Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NHWhat WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden Exposed, and What It Changed
Two federal appeals courts ruled the phone-records program Snowden revealed unlawful, and Congress ended it. WikiLeaks’ Iraq war logs held an estimated 15,000 civilian deaths missing from Iraq Body Count’s tally. Assange pleaded guilty to one Espionage Act count in 2024; Snowden has faced charges since 2013. In 2010 New Hampshire’s Supreme Court held that a website that published a document a lender said was confidential, from an unnamed source, counted as the press.
Correction, Oct. 5, 2026, 4:10 a.m. EDT: An earlier version of this article said Judge Richard Leon’s December 2013 order on the phone-records program was reversed in 2015. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated the order on Aug. 28, 2015 and sent the case back to the district court. The program table and fact-check row 8 were corrected.
This is analysis. It sets out the public record behind the case that defenders of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden make, and the record their critics cite against it.
In August 2008 a website that tracks the mortgage industry published an article about a lender the New Hampshire Banking Department had taken action against, and linked to a document that purported to show the company’s 2007 loan figures. The lender said publishing it violated a state banking confidentiality law. A Superior Court judge ordered the site to take the chart down and to name whoever had supplied it.
On May 6, 2010, the New Hampshire Supreme Court reversed the takedown order and vacated the order to name the source, sending that question back for a balancing test. “The fact that Implode operates a website makes it no less a member of the press,” Justice Conboy wrote for a unanimous court in Mortgage Specialists v. Implode-Explode Heavy Industries. The lender’s loan information, the court said, “is certainly not more sensitive than the documents at issue in the Pentagon Papers case.”
Citing the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices stated the rule this way: “the lawfulness of publishing information does not depend upon the nature of the information itself, but, rather, upon whether the information was obtained lawfully by the publisher.”
That ruling came one month after WikiLeaks released a gun-camera video from Baghdad, and three years before Edward Snowden gave reporters a secret court order. The court’s questions, who counts as the press, when a source can be shielded, and whether the publisher obtained the material lawfully, run through both stories.
What Snowden’s documents showed
On March 12, 2013, at a public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden asked the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, a yes-or-no question: “does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?” Clapper answered, “No, sir.” Wyden asked again. “Not wittingly,” Clapper said.
Less than three months later, on June 5, 2013, The Guardian published an order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It directed Verizon Business Network Services to give the National Security Agency, “on an ongoing daily basis,” the call records of its customers. The source was Snowden, an employee of the contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who had been working at an NSA office in Hawaii. He identified himself four days later. “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” he told the paper.
Clapper later told the committee’s chairwoman that his answer had been “clearly erroneous,” NPR reported.
What courts and Congress did with them
The program rested on Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. By September 2020, two federal appeals courts had ruled it unlawful, Congress had ended it, and the NSA had shut down the narrower program that replaced it.
The Phone-Records Program After June 5, 2013
Official findings on the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ call records, in date order
| Date | Who | What it said or did |
|---|---|---|
| Dec. 12, 2013 | President’s Review Group | Information from the program “was not essential to preventing attacks.” |
| Dec. 16, 2013 | U.S. District Judge Richard Leon | Described the “almost-Orwellian technology” behind it and barred collection of the plaintiffs’ records, staying his order pending appeal. Vacated on appeal in 2015. |
| Jan. 23, 2014 | Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board | Found no “single instance” in which the program “made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.” It also said the program had been run in good faith. |
| May 7, 2015 | U.S. Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit | The program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized and therefore violates § 215.” |
| June 2, 2015 | Congress | The USA FREEDOM Act became law. It barred bulk collection under Section 215. |
| Early 2019 | NSA | Suspended the narrower program that replaced it, then deleted the records. |
| March 15, 2020 | Congress | Let Section 215 expire. |
| Sept. 2, 2020 | U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit | The program “violated that section of FISA.” The court upheld the convictions in the case before it. |
Granite State Report · Sources: the reports and opinions named, linked in the source list. The 2nd Circuit decided the case on the statute and did not reach the Constitution.
