The judge discusses that in the opinion. The difference she notes is that the newspapers carefully choose what they publish in order to avoid harm--for example, they don't publish the names of government informants even if those names are contained in the materials they obtain, since that would put the lives of those informants at risk. Wikileaks did not do that with the information obtained from Manning; they just released it all. The judge quotes the newspapers themselves condemning Wikileaks for doing that.
She cites the Guardian who has a history of questionable reporting on Assange and WikiLeaks because they didn't do a good job[1][2].
In fact WikiLeaks made a point of going via the newspapers after being blamed.
Assange tried (at least he claims he tried) to get the US government to help him remove names that it felt should not be released. The US government refused. Which is perfectly understandable: why should the US government tell Wikileaks exactly which names in some leaked documents are the names of actual US government informants? That would be stupid.
Assange then chose to release all the material anyway, putting the life of anyone whose names were in that material potentially at risk. Newspapers, in the same position, did not publish the names. Whether you agree or not with either action, the fact remains that they are clearly different actions, and that one involves publishing people's names and potentially putting their lives at risk and the other does not.
What if you lived in an oppressive regime and believed, rightly or wrongly, that the US was trying to help improve the situation in your country, and you gave the US information? Would you still be OK with your name being published and your life being put at risk?
If that's stupid then complaining asking him to redact names without telling him which ones is even more stupid and gives the U.S. no right to complain. Especially when top secret is used to conceal war crimes.
> Assange then chose to release all the material anyway
Not publishing war crimes because those who commited them refuse to cooperate in redacting names would be a great way for the Pentagon to make sure their crimes stay hidden. In fact it appears that was their goal in not cooperating.
> Newspapers, in the same position, did not publish the names.
Newspapers were NOT in the same position. They published the leaks but Pentagon started cooperating with them by then.
It's remarkable that people exposing war criminals get more blame that actual war criminals who did not face any consequences and laughed about while murdering civilians including journalists.
He should have had the good judgment to redact all names even without being asked to. (Or at least all names that he didn't know belonged to people whose lives would not be put at risk by their publication.) He didn't.
> Newspapers were NOT in the same position.
It is true that newspapers (and other "mainstream" media organizations) have a special relationship with governments (and note that I'm not saying it's right that they do, only that as a matter of fact they do), so they aren't in exactly the same position as Wikileaks. That still does not excuse Wikileaks putting people's lives at risk by publishing their names.
> people exposing war criminals get more blame that actual war criminals
I haven't said anything at all about blame regarding anyone other than Assange, so you have no basis for even making any such comparison.
Also, I'm not blaming Assange for publishing the material itself. I'm blaming him for publishing people's names and putting their lives at risk. As I've already said, he could have published the material without publishing the names. He chose not to.
There's (luckily) no exams (yet) for what makes a journalist. Someone who has a blog is no less a journalist than anyone at a national newspaper.
> They have to rely on real newspapers or the pentagon (!) to do it for them. It’s no defence to say: we tried to get other people to help us do the right thing
Actually it is. That's why intention is regularly taken into account in court cases and it shows WikiLeaks had the intention to redact and if needed even via the Pentagon.
> but we couldn’t, so we did the wrong thing instead.
They did no 'wrong' thing instead. They tried to consult the U.S. Government about any needed redactions and then published vital information to inform the public that the government is committing war crimes of foreign soil in their name.
Not publishing that would've been wrong and was most likely the goal of the Pentagon in not cooperating.
Is similar with zero days, researchers publish them if the vendor doesn't cooperate because not doing so and letting black hats exploit a known bug is way more 'wrong' than publishing the 0day widely is.
No, it shows that Wikileaks can be just as disingenuous as any other "journalistic" organization. Wikileaks made a request to the US government that it had to know the US government would refuse (for the reason I gave in my other post in response to you upthread). It did that so it could disingenuously claim that it gave the US government a chance to protect people's names and the US government refused, making it seem like it's the US government's fault, not Wikileaks's fault, that the names got published. That's not "responsible journalism"; it's Wikileaks playing power politics just like governments and the media do.
> published vital information to inform the public that the government is committing war crimes of foreign soil in their name
Wikileaks could have published that information without publishing anyone's name. They chose not to do it that way.
