> But if Assange is innocent, he should just turn himself over to the Swedish government.
> But if Assange wants freedom, all he needs to do is leave the embassy.
> But if Assange wants to get out of jail, he just needs to go through the UK courts.
> But if Assange didn’t commit any cyber-crimes, the evidence will show that.
> But if the evidence was made up, it probably wasn’t important to the case.
>>> YOU ARE HERE
> But if Assange dies in jail, that’s life.
> But if Assange had fought his case in the American legal system, we could have had a real discussion in this country about the relationship between journalism and the regime, before it was too late.
Whose mouths are you putting these words in? I don't doubt that each of these arguments was made by somebody at some point, but this parading and uncharitable extrapolation seems unhelpful.
Basically anyone who didn’t see what was obvious from the start, that this was a vindictive, bad-faith persecution pushed by the US gov because a journalist was actually making them experience some accountability.
On the one hand yes, on the other hand Assange kicked off the bad-faith by singling out the US under a guise of "just looking for the truth" while conveniently ignoring the failings of basically any other country.
> while conveniently ignoring the failings of basically any other country.
This is not true. Wikileaks leaked material regardless of the materials country of origin.
He never "singled out" the US, they just got the most upset out of any of the countries who had material that leaked because it was a substantial amount of data that made them look bad.
The argument was that the only reason Assange wouldn’t turn himself in (even though he did initially, and was released) must be that he is guilty, not that there was a superpower trying to throw him in jail for the rest of life for unrelated reasons.
EDIT: I’m seeing downvotes. I consider these to be genuinely valuable resources on media literacy but if you disagree I’d love to know what aspects of Chomsky or Parenti’s theories you disagree with.
I've noticed mental rigidity on HN - some people are looking for objective truth compatible with first-order logic. Hints of nuance or relative perspective get them riled up.
I'm pretty skeptical of most of the Pro-Assange reporting that happens because so often it seems very unreliable - cherry picking things, misrepresenting things etc. For example, I don't know enough about the Assange charges to say what is relevant or not relevant to the extradition, but just from a basic premise - what most people know Assange for is nothing to do with hacking Iceland MPs so it seems pretty unlikely that this would be a material part of the extradition. It would be kind of weird if that were a core part of the extradition, yet this article seems to be making out this is the star witness. I just doubt it frankly.
It doesn't help the author that they repeat tired old accusations about the judge being biased.
You should look into this a lot more. The core fact is that there are very little potentially valid reasons that Assange could be extradited - the prosecution is mostly grasping at straws, as he has done nothing wrong by UK laws. That is why ancillary witnesses like this Thoradsson become crucial: the prosecution needs to invent something that could be a good enough excuse to get him in the hands of the US "justice system" (for people like Assange or Snowden, it is obvious there would be no real justice in the US).
He has skipped bail, which is most definitely illegal. Why he skipped bail is a different issue, but it cannot be denied that he has skipped bail.
Secondly and more importantly, you don't need to be guilty of something under UK law to be extradited. That's the whole point of extradition. If you commit a crime abroad, you are almost certainly not guilty of it at home, because you are out of your home country's jurisdiction.
Also I've never understood the whole Sweden is a stepping stone to the US. in my little understanding, I don't see why the US would seek to only issue an extradition order when he was in Sweden. They won't grant extradition to a place where there is a material risk of the death penalty (well, unless you're an asylum seeker, but that's a different issue.)
> He has skipped bail, which is most definitely illegal.
He has served the sentence for that crime, so it is no longer relevant.
> Secondly and more importantly, you don't need to be guilty of something under UK law to be extradited.
You misunderstand the point: extradition requires dual criminality: the offense that the US is seeking extradition for must be an offense recognized by the UK as well. If Saudi Arabia were to ask for the extradition of Stephen Fry to stand trial of his crime of being gay, the UK would not be able to extradite because there is no dual criminality - the UK does not find being gay a criminal offense today.
Similarly, the offenses Assange is accused of are mostly not recognizable as UK offenses (the espionage act) or they have very low quality evidence. The direct hacking that Thordarson was a witness for would have been much stronger than the main case.
Skipping bail in the UK isn't a justification for extraditing to the U.S..
Assange has beeen charged with a misdeamonor and with violating the Espionage Act, which has never before been used against a journalist. It's a huge attack on the 1st amendment.
I personally also think it's unjust to extradite someone to a country without them actually have commiting crimes in that country (has Assange even been to the US)? It's like a US citizen being extradited to Saudia Arabia for watching porn on US soil.
> It's like a US citizen being extradited to Saudia Arabia for watching porn on US soil.
Its not the same.
Regardless of your feelings on Assange, and regardless of your feelings on what the US had been doing in those cables, had this been a russian/chinese/british/french spy, they would have been treated far more aggressively.
Again, this isn't a justification, or indeed an endorsement of either Assange, or the US & UK.
but, it's clear by UK standards, Assange has a case to answer.
The moral case is entirely different, on that I am not equipped to answer.
> Regardless of your feelings on Assange, and regardless of your feelings on what the US had been doing in those cables, had this been a russian/chinese/british/french spy, they would have been treated far more aggressively.
Because actual espionage is working to undermine one government at the behest of another. That's not what journalists do, so the espionage charges against Assange are bullshit.
He has served his sentence for skipping bail. That is also not a justification for extradition, as skipping bail in the UK is not a crime in the US. As such it has no relevance.
Secondly, the point is that the extradition treaty requires "dual criminality". That is, the charge needs to be over something which would have been a crime in the UK to if UK jurisdiction applied.
The comment above is clearly making the argument that what Assange is accused of did not meet the test of dual criminality.
> That is also not a justification for extradition
correct. Hes in jail because hes a flight risk, whilst he is await the outcome of extradition. This extradition is _different_ to the one he was originally hiding from.
> Assange is accused of did not meet the test of dual criminality.
knowingly publishing government secrets is certainly going to be a specific crime under the heaps of crap thats in the official secrets act.
> correct. Hes in jail because hes a flight risk, whilst he is await the outcome of extradition. This extradition is _different_ to the one he was originally hiding from.
Yes, and this has no relevance to the claim you first replied to, and no relevance to the correction I made.
> knowingly publishing government secrets is certainly going to be a specific crime under the heaps of crap thats in the official secrets act.
That would be relevant if the US made allegations to that effect, but they can't because merely publishing government secrets is not a crime in the US. See e.g. the Pentagon Papers publication. So figuring out whether it meets the standard in the UK is irrelevant.
This is not how dual criminality works - you can't say "this is illegal in the US, and this other bit over here is illegal in the UK". The same alleged action must be illegal both places.
UK extradition law doesn't permit extradition for politicial crimes. Exposing the criminal behaviour of the US government by publishing secret files is a political offence par exellence.
> Secondly and more importantly, you don't need to be guilty of something under UK law to be extradited. That's the whole point of extradition. If you commit a crime abroad, you are almost certainly not guilty of it at home, because you are out of your home country's jurisdiction.
The issue isn't one of jurisdiction, it's whether his actions would have been illegal in the UK _if_ they occurred in the UK. If not, why would the UK extradite? He wasn't in the US at the time and wasn't under US jurisdiction.
> The issue isn't one of jurisdiction, it's whether his actions would have been illegal in the UK _if_ they occurred in the UK.
That is really not how extradition works. But even if it was, illegally sourcing, publishing, and continuing to host secret documents is still very much illegal in the UK.
The other important thing to note is that the UK extradited a number of British citizens to the US for computer hacking charges, even though they were on UK soil at the time. The issue is not where the person physically is, but where they were doing the damage. The crime happened in the USA, not on UK soil.
