straightlinelogic | In America, there is no one villain or group that one can point to as
responsible for the erosion of rights. Begun the day the Constitution
was ratified, it’s been a gradual process. We’ve reached the point where
only a few of the rights guaranteed in the Constitution and Bill of
Rights still receive any measure of government solicitude.
Property and contract rights are out the window; the government
routinely abridges them. You have no right to your own income, or to
conduct your legitimate business or trade free from government
regulation and interference. Much of the Bill of Rights is either
irrelevant now or has been rendered a dead letter. In terms of
individual rights, only the Second Amendment’s much infringed right to
bear arms, and the First Amendment—the prohibition against the
government establishing a religion, free speech, press, and assembly,
and the right to petition the government—are still hanging by a thread.
Which is why the fate of Julian Assange takes on such significance.
While the government has prosecuted those like Chelsea (formerly Brad)
Manning who have stolen government secrets and classified information,
it has not prosecuted the press individuals and organizations who have
published them. That is WikiLeaks’ business model: it receives, vets,
and publishes stolen information, often from governments.
The government has not gone after publishers because it would be a
frontal assault on the First Amendment that it would probably lose. Any
exception would swallow the general rule of press freedom. Say the
Supreme Court recognized an exception: classified information whose
publication would constitute an imminent and grave threat to the
security of the United States. Who decides what’s an imminent and grave
threat? The government would have the power to classify whatever
information it pleases under that exception and put those who publish it
at risk of prosecution, their only recourse years of costly litigation
spent arguing that the information didn’t fit the exception.
Many Trump admirers resist the notion that their man is interested in
the acquisition and use of power, but his and members of his
administration’s hostility to individual civil liberties belies that
resistance. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a gung-ho supporter of the
civil-liberties-eviscerating-government-power-expanding War on Drugs
and civil asset forfeiture.
In the latter, a government seizes assets it claims were involved
with crimes and makes their owners jump through myriad legal
hoops—including proving the negative that their assets weren’t involved
in a crime—even if the owners themselves were never convicted, or even
charged, with a crime. Assets that are not “acquitted”—cars, cash,
boats, houses, etc.—are kept and used by the government. President Trump
has endorsed civil asset forfeiture, and has extended it outside
America’s borders via an executive order (see “By Imperial Decree,” SLL, 1/2/18).
Trump’s Secretary of State and former director of the CIA, Mike
Pompeo has fashioned a legal approach the administration might use, in a
case against WikiLeaks and Assange, to slither around the First
Amendment. In April, still director of the CIA, he delivered a speech
in which several passages demanded, but never received, careful parsing
from the mainstream media. They are still obsessing over a February
Trump tweet in which he declared the US media an “enemy of the people.” This is considered a threat to the First Amendment, but Pompeo’s speech was mostly ignored.
Pompeo called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service
often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Most press organizations,
and almost all that consistently challenge the state, are non-state.
WikiLeaks has published state secrets, undoubtedly considered hostile
acts by those states, but how is it an intelligence service? Pompeo is
arguing that WikiLeaks cannot be considered part of the press, consequently it’s not protected by the First Amendment.
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