Kill the Messenger Much?
After seven years holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, Julian Assange has recently been expelled, arrested, and now faces extradition to the USA on charges of stealing state secrets. There are two glaring absurdities in this case which reveal the State in all its hypocrisy.
First things first, Julian Assange stole no state secrets. His organization, Wikileaks, was given the infamous video dubbed “Collateral Murder” by disaffected Private First Class Bradley (Chelsea) Manning in 2010. This grisly video showed the mistaken assassination three years earlier of several civilians in Bagdad, including two Reutgers journalists for which the U.S. had denied responsibility. Those committing the act were U.S. soldiers whom we are told (often and loudly) serve our interests, yet the State cried treason to say that we had no right to that information, years after its revelation could have posed risk to anybody.
Compare that stance to a quote from one of Dutchess County’s most famous residents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.” Our schools teach civics to our children, instilling the notion that we are all stakeholders in the State, but Julian Assange’s case demonstrates that – if nothing else – the State’s interests sometimes differ markedly from those of the citizenry.
Assange is also blamed for Wikileaks’ collaboration with CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and this is another patent absurdity. Snowden defected from the CIA and revealed the information which that agency was electronically gathering from all Americans. Again the State cried treason, accusing Snowden and Assange of having stolen the information.
Said accusation flies in the face of the very theory on which the CIA gathers that information, which is called “third-party doctrine.” It stems mainly from two U.S. Supreme Court cases from the 1970s which stated that citizens relinquish any privacy interest in information transmitted to outside parties, like banks or telephone companies. Even in the 1970s, legal scholars denounced this case law as irredeemably short-sighted, and today it is utterly preposterous given the mediums of smartphones and cloud computing, yet the CIA relies on this case law to say, “We collect citizens’ data because they have surrendered all privacy interest in it.”
Notice though that the State cries foul when somebody like Assange takes information which the State itself had taken. A citizen’s romantic chats by telephone and Instant Messages stop belonging to him when the CIA clandestinely trawls them, yet somehow the CIA then mysteriously develops a privacy interest in these same communications. This logic is laughable to anybody!
Julian Assange has done nothing more than air the government’s dirty laundry. If you are somebody who favors good government, then Assange is a clarion messenger about what actions a virtuous government should avoid. If you tend towards the Libertarian like myself, Assange is the perfect messenger about the dangers of overarching government. In either case, his is a message which should be heeded, and he is a messenger who must not be killed!
Daniel Donnelly, Amenia
Dutchess County Libertarian Party’s Vice-Chair
April 15th, 2019
