On 20 Jan 2014, at 13:09 , grarpamp <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 5:56 PM, Philip Shaw <[email protected]> wrote: >> reading documents into the public record would be useful (since it would >> give us all legitimate access), it wouldn’t help subsequent publishers. > > It's public record at that point... when acting under that context, anyone can > read and publish it. Be it the Press/WL or Jane Public. Or perhaps even > congressperson, NSA, military, executive branch, etc... so long as they > were say officially off work as anyone might be in the evening at the library > or on vacation visiting their capitol... though you probably wouldn't want to > actually try it (ref also: the military blocking WL website from soldiers), > just > let the Press do it. You just can't be cleared/NDA'd and do the initial leak, > unless you change policy by fiat (exec order), or are Rep/Sen and speak > in congress.
I must have misunderstood the reports of the part involving Beacon Press, since the documents published there were the same ones as he had placed in the records of the committee. On reflection, ISTM that the mistake Gravel and Beacon made was that Gravel had obtained it as classified material, and so couldn’t publish it until it was declassified, even though anyone else could have obtained identical documents as an open matter of public record. (A similar quirk affects people who read the Snowdon documents in that the handling rules still apply even though the documents have been published openly, which also makes the mistake of confirming the authenticity of at least some of the documents.) For any lawyers out there - do state legislatures have an equivalent of parliamentary privilege, and if so does it protect state legislators from federal law? I know in Australia they do, but there parliamentary privilege mostly relates to defamation law rather than official secrets (and that’s a matter of state law).
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