It overturned Scott Walker’s revocation of collective bargaining rights.
He declared that it violated the home rule provisions of the Wisconsin state constitution, as well as the 1st amendment.
I don’t expect this to stand on appeal, but I’m an engineer, not a lawyer.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has vacated the lower court ruling which upheld the law.
While this is not an injunction, it does appear that the court is very dubious of the claims by state government:
Signaling that it will tolerate “no voter disenfranchisement,” a divided state Supreme Court is sending the dispute over Pennsylvania’s new voting law back to a lower court to decide whether the state is doing enough to get photo ID cards to voters who need them.
In a 4-2 ruling issued Tuesday, the high court ordered Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr., who upheld the law in August, to file a supplemental opinion on whether the alternate-ID programs set up by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and state election officials are providing the “liberal access” to ID cards that the legislature intended.
“If they do not, or if Commonwealth Court is not still convinced in its predictive judgment that there will be no voter disenfranchisement arising out of the commonwealth’s implementation of a voter identification requirement . . . that court is obligated to enter a preliminary injunction,” the majority said in an unsigned opinion.The justices gave Simpson until Oct. 2 – just five weeks before the presidential election – to decide.
So, it appears that they are demanding affirmative proof that the state has set up its voter ID program properly.
I find it highly unlikely that they will be able to show this.
Of course, it is concerning that they basically kicked it down the road until October 2.
It’s a clusterf%$#, and I would argue that this is by design. The goal is to keep blacks and Hispanics from voting.
A federal judge just ruled that there is no legal obligation to secure your WiFi signal in order to prevent file sharing:
It looks like it might be hard for rights holders in various entertainment industries to sue individuals who have open Wi-Fi networks for copyright infringement done by guests, if the following court case is any indication. A California man whose open network was allegedly used to download a copyrighted video cannot be sued, according to a ruling by a federal judge.
The complaint filed in April of this year alleged that Hatfield was negligent because he didn’t secure his network, and therefore liable.
AF Holdings, who admitted in its case that it does not know the identity of the user who downloaded its video using BitTorrent, targeted Josh Hatfield with a lawsuit in federal court because it was downloaded via his unsecured home Internet connection. Hatfield moved for a dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiff failed “to state a claim” and that the claim “is barred by Section 301 of the Copyright Act and by immunity under the Communications Decency Act.”
U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton dismissed the claim last week. The Electronic Frontier Foundation planned on submitting an amicus brief on behalf of Hatfield if the case had gone forward.
I’m not surprised by the ruling, but I am surprised that it happened this early in the process.
I think that people are beginning to recognize just how f%$#ed up the current IP regime is, and they are no longer willing to treat potential offenders like they’ve robbed a gas station.
Scott Horton’s article on how the Obama administration has continued to embrace and extend the bush administration’s extreme views on executive power is worth a read:
A clear-cut example recently emerged when lawyers serving as defense counsel at Guantánamo discovered that they were arbitrarily being denied access to their clients on the orders of a military commandant, despite a series of court orders dating back to 2004 that had guaranteed them access. The Obama Administration had put in place new rules under which only those prisoners who are actively challenging their detention are guaranteed the right to talk to counsel; otherwise the commandant has the right to deny access. Moreover, to have any access to clients at all, the lawyers were being pressed to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the Department of Defense under which they consented to these new rules.
But the Guantánamo bar took the Obama Administration to court, and yesterday they won a resounding victory. Chief Judge Royce Lamberth’s decision (.pdf) was not only an uncompromising vindication of the posture of lawyers who have provided pro bono counsel to Gitmo inmates for years, it was also caustic in its dismissal of the arrogant and meritless arguments of the Justice Department:
………
Barack Obama seemed at one point to appreciate this focal lesson. On the other hand, his Justice Department is so obsessed with the vindication of arbitrary and capricious exercises of power that it seems to have concluded that upholding the laws and the Constitution—to the extent that they impose obligations on, rather than grant rights to, the government—is a secondary consideration. And that, in a nutshell, explains the public’s current lack of confidence in the Justice Department.
Why I am glad to live in Maryland. I can exercise my conscience and not vote for the purveyors of this crap, even if the other side is worse, because is Maryland is in play, the election is over anyway.
