Salon War Room: Assange Prosecution Would Be "Extremely Dangerous"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/news/wikileaks/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/11/30/wikileaks_espionage_act

TUESDAY, NOV 30, 2010 11:12 ET
WAR ROOM
Assange prosecution would be "extremely dangerous"
BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT

The Obama Administration is exploring the possibility of prosecuting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the century-old Espionage Act, according to a front-page Washington Post story this morning. But legal experts tell Salon that such a prosecution would not only face myraid legal and practical hurdles, it would also set what one analyst calls "an extremely dangerous precedent."

"This is novel legal territory. Every step involves uncertainty and virgin territory, and ideally it will be left that way," says Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. Aftergood, who has been a critic of WikiLeaks in the past, argues that "a prosecution of WikiLeaks would be a horrible precedent that in time would almost certainily be applied to other publishers of controversial information."

At issue here is the Espionage Act of 1917, which was passed by Congress during World War I and makes it a crime to, among other things, disclose national defense information to someone not authorized to receive it or retain national defense information after the government has demanded it back. While there have been many successful prosecutions of leakers under this law, there have been extremely few prosecutions of those on the recieving end of leaks.

Many have argued that the law is unconstitutional, and, if it was actually applied broadly, would lead to the prosecution of journalists and newspapers that routinely obtain and publish classified national defense information.]/b] In a Washington Post op-ed today, former CIA General Counsel Jeffrey Smith nonetheless argues that Assange should be prosecuted under this section of the law. One potential hurdle with this theory is that the Espionage Act is anachronistic. It refers to physical documents like a "signal book" and a blueprint; it's not clear how this would apply to digital information.

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1. Kill the messenger nt

[EFerrari]

2. Why is only Assange being singled out? What about the newspapers

that also handled this material?

[grasswire]

3. to say nothing of discovery

Discovery would be a real bitch for certain parties.

[FarCenter]

4. What is Assange holding back as an "insurance policy"?

First, he may have undisclosed material that is considerably more damaging than that which has been published.

Second, wikileaks is not a one-person organization, and his co-workers would continue the operations.

Third, arresting and trying Assange would motivate many additional people to act either as leakers of material or to join the effort to get it published.