Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army whistleblower currently serving a 35-year sentence for leaking thousands of internal military and State Department documents that helped expose wrongdoing by the U.S. government, has proposed legislation from prison aimed at helping others avoid her fate.
The bill, called the National Integrity and Free Speech Protection Act (pdf), would amend laws including the Freedom of Information Act and Espionage Act and federal disclosure rules for journalists, with an eye toward expanding transparency and access to information as well as free speech and press protections.
As the Guardian reports, “[t]he model bill would shift the legal advantage away from government prosecutors acting in the name of ‘national security’ and towards journalists and their sources. The proposal is significant coming from the individual who has personally felt the wrath of the US government towards official leakers more than anyone else in recent times.”
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The bill would codify measures Manning called for in an op-ed published Wednesday at the Guardian, in which she declared: “The US needs legislation to protect the public’s right to free speech and a free press, to protect it from the actions of the executive branch and to promote the integrity and transparency of the US government.”
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She wrote:
In addition to the 31-page proposed bill, Manning has prepared a section-by-section analysis (pdf) of its language.
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