The law is clear. If you mishandle, distribute or disclose classified information you can get in big trouble. In the worst cases, as with Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who has been accused of divulging top secret national security documents, you can be arrested, charged under the Espionage Act and, if convicted, sent to prison.
But in the court of public opinion the calculation is often less cut and dried.
Out in the real world, people who divulge government secrets are sometimes viewed as traitors or spies, but at other times, they're hailed as heroes, regardless of their legal culpability. Still other times, they fall somewhere in between.
Consider Daniel Ellsberg, Aldrich Ames, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and now, allegedly, Teixeira.
In each case, context matters: what information was released, how it was released, to whom it was released and why it was released. That may not be so germane to a judge or jury charged with determining what laws were broken, but before I pass my own judgment I want to know whether a leaker was a whistleblower or a money grabber or a malevolent traitor or a publicity seeker or an ideologue. And I want to know what good or harm was caused.
Ellsberg, now 92 and ailing with pancreatic cancer, became famous in 1971 for leaking to the press copies of the so-called Pentagon Papers, a classified 7,000-page history of the Vietnam War that revealed that successive governments had lied to Americans about the progress of...
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