By Kevin McCauley
Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman says the decision of the New York Times to publish the WikiLeaks trove of U.S. government documents could lead to prosecution of the media company.
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The chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee told Fox News that the NYT "has committed at least an act of, at best, bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the Justice Dept."
Lieberman believes the U.S. should seek extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is currently in a British jail, and try him under the 1917 Espionage Act. He referred to the massive document dump as the "most serious violation of the Espionage Act in our history."
The Times received its WikiLeaks documents from the U.K.'s Guardian. Assange also provided full documents to Germany's Der Spiegel, Spain's El Pais and France's Le Monde.
Lieberman, an independent, joined Republicans Scott Brown (Mass.) and John Ensign (Nev.) on Dec. 2 to introduce the Shield (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination) Act to make it illegal to publish the names of human intelligence informants to the U.S. military and intelligence community.
He called the WikiLeaks disclosures the "latest example of how our national security interests, the interests of our allies and the safety of government employees and countless other individuals are jeopardized by the illegal release of classified and sensitive information."
The Shield Act would amend the Espionage Act to extend the legal protections that already exist for communications intelligence and cryptography to human intelligence informants.
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