My links to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden mean I am treated as a threat and can't return to the U.K.

Sarah Harrison

Categorized in : I Am Mean Return Threat

The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.

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Free speech and freedom of the press are under attack in the U.K. I cannot return to England, my country, because of my journalistic work with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and at WikiLeaks. There are things I feel I cannot even write.

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Whistle-blowing and publishing should not be seen as a crime, and certainly not as terrorism.

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The U.K. government has a responsibility to keep secrets in some circumstances. It also has a responsibility not to abuse that power for other purposes.

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Saving Edward Snowden from prison is one of WikiLeaks' achievements of which I am most proud.

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The work of WikiLeaks is with principal documentary evidence; that's where the truth lies. It gets to the heart of the matter. It educates people and in turn empowers them.

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To know we are being spied on by our own government, and to have someone else's government collaborating on that, to know that data storage is so cheap your information can be kept for years and used to create any kind of story, to me that's a grave attack on human rights.

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The job of the press is to speak truth to power. And yet, for doing our job, we are persecuted. I say that these aggressive and illegal tactics to silence us - inventing arbitrary legal interpretations, over-zealous charges and disproportionate sentences - must not be permitted to succeed.

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If our governments are so compromised that they will not tell us the truth, then we must step forward to grasp it.

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When whistleblowers come forward, we need to fight for them, so others will be encouraged. When they are gagged, we must be their voice. When they are hunted, we must be their shield. When they are locked away, we must free them. Giving us the truth is not a crime. This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.

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If Britain is going to investigate journalists as terrorists - take and destroy our documents, force us to give up passwords and answer questions - how can we be sure we can protect our sources?

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For future Snowdens, we want to show there is an organization that will do what we did for Snowden - as much as possible - in raising money for legal defense and public advocacy for whistleblowers so they know if they come forward there is a support group for them.

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Britain has a Terrorism Act, which has within it a portion called Schedule 7, which is quite unique. What it is is it gives officials the ability to detain people at the border as they go in or out or even transit through the country.

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WikiLeaks, for me, has not only that element in it of journalism publishing, but also the way in which it does it, with its - the concept we have of scientific journalism, I find very important and really appeals to me, that all of the source documents should be there.

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