The law's interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.

Here Benjamin restates one of the fundamental goals of classical liberal political philosophy, at least for philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke, namely to eliminate the use of violence from everyone except the state and its duly appointed deputies. This is why in Locke, the state "agrees" to protect the rights of individuals in exchange for individuals giving up their right of retribution and punishment. The right of violence becomes the sole provenance of the state, whether through the death penalty, prisons, or defense of the state itself.

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Is that the case? We're going to find out momentarily from my guest, Daniel Ellsberg.

The Guardian asserted last week --- actually over the weekend in Glenn Greenwald's article in which Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor, was outed as the leaker, the whistle-blower, of these NSA documents we've been seeing over the past week --- The Guardian asserted that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden "will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistle-blowers alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning." So of course it seems like a good time to talk with Daniel Ellsberg about all of this. We can't really talk with Bradley Manning, unfortunately. He's in a military brig facing his trial.

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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein called Snowden’s leak an “act of treason,” as did Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, while House Speaker John Boehner called the leaker a “traitor.” And they were only the most prominent of a slew of columnists and officials. For instance, former UN Ambassador and Fox News regular John Bolton called the leak “the worst form of treason.”

Treason is the only crime specifically defined in the Constitution, and considering how much people in Washington say they love the founding document, one would think they would have read it a bit more closely, because experts say that among Snowden's potential crimes -- and they are crimes, in all likelihood -- treason is almost definitely not one of them.

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From that view flows the reaction that anyone can see on television right now as the media discusses Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistle-blower whose disclosures on top-secret surveillance programs were published by the Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald.

Jeffrey Toobin, a senior CNN legal analyst and contributor to the New Yorker, was leading the charge against Snowden in the media by characterizing him as a “grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” He appeared on Piers Morgan’s program later in the evening and said, “I think there are right ways to do it and there are wrong ways to do it, and by a 29-year-old kid, just throwing open the safe and giving away documents that people have devoted years of their lives to creating and protecting. That’s the wrong way to protest.”

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Think of it as courtroom cartoon theater: the heroic slayer of the jihadi super-villain testifying against the ultimate bad soldier, a five-foot-two-inch gay man facing 22 charges in military court and accused of the biggest security breach in U.S. history.

But let’s be clear on one thing: Manning, the young Army intelligence analyst who leaked thousands of public documents and passed them on to WikiLeaks, has done far more for U.S. national security than SEAL Team 6.

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Despite the customary competition between news sources -- heightened, in this case, by differing accounts of how the story was reported -- Poitras achieved the unusual distinction of sharing a byline both with Barton Gellman on the June 6 Washington Post story on PRISM and with Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill on the June 8 Guardian story naming Edward Snowden as a source. In the accompanying video interview of Snowden, Greenwald is credited as “interviewer” and Poitras as “filmmaker.” Greenwald wrote in a tweet this morning, “The reality is that Laura Poitras and I have been working with [Snowden] since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman.”

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[T]here is a lack of skepticism on a whole in the media on the issue of national security." In the U.S., she said, there can be "a sense that it is unpatriotic to question the role that the security services play."

Indeed, Gibson's comments are supported by certain facts that emerged in Bradley Manning's pretrial hearing. The private noted in a statement that he had attempted to approach the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico with his document trove -- all of whom turned him away -- before he provided WikiLeaks with the classified information.

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A specter is haunting America – the specter of freedom. After 12 years of being surveilled, harassed and terrorized by our government and corporate overlords, the public seems increasingly fed up. The backlash ignited by the Justice Department’s crackdown on the press and by the politicization of the IRS is a turning point. The public push-back against creeping Big Brotherism is coming from all directions, from the left and right. This week as Bradley Manning – the heroic young whistle-blower who has become the face of the new defiance – went on trial for alleged national security crimes that could result in a life sentence, thousands of people all over the world rallied in his defense. More than 20,000 people have contributed a total of $1.25 million to Manning’s legal battle.

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The Guardian's Ed Pilkington reported from Fort Meade:

The prosecution attempted to depict his unit within the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division as meticulously trained in the handling and safeguarding of classified information.

By contrast, the defence team led by civilian lawyer David Coombs extracted answers from prosecution witnesses under cross-examination that presented the unit as an ill-disciplined group that operated under lapse security guidelines, even though they were stationed on active duty at a U.S. military base outside Baghdad.

... Under cross-examination, [Manning's supervisor] Showman said that she was unable to recall any official stipulation of areas of the secure network of US official secrets – known as Siprnet – that intelligence analysts were barred from entering. There was no training provided on the restrictions of Siprnet.

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"I think it's more likely than not that there is a sealed indictment against Julian Assange right now," said Ratner, the head of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The lawyer cited the empaneling of a grand jury in 2010, subpoenas that have been issued, and the number of people associated with WikiLeaks who've been contacted by the Justice Department.

"Our contacts with the Department of Justice and the district leave us the impression that there's a fair possibility that there's a sealed indictment," Ratner said. He added that the DOJ has been unresponsive to questions the department normally answers when there is no indictment.