Federal Judge Robert Hinkle has announced that if the Appeals court remands or dismisses the state of Florida’s appeal, he will issue a permanent injunction against their voter suppression law:
A federal judge said Wednesday he would permanently remove harsh restrictions on third-party voter registration groups that have handicapped registration efforts in Florida this year. U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle said he would grant a motion to permanently remove the restrictions once he receives confirmation that a federal appeals court has dismissed the case (the state of Florida has agreed to dismiss their appeal).
Hopefully, this will happen in the rest of the states that are trying to people from voting while black.
A federal appeals court has determined that Texas’ redistricting plan had a deliberately discriminatory intent and effect:
Hispanic and black voters in Texas were vindicated on Tuesday when a federal three-judge panel rejected the state’s new redistricting plans for Congressional and state legislative seats. A panel of the United States District Court in the District of Columbia properly found that the maps, based on the 2010 census, had a discriminatory purpose and effect in reducing the ability of minority voters to elect candidates they favor.The evidence of the discrimination was stark. Almost 90 percent of the 4.3 million growth in the state’s population in the last decade came from minority residents. That growth qualified Texas for four additional Congressional seats, and it required the state to create new voting districts. Yet instead of adding districts in which minority voters could elect candidates of their choice, the Republican-controlled Legislature drew the districts in a way that reduced the number represented by members of minority groups. About some districts, the panel said, the plans maintained “the semblance of Hispanic voting power,” but the mapmakers actually diluted it.Texas is covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act for its history of voting discrimination. It was in court because it had to get prior approval for any changes to its voting procedures from a federal court or the Justice Department — and it could receive permission only if it could prove that the changes would not have a discriminatory effect. The judges, sensibly, said no.As the court’s majority opinion noted, no major surgery was performed by the lawmakers on the Congressional districts of white incumbents. But there was “unchallenged evidence” that in four minority districts, the Legislature performed surgery to cut out “economic engines” and harm the districts. In a couple of cases, the Republicans cut out the district offices of the members of Congress.
You mean that Texas Republicans are racist ratf%$#s?
Hoodoodanode?
Egypt’s President Mohamed Mursi has issued a decree ordering that journalists who have been detained under Egypts media laws must be released:
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi issued a decree barring the detention of journalists awaiting trial, the state-run Middle East News Agency reported, citing presidential spokesman Yasser Ali.
In response to Mursi’s action yesterday, Egypt’s public prosecutor ordered the release of Islam Afifi, editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Al-Dostour, MENA reported, citing Deputy Prosecutor General Adel el-Saeed. He was freed late yesterday, the Associated Press reported.
Egyptian journalists and rights groups have described the prosecution of Afifi, whose newspaper has been critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a benchmark of press freedom under Mursi and the most aggressive action by Islamists against what they portray as biased media coverage.
This was not something that I would have expected, but my guess is that he he is much more forward looking in his views of free speech and society than the generals we have been backing all these years.
But I think that we will still see a full court press from the usual suspects at the Council for Foreign Relations screaming “Islamist”.
Looks like those military tribunals are not going as well as expected, so now they are trying to ensure that effective and vigorous representation by counsel is impossible:
In a federal court hearing that fully disclosed the deepening level of distrust between the military officers who run the Navy’s prison at Guantanamo Bay, and the volunteer lawyers who represent the detainees there, the presiding judge reacted with obvious skepticism to the military’s new move to curb those lawyers’ activities there.
………
As the hearing unfolded, a government lawyer suggested darkly that detainees’ lawyers have brought unspecified “contraband” into their meetings with clients at the Naval prison, and argued that intensifying activities in prosecuting war crimes cases there are raising new security fears among military officers, with many more lawyers in their midst. Answering those expressions of distrust, lawyers for detainees countered that the government cannot be trusted to keep its word even if it promises not to interfere with legal representation; they cited shifting details of lawyer curbs as well as the government’s more fully expressed doubts that some of the detainees have any remaining right to a lawyer.
