Julian Assange – the WikiLeaks founder who has spent the past 14 years resisting extradition to the US on Espionage Act charges – is set to be released on Wednesday after spending the past five years in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison.
In exchange for his freedom, he will plead guilty to a criminal charge under the Espionage Act, which the US government has increasingly used to prosecute and silence whistleblowers.
The indictment relates to his role in the 2010 search and release of classified or sensitive documents and videos related to the Iraq War and other US national security matters.
Assange is on his way A US federal court in the Mariana Islands, near his native Australia. That’s where he’ll do it Write his application and be sentenced – probably already served at Belmarsh – and could then live with his wife Stella and his children.
Assange’s status as a journalist and his actions in obtaining those documents are still disputed. The fact that his story ended with a plea deal means these questions are not being fully litigated in court, and therefore, other whistleblowers and publishers may still be punished for disclosing information in the public interest. Freedom of the press is under serious threat in the United States.
Assange’s case, in a nutshell
As its founder, Assange has been in the public eye for the past 14 years Wikileaks, website that hosts emails, cables and other documents from the government and other power players Some of this information is obtained through illegal means such as hacking, while other documents come through whistleblowers.
As Emily Stewart wrote for Vox: “Beginning in 2010, WikiLeaks released a video of an airstrike in Iraq. that killed civiliansMilitary documents about Iraq And Afghanistan warAnd State Department cable Where diplomats give candid assessments of foreign governments, provided by Chelsea Manning, who was a US Army intelligence analyst at the time. The unprecedented leaks attracted a lot of attention and made Assange a celebrity of sorts — and a target, for example, of top US officials such as Attorney General Eric Holder. mused openly About how they can charge him.
In late 2010, before the United States filed any charges, Assange was charged with rape in Sweden. Swedish authorities issued a warrant for his arrest and he was detained in London but was quickly released on bail. In 2012, the UK Supreme Court ordered his extradition to Sweden; Before he was deported, he took up residence in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where officials granted him asylum. Although the rape charges were dropped in 2017, she continued to claim asylum at the embassy until 2019.
That year, the London Metropolitan Police, who had been invited to the embassy by Ecuadorian leaders, including President Lenin Moreno, arrested him after he was released on bail in 2012 and failed to appear in court on behalf of the United States. Later that year, the US government Complaints have been made against him — all under the Espionage Act — including seven counts of obtaining national security information, conspiracy to obtain national defense information, and nine counts of disclosing national defense information. He has already been charged with conspiring to breach the Defense Department’s secret Internet Protocol network to obtain intelligence.
Assange was held in Belmarsh, where he was forced to stay in a cell for 23 hours while he fought the UK government’s attempt to extradite him to the US.
What Assange’s plea means for whistleblowers — and journalism
Journalists and publishers have Some federal protections When it comes to reporting and disclosure of sensitive information.
While the Espionage Act has increasingly been used to target whistleblowers and sources who provide information to journalists, it has not been used to charge journalists or outlets who disclose information in the public interest, although it has been used. Against journalists for other reasons. Whether Assange qualifies as a journalist — and whether his actions in uncovering and publishing the Mannings leaks qualifies as a public interest — remains a matter of debate.
“A Data Dump Journalism? It’s an interesting question,” journalist and Columbia Journalism School professor Todd Gitlin told Vox in 2019. “With regard to the war crimes footage, I feel comfortable saying that by working with Manning, Assange is doing an act of journalism. But when you indiscriminately publish terabytes of data, I don’t know what to call it, but it’s not journalism per se.”
Some experts fear that Assange’s guilty plea to Espionage Act charges for disseminating national defense information “could set an even more dangerous precedent” because he is pleading guilty as a whistleblower, as Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns at Reporters Without Borders International, told Vox.
Because his case was settled through a plea agreement rather than a trial, it does not set a legal precedent, but the guilty plea “signals that [the US government] could file other such lawsuits” and pursue publishers that print information it would rather keep under wraps, even if that information is not classified, Vincent said. The situation will also remain dire for whistleblowers who disclose information about government activities related to national defense, even if that information is public interest – meaning it is a crime, misappropriation of public funds, or reveals hypocrisy or conflict of interest on the part of those in power, or other forms of corruption or corporate greed.
“Unfortunately, the precedent, both legally and politically, has been set that espionage laws can be used against a journalist’s sources,” Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Decent, told Vox. “[The Obama administration] Whistleblowers, journalistic sources, have normalized the use of espionage laws against government insiders, whatever you want to call them.”
As has been the case for whistleblowers A real winner, the former Army linguist who sent a classified report on Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 election to the Intercept; He pleaded guilty to unauthorized transmission of national defense information and was sentenced Five years and three months in jail in 2018 – Longest sentence for such crime at that time. Edward Snowdenwho has become a naturalized Russian citizen after spending more than a decade avoiding extradition to the United States on espionage charges, Leaked a trove of documents to the Guardian in 2013 Reveals National Security Agency Collecting Verizon Customers’ Phone Call Data
Given the value that Assange and whistleblowers have placed on disclosure in the public interest, both Gibbons and Vincent say it’s time to reform espionage laws, making it so that journalists, whistleblowers and publishers can argue that disclosure of government information is public. interests
The impact of government action against whistleblowers has caused significant damage to journalism in the United States and around the world, Vincent and Gibbons said. This has had a chilling effect on sources, journalists and outlets fearing reprisals for newsgathering. And it certainly hurts US credibility in cases like this Ivan GershkovichUS struggles to free Wall Street Journal reporter wrongfully detained in Russia