> But even if it was, illegally sourcing, publishing, and continuing to host secret documents is still very much illegal in the UK.
If this was even vaguely true then it would be what he is being extradited for. It's not, because it's not.
If you'd read the article, you'd know this. The USA is literally making crimes up, accusing Assange of them, and then finding "evidence" from a dodgy Icelandic criminal to support their case. Said criminal has now admitted that he lied about that evidence.
What should happen now is that the entire case collapses and Assange is released. That's not happening because the system is corrupt. This is important and we need to be making more noise about such a blatant abuse of justice.
That is from the section discussing extradition to the US. Clearly you are wrong.
That said, out of your example only “illegally sourcing” the information is potentially illegal. The information I read previously released by the US supporting this claim was extremely weak. I personally would never have supported the extradition on the evidence I saw were I on a grand jury tasked with it. That said, the UK of course needs to decide that it is extraditable on their end as well. You have argued this isn’t the case for a few posts now. Clearly you’re incorrect. That is the point I intended to make.
> The information I read previously released by the US supporting this claim was extremely weak.
Your link says the United States (and many other countries) "are not required to provide prima facie evidence in support of their requests for extradition".
This is true. If I were the UK and I saw what the US considered as evidence in this case, I would strongly consider requiring the US to provide prima facie evidence going forward.
That said, I was more replying to the claims that dual criminality were not required. The UK still needs to find the acts themselves as illegal under UK law. I don't remember it being clearly so. Frankly, the released information I read coming from grand jury didn't even seem illegal to me according to US law.
> Secondly and more importantly, you don't need to be guilty of something under UK law to be extradited.
Most countries won't extradite you if the thing you did isn't also illegal there. The reasoning being that you wouldn't want to extradite someone for being for instance a homosexual and that is illegal in the target country, but you would do so if they committed murder.
This is correct. The DOJ will unveil a “superseding indictment” once he is on our soil that will eliminate the testimony and charge him with more vague crimes like “wire fraud” and “conspiracy” that carry multi-year sentences. The require allegations of much more serious and harder to prove crimes in order to extradite him.
He will be held for 3-5 years before his trial begins.
The trial will last a month and he will be found guilty of at least 1 charge, enough to receive a sentence of 8 years.
The principle of specialty prevents a requesting state changing the charges after extradition, without re-requesting the extraditing state. I mean, the UK has no way of stopping it, but it would undermine the legal comity that the US needs to get future cases extradited. Murder, for example, is only extraditable from the UK to the US if binding commitments are made not to seek the death penalty. If the UK courts stopped trusting US commitments then that would be at serious risk. Incidentally, this would also have been a bar to onward extradition from Sweden to the US if that had gone ahead.
I'm not saying they couldn't get consent for the UK for a superseding indictment, but it's certainly not as straightforward as dropping one they've prepared earlier and laughing manically.
One key element of UK<->US relations is that the US can do literally anything and the UK will quietly accept it. Good example is the Anne Sacoolas case, where an NSA operative killed someone in a traffic accident, driving on the wrong side of the road, then fled the country, claiming diplomatic immunity. She avoided any charges, and the US won't extradite her - despite her lying about the immunity and fleeing from the country - because US.
That's absolutely true on a political level. I'm not so sure that it would apply to breaches of judicial assurances. British judges are cranky, have a strong sense of the dignity of their office and role, and would personally face no consequences for poking the US authorities in the eye with a stick.
Assange was singled out after he wrote an essay describing an organisation such as WikiLeaks was needed in the political climate we inhabit, he had the foresight to see that Wikileaks was necessary and had the conviction talent and self sacrifice to bring it into being, that's when the knifes came out, and we all knew it, himself included. The rest of it is the circus, a means to an end and those who are getting caught up in details are being manipulated. Without Wikileaks the minds of humanity would have less degrees of freedom, I like Assange want more not less, we need the full 720, these obscured obtuse angles that are afforded to us are only useful for the powerful few. So you either want to be ruled in ignorance where the darkest shadows of men can loom over us without retribution, or you want to walk in the light.
Truth lights the path to enlightenment and its a hard yes that that journey should be allowed for everyone, not just the few. I believe that path is the only way for humanity to live with itself when making the tough decisions that lie in the not too distant future. People are manipulated just as we manipulate computers, to have an output we need input, and those who view the world in these terms and have talent in these areas have use manipulation tactics to control society's inputs. I wont get into sides, there are power mad megalomaniacs everywhere you care to look, as I'm sure Assange is no angel, he is human like the rest of us, but I will talk about what I know, our western world has banned books orchestrated people and imprisioned speech when these power structures are threatened. As they did with Orwell, Miller, Huxley and now Assange.... the choice is simple, truth and hope or deceit and misery, because we will produce an output that directly correlates with our input.
" Oh would some power the giftie gie us, To see ourselfs as others see us" Robbie Burns, This gift burns would realish for himself and all, not a curse for an enemy but a call for transparacncy which is the only way forward. I think the press,the journalists, very much see themselfs as we see them, which is powerless to the manipulation they are experiencing, and its funny that the institutions that he sacrificed himself for are the ones who have been silenced and told to bow, this is no accident, this is a sign to all, a show of power of their manipulation and control.
To give the smallest amount of credit to the media, they were largely forbidden access to cover the case. Something like ten journalists were provided access with scores more having digital access revoked on the first day.
I haven't heard that, despite reading Craig Murray's reporting of the case daily. Murray said the MSM turned up on the first day, didn't bother to write it up, and he never saw them again.
Can you substatiate that "forbidden access" claim?
There is direct physical and historic evidence that intelligence work involves misrepresenting positions left and right while fabricating lies about political opponents.
Why are you that concerned about something getting misrepresented? Your position sound extremely dishonest, because misrepresentation is the primary tool of those that accuse Assange of crimes.
> In the indictment, Thordarson’s claims are used not as the basis for charges but as background for what Assange told Chelsea Manning, who as an Army soldier exposed classified information through WikiLeaks in 2010.
> Thordarson in the article also does not deny involvement in the hacking of U.S. targets, and tells the publication his activities were “something Assange was aware of or that he had interpreted it so that this was expected of him.”
Your linked Washington Post article was published on 8th July. It's actually a good demonstration of the animosity towards Assange in the corporate press. It wasn't published in response to the major Sundin story (26th June) which as the OP's article (published 7 July, before your Post piece) shows, was blanked by all corporate press at the time:
> ...as of Friday, July 2, there has been literally zero coverage of it in corporate media; not one word in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, Fox News or NPR. A search online for either “Assange” or “Thordarson” will elicit zero relevant articles from establishment sources, either US or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, even in tech-focused platforms like the Verge, Wired or Gizmodo,” FAIR says.
The Post mainly sides with the US and only mentions the Sundin reporting in passing, diminishing its importance and omitting important parts, as the other replies here point out. A great example of power-friendly reporting when it comes to Assange.
Rightly or wrongly, Assange has largely been a non entity in the US media for a long time. This was pretty much after Der Spiegel, the Guardian, and the NYTimes spent a huge amount of resources for over a year, to properly redact the Cablegate leaks and release them, only to find that Assange was unhappy with how slowly this was going and he released them all himself, with basic redactions.
Ever since then regular media has been unwilling to work with him, because they’ve rightly judged him to be unreliable and have barely covered his personal issues from anymore than an arm’s length (the Guardian has been the most active in covering him from what I can tell, but US media has shunned him since then).
> only to find that Assange was unhappy with how slowly this was going and he released them all himself, with basic redactions.
That is NOT what happened.