“‘Counsel visits [to Guantanamo] are a burden on the resources and manpower of Guantanamo Bay to provide accommodations for counsel and on security personnel to ensure the safety of counsel and their good behavior as well,” Justice Department attorney James J. Gilligan said at the hearing. In turn, one of the lawyers for the detainees, New York attorney Rebecca Briggs, contended that “these limitations [on counsel’s access] that are being added in footnotes [in government access rules] just highlight the fact that their assurances to yield their discretion responsibly cannot be taken at face value, unfortunately.”
When the rabid right wing rants that Barack Obama wants to create some sort of Soviet style totalitarian state, they miss the fact that Obama has already done so, but he hasn’t expanded it beyond Muslims ……… yet.
An appeals court has reinstated a case against the South Burlington, VT jail for slavery, for forcing inmates in pretrial detention to do hard labor:
A man who claimed he was forced to do manual labor while detained pending trial can proceed with claims against the state of Vermont under the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude.
In an opinion on Friday, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that a lower court wrongly denied Finbar McGarry a chance to argue that he was forced, against his will and under threat, to work in a prison laundry.
………
For six weeks, McGarry said he was forced to work three days a week for up to 14 hours at a time washing other inmates’ laundry at a pay of 25 cents an hour.
The work was hot, unsanitary and resulted in his getting an infection in his neck, McGarry said. If he refused to work, McGarry said prison officials threatened to send him to “the hole,” where inmates were confined for 23 hours a day.
………
His lawsuit, which he filed himself, asked for $11 million in damages.
In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Garvan Murtha in Brattleboro, Vermont, ruled that the state was immune from McGarry’s claims because he had failed to show that the prison work was sufficiently akin to African slavery.
Appeals judges Robert Katzmann, Barrington Parker and Richard Wesley, however, disagreed with the judge’s reading of the 13th Amendment, which was enacted in 1865.
“The Amendment was intended to prohibit all forms of involuntary labor, not solely to abolish chattel slavery,” the opinion, drafted by judge Parker, said.
More broadly, the appeals court said Vermont could not treat people in custody pending trial the same way it treats convicted prisoners, such as compelling them to participate in work programs designed to rehabilitate inmates.
The Supreme Court has recognized that you cannot treat people in pretrial detention the same as people who are serving a sentence, and if this stands, this will make a major change in the operation our prison industrial complex.
There is an interesting article in Scientific American which argues that punishing cheaters produces evolutionary pressures toward cooperation:
Humans are one of the most cooperative species on the planet. Our ability to coordinate behavior and work collaboratively with others has allowed us to create the natural world’s largest and most densely populated societies, outside of deep sea microbial mats and a few Hymenoptera mega-colonies.
However, a key problem when trying to understand the evolution of cooperation has been the issue of cheaters. Individuals in a social group, whether that group is composed of bacteria, cichlids, chimpanzees, or people, often benefit when cooperating with others who reciprocate the favor. But what about those individuals who take advantage of the generosity of others and provide nothing in return? These individuals could well thrive thanks to the group as a whole and end up with greater fitness than everyone else because they didn’t have to pay the costs associated with cooperating. For decades the idea that cheaters may in fact prosper has been the greatest difficulty in understanding cooperation as an evolved trait.
However, it turns out that cooperation could be a viable evolutionary strategy when individuals within the group collectively punish cheaters who don’t pull their weight. For example, Robert Boyd, Herbert Gintis, and Samuel Bowles published a paper in the journal Science in 2010 with a model showing how, so long as enough individuals work together to punish violators, each cooperative individual in the group can experience enhanced fitness as a result.
This is why, “Looking forward and not back,” is so harmful to society.
Whether it’s the torture by the Bush administration (or for that matter by the Obama administration) and the misdeeds of the banksters must be prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law.
In failing to do this, Obama and Holder are, whether they realize it or not, are actively selecting for corruption and fraud.
This is not an unexpected development.
The British are saying that they are never going to allow his passage out of the country, and are continuing to imply that they will use a law passed in late 1980s to raid the Ecuadorean embassy.
The law in question was passed after someone shot a Bobby from inside the Iranian Lybian embassy, which is clearly a different circumstance from this.
The real issue here is that pretrial process, and extradition, in Sweden is opaque, and Assange has publicly stated that he would be willing to go to Sweden if they gave him guarantees that he would not be transferred to US custody.
This is about Obama, and people close to him, desperately wanting to get their hands on him so that they can make an example of him. (Even if there is not a successful prosecution, there will be torture, even if he does not get sent to Gitmo, look at what they did to Bradley Manning in pretrial detention.)
Rather unsurprisingly, all the news that’s fit to print, i.e. the NY Times reported this as a hit piece against Assange.
Well, we now have reports that
Ecuador intends to grant Julian Assange asylum, but it appears that the British are threatening to storm the embassy:
Ecuador has accused the UK of making a “threat” to enter its embassy in London to arrest Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.
Mr Assange took refuge at the embassy in June to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces questioning over assault and rape claims, which he denies.
Ecuador foreign minister Ricardo Patino also said a decision on the 41-year-old’s bid for political asylum had been made and would be announced later.
The Foreign Office said it could revoke the embassy’s diplomatic status.
………
At a news conference in Quito on Wednesday, Mr Patino said a letter from the UK government was delivered through a British embassy official.
“Today we received from the United Kingdom an express threat, in writing, that they might storm our Embassy in London if we don’t hand over Julian Assange,” he said.
“Ecuador rejects in the most emphatic terms the explicit threat of the British official communication.”
He said such a threat was “improper of a democratic, civilised and rule abiding country”.
“If the measure announced in the British official communication is enacted, it will be interpreted by Ecuador as an unacceptable, unfriendly and hostile act and as an attempt against our sovereignty. It would force us to respond,” he said.
“We are not a British colony”.
A Foreign Office spokesman said the UK remained “determined” to fulfill its obligation to extradite Mr Assange.
If you are old enough to remember the Iranian hostage crisis, it wasn’t the Iranian government that took the American embassy in Tehran, it was a bunch of kids with no “official” ties to the government.
Even Ayatollah Khomeini understood that the consequences of flaunting the sanctity required a fig leaf.
The British are not doing this for the Swedes. They are doing this because the US government, with the certain knowledge of, and likely active participation of Barack Obama personally, has demanded this.
Seriously, Obama’s war on whistle blowers makes Richard Nixon look like the Sunlight Foundation.
In a ruling from the failure of a brokerage in 2007, a court has ruled that segregated client funds can be used by the firm for as collateral, and the bank gets priority for the clients’ money:
A ruling in the case of failed futures brokerage Sentinel Management Group could make it more difficult for customers to recoup money lost in the much larger collapse of MF Global, according to Sentinel’s bankruptcy trustee.
A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld a ruling that puts Bank of New York Mellon ahead of former customers of Sentinel in the line of those seeking the return of money lost in the 2007 failure of the suburban Chicago-based futures broker.
The appeals court affirmed an earlier district court ruling that the bank had a “secured position” on a $312 million loan it gave to Sentinel, which turned out to have been secured by customer money.
Futures brokers are required to keep customers’ funds in dedicated accounts to protect them from being used for anything other than client business.
However, Thursday’s ruling suggests that brokerages can use customer funds to pay off other creditors, Sentinel trustee Fred Grede told Reuters.
“I don’t think that’s what the Commodity Futures Trading Commission had in mind” with its requirement that brokers keep customer money separate from their own, he said.
“It does not bode well for the protection of customer funds.”
Worse, Grede said, is that the ruling suggests that a brokerage that allows customer money to be mixed with its own is not necessarily committing fraud.
That may raise the bar for proving that MF Global Holdings Ltd, under then-CEO Jon Corzine, misused customer funds as it scrambled to meet margin calls to back bets on European debt in the brokerage’s final days. A $1.6 billion customer shortfall remains.
………
Customer funds were allegedly moved from the protected accounts to other accounts so they could be used as collateral for loans to Sentinel’s own trading operations.
The appeals court said that “perhaps the bank should have known that Sentinel violated segregation requirements” but agreed with the district court’s earlier ruling that “such a lack of care does not rise to the level of the egregious misconduct” needed to reprioritize a claim.
“That Sentinel failed to keep client funds properly segregated is not, on its own, sufficient to rule as a matter of law that Sentinel acted ‘with actual intent to hinder, delay, or defraud’ its customers,” U.S. Circuit Judge John D. Tinder wrote in the ruling.
