The controversy surrounding the website WikiLeaks, which has leaked thousands of confidential military documents to the public throughout the last several months, intensified when FBI agents allegedly attempted to intimidate supporters of the man who is reportedly a major contributor to the WikiLeaks campaign earlier this month.
David House, a 23-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher and Boston U. graduate, was returning from vacation in Mexico on Nov. 3 when he was reportedly stopped and interrogated by men who identified themselves as Homeland Security officials. The men took his cell phone, laptop computer, digital camera and USB flash drive. He said he was later informed that one of the men was an agent for the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
House has never been accused of a crime and had not been told that he was under investigation for any reason. His supposed transgression? Helping to set up an organization that raises funds for the legal defense campaign of Bradley Manning, the man accused of leaking the documents that were subsequently published on WikiLeaks.
The interrogation of House is a clear example of the agents involved circumventing the law in order to get what they want. Although the federal government has the legal right to search anyone entering the country without a warrant, the situation screams of an abuse of power. Had House remained in the U.S. he could not have been searched because the FBI had no warrant to do so and no basis to acquire one. They reportedly used his entrance into the country as a pretext to gain information that they otherwise would have had no right to obtain. By going through this legal loophole, the agents were obeying the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it.
House committed no crime. He has every right to provide support for a cause that he believes in. Whether the government finds that cause damaging or not, it is wrong to so blatantly attempt to intimidate a man who does not appear to have broken the law in any way.
It is a shame that the news media has drastically underreported this situation. If it had been given more national attention, this incident might have raised some eyebrows about the legality of the agents’ actions. Although it may have been technically legal to search House at customs, seizing his laptop with no evidence that he has ever done anything illegal is wrong. The government is merely attempting to intimidate people from being involved with WikiLeaks in any way.
These blatant scare tactics are vaguely reminiscent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s attempts to intimidate suspected communists in the 1950s, convicting people of disloyalty or treason with very little evidence on which to base those accusations. This sort of alleged behavior by agencies of the federal government is a completely inappropriate abuse of the Constitution and should be ceased immediately. Investigating Manning is one thing, but intimidating his supporters with no basis for doing so crosses a dangerous line.