The 9th Circuit put cause and effect in one sentence. “Snowden’s disclosure of the metadata program prompted significant public debate over the appropriate scope of government surveillance,” Judge Berzon wrote in United States v. Moalin. Officials had publicly credited the program with a role in the investigation of the defendant, Basaaly Moalin. To the extent their statements suggested it produced the evidence used at his trial, the court said, that impression “is inconsistent with the contents of the classified record.”
The Guardian US and The Washington Post shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the reporting. In Europe, the Court of Justice of the European Union in October 2015 invalidated the “Safe Harbour” decision under which companies had moved Europeans’ personal data to the United States. The complaint behind the case, the court noted, referred to “the revelations made by Edward Snowden.” In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights, ruling in cases filed after those revelations, found that Britain’s bulk interception regime violated the right to respect for private life. It also held that bulk interception is not unlawful in itself.
Eric Holder, the attorney general when Snowden was charged, said in 2016 that Snowden “performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made.” Holder added that what Snowden did was “inappropriate and illegal.” Clapper complained the same year that because of the disclosures, “the onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years,” The Intercept reported. He attributed the estimate to the NSA.
What WikiLeaks published
WikiLeaks, founded by Assange in 2006, describes itself as “a multi-national media organization and associated library.” Its best-known releases came in 2010 and 2011 and drew on files supplied by a U.S. Army soldier, Chelsea Manning.
- April 5, 2010. A gun-camera video of a July 12, 2007 helicopter attack in Baghdad. The Guardian reported that the dead included a 22-year-old Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40, and that the Pentagon had blocked Reuters’ freedom-of-information request for the footage. The military had concluded that the soldiers acted within the law of armed conflict and their rules of engagement.
- July 25, 2010. The Afghan war logs: more than 90,000 military records, shared with The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel.
- October 22, 2010. The Iraq war logs: almost 400,000 Army field reports. Iraq Body Count estimated that they contained 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths. The Guardian found in them an order called Frago 242, which told coalition troops not to investigate detainee abuse unless coalition members were directly involved. A Pentagon spokesman said the military referred such reports to the Iraqi government for investigation.
- November 28, 2010. The first of 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables, published with The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel. In 2012 the European Court of Human Rights, in El-Masri v. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, set out cables released by WikiLeaks among the material the applicant submitted about his case and alleged CIA flights.
- April 2011. Military files on Guantánamo detainees. The Guardian counted 759 of them, covering almost every prisoner held there since 2002.
Amnesty International’s 2011 annual report credited WikiLeaks and its newspaper partners as a catalyst in the uprising that toppled Tunisia’s president, The Guardian reported. WikiLeaks or Assange received an Amnesty International UK media award in 2009, the Sam Adams Award in 2010, the Sydney Peace Foundation’s gold medal in 2011 and, that November, Australia’s Walkley Award for most outstanding contribution to journalism.
Manning was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of 20 counts, six under the Espionage Act, acquitted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, and sentenced to 35 years. President Obama commuted the sentence on January 17, 2017.
What it cost
Assange walked into the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on June 19, 2012 and stayed until April 11, 2019, when Ecuador withdrew his asylum and British police arrested him inside. A London court gave him 50 weeks for skipping bail. The United States then sought his extradition on 18 counts, 17 of them under the Espionage Act, carrying what five newspapers that had worked with him called “a sentence of up to 175 years.”
“For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information,” the American Civil Liberties Union said on May 23, 2019, the day the Espionage Act charges were announced. On November 28, 2022, the editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel signed an open letter asking the government to drop the case.
A United Nations working group concluded in 2016 that Assange had been arbitrarily detained by Sweden and the United Kingdom. The British judge who sentenced him in 2019 said that opinion was not binding and “was underpinned by misconceptions of fact and law.” The U.N. special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, visited him in Belmarsh prison in May 2019 with medical experts and concluded that he showed the symptoms of prolonged exposure to psychological torture, The Guardian reported.
