Stand with Reality Winner (standwithreality.org)

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, organizations dedicated to preserving civil rights in the United States, have publicly declared support for Reality Winner, the 25-year-old Air Force veteran currently held without bail awaiting trial on charges of leaking a classified document to The Intercept.

In separate blog posts, the ACLU and EFF slammed the Department of Justice for its ongoing abuse of the Espionage Act, a law originally intended to prosecute foreign spies, as a tool to silence critical investigative journalism.

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, wrote:

“The Espionage Act is a fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional law. As the ACLU argued in an amicus brief in the Chelsea Manning appeal, and has argued with reference to Edward Snowden, this act is unconstitutionally vague because it allows the government to prosecute leakers and whistleblowers that it dislikes, while leaving untouched the many leakers within the security state who release classified materials to advance those agencies’ bureaucratic aims. Perhaps worse, it doesn’t allow leakers to defend their leaks by trying to demonstrate in court that they served the public interest.”

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“As it stands, the Espionage Act makes NO distinction between a civic-minded whistleblower who releases something that should never have been classified and which reveals illegal government activities, and a spy who sells genuinely damaging documents to a foreign government for cash.”

David Greene, Civil Liberties director for the EFF, wrote:

“The Espionage Act was designed to prosecute spies who disclosed military secrets to foreign nations, not sources who disclose newsworthy information to the press. Unfortunately, the Espionage Act has been misused throughout its existence, from silencing left-wing speech during the Red Scare days of its origin to the indictments of whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.”

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“Moreover, because a great number of leaks are either encouraged or at least tolerated by the U.S. government when they serve the government’s purpose, the Espionage Act provides a mechanism for the selective punishment of government critics rather than furthering the general interests of preserving classified information.”

Both organizations have challenged the Espionage Act in court. The law has never been tested on First Amendment grounds.

The document Reality Winner is charged with leaking revealed that the Russian government succesfully infilitrated election databases in 21 states. The Trump administration, despite raising alarms without any evidence about a domestic threat to election security, did not share information about these very serious security vulnerabilities with state election officials.

Reality Winner is currently being held without bail in Lincoln County jail in Georgia, awaiting trail in October.