A few months ago in Sweden we had a major news story about a journalist who went under cover as an employee of a political party media department in order to follow a story. They explicitly took the job in order to leak information which their employee contract disallowed. They will, practically guarantied, not get in legal problems for it.
People occasionally talk about this tactic as being a bit of a morally grey zone but under cover journalism with an intention of leaking information (if they get their hands on it) do happen from times to times.
> They explicitly took the job in order to leak information which their employee contract disallowed.
I get the feeling if they'd joined the Swedish military and leaked national secrets, things would not have worked out so nicely for them.
That's what Assange was accused of, not being in the military, but actively conspiring with the leaker to steal the documents rather than merely receiving the leaked documents.
Further, if that reporter claimed to be all "free the secrets!"
...but when handed documents from one another foreign government refuses to publish them
and then it becomes obvious that the leaks were targeting liberal Swedish politicians facing election versus conservative candidates favored by that same one particular other foreign government...
I don't understand why people don't see wikileaks as anything other than a proxy Russian foreign intelligence operation.
If they leak info against our opponents, they are free speech heroes and paladins of truth. If they leak info against our party, they are filthy dirty spies. I don't understand why people can't see it.
Apparently Wikileaks were given documents that had already leaked elsewhere before and refused to publish them because their purpose is novel leaks, not repeating leaks from elsewhere. That has been spun into a narrative that they refused leaks because they are biased, without much evidence.
When there are a lot of disingenuous arguments like this being made to discredit someone that turn out to be unreasonable once you dig a little deeper, like we see with Wikileaks and Assange, it generally is a strong suggestion someone is trying to manipulate people into believing a false narrative.
We knew the US wasn't happy with Assange when he landed in prison.
You know that Russia isn't happy with someone when they end up dead. If the Russian files that Wikileaks published didn't make Russia happy, Assange would be in a box right now, and not headed home.
There is actually some funny history around that, since after the world war 2 there was laws restricting news papers from publishing national secrets. One case was a map that the military official accidentally leak themselves, but which was classified, so when the news papers published an article discussing the leak (including a image of the map) the news paper were charged with leaking national secrets.
The result from the political fallout was creation of one of the four constitutional laws that exist in Sweden, the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act of 1949.
One result of that is that if a military personal were to leak information to the press, the journalist would by law be forbidden to ever disclose who that person was. The journalist can be sent to jail if they just happen to disclose it, and must take active steps to prevent it.
The publisher themselves must have the intention to inform the public. If that is true, then the constitution allows the publisher to ignore any other Swedish law like national secret classification for the act of publishing (explicit right given in the constitution).
Legal professors were discussing the situation back during the initial periods when the leaks occurred that Julian Assange now has plead guilty for. The conclusion was that he can not get charged for disclosing national defense information. The constitution do not allow that. He could be charged for conspiring to steal documents (ie, hacking), if the original whistle blower did not have access to the documents in the first place and had material help from the journalist or if they paid the whistle blower to steal the documents (proportional to that action). Conspiracy charges are quite messy however, and since military personal are under different legal laws than civilians, the consensus was unclear if such conspiracy charges is possible, and what if any punishment is available for the courts.
People occasionally talk about this tactic as being a bit of a morally grey zone but under cover journalism with an intention of leaking information (if they get their hands on it) do happen from times to times.