In fact, the documents that Assange has been indicted for releasing on Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo were the exact ones reported on by The New York Times, The Guardian and WikiLeaks' other media partners, but only Assange has been prosecuted.
The Political and Class Nature of These Acts
While the overt intentions of legislators in Britain and the U.S. in enacting these laws may have been to combat foreign espionage, the broadness and complexity of the language left open its use, intentionally or not, against the press and the interests of the public. Instead, these Acts protect the interests of a class of people who have accrued vast power and are responding to the crisis of their rule with increasing aggression against anyone who threatens it.
Two U.S. presidents came close to prosecuting journalists and a third has indicted Assange for publishing defense information. Wilson intended the Espionage Act to censor the press. Though Congress defeated that effort it left an Act that has been used after publication to punish the press on the grounds of "national security" defined by the government of the day.
The British legal scholar David Glyndwr Tudor Williams warned back in 1965:
"It is surely desirable that the operation of the Official Secrets Acts should be severely confined. They should not be wielded as an all-purpose weapon, whatever the literal wording of their provisions. They should not be invoked unnecessarily -- where other appropriate laws are available -- or for trivial considerations. Their only admissible purpose in a democracy should be to restrain and punish espionage, gross breaches of trust and gross carelessness in respect of State secrets. They should not be used to intimidate the Press and to encourage a timidity in the handling of official information, which in the end deprives an administration of the scrutiny and criticism necessary for efficiency and responsibility. If they are used too readily to stifle exposures of governmental inefficiency and corruption. they could become as oppressive as the law of sedition once was."
But indeed that is how they have now been used. And for a political purpose: to protect the interest of people in power.
In a 1990 academic paper, Australian scholar Barbara Hocking quoted journalist Tony Bunyan in his 1977 book The Political Police in Britain:
"In an analysis of the political uses of the criminal law in the United Kingdom, Bunyan turns this theoretical myth around: the fundamental purpose of the criminal law is the maintenance of a political order acceptable to the British ruling class; this was the primary purpose of the secrets legislation: 'The British state has available to it the whole of criminal law for use against political opposition: the laws used against political activists embrace those normally used against the criminal and those for maintaining public order.'"
A Shattered Notion
Both British and U.S. espionage legislation throughout their histories have been as much political as legal instruments, allowing punishment not only for foreign spies, but for government officials who leak embarrassing information and for journalists who publish it.
Until now a difference between the Espionage and Official Secrets Acts has been the First Amendment. Without one, Britain has been more easily able to prosecute journalists. That led to the notion that the U.S. is better off because it does not have an "Official Secrets Act." But the indictment of the journalist Assange, despite the First Amendment, has shattered that notion, giving the U.S. in effect an Official Secrets Act of its own.
At the time of the Pentagon Papers case, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson called for a "severe official secrets act" to go after journalists, not acknowledging that the U.S. already had one in the Espionage Act, which has now been proven with the indictment of Assange.
The political and class nature of these British and U.S. laws that go beyond classic foreign espionage to endanger journalists has never been clearer than in the Assange case, a man clearly seen as a class enemy for exposing rulers' crimes and corruption.
Assange in the Dock
After three previous presidents came close to prosecuting journalists for possessing and publishing defense information -- FDR in 1942, Nixon in 1971 and Obama in 2011 -- the Trump administration unveiled an Espionage Act indictment shortly after Assange's arrest in April 2019. Trump's secretary of state tried to justify it by saying the U.S. had universal jurisdiction to prosecute but the First Amendment wouldn't apply to Assange.
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