Julian Assange’s release is still a lose-lose for press freedom

Julian Assange — the WikiLeaks founder who has spent the last 14 years resisting extradition to the US on Espionage Act charges — is set to be released on Wednesday after spending the last five years at London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison. 

In exchange for his freedom, he will plead guilty to a criminal charge under the Espionage Act, which the US government has increasingly used to prosecute and silence whistleblowers. 

That charge is related to his 2010 role in seeking and publishing classified or sensitive documents and videos about the Iraq war and other US national security issues.  

Assange is on his way to a US federal court in the Mariana Islands, close to his native Australia. That is where he’ll enter his plea and be sentenced — likely to time already served in Belmarsh — and then be free to live with his wife Stella and his children. 

Assange’s status as a journalist and his actions to obtain those documents are still hotly debated. The fact that his saga ends with a plea deal means those questions are not being fully litigated in court, and, therefore, other whistleblowers and publishers could still be punished for revealing information in the public interest. Press freedom in the US remains at serious risk.

Assange’s case, in brief

Assange has been in the public eye for the past 14 years as the founder of WikiLeaks, the website that hosts emails, cables, and other documents from governments and other power players. Some of that information is obtained through illicit means, like hacking, while other documents come through whistleblowers.

As Emily Stewart wrote for Vox: “Starting in 2010, WikiLeaks published a video of an airstrike in Iraq that killed civilians, military documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and State Department cables in which diplomats gave candid assessments of foreign governments, all provided by Chelsea Manning, who was at the time a US Army intelligence analyst. The unprecedented leaks gained enormous attention and made Assange a sort of celebrity — and a target, as top US officials like Attorney General Eric Holder publicly mused about how they could charge him.

In late 2010, before the US filed any charges, Assange was accused of rape in Sweden. Swedish authorities put out a warrant for his arrest, and he was detained in London but quickly bailed out. In 2012, the UK’s Supreme Court ordered him extradited to Sweden; before he could be sent away, he began living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where officials granted him asylum. Even though the rape charges were dropped in 2017, he continued to claim asylum in the embassy till 2019. 

That year, the London Metropolitan Police, who were invited into the embassy by Ecuadorian leaders, including President Lenin Moreno, arrested him both for failing to appear in court following his release on bail in 2012 and on behalf of the US. Later that year, the US government revealed its charges against him — all under the Espionage Act — including seven counts of obtaining national security information, conspiracy to receive national defense information, and nine counts of disclosing national defense information. He had already been charged with conspiracy to breach the Defense Department’s Secret Internet Protocol Network to obtain classified information.

Assange was kept in Belmarsh, where he was forced to stay in a cell 23 hours a day while he fought attempts by the UK government to extradite him to the US. 

What Assange’s plea means for whistleblowers — and journalism

Journalists and publishers have few federal protections when it comes to reporting and releasing sensitive information. 

While the Espionage Act has been increasingly used to target the whistleblowers and sources who provide information to journalists, it has never been used to charge a journalist or outlet who published information that was in the public interest, though it has been used against journalists for other reasons. Whether Assange qualifies as a journalist — and whether his actions soliciting and publishing Mannings’ leaks qualify as serving the public interest — remains a matter of debate. 

“Is a data dump journalism? That’s an interesting question,” journalist and Columbia Journalism School professor Todd Gitlin told Vox in 2019. “In the case of war crimes footage, I feel comfortable saying that by working with Manning on that, Assange was performing an act of journalism. But when you release terabytes of data indiscriminately, I don’t know what to call that, but it’s not self-evidently journalism.”

Some experts fear Assange pleading guilty to the Espionage Act charge to disseminate national defense information “could set an even more dangerous precedent” because he is pleading guilty as a publisher, as Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns at Reporters Sans Frontieres international, told Vox. 

Because his case was settled through a deal rather than trial proceedings, it doesn’t set a legal precedent, but the guilty plea “signals that [the US government] could file other cases like this” and go after publishers that release information it would rather keep under wraps, even if that information isn’t classified, Vincent said. The situation will also continue to be grim for whistleblowers who expose information about government actions related to national defense, even if that information is in the public interest — meaning that it exposes a crime, misuse of public funds, or hypocrisy or conflicts of interest on the part of the powerful, or other kinds of corruption or corporate greed. 

“Unfortunately, the precedent has already been set, both legal and political, that the Espionage Act can be used against a journalist’s source,” Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, told Vox. “[The Obama administration] normalized the use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, journalists’ sources, government insiders, whatever you want to call them.”

That’s been the case for whistleblowers like Reality Winner, the former Army linguist who sent a classified report on Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 election to the Intercept; she pleaded guilty to unauthorized transmission of national defense information and was sentenced in 2018 to five years and three months in prison — at that time the longest sentence ever for such a crime. Edward Snowden, who has become a naturalized Russian citizen after spending more than a decade avoiding extradition to the US on espionage charges, leaked a trove of documents to the Guardian in 2013 showing that the National  Security Agency was collecting information on phone calls by Verizon customers. 

Given the price Assange and whistleblowers have paid for exposing information in the public interest, both Gibbons and Vincent said that it’s time to reform the Espionage Act, tailoring it so that journalists, whistleblowers, and publishers can argue that revealing government information is in the public interest.

The effect of government actions against whistleblowers has caused significant damage to journalism in the US and all over the globe, Vincent and Gibbons said. It has had a chilling effect on would-be sources, journalists, and outlets fearing retribution for the act of news-gathering. And it certainly damages US credibility in cases like that of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter unjustly detained in Russia, who the US has struggled to free.