Likewise, if you think leaking the pentagon papers is the same as leaking all diplomatic cables and operational communications from a period of time is the same thing, not sure I can say much to change your opinion.

If you think it wasn't about that you clearly didn't follow the lawsuit.

What something is ostensibly about -- like for instance, what's spelled out in a lawsuit -- is not necessarily what it's actually about.

It would be very difficult, because you believe that journalists enabling the distribution of secret government documents means they're not journalists, they're activists. That equally condemns the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. You agree with their opinion, which is why you can't say much to change it.

edit:

Daniel Ellsberg: “Whatever Julian Assange is guilty of, I’m guilty of.”

https://www.exberliner.com/features/julian-assange-trial-202...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/indictment...

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wikileaks-releases-classifie...

The overarching question is at what point does a private citizen/activist become culpable. Developing technologies and social networks (old school kind, not facebook) which are explicitly designed to enable the stealing/leaking of state secrets would seem to be skirting pretty close to the line of "I'm just a private citizen/journalist." This is doubly true if said leaks end up putting military personnel and government assets in harms way.

We don't need to consider that possibility. It has been over a decade since this information was released. If anyone about whom USA government cares had ever suffered any harm (even if they actually deserved it) as a result, the USA war media would have crowed about it until we had all memorized all details. Not even a rumor exists of anything like that, so we know it didn't happen.

Scoping to a reasonable level, publishers' primary job is to review and filter information for quality, safety, and fitness for mass consumption. Assange and WikiLeaks explicitly do not do that. At best, they are a distributor.

The law generally views the publisher as responsible for unlawful (defamatory, copyright infringing, etc.) content without evidence of specific knowledge, whereas distributors are generally liable only when they have specific knowledge of the facts that make the content unlawful. This, in effect, makes publishers responsible for reviewing/filtering content, because if they fail to do so, they will be held responsible.

That's the whole source of significanxe of, e.g., the section 230 protection against hosts or other users of online services meeting certain descriptions being treated as the publisher of other-user submitted content.

WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia granted Snowden asylum.

As a reminder, the post you show isn't when the aggression against Wikileaks escalated. You reminder is not true.

His disclosures have shown a consistent bias to damage the Democrats, support the Republicans, Trump, and the Putin regime. He also endangered the lives of multiple assets by revealing their names and locations.

It's a lot more nuanced than you portray it.