The misernable excuse for a journalist Luke Harding, who works for The Guardian, was given (in confidence) the password to an encrypted online dump of an unredacted version Assange's documents. He then published a book, in which he included this password. Harding was therefore blowing the identities of many vulnerable informants - not Assange.
Assange first tried to engage with the State Department to mitigate the damage that The Guardian's employee had caused. He then published the unredacted documents in full, so that those people that were identified could see that they had been exposed, and take suitable remdial action.
> because they’ve rightly judged him to be unreliable
This shifts the question to whether Assange is trustworthy or not, which isn’t the main one.
The main question is why Assange was able to get hold of those documents at all. The security is appalling.
The proof has been repeated by Snowden: Again, a single guy, limited resources, not even startup resources, just sole-trader resources, could access half of USA’s secrets at will and most of Americans’ personal information.
Think what enemy state agencies have access to, with resources and spies.
> Rightly or wrongly, Assange has largely been a non entity in the US media for a long time.
Let me help: wrongly so. That's the point and the disgrace.
> Ever since then regular media has been unwilling to work with him, because they’ve rightly judged him to be unreliable
I can think of so much worse adjectives for journalists who think this serves as an excuse to ignore something like this. If someone shows up drunk at the police station and says "hey you assholes, person X murdered someone, do your job already and don't just eat donuts" that may not be super polite, but it's not an excuse to not investigate.
I do not believe that 'regular' (aka corporate) media's animosity towards real journalists is because they're reckless and unpredictable (though I imagine you'd have to be to be a real journalist). I believe it's because it's an unpleasant reminder that most people who carry the job description of journalist do not have the necessary mindset to do what the job may require of them.
> only to find that Assange was unhappy with how slowly this was going and he released them all himself, with basic redactions.
That's not what happened.
The Guardian, through its own incompetence, made the full unredacted cables publicly available in February 2011, by publishing the decryption key. People online realized that the cables were available, and a German magazine published an article explaining that the cables were now available. Only after that happened did WikiLeaks put the unredacted cables on its website, under the rationale that since the cables were already public, they might as well be hosted on WikiLeaks.
The Guardian has consistently obfuscated this issue, and tried to blame Assange for the Guardian's decision to publish the decryption key. The Guardian's excuse is that they thought the decryption key was only temporary, whatever that's supposed to mean.
Are you saying that the media is more concerned with the status of a personal relationship, than reporting on the most important leak of the decade and getting to the truth?
Sorry, but you've got that the wrong way round. Assange was the one who wanted careful redaction and it was his media partners at the Guardian and Der Spiegel who were impatient and wanted to publish early. In the end, it was the recklessness (perhaps malice) of the Guardian journalists which resulted in the unredacted cables being released. They published the password to decrypt the unredacted archives in their book (unbelievable, but true). Jonathan Cook (ex-Guardian) has written about this:
> The Guardian book let the cat out of the bag. Once it gave away Assange's password, the Old Bailey hearings have heard, there was no going back.
> Any security service in the world could now unlock the file containing the cables. And as they homed in on where the file was hidden at the end of the summer, Assange was forced into a desperate damage limitation operation. In September 2011 he published the unredacted cables so that anyone named in them would have advance warning and could go into hiding – before any hostile security services came looking for them.
> Yes, Assange published the cables unredacted but he did so – was forced to do so – by the unforgivable actions of Leigh and the Guardian.
Here's another Jonathan Cook article citing people intimately involved with the redaction process which contradicts your version of events:
> ...Goetz [Der Spiegel], as well as Nicky Hager, an investigative journalist from New Zealand, and Professor John Sloboda, of Iraq Body Count, all of whom worked with Wikileaks to redact names at different times, have testified that Assange was meticulous about the redaction process. Goetz admitted that he had been personally exasperated by the delays imposed by Assange to carry out redactions:
>> At that time, I remember being very, very irritated by the constant, unending reminders by Assange that we needed to be secure, that we needed to encrypt things, that we needed to use encrypted chats. … The amount of precautions around the safety of the material were enormous. I thought it was paranoid and crazy but it later became standard journalistic practice.
> Prof Sloboda noted that, as Goetz had implied in his testimony, the pressure to cut corners on redaction came not from Assange but from Wikileaks' "media partners", who were desperate to get on with publication. One of the most prominent of those partners, of course, was the Guardian. According to the account of proceedings at the Old Bailey by former UK ambassador Craig Murray:
>> Goetz [of Der Spiegel] recalled an email from David Leigh of The Guardian stating that publication of some stories was delayed because of the amount of time WikiLeaks were devoting to the redaction process to get rid of the "bad stuff."
> When confronted by US counsel with Leigh's [Guardian] claim in the book about the restaurant conversation, Hager observed witheringly: "I would not regard that [Leigh and Harding's book] as a reliable source." Under oath, he ascribed Leigh's account of the events of that time to "animosity".
But how many people have heard this version of events from the NYT, The Washington Post, the Guardian or all the other corporate media outlets that have been all to happy to pour scorn on Assange?
>Sorry, but you've got that the wrong way round. Assange was the one who wanted careful redaction and it was his media partners at the Guardian and Der Spiegel who were impatient and wanted to publish early. In the end, it was the recklessness (perhaps malice) of the Guardian journalists which resulted in the unredacted cables being released. They published the password to decrypt the unredacted archives in their book (unbelievable, but true).
Thanks for correcting this. It's frustrating how many people get this, and many other so called facts in his case, wrong.
It's not their fault, the US and UK media gloss over the facts whenever they directly report on him, and references to him in editorials or stories about other events refer to the "beliefs" of authority figures and agencies, and the charges, but never directly to specific allegations, facts, or timelines.
People have no hope of having an accurate picture of events unless they invest a significant amount of time into something that will not benefit them.
Journalists at major outlets are more concerned about the Assange case than their papers, but still have zero chance of getting accurate stories published about it.
Patently untrue. This year alone there was active reporting on Assange from up to June on most popular US media outlets which suddenly stopped. My comment from an earlier thread on July 3rd:
There have been 20 articles in print and on the web mentioning Assange in the NY Times since 2021 began, avidly covering the details of his trial and extradition, but now nothing. If their search features are any indication, CNN doesn't believe you should seek out news as much as passively accept it-same pattern and then no recent mention.
Reuters' latest article from 25 June in a break from the style of their previous coverage leaves out mention of the trial details entirely in favor of a human element story petitioning Biden free Assange "to show the US has changed". This narrative does little to exculpate Assange or share why the trial may be over for good while preempting any credit for what follows to the mercy and wisdom of Biden. Whether Biden ignores or denies, well, them's the laws, you know.
Remember when there were 80 stories about how Assange smells and lives like a slob? Clearly world news. That the main witness against him is a liar and a creep? Not important.
1. Sure the Washington Post covered it, but it didn't cover it soon enough.
2. Sure the Washington Post covered it, but it's coverage wasn't favorable to Assange
This is just a non-story. The guy gave testimony under oath (or signed an affadavit) and submitted it to court under penalty of perjury. Then the case was adjudicated in Assange's favor. Then months later he recants to the press. It's more likely he's lying now as PR than he was lying when his life depended on it. And his story is now completely moot since the case is over. Very few people are sufficiently interested in this story to make a big deal out of non-binding details. The case itself barely made news until it was decided.
One article that completely ignores that the DoJ offered Thordarson immunity for this false testimony and that the judge mentions the Icelandic stuff as part of the reason the extradition was valid. It is also used as further evidence of the only charge that isn't an Espionage Act charge, which is the reason people try to claim these charges aren't clear violations of a free press.
