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Tag: Wikileaks

  • Julian Assange pleads guilty to espionage but defends himself in court

    Julian Assange pleads guilty to espionage but defends himself in court

    Julian Assange has formally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act at a federal courthouse in Saipan, the capital of Northern Mariana Islands. The WikiLeaks founder was released from prison on June 24 after reaching a plea deal with the US government and quickly boarded a plane at Stansted Airport to make his way to Saipan. While the deal required Assange to plead guilty to “conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the United States,” he still defended himself in court.

    According to The Washington Post, Assange argued that he should’ve been protected by the First Amendment as a journalist. “Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information,” he said. “I believe the First Amendment protected that.” He also said that he believes the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction of each other, but he accepts that his actions were in “violation of an espionage statute” and that it would be “difficult to win such a case given all the circumstances.”

    A lawyer for the US government, however, accused him of encouraging personnel with high security clearances to expose classified military information and threaten national security. If you’ll recall, WikiLeaks published classified information related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which was obtained by whistleblower and former Army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning, under his leadership.

    Lawyers from both sides argued about the time Assange served in prison, but around three hours after the proceeding started, Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona declared that the 62 months he spent in Belmarsh Prison was reasonable and on par with the time served by Manning. Assange will not spend any time in US custody, but he has to leave the US Northern Mariana Islands immediately. As of this writing, the same private jet that flew him from London to Saipain is waiting to take him to Canberra, Australia.

    Mariella Moon

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  • The Julian Assange Saga Is Finally Over

    The Julian Assange Saga Is Finally Over

    United States prosecutors have secured a deal with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange requiring the long-embattled publisher to plead guilty to one count of espionage for his role in making public classified documents concerning the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The agreement, which follows more than a decade of efforts by Assange, 52, to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom, would draw to a close one of the longest-running national security investigations in US history. The deal was first disclosed in court documents made public in the UK.

    Assange and his legal team, which have denied the accusations levied by the US, could not be immediately reached for comment.

    “Julian Assange is free,” WikiLeaks wrote in a statement posted to X. “He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there.”

    A letter US prosecutors filed in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands on Monday indicates that Assange will enter his guilty plea at a Wednesday hearing in Sapian, the island territory’s capital, having refused to travel to the continental US. He is then expected to return to his home country of Australia, having already served the expected 62-month sentence in London prison.

    The case against Assange centers around the publishing of more than 750,000 stolen US documents by WikiLeaks between 2009 and 2011. It has drawn enormous attention for its clear implications on press freedoms internationally. Organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists in the US have for years warned the case could severely imperil the ability of journalists to obtain and publish classified information—even though the nation’s highest court has long recognized the right of journalists to do so.

    Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, WikiLeaks published a trove of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. The leak, which embarrassed the DNC and won Assange praise from right-wing figures, was later revealed to be the work of notorious Russian hacking groups known as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, both affiliated with Moscow’s GRU military intelligence agency.

    US prosecutors initially charged Assange with a single count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for allegedly conspiring with Chelsea Manning, who provided WikiLeaks with the trove of classified material related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to gain unauthorized access to government computers. Prosecutors later added an additional 17 charges under the Espionage Act—a move widely condemned as an attack on the free press.

    Assange, forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2019 after seven years asylum, has been held in Belmarsh prison in London pending the outcome of his extradition hearings, which were delayed repeatedly over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. His attorneys argued that due to his deteriorating mental health, extradition to the US would increase the likelihood of suicide.

    US prosecutors secured, on appeal, permission to extradite the award-winning journalist, who married his longtime partner, Stella Moris, while in jail in 2022, by offering UK courts a slate of written assurances. Among other concessions, the US promised not to subject Assange to “special administration measures,” a term referring to the practice of wiretapping certain defendants’ phone calls citing national security concerns.

    “This period of our lives, I’m confident now, has come to an end,” said Moris—now Assange—in a video prerecorded last week. “I think by this time next week, Julian will be free.”

    Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor in chief, said in the same video captured outside Belmarsh that he hoped to see Assange for the last time inside its walls. “If you’re seeing this, it means he is out.”

    Dell Cameron

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  • Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act

    Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act

    Washington — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act and is expected to appear in a U.S. courtroom on the Northern Mariana Islands in the coming days, court records revealed Monday. 

    The guilty plea, which is to be finalized Wednesday, will resolve Assange’s outstanding legal matters with the U.S. government. Justice Department prosecutors recommended a prison sentence of 62 months in custody as part of the plea agreement, CBS News has learned, which is on the high end for a single-count violation. Assange would not spend any time in U.S. custody because, under the plea agreement, he’ll receive credit for the approximately five years he has spent in a U.K. prison fighting extradition to the U.S. 

