Julian Assange

Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006; he is also recognized as an editor, publisher and activist. WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes news leaks and highly classified media content that is provided by anonymous sources; so one can see how this event could cause many problems, and it did. WikiLeaks truly made its international debut in 2010 when it supplied leaks given by a U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video, Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and Cablegate. After all of these intense leaks, without any surprise, the U.S. Government launched a criminal investigation on WikiLeaks and Assange himself in hopes of prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917. The Espionage Act was intended to prohibit interference with military operations or recruitment, to prevent insubordination in the military, and to prevent the support of United States enemies during wartime. While they investigated both Manning and Assange, they found chat logs, allegedly between the two, but Assange denied it being him on the other end and Manning insisted that she acted alone. Fast forward to 2013, Assange’s case was still in question and U.S. officials deemed it unlikely that he would be indicted for publishing classified documents, because they would have to do the same to other sources that did the same such as: The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc. 

Assange was being investigated by several government agencies, including the F.B.I. So, he was stuck. The United States urged other allies to open criminal investigations against him as well. The question at hand here is: was Assange doing anything wrong as a journalist under the first amendment? Under the Obama Administration, we saw this question illuminated. The Department of Justice could not find any valid evidence that would prove his actions differed from the job description of a  journalist. That trend ended quickly once Trump took office and Mike Pompeo reopened the Assange pursuit. So, in 2017, U.S. officials decided to formally make charges against Assange, which led them to start looking for witnesses; all which said the case was a form of government overreach. 

Julian Assange is facing an 18-count indictment and is being accused of soliciting and publishing classified information to try to crack a Defense Department computer password; all of these charges come up under the Espionage Act. To outline the history of this act’s use, it has never been used against a media organization since it has existed as a United States law. Although Assange has been in the business of gathering information and such documents since the founding of WikiLeaks in 2006, yet the government only cares when the information could possibly be detrimental to their reputation? Seems fishy. To give you some perspective on what type of information Assange brought to the public’s attention, one of the videos that was leaked included the U.S. Apache helicopters slaughtering dozens of people in Iraq in 2007, which contradicted claims that had been formally made by the United States. So, I guess you could say the government got their feelings hurt a little bit. The use of the Espionage Act to indict Assange raised concerns by many journalism groups that the government’s decisions were politically motivated.