A British judge refused to extradite him in January 2021, finding it would be oppressive given his mental condition. The High Court reversed her that December after the United States gave assurances about his treatment, and in May 2024 it granted him permission to appeal. The case ended on June 26, 2024, in a federal courtroom on the Pacific island of Saipan. Assange pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose national defense information and was sentenced to the 62 months he had already served in Britain. “I believe the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction with each other, but I accept that it would be difficult to win such a case given all these circumstances,” he told the court. He flew home to Australia that day. At the Council of Europe that October he put it more bluntly: “I pleaded guilty to journalism.” The council’s parliamentary assembly voted the next day to recognize him as a political prisoner.
Snowden has never stood trial. A criminal complaint sworn in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 14, 2013 charges him with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorized person.
The Espionage Act, Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University wrote in 2021, “subjects insiders who disclose classified secrets to the possibility of harsh sanctions regardless of the value to the public of the information they disclose.”
Snowden flew from Hong Kong to Moscow on June 23, 2013. The United States revoked his passport; accounts differ on whether that happened before or after he left Hong Kong. Russia granted him temporary asylum that August and citizenship by presidential decree on September 26, 2022. In 2020 a federal court entered judgment against him for more than $5 million in proceeds from his memoir and speeches, after ruling that he had broken his agreements with the CIA and NSA by not submitting them for review before publication.
New Hampshire’s part in it
On July 15, 2013, Gordon Humphrey, who served two terms as a Republican U.S. senator from New Hampshire, emailed Snowden. “Provided you have not leaked information that would put in harms way any intelligence agent, I believe you have done the right thing in exposing what I regard as massive violation of the United States Constitution,” he wrote, in an exchange The Guardian published the next day. Snowden answered: “I only wish more of our lawmakers shared your principles.”
On February 20, 2016, Snowden spoke by video link from Russia to the Free State Project’s Liberty Forum in Manchester. “They know more about us than they ever have in the history of the United States,” he told Nick Gillespie of Reason, which published the interview.
New Hampshire’s members of Congress split on five of the six recorded votes below.
How New Hampshire’s Delegation Voted
Six recorded votes on the NSA phone-records program, 2013 to 2015
| Vote | Result | New Hampshire members |
|---|---|---|
| July 24, 2013. House amendment by Rep. Justin Amash to the defense spending bill, to strip funding for the NSA phone-records program | Failed, 205 to 217 | Carol Shea-Porter (D): yes. Ann McLane Kuster (D): no. |
| May 22, 2014. House passage of the first USA FREEDOM Act | Passed, 303 to 121 | Kuster: yes. Shea-Porter: no. |
| Nov. 18, 2014. Senate vote to take up the Senate version | Failed, 58 to 42; 60 needed | Jeanne Shaheen (D): yes. Kelly Ayotte (R): no. |
| May 13, 2015. House passage of the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015 | Passed, 338 to 88 | Kuster: yes. Frank Guinta (R): no. |
| May 23, 2015. Senate vote to take up the House bill | Failed, 57 to 42; 60 needed | Shaheen: yes. Ayotte: no. |
| June 2, 2015. Senate passage; the bill became law that day | Passed, 67 to 32 | Shaheen: yes. Ayotte: yes. |
Granite State Report · Sources: Clerk of the House, roll calls 412 (2013), 230 (2014) and 224 (2015); U.S. Senate, vote 282 (113th Congress, 2nd session) and votes 194 and 201 (114th Congress, 1st session); the Amash amendment’s purpose as described by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The roll calls record votes, not reasons.
New Hampshire has no shield statute for reporters. The protection comes from Part I, Article 22 of the state constitution, which reads: “Free speech and Liberty of the press are essential to the security of Freedom in a State: They ought, therefore, to be inviolably preserved.” In 1977 the justices explained what that protects. “Our constitution quite consciously ties a free press to a free state,” they wrote, “for effective self-government cannot succeed unless the people have access to an unimpeded and uncensored flow of reporting.”
The 2010 mortgage-website ruling has limits, and they matter here. The privilege it recognized is qualified. The dispute was commercial, with no national-security claim. The court struck down an order against future publication and left open punishment after the fact. It binds New Hampshire courts, not federal courts or federal prosecutors. And it stressed that “the trial court made no finding that Implode unlawfully obtained the Loan Chart.” Granite State Report has written about who counts as the press in New Hampshire and about what Verizon discloses about government demands for its customers’ records.
