Margaret Sullivan: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, asks: Who will be the next Snowden? – Salt Lake Tribune

Almost five decades after the first Pentagon Papers story was published in 1971, revealing the secret history of the Vietnam War, the 85-year-old Ellsberg still isn't done making trouble. That was clear on a Georgetown University stage earlier this month, shortly after the scarf encounter.

"Something like the Pentagon Papers should be coming out several times a year," Ellsberg told journalist and scholar Sanford Ungar, who organized the two-day symposium, "Free Speech Legacies: The Pentagon Papers Revisited."

If Ellsberg had had access to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, a summary of which was released in 2014, "I would have put that out," he said.

There's plenty more, he's sure.

"The secrecy system operates overwhelmingly to keep important information from the American public," he said.

Whistleblowers are the best defense, he believes but there aren't enough of them.

An admirer of two other major leakers, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, Ellsberg wants more.

"Is three whistleblowers of this scale about right in 45 years?" he demanded.

He knows, though, that they have paid a big price and the legal troubles of other Obama-era leakers, such as Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, underscore his point.

Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, leaked a huge tranche of classified information including a video showing a U.S. airstrike killing Iraqi civilians through WikiLeaks. Court-martialed, the transgender woman formerly known as Bradley Manning went to prison for seven years. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in his final days in office.

Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who revealed shockingly widespread electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens by their government, will never return to the United States, Ellsberg said. Exiled in Russia, Snowden would not be allowed to explain his motivations during trial because he is charged under the Espionage Act, which allows no public-interest defense.

Ellsberg entertained the Georgetown crowd with spot-on impressions of Nixon and Kissinger, and tales about failing to master Twitter and digital encryption.

"I had to rely on Xerox I used the cutting-edge technology of my day," he quipped.

The government case against him ended in a mistrial, sparing him what he expected would be life in prison.

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Margaret Sullivan: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, asks: Who will be the next Snowden? - Salt Lake Tribune