And here's the full quote that the article took one line from
>Stundin cannot find any evidence that Thordarson was ever instructed to make those requests by anyone inside WikiLeaks. Thordarson himself is not even claiming that, although he explains this as something Assange was aware of or that he had interpreted it so that this was expected of him. How this supposed non-verbal communication took place he cannot explain.
edit oh, and the Washington Post article is from July 8th. The original article claims the media ignored the report as of July 2nd.
That WaPo article was put out after a ton of criticism that the US media was refusing to report on it. The original news about the key witness admitting to lying and fabricating was released on 26. júní 2021:
This was an interesting case when he was trapped in the embassy, police waited outside, and stories came out about his cat pooping everywhere. Easy to understand and fascinating to read about.
Now it is a mundane series of legal events with no final conclusion as of yet.
Even these articles that are upvoted to the front page about Assange consistently have to attack the US media to get traction on HN. It's not interesting by itself to people without them getting to be mad at the media.
And the msm deserves every last drop of vitriol they get over this. Their deliberate and abject failure to put this into context for people results in comments like yours.
The hatred for "main stream media" quickly outpaced its usefulness very early on. The media do a bad job of a lot of things, but the undeserved portion of spite has now caused much more harm (both real and in the form of information noise) than good (in the form of enlightenment or exposure). Hatred for the main stream media is now more often than not just a way of rationalizing one's political side-taking. I think there's a fair share of that in this case. I don't necessarily agree 100% with the parent, but their point is totally valid. Look at how hostile your tone is.
> but the undeserved portion of spite has now caused much more harm (both real and in the form of information noise) than good (in the form of enlightenment or exposure).
Why is it undeserved if they haven't changed their partisan tactics and misleading reporting despite all hate levelled at them for exactly these things?
Unfortunately I think that hatred also caused otherwise rational people to place more faith than should be in the media - likely those that are on the other side of the political side taking you mention. “My tribal out group strongly dislikes the media and I need to align as opposite from them as I can rationalize”.
I think you're onto something here. I can't find the link but in the early 2000s blog-era there was a blog about how media criticism is a low form of argument. Media criticism is easy, it doesn't require any particular expertise or research, and it has broad appeal.
It's also rather thin gruel. It generally relies on a sort of sleight-of-hand where you imply the media (or the mainstream media) is a single entity and define away counterexamples.
> Hatred for the main stream media is now more often than not just a way of rationalizing one's political side-taking.
I don't know where you are from, but in every country I ever lived it was readily apparent that their mainstream media is tasked with pushing the status quo, muzzle dissenting points of view and opinions, and persecute inconvenient political targets.
It boggles the mind the amount of cognitive dissonance that is rewired to simultaneously acknowledge private companies can easily manipulate the media to further their propaganda goals, but somehow deny political regimes do the same.
In Assange's case, it was readily apparent from the start that the accusations were a ruse to persecute and punish inconvenient voices under the excuse of a carefully fabricated accusation that was intended to be hard to defend on moral grounds.
Except they still lie constantly and clearly that message hasn't sunk in if HN commenters such as yourself still defend them. The days of non-partisan, non-clickbait and thoroughly researched journalism is long over, yet many still don't hold them to the same standards they would to any blog.
It causes "harm" to call out their lies? Get real, they've fanned the flames for riots and other political violence for years now and that's far more harmful than calling them terrible for doing so.
The astroturfing against Assange became insane at a certain point. There was a time where you could say “Wikileaks” nearly anywhere online and have a flood of comments calling Assange various things and anyone who didn’t outright hate him a terrorist.
Not sure if that was always astroturfing. I certainly feel ambivalent about Julian Assange and he arguably cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, which obviously upset a lot of people.
The one responsible for loosing the election was Hillary Clinton, not Julian Assange.
And supporting the prosecution because of this is also quite an apt reason to not vote for her in the first place. And I think that was made clear before the election.
No single person can be attributed all the blame, but any person who (illegally) tried to influence the election is not a good person in my book. That's like saying Russia's misinformation campaign had zero influence and it was all Hillary's fault. That's just plain silly. You can admit Hillary made mistakes while also agreeing that Russia illegally tried to influence the 2016 election.
Don't even have to go very deep. Just look at these tweets [0] for example. Why is some "non-profit" organization started by an Australian trying to influence an American election?
Wikipedia wasn't perfectly neutral here but released truthful information in contrast to many media outlets, who were just as partisan. The reason why many people craved balance and so they made interna of the DNC public.
I have not seen any evidence of Russian interference, but they probably tried. I don't think they got any talking points across to be honest.
This non profit had proof of war crimes and maybe that influenced their disposition? Understandable in my opinion.
In general I am suspect of anyone pointing fingers at others to build a profile. Trump could do that and some people understood that it was holding up a mirror. That is no Trump endorsement and the Russian story an excuse. I believe internal leaks are much more likely.
The DNC talking points on this issue were schizophrenic as hell.
At first they said the most damning thing in there was recipes.
Then they said it cost them the election.
But they refused to say which leaks were responsible.
Then they claimed the swing voters they lost believed in pizzagate as if it were a mainstream conspiracy theory believed by many and that all the swing voters were therefore complete idiots.
Also if you're going to blame a conspiracy theory that was conjured out of thin air the leaks really didnt actually matter. An equally stupid pretext could have been invented, so why say they cost you the election?
So, according to them the leaks both cost them the election and didnt matter in the slightest.
If you think about all this for just a second it logically doesnt make any goddamn sense but people still parrot it. Those same people will instinctively hit that downvote button.
> Those same people will instinctively hit that downvote button.
I read your message waiting, line after line, for the dumb statement that got you downvoted. How do people still claim that there's no politically motivated mass-flagging going on on HN?
"If I talked about drone striking Assange it would have been a joke"
She said this. This is as close to an admission that you could get. She would never use that wording if this story were fabricated. She'd just say "I never said anything like that".
The "nonlegal" fluff in the emails is bs, but this story itself isnt.
It was, of course, "just a joke" much in much the same way racist jokes are "just a joke", which is why he took it seriously. It's why making a joke about murdering the president will get you hauled in by the secret service.
Arguing it's unproven is FUD. Why snopes is saying this is beyond me.
If one want to see how people perceived the relation between Hillary Clinton and Assange in 2010, this song/video demonstrate it quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl4NlA97GeQ
Julan Assange also participated in the creation of a video with the same group released closely afterward, which at least implies that he might share the song writers perspective.
I have tried to found a source for what the lyrics say, but at any rate it seems clear that there existed an opinion (which very likely was shared by Assange) that Hillary Clinton where out to get Assange and an active part of the US actions against him. The exact wording is "charged for high treason", which is different from a drone strike but carries the same result: Death.
In my intepretation, it seems pretty clear that Assange might have had a negative opinion about Hillary Clinton 6 years later, rather than being neutral about the whole thing. Having the perception that someone is after to kill you can have that.
(Anyone that thinks that the band is a right-wing group should check out the videos produced about Trump).
Even if Assange's personal motivations had any relevance here, that comment alone would be enough to disqualify someone from holding any kind of public office in a functioning democracy that respects human life.
She lost to a guy that said 'grab her by the pussy', if you can't win against that I don't know... a rock with painted face might be a challenge to run against for her.
Lol not "traditional democratic voters"; the die-hards who saw, and continue to see, Trump as a messiah as he insults anyone from Gold Star parents, to disabled journalists, to Mexican immigrants...
Anyway, off topic and deplorably exhausting.
