{"id":6831,"date":"2013-05-30T21:55:19","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T01:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/?p=6831"},"modified":"2013-05-30T22:28:50","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T02:28:50","slug":"assange-its-u-s-security-state-vs-first-amendment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2013\/05\/assange-its-u-s-security-state-vs-first-amendment.html","title":{"rendered":"Assange: It&#8217;s U.S. Security State vs. First Amendment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a 40-minute Web &#038; television interview on <em>Democracy Now!<\/em> WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange discussed U.S. Justice Department spying on journalists and what the &#8220;abuse of the Espionage Act&#8221; against a reporter means. He also talked about the future of WikiLeaks, the financial blockade against it, and his nearly year-long political asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"400\" height=\"225\" src=\"http:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/embed\/blog\/2013\/5\/29\/extended_interview_julian_assange_on_international_crackdown_on_wikileaks\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Some excerpts:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>NERMEEN SHAIKH:<\/strong> Julian Assange, you spoke in the first part of our interview about some of the financial restrictions placed on donations to WikiLeaks. Can you explain what you think the future of WikiLeaks is, how the organization has suffered as a result of the constraints that have been placed on financial donations, and some of the ways in which you\u2019re still managing to receive funding?<\/p>\n<p><strong>JULIAN ASSANGE:<\/strong> The initial blockade, which occurred for purely political reasons, by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, Diners Club, JCB, Discover, the Bank of America and Swiss Post Finance, that initial blockade was done extrajudicially, extralegally. There\u2019s no law being used. There\u2019s no law being cited. There\u2019s not even an administrative decision that has been cited by, say, the U.S. Treasury. In fact, the U.S. Treasury has found just the opposite, that there is no lawful reason for such a blockade, and has not applied one itself. This is an example of patronage, an example of how this new center, extreme center, of U.S. power is able to influence the organizations in its periphery &#8212; namely, financial service companies.<\/p>\n<p><strong>AMY GOODMAN:<\/strong> In a major development in the ongoing scandals around the Obama administration spying on journalists, NBC News has revealed that Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a possible co-conspirator in violations of the Espionage Act. The search warrant enabled Justice Department investigators to secretly seize his private emails as part of an investigation into who provided him with classified information about North Korea in 2009. In the government\u2019s application for the warrant, prosecutors allege there was probable cause to believe that Rosen violated the Espionage Act of 1917. In another filing, prosecutors argued they should be allowed to keep the warrant secret from Rosen because they might need to monitor his email account indefinitely. I want to ask you about Rosen and also about the FBI getting the phone records of AP, you know, on 20 phone lines, which meant about a hundred reporters and editors at Associated Press.<\/p>\n<p><div id=\"attachment_6863\" style=\"width: 210px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/blog\/2013\/5\/29\/extended_interview_julian_assange_on_international_crackdown_on_wikileaks?autostart=true\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6863\" data-attachment-id=\"6863\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2013\/05\/assange-its-u-s-security-state-vs-first-amendment.html\/julian-assange-democracy-now\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/julian-assange-democracy-now.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"200,143\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"julian-assange-democracy-now\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"&lt;p&gt; Julian Assange on Democracy Now!&lt;\/p&gt;\n\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/julian-assange-democracy-now.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/julian-assange-democracy-now.jpg\" alt title=\"Julian Assange on Democracy Now!\" width=\"200\" height=\"143\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6863\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-6863\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><br \/> Julian Assange on Democracy Now!<\/p><\/div><strong>JULIAN ASSANGE:<\/strong> Well, let\u2019s look at this phenomena from two aspects. Don\u2019t be deceived by what appears to be small maneuvers by the Department of Justice to go after AP, to go after Rosen, to go after us, etc. We have over here the bulk surveillance industry run by the National Security Agency that already has all these records. It has them all already. The National Security Agency &#8212; and this has come out in one court case after another &#8212; was involved in a project called Stellar Wind to collect all the calling records of the United States, every record of everyone calling everyone over years. And the result of that lays out the entire community and political structure, based upon who people are friends with. You can infer that by who calls who, and what the status is by the relative flow of calls around the country, to suck out the entire community structure of the United States. That has already been done. Those calling records already enter into the national security complex.<\/p>\n<p>What we\u2019re talking about here are mechanisms to use that information in a court case, and therefore it has to be clean. This is the dirty team; this is the clean team. And so, these are maneuvers to pull people into court cases that will become public to set a deterrent against national security journalism. And the most pernicious aspect of that is the abuse of the Espionage Act and other mechanisms to try and conflate the activities of a source with the activities of a journalist or a publisher, and to try and say that whenever a journalist deals with a source, they\u2019re in fact engaged in a conspiracy. And if there\u2019s an allegation &#8212; of course, allegations can be very easily made, placed on the table, just invented from thin air &#8212; that a source\u2019s behavior affects national security and is therefore espionage, and therefore, extend that allegation over to the journalist and to the source &#8212; and to the publisher. In the case of Rosen, they have done that in order to get at Rosen\u2019s emails and other records, to then reflect back onto the source or onto other sources. You know, it is simply a disgrace. It is unethical conduct. It is politically worrying conduct. It is chilling conduct. And it is &#8212; why is it being done? Because they believe they can get away with it. It is part of advancing the frontier of the national security state to roll on over the First Amendment and every other traditionally accepted U.S. value.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/blog\/2013\/5\/29\/extended_interview_julian_assange_on_international_crackdown_on_wikileaks?autostart=true\">transcript<\/a> of the complete interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a 40-minute Web &#038; television interview on Democracy Now! WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange discussed U.S. Justice Department spying on journalists and what the &#8220;abuse of the Espionage Act&#8221; against a reporter means. He also talked about the future of WikiLeaks, the financial blockade against it, and his nearly year-long political asylum in the Ecuadorean [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,23,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6831","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-media","7":"category-news","8":"category-political-culture","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-1Mb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}