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> act to make the question of suing the NYT, WaPo, etc. not as easy as you make it sound No, not "suing" the NYT, WashPost, etc. The Espionage Act is armed wit

• mpyne 12y ago
  > The reason FedGov has not is left as an exercise to the reader. There's no exercise at all: They'd get pilloried for it in the very same media, on top of what I already mentioned regarding the tension around facilitating a mostly free press. I mean, even the Guardian's editors noted that they preferred working on the Snowden leaks from their New York office rather than their London office. That wasn't an accidental or hasty decision. Your article is very informative, actually. And to your great credit, I'm not actually sure what specific views you hold after reading it, other than an apparent opposition to the Espionage Act. Some of the points brought up appear to be in the sense of "look how ridiculous this is", but I don't agree with the ridiculousness at all. E.g. the intent of someone doing the spying shouldn't any bearing on whether someone is guilty under Espionage Act or not; either your spying could have hurt the nation (for some definition of "hurt") or it couldn't. Intent would certainly have bearing into the severity of a sentence, and we could even envision having entirely separate charges for different categories of harm (just as we split murder into attempted murder, manslaughter, premeditated murder, etc.), but whether you spied or not is effectively a binary question at the end, and that very well should possibly extend all the way up a felony. Maybe your point is that we need to revisit the law as it stands to have those separate categories of harm instead of what amounts to a giant "reasonable man" test, and I wouldn't oppose that. But the law is in many ways demand-paged; it only gets changed in response to obvious miscarriages of justice, and I'm not sure that all possible prosecutions of Assange under the Espionage Act would represent that. He's not a journalist and he's certainly trying to harm the USG (and thereby, the US people) so it's not as if such a prosecution would be obviously mistaken.
  • declan 12y ago
    > There's no exercise at all: They'd get pilloried for it in the very same media Unfortunately you only get a C+ on this exercise. :) The short answer is that portions of the Espionage Act likely violate the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech if the EA were used to prosecute journalists who obtained the materials over the transom. (Whether this applies to Wikileaks is a different story. Different facts.) The slightly more detailed answer is that the modern jurisprudence relating to the First Amendment is far more speech-protective than it was when the EA was codified a century ago. And DOJ doesn't want to risk having parts of the EA declared unconstitutional. So Glenn Greenwald and other reporters were (properly) not indicted for violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it a federal felony to publish classified NSA SIGINT or cryptographic material.