"(WikiLeaks) directed Chelsea Manning to intercept specific secret information, and it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States," Pompeo said. "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: A non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia."
The ramifications for this could have serious implications for press freedoms. If the United States government can start holding journalists responsible for reporting information simply because the United States government did not want it to be released, there's really nothing stopping them from going after muckraking journalists under similar situations. Imagine if the Nixon administration had declared Woodward and Bernstein a "non-state hostile intelligence service" who conspired with their sources in the Watergate investigation. Imagine if the Trump administration decided that it wasn't pleased with a journalist receiving information about a White House leak with potentially damaging consequences for an administration official. The potential for prosecutorial abuse is limitless.
The First They Came For Assange events will be held on June 19, 2017, in Athens, Belgrade, Berlin, Bruxelles, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Milano, Montevideo, Naples, New York, Quito, Paris, Sarajevo, and other cities throughout the world. Julian Assange will be participating via live feed from Ecuador's embassy in London. Among the speakers will be linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, music legend and author Patti Smith, Slovenian bad boy philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Chinese artist and human rights activist Ai Wei Wei, Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy, legendary composer Brian Eno, Democracy Now journalist Amy Goodman, philosopher Bernard Stiegler, journalist Chris Hedges, and many more, as listed on the event's website.
Many of these people have spoken extensively about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange before. Writing in the Guardian, Slavoj Žižek explained how WikiLeaks has opened the world's eyes to the fact that much of what we call freedom is a big illusion.
"Not only have we learned a lot about the illegal activities of the U.S. and other great powers," Žižek writes. "Not only have the WikiLeaks revelations put secret services on the defensive and set in motion legislative acts to better control them. WikiLeaks has achieved much more: millions of ordinary people have become aware of the society in which they live. Something that until now we silently tolerated as unproblematic is rendered problematic."
