Snowden, Kim and James Rosen

Stephen Kim is going to jail for 13 months for disclosing a Top Secret document to James Rosen, who then made public the substance of the classified piece of literature on North Korea.  Kim's lawyer says he got prosecuted because he was a small fish who had no contacts, or power.  Preposterous.  He got prosecuted because he gave a TS document to somebody without a security clearance, and perhaps 13 months is not much of a sentence for doing such a thing.  But, he also got prosecuted because he can't claim to be journalist.  He is a State Department contractor, who admits to one count, while a DoD contractor, Edward Snowden, admits to nothing.  Snowden wants to be a hero for what he did.

Both Snowden and Kim have something in common;  they gave documents to reporters to publish.  What do the reporters get in the way of jail time for publishing documents they know will do harm to the United States?  What do the newspapers get for publishing what these people give them?  Circulation.

The Guardian has even admitted it will continue to publish whatever Snowden gives them, because they wouldn't want the circulation increases to stop.  Besides, they say, they have a God-given right to publish something that "causes grave damage to the U.S. if disclosed to an unauthorized person." By definition, that is what Top Secret means.  Fox and the Guardian both need to think about that a little.  If this stuff is really not classified, they have a good argument that it should be given to every terrorist in the world.  Nobody could claim any advantage from it.

Where is our Congress, when we need some new laws?  Yes, it is a hard issue to tackle.  Yes, it is going to make some liberals cry.  Yes, it will be a long time in coming about.  We still have the Stuxnet worm disclosure, several from our White House, and a hundred more I can name, that were not prosecuted.  We need some new laws that will prevent the press from publishing things we can be sure will cause grave damage to the United States.  All done, by the way, in the name of a free press.  I wonder if that is what being free really means.  See Acting Free on my website, or Amazon books: