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Supporters of WikiLeaks proprietor Julian Assange protested his arrest in Sweden on sexual charges as a classic “honey trap”—a sting operation in which an attractive person is used to entrap or coerce a target. In this case, the claim is that two Swedish women used sex as a way of trapping Assange. “Honey trap” is a phrase more familiar in Britain than the United States, and its connection with sting seems more than coincidental. The honeybee has long been associated in literature and political philosophy with a model of human society—from Virgil's Georgics to Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees to Leo Tolstoy and Karl Marx. But although the term “honey trap” was originally associated with espionage, the Oxford English Dictionary says that it is now onw which is found “especially in journalism.”

Drawing together the stolen correspondence of British colonial officials and leaked U.S. governmental communiqués, this chapter reexamines the relationships among media, networks, and revolution. Propaganda, the preeminent mode for spreading and scattering, becomes central to the dissemination of once-confidential information. Whether it is Ben Franklin’s circulation of American colonial propaganda or the document dumps facilitated by Julian Assange, the spilling of state secrets suggests the importance of seeing both printed and digital texts as mobile expressions. This linkage between the movements of eighteenth-century correspondence and the disclosures of WikiLeaks invites a meditation on the revolutionary capacity of liberal subjects, who, as it turns out, may be most revolutionary when they cease to be identified or act as subjects at all.

This concluding chapter argues how knowing and understanding the history of discourses that have shaped the perception of the Internet's meanings, problems, and possibilities lends insight into ongoing developments and debates. It turns to the WikiLeaks scandal where diplomatic “cables” containing classified information were released to the public. As journalists, academics, and politicians in the halls of Congress debated, discourses explored in the previous chapters emerge. The coverage of WikiLeaks was reminiscent of the “teenaged technology” discourse from the 1980s, which cast Internet users as rebellious teenagers with the potential to destroy the world. Additionally, the story of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, as a country-hopping bandit avoiding legal retribution was mapped onto WikiLeaks itself. The chapter also describes how WikiLeaks emblematized early news media fantasies of the best of what the blogosphere could offer and the company's role in sparking the 2010 Arab Spring.

This chapter focuses on the grant of diplomatic asylum. It provides an overview of the development of this legal institution in Latin American law and its consideration in the Haya de la Torre case, but it also reflects on incidents from the rich history of diplomatic asylum, reaching from the case of Cardinal Mindszenty to Julian Assange. The authors analyse legal arguments which were advanced on the various controversies surrounding diplomatic asylum, including the possible distinction between asylum on the one hand and shelter or refuge on the other, but also the impact of potential ‘extraordinary’ circumstances on the legality of asylum. This chapter also offers conclusions on the question whether the grant of asylum is to be considered an abuse of immunities or embraced by diplomatic tasks, and whether there are possible grounds precluding responsibility, if it were found to be the breach of an international obligation.

The number, frequency, and seriousness of leaks of classified information have grown sharply in the last two decades. The government has reacted to these leaks with several initiatives to stop or deter them. Journalists and their allies, in turn, have complained that these initiatives have narrowed press freedoms and damaged the First Amendment. This essay argues that the journalists are wrong. The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in press freedoms in the national security context and greater protection for journalists in their reporting of national security secrets. The recent indictment of Julian Assange is no violation of this norm and in many ways confirms it.

This is the first career interview with Academy Award–winner, Pulitzer Prize–winner, MacArthur Fellow Laura Poitras, whose shift from cooking to filmmaking brought her first into contact with the avant-garde filmmaking community in the Bay Area, and in particular, with Ernie Gehr; then into contact with Linda Goode Bryant, with whom she made Flag Wars (2003), an Emmy-winning documentary about ethnic collisions in a Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood. Her reaction to the American response to 9/11 instigated her celebrated post-9/11 trilogy of films: My Country, My Country (2006), which explores events during the election in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein; The Oath (2010), a portrait of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s one-time bodyguard; and CITIZENFOUR (2014), where Poitras worked with Ed Snowden to reveal unconstitutional surveillance practices. Her feature about Julian Assange, Risk (2016), followed. In 2015, with Charlotte Cook and A. J. Schnack, she founded Field of Vision to provide independent documentary filmmakers with a platform for their work.

Chapter 13 discusses the synergy among Julian Assange, conservative media, and Russian trolls in the final days of the campaign. Two days before the election, WikiLeaks posted allegations of Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, which was amplified by troll accounts and conservative media. During the lead-up to Election Day, the Russian trolls focused their messaging on turning out the votes of evangelicals and military households, suppressing voting by Blacks, and shifting the votes of disaffected liberals to Stein.

Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the top-secret Pentagon Papers established the precedent that the US government cannot impose prior restraint on the publication of sensitive national security information—even when it is classified. Over the ensuing fifty years, an uneasy, informal arrangement between government officials and news organizations has evolved to manage the challenges of publishing this material. The age of persistent cyber conflict is testing this arrangement. While the US government frequently reveals cyberattacks on its institutions, corporations, and the power grid, it surrounds its own offensive cyber operations with intense secrecy. This essay argues that if the United States is serious about creating “norms of behavior” in cyberspace and deterring cyberattacks on American citizens, the public must be able to debate how and why the U.S. employs cyberweapons against other countries—an objective threatened by the aggressive policies of the Obama and Trump administrations aimed at criminalizing leaking.