Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology project, spoke with Huffington Post Live about the Manning prosecution:

They wanted to establish this precedent that leaks to the press — even leaks to the press in the public interest — can be equated with treason, in the information age where anything that is published in the press is also available to our enemies. Well, sure. This chat that we are having right now, this broadcast, is available to our enemies. But that's not why we are having this conversation. We are having this conversation to educate the public. And so it's extremely dangerous to equate a leak to the press with a treason charge, which is what the government did in this case.