News and Commentary

By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout Attorneys and journalists whom the CIA spied on when they visited WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London have filed a lawsuit against the CIA, its former director Mike Pompeo, UC Global and its director, David Morales, in U.S. District Court.

By Micah Lee -- The Intercept The Trump administration used the controversial law to target media outlets and sources who provided important information to the public.

Opinion by Jameel Jaffer -- Politico Reforms to the law are long overdue, but they have nothing to do with the Mar-a-Lago search.

Once an independent muckraker, Greenwald has moved sharply rightward — but even so, this was embarrassing By Eoin Higgins - Salon.com -- October 7, 2022

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.