QOTD: Melissa Mayer Yahoo CEO
by digby
At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference Michael Arrington asked her wanted to know what would happen if Yahoo just didn’t cooperate with the NSA and what would happen if she were to simply talk about what was happening, even though the government had forbidden it. She replied, “releasing classified information is treason.”
Actually it isn’t. The constitution is pretty specific:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
The government could feasibly interpret the CEO of Yahoo talking about the NSA requiring her company to secretly do certain things as giving aid and comfort to the enemy I suppose, but I’m not sure who the enemy would be in that case. I wouldn’t put it past them to try — they’ve been pretty willing to stretch the plain meaning of the 4th Amendment, after all. But that’s why the treason clause was put in the Constitution in the first place.
As treason may be committed against the United States, the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it. But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.
Mayer can probably relax on the treason thing.