Assange is also accused of assisting his source in attempting (unsuccessfully) to crack a password hash, thereby (the prosecution alleges) taking on more the Daniel Ellsberg role rather than the Washington Post role.
Not commenting on the appropriateness or not of prosecuting Assange, but the situations have significant differences.
Yes, one of them, the other being that he published the full documents and not just stories using them as a source.
> you think makes him worthy of prosecution
It was so obvious I would get downvoted by Assange stans for answering the GP's question, that I literally preemptively stated I wasn't saying this. Wasn't enough apparently.
You have linked to the version published after Senator Gravel made them public domain by submitting to the congressional record - nothing comparable happened prior to Wikileaks publishing it's material.
There is no content difference, both contained leaked documents and articles about them, the only difference is the limitations of the medium.
"The New York Times began publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#Leak
2 main ways: first, Julian is an Australian and never lived in the US, and Daniel Elsberg was a US citizen living in the US the time he released the PP and thus was protected under some semblance of need for a trail to ensure he was in fact an enemy combatant or a spy for a foreign nation-state--these charges were then dropped subsequently when the public was made aware of Watergate and Nixon stepping down.
Secondly, it's a blatant selective application of the Law, even with Snowden who has repeatedly asked to be tried by a jury of his peers, which will never happen. There is nothing more to it than that, Jullian never stepped foot in the US and the leaks were ultimately done by Chelsea Manning and hosted on Wikleaks and sent to major publications around the World, who has also been through hell and back before getting her sentence commuted.
Ultimately, it's become a politicized issue and Julian Assange has been a the bane for the DoD and Intelligence Agencies of not just the US but many other countries, so despite the UN calling his continued arrest a Crime Against Humanity, nothing will change until he is either made an example of, ironically this means that Assange will have lived up to his supposed reputation for being a megalomaniac and thus will become a martyr the same way Arron Scwartz has become from the FOSS community.
Suffice it to say, I'm a big fan of Jullian and followed his work since his talks at the CCC (2011?) and all of his Wiki stuff which involved Bitcoin etc... I fear the Julian we all knew has likely been eroded away and has clearly had his faculties get destroyed along with his physical health, mental health--he was diagnosed as autistic but I'm sure the PTSD, loneliness and forced isolation have been more severe than anything else after all these years.
Julian isn't a hero, he is a deeply flawed Human being who decided that he couldn't bare not acting at a time of crisis; something that we should as a species should laud, but instead we are forced to witness the systematic destruction of a Man's life for making the World aware of what took place in perpetual and unjust wars.
How is it different from the Washington Post leaking the Pentagon papers? Honest question, not snarky.