I garbled a small part of that.
Anyway, shockingly, there is no legal shield in the USA to protect government whistleblowers or anyone else from certain criminal charges for revealing government secrets, particularly espionage. Governmant whistleblowers put in front of such charges before Ellsberg -- and now Manning.
Should have been: 'Government whistleblowers were never previously put in front of such charges before Ellsberg -- and now Manning.' My point was that the two botched attempts under pressure of the Richard Nixon administration to prosecute Ellsberg were the first-ever real attempt to bring up journalistic whistleblowers up on espionage charges for publishing government secrets, and that the Manning trial is the predictable second effort, given that the initial effort to set precedent at Ellsberg's expense didn't succeed, but wasn't discredited as a general approach, either. Note that authorities in the USA prosecuting a leaker differs from (and is far, far easier than) attempting either prior restraint or retributionn against the publications themselves, that send out government secrets to the public. The latter actions remain, for now, off limits -- that much of the rather shredded First Amendment still standing. (Many would say that mainstream publications self-censor so thoroughly that government control over them would be superflous.) Before anyone says 'Wikileaks' as a counterexample: Nope. The USA's Feds claim[1] to loathe Wikileaks and have taken a number of petty indirect measures to impede the group (e.g, but there's been nary a peep about gagging it. Just Private Manning -- and threats but no real action against Assange. [1] I'm among the many observers speculating that most Feds are privately delighted at Wikileaks's airing of diplomatic cables, as, say, those cables' scathing assessments of Middle-Eastern dictators (etc.) have been precisely what State Department would have loved to say in public, if only it weren't impolitic.