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In an overview of the case against Bradley Manning -- who in 2010 released classified documents on the Iraq war, which were then published around the world with help from WikiLeaks -- Gibney said, "Frankly, the secrets he leaked did a lot of good."

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Large parts of the proceedings are expected to be closed to the public. Many documents have been withheld or heavily redacted. Photographers were blocked from getting a good shot of the soldier and even some of Manning's supporters had to turn their T-shirts inside out.

Military law experts say some of it is common for a court-martial, while other restrictions appear tailored to the extraordinary nature of the case, which has garnered an outpouring of support from whistleblowers, activists and others around the world.

"I think the judge is very concerned about not turning this trial into a theater, into a spectacle," said David J.R. Frakt, a military law expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and a former military prosecutor and defense lawyer. "I cannot remember a situation where there was such a high degree of civilian interest, people not affiliated with the military, having intense and passionate interest in the outcome of the case."

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The prosecutor went as far as to say that Manning was taking direction from WikiLeaks, following the site's "most wanted" list when searching for classified documents to leak. Assange was mentioned no fewer than eight times in the prosecution's opening statements.

Manning's defense team outright rejected the government's claims."There is no evidence to support that Manning took direction from WikiLeaks or that he used this list as a guide to what he would give to WikiLeaks. Mr Manning was not taking his direction from WikiLeaks," Manning's attorney, David Coombs, told the court.

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The government prosecutors, according to reporters present at Fort Meade, were direct in framing their argument behind the dangerous and far-reaching "aiding the enemy" charge levied against Manning." Capt. Joe Morrow, a military prosecutor, said Manning "dumped information on the Internet, into the hands of the enemy."

The prosecutor suggested that it was in search of "notoriety" and out of "self-interest" that Manning leaked thousands of government documents. Kevin Gosztola reported from the courtroom:'

He declared, “This is not a case about a government official” making discreet disclosures. It is a case about a soldier who “literally dumped” information on the Internet “into the hands of the enemy.” It is a case about “what happens when arrogance meets access to information.”

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Manning's military court battle -- in which he has already admitted to passing hundreds of thousands of U.S. intelligence documents to WikiLeaks for publication -- is synecdochic of struggles defining this epoque of U.S. political and military ideology. He, more than any other individual, has become representative of the government's war on leaks and fierce battle to control the narrative about government and military activity. Manning, too, as a detainee at Quantico, came to represent (alongside Guantánamo prisoners) the U.S.'s troubling practice of holding individuals in a legal state of exception, without recourse to the processes and treatment purportedly afforded U.S. prisoners. Above all, the government's contention that Manning's actions constitute "aiding the enemy" -- the most severe charge he faces at trial -- illustrate with troubling clarity what it means to be considered a possible enemy of the state, revealing, as Manning did, the grimy underbelly of the U.S. war on terror.

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The military judge presiding over the case can currently close a courtroom to the press and public for "security" reasons -- citing sensitive classified information. The plaintiffs are calling on the judge to grant public and press access to the historic trial and its attendant documents. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has already had some success in having pretrial transcripts published, but for the most part public access to the proceedings has been provided in the form of rush transcripts compiled by dedicated independent journalist, Alexa O'Brien. Common Dreams reported on this week's filing:

In a complaint filed in a federal district court Wednesday by the Center for Constitutional Rights -- along with journalists Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Kevin Gosztola, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, and Chase Madar -- the group of plaintiffs motioned for a preliminary injunction that would compel the judge to "grant the public and press access to the government’s filings, the court’s own orders, and transcripts of the proceedings." To date, none of these have been made available to the public.

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Even if we are to take Carney at his word, his remark comes as little assurance. The president may believe that journalists should never be prosecuted for doing their job. What's at stake, then, is what this administration considers the job of a journalist. In the context of the ongoing war on leaks and an administration invested in the tight control of information, the presidential view on protected journalistic activity seems a far cry from a robust Fourth Estate.

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"Most often" and "typically," though, are the operative words these days. While I'm obviously hesitant to invoke the 37th president terms for the aforementioned reasons -- and while I agree with my Salon colleague Alex Pareene and my pal Steve Almond that the IRS and Benghazi brouhahas most certainly do not warrant Nixon references -- I do believe Nixon's legacy is nonetheless applicable to the revelations about the Obama administration's posture toward press freedom.

Those particular revelations, of course, aren't happening in a vacuum. Instead, they relate to an administration whose known obsessions suggest this is part of a larger, dare I say Nixonian, pathology -- one defined by a hostility toward the most basic democratic ideals.

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It was the right moment then, for the New Yorker to launch Strongbox, an open-source drop box for leaked documents, co-created by late technologist and open-data activist Aaron Swartz with Wired editor Kevin Poulsen.

"With the risks now so high – not just from the U.S. government but also the Chinese government that is hacking newsrooms in the West – it's crucial that news outlets find a secure route for sources to come to them," said Poulsen on Thursday.

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