If you have your money in an account, the firm can steal it and use it for loan collateral, and the bank gets it all.
For ordinary people who, for example, simply get a good deal on a used car that later turns out to have been stolen, they have to give the car back, even though they had no reason to know that he car was stolen.
But for the banks, if they are willfully blind, they get to keep the stolen property, because the law does not apply to them.
We need to end this sh%$. My next post discusses what would work, but ever won’t be done by either the current administration, or by a possible Romney administration.
What a surprise, Goldman Sachs gets to defraud its customers in and lie to Congress about the Abacus deal, where they sold bad loans to investors, and then bet against them, and there is no prosecution:
Neither Goldman Sachs Group Inc nor its employees will face U.S. criminal charges related to trades they made during the financial crisis that were highlighted in a 2011 U.S. Senate report, the Justice Department said on Thursday.
The unusual announcement not to prosecute criminally came in an unsigned statement attributed to the department.
Few expected the bank to face criminal charges, but in April 2011, U.S. Senator Carl Levin asked for a criminal investigation after the subcommittee he leads spent years looking into Goldman.
Levin’s subcommittee held televised hearings as part of its inquiry, which centered on a subprime mortgage product known as Abacus. He said Goldman misled Congress and investors.
Goldman employee Fabrice Tourre still faces a civil complaint from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He has denied any wrongdoing and was the only person accused.
Goldman itself settled with the SEC for $550 million in July 2010 without admitting wrongdoing.
(emphasis mine)
Why am I not surprised?
Bringing on Felix Salmon* and Dennis Kelleher to discuss our we need to put some senior banksters in handcuffs was a good move:
*Unfortunately, he was not wearing his Willy Wonka suit.
Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who rose to infamy when he pepper sprayed women who were peacefully behind a police line, has been thrown to the wolves by the city of New York, which is refusing to defend him in civil suits filed against him:
New York City has distanced itself from a high-ranking police official accused of firing pepper spray at Occupy Wall Street protesters, taking the unusual step of declining to defend him in a civil lawsuit over the incident.
The decision means Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna also could be personally liable for financial damages that may arise out of the suit, said lawyers familiar with similar civil-rights claims.
The 29-year veteran has asked a judge to reverse the city. “He wasn’t doing this as Anthony Bologna, mister. He was doing this as Anthony Bologna, deputy inspector, NYPD,” said his lawyer, Louis La Pietra. Mr. Bologna’s union, the Captains Endowment Association, is now covering the cost of his defense.
Mr. Bologna was one of the most contentious public figures to emerge out of frequent clashes between Occupy Wall Street protesters and police officers last fall. A video that purported to show him aiming pepper spray at a group of demonstrators who were being held behind orange netting was widely viewed on the Internet.
Four weeks after the Sept. 24 incident, which allegedly occurred during an unpermitted march that ended in dozens of arrests, an internal investigation found Mr. Bologna in violation of New York Police Department guidelines. He was given a departmental punishment called a command discipline and docked 10 vacation days.
The city’s action is an uncommon occurrence, and I’m wondering if this means that he will start rolling on higher-ups.
This should get interesting.
It looks like there is going to be testimony offered on the torture of Pfc. Bradley Manning by the military with the active support of the administration:
A comprehensive motion containing allegations and evidence from the defense for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, was filed on July 27. The 110-page motion, which Manning’s defense lawyer said should “shock the conscience of the court” during a motion hearing this month, included a request to the Fort Meade court to dismiss all charges with prejudice because he was subjected to “illegal pretrial punishment” while imprisoned at the Quantico Marine Brig for nine months.
The defense’s motion was not approved for publishing; however, two other motions involving the defense’s request for witnesses to appear during argument on “unlawful pretrial punishment” were posted to the defense’s website. One of the motions reveals Manning will likely take the stand to give testimony on how he was subjected to “unlawful pretrial punishment”—what many have called cruel and inhuman treatment or even torture. His testimony may include what he knows about a video of his interrogation at Quantico, which the government claims does not exist.
Obama knew, or was deliberately and willfully blind to Manning’s torture.
He admitted this in an open press conference, when he said:
With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can’t go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.
