An article over a year old isn’t “news”…

While I'm glad this post did so well, I do apologies to anyone I may have offended by posting a barely 1yr old article in a news community. Please let me explain. My understanding is that news is information about current events. The letter written by the editors and publishers of: The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, which were WikiLeaks' media partners, attempts to protect investigative journalism as an institution, which is still threatened by the persecution of Julian Assange is a current event: in fact, now is a critical moment, with his last-gasp UK appeal in the extradition-fight set for 2 months from now. When an event happens in slow-motion, such as this slow-motion torture-to-death, we have to widen our field of vision to get a clear picture of what's going on. If you want more recent criticism of the case by prominent journalists, the US just had another Belmarsh Tribunal. I posted about it here: https://aussie.zone/post/5092162

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The US government must drop its prosecution of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange because it is undermining press freedom, according to the media organisations that first helped him publish leaked diplomatic cables.

Twelve years ago today, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País collaborated to release excerpts from 250,000 documents obtained by Assange in the “Cablegate” leak.

He had spent the previous seven years living inside the diplomatic premises to avoid arrest after failing to surrender to a UK court on matters relating to a separate case.

Twelve years ago, on November 28th 2010, our five international media outlets – the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel – published a series of revelations in cooperation with WikiLeaks that made the headlines around the globe.

“Cablegate”, a set of 251,000 confidential cables from the US state department, disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.

This group of editors and publishers, all of whom had worked with Assange, felt the need to publicly criticise his conduct in 2011 when unredacted copies of the cables were released, and some of us are concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database.

The original article contains 728 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Title is a pretty dumb take.

Publishing is not a crime, which is correct.

I cannot be charged with a crime for making posts on Reddit, Lemmy or wiki pages. (I absolutely can be charged by publishing to wiki leaks though under agreements)

Publishing classified information is treason under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Section 798

This is just stupidly obvious.

The only good thing he did was bring to focus the problem with over classification of information. We now have Controlled Unclassified Information thanks to that.