Professor shintasama wrote:
had Brad Manning gone to The New York Times first instead of Assange (see: pentagon papers), and The New York Times had printed said materials (see: the pentagon papers), what do you think the punishment for those at The New York Times would have been? (see: precedent set in cases resulting from the pentagon papers)
If the NY Times had simply dumped the entire contents of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, with or without the minimal filtering that took place, they would be equally liable for being charged with a crime. There are also vast differences between these two situations. Everyone likes to compare them, but they're really very very different. The NY Times didn't just dump whole documents with some minimal editing. They read the documents. They looked for patterns which indicated wrongdoing and/or violations of policy promises by the various administrations involved. Then they wrote a series of editorials detailing what they found from the documents, using only those documents which they needed to support their allegations. Also, the Pentagon Papers were already edited and refined material. They were policy papers, not just raw documents.
And even with those massive differences, I think you fail to understand that in the Pentagon Papers deal, several reporters *were* charged with crimes and jailed, and several newspapers were ordered by the courts to cease releasing documents. And they were not found not-guilty. Their cases were dismissed on various technicalities, not the least of which was that the same sort of wiretapping irregularities found during the Watergate scandal were involved in some of the investigations used by the government at the time.
The Supreme Court did not rule that the press has some magical right to release classified documents to the public. It absolutely did not rule that the various espionage acts involved were unconstitutional. What happened there was a series of bungles and bizarre acts which happened to conspire to allow what was effectively a classified policy report to be opened up to public scrutiny without punishment. Arguing that this means that actual day to day classified communications and reports can be equally released is a huge step past what happened then.
It's a completely different issue.
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Wikileaks is a site dedicated to soliciting leaked information.
and The New York Times doesn't?
You clearly don't understand the difference between asking people to bring evidence of wrong doing to them so they can write stories about it, and asking people to just pass on any classified information they get their hands on so they can dump it in front of the public. One is a form of check on government abuses which may also impact national security along the way. The other is just a form of undermining national security for the sake of doing so.
The big glaring problem with the wikileaks dumps is that there is no story. There is no editorial. There are no specific allegations, or examination of data. Said data is not selectively released in order to support a specific given charge against the government. If those things were happening, one could argue that they were working for the public good. But they aren't. This is just about releasing data for the sake of releasing it and nothing more.
Like I've been saying all along, those are completely different things.
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He didn't talk to Wikileaks then steal documents, he stole documents then talked to Wikileaks. To pretend that someone determined enough to risk actual treason charges would give up if Wikileaks didn't exist or turned him down is naive.
Er? He knew that a site called wikileaks existed. He presumably had some beef with the government. He decided to funnel massive amounts of documents to wikileaks servers. It's not like this guy was stealing documents and hiding them in his house deciding who to hand them to. Had there not been an online site for him to send the data to, what do you suppose he would have done?
Edited, Dec 10th 2010 3:29pm by gbaji 