In the end, Assange is just a scapegoat. Although, he wouldn't be the first or the last. When WikiLeaks was being used to disclose information about other countries, US citizens and even the Government saw them as a positive force in the world. But, once the info focused on US affairs, especially around a Presidential election, Assange was public enemy number one (tied with Snowden).
Still very much (1) a tactical mistake and (2) not everyone of the 60 million people who voted for trump fits your description. Working class people fucked over by the establishment voted for the "anti-establishment" candidate, surprise surprise.
Again, that speech was made early in the campaign. Obviously not talking about 60mil people. But, definitely didn't help, especially once pundits pounced on it.
I'm not saying it wasn't a bad decision, I'm saying it's very understandable why people did what they did. Calling them stupid rednecks is very easy and makes you feel better than them but it's lazy and untrue.
And the guy actually increased his vote tally significantly in the next election, against a far less polarizing candidate than Hillary Clinton. I don't know if it's really as easy as blaming it entirely on her.
The DNC only have themselves to blame, wikileaks exposed their Pied Piper strategy -- they encouraged their media connections to elevate Trump before the playing field thinned out, they were so sure they could beat him [0]. As a Hillary voter, we were sure Trump was a joke. We didn't realize he had the DNC on his side. See the politico piece for quotes from wikileaks:
"How do we prevent Bush from bettering himself/how do we maximize Trump and others?" [1]
"We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously." [2]
Is it a crime to subvert democracy? Apparently not when it’s your side doing it.
There were claims that Assange sat on Trumps mails, but genuinely I don’t think that’s the case and if it was then people likely would still vote for him as he is openly horrible: the emails proved Hilary was calculated.
Honestly if your biggest gripe with Assange is that he caused your person to lose then you have to ask yourself: did you just not want to know that your candidate was trying to subvert democracy?
The Sanders stuff was enough to put me off the DNC (actively hampering his chances of being a presidential candidate by removing him from ballots for instance), but learning that Hillary was the one with media contacts and pushing Cruz and Trump to be president is the ultimate backfire.
Should this man go to prison, for life, because your person didn’t get 4 years in office? Because of things she herself said?
Both parties do this. Pointing it out isn't whataboutism. Pointing it out is showing that Assange is the one who made political moves. He targeted specific politicians to leak negative information at opportune times. He didn't do this out of a sense of bringing the truth to light, he did this to further a political agenda. Where are his leaks on the republican party?
Did you provide him with some leaks? As he can't publish what he doesn't have. Though there is some evidence that the same group that leaked the DNC emails had access to RNC data, there is no evidence that shows Assange had any knowledge of or access to RNC data.
It's mind-boggling you actually conclude this from
> The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.” Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases.
> Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday.
It's because the tweet takes the article it quotes out of context. This is what leads up to the quoted part:
> That study design, as well as those of other drug makers, came under fire from experts who worried that, even if it was statistically valid, these interim analyses would not provide enough data when a vaccine could be given to billions of people.
Kind of an important passage to leave out, don't you think?
Do you really think this was comic book supervillain?
I remember this happening at the time and my impression was that it was happening without a doubt. Particularly when they announced the results a few days after the election.
My thinking at the time was inside Pfizer the idea of turning an election on this data was deemed too controversial - they would forever be associated with Trump if he won again. That might cause issue with the Dems.
No idea but unless there’s proof of something shadier? That would be my guess - just an American corporation making sure it doesn’t piss off half the country.
Nah, the most comicbook supervillain event was the fricking New York Times publicly hinting that if the vaccine was approved before the election because enough evidence was found that not doing so would definitely do more harm, they'd push the narrative that it was only approved to help Trump win and that people shouldn't trust its safety, effectively undermining safety in the vaccination program just to make sure Trump lost. All the other morally and scientifically dubious attempts to delay approval mostly seem to be downstream consequences of that.
This is how propaganda works. What is sad is that some journalists never learn (that what happened to Assange can also happen to them) and when they finally get it, it is too late.
There's always going to be a few who don't get it, and those are the ones who end up publishing. What I'd like to see is widespread understanding on the readers' part of sampling biases like this.
Maybe "activists" who have very strong ideological beliefs but unknowingly present their preach as fact-based reports in a very tricky way that looks very objective. The public are misled to believe their distorted conclusions.
I've seen a lot of them. On some topics especially when audience don't have access to the ground truth, they(zesty activists disguised as objective journalists) are majority. This lead to a big gap between the perceptions on the same topic among different groups of audience and each group consider the other one are brainwashed.
The difference between activists and advertisers is: the later are knowingly try to sell something while the former thought they are telling truth which make the hidden activists more deceptive.
Disliking him personally is not a good reason to ignore this case or hope he is prosecuted. Assange is an asshole, but this attack on him enables future attacks on all journalists.
I'm not sure that journalists play too big a role. Journalists don't decide what gets printed or played on repeat on TV. Refusing to provide fodder to a propaganda machine (any major news organization) just creates a vacancy that can be easily filled, because it's capitalism and journalists too have kids, mortgages and college debt.
You're missing the point. There is no plural. There is only one editor in chief who makes final decisions and it's more of a management position. The higher up you are the more directly accountable you are for the bottom line. You don't get to that position by fighting for the truth. You get to that position by maintaining the tone that reliably brings in advertising revenue.
When talking about "astroturfing" it is worth remembering that the average person is dangerously practical and not easily persuaded by "the incentives here are terrible..." style arguments. But they do have very strong loyalty to anything perceived as part of the in-group.
It is likely that the attacks on Assange were all in good faith. Still baseless though, the fellow has all but secured his place in the history books as a hero at this point.
"perfectly ordinary political discou..." oh wait, no that isn't right.
I don't know. Not astroturfing though, that has implications that the people arguing don't believe what they are saying and are just in it for a cheque.
Ok so what do you call the mass of people that includes:
1. In it for the cheque.
2. Believe the people who are in it for the cheque.
Given that there's very rarely an easy way to tell them apart and 2 follows 1?
Honest question.
I would lean towards calling it a wave of astroturfing given that 2 doesnt happen without 1 and 2 and 1 are inseparable, but I can potentially see the argument for using different terminology if there is something more precise.
The fact that bad people are certainly involved doesn't change the likelihood that good people were involved. I know a few anti-Snowden types in real life. They're fine people, just not very good at predicting consequences.
You should have seen HN discussions about him around the 2016 election. He went from venerated to intensely maligned in the span of a couple weeks. Just like what happened with Glenn Greenwald around the 2020 election.
Greenwald became a common punching target after he criticized the 2008 administration for continuing to significantly expand executive authority and brought black budget activities into a whole other level. Something that Bush Jr also massively expanded and people were much quicker to criticize from various sides.
By 2020 Greenwald was basically persona-non-grata for not pulling either US party lines and his strong support for people like Snowden. Despite his great work in Brazil on human rights and anti-corruption which is something that goes beyond partisan politics and should be lauded.
The problem is people trying to put him (or everybody) into convenient boxes - representing singular view points - without shades of grey, like the 24 hour news talking head guests pushing sound bites.
The type of pressure on any person who dares to enter political news for a living. Which to me seems like a never ending gauntlet.
That's unfair, because Assange's own actions also veered heavily around 2016, so to assume the arguments about him were all astroturfing is extremely misleading.
If tomorrow Sanders starts spouting antivaxx stuff, and half the internet starts attacking him, you wouldn't go and say "there's a misinformation campaign astroturfing against Sanders".
In the Bush years he was cool. In the Obama years he wasn't cool. Around 2016 he became a pariah. The press is most often aligned with the interests of the party and is a fair-weather-friend at best.
