 Hold in triplet, you heard this specific description of the course of events, I wanna get your take. Sure, thanks very much. Let me just start off by saying I am not with the government nor do my views on my own at this point, I'm not representing the views of the US government or the FBI specifically. So I think maybe we can just take a step back because I'm not sure what we wanna do up here is sort of completely litigate the specifics of the case and just think about what we're actually dealing with here and I think it's important to think of the entire narrative and the arc of the organization and that helps inform how, why the government is so concerned about this and what we have essentially is an organization that has called itself essentially an intelligence agency that isn't trying to inform the people of the world and has said that they want to hack to bring that information out and to publish it. Now again, this is an organization that has generally been used against a number of different governments within the world but has worked specifically very hard against the US government. It is not a US entity. Assange is not a US citizen. So again, injecting themselves in our conversation here, in our dynamic of figuring out what is the balance between security and privacy in a sense. And so I think it's important to think about who is the actor that we're talking about here before we start to get into the specifics about what might be misconceptions that are out there. So there's two basic charges within the superseding, well there's 18 charges but two basic ones which essentially is there's a computer hacking charge and then there's the charges under the espionage act. And so as it's very laid out, there is at least a narrative that's out there about whether or not the hacking and how big of a part that played in the overall exploitation of receiving information or whether it was a part of it that was necessary in order to get the information out. But I'm not sure that actually matters for whether or not the case, if someone actually has broken the law in order to make an attempt to actually extract additional information. So while it may or may not be, and again I think we should stay kind of a little bit on the wave tops here on the specifics of this, may or may not be actually impactful on the information that's coming out, if Assange took these actions essentially was encouraging someone and actually trying to help them to hack into a US government system, that is a violation of US law. And that is not someone who is protected in terms of publishing that information. Generally that is not something that the Supreme Court has decided to protect and those types of actions. And the second was a very nuanced and complicated piece of it. I don't know the specifics of this, but I can tell you what it smells like. It smells like an intelligence operation to me. This is a very typical sort of tactic of how Russian intelligence works. They use individuals and they use people to as proxies and many times they may be unwitting in which ways they would do that. Sometimes they may be winning in order to leak this type of information. So creating a situation where there was a supposed, it was told it was a temporary password to some person so that they could push this information out versus saying that it was a permanent password that could be unchanged. This is the type of information that a Russian intelligence service, so this is how they would operate in order to push that information out. Really quickly, with the names that were ultimately revealed in the unredacted versions, was there any harm done to anybody? So I think that my information is anecdotal. I have people that I know that were undercover, friends that were revealed that then felt unsafe in doing their job and trying to protect US national security. There's untold number of other people. So if you remember what was essentially revealed with the identity of some individuals in US government who were undercover, some individuals who were working with US government in different parts of the world, and a lot of those identities were revealed. So these are people who were in substantial danger. They were providing assistance to US government and their information was leaked out. And as Barry mentioned, although there may have been an attempt to limit that at the beginning, once the information was out, WikiLeaks was happy to publish it on their own website. So again, I think it kind of gets to the underline of what was WikiLeaks' intentions all along in this instance. But I think there's some real substantial harm here. And again, this gets back to my earlier point. If we have an organization that's outside the United States, made up substantially of people who are not US citizens, making decisions about information's gonna be leaked that impacts Americans, impacts individuals who are working with the United States. And so I think the question really should be asking is, is this the type of power that we wanna give to someone outside of our government or outside of our society? This is not an American, this is not an US organization doing this. It's an outsider. Gabe Rotman, do you believe that Julian Assange, considering the allegations, is a journalist? If we're talking about hacking, we're talking about names that have now been revealed as informants in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, what do you think? So maybe I can start instead of directly answering that question by setting the fundamental stakes in the case, I think for journalism. And I was gonna start off this answer by preempting the question you just asked, is Julian Assange a journalist? And the answer is, respectfully, it doesn't really matter. The First Amendment doesn't protect journalists as an employment class, it doesn't protect, it protects individuals who do certain things, who engage in journalistic activity. So with that said, if you look at a specialty national security reporting, reporting on federal law enforcement, what is the life cycle of that activity? You try and get the information, you pursue it. Occasionally you say I'm interested in large classes of information, things like that. You receive the information and then you publish the information. Under U.S. federal law, under the Espionage Act and actually under parts of the computer fraud and abuse act, on the face of those statutes, that activity could potentially be criminal. Now, just to dig into the second superseding indictment, so there's three indictments here, it gets super complicated, but basically the last indictment against Assange, there are let's say three types of charges. One involves the computer intrusion conspiracy, then there are a series of charges that are based on in-co-it theories, in other words, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, solicitation, and then there are three charges that are based on only that third piece of the journalistic activity national reporting life cycle publication. They charge Assange directly for the sole act of publishing classified information online. Now, the government has argued that, and this is true on the face of the actual indictment, that they're only charging Assange for the publication of unredacted informant names. When you read it, that's true. Under the Espionage Act, informance is not a special class. There actually is a statute that covers the publication, the identification of informants. That's not an issue here. The Espionage Act, by its plain terms, covers the publication of classified information to the public. The government has thought about prosecuting members of the news media historically. There's a case in World War II where they were ultimately unsuccessful in getting an indictment against the Chicago Tribune and a Tribune reporter for releasing information about the midway attack. There are a related set of cases in the 1970s and 1980s involving leaks concerning a very secret Soviet submarine-based surveillance program against the Soviets. That case went all the way up to the top levels of the Ford administration. And ultimately, the administration decided not to indict. But in all of those cases where it's come close, the government's never pushed over to charge pure publication. And that's what's an issue here.