Published by Chip Gibbons: Defending Rights & Dissent

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, international financial summits, like the IMF and the World Bank, attracted masses of protesters. In many cases, protesters engaged in civil disobedience. They were also met with brutal repression by police that included physical violence and illegal arrests. The media helped peddle police narratives that painted them as violent rioters engaged in senseless destruction for destruction’s sake. The reality is that protesters were victims of police riots.

By Jesselyn Radack – Kathleen McClellan: Salon.com

What happened to whistleblowers like our client Daniel Hale never happens to high-level government officials

We can now add Vice President Mike Pence to the list of former presidents and vice presidents who have had classified information found in their homes. While there are marked differences between Donald Trump intentionally keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and refusing to cooperate with authorities, and Pence and Joe Biden’s apparent discovery of classified documents that inadvertently ended up in their homes — and were returned voluntarily and promptly — the commonality between these cases and others involving high-level officials is the lack of serious punishment.

By Ben Cohen: Salon.com

Ben & Jerry’s co-founder: Joe Biden stood up for press freedom as a candidate — but backtracked in the White House

Trevor Timm — The Guardian

With President Joe Biden now embroiled in his own classified documents controversy, partisan commentators will surely have a field day playing the tired old game of “no, you endangered national security.” Instead, I’d like to focus on the real issues: the overly broad and often-abused Espionage Act and the massive, draconian secrecy system that does far more harm than good in the United States.

Richard Spence — The Dissenter — January 5, 2023

Ministers and security officials in Australia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have coordinated with the United States to develop new espionage laws.

December 12, 2022

The U.S. government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.

Twelve years ago, on November 28th 2010, our five international media outlets – The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL – published a series of revelations in cooperation with Wikileaks that made the headlines around the globe.

Freedom of the Press Foundation — November 10, 2022

This post was originally published as part of our weekly newsletter. For more breaking news and analysis of the state of press freedom in the U.S., subscribe here.

By Branko Marcetic — Jacobin.com — November 09, 2022

The Department of Homeland Security is helping to coordinate tech company censorship efforts according to recent reporting. The line between tech firms and the national security state is only getting blurrier.

Opinion by William Neuheisel – Responsible Statecraft — October 18, 2022

The Agency’s carelessness in protecting its own agents reveals the cynicism of the US government’s treatment of whistleblowers.

Reuters recently published new reporting on the story of one of the worst U.S. intelligence failures in decades. From approximately 2010 to 2013, dozens of CIA informants in China, Iran, and elsewhere were rounded up and executed, jailed, or flipped to double agents. In Iran and China, almost the entirety of the CIA’s network in two of its top-priority countries are reported to have been exposed.

Opinion by Jesselyn Radack, Kathleen McClellan – Salon — October 20, 2022

Donald Trump has an indisputably delusional view of what it takes to declassify national security secrets, recently claiming that he, as president, could have declassified documents just “by thinking about it.” As much as Trump’s latest self-serving crazy makes for good late-night comedy fodder, it also reminds us how much absurdity the U.S. government has created in national security litigation. As attorneys for whistleblowers and media sources, our cases have been the breeding ground for abuse of the broken classification system.Beneath the public laugh-fest over Trump’s outlandish claims of telepathic declassification powers lies the implication that somewhere, somehow, there is a clear, fair process for doing so.