I am not a lawyer but I'd say this is a legal gray area.
The leaker probably broke a law. E.g., hacking Podesta's private emails would have been illegal under computer fraud and abuse. It's alternately possible that the leaker had legal access but breached contract to release the data publicly.
Now that the information has been leaked, it's hard to say that it's clearly illegal for John Q. Public to access what Wikileaks has made publicly available. The anchor is unable to point to a specific statute in his tweet above and also mentions that it hasn't been tested in court to his knowledge.
A central theme of the leaks so far is that large segments of the media have been overly cooperative with the Clinton campaign in spite of feigned objectivity. This HN comment has curated some links to primary evidence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722664 . Take a quick perusal and you'll be about as informed as anyone on the answer to your question.
>A central theme of the leaks so far is that large segments of the media have been overly cooperative with the Clinton campaign in spite of feigned objectivity.
This is a nice bit of propaganda you've put forth here.
Here's a Harvard study into the majority of the 2016 election coverage including primaries which shows a demonstrably strong bias in the media pro-Trump and anti-Clinton and demonstrates that Clinton has received a FAR more harsh relationship with the major press.
It demonstrates that coverage of Clinton was on average negative about her for the entirety of 2015.
It demonstrates that Trump enjoyed a very positive and cushy relationship with newsmedia who combined to give him hundreds of millions USD of free exposure.
I would argue that Clinton has had mostly negative coverage up until the end of September 2016.
Yes, it's almost as if Trump's positive media attention in late 2015 was coordinated somehow. Like they were instructed to take him seriously or something...
I hope you are rational enough to see the hilarious doublespeak being engaged in here:
* Positive coverage of hillary is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
* Positive coverage of her opponent, is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media
Come on man. I hope readers of this particular site are rational enough to apply occam's razor and think critically.
I also find it extremely telling that Donald Trump, Mr Reality TV and the "hyper-successful" media and real estate man isn't responsible for his own success, but rather it's his opponent which is apparently so powerful that every single event occurring is by her design...?
How feckless Trump appears in your "everything good or bad happening to both candidates was preordained in a conspiracy" viewpoint!
Not everything is a conspiracy, I hope you're capable of rational thought.
There's a dimension/axis of time involved in the pattern. At least some (substantial?) positive coverage of Trump before Republican nomination is due to Hillary's cozy relationship with media.
I, for one, am also comfortable blaming the Republican electorate for allowing the three pied pipers, including Trump, to have been elevated.
Wait, so because a political opponent identified him (and 2 others) as the weakest and most unpalatable candidates, that means media outlets were "instructed" to prop him up?
It seems like his tweet defends the possibility of it being illegal, but not the idea that somehow it could possibly be legal for CNN & "the media" while still illegal for everyone else, which seems like the most absurd part to me.
I guess he never explicitly said it was legal for CNN -- maybe he was claiming that CNN is generously taking on all that legal risk so the rest of us don't have to?
Funny too because the argument is that Hillary wasn't negligent with classified data, thus why would Podesta emails be unlawful to read? Either information is classified and Hillary was criminally negligent or it's not and therefore nothing 'unlawful' about WikiLeaks.
More interesting that CNN thinks they can read them but the public can not. Media organizations have no security clearances and thus are subject to the same access as anyone else.
Well to be fair, media organizations like CNN have legal departments staffed with experts ready to fight on this type of stuff. You and I probably do not.
There is also the famous Pentagon Papers case, which to my knowledge rests on the "freedom of the press" language in the First Amendment.
That said, this was a stupid thing for the CNN anchor to say. Regardless of the law, no federal prosecutor is going to waste their time trying to find and prosecute every U.S. citizen who visits the Wikileaks website.
