Hacker Cinema
Official Secrets
2019 · Film · 112 min
Directed by Gavin Hood
The true story of British intelligence whistleblower Katharine Gun who—prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion—leaked a top-secret NSA memo exposing a joint US-UK illegal spying operation against members of the UN Security Council. The memo proposed blackmailing member states into voting for war.
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Speaking of GCHQ - this is an excellent movie starring Keira Knightley and Matt Smith that got way too little exposure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Secrets_(film)
(Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 89%)
> Official Secrets is a 2019 British-American docudrama film based on the life of (GCHQ) whistleblower Katharine Gun who leaked a memo exposing an illegal spying operation by American and British intelligence services to gauge sentiment of and potentially blackmail United Nations diplomats tasked to vote on a resolution regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Gun
> Gun's regular job at GCHQ in Cheltenham was to translate Mandarin Chinese into English. While at work at GCHQ on 31 January 2003, Gun read an email from Frank Koza, the chief of staff at the "regional targets" division of the American signals intelligence agency, the National Security Agency.
> Koza's email requested aid in a secret operation to bug the United Nations offices of six nations: Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan. These were the six "swing nations" on the UN Security Council that could determine whether the UN approved the invasion of Iraq. The plan might have contravened Articles 22 and 27 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which regulates global diplomacy.
Rather than go over these claims point by point, I'd direct your attention to the case of Katherine Gun in the UK (admittedly a different legal system).
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/22/katharine-gun-whistleblower-iraq-official-secrets-film-keira-knightley
Gun was a GCHQ agent (a UK citizen that agreed to the restrictions that come with being a government intelligence analyst) that leaked evidence of the US plan to rig the UN vote around the Iraq War. She got off because the crown declined to prosecute because her defense strategy was one of necessity, showing that the government knew what they were doing was illegal and that it would imminently result in the deaths of innocents.
"Some of the information that would have been revealed at her trial, in particular Lord Goldsmith’s “conflicting arguments” as to the legality of the invasion, did not fully emerge until the publication of the report of the Chilcot inquiry in 2016. In its absence, Tony Blair won another election in 2005. Gun is grimly amused to see his current return to the moral high ground over Brexit."
In Mr. Assange's case, he is neither a US citizen nor a sworn intelligence analyst. He did in fact reveal crimes that horrified the world. They are trying to get him for running some code on a computer to see what the criminals were saying. Those people were knocking over countries and killing innocent people (something that he was able to show live in the helicopter gunship video).
The US standard for this case compared to Kat Gun is mind blowingly authoritarian and criminalizes effective dissent.