Asylum

Abstract

This chapter develops the history of how technology and digital media have significantly reshaped the modern press, enabling not only information sharing at unprecedented scale but also unprecedented consequences for those disclosures. Chelsea Manning faces thirty-five years in prison, later commuted, for disclosing document caches on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and US foreign policy. The Justice Department mounts the most far-reaching investigation in the history of the Espionage Act against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. WikiLeaks, in enabling digital whistleblowers, represented a new form of publisher with a complex relationship with traditional media. Edward Snowden releases to the press classified NSA documents that reveal widespread electronic surveillance on a global scale. The prosecutions in these cases prompt countries to grant asylum in response to the Espionage Act.