while reading a recent post by whistleblower Edward Snowden about Julian Assange of WikiLeaks infamy, titled Everything Going Great.

After a lengthy and somewhat rambling preamble regarding bad faith’s meaning, Snowden gets to his point, namely that the U.S. attempt to extradite Assange is a direct attack on freedom of the press.

I agree with my friends (and lawyers) at the ACLU: the U.S. government’s indictment of Assange amounts to the criminalization of investigative journalism. And I agree with myriad friends (and lawyers) throughout the world that at the core of this criminalization is a cruel and unusual paradox: namely, the fact that many of the activities that the U.S. government would rather hush up are perpetrated in foreign countries, whose journalism will now be answerable to the U.S. court system. And the precedent established here will be exploited by all manner of authoritarian leaders across the globe. What will be the State Department’s response when the Republic of Iran demands the extradition of New York Times reporters for violating Iran’s secrecy laws? How will the United Kingdom respond when Viktor Orban or Recep Erdogan seeks the extradition of Guardian reporters? The point is not that the U.S. or U.K. would ever comply with those demands — of course they wouldn’t — but that they would lack any principled basis for their refusals. //

If we had honest media dedicated to the truth and not the narrative, it would be rallying around Julian Assange. This is not the case. Instead of being infected with the omicron variant of COVID, the media is infected with omertà. When the worm turns against the worms, the cost will be high. In ignoring Julian Assange’s plight because the Democrats were the ones embarrassed by his actions, the media sets itself up to have no one to blame but itself when the government comes down hard at the release of classified (read: embarrassing) material.