A British judge has ordered the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, where he faces a 175-year sentence. The final decision on Assange’s extradition will now be made by U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel. Amnesty International’s Simon Crowther spoke outside the courthouse prior to today’s ruling.
Simon Crowther: “Julian Assange is being prosecuted for espionage for publishing sensitive material that was classified. And if he is extradited to the U.S. for this, all journalists around the world are going to have to look over their shoulder, because within their own jurisdiction, if they publish something that the U.S. considers to be classified, they will face the risk of being extradited.”
You may have got a couple of facts wrong:
https://www.laprogressive.com/the-media-in-the-united-states/wrong-about-assange
"Wikileaks had hundreds of thousands of documents it had gotten from Manning – the war logs and State Department cables — for a considerable period in 2010 and went to “extraordinary lengths to publish them in a responsible and redacted manner,” the submissions to a lower U.K. court said. WikiLeaks held back information while it formed media partnerships with news organizations such as The Guardian, The New York Times and DER SPIEGEL to manage the release of the material. Assange’s legal team cited named witnesses, various journalists who worked with Assange on the process. Those witnesses testified to the rigor of the redaction effort.
The media partners’ work on the Afghan war logs included approaching the White House before releasing them. In July 2010, Wikileaks also entered dialogue with the White House about redacting names. On July 25, 2010, WikiLeaks held back publication of 15,000 documents on Afghanistan to safeguard its “harm minimization process” even after its media partners published stories.
Redaction of the Iraq War diaries was likewise “painstakingly approached” and involved the development of special redaction software. Publication was delayed in August 2010 despite this annoying some media partners because Assange didn’t want to rush.
Un-redacted publication of the State Department cables in September 2011 was undertaken by parties unconnected to WikiLeaks, and despite WikiLeaks’ efforts to prevent it, the legal submissions state. Those who revealed un-redacted cables have never been prosecuted nor requested to remove them from the internet.
[Ed.: John Young, founder of Cryptome, testified at Assange’s hearing that he published the unredacted cables before WikiLeaks but was never questioned by police. The password to the unredacted cables was published by Guardian journalists Luke Harding and David Leigh before Cryptome did.]"