Not that I'm going to dig through 10 years of reddit comments, but I always hated Assange. It was abundantly clear from the outset that he was only ever self-interested. All he ever did was collect dumps of data from wherever he could, hang his sources out to dry, then try to sell them to the public with the most manufactured drama possible.
Slight rant: People just get enamored with the story of the dark horse "journalist" fighting against the odds to expose corruption. In reality, the NY Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Pro Publica have all exposed vastly more salient information and done it all ethically and faced down all legal challenges in US courts and won.
That's a ridiculous assertion. Any reasonable person would know that Assange is disingenuous and not a good person. I can point to his man years of agenda-driven public statements, but you can sum it up pretty succinctly when he tried to blame Seth Rich for the DNC leak. He's a fraud who did a few decent things many years as a complete coincidence.
I find the whole spectacle of watching two propaganda machines trying to out- manoeuvre each other to be a little exhausting to be honest.
There's no doubt that the US is acting vindictively here, but the pro-Assange camp does little for its credibility by using the same tactics.
Even the headline here has been massaged - originally this was a "key" witness but by the time it gets to HN, he's a "keystone" witness.
But the bigger problem is that he's neither. I've been vaguely following the case and this is the first mention of this guy I've seen. TFA asserts that the 2nd indictment rests on his bought testimony, but there's nothing about hacking Icelandic MPs or banks in that indictment. There's definitely stuff about hacking, but only about US targets, and Thordarson has nothing to say about that.
Unless I'm missing something, this is a minor story about the DoJ doing a deal with one criminal to convict another (hardly news in itself) in order to strengthen an already robust case, not the slam dunk people are making it out to be.
I grew up in the "keystone state". As far as I am concerned these words mean precisely the same thing in this context, and neither has stronger implications than the other. Are you sure you're not the one spinning here?
Well, maybe. But to me there can be several key witnesses and losing one will damage your case, but as your definition states, if you remove a keystone witness the case falls apart.
Tangentially, reading the indictment this witness seems to be neither. More to the point, OP felt the need to change the wording. That was a conscious act, not an accident.
If a "key witness" is can be lost without sinking the case, then they are not "Indispensable, supremely important" and were not actually key. If an indispensable, or supremely important witness is lost, then your case has been lost. That's what indispensable means to me.
What does indispensable mean to you? Do you think something that is indispensable can be dispensed?
You are welcome to ignore half of the definitions you posted and focus on the one that suits you best. I lean towards the second one you supplied, being "Important, salient"
We can disagree on semantics, but my original point stands: the wording of the headline was changed. As another poster has asked, why would you choose to change a shorter, more common word for a longer, less common one if they mean exactly the same?
A keystone is that. Keystones are key, take the keystone out of an arch and the arch collapses. Doesn't that make a keystone "important, salient"? I think it does. Both of those definitions support these words being synonyms. I quoted both definitions because I believe both support my point. (And I quoted both for 'keystone' because if I didn't, I figured you'd disingenuously attribute that omission to malfeasance.)
> As another poster has asked, why would you choose to change a shorter, more common word for a longer, less common one if they mean exactly the same?
My response to him applies to you as well. You would not be nitpicking such word choices if you were not looking for a crack to gain leverage in the conversation.
Multiple people are telling you that it means something different in their experience. Personally, I have 3 keys to my house, but my house has only 1 keystone.
Why would you replace a 3-letter word with an 8-letter word that means the same thing? Especially when you have to type the entire word "key" to get to "keystone".
All that would be relevant if I were positing that key > keystone, but it's obviously the opposite so I'm not sure why you're trying to convince me that a keystone is important.
I'm not looking for a crack here and the "nitpicking" was a convenient example of how both sides are skewing reality to suit their ends.
Anyway, I notice that the title has now been changed to reflect the original headline so I guess somebody else thought they were different enough words to warrant changing it back again.
> I guess somebody else thought they were different enough words to warrant changing it back again.
Or dang thought to cut this fruitless tangent off at the knees. I am perfectly happy with the new headline, because it means the same thing as the old. If I were dang I'd change it too, for that reason. The new headline is still a damning indictment of US media.
I hate to say it, but Language is a theater of war in the modern world. English has a large and loose lexicon that gives manipulators plenty of room to make insinuations while still being technically correct.
> why would you choose to change a shorter, more common word for a longer, less common one if they mean exactly the same?
I'm not the OP, but you're assuming this was copied and pasted and the word changed deliberately. I can think of a number of reasons why the different word was used, that has nothing to do with an attempt to mislead: e.g. autocorrect if typing it on mobile, genuine error (thinking it was actually 'keystone' in the original).
Journalists and editors swap out words all the time, particularly when they aren't explicitly quoting somebody. People who write for a living tend to like words and pick words form sets of synonyms that suit their personal preferences. Any story that has been written about by more than one writer/editor will almost certainly have headlines that mean the same thing using different words.
A current example grabbed from google news:
"Two dams in Inner Mongolia collapse after heavy rain"
"Two dams in China's Inner Mongolia collapse after torrential rain"
"Heavy rain" and "torrential rain" mean basically the same thing. Why does one headline use one phrase, and the other another? Is this some sort of malicious attempt to propagandize at us? Or is it just an editor/writer who fancies the word 'torrential'? I think it's the second.
Yes, I should have added that I see nothing wrong with the replacement of key with keystone here. Not sure what the big issue is. I was just surprised that someone who does object to it assumes a HN posting has been deliberately crafted to mislead when it could simply have been an innocent error.
Arguing against Assange in 2010: don't say anything about Assange because it's better if nobody knows about WikiLeaks
Arguing against Assange in 2018: Vaguely refer to the allegations against him while making sure to avoid linking any detailed articles or starting a facts-based discussion.
Arguing against Assange in 2021: Okay, I know the US government is trying to arrange a show trial, but is key the same word as keystone?
The original point wasn't about semantics it was about the difficulty of parsing reality when both sides are so adept at managing spin that they don't even notice they're doing it.
I don't think semantic details like whether a headline uses "key" or "keystone" are significant impediments to figuring out what's going on when it's easy to read what's going on and make the judgement that way.
There is plenty of distortion in the emotional affect created by phrasing, and plenty of ignorance in the abstract theory-of-policy level comment thread discourse, but fortunately there's nothing restraining us to operate on those once-removed levels.
> There's no doubt that the US is acting vindictively here, but the pro-Assange camp does little for its credibility by using the same tactics.
Revelations about an important witness lying about Assange to get immunity from the US is blanked by corporate media. How is reporting that this important story was blanked "acting vindictively"?
Why would you start criminal deals if you had a robust case? That is a direct contradiction fully aside from the fact that the "institution responsible for upholding the law" directly bend the rules here.
Sorry? Can you elaborate here? Do you think a justice department should use falsified evidence? This needs explanation because your country and party will be made responsible for such reactions and it might lead to people voting someone you couldn't imagine being president.
I explicitly referred to the charges and accusations related to the acquiring and release of classified information, this link has nothing to do with that.
That's a very uncomfortable thing for his defenders to focus on. Much more convenient for them is to present him as a journalist and frame the discussion around freedom of speech/the press.
It's not uncomfortable at all from where I'm sitting, I had thought we settled this with Ellsburg and the pentagon papers.
Assange had no clearance and took no oaths regarding this information. Converting "working with a source" into "conspiracy to access an information system" because the files were on a computer instead of in a drawer should fail the smell test.
That hinges on the extent to which Assange personally exfiltrated documents.
NYT vs US established that its totally OK to publish documents you receive. They're trying to make Assange a 'conspirator' in the exfiltration for working with Manning. Apparently the extent of his alleged direct involvement was receiving a password hash but not actually cracking or doing anything with it: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1153486/downl...
