In the authoritarian political system that exists in Russia, it can be very hard to learn the truth about what the government is up to, let alone force it to change its behavior or obtain any sort of justice for its crimes. This makes government leaks, the whistleblowers who leak them, and the journalists and press outlets that publish them, all the more vital.

It also means all of those entities have a big target on their backs. So let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say Moscow has engaged in a years-long attempt to catch and imprison the man responsible for publishing a series of massive leaks that proved deeply embarrassing to the Kremlin.

Though he’s not a Russian national, has never lived in the country, nor was he there when he committed his supposed “crime,” the Russian government has taken the radical step of trying to have him extradited to its soil, so it can put him through a trial that’s a foregone conclusion and imprison him for god knows how long — effectively asserting the right to prosecute and jail any journalist anywhere in the world if they happen to publish something that displeases Russia’s ruling elite.