As the unsealed indictment of Assange reveals, Assange like Rosen, solicited highly classified material from Manning. And like Rosen, he came into the unauthorized possession of such material. Both are crimes, but not crimes for which journalists have ever been charged.
But Assange went a great leap further than Rosen, however: He entered into an agreement with Manning to help crack a password on a government computer to expand access to government secrets.
As a journalistic practice, this is a complete novelty. Legitimate journalists engage in a number of activities to obtain newsworthy government secrets that might or might not enjoy First Amendment protection; our courts have never had occasion to draw a line and, fortunately, the Trump administration—despite the president’s ranting against the media, and his extraordinary charge that the media are “the enemy of the people”—has not deployed the legal instruments at its disposal that would force such line-drawing. That remains a dangerous possibility because there are vague statutes on the books, which, depending on how the Supreme Court interpreted them, could criminalize a lot of what has come to be ordinary—but is extraordinarily valuable—journalism.
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