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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Whenever a journalist asks their source for classified information, which they do all the time, they're asking their source to break the law.

That's not true but I don't have time to run through an exhaustive legal explanation of why. In a nutshell: the source is responsible for maintaining security of information, because third parties like journalists don't know the bounds of what is covered by confidentiality.

Moreover, asking for information is not the same thing as soliciting information. Asking is fine, soliciting is not (in this context, soliciting means offering them something of value in exchange for the information).

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Journalists normally know full well that they're asking sources for classified information. Asking for classified information is absolutely routine in investigative journalism.

> Asking is fine, soliciting is not (in this context, soliciting means offering them something of value in exchange for the information).

Assange didn't purchase the information.

The theories you're supporting would make reporting on US government secrets illegal. You should stop and think about how fundamentally this would undermine the freedom of the press and the ability of the public to know about what their government does in secret.

Black-and-white/yes-or-no/kindergarten level of analysis? Sure, that's correct.

In the real world? It's not correct at all. For starters, it's perfectly legal to ask for classified information, because it's well understood that a source generally will not provide any classified information (because the source would face criminal sanction if they do). However, if the source is willing to reveal said information, and the journalist did not solicit it, then the journalist is free to publish it because journalists are not covered by classified information laws (in the US).

If, however, the journalist solicits the information (by offering something of value, not necessarily monetary), or by assisting in the acquisition of the information, then they have violated various US laws, because they've crossed the line.

Assange is alleged to have performed acts that could be construed as attempts to access classified information, beyond merely asking for it--specifically, it is alleged that he assisted Manning with attempting to acquire and decrypt classified documents. That is the heart of the issue--if Assange had merely accepted a document dump from Manning (as he generally did with most other sources), he wouldn't be facing 18 charges today.

However, Assange is also not protected by free press rulings. Because he's not a journalist. He's just a parrot. A parrot merely passes on what's given to them. A journalist verifies their sources, the information they've received, and exercises some sort of analysis and judgment in deciding what to publish. Assange literally did none of those things until it came time to interfere in the Trump-Clinton election, when he chose to bury the Trump documents he received and time the release of Clinton-related documents, most of which are now known to have been partial or whole-scale forgeries by the Russian intelligence agencies.

You’re being downvoted for knowing factually correct information that happens to disprove some of the biases that’s HN posters hold, which is a shame. Downvotes aren’t supposed to be a consolation prize for having your inferior arguments lose.

As a reference point, season 3 of the tv show “The Newsroom” has a plot that centers around a new reporter who aids their source in collecting confidential documents from the US government, and every reporter in the newsroom immediately understands they’ve ‘solicited’ information and thus violated the espionage act. I sincerely doubt that this is a concept that a tv show writer can understand and effectively explain, yet would be opaque to a reporter.

As a minor note though, Wikileaks absolutely buried trump related documents and carefully timed the release of Clinton related dumps, which makes sense as Wikileaks had been reduced to a front for Russian intelligence by that time. But the emails they released were themselves authentic, and their veracity can be independently verified by the DKIM system they had enabled. Funnily enough, for all the sound and fury over the Clinton emails, the worst thing that they show is that Clinton received a debate in advance, just like Donald Trump did.

They're being downvoted for making up their own pet legal theories that go against settled American law. Sycophantically justifying the Trump administration's attack on the press isn't "nuanced." A lot of people dislike Assange because they're upset that Clinton's emails reflected badly on her and might have contributed to her loss, or because they're upset he published documents that embarrassed the US. That's no reason to suddenly start inventing novel legal interpretations that outlaw investigative journalism.

Except for the fact that the lawyer above is correct in their interpretation of the law, and you are wrong. You don’t get to decide that laws you disagree with are ‘pet’, ‘novel’ and go against ‘settled’ law. You’re trying to couch your opinion in certainty that it doesn’t deserve - again, because your interpretation of the law is wrong. You should even have a clue that the DoJ understands this difference, because they specifically allege that Assange helping Manning steal further documents constituted ‘solicitation’. Another clue should be the fact that the articles criticizing this charge, and original Obama era decision not to prosecute the violation, are based on the ‘chilling effect’ that it causes, not that no ‘solicitation’ occurred.

If you’re still confused, here’s a short clip from the aforementioned show discussing that it’s wrong with soliciting sources to steal: https://youtu.be/VSPhYdxSTRI

Their statement that American free-speech jurisprudence doesn't apply to non-journalists is a dead giveaway that they're speaking nonsense.

Maybe you're impressed when the Trump administration's DOJ comes up with a novel legal theory to prosecute a journalist for "solicitation." I'm going to rely on Hugo Black's opinion of this sort of attempt to intimidate journalists and crack down on national security reporting - that it is a fundamental threat to democracy and contravenes the First Amendment. You can trust Trump's cronies over at the DOJ if you'd like.

> That's not true but I don't have time to run through an exhaustive legal explanation of why. In a nutshell: the source is responsible for maintaining security of information, because third parties like journalists don't know the bounds of what is covered by confidentiality.

Guess what, your wrong and here's why: all gov't info is bound by confidentiality unless it's on a press release page.

That's not true at all.

See https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/why-the... which explains the SCOTUS case that describes why journalists can publish classified information.

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