    In a letter to the federal judge on Monday, the Justice Department said Assange opposed traveling to the continental U.S. to enter the guilty plea. The Justice Department expects Assange to return to Australia after the court hearing. 

    Assange, an Australian national, was indicted in 2019 by a federal grand jury in Virginia with more than a dozen charges that alleged he illegally obtained and disseminated classified information about America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on his WikiLeaks site. Prosecutors at the time accused him of recruiting individuals to “hack into computers and/or illegally obtain and disclose classified information.”

    He is set to plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information.

    His attorney declined to comment. 

    One of his best-known recruits, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, was convicted of the 2010 leak of hundreds of thousands of sensitive military records to WikiLeaks in what officials said was one the largest disclosures of secret government records in history. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison and in 2017, former President Barack Obama commuted her sentence. 

    Assange was accused of working with Manning to figure out the password on a Defense Department computer system that stored the sensitive records about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well as hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs.  

    Federal prosecutors also accused Assange of publishing the names of “persons throughout the world who provided information to the U.S. government in circumstances in which they could reasonably expect that their identities would be kept confidential.” 

    Assange previously denied all wrongdoing. He and his supporters argued the charges should never have been filed because he was acting as a journalist in reporting on government actions. 

    He has been in British custody since 2019 and launched a yearslong legal effort to resist extradition to the U.S. to face federal charges. The expected guilty plea brings an end to the intercontinental court fight. 

    In May, the WikiLeaks founder won his bid to appeal his extradition to the U.S. on espionage charges after a British court asked the U.S. government earlier this year to assure that Assange would be granted free speech protections under the U.S. Constitution and that he would not be given the death penalty if convicted on espionage charges. 

    President Biden said in April he was “considering” a request from Australia to allow Assange to return to his native country, which called for the U.S. to drop the case against him. 

    Assange has faced legal troubles for more than a decade, beginning in 2010 when a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant related to rape and sexual assault allegations by two women, which Assange denied. As he faced extradition to Sweden, he sought political asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he lived for seven years until he was evicted in 2019. 

    Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation into Assange in 2017 and an international arrest warrant against him was withdrawn, but he was still wanted by British police for skipping bail when he entered the embassy. 

    By early 2019, Ecuador became irritated with its London house guest, accusing him of smearing his feces on the walls and attacking its guards. 

    “He exhausted our patience and pushed our tolerance to the limit,” Lenin Moreno, who was Ecuador’s president at the time, said. Moreno accused Assange of being “an informational terrorist” by selectively releasing information “according to his ideological commitments.”  

    At the request of the U.S. government, British police arrested Assange on April 11, 2019, at the embassy after Ecuador ended his asylum. By then, he was facing charges in the U.S. related to the 2010 leak. 

    WikiLeaks was a key player in the 2016 presidential election, publishing thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee that had been stolen by Russian government hackers. WikiLeaks and Assange are mentioned hundreds of times in special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, though they were not charged for the 2016 conduct. 

    Priscilla Saldana contributed reporting.

    Robert Legare

    Robert Legare is a CBS News multiplatform reporter and producer covering the Justice Department, federal courts and investigations. He was previously an associate producer for the “CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell.”

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  • Julian Assange Released From Prison in Plea Deal With U.S.

    Julian Assange Released From Prison in Plea Deal With U.S.

    WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has been released from prison in the UK and will be allowed to return to his home country of Australia after he pleads guilty to illegally disseminating national security material in the U.S., according to a surprising new report from NBC News.

    Will The MSI Claw Scratch Your Handheld Gaming Itch?

    Court documents filed Monday by the U.S. federal government in the Northern Mariana Islands suggest the plea deal is imminent, though the New York Times notes everything still needs to be approved by a judge. Assange previously faced 170 years in prison.

    Why have the court documents been filed in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific? According to the Associated Press, it’s due to Assange’s “opposition to traveling to the continental U.S. and the court’s proximity to Australia.”

    The 52-year-old has been held in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison for the past five years, a period that follows a years-long saga that saw Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy while first claiming asylum in 2012. Assange was physically dragged out of the embassy by British authorities in April 2019.

    “Julian Assange is free,” the WikiLeaks X account tweeted on Monday around 8:00 p.m. ET. “He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.”

    WikiLeaks also published a video of Assange, embedded below, showing him reading paperwork and appearing to board a plane, presumably bound for the Northern Mariana Islands to formally enter his plea.