What then is espionage and how does it differ from actively participating in the theft of classified information? (for the sake of argument, assume that Assange actually did do things like crack password hashes)
i.e. what is the differentiator that makes Assange innocent of espionage and would make someone else guilty?
Exfiltrating classified tactics, techniques or technology for the purpose of supplying a rival power with a tactical advantage would be a good working definition.
Whatever definition is used if it includes leaking war crimes to the public and youre ok with that you are signing up to putting the pieces in place for a fascist dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration.
> Exfiltrating classified tactics, techniques or technology for the purpose of supplying a rival power with a tactical advantage would be a good working definition.
Not particularly good, IMO: Knowledge of what resources you have where seems pretty damn important, and that's neither "tactics, techniques or technology" AFAICS.
> Whatever definition is used if it includes leaking war crimes to the public and youre ok with that you are signing up to putting the pieces in place for a fascist dictatorship.
This ever so conveniently ignores the crux of the matter, namely that he (at least according to his accusers) leaked so much more than just "war crimes".
>Not particularly good, IMO: Knowledge of what resources
Sure, add that to the list. It doesnt change anything.
It was a definition I came up with on the spur of the moment. If you're picking minor holes in it then you missed my broader point: if your country's legal definition of aiding and abetting the enemy includes exposing war crimes to the world at large then it's deliberately not about espionage at all.
>This ever so conveniently ignores the crux of the matter, namely that he (at least according to his accusers) leaked so much more than just "war crimes".
It's not convenient in the slightest. Leaking evidence of American war crimes is all he is on trial for.
>Given the above, it's a huge exaggeration.
It's not an exaggeration in the slightest. This prosection is a giant klaxon warning bell signaling impeding fascism.
Not just the prosecution itself, but how little support there is for dropping the case.
He's being charged with a bunch of stuff. Offering to help Manning crack passwords and encouraging them to dig deeper is the uncomfortable bit for his supporters.
I agree that the espionage charges are ridiculous and dangerous for actual investigative journalists.
Seventeen of his eighteen charges are clearly about the freedom of the press, as they are entirely about what he published. Only one arguably isn't, and even that can be argued is also a violation of a free press.
Outlawing the the theft (and publication) of classified information in the public interest puts investigative journalists in a difficult place. One could say it's a 'keystone' of free press and, hence, democracy.
So are journalists allowed to break any law they want in the pursuit of a story, or is it limited to computer hacking?
To be clear, I have no problem with the publication part. But to frame investigative journalism as being dependent on criminal activity to survive is ignoring decades of groundbreaking, hard hitting reporting done completely within the bounds of the law.
> ignoring decades of groundbreaking, hard hitting reporting done completely within the bounds of the law.
That's a little hyperbolic. I'm certain it's possible to do so within the law, but when it comes to corruption or cover-ups at a government or corporate level, there's simply no other way for a journalist to do their work without leaks. This requires some protection by the law, and once such protection is taken away, it would be nigh-on impossible to get it back. There may be some legal peculiarities about JA's case that make him different from a journalist in some way - IANAL - but I worry that even a technical distinction would be unfair, as he has uncovered much that is of public interest.
And I 100% agree that whistleblowers need protection, as do journalists.
This isn't about legal peculiarities. When Assange was offering help to crack passwords and encouraging Manning to access unauthorized material, he wasn't being a whistleblower or a journalist. He was conspiring to commit a crime. He knew that. He'd already been charged with hacking as a teenager. It was a choice he made having weighed up the risks and benefits.
White hats gain unauthorised access and inform the admins that their systems are insecure, perhaps they should be thrown in a jail cell? The distinction you're missing here between Assange and an actual criminal (in the eyes of a fair citizen) is intent. The average citizen does not want laws that punish people working in the public interest
If you create a gate that investigative journalism cannot cross, then all of the government's dirty secrets will be locked behind that gate. You can call it criminal all you want, but this type of journalism should not be a crime because, per the First Amendment, a free press is essential for the operation of a democracy, and this is what Assange's persecution is really about.
You make it sound as if Assange is the first person to publish a leak and the only way to do so is by aiding and abetting a crime. Have you heard of Watergate?
You are using this word as a taint, free of context. In the way people toss away drug users because after all possessing drugs is a crime. Therefore, they are a criminal.
You don't ask, why is this a crime? Should we respect this law? Forget all that, obviously someone made up this great law and people who don't follow it are bad.
Classification blocks real journalists from pursuing stories all the time. It works. It literally almost worked in Watergate. The fist hearings into Nixon's dirty money machine closed with little to show because of government secrecy. The government classifies millions of documents per year. It's not just state secrets. It's anything that could be embarrassing, anything that might undermine a government position, etc.
Nothing. Journalists are normal people. The mistake you're consistently making is thinking that Assange actually committed a crime. He didn't, although that's certainly the narrative that the government wants you to believe.
So is it that you believe that offering to crack passwords and encouraging further network intrusion is not a crime, or that it shouldn't be? And if it's OK for journalists to do those things, what other special compensations do they get?
To be clear, I don't have a clear opinion on whether he committed those crimes or not. I do think there's enough evidence to support an indictment.
> So is it that you believe that offering to crack passwords
No such "offer" was extended, nor is there any evidence that cracked passwords were ever used to obtain any data. If you're suggesting that merely talking about password cracking is a crime, well then you've just criminalised a lot of discussions here on HN and reddit.
> encouraging further network intrusion is not a crime
Cite the transcript entries [1] where this alleged encouragement happened.
> I do think there's enough evidence to support an indictment
And you formed this opinion from actually reading the official transcripts [1]?
Yes I'm familiar with the exchange. I ask again, where is the offer to crack the password exactly? Assange claims an ability to crack, and claims that he passed the hash on, but notice the complete absence of promises to attempt to crack, or statements of intent to use it to compromise computer systems, or corroborating evidence that Assange actually passed it on or actually attempted to crack the password. Assange could be lying or exaggerating or any number of other things.
And you think this constitutes sufficient evidence for an indictment? If so, you have really low standards of evidence.
> Cite the transcript entries where this alleged encouragement happened.
And where is the encouragement? All I see is you projecting an unjustified interpretation.
Even if I steelman your position and we both agree that Assange was encouraging further leaks, are you suggesting that a journalist cannot ask their sources to continue feeding them information? Because if so, you are suggesting we indict every journalist with a source.
Yeah, because neither you nor Assange have the faintest idea what "that's implied" might mean, right? "All he claims is the ability..." Yeah, and "Nice place you got here, would be a shame if anything happened to it" is just preemptive commiseration, not at all an implicit threat.
> "Nice place you got here, would be a shame if anything happened to it"
Well of course, everybody knows for it to be a real extortion attempt first you have to fill out a 543B detailing payment options, severity of firebombing in case of failure to comply and ancillary terms & conditions. Otherwise it's just a couple of guys exploring some hypotheticals like they do on HN and Reddit all the time.
Honestly, if this is what the defense is going to look like it's not hard to see why they're reluctant to try it out in front of a judge.
> Unless I'm missing something, this is a minor story ... in order to strengthen an already robust case, not the slam dunk people are making it out to be.
I don't think this was a robust case at all. A couple of things to note here:
1. The witness from Iceland whose testimony against Assange has now revealed to have been lies wasn't part of the original case the US put forward. They added him much later into the proceedings. So if this was a "robust case" as you put it, why would they decide to add new accusations?
2. You might say, well, they didn't need to include him and shouldn't have. But you have the judge (Baraitser) citing these new accusations when siding with the US, as Stundin reported: "Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question." So clearly they were significant enough for the judge.
