For better or for worse, Julian Assange push the limits. In his professional life and your sex life, which is situated on the border that divides the legal conduct of the crime, although it is not clear which side of that border it occupies.
U.S. officials are looking for a way to prosecute him for publishing secrets while women in Sweden say they crossed the line between horseplay consensus and rape.
Incorporate the release of the journalists say Assange of thousands of classified documents is not real journalism. And yet, they realize their situation is linked to yours. Some have urged the Justice Department not to judge knowing reporter essential task of discovering the truth could suffer if it did.
For all lines we would like to point out, the law makes no distinction between civil publishers of classified documents, and shall be loosed in raw form or verified WikiLeaks developed with interviews, analysis and wrapped in the form of articles in the New York Times.
As the value of the documents, some little more than gossip content, while others showed very newsworthy. Last week, for example, we learn that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is doing more than its name implies.
It has become "a global intelligence organization" with "so vast spying operation that has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use against their political enemies," the New York Times, citing diplomatic cables obtained WikiLeaks.
Israel is about to admit and apologize for using forged documents to get UK within the range of killing a Hamas leader in Dubai. The admission will come as WikiLeaks was about to release documents showing the role of Israel.
Wikileaks on Russia
In Russia, the independent weekly Novaya Gazeta newspaper, said that soon Wikileaks published documents that reveal corruption in the Kremlin. What can not be that good?
Without doubt, carelessness with documents tightened Assange diplomatic communications. Whether it also has killed as some predicted, do not know.
But unless the publication created a "clear and present danger" to national security, such as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it in a case of 1919, the Constitution prohibits the prosecution of U.S. for freedom of expression for most of us.
As recently as 2001, the Supreme Court said that "absent a need to first order", a radio commentator could not be sued for broadcasting a tape that someone else had arrived illegal spying by telephone. In that tape, an official of the labor force had been talking about a teachers' strike.
Private Manning
Yes, the government can prohibit their employees to escape, so the U.S. Army arresting individuals suspected of leaking to Assange, Bradley Manning, who faces a court martial. It is also why researchers are looking for evidence that the leak Assange encouraged or helped to present the material.
Loading Assange of conspiring with the leaker could put it in the Espionage Act of 1917. But even if he did conspire, how Assange be different from a reporter from the Washington Post that leads to a government source in the disclosure of secret information that the public really should know?
Assange prosecution would be "a dangerous precedent for journalists in any publication or medium term, which could chill investigative journalism," wrote the 20 professors of journalism at Columbia University to the Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama this month .
History shows that "the government's overreaction to the publication of material leaked to the press has always been more damaging to American democracy than their own losses," the teachers wrote.
Nixon's response
Congress and presidents have periodically attempted to punish perfectly constitutional discourse, dating back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1787 and again during the Civil War, the First World War and the Cold War, as the University of Chicago professor right Geoffrey Stone told Congress this month.
The baby boomers may be recalled that 1969 news reports revealed the secret bombing of Cambodia led the United States to a kind of backlash by President Richard Nixon. He ordered wiretapping officials and journalists to locate leaks.
Two years later, Nixon was so outraged by Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fall to the New York Times that he ordered a group of attendees to find and plug leaks.
These "plumbers" as it was released, stolen office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in search of dirt, and broke into the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in 1972.
End of the war
The idea of a president leading a criminal enterprise to suppress the truth and punish those who reveal it's not exactly what one expects of the leader of a democratic society.
Despite the backlash against the run, which gave Americans a history of the unwinnable war in Vietnam. The study revealed that they had been deceived by the president after president. The publication helped hasten the end of U.S. involvement.
What he did not harm national security is, as the Nixon administration had claimed when he went to court to stop publication by the New York Times.
Assange do not think is a real journalist, either, and there is much about the way it works I find deplorable. But history gives us many reasons to doubt the official proclamations that has damaged national security.
You should also warn us against government overreaction. If the Obama criticizes Assange on charges, journalists from around the world could be more difficult to discover what is really happening and risk prosecution if they do.
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