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Espionage Act

Biden’s Legacy: Fundamentally Changing Nothing For Whistleblowers

January 15, 2025 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. , , , ,
When Joe Biden was vice president under President Barack Obama, he was part of an administration that waged an unprecedented war on leaks. President Biden may not have been as zealous as Obama, however, he periodically harnessed the very machinery that Obama and President Donald Trump wielded to enforce secrecy and silence whistleblowers. With the Espionage Act, the Obama Justice Department prosecuted more United States government employees and contractors who disclosed information to the press than all previous presidents combined.

Guilty Plea In First Espionage Act Case Involving Drone Photography

July 16, 2024 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. , , , , ,
In a first-of-its-kind prosecution, a Chinese graduate student pleaded guilty to violating the United States Espionage Act when he flew a drone and photographed U.S. military and naval installations. The plea deal does not create any legal precedent, and U.S. prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia never explicitly accused Fengyun Shi of spying on behalf of the Chinese government. However, the case itself carries implications for the right to photograph or gather news. Shi agreed to plead guilty [PDF] to two counts of “unlawful photographing of designated installation without authorization.” Both are misdemeanor charges that carry a potential sentence of one year in prison and a fine of $100,000. He also faces deportation back to China.

Assange’s Case Shows Why Reforming The Espionage Act Is Imperative

July 12, 2024 Chip Gibbons, The Nation. , , , , ,
On June 25, 2024, the 14-year persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange came to an end. As part of a plea deal, the journalist pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act. In exchange, he received time served for the five years he spent in a British maximum-security prison while fighting his extradition. Although Assange walked out of the courthouse a free man, his freedom came after paying an extraordinary harsh price. Officially, Assange’s crime was “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.” According to the plea deal, Assange helped to set up WikiLeaks, which announced that it would publish “classified, censored, or otherwise restricted information of political, diplomatic, or ethical significance.”

Julian Assange Freed By The Prospect Of Justice

July 7, 2024 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
The sudden announcement that Julian Assange would be freed after a plea agreement came as a great and very welcome surprise. Assange and the Wikileaks team were targets of United States persecution and prosecution by three different presidential administrations because they revealed secrets that the state wanted to keep hidden. Wikileaks revealed war crimes committed during the George W. Bush administration in their Iraq War Logs and Afghanistan War Logs. Private Chelsea Manning leaked the Collateral Murder video, which shows the deaths of civilians, including two Reuters reporters, as they were gunned down by a U.S. army helicopter crew in 2007.

You Saved Julian Assange

June 26, 2024 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , , ,
The dark machinery of empire, whose mendacity and savagery Julian Assange exposed to the world, spent 14 years trying to destroy him. They cut him off from his funding, canceling his bank accounts and credit cards. They invented bogus allegations of sexual assault to get him extradited to Sweden, where he would then be shipped to the U.S. They trapped him in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for seven years after he was given political asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship by refusing him safe passage to Heathrow Airport. They orchestrated a change of government in Ecuador that saw him stripped of his asylum, harassed and humiliated by a pliant embassy staff.

Like Prison Visiting Rules, Use Of The Espionage Act Is Arbitrary, Punitive

February 11, 2024 Jeffrey Sterling, Scheer Post. , , ,
In Mid-December 2023, Charles Glass, the esteemed writer, journalist, broadcaster, and publisher visited with Julian Assange, an inmate at Belmarsh Prison in the U.K. Assange has been confined there since April, 2019. He is awaiting his final appeal to quash U.S. efforts to extradite him to face some of the same Espionage Act charges I was confronted with. Glass chronicles the visit in a recent piece in The Nation. His account took me right back to prison. Glass’s visit with Assange could have been a visit with me. I fondly remember Charles Glass. He wrote to me while I was in FCI Englewood, the prison I was bound in after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act in 2015.

Assange Is ‘Dangerously Close’ To Extradition For Revealing Crimes

July 18, 2023 Marjorie Cohn, Truthout. , , , , , ,
For nearly five years, publisher and journalist Julian Assange has fought extradition to the United States where he faces 175 years in prison for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes. Instead of protecting freedom of the press, to which he pledged allegiance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Joe Biden is continuing Donald Trump’s prosecution of Assange under the infamous Espionage Act. James Ball is one of at least four journalists that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI are pressuring to cooperate with the prosecution of Assange, Ball wrote in Rolling Stone.

