President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I find this so wrong. I don't see Julian Assange as some kind of selfless hero, the image he would like to project. He's a self-righteous, egotistical shit stirrer. But he's not an American citizen, owes us nothing, and to me, the most telling thing about that article is that it reads like they are sitting around trying to figure out what charges they can create to indict him. Like they are after him, and it's not about justice, it's just about getting him by any means possible.

I think this is such a bad look for the country, and it feeds the narrative that we are a bunch of hypocrites. We spout off about freedom, try to push our notions of freedom on the rest of the world, pontificate about the first amendment. ... and then we are going to turn around and essentially prosecute Assange for publishing truthful information? Whatever bad deed they cloak it in to try to create criminality, that really is all he did.

It's so problematic, first because the government shouldn't be criminalizing what he does based on whether they like or don't like the information he published, which is what this comes down to. And secondly, because he's not an American citizen even. He doesn't owe the U.S. anything.

As much as I personally don't like what it seems the Russians did in spreading misinformation, hacking some servers and e-mail accounts and making stuff public, my problem isn't with the information itself. Even the false propaganda. And to the extent Assange was their vehicle for getting stuff out there, he didn't do anything that should be criminal. Free flowing information is what makes a free society. People should be worried when the government starts to erode that in any way. It should be up to each of us to evaluate the sources of information, the truth of anything we see, etc. But not having the government decide what we can see, from whom, and under what circumstances. That is way more dangerous than Julian Assange is. As for Russia? If you don't like them hacking into your e-mail account and making you look bad, maybe protect your e-mails better? Or be careful about what you say in e-mail?

Either way, from my perspective, anything we saw from dumps of her e-mails or John Podestas e-mails wasn't really a bad thing. It was just more information. People could take it for what it was worth. But free flowing information is never a bad thing.

 

When you don't like the information someone publishes being made public, call it a national security issue, and stifle it. It's so ripe for authoritarianism at worst, persecution of political enemies at best.

The Espionage Act is ridiculously broad. ... for a reason. It's illegal for anyone with "unauthorized possession" of "national defense information" to "willfully communicate" it "to any person not entitled to receive it" if the person "has reason to believe" that info "could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation."

It's catch-all bullshit that tries to give the government a justification to trash the first amendment, especially good for when they get caught violating the Bill of Rights or get embarrassed somehow.

As for Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, I suppose they took oaths that they would keep things related to the work they signed on for secret. So if they violated what they signed on for -- even if in the case of Snowden, who I think did the rest of us a service by exposing how Big Brotherish the NSA has gotten -- fine, prosecute them. I can see a solid and principled position being that it was an act of civil disobedience, and being willing to except the consequences of what you think is an unjust prosecution in order to try to fix government malfeasance.

Julian Assange doesn't owe us a thing, though. Someone brings him information. I'd rather a free society, where he is free to publish it, than a government that is given secretive authority to decide what is harmful and what isn't, with the authority to criminalize publication of information. That notion is about as unfree and unAmerican as anything I can think of.