Precedents
There are a lot of precedents concerning the freedom of the press that don't favour governments hoping to manipulate the law to protect themselves.
Back in 1971, the NYT published the first of a series of stories that revealed US political and military involvement in Vietnam between the end of the Second World War and the escalation of US military action in 1967. The source was a government dossier - later dubbed ‘The Pentagon Papers' - which included a lot of ‘sensitive' documents. Sound familiar?
Before long US attorney general John Mitchell got a legal injunction forcing the NYT to stop publishing, so the leaker - Daniel Ellsberg - went to the Washington Post. Once more the state attempted to use the law to prevent publication, but was this time declined. Both cases were then jointly assessed by the US supreme court, and a majority of judges found the state had failed to meet the burden of proof that national security had been threatened.
Ellsberg then gave himself up to the authorities, but the case against him was declared a mistrial after it was found that, not only has state employees broken into the offices of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, but they had illegally bugged his phone. The unexplained disappearance of the records of this wire-tapping are what precipitated the mistrial.
And it gets better. The people responsible for the break-in - Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy - also commissioned the break-in to the Democratic National Committee's offices in a building called the Watergate Complex in Washington. Hunt and Liddy ultimately got their orders from Mitchell, who was also the head of the campaign to get Nixon re-elected. Mitchell was eventually jailed for his role in the cover-up of the Watergate affair, which culminated in Nixon resigning the presidency and defined the suffix used for any scandal thereafter.
Why, you may be wondering, have I gone off on this historical tangent? It's to illustrate that the the interests of The State and The People are frequently at odds. Just because an act is inconvenient to public employees, that doesn't mean it's damaging to the general populace, nor that it should be illegal. If, however, a leak can be proven to materially damage national security and/or lead to deaths that would otherwise have been avoided, then it can be found to be illegal.
Ellsberg recently announced his support for Wikileaks, saying that the national security angle is a standard argument used by the sate whenever there's a leak, and that secrecy and lies cause far more deaths than any leak. He makes the further point that the decision to go to war costs thousands of lives, and thus it's right that the decisions made to do so be properly scrutinised
While the US government seems to have learnt from its Nixon-era folly that it can't silence the press, it is focusing a lot of resources at silencing Wikileaks. Companies such as Amazon, Mastercard and Paypal have suspended their relationships with Wikileaks and companies associated with it. They're all claiming violations of their terms and conditions, but the general feeling is that they were pressurised by the US government.
