Are There Limitis To Free Speech Blog

Every day the press releases information and secrets that citizens of the U.S. soak up can't seem to get enough of.  Many of these secrets are about politicians or celebrities and often published for means of entertainment only. I don't think that it is necessary information to know about every detail of Kim Kardashian's life. Although most information and secrets are ones like these that don't jeapordize our nations security, I think that some secrets are much better kept. In the case of WikiLeaks, most of the information they release to the public is very classified information. Some may say that as citizens of the United States we have the right to know this information. I think that this is true to some extent. For example, if the government knew we were going to be attacked by another countries nuclear weapon, this information must be shared with the rest of the country. In other words if the information directly affects our safety we should know about it. There are some cases where information that is meant to be classified is better off not being shared. A moment in our countries history where classified information should not have been shared was during World War II. Gabriel Schoenfeld brought up this point in his article Can U.S. Bring Assange to Justice?  The press announced that the U.S. may have broken Japanese naval codes. Thankfully the Japanese did not notice the newspapers and did not alter their codes. If the Japanese had noticed the newspaper, the course of the war could have been drastically different. This information was also not necessary for everyone in the U.S. to know and could have affected our national security.

According to Julian Assange, the man in charge of WikiLeaks, they do filter through and carefully choose which pieces of classified information they are going to release. Even though this may be true, most of this information is not directly related to the safety of U.S. citizens; therefore if it is meant to be classified it should probably stay classified. In some ways Assange did break the Espionage Act of 1917, because he knew by releasing the information that it had the potential to harm the U.S. In other ways he may have been trying to exercise and be an activist for free speech, which is a good thing. He is riding on a very fine line, making it understandable why it is so difficult for the Judges in his trial to come to a verdict. If Assange is accused of breaking the law, many could say that it goes against our free speech amendment. If Assange isn't accused then people who actually do leak information with the purpose of injuring the U.S. could argue that what Assange did is no different. You can't exactly pick and choose who you want to convict based on the degree of their intentions to injure the U.S.

I think that the best idea would be to not convict Assange as long as he agrees to discontinue WikiLeaks. I think that in the end this would please people on both sides of the argument.