Opinion: Prosecuting Julian Assange is a threat to press freedom
“Publishing is not a crime,” the editors and publishers of The New York Times and four leading European news outlets say in an open letter released last week. While that statement might seem uncontroversial, the U.S. Department of Justice disagrees, as evidenced by its prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for obtaining and disseminating classified material.
That position is profoundly ahistorical. As scholars such as UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh have shown, the “freedom … of the press” guaranteed by the First Amendment protects your right to communicate with the public through the printed word and other tools of mass communication, regardless of whether you do that for a living or work for a mainstream news organization.
Twelve years ago, those newspapers published a series of startling stories based on confidential State Department cables and military files that Assange had obtained from former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Those documents, the open letter notes, “disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.”
All but one of the 17 counts in the latest federal indictment of Assange relate to obtaining or disclosing such “national defense information,” a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act of 1917. Once the U.S. has completed his extradition from the U.K., Assange will face a maximum sentence of 160 years on those counts alone.
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