What the critics say
One part of the case against WikiLeaks concerns September 2011, when it published its full archive of the diplomatic cables with names unredacted. Its five newspaper partners answered in a joint statement: “We deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk.” The Justice Department said on the day of the 2024 plea that the release had put people who helped the United States “at great personal risk.”
What the record shows about actual harm is narrower. At Manning’s sentencing in 2013, Brig. Gen. Robert Carr, who had headed the Pentagon task force that investigated the impact of the disclosures, testified that it had uncovered no specific example of anyone killed in reprisal after the publication. “I don’t have a specific example,” he said, The Guardian reported. At the 2024 plea hearing, Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona said: “the government has indicated there is no personal victim here. That tells me the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury.” Her statement covers known injuries. It does not establish that nobody was endangered.
The second charge concerns 2016. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report found that the Democratic National Committee emails WikiLeaks began releasing that July had been “stolen by the GRU,” Russia’s military intelligence agency. The report said the file-transfer evidence and other information “discredit WikiLeaks’s claims about the source of material that it posted.” Assange had told Fox News in January 2017: “Our source is not a state party.” After WikiLeaks published documents describing CIA hacking tools in 2017, the agency’s director, Mike Pompeo, called it “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
The British judge who blocked his extradition in 2021 did so on mental-health grounds alone. She rejected his press-freedom defense, finding that his alleged conduct “went beyond the mere encouragement of a whistle-blower.” The five newspapers’ 2022 letter, while asking that the charges be dropped, also said some of them were “concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database.” A Swedish investigation of a rape allegation, opened in 2010, was discontinued in November 2019. The prosecutor said the evidence had weakened with time and called the complainant’s account credible. Assange was not charged and has denied wrongdoing.
The case against Snowden is set out in a House Intelligence Committee report released in December 2016. It says he removed “more than 1.5 million classified documents,” that he “caused tremendous damage to national security,” that “the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests,” and that he “was not a whistleblower.” The committee did not interview Snowden, and most of its review is classified. Critics also point to his years in Russia. The committee’s report says that in June 2016 the deputy chairman of the Russian parliament’s defense and security committee “publicly conceded that ‘Snowden did share intelligence’ with his government.” Russia granted his citizenship days after President Vladimir Putin announced a mobilization for the war in Ukraine, CNN reported. Snowden told NPR in 2019: “I didn’t cooperate with the Russian intelligence services — I haven’t and I won’t.” President Obama, ordering an end to the program “as it currently exists” in January 2014, said the disclosures had “often shed more heat than light, while revealing methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations in ways that we may not fully understand for years to come.”
Where it stands
As read on October 5, 2026, the newest release listed on the WikiLeaks home page was dated August 5, 2021. Assange returned to Australia after the plea. Two members of Congress, a Democrat and a Republican, asked President Biden to pardon him in November 2024. This newsroom found no report that he has been pardoned. Snowden sits on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which he led as board president from 2016 to 2022. This newsroom found no report that he has left Russia, that the 2013 charges have been dropped, or that he has been pardoned.
The 2010 ruling noted that no court had found the website obtained the document unlawfully, and it cited decisions refusing to block publication even of material a source had taken unlawfully. Those decisions concern orders to stop publication. The Assange case was a criminal prosecution after publication, and it turned on how he got the material. The government said he conspired with his source to obtain the documents. He told the court that, working as a journalist, he had encouraged his source to provide information in order to publish it, and that he believed the First Amendment protected that. The plea ended the case before an American court decided which account the First Amendment covers.
The record does not wait on that answer. The country’s top intelligence official told a Senate committee the NSA did not collect data on millions of Americans. It did, and two appeals courts held the program unlawful. Classified war logs held an estimated 15,000 civilian deaths that Iraq Body Count’s tally had missed. The public learned both because a source took the documents and a publisher printed them.
