Early Thursday morning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by British authorities and forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he had been staying. Assange’s arrest came after the US filed an extradition request with the British government.
Shortly after, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed an indictment against Assange charging him with conspiring to hack a government computer in the Pentagon that contained classified information.
Thursday’s events mark a dramatic inflection point in the ongoing debate over how the US government prosecutes individuals accused of obtaining or leaking classified information, and the broader implications that can have on First Amendment protections.
Assange was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion over his alleged role in helping the former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning hack a classified computer. The indictment said Manning passed the files she downloaded to WikiLeaks and that she and Assange then agreed that he would help her try to “crack the password” so she could access other classified computers to obtain more information.
The document did not contain criminal charges against Assange, WikiLeaks, or any other entity related to the publishing or dissemination of classified information.
But First Amendment advocates said Assange’s arrest still raised red flags for a number of reasons.
“Lots of things a journalist says about a leaker’s behavior could be ‘encouragement,’ and I find the indictment’s gratuitous focus on that (it’s really not necessary with the details about the hacking) to be chilling,” White said.
Ben Wizner, the director of the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed that view.
Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, also characterized his arrest and indictment as an attack to press freedom. “This sets a dangerous precedent for all media organizations in Europe and around the world,” Robinson told reporters on Thursday.
But national-security experts disagreed, saying the charge against Assange has nothing to do with freedom of the press.
“Assange’s sole criminal charge is for conspiring to assist Manning in hacking government passwords in order to aid her in gaining additional access to more classified documents to which she otherwise would not have access,” Bradley Moss, a national-security lawyer based in Washington, DC, told INSIDER.
“That is the very type of action that journalists are trained not to do, as it goes beyond what is protected by the First Amendment’s press protections and implicates separate criminal restrictions,” he said.
Jeffrey Cramer, a longtime former federal prosecutor who spent 12 years at the Justice Department, told INSIDER it was likely prosecutors leveled a narrow charge against the WikiLeaks founder as a mechanism to secure his extradition to the US.
If a UK judge agrees to extradite Assange to the US, however, Cramer noted that prosecutors could bring additional charges in order to get more evidence admitted in a trial against him.
Assange and WikiLeaks are central to the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election.
In an indictment charging 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking into the Democratic National Committee and disseminating stolen emails, Mueller’s office mentioned WikiLeaks — though not by name — as the Russians’ conduit to release hacked documents via the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0, who is believed to be a front for Russian military intelligence.
The indictment against Assange, which was obtained by federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, in March 2018, does not have any connection to WikiLeaks’ role in the 2016 election.