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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 02 2018, @09:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the sauce-for-the-goose dept.

The DNC's Lawsuit Against WikiLeaks Is an Attack on the Freedom of the Press

It's a large world, filled with felonies big and misdemeanors small. And so I prefer to write long columns. But sometimes a short, sharp word is necessary. The Democratic Party is suing WikiLeaks and they shouldn't. As Glenn Greenwald wrote last week in The Intercept:

The Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit this afternoon in a Manhattan federal court against the Russian government, the Trump campaign, and various individuals it alleges participated in the plot to hack its email servers and disseminate the contents as part of the 2016 election. The DNC also sued WikiLeaks for its role in publishing the hacked materials, though it does not allege that WikiLeaks participated in the hacking or even knew in advance about it; its sole role, according to the DNC's lawsuit, was publishing the hacked emails.

As Greenwald points out, the Dems' claim that "WikiLeaks is liable for damages it caused when it 'willfully and intentionally disclosed' the DNC's communications ... would mean that any media outlet that publishes misappropriated documents or emails (exactly what media outlets quite often do) could be sued by the entity or person about which they are reporting."

After the Manning releases in 2010, the Obama Justice Department wanted to sue WikiLeaks. However, they couldn't prove that anyone from WikiLeaks had actually stolen documents. They knew that suing WikiLeaks would have infringed on press freedom. Sue WikiLeaks, and you have to sue the Washington Post as well.

The DNC has no such qualms now.

Also at Al Jazeera.

See also: Why the DNC Is Fighting WikiLeaks and Not Wall Street


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday May 03 2018, @12:01AM (5 children)

    by hemocyanin (186) on Thursday May 03 2018, @12:01AM (#674840) Journal

    You confuse fascism and authoritarianism as being identical when really, they are more like a square and a rectangle -- one can say a square is a rectangle but not the opposite. To be clear, fascism is a form of right wing authoritarianism which favors corporate/business interests over the needs of the people and will use the violence of the state against the people to protect business interests. There have been other forms of authoritarianism that are based on ideologies rooted in the needs of the people but turn out rotten (Cultural Revolution in China for example). These alternatives are not examples of fascism (square), but they are authoritarian (rectangle), and while just as bad to be sure, they are also something different.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday May 03 2018, @03:04AM (4 children)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Thursday May 03 2018, @03:04AM (#674908)

    The A/C comment above with "Fascism is Left Wing" in it is just a standard ignorant far right talking point.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @03:44AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @03:44AM (#674920)

      > The A/C comment above with "Fascism is Left Wing" in it is just a standard ignorant far right talking point.

      Especially since both parties in the US are far right, if the Republicans still qualify to be called a party and if they have not wandered off the end of the scale. The purpose of their talking point it to accuse everything of being "Left" and walk the field further to the right. It has worked well for them starting with Reagan.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @09:11AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @09:11AM (#674984)

      The A/C comment above with "Fascism is Left Wing" in it is just a standard ignorant far right talking point.

      Your dismissal is just a standard ignorant, leftist talking point.

      Mussolini was a Marxist who came to believe that total war was the only effective way the proletariat would rise in support of international socialism. This is a matter of well documented historical fact and the far left hate it because it adds the death toll of their "ideological enemies" to their own even greater and equally indefensible death toll. Marxism is murder!

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:26PM (1 child)

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:26PM (#675261) Journal

        Once again: do not confuse economic left/right with social left/right. The leftists you're going on about are economic leftists, but tend toward authoritarianism on the social scale. What we've learned from the last 150+ years is authoritarianism is a bad idea, no matter what your economic policy looks like.

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @09:15PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @09:15PM (#675313)

          Once again: do not confuse economic left/right with social left/right.

          Well, hello again.

          What we've learned from the last 150+ years is authoritarianism is a bad idea, no matter what your economic policy looks like.

          Agree but there are economic limits on social liberalism and that is the point at which many social liberals, rather than fall back to classical liberalism become illiberal collectivists. We've seen this pathway to authoritarian tyranny walked too many times to be coy about the end results. This is why I insist on pointing out that while Communists and Fascists oppose each other, the liberal position should be in firm opposition to both.