— Granite State Report
Your Turn
Tell us: if you are a New Hampshire reporter, lawyer or public employee who has dealt with a subpoena for a source, an order to take something down, or a confidential document, this newsroom wants to hear how it went. Write to granitestatereport@gmail.com. No person or agency named in this article was asked to comment for it. Any of them may write to the same address; a response will be added here with its date.
Fact check
| # | Claim | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | On May 6, 2010, in Mortgage Specialists, Inc. v. Implode-Explode Heavy Industries, Inc., 160 N.H. 227, the New Hampshire Supreme Court reversed an order barring a website from republishing a loan document, vacated an order to disclose its source and remanded that question for a balancing test. The quotations are from the opinion. | VERIFIED | Opinion of the court (Conboy, J.; four justices concurring), read at CourtListener, October 5, 2026. |
| 2 | The court noted that the trial court made no finding that the website obtained the document unlawfully and that the lender made no such assertion, distinguished prior restraint from later sanctions, and held the website a reporter for purposes of the newsgathering privilege in light of the trial court’s implicit findings. | VERIFIED | Same opinion, 160 N.H. at 233–44. |
| 3 | In 1977 the justices wrote that “effective self-government cannot succeed unless the people have access to an unimpeded and uncensored flow of reporting”; New Hampshire has no reporter shield statute and relies on Part I, Article 22. | VERIFIED | Opinion of the Justices, 117 N.H. 386 (1977), read at CourtListener; Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Reporter’s Privilege Compendium, New Hampshire; N.H. Constitution, Part I, Art. 22, at nh.gov; all read October 5, 2026. |
| 4 | On March 12, 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper answered Sen. Ron Wyden “No, sir” and “Not wittingly.” | VERIFIED | S. Hrg. 113-89, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, printed hearing record, p. 66. |
| 5 | Clapper later told the committee chairwoman his answer was “clearly erroneous.” | VERIFIED | NPR, July 2, 2013; PolitiFact, March 11, 2014. The letter itself was not opened. |
| 6 | On June 5, 2013, The Guardian published a FISA court order directing Verizon Business Network Services to produce call records to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis.” | VERIFIED | ACLU v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787 (2d Cir. 2015); The Guardian, June 2013. |
| 7 | Snowden, a Booz Allen Hamilton employee who had worked at an NSA office in Hawaii, identified himself four days later and said, “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” | VERIFIED | The Guardian, “Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations,” June 2013; CNN timeline for the June 9 date. |
| 8 | The President’s Review Group (Dec. 12, 2013), Judge Richard Leon (Dec. 16, 2013), the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (Jan. 23, 2014), the 2nd Circuit (May 7, 2015) and the 9th Circuit (Sept. 2, 2020) said what the table quotes. Leon’s order was stayed and then vacated on appeal in 2015. | VERIFIED | Review Group final report; Klayman v. Obama, 957 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2013) and 800 F.3d 559 (D.C. Cir. 2015); PCLOB Section 215 report; ACLU v. Clapper; United States v. Moalin, No. 13-50572 (9th Cir. 2020). |
| 9 | The USA FREEDOM Act, Pub. L. 114-23, became law June 2, 2015 and barred bulk collection under Section 215. | VERIFIED | Public Law 114-23, section 103, at govinfo.gov. |
| 10 | The NSA suspended its call-detail-records program in early 2019 and deleted the records; the Section 215 provisions expired March 15, 2020 and, as of the report’s 2021 revision, had not been reauthorized. | VERIFIED | PCLOB, report on the USA Freedom Act call detail records program (2020); Congressional Research Service report R40138. |
| 11 | The 9th Circuit wrote that Snowden’s disclosure “prompted significant public debate” and that officials’ contrary impression “is inconsistent with the contents of the classified record”; it affirmed the convictions. | VERIFIED | United States v. Moalin, No. 13-50572, opinion of Sept. 2, 2020. |
