He's also facing a very minor charge (max 5 years in prison) for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for allegedly helping Manning attempt to hack a computer.
Otherwise I agree. His treatment comes down to nothing other than the fact the USA govt want to make it very, very clear that they are willing to totally destroy anyone's lives who dare publish the horrific things they're doing.
It was actually senior Guardian journalists who compromised the cables by publishing the password Assange had entrusted them with. That's what led to the unredacted copies being made available. Jonathan Cook has written about it here: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-26/guardian-assan...
> The Guardian book let the cat out of the bag. Once it gave away Assange’s password, the Old Bailey hearings have heard, there was no going back.
> Any security service in the world could now unlock the file containing the cables. And as they homed in on where the file was hidden at the end of the summer, Assange was forced into a desperate damage limitation operation. In September 2011 he published the unredacted cables so that anyone named in them would have advance warning and could go into hiding – before any hostile security services came looking for them.
> Yes, Assange published the cables unredacted but he did so – was forced to do so – by the unforgivable actions of Leigh and the Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/10/afghanistan-wa...
The accusation was that the Afghan documents were not sufficiently redacted, but they were redacted. The Iraq War documents, released later, were more heavily redacted.
Basically helping to break into the computer system moves you out of the realm of journalist and into the realm of political enemy which now makes you vulnerable to espionage.
I think there isn’t much case law around this stuff though.
It's bad enough that there's a law on the books that allows the US government to go after American journalists, but in this case, the US government is asserting the right to prosecute a foreign journalist who operated from outside the US. As far as I understand it, if Julian Assange is extradited, he will not be able to argue in court that WikiLeaks' publications were in the public interest.
Good luck getting the Supreme Court agreeing with that. That greatest disappointment in the entire American Experiment has to be the US Supreme Court.
That was the founders greatest mistake, vesting soo much power in this single branch
They made up their own powers. There's nothing about judicial review in the Constitution. They basically decided that they had that power, and everybody else agreed with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison
So perhaps their greatest mistake wasn't vesting too much, but vesting too little. That left the court open to write its own job description. And also to create lifetime appointments, in theory to de-politicize it, but in practice to enshrine ideologies for many decades.
That said, whistleblower protection rarely covers confidential information anyway.