re: the threats of the U.S. government bringing up espionage charges against Wikileaks and its editor:
Spying, to the average reasonable person, involves one party under a false cover gaining access to secrets for the benefit of another party, under the direct orders of the latter. Since Wikileaks doesn’t order anyone to obtain anything, and the people providing the documents to them didn’t get their position primarily to gain access to those documents, such a charge proves itself ridiculous on its face. We’re not talking about a spying operation here.
What ARE we talking about, then? Simply put, a wire service.
Wikileaks obtains raw data, in the form of leaked documents, and organizes it for search and transmission. The results are then picked by certain media organizations and sifted for re-publication as individual news stories.
To the political establishment figures continuing to invoke the espionage act, here’s the challenge: explain how any legal reasoning that counts Wikileaks as a criminal organization for seeding news stories from leaked documents wouldn’t equally apply to, say , the Associated Press.
