Julian Assange’s petition to ban press freedom in May

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plea to prosecutors is damaging to the freedom of the American press. But the outcome could have been worse.

In this case, he is expected to spend more than five years in British custody, most of which is spent preventing extradition to the United States. In trade, he is going to plead guilty to a charge of violating espionage work.

The result is an ambiguous end to a prison saga that has jeopardized journalists’ power to record military, intelligence or diplomatic data that authorities consider secret. Enshrined in the First Amendment, the role of a free press in bringing forth shining data beyond what is accepted by those in power is a fundamental idea of ​​American freedom.

Assuming that the decision passed accepts the word of honor, for the first year in American history, collecting and publishing data that the federal government considers secret could have been effectively handled against the law. This ancient precedent would send a threatening message to national security journalists, who may feel intimidated by how aggressively they do their work because they would see a greater possibility of prosecution.

However, avoiding grand ultimatums may limit its achievement. Since Mr. Assange has taken a positive approach to doing business, he would not raise any objections to the legality of using espionage operations in his activities. The end result, at best, averts the danger that the case could result in a definitive Supreme Court ruling blessing the prosecutors’ narrow interpretation of First Amendment press freedom.

“He’s basically guilty of the things that journalists do all the time and need to do,” said Jamil Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia College. “It will cast a shadow on freedom of the press – but not the kind of shadow that would have been cast by a judicial opinion that this activity is criminal and unprotected by the First Amendment.”

In short, he said, the outcome was sophisticated from the point of view of press autonomy and could be categorical as neither “all bad or all good”.

The First Amendment implications of the case have consistently been unclear through the heated debate over whether Mr. Assange counted as a journalist — and the revelations of emails stolen from his birthday party during the 2016 presidential election. -Via Democrats’ remaining outrage over newsletter.

Mr Assange set out to harvest messages obtained by Russian hackers in a bid to damage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, disrupting the party’s national convention and generally sharing batches in the final stages of the campaign.

However, for the autonomy of the press, it does not matter who is considered a journalist, but rather whether journalistic-style actions – whether performed by a journalist or by someone else – constitute a crime. Can also be considered as. And allegations against Mr. Assange in the 2016 election against Donald J. There do not appear to be covert efforts by Moscow to support Trump’s victory.

Instead, the charges targeted past publications that brought him worldwide notoriety and made him a hero of the anti-war left: a video of an American helicopter firing on an unharmed family carrying a Reuters photographer in Baghdad; troves of military event placards documenting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; a quarter of a million diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world; and documents about Guantanamo detainees.

Mr Assange has slim prison information to request a guilty plea to the agencies on a basis of conspiring to violate the espionage operation. Court records say Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, and Mr. Assange confirmed that he would send her national-security documents, even though she refused security clearance, and that he “communicated” them with others. Will do what they are not entitled to do – i.e., post them.

It was once extremely rare for a central authority official holding a security clearance to be charged with leaking national-security information to a newspaper, but such prosecutions have become routine in the 21st century. The Justice Division began filing more frequent whistleblowing cases during the Bush leadership, and continued that trend under successive administrations.

Even though she was charged in the military justice system, Ms. Manning was part of that stream, pleading guilty at a 2013 court-martial and receiving a 35-year prison sentence. In January 2017, President Obama reduced the maximum sentence of that sentence; In total, she remained in custody for approximately seven years from the year of her arrest.

However, effectively blaming a non-government credential for publishing national-security data to the mob’s amusement that he ran with a source all day is different. No person was ever charged under the Espionage Act for journalistic work, partly because there was a long-held belief that using that statute for such acts would be unconstitutional.

Closer to home, the allegations against Mr. Assange crossed a spectrum. This confirmed that a twenty-first century crackdown on leakers could extend to criminalizing the same types of movements that were notable after September 11, 2001, in addition to daily journalism about military, intelligence, and warrantless wiretapping. and ill-treatment such as torture. Or diplomatic issues that support the family understanding the region better.

The Justice Department under Mr. Bush took the first step in this direction, after a Pentagon official leaked classified information about Iran to two lobbyists for the pro-Israel AIPAC. As well as charging trusted people who pleaded guilty, in 2005 prosecutors moved closer to lobbyists to further disseminate secrets among journalists – even though they were not officials and did not have security clearances. Was.

However, a subsequent ruling issued questionable rulings that weakened the case, and the Obama-era section removed it in 2009.

The following year, when Mr. Assange began publishing Ms. Manning’s leaks, Justice Division officials considered whether he could be charged with a felony. However, they were hesitant at the prospect of setting a precedent for mainstream news outlets like The Untouchable New York Times, which occasionally collect and post information that the federal government has deemed secret.

On the other hand, the Justice Department under Trump leadership moved to charge Mr. Assange, secretly filing a criminal complaint in late 2017 and, over the next few months, obtaining a sealed super jury indictment. The move ensured that the federal government could seek his arrest and extradition if he ever left the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had been hiding for years.

The initial indictment largely avoided issues of press autonomy by bringing a smaller charge alleging a hacking-related conspiracy against Mr. Assange. However in 2019, the Justice Division added the espionage action charge, turning it into a key test of the First Amendment.

And in 2021, the Biden leadership continued to work and move forward on seeking the extradition of Mr. Assange for criminal prosecution on all charges. The Biden-era faction also negotiated Honor’s plea deal to resolve the case, dismissing charges related to hacking but pleading guilty to espionage.

At this point the case is unlikely to give the Supreme Court a chance to curb First Amendment press freedoms, yet the federal government has somehow made an example of Mr. Assange to let some national security journalists go to some extent. Will control. Notable stories were not recorded due to concerns about dealing with unique prosecution.

And if the present free stream of newsworthy data to the mob has certainly been disrupted, thereby destroying the machine of American autonomy, the responsibility is shared by officials of both administrations.