Daniel Ellsberg’s Day In Court For Julian Assange

June 24, 2023 Craig Murray, Consortium News. , , ,
The massive obituaries to Daniel Ellsberg last weekend in both The New York Times and Washington Post were proof of the status he held in the United States. Only presidents get an obituary that size. His name was not nearly so widely known in the U.K. I first met Dan on 3 May 2006 when we were giving a joint presentation at Berkeley. The large hall was full to overflowing and to my surprise there were young students queuing outside and striving to listen on stairways through open doors. The large majority of the audience were not born when Dan leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

First Amendment Authorized Assange’s Possession Of Classified Data

April 21, 2023 Bruce Afran, Consortium News. , , , ,
Last week marked four years of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange being held at Britain’s Belmarsh Prison while he awaits the outcome of his fight to block extradition to the United States. While the U.S. government is also charging Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion,  the core of its case is that Assange violated the 1917 Espionage Act by “possessing” and releasing “defense” material that caused “injury” to the United States or gave “advantage” to other nations, a boundless and limitless standard that can turn virtually any journalist or blogger into a criminal defendant. No other direction, definition or limitation appears in this law that is now being applied to Assange.

Don’t Charge Trump With Espionage

August 27, 2022 John Kiriakou, Consortium News. , , ,
Former President Donald Trump shouldn’t be charged with espionage for taking classified documents with him —some of them apparently very highly classified — when he left the White House for semi-retirement at his Mar-a-Lago home. Nobody should be charged with espionage unless they are working for a foreign power and mean harm to the United States.  The Espionage Act, which was written 105 years ago to combat German saboteurs, is rarely used now to target spies and traitors.  Instead, it’s used as a cudgel to silence whistleblowers, journalists, and occasionally a stupid former president. To understand the damage that this deeply flawed law has done, and will continue to do, we have to look at its origins.  The Espionage Act was written in 1917, at the height of World War I.  The U.S. was panicked at the thought of German spies working undercover to steal its secrets and to disrupt its ability to produce war materiel and support its allies.

Trump Derangement Syndrome Returns

August 19, 2022 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. , , , ,
Progressives love the FBI? Leftists embrace the Espionage Act? Of course, one man is responsible for this madness, and he is none other than Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. The fallout from the FBI search conducted at Trump’s home shows the rank confusion spread by people who call themselves liberal but who are as dangerous as anyone on the right. From the moment that Trump announced the raid they were in full fascist mode, even as they claimed to be fighting fascism. Trump did what he usually does, play fast and loose with the truth. Of all former presidents only he would ignore subpoenas and claim to have declassified documents when he hadn’t done so. He can’t get out of his own way and thus makes himself a target. But Democrats should know that the search is seen as nothing more than a personal attack against him.

When The Just Go To Prison

August 2, 2022 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , ,
Marion, Illinois — Daniel Hale, dressed in a khaki uniform, his hair cut short and sporting a long, neatly groomed brown beard, is seated behind a plexiglass screen, speaking into a telephone receiver at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. I hold a receiver on the other side of the plexiglass and listen as he describes his journey from working for the National Security Agency and the Joint Special Operations Task Force at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to becoming federal prisoner 26069-07. Hale, a 34-year-old former Air Force signals intelligence analyst, is serving a 45 month prison sentence, following his conviction under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified documents about the U.S. military’s drone assassination program and its high civilian death toll. The documents are believed to be the source material for “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept, **on October 15, 2015.

Force The Government To Prove Espionage, Not Whistleblowing

July 14, 2022 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. , , ,
If you’ve been following the case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder whose revelations about US wars and war crimes outlets like the New York Times published to great acclaim, you know that you haven’t been following it in, for example, The New York Times. Major US outlets’ interest in Assange’s prosecution is hard to detect, as if they had no stake in a case which is not, at bottom, only about whether individuals can leak classified information, but whether journalists can publish that information at all. And it’s as if their readers had no stake in that decision either. Joining us now with the latest is researcher and journalist Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director of the group Defending Rights and Dissent. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

A History Of The Espionage Act And How it Ensnared Julian Assange

April 12, 2021 Joe Lauria, Consortium News. , , ,
From its earliest years the United States has found ways to deny the rights of a free press when it was politically expedient to do so. One of the latest ways was to arrest WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange two years ago today and to indict him — the first time a publisher and journalist has ever been charged under the 1917 Espionage Act for possessing and publishing state secrets. Though several U.S. administrations had come close to punishing journalists for revealing defense information, they all pulled back, until Assange. They were restrained because of a conflict with the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from passing any law, including the Espionage Act, that abridges press freedom.

Standing With Daniel Hale, Standing With Whistleblowers

April 8, 2021 Chip Gibbons, Defending Rights and Dissent. , ,
Join us for a special broadcast featuring DRAD Policy Director Chip Gibbons, Jesselyn Radack head of Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts, and whistleblowers who have faced Espionage Act charges. Last week, Daniel Hale, a drone whistleblower, pled guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act. Hale admitted in court that he gave to an investigative reporter documents detailing human rights abuses pertaining to the US’s troubling assassination program. Although this information was in the public interest, the government nonetheless indicted Hale under the Espionage Act. This fits into a troubling pattern where those who expose official abuses of power, including war crimes and unconstitutional surveillance, are charged under the Espionage Act.
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