| 12 | The Guardian US and The Washington Post won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for revealing “widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency.” | VERIFIED | Pulitzer Prizes, 2014 winners, read October 5, 2026. |
| 13 | The EU Court of Justice invalidated the Safe Harbour decision on Oct. 6, 2015, noting the complaint’s reliance on Snowden’s revelations. The European Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber found on May 25, 2021 that Britain’s bulk intercept regime violated Article 8, while holding bulk interception not unlawful in itself. | VERIFIED | Judgment in Case C-362/14, Schrems, EUR-Lex; Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United Kingdom, Grand Chamber, press release ECHR 165 (2021). |
| 14 | Eric Holder said in 2016 that Snowden “performed a public service” and that what he did was “inappropriate and illegal.” Clapper said in 2016 that “the onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years” and attributed the estimate to the NSA. | VERIFIED | CNN, May 30, 2016; The Intercept and The Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 2016. |
| 15 | President Obama ordered an end to the Section 215 program “as it currently exists” and said the disclosures had “often shed more heat than light.” | VERIFIED | Remarks by the President on Review of Signals Intelligence, Jan. 17, 2014, White House archive. |
| 16 | WikiLeaks was founded by Assange in 2006 and describes itself as “a multi-national media organization and associated library.” | VERIFIED | WikiLeaks, “What is WikiLeaks,” read October 5, 2026. |
| 17 | The April 5, 2010 video shows a July 12, 2007 attack in which Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed; the Pentagon blocked Reuters’ freedom-of-information request; the military concluded the soldiers acted within the law of armed conflict and their rules of engagement. | VERIFIED | The Guardian, April 5, 2010; WikiLeaks, Collateral Murder page (quoting the military’s conclusion). |
| 18 | The Afghan logs (July 25, 2010) held more than 90,000 records shared with The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel; the Iraq logs (Oct. 22, 2010) held almost 400,000 field reports. | VERIFIED | The Guardian, July 25 and Oct. 22, 2010. |
| 19 | Iraq Body Count estimated 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths in the Iraq logs. | VERIFIED | Iraq Body Count, “Iraq War Logs: What the numbers reveal,” first published Oct. 23, 2010; described there as an early assessment. |
| 20 | Frago 242 told coalition troops not to investigate detainee abuse unless coalition members were directly involved; a Pentagon spokesman said such reports were referred to the Iraqi government. | VERIFIED | The Guardian, Oct. 22, 2010 (two articles). |
| 21 | WikiLeaks published 251,287 diplomatic cables beginning Nov. 28, 2010, with five newspapers; the European Court of Human Rights recorded WikiLeaks cables among the applicant’s material in El-Masri (Dec. 13, 2012), para. 77. | VERIFIED | WikiLeaks Cablegate page; open letter of Nov. 28, 2022 (nytco.com); El-Masri v. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, no. 39630/09, HUDOC. |
| 22 | The Guardian counted 759 Guantánamo files covering almost every inmate since 2002. | VERIFIED | The Guardian, April 25, 2011. |
| 23 | Amnesty International’s 2011 annual report credited WikiLeaks and its newspaper partners as a catalyst in the Tunisian uprising. | ATTRIBUTED | As reported by The Guardian, May 13, 2011. The Amnesty report itself was not read. |
| 24 | WikiLeaks or Assange received an Amnesty International UK media award (2009), the Sam Adams Award (2010), the Sydney Peace Foundation gold medal (2011) and the Walkley Award for most outstanding contribution to journalism (2011). | VERIFIED | Amnesty International UK, June 2009; Sam Adams Award citation, Oct. 23, 2010; Sydney Peace Foundation; ABC News (Australia), Nov. 28, 2011. |
| 25 | Manning was convicted of 20 counts in July 2013, six under the Espionage Act, acquitted of aiding the enemy, sentenced to 35 years on Aug. 21, 2013, and had the sentence commuted on Jan. 17, 2017. | VERIFIED | The Guardian, July 31 and Aug. 21, 2013; White House, Jan. 17, 2017. |
