Quoting Carl Turney (carl@boms.com.au):
Back around 1972 I very seriously considered doing what Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning recently have done. I was young and idealistic. I thought it would make a significant difference to America and the world.
Luckily for me, Daniel Ellsberg did pretty much the same thing just before me. Then I saw how he was persecuted, and how very little it really changed things.
One of the things many people don't recall about the Ellsberg Pentagon Papers case is that, disappointingly, he did _not_ win his criminal prosecution court case[1] on grounds of the rightness and legality of his actions, or those actions' necessity in serving the public interest. Rather, he 'won' solely because the trial was cancelled by the presiding judge, who (twice) ruled that government lawyers had tainted their case. The trial was halted and declared a mistrial because the FBI had compromised the case by wiretapping a conversation between the defendant and his lawyer -- and then claimed that it had lost all relevant records of that wiretapping, too. A new trial commenced with a fresh jury, and then that trial, too, was declared a mistrial when it emerged that White House operatives Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had burglarised the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist looking for information damaging to the defence, at which time the judge dismissed all charges in recognition of government misconduct. So, Ellsberg was never vindicated in court. He was merely never put through a complete trial because U.S. District Judge William Matthew Byrne, Jr. would not permit tainted criminal prosecutions. 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.
I just want to keep my head down, enjoy what's left of my life, and hope that the USA and China neutralise each other -- so the rest of the world can get on with living a good life.
FWIW, I keep hoping that both of those countries will relax and remember that they are both essentially mercantile states rather than empires, and logically should on self-interest grounds alone have no interest in attempting to interfere in other people's affairs. [1] To be clear, in this specifc context, I am not referring to the famous 'Pentagon Papers' civil case about prior restraint of the pres, New York Times Co. v. United States, (per curiam) 403 U.S. 713, 91 S. Ct. 2140, 29 L. Ed. 2d 822 (1971), which the _New York Times_ won on a 6-3 decision. but rather a criminal trial of Ellsburg and associate Tony Russo for theft and espionage initiated by a Los Angeles grand jury.