The indictment charging Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange with obtaining and publishing classified material represents a grave threat to all Americans' First Amendment rights, advocates across the political spectrum say.
John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, told reporters on Thursday that the Justice Department"takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy" but that department officials didn't consider Assange to be a journalist.
But Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement:"Any government use of the Espionage Act to criminalize the receipt and publication of classified information poses a dire threat to journalists seeking to publish such information in the public interest, irrespective of the Justice Department's assertion that Assange is not a journalist.
The whole point of the First Amendment, he said,"is, in significant part, to avoid making particularized governmental determinations about who is a 'real journalist.'" "It begins by citing public requests by Wikileaks for classified documents from a number of governments," HortonSimilarly, Eli Lake, a neoconservative columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, said the indictment"While it can be debated whether Assange is a journalist and whether Wikileaks is a news organization,"this debate is irrelevant," Lake, who has long denounced the leaking of information from counterintelligence investigations, wrote Thursday.
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