Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine. It’s hard to know the trut…
> At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent.…
> You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships.
Wikileaks isn't some sort Wikipedia of public/accessible records, it's a platform to publish confidential information.If the US gov is a healthy, democratic, open gov, how and why can Wikileaks be so damaging?
Should we stop newspapers?