He assisted his source in a failed attempt to crack a password hash? This is the "significant difference" you think makes him worthy of prosecution? He was a journalist exposing war crimes. He is not a US citizen and is not subject to US laws. If China extended their ban on youths playing video games for more than a few hours in a week to the world, you would probably have a problem with them forcing authorities in a country you're vacationing in to arrest your children and extradite them to China.

> This is the "significant difference"

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're being downvoted as you are just wrong. Though the New York Times did not publish the full papers, it was because the leaked documents took up five books. You can find Ellsberg's annotated copies of the books the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/pentagonpapersde00beac

I don't understand how that shows I'm "just wrong"...? We agree that Assange published the documents in full and The New York Times didn't.

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.

The New York Times and other publications published multiple pages of the Pentagon Papers, they just were unable to realistically publish the entire leak. If you read the Supreme Court case involving the Times, it clearly says it was about publishing the contents of a classified study, not writing articles about a classified study.

There is no content difference, both contained leaked documents and articles about them, the only difference is the limitations of the medium.

> I don't think they actually published the papers, they just wrote stories using the papers as the source.

"The New York Times began publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#Leak