| 26 | Assange entered the Ecuadorian Embassy June 19, 2012, was arrested there April 11, 2019 after Ecuador revoked asylum, and was sentenced to 50 weeks for the bail offense; the judge called the U.N. opinion not binding and “underpinned by misconceptions of fact and law.” | VERIFIED | Sentencing remarks, Southwark Crown Court, May 1, 2019, judiciary.uk. |
| 27 | The May 2019 indictment had 18 counts, 17 under the Espionage Act; five newspapers described the exposure as “a sentence of up to 175 years.” | VERIFIED | U.S. Justice Department release, May 23, 2019; The Guardian, May 20, 2024; open letter of Nov. 28, 2022. The 175-year figure is not stated by the Justice Department. |
| 28 | The ACLU statement and the five newspapers’ letter read as quoted. | VERIFIED | ACLU, May 23, 2019; “Publishing is not a crime,” Nov. 28, 2022, nytco.com. |
| 29 | A U.N. working group found in 2016 that Assange had been arbitrarily detained; U.N. rapporteur Nils Melzer, after visiting him with medical experts in May 2019, found symptoms of prolonged exposure to psychological torture. | VERIFIED | CNN, June 25, 2024 (photo caption on the 2016 finding); The Guardian, May 31, 2019; U.N. human rights office releases of Feb. 5, 2016 and May 31, 2019. |
| 30 | District Judge Vanessa Baraitser refused extradition on Jan. 4, 2021 on mental-health grounds and found his alleged conduct “went beyond the mere encouragement of a whistle-blower”; the High Court reversed on Dec. 10, 2021 after U.S. assurances; on May 20, 2024 he won permission to appeal. | VERIFIED | Judgment of Jan. 4, 2021, paras. 96 and 363; [2021] EWHC 3313 (Admin); The Guardian, May 20, 2024. |
| 31 | On June 26, 2024, in Saipan, Assange pleaded guilty to one count under 18 U.S.C. § 793(g), was sentenced to time served of 62 months, said the words quoted, and flew to Canberra that day. | VERIFIED | Docket, United States v. Assange, No. 1:24-cr-00014 (D. N. Mar. I.); CNN and NPR, June 25–26, 2024; ABC News (Australia), June 26, 2024. |
| 32 | Assange told a Council of Europe committee on Oct. 1, 2024 “I pleaded guilty to journalism”; the Parliamentary Assembly voted the next day to recognize him as a political prisoner. | VERIFIED | JURIST, Oct. 3, 2024; PACE Resolution 2571 (2024). No official transcript of the testimony was read. |
| 33 | The criminal complaint against Snowden, No. 1:13 CR 265, sworn June 14, 2013 in Alexandria, Va., lists the three offenses named. | VERIFIED | Complaint document image, Knight First Amendment Institute archive. |
| 34 | Jameel Jaffer wrote that the Espionage Act “subjects insiders who disclose classified secrets to the possibility of harsh sanctions regardless of the value to the public of the information they disclose.” | VERIFIED | Knight First Amendment Institute, “What We Owe Whistleblowers,” Sept. 9, 2021. |
| 35 | Snowden flew to Moscow June 23, 2013; accounts differ on when his passport was revoked; he received temporary asylum in August 2013 and Russian citizenship by decree Sept. 26, 2022. | VERIFIED | The Guardian, June 23, 2013; Associated Press, June 2013; NPR and Al Jazeera, Aug. 1, 2013; CNN and The Moscow Times, Sept. 26, 2022; NPR, Sept. 19, 2019. |
| 36 | A federal court ruled in December 2019 that Snowden breached his secrecy agreements and in 2020 entered judgment for more than $5 million. | VERIFIED | U.S. Justice Department release, Oct. 1, 2020; CyberScoop, Dec. 18, 2019; CNN timeline. |
| 37 | Former Sen. Gordon Humphrey emailed Snowden on July 15, 2013 in the words quoted, and Snowden replied as quoted. | VERIFIED | The Guardian, July 16, 2013; Concord Patch, July 16, 2013. |
| 38 | Snowden spoke by video link to the Free State Project’s Liberty Forum in Manchester on Feb. 20, 2016, interviewed by Nick Gillespie. | VERIFIED | Reason, Feb. 25, 2016; Associated Press, Feb. 18, 2016. |
| 39 | The six votes and New Hampshire members’ positions are as shown. | VERIFIED | Official roll calls: House 412 (2013), 230 (2014), 224 (2015); Senate 282 (113th, 2nd) and 194, 201 (114th, 1st). Amendment purpose: Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 24, 2013. |
| 40 | Five newspapers condemned the September 2011 unredacted release in the words quoted. | VERIFIED | The Guardian, Sept. 2, 2011. |
