1. How does the First Amendment protect WikiLeaks from prosecution?

2. Is WikiLeaks justified in releasing Syrian government emails? Is this different from posting classified U.S. documents?

3. What limits, if any, should be placed on WikiLeaks’ right to post government or corporate secrets?

In September 2011, WikiLeaks (a nonprofit organization whose goal is to “bring important news and information to the public”) published more than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables on its Web site.Included in this cache of private communications between employees of the U.S.Department of State were requests made of U.S. diplomats serving in overseas embassies to gather intelligence information for the purpose of espionage. Specifically, diplomats were tasked with collecting personal information on foreign officials including email addresses, credit card numbers, and even frequent flier account numbers.These documents were made public less than a year after WikiLeaks’ monumental release of approximately 400,000 top secret U.S. Army documents—a leak believed to be the largest in U.S. history.The leaked Army documents purportedly uncovered instances in which American soldiers stood aside as the Iraqi Shiite-dominated security forces tortured Sunni prisoners. The documents also allegedly disclosed an additional unreported 15,000 civilian deaths during the Iraq War.This“document dump” was in fact the third major leak of U.S. military secrets of 2010. In April, the organization had posted a video of U.S. Army helicopter carrying out an operation in which civilians and two Reuters reporters were killed in Iraq. Then in July, Wiki-Leaks posted 92,000 military memos that supposedly confirmed that Pakistan’s intelligence agency regularly met with Taliban fighters.The United States government, meanwhile, tried feverishly to prosecute WikiLeaks and prevent future leaks. However, the First Amendment guarantees citizens freedom of the press and very few restrictions have been permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The most notable instance of that judicial restraint is when President Richard Nixon attempted to seek an injunction against the publication of the Pentagon Papers, containing military secrets from the Vietnam War, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused. In 2010, the Congressional Research Service issued a report in which they concluded that no publisher of leaked information has ever been prosecuted for publishing the material, due to the implications for the First Amendment. As a result, the only legal action the U.S. government could take was to charge an Army soldier,Bradley Manning, with violating the Espionage Act for purportedly supplying WikiLeaks with the video of the helicopter and other classified documents. Prosecutors plan to present classified documents in court to show that the terrorist group Al Qaeda has benefited from the secret documents that Manning supplied WikiLeaks. Meanwhile, the judge has ruled that Manning,who was kept naked in a windowless room for as long as 23 hours a day, was subject to confinement“more rigorous than necessary” while he awaited his trial, which was scheduled tobegin in the summer of 2013.Shortly after this third leak, several major Internet companies began to shut off services to WikiLeaks. These included PayPal and Money bookers, two sites that WikiLeaks’ supporters had used to contribute funds to the organization.After massive denial-of-service attacks on Wiki-Leaks’ site, the organization moved to Amazon servers.Within a couple of days, however,Amazon decided it would no longer host the site.The following day, December 3, 2010, the American domain name system provider Every DNS.net took the domain offline. WikiLeaks sup-porters and volunteers responded immediately. Two days later, 208 WikiLeaks mirror sites were operating. On December 7, Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, was arrested in London at about the same time on rape charges issued from Sweden. Assange fought extradition to Sweden and eventually sought and found asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London. Even from asylum, Assange continues to vex the U.S. government, hosting a video conference at the United Nations on U.S. efforts to combat WikiLeaks. As this online and offline battle rages, the public and the media have expressed a range of views. Many argued that WikiLeaks has endangered national security. Others staunchly defended WikiLeaks and its freedom to publish leaks. WikiLeaks came under criticism from human rights organizations and the international free press group Reporters Without Borders.Thousands of documents contained the names of Afghan informants, whose identity was now exposed and so could be targeted by the Taliban in reprisal for their collaboration. Assange’s actions also provoked dissent within the WikiLeaks organization. Some Wiki-Leaks staff felt that Assange had ignored hundreds of leaks from other regions of the world, in order to target the U.S. government. About half-a-dozen staffers resigned in the months after Assange was charged with rape. These staffers called attention to an important point. Wiki-Leaks’ Facebook page claims“Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia,the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East….” Yet the over whelming majority of its documents released in 2010 targeted one of the largest and most stable democracies in the world, the United States. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ very public leader, states that his objective is to establish a new standard of scientific journalism. He has published WikiLeaks’ analysis of source material along with the source material itself, so that the readers themselves can come to their own conclusions. Yet like other media sources, he, his staff, and his volunteers choose which sources to share, and this choice is colored by their own ideology and purposes. What these are, however,is difficult to ascertain. While WikiLeaks advocates for transparency in government and corporations, uncovering their secrets, the organization itself is far from transparent, keeping the identity of most of its members and contributors secret. The organization relies on a few staffer sand hundreds of volunteers from around the world. Key volunteers are known by their initials only, even within encrypted online chats. Hence, the question of WikiLeaks’ bias or motivation or ultimate purpose cannot be definitively resolved.In the summer of 2012, WikiLeaks posted over two million emails documenting communication between Syrian government officials and private companies. WikiLeaks claims on its home page that these documents showed that Western companies supported the Syrian government, which has killed thousands of civilians in a brutal civil war. Clearly, WikiLeaks would like to portray itself as an advocate for civil liberties and human rights. However, it is as yet unclear what the political ramifications of its leaks will be, and whether the leaks will have a positive or negative impact on democratic governments around the world.