Matthew Yglesias responds to those clamoring to label Wikileaks a "terrorist organization."
Currently the rule is that it's illegal to be the guy with legal access to classified information who passes it on to outsiders, but once you receive the leak you're free to do what you want with it. But for the past 24 hours I've seen a lot of outrage directed not just at Bradley Manning but also at Assange and WikiLeaks. Operationalizing that anti-Assange outrage would, it seems to me, necessarily entail challenging our current understanding of the First Amendment. Representative Peter King’s suggestion that we designate WikiLeaks as a foreign terrorist organization is in part grandstanding and in part an effort to devise a way to begin restricting freedom of the press.
Since the label "terrorist" has been applied to everyone conservatives don't like from Wikileaks to teachers' unions, this sounds to me mostly like bluster. The problem with aggressively targeting leaks is that government officials often leak secret information for the purposes of manipulating public debate, and they aren't going to want to stop doing that.
I think Yglesias' instincts here are right that what King is ultimately looking for here is a way to implement some form of prior restraint on news organizations. After all, before King was calling Wikileaks a terrorist organization, he was accusing The New York Times of treason and calling for them to be prosecuted. Perhaps the only difference here is that King understands that Julian Assange is not an American -- the point is it's not as though King is only talking like this because Wikileaks isn't a "legitimate" news organization.
Part of how the American tradition of freedom of the press works is the media bitterly resists government efforts to define what is news and what isn't. We saw that acute sense of self-preservation instinct kick in when the administration accurately criticized Fox News last year. Assange's recklessness aside, it would be foolish if media organizations didn't see any legislative effort to target Wikileaks as not aimed at the press in general.
