Espionage & the pressAssange’s new indictment: Espionage and the First Amendment
The Espionage Act, a sweeping federal statute enacted a century ago, imposes heavy criminal penalties for obtaining or disclosing classified information without proper authorization. Beginning under President Barack Obama, recent years saw a dramatic increase in prosecutions under the Espionage Act. But these prosecutions were directed at leakers of classified information — all government employees and government contractors — not at journalists or publishers. That makes Assange’s indictment a watershed.
Julian Assange, the co-founder of WikiLeaks, has been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with a slew of Espionage Act violations that could keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
The new indictment expands an earlier one charging Assange with conspiring with Chelsea Manning, the former soldier convicted of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, to hack into a government computer.
Assange is responsible for the dissemination of troves of classified American documents, including hundreds of thousands of military reports, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, hundreds of reports from the military prison in Guantanamo Bay and thousands of secret CIA documents revealing the agency’s techniques for hacking and surveillance.
The Espionage Act, a sweeping federal statute enacted a century ago, imposes heavy criminal penalties for obtaining or disclosing classified information without proper authorization.
Beginning under President Barack Obama, recent years saw a dramatic increase in prosecutions under the Espionage Act. But these prosecutions were directed at leakers of classified information — all government employees and government contractors — not at journalists or publishers.
That makes Assange’s indictment a watershed.
Scarcity of prosecutions
To be sure, threats of Espionage Act charges against journalists and newspapers were previously made, and in one case charges were even submitted to a grand jury.
In 1942, in the middle of World War II, the Chicago Tribune published a front-page story titled, “Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea.” The story implied that the U.S. military had cracked Japan’s secret naval code – which it had.
An incensed President Franklin Roosevelt demanded that Espionage Act charges be brought against the reporter, the managing editor and the Tribune itself. But unlike Assange’s grand jury, the Tribune’s grand jury refused to issue indictments.
