Filmmaker, journalist, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Laura Poitras today published an “Opinion” piece in the New York Times urging that the U.S. prosecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act be dropped. She shared a Pulitzer Prize for public service, for reporting on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance program: “I am guilty of violating the Espionage Act,” she says. “If charged and convicted, I could spend the rest of my life in prison.”
Poitras points out that she, and journalists at the Guardian, the Washington Post, etc., reported on and published highly classified documents from the National Security Agency provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, which revealed the government’s mass surveillance program; and that this was widely recognized as a public service. However, “The Espionage Act, enacted in World War I to prosecute ‘spies and saboteurs’ defines the unauthorized possession or publication of ‘national defense’ or classified information as a felony, and does not allow for a public interest defense, which means the jury is barred from distinguishing between exposing government crimes to the press, and selling state secrets to a foreign government. Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Espionage Act was rarely used for journalism.”
This changed after Sept. 11, when the Espionage Act became a government tool to selectively prosecute whistleblowers, but never against reporters and publishers like WikiLeaks’ Assange. A decade ago WikiLeaks, in collaboration with the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel, published the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and later State Department cables. WikiLeaks’ publications exposed war crimes; previously undisclosed deaths in American-occupied Iraq, government corruption in Tunisia, and the start of the “war on terror.… And none of the architects of the `war on terror’ including the CIA’s torture programs, have been brought to justice,” says Poitras. Yet Assange faces up to 175 years in prison.
“It is impossible to overstate the dangerous precedent of Mr. Assange’s indictment … and possible extradition,” Poitras writes. “Every national security journalist who reports on classified information now faces possible Espionage Act charges…. To reverse this dangerous precedent, the Justice Department should immediately drop these charges, and the President should pardon Mr. Assange. If his case goes forward, he will be the first, but not the last.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/opinion/laura-poitras-assange-espionage-act.html