Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Correspondence with Rob Related to Julian Assange

Here is some correspondence between Rob and me on December 7, 2010, the day Julian Assange was arrested in London. As always with email threads, the earliest message is at the bottom and the latest message is at the top:
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Hi Rob,

I’m going to challenge you on that one! The Bill of Rights doesn’t make any distinctions about people or groups in the First Amendment. The right of free speech applies to everyone, not just the press, without qualification. The only settled qualifications applied since the Bill of Rights are those related to crowded theaters. The courts have tried to stay away from decisions about what counts as privileged information under national security. Yet I think the legal case against Assange has to turn on national security, not on whether he enjoys special privileges as a journalist.

As we saw with the Times reporter in the Valerie Plame case, Judith Miller, if a prosecutor wants to put a journalist in jail to force disclosure of sources, he will do it. Being a journalist doesn’t give you special immunity from coercion, according to the prosecutor or the courts. The Wikileaks case is different, of course, as Wikileaks’ source is not in question. We know from long history and from the last few days that if the government wants to shut you up in a national security case, it can and will.

I know of course that constitutional lawyers have a lot to say about these issues, but I’m going to stay in my role as dismayed and indignant citizen. I truly hope that Palin and the patriotic crowd do not carry the day here. Palin and others throw around the word treason in connection with a case that turns on rights of free speech. And I write in the middle of the work day to keep from becoming angry and depressed.

Love,

Dad


P. S. Thanks again for being such a good audience, interlocutor, and commentator. It has helped me a lot.

/S. G.
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The Assange vs. New York Times distinction will probably come down to one of old media versus new media.  Whether bloggers can avail themselves of the same freedom of the press protections that established newspapers can is an open and I think difficult question.

Also, I think El Pais is is a Spanish newspaper.  I hadn't heard of it before the last week or so either.

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Hi Rob,

Thanks for your note. I didn’t do research to nail down the list of publications that have an agreement with Wikileaks. I assumed that the Post, like the Times, had early access to the cables, since the Post published analysis of the cables shortly after Wikileaks published them. The list you give below sounds right, though I hadn’t heard of El Pais before. Is that in Paris?

I called Assange a journalist in my message to you, and changed that to website owner in the version I posted. However you see Assange’s role, you state the case correctly: if it’s unconstitutional to prosecute the New York Times under the Espionage Act, it’s unconstitutional to prosecute Wikileaks or Wikileaks’ founder, and for the same reasons.

/Dad

P. S. The only standing the government has for prosecution is the case against Bradley Manning. He is held in solitary confinement, with no visits even from his parents. The government has already denied him his right to a speedy trial. We can expect that when he is granted a military trial, it will be largely secret.

/S. G.
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Dad -

I was at an event today regarding data mining (the Constitution Project put it on to release its new report on the subject), and WikiLeaks briefly came up.  It was not the subject of the panel, and is only tangentially related since data mining touches on issues of government openness and transparency. One of the panelists there was a guy by the name of Jim Harper who works at the Cato Institute.  He described his position as not so much pro-WikiLeaks as anti-anti-WikiLeaks.  I thought it was a good way of staking out some middle ground where you have some reservations about the whole situation, but hate the scapegoat that he has become.

Two quick comments about the substance of your email... I want to point out, again, that I don't think the Washington Post was one of the sources used for Wikileaks.  I could be wrong, but I think the list was Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El Pais, The Guardian, and the New York Times.  In fact, I believe that the New York Times was not even directly a source, but has an agreement with The Guardian whereby they share the information.  Which brings me to my second point.

On the way back from the event I mentioned, WikiLeaks came up again, specifically that Assange was up a creek.  I asked your question - why is it that Assange might be charged under the Espionage Act, but no one was talking about the Time culpability (or, for that matter, the other newspapers, though obviously there are jurisdictional issues there).  Someone answered a newspaper has never been charged under the Espionage Act.  Moreover, that the Times was aware of this issue, and took the position that the Espionage Act, if applied to journalists, would be unconstitutional.   Your argument would probably be that Assange and WikiLeaks is operating as a journalistic group and therefore if it's unconstitutional with respect to the Times, then it's unconstitutional with respect to him... and I'm sure he'll make that argument.  But, I thought I'd relay the points outlined from my cab ride.

Another point - I guess there's some uncertainty about whether our extradition treaty with Sweden covers Espionage Act violations.  I hope that if Assange is ultimately prosecuted in the US that someone good steps up to the plate to defend him and makes these First Amendment arguments.  It will be interesting to see how they play out.

Love,

Rob
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On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 12:58 PM, Steven Greffenius wrote:

Hi,

Britain arrested Assange today. They are holding him without bail.

Feinstein is a chicken in her argument. She advocates prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act, but says nothing about prosecuting the New York Times or the Washington Post under the same law, which makes it a felony

to possess or transmit "information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation."
She’s chicken because she knows prosecution of the Times and the Post would raise free speech issues the prosecutors could not overcome. So you go after an unsympathetic individual without resources to make an example of him. That way you intimidate others and make sure like-minded people don’t follow his path. Anyone who believes Assange broke the law has to believe the Times and the Post broke the law as well.

Another interesting point comes up when you consider the language of the Espionage Act, which Feinstein wants us to do. All government officials – in the military, in the intelligence agencies, and in the administration itself – who planned torture, set up and maintained torture sites, transported people to those sites, prepared prisoners for torture, carried out torture, disposed the bodies of people who died from torture, arranged for torture with other governments, documented torture, transmitted and stored information about torture: every person who did that is guilty under the language of the law. They all possessed “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” That’s exactly why the people engaged in torture wanted to keep the information secret. It was obviously harmful to the United States – much more harmful than the information in the State Department cables.

That’s why I wrote about this question in that brief post (http://sgreffenius.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/treason-betrayal-and-revolution/)  about treason and betrayal. Treason isn’t committed by people outside of government who reveal things the government deems dangerous to its own security. Treason is committed by people inside government who betray the people they serve. No person who tries to replace the people guilty of that betrayal can be called a traitor.

/Steve

P. S. Note one more item, this one from Jon Stewart’s clip on Palin’s tweets: Assange isn’t even a United States citizen! By claiming a right to prosecute Assange, Feinstein claims a right to prosecute anyone in the world who possesses information we say is dangerous to the United States. Think about what that means.

It means we can hunt, capture, imprison, interrogate, prosecute, and sentence anyone in the world who we consider an enemy. I guess one shouldn’t be dismayed. We’ve already been doing that for nearly ten years. Now that Assange is under arrest, Feinstein would like to extend the hunt to a vulnerable journalist. Let’s see who’s next.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989004575653280626335258.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_opinion

Monday, December 06, 2010

Wikileaks Mirror Sites

Here's a list of Wikileaks mirror sites:

http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html

And here's the Wikileaks home page:

http://wikileaks.ch/

Please support this organization in your own blogs!

Tension grows between Calif. Muslims, FBI after informant infiltrates mosque

'They got a guy, a bona fide criminal, and obviously trained him and sent him to infiltrate mosques,' Syed said. 'And when things went sour, they ditched him and he got mad. It's like a soap opera, for God's sake.'