WASHINGTON — As purveyor of secret U. S. government information, Julian Assange has few rivals. The release of a stunning trove of sensitive diplomatic cables…
WASHINGTON — As purveyor of secret U. S. government information, Julian Assange has few rivals.
The release of a stunning trove of sensitive diplomatic cables and entire Pentagon databases nearly a decade ago made Assange and his anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks a household names and an enemy of the American government.
Six years later, WikiLeaks published thousands of private emails involving members of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign that investigators said were stolen and passed to Assange’s organization working for the Russian government. That episode and others so infuriated U. S. authorities that then-CIA director Mike Pompeo called Assange’s organization a “hostile intelligence service.”
But none of those things prompted the government to call Assange a criminal.
When the U. S. government revealed its long-rumored criminal case against the WikiLeaks founder on Thursday, the leaks that made him either famous or infamous merited only scant mention.
Instead, federal prosecutors unveiled a single count outlining a simple criminal conspiracy alleging that Assange joined with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 to crack a password on a secret computer network within the Defense Department. It wasn’t clear from the charges that they succeeded.
That case appeared to be the result of a years-long struggle within the Justice Department over what to do about WikiLeaks and its famous founder, whose activities the government has said repeatedly jeopardized U. S. security but also were difficult to distinguish from those of journalists who frequently print information the government would rather keep secret. The question that vexed prosecutors was where to draw the line between journalism and crime.
Wherever that line is, prosecutors say Assange crossed it on March 8,2010, when they allege that he agreed to help Manning crack a password on the Pentagon’s computer network. In framing the case that way, the Justice Department cast its focus on conduct that separates Assange from journalists who receive and publish classified secrets.
“I think the top line takeaway form this: journalism is not a crime, but hacking is,” said April Doss, a former National Security Agency associate general counsel. “What we see in the indictment is the Department of Justice being very careful to draw that distinction and make clear that the indictment is not for anything that he published. The indictment really centers around the allegation that he was conspiring to hack into Department of Defense computers.”
Doss said the nature of the government’s charge is so limited in scope that it should provide “comfort” to journalists who report on national security.
“This indictment does not cause any risk to journalists who are encountering that information,” Doss said. “What it does is reinforce the longstanding rule that nobody can commit crimes in order to get that kind of information.
