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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.




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