Viewpoint: What Assange charges could mean for press freedom - BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us-canada-48393512
The Trump administration has now crossed the line that many counselled it to avoid - and may have triggered the most important press freedom case in the US in 300 years.
While the status of Assange has long been hotly debated, his actions in publishing classified information on Wikileaks is a common component of journalism. Indeed, the most celebrated cases in history - such as the failed attempts to stop the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 - were based on the publications of classified evidence.
Assange's supporters note that his publications revealed alleged war crimes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq that were unlikely to have been exposed otherwise. If it was a crime for Assange to receive and publish such information, much of the journalism in the US would become a de facto criminal enterprise.
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The charges were brought under the controversial Espionage Act of 1917. Passed after World War One, it was used to target anti-war activists and political dissidents.
The government charged figures ranging from German-American Socialist congressman (and newspaper editor) Victor Berger to anarchist and author Emma Goldman to five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs.
The law has long been denounced as unconstitutional in its criminalising of receiving and publishing classified information. It is no surprise that the justice department had to use this much-ridiculed law to achieve this ignoble goal.
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The justice department takes pains to try to argue that Assange is not a journalist and that the publication counts concern the disclosure of not just classified information but the actual names of intelligence sources. That however may establish that Assange is a poor journalist, but a journalist all the same.
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Assange is not the rallying figure advocates for press freedom would choose, but he is the one they have been given. Assange may be the first modern journalist to be prosecuted under this law. However, if successful, he will certainly not be the last.