Wednesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, FBI Director James Comey said Wikileaks was not journalism, but “intelligence porn.”
Comey said, “In that there is at least a portion, and people can argue that maybe this conduct Wikileaks is engaged on in the past that is closer to regular news gathering, but in my view, a huge portion of Wikileaks’ activities has nothing to do with legitimate news gathering, informing the public, commenting on important controversies but releasing classified information to damage the United States of America. People start to get cynical about journalists, but American journalists do not do that.”
“They almost always call us before classifying publishing information to say, is there anything that will jeopardize government people, or innocent civilians anywhere in the world and work with us to try to accomplish their important First Amendment goals by safeguarding the interests. This activity, I’m talking about Wikileaks, involves so much considerations whatsoever,” he continued. “It is intelligence porn, push it out in order to damage.”
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