| 41 | The Justice Department said the releases placed people who assisted the U.S. government “at great personal risk.” | VERIFIED | Justice Department statement of June 25, 2024, as quoted by ABC News (Australia). |
| 42 | Brig. Gen. Robert Carr testified in 2013 that his task force found no specific example of anyone killed in reprisal; Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona said in 2024 there was “no personal victim” and no “known physical injury.” | VERIFIED | The Guardian, July 31, 2013; Fox News, June 26, 2024; CNN, June 25, 2024. |
| 43 | The Mueller report says the DNC emails were “stolen by the GRU” and that the file-transfer evidence and other information “discredit WikiLeaks’s claims about the source of material that it posted”; Assange told Fox News in January 2017 “Our source is not a state party.” | VERIFIED | Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, Vol. I (March 2019), full text; Fox News “Hannity” transcript, Jan. 3, 2017. |
| 44 | Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia” on April 13, 2017. | VERIFIED | CIA, remarks at CSIS, April 13, 2017. |
| 45 | The 2022 letter said some signers were “concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database.” | VERIFIED | Open letter of Nov. 28, 2022, nytco.com. |
| 46 | The Swedish investigation was discontinued Nov. 19, 2019 because the evidence had weakened; the prosecutor called the complainant’s account credible; no charge was filed; Assange has denied wrongdoing. | VERIFIED | Swedish Prosecution Authority, Nov. 19, 2019; CNN, June 25, 2024; U.N. human rights office, Feb. 5, 2016. |
| 47 | The House Intelligence Committee report says what is quoted, including the June 2016 statement it attributes to a Russian parliamentary official, and states that the committee did not interview Snowden and that most of its review is classified. | VERIFIED | H. Rept. 114-891, executive summary, page images at govinfo.gov. |
| 48 | CNN reported the timing of the citizenship decree relative to Russia’s mobilization; Snowden told NPR in 2019 he had not cooperated with Russian intelligence. | VERIFIED | CNN, Sept. 26, 2022; NPR, Sept. 19, 2019. |
| 49 | As read on the date shown, the newest release on the WikiLeaks home page was dated Aug. 5, 2021. | VERIFIED | wikileaks.org, read October 5, 2026. |
| 50 | Reps. James McGovern and Thomas Massie asked President Biden in November 2024 to pardon Assange. Snowden is a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and was its board president from 2016 to 2022. | VERIFIED | Fox News, Nov. 27, 2024; Freedom of the Press Foundation board page and announcement of Nov. 22, 2022, read October 5, 2026. |
| 51 | This newsroom found no report of a pardon for either man, of the Snowden charges being dropped, or of Snowden leaving Russia. | VERIFIED | News searches conducted October 5, 2026. A search that finds nothing does not prove nothing exists. |
| 52 | The two photographs are licensed as stated in the caption. | VERIFIED | Wikimedia Commons file pages for “Julian Assange August 2014.jpg” (CC BY-SA 2.0, from Flickr) and “Edward Snowden-2.jpg” (CC BY 3.0, permission from Praxis Films on file), read October 5, 2026. |
Court orders, subpoenas, policies and the dates on them are what build the record. Confidentiality respected where possible. granitestatereport@gmail.com · (603) 931-9264.
Editor’s note. Court holdings are quoted from the opinions of the New Hampshire Supreme Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd and 9th Circuits. Findings on the phone-records program are quoted from the reports of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and the President’s Review Group. Votes are taken from the official roll calls of the House and Senate. The Senate exchange is quoted from the printed hearing record. Accounts of the WikiLeaks releases, the court hearings in London and Saipan, and statements by the people named are taken from the documents and news reports listed above. Granite State Report is a newsroom, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice.
Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.
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