    The Times explains that a plea deal was deemed acceptable to top officials at the Justice Department because Assange had already served five years in the UK while awaiting extradition to the U.S.

    The original charges against Assange were brought by the U.S. Department of Justice under President Donald Trump in 2019, despite the fact that Trump would often talk about how much he loved WikiLeaks. Trump failed to pardon Assange before leaving office, something many Assange backers insisted the former president would do.

    Assange faced 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act along with charges related to criminal hacking, but the Times reports he’ll only plead guilty to one charge. Assange allegedly provided instructions to whistleblower Chelsea Manning on how to access classified computers, which is what experts claimed was the differentiating factor that made his conduct more serious than a typical journalist who simply disseminates sensitive information.

    Some of the documents were published by WikiLeaks in 2011 under the name “Collateral Murder,” including a video from 2007 that showed U.S. forces in Iraq killing several civilians, including two journalists from Reuters.

    The plea deal would put an end to the incredibly long saga that has engulfed Assange for over a decade now, though it’s not clear whether the WikiLeaks founder would immediately get back to work. Assange started as a celebrity among lefty and libertarian circles in the early 2010s before becoming celebrated more by the political right-wing after furthering conspiracy theories that supported Donald Trump in 2016.

    Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, released a video statement along with WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson which appears to have been shot shortly before Julian was actually released.

    “I just came out of Belmarsh prison and what I hope is my last visit to see Julian here in this prison where he spent five years, two months and two weeks. And if you’re seeing this, it means he is out,” Hrafnsson says in the video.

    Stella Assange says that a crowdfunding campaign would be launched to support Julian’s “recovery” and health care costs.

    SA KH statement 260624

    The Australian government and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made repeated pleas to the White House for Assange’s release, though it was never clear whether President Joe Biden was going to intervene in the case. Assange has reportedly suffered various health issues in prison, though the short video clip released by WikiLeaks appears to show Assange is visibly healthy.

    Matt Novak

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  • WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Can Appeal His Extradition to the US, British Court Says

    WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Can Appeal His Extradition to the US, British Court Says

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can appeal his extradition to the United States, a British court has said.

    Two judges at the High Court in London today said Assange can officially challenge his extradition order from the United Kingdom in the long-running dispute over the leaking and publication of military secrets.

    Following a two-hour hearing, at which Assange was not present due to health issues, the judges allowed Assange to appeal his extradition on freedom of speech and freedom of expression grounds. The decision, the latest in a years-long legal battle, follows a UK High Court ruling in May that asked the US government to provide more “assurances” about the conditions Assange would face if he was extradited. In that instance, the court said it required more convincing that Assange would have free speech protections, his Australian nationality would not prejudice him in any trial, and he would not later be sentenced to death.

    The judges, Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson, have now considered arguments from both sides on the three issues and decided to allow Assange to appeal the “assurances” about how his trial would be conducted and First Amendment grounds. (Assange’s team did not contest assurances from the US government that he would not be given the death penalty.)

    The decision to grant an appeal, which will be seen as a partial win for Assange, means the long-running saga will likely extend over months to come.

    Assange faces 18 charges in the US, all but one under the Espionage Act, for publishing classified information related to the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A conviction under the act would require prosecutors to demonstrate that Assange not only obtained national defense information but released it with the intent to injure the United States—a major hurdle for US prosecutors in a case against an award-winning journalist.

    Assange’s attorneys say he could face up to 175 years in prison, though US prosecutors have claimed publicly that they expect him to serve no more than five.

    Prosecutors in the US allege that Assange, 52, overstepped his role as a journalist in online conversations with a source, Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, by allegedly offering to help the then-22-year-old private crack a hashed password that could have, hypothetically, furthered her illicit access to a classified Defense Department network.

    Manning was arrested in 2010 on suspicion of having leaked purportedly classified footage of a US airstrike in Baghdad. The damning video, which came to be known as Collateral Murder, depicted a helicopter attack in which at least 12 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, were gunned down. (The Pentagon later assessed that the footage was not, in fact, classified.)

    Manning, who spent more than a year and a half in pretrial confinement, confessed in 2013 to leaking more than 750,000 documents. A third of the cache were diplomatic cables that, while portrayed as highly damaging by the Obama administration, were in large part simply embarrassing for US diplomats, who wrote candidly about the behavior of foreign leaders in their reports back home.

