4 ms·
I once looked into the Swedish law back a decade or so ago when Wikileaks did their first big publication. As it happened there were a few court case back duri
by belorn 6y ago
I once looked into the Swedish law back a decade or so ago when Wikileaks did their first big publication.
As it happened there were a few court case back during the cold war where classified military information were published by news paper and the paper ended up in court. Recalling what I read, they made a few tests in order to confirm their conclusion.
1: Did the leaked information exist publicly before the publication. It make no sense to continue demand legal protection for information which is already public.
2: Did the leaked information cause any harm by being leaked. If it can not be demonstrated to have caused harm then the information should not have been classified from the start and thus do not deserve legal protection.
3: Was publicizing the information in the public interests?
This has made prosecuting news papers for publicizing classified information almost impossible.
- umvi 6y agoSeems like it would be hard to quantify number 2, depending on how your define "harm". Foreign relations might be harmed (which might indirectly lead to deaths down the road), even if nobody was directly killed or injured because of the leak.
- belorn 6y agoIt would indeed be very hard. It have not stopped government from continuing classifying documents, and media publisher could in theory be found guilty, but the bar is set very high, The first test is also much harder that one might think. Open source intelligence tend to have a lot of information if one know what to look for. Similar, small news paper can often be early in publishing information before more mainstream publishers.