Manning was arrested in 2010.
Everything that has been done to him, in what is a transparent attempt to coerce Manning into providing false testimony against Julian Assange to allow for a prosecution under the 1917 Espionage Act.
One of the positions of the Obama administration is that officials should not be prosecuted for matters of policy.
I could not disagree more. (Roll prosecushun kitty)
We won’t begin to fix the damage done to core rights, and the concept of the rule of law until the most senior members of the executive branch face criminal prosecutions.
Finally, some sanity in the courts, though it’s across the pond.
Perhaps we’ve finally found judges who have a clue about Twitter:
A bloke found guilty of tweeting a “menacing” joke about blowing up a UK airport has had his conviction quashed by the High Court today. A collective sigh of relief was heard moments later from comedians addicted to the micro-blogging website.Paul Chambers, 28, was waiting to fly from Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport to Belfast to see his girlfriend, whom he met on the social networking site, when snow closed the airfield and delayed his flight.
He vented his frustration in a series of tweets to his squeeze Sarah Tonner, now his fiancee, including a suggestion that he had considered “resorting to terrorism” to ensure he could visit her.
………
Mr Justice Owen and Mr Justice Griffith Williams said in the High Court today that the facts needed to be considered in context, pointing out that the tweets had clearly appeared to be a reference to the airport closing due to adverse weather conditions.
“There was no evidence before the Crown Court to suggest that any of the followers of the appellant’s ‘tweet’, or indeed anyone else who may have seen the ‘tweet’ posted on the appellant’s time line, found it to be of a menacing character or, at a time when the threat of terrorism is real, even minimally alarming,” the High Court heard.
His comedian supporters were stoked:
The operative quote here is, “individual traders“:
American prosecutors and European regulators are close to arresting individual traders over the Libor scandal and charging them with colluding to manipulate global benchmark interest rates, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
Federal prosecutors in Washington DC have recently contacted lawyers representing some of the individuals under suspicion to notify them that criminal charges and arrests could be imminent, said two sources speaking anonymously.
Defence lawyers representing individuals under suspicion said prosecutors have indicated they will begin making arrests and filing charges in the next few weeks. In long-running financial investigations it is not uncommon for prosecutors to contact defence lawyers for individuals before filing charges to offer them a chance to co-operate or take a plea, the lawyers said.
(emphasis mine)
This is looking a lot like a US military investigation of war crimes. The goal is to prosecute at absolutely the lowest level possible, and come down on the little fish like a ton of bricks.
We know how this works. It’s called “looking forward, not back.”
If any one at the VP level is charged, I predict that they will be non-white, south or east Asian.
The prosecution in the Bradley Manning Wikileaks trial the claims to have proof that he was aiding the enemy, a crime that carries the death penalty, but is refusing to produce any evidence”
The US government claims to have proof that Bradley Manning, the WikiLeaks suspect, knowingly passed state secrets to a location where it was bound to be obtained by enemy groups, a military court in Maryland has heard.
Captain Joe Morrow, a member of the five-strong prosecution team assigned to the case, said that the government would show at court martial that Manning had knowingly “aided the enemy” – the most serious of the 22 charges facing the soldier that carries the death penalty. Morrow said the evidence would show that Manning sent the information to a “very definite place” that he knew was used by the enemy.
He did not mention al-Qaida, though the terrorist network has been explicity named by the prosecution in previous hearings.
The insistence by the US government that it can prove Manning had actual knowledge that the WikiLeaks dump would be used by enemy groups was instantly disputed by the lead defence lawyer, David Coombs. He demanded that the government produce the evidence to which it was alluding.
“We haven’t seen any evidence that the government has provided by discovery that supports any knowledge that the information would be obtained by the enemy,” he said.
Note that if the court accepts this, to quote the ACLU, “the threat of criminal prosecution hangs over any service member who gives an interview to a reporter, writes a letter to the editor, or posts a blog on the internet. In its zeal to throw the book at Manning, the government has so overreached that its ‘success’ would turn thousands of loyal soldiers into criminals.”
I believe that this is one of the goals of this prosecution. When you define laws this broadly, every is a criminal, and so “troublemakers” can be dealt with.