    Dell Cameron, Matt Burgess

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  • U.S. Pinky Swears Not to Kill Julian Assange If He’s Extradited

    U.S. Pinky Swears Not to Kill Julian Assange If He’s Extradited

    U.S. officials pledged not to pursue the death penalty against Julian Assange if he’s extradited from the UK to face charges related to his publication of documents highly embarrassing to the U.S. government, according to a report from Australia’s ABC News Tuesday. But that will be cold comfort to some in the British legal system who have argued U.S. prisons are so inherently cruel that sending Assange to America, even with such a guarantee, would still amount to an inhumane act.

    Why Was Now the Right Time to Come Back and Do 28 Years Later?

    American officials at the U.S. embassy in London reportedly sent a note to British officials on Tuesday in a bid to address several concerns about what may happen to Assange if he’s ultimately extradited to the U.S., according to several news outlets. The 52-year-old WikiLeaks co-founder faces computer hacking and espionage charges first brought by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department that have been continued into the Biden era.

    President Biden signaled last week he’d be open to dropping the case against Assange, saying “We’re considering it” when asked about a request from the Australian government. Assange is an Australian citizen, though he hasn’t lived in the country for some time and one of the questions addressed in the diplomatic note is whether the First Amendment applies to people outside the U.S.—an issue the U.S. insists Assange’s lawyers can “raise,” without elaborating too much.

    Megan Specia, a reporter for the New York Times in London, tweeted the three-page note on Tuesday including two carefully-worded assurances, quoted below:

    1. ASSANGE will not be prejudiced by reason of his nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing. Specifically, if extradited, ASSANGE will have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. Courts.

    2. A sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on ASSANGE. The United States is able to provide such assurance as ASSANGE is not charged with a death-penalty eligible offense, and the United States assures that he will not be tried for a death-eligible offense.

    Assange has been held in Belmarsh Prison in London since 2019 and a British judge ruled in 2021 that he shouldn’t be extradited due to America’s extremely brutal prison system. The UK’s Judge Vanessa Baraitser cited Assange’s depressive state and risk of suicide in the conditions he would face in the U.S. when she first argued Assange shouldn’t be extradited in a surprise ruling.

    “Mr. Assange faces the bleak prospect of severely restrictive detention conditions designed to remove physical contact and reduce social interaction and contact with the outside world to a bare minimum. He faces these prospects as someone with a diagnosis of clinical depression and persistent thoughts of suicide,” Judge Baraitser wrote back in 2021.

    The judge’s ruling also noted that Assange could be stuck in solitary confinement for 23 hours per day while awaiting trial in the U.S., a punishment widely considered by other wealthy countries to be torture.

    Julian Assange’s wife, Stella Assange, released a statement on Tuesday in response to news of the diplomatic note sent by the U.S. to the UK, calling them “blatant weasel words” that don’t actually guarantee Julian can claim protections under the First Amendment as a foreign citizen.

    “The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future—his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in U.S. prison for publishing award-winning journalism,” Stella Assange said, according to the AFP.

    Lawyers for the U.S. and Assange are scheduled to reconvene in a British court on May 20, though it’s still unclear how many chances the WikiLeaks co-founder may have to appeal any decision that could see him finally shipped to the U.S.

    Matt Novak

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  • Australian lawmakers press US envoy for Julian Assange release

    Australian lawmakers press US envoy for Julian Assange release

    Assange’s supporters say he is an anti-establishment hero who has been victimised because he exposed the US wrongdoings.

    Australian lawmakers have met United States Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, urging her to help drop the pending extradition case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and allow him to return to Australia.

    The “Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group” said on Tuesday it informed Kennedy of “the widespread concern in Australia” about the continued detention of Assange, an Australian citizen.

    The meeting comes before US President Joe Biden’s scheduled visit to Australia this month for the Quad leaders’ summit.

    “There are a range of views about Assange in the Australian community and the members of the Parliamentary Group reflect that diversity of views. But what is not in dispute in the Group is that Mr Assange is being treated unjustly,” the legislators said in a statement after meeting Kennedy in the capital, Canberra.

    Assange is battling extradition from the United Kingdom to the US where he is wanted on criminal charges over the release of confidential military records and diplomatic cables in 2010. Washington says the release of the documents had put lives in danger.

    Assange’s supporters say he is an anti-establishment hero who has been victimised because he exposed US wrongdoings, including in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    The US embassy in Australia confirmed the meeting in a tweet but did not share further details.

    ‘Millions of Australians’

    Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, said he felt the meeting was an “important acknowledgement” by the US government that “Julian’s freedom is important to millions of Australians”.

