First Amendment Violations

Today in class we learned how the first amedment rights of citizens can be violated by the government. One example of this is Julien Assange. He is the founder of WikiLeaks, which is a platform on which whistleblowers can post government documents anonymously. He fled America in 2012 to escape persecution. In London, he asked for asylum from the Ecudorian embassy and they granted it. He lived in the Ecudorian embassy for over 6 years to avoid being procecuted by either the United States or London police. In 2019 he was evicted from the embassy and put into a London high security prison. It was a prison normally used for housing potential terrorist suspects, not someone like Assange who had enabled the actions of a corrupt government to be revealed. He was denied justice and his first amendment rights as his lawyers were unable to speak to him during when he was held at the Belmarsh prison. 




Daniel Ellsberg also shares why he thinks Assange has been unjustly treated. Ellsberg was indicted for leaking the Pentagon Papers, which revealed what the government was hiding about the Vietnam War. He says that Assange was unfairly procecuted for his actions, which were him exercising his right to free speech as an extension of journalism. He said "It is not a good day for the American press, or for American democracy. Forty-eight years ago, I was the first journalistic source to be indicted. There have been perhaps a dozen since then, nine under President Obama. But Julian Assange is the first journalist to be indicted. If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last.

The First Amendment is a pillar of our democracy and this is an assault on it. If freedom of speech is violated to this extent, our republic is in danger. Unauthorized disclosures are the lifeblood of the republic." By arresting Assange and trying to put him on trial for his actions, they are threatening his right to free speech. The people have a right to know what their government is up to, and regardless of how the government feels about that it is not their right to supress the free speech of journalists trying to expose the truth. 




A more recent example of this is the Facebook whistleblower. Frances Haugen, a former product manager released documents showing internal message boards detailing employees frustrations of Facebook. Among this was Facebook's spread of misinformation and polarization despite multiple assurances that that problems would be fixed. However, the news of these documents have not been widely reported on major news channels. 




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