Manning found guilty of violating the Espionage Act, acquitted of aiding the enemy (updated)

Union Army private, Henry Vanderwater, was found guilty of aiding the enemy when he leaked a Union roster to an Alexandria newspaper. Vanderwater received a sentence of three months hard labor and was dishonorably discharged.

Violating several aspects of the Espionage Act could lead to punishment of up to 100 years in prison.

The Times notes that the case of Manning aside, the “aiding the enemy” charge, which has no precedent in a leak case, could have long-term ramifications for investigative journalism in the Internet era.

“The government’s theory was that providing defense-related information to an entity that published it for the world to see constituted aiding the enemy because the world includes adversaries, like members of Al Qaeda, who could read the documents online,” the Times reports.

“This ruling has far-reaching implications,” Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice said in a statement. “You don’t need specialized intelligence training to know that terrorists use the Internet. By this logic, any military officer who discloses information to the media or posts it on the Internet could be charged with aiding the enemy. That’s not consistent with the purpose of the law, and it could have a dramatic, chilling effect on would-be whistleblowers.”

Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who testified in Manning’s defense, praised the judge for making an “extremely important decision” to reject the aiding the enemy charge and thereby deny “the prosecution’s effort to launch the most dangerous assault on investigative journalism and the free press in the area of national security that we have seen in decades.”

He told the Times, however, that the potential decades of imprisonment Manning still faces remains a major blow to “leakers and whistle-blowers,” and that the prospect of decades of imprisonment “is still too high a price for any democracy to demand of its whistle-blowers.”

Steve Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), called the outcome “a weighty verdict that the prosecution would count as a win,” but argued that the “larger significance of the case” may be limited.

“The unauthorized disclosures that Manning committed were completely unprecedented in their scope and volume,” he told the Times. “Most investigative journalism does not involve the wholesale publication of confidential records, so the impact of these verdicts on working journalists may be confined. It’s not good news for journalism, but it’s not the end of the world