    “After [Prime Minister Anthony Albanese] expressed frustration with the Biden administration, this is now a test for Ambassador Kennedy to see if she can move Washington on this issue,” said Shipton.

    Albanese, who has been advocating for the release of Assange, last week aired his frustration for not yet finding a diplomatic fix over the issue.

    Support for Assange among US policymakers remains low. Only a few members of Congress have come forward in support of the demand to drop charges against him.

    If extradited, Assange faces a sentence of up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison.

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  • Transparency For Payment Processors

    Transparency For Payment Processors

    Recently, PayPal released an update to its terms of service that said it would fine people using its service for spreading disinformation. It faced an immediate free speech backlash on social media. Former PayPal President David Marcus tweeted this policy was against everything the company believed. He seemed to think it was “insanity” for payment companies to refuse service “if you say something they disagree with.” Elon Musk tweeted his agreement.

    The company quickly reversed itself, saying the release was a mistake.

    But the controversy led libertarian lawyer Eugene Volokh to look more carefully at PayPal’s terms of service and he was horrified to discover that PayPal has a long-standing acceptable use policy that forbids “the promotion of racial intolerance or other forms of discriminatory intolerance.” As a good First Amendment lawyer he pointed out that “sharply criticizing a religion or government officials could be construed as the promotion of hate—and could theoretically violate that policy.” To protect himself from this danger and to protest this form of censorship he closed his PayPal account and urged others to do the same.

    Good luck finding an alternative. The reality is that payment companies have always had acceptable use policies, and for good reason.

    For one thing, they have legal responsibilities to stop money laundering and terrorist financing. So, they have to know who their customers are and what they are spending their money on. They also have a specific legal obligation to block unlawful internet gambling transactions. Payment companies also have policies against the use of their systems for illegal transactions and most of them take special precautions against copyright violations and child porn.

    Beyond these legal issues, payments systems restrict who they do business with for ethical and brand reasons. Amex doesn’t allow its services to be used by pornographers, even though pornography is protected by the First Amendment. Neither do Stripe, Amazon Pay, or Square.

    Visa and Mastercard allow their member banks to provide service to legal pornography merchants, but they also allow the banks to refuse this business and many of them do. This tolerance has its limits, however. The payment networks recently cut ties with Pornhub after revelations that it didn’t do much to control depictions of rape on its site.

    Both payment systems have broad brand protection clauses in their contracts with merchants and banks. They can withdraw service from “brand-damaging” transactions and reserve the right to unilaterally define what those transactions are.

    Some of these payment company restrictions seem idiosyncratic, to say the least. Amazon Pay, for instance, won’t pay for “occult services.” So, witches and warlocks stay away!

    But many of them seem right. In particular, the bans on hate speech that mimic PayPal’s. Amazon Pay prohibits “hate literature.” Square rejects “hate or harmful products.” Swipe bans a company or individual “that engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence toward any group based on race, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or any other immutable characteristic.”

    Visa and MasterCard could ban such merchants under their brand-protection programs, even without an explicit prohibition. What reputable business would want to be associated with companies or groups promoting hate speech? Responsible payment card companies flee contact with such people and they are right to do so.

    Of course, enforcement can often be controversial. In 2019 PayPal applied its policy against hate speech to Gab and Infowars, which brought cries of censorship from conservative activists. But displeasing some critics comes with the territory. Controversies over standards enforcement are an inevitable part of being in the payment business.

    I talked about these issues with former general counsel for the National Security Agency and current partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP Stewart Baker on his October 17 Cyberlaw podcast (around 32:40). He’s more suspicious of payment card hate speech standards than I am but we agree that a good step forward would be transparency. Payment card companies should be required to disclose their standards, explain their disconnection decisions, and provide adequate opportunities for challenging them.

    Laws providing for this kind of transparency for social media companies are already on the books in some U.S. states and in Europe. Existing financial regulations should be supplemented to require similar transparency rules for payment card companies, to be enforced by the powerful regulators that already supervise financial institutions.

    Transparency has another advantage. It can reveal behind-the-scenes government pressure on card companies to withhold service. This apparently happened in December 2010 when Wikileaks began to release the contents of confidential diplomatic cables. Senator Joe Lieberman, then-Chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, publicly called for card companies to disconnect Wikileaks. But PayPal said that it received secret pressure from the State Department. Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal soon suspended Wikileaks’ accounts.

    Government agencies should not exert shadowy pressure on payment companies to disconnect disfavored companies and groups. A little sunlight on such hidden agency nudges would be a good disinfectant and transparency requirements would provide it.

    Mark MacCarthy, Contributor

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