The cost of being a whistle-blower is going up. When Daniel Ellsberg stole and published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, revealing the monstrous lies that the U.S. government was telling the American public about the Vietnam war, he was arrested and tried, but the court set him free.When Edward Snowden released a vast trove of documents in 2013 about the global electronic surveillance activities of U.S. intelligence agencies, he was already abroad, knowing that civil liberties had taken a turn for the worse in the U.S. since 1971.Snowden is still abroad seven years later, living in Moscow, because hardly anywhere else would be safe.And Julian Assange, whose court hearing on a U.S. extradition request began on Monday at Woolwich crown court in east London, is facing 175 years in jail if Britain delivers him into American hands. The American authorities are really cross about his WikiLeaks dump of confidential material in 2010 that detailed U.S. misbehaviour in Iraq and Afghanistan.Everybody knew or at least suspected that terrible things were happening there, but without documentation there was really nothing they could do about it. What Assange did was give them the evidence.
Source: Dyer: Whistle-blowers like Julian Assange should be praised, not punished | The London Free Press