The outrageous legal attack on WikiLeaks and its staffers, who are exercising their First Amendment rights to publish classified information in the public interest—just like virtually every other major news organization in this country—is an attack on freedom of the press itself, and it’s shocking that more people aren’t raising their voices (and pens, and keyboards) in protest.

In the past four years, WikiLeaks has had their Twitter accounts secretly spied on, been forced to forfeit most of their funding after credit card companies unilaterally cut them off, had the FBI place an informant inside their news organization, watched their supporters hauled before a grand jury, and been the victim of the UK spy agency GCHQ hacking of their website and spying on their readers.

WikiLeaks demands answers after Google hands staff emails to US government Read more

Now we’ve learned that, as The Guardian reported on Sunday, the Justice Department got a warrant in 2012 to seize the contents – plus the metadata on emails received, sent, drafted and deleted – of three WikiLeaks’ staffers personal Gmail accounts, which was inexplicably kept secret from them for almost two and a half years.

The warrant for WikiLeaks staffers’ email is likely connected to the grand jury the government convened in 2010 to investigate the WikiLeaks’ publication of leaked State Department cables, along with the Afghan and Iraq war logs. As The Guardian reports:

The warrants were issued by a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia – the same jurisdiction in which a grand jury was set up under the criminal investigation into WikiLeaks. The investigation was confirmed to be still active and ongoing as recently as May last year. [Emphasis mine.]

Most journalists and press freedom groups have been inexplicably quiet about the Justice Department’s treatment of WikiLeaks and its staffers ever since, despite the fact that there has been a (justified) backlash against the rest of the Justice Department’s attempt to subpoena reporters’ phone call records and spy on their emails. But almost all of the tactics used against WikiLeaks by the Justice Department in their war on leaks were also used against mainstream news organizations.

For example, after the Washington Post revealed in 2013 the Justice Department had gotten a warrant for the personal Gmail account of Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010 without his knowledge by explicitly accusing him of being an espionage “co-conspirator” (for have the audacity to arrange to confidentially speak with a source), journalists and privacy advocates understandably reacted in shock and outrage.

WikiLeaks staffers faced virtually the same tactics: they had their Gmail seized by the government in secret, they didn’t find out for years after the fact (so they had no way to challenge it) and, according to WikiLeaks’ lawyers, the warrant specifically indicates the Justice Department is investigating WikiLeaks for “conspiracy to commit espionage.”

Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale wrote in 2011 how ridiculous and dangerous a charge like ‘conspiracy to commit espionage’ was, whether it was directed at WikiLeaks or the New York Times:

Charging Assange with “conspiracy to commit espionage” would set a precedent with a charge that more accurately could be characterized as “conspiracy to commit journalism.”

Unfortunately the news world has never rallied around WikiLeaks’ First Amendment rights they way they should – sometimes even refusing to acknowledge they are a journalism organization, perhaps because they dare to do things a little differently than the mainstream media, or because WikiLeaks tweets provocative political opinions, or because they think its founder, Julian Assange, is an unsympathetic figure.



Those are all disgraceful excuses to ignore the government’s overreach: the rights of news organizations everywhere are under just as much threat whether the government reads the private emails of staffers at WikiLeaks, Fox News or the Associated Press. In the eyes of the law, the organizations are virtually indistinguishable, as legal scholars from across the political spectrum have documented for years.

At the same time WikiLeaks’s legal troubles have been largely brushed off by the journalism world, the Justice Department has continued to treat them with contempt, ignoring their own guidelines for issuing search warrants and subpoenas to journalists publishing leaked materials and pressing ahead with all-out surveillance of a news publisher. Just imagine if the FBI placed a paid informant inside the New York Times: there would be protests on the steps of the Justice Department the next day.

Years after they first started publishing, the WikiLeaks State Department cables still remain critical to journalists all over the world (they featured prominently in the New York Times front-page obituary of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia just this week, for instance). Yet the vast criminal investigation into WikiLeaks for publishing them at all has received scant condemnation, despite the clear dangers.

And, despite the ongoing legal pressure, WikiLeaks has continued to publish important documents in the public interest. In 2014, they published draft texts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that has been vigorously opposed by a variety of public interest groups because of the extreme secrecy around the treaty’s negotiations. And in December, they published a secret CIA study showing the negative effects of the US government’s policy of targeted killing in Afghanistan and other places.

The Justice Department in the past few months has commendably seemed to retreat, at least temporarily, from its much-maligned assault on journalism. They dropped their efforts to force New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal his sources at ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling’s just-completed trial, and strengthened their media guidelines after negotiations with news organizations. Now would be a good time to officially drop its WikiLeaks investigation,too – since if WikiLeaks is prosecuted, the New York Times or the Guardian could be next, as they’ve all published classified information from WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden (and countless other sources) too .

It shouldn’t be the government’s job to decide who is enough of a journalist in their minds to qualify for the constitutional and legal protections that can and should be afforded to all of them – since it’s clear that, when they do, almost nobody qualifies, whether it’s James Risen, James Rosen or Julian Assange.

[Full disclosure: it’s very likely some of my emails were caught up in the Justice Department’s WikiLeaks dragnet, as the Freedom of the Press Foundation – the organization at which I work – was founded the same year as the warrant was issued. We were in close contact with WikiLeaks at that time, as we started crowd-funding donations for them after the payment processors extrajudicially blocked from 95% of their donation stream, despite them not being charged with a crime. They still haven’t been.]