3. Craig Murray has written about why he thinks the witness was included late into the proceedings:
> The hearings on the Assange extradition in January 2020 did not seem to be going well for the US government. The arguments that political extradition is specifically banned by the UK/US extradition treaty, and that the publisher was not responsible for Chelsea Manning's whistleblowing on war crimes, appeared to be strong. The US Justice Department had decided that it therefore needed a new tack and to discover some "crimes" by Assange that seemed less noble than the Manning revelations.
> To achieve this, the FBI turned to an informant in Iceland, Sigi Thordarson, who was willing to testify that Assange had been involved with him in, inter alia, hacking private banking information and tracking Icelandic police vehicles. This was of course much easier to portray as crime, as opposed to journalism, so the second superseding indictment was produced based on Thordarson's story, which was elaborated with Thordarson by an FBI team.
> The difficulty was that Thordarson was hardly a reliable witness. He had already been convicted in Iceland for stealing approximately $50,000 from Wikileaks and with impersonating Julian Assange online, not to mention the inconvenient fact he is a registered sex offender for online activities with under-age boys. The FBI team was in fact expelled from Iceland by the Icelandic government, who viewed what the FBI was doing with Thordarson as wholly illegitimate.
> [...] While Baraitser's eventual decision barred extradition on the grounds of Assange's health and US inhumane prison conditions, the second superseding indictment and Thordarson's accusations were accepted as a valid basis for extradition.
Given all that, I think it's fair to describe him as a key witness.
Let compare the two and see if they are two equal forces.
On one side we have a democratic government fabricating evidence in a legal case. Corruption by any definition, the break down of the building blocks of law and order. A government that knowingly fabricates evidence is not a government suited to hold power.
On the other side we have the pro-Assange camp.
Either the US government knowing fabricated evidence, or they did not. That all that matters. A government that fabricate evidence is corrupt beyond questioning, at which point the case itself it irrelevant.
I just now looked and noticed the journalist interviewed here also tells about his participation in a small pro-Assad info op, too, i.e., a bit of Douma denialism, an old Grayzone (or should I say Roublezone) favorite. Disgusting how low the Exile(d) has fallen.
I still remember when The Exiled were openly derisive of Assange. Now that they represent the same scene of broadly tankie-ish anti-American populism (not speculating on their reasons or connections to any regimes...), it seems it's a love affair.
I think it's good to have visibility into something like this, but I worry that we aren't typically getting meaningful discussion since people have dug to the Earth's core to fortify their positions on topics like this, and I'm not sure what the appropriate frequency of reposting should be.
Sigi the hacker's history is the subject of the latest episode of John Dolan and Mark Ames's Radio War Nerd (#288) which I can't link since it's patreon only. Gunnar Hrafn Jónsson is the guest and alleges that Sigi is a sex predator, serial con artist, and not even a hacker.
In 2010 I was living in Melbourne, where he's from. There was a pro Assange petition/demonstration in Richmond. I went over to sign. Assange was an Australian citizen. The Wikileaks leak was journalistic, as far as I could tell. The Swedish indictments seemed extremely dubious. It definitely felt like an extrajudicial persecution of a journalist.
Anyway, the petition did have something about Assange in it, besides the sign. It also demanded an immediate end to Australia's involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan. It called the US imperialist, condemned the alliance, mentioned Israel, various global left wing causes, calls for resistance, etc. I'm not sure if it mentioned freedom of the press at all. I don't remember the details, but it was enough that I didn't sign.
The whole thing presented Assange and wikileaks totally as activists. Of course, that doesn't mean that it isn't a press freedom issue. It is. It also doesn't make the pursuit of Assange ok. In some senses, it's been worse than a Putinesque hit. Hits don't corrupt legal systems and establish precedents.
It's been much harder to think of Julian & Wikileaks as a journalist than it should have been. They present on a nexus of belligerent, activist and journalist. This technically shouldn't affect legal processes, but... reality.
I do think there's an imperative for journalism to remain journalistic, in both the hard and soft sense. Freedom of the press does, IMO, require a distinctive press, easily identified as such.
We'll that's really traditional in Aus. Ask Peter Garret about the Nuclear Disarmament Party which had a fairly wide appeal initially. Later all the original founders resigned and advised everyone to have nothing whatever to do with it. Their one senator fro WA became an independent. Popular vehicle gets taken over by extreme radicals.
Was the petition organised by Asssange or people he approved? Or was it essentially a militant communist faction using it for their own purposes because, at most charitable reading, they're right about everything as you must agree as soon as you open your eyes.
As someone who is not leftist it appears to me to be prevalent and an extreme hindrance on genuine protest against the unconscionable.
Well... He would know. He's from activist land, and probably still has a lot of friends from the punk rock scene, became a serious environmental lobbyist and from there to being a centrist MP. I'm sure he had an interesting journey. Smart guy. I actually met him several times. Seems kind of like an alien in person. I didn't know about his Nuclear Disarmament Party.
>> Or was it essentially a militant communist faction
Best guess, it was mostly young radicals from University of Melbourne. But... I don't think this falls into the "other people using it for their own purposes" bucket either. Wikileaks & Assange are from this (specific) resistance clique themselves. It was their neighborhood. Both the organisation and the man have always represented themselves as hard left activists. Still do. This was back in the Bush-Howard days, or just after.
As with Garret's Nuclear Disarmament Party (I assume) there's a dynamic between progressive and radical thought that often leaves them in no man's land... or radical land.
Like I said, being politically weird doesn't mean you lose rights or can't be a journalist. So, I'm justifying anything. I'm noting that journalists and journalistic organisations, especially those reporting on war, should not blur lines between press and "not press" themselves. Press freedom is premised on you being press. Make that unchallengeable, and obvious at first sight.
Contrast this with Snowden, who knows what he is, what categories he falls into. As such, he always expected to face trial or exile. He wants to return and face trial, just with open proceedings. His was an act of civil disobedience. Meanwhile, not protected like the journalists he leaked to. They never blurred the lines between them.
NDP was a single issue party that had wider support among middle class, at that time Liberal voters than radicals. I think it was Garret's first foray into any kind of activism. From memory his rock band were mostly fairly moderate private school boys with the kinds of concerns about the state of the world that tend to cross party affiliations. In the 1980s nuclear apocalypse seemed somehow extremely likely in a way that is hard to relate if you didn't live through it. It didn't belong to party politics at all.
The NDP went from that base to became a front for the pro-soviet communist party while the cold war was still very much on, thus completely undermining its original purpose and relegating it to useless and disillusioning its founders including Garret. If you were tasked with trying to destroy it as a political force given they had a fair amount of support you couldn't have done it more effectively.
Seems advertising a protest in favour of journalistic freedom then flipping it to be about a bunch of other unadvertised issues and bundling it up in a petition is /exactly/ what I'm talking about. Assange's PR skills suck but I somehow doubt they suck that badly given how scared he evidently has been about what he is still facing. Being persecution by the USA in a supermax prison.
This story brings to mind the Gell-Mann amnesia affect.
"Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
Wow, captcha to create a HN account. The times are changing.
I was watching the 60 minutes rewind playlist on YouTube and happened to come across the original 60 minutes interview with JA. It was amazing to see him walking around outside during his initial house arrest and to see him so young. And it was a strange feeling to watch it knowing the outcome for the first time.
In that interview they make mention of a “poison pill” where JA was threatening the US government with disclosing explosive classified secrets if he were to be arrested or assassinated. I wonder if that poison pill is still in play?
Yet the question remains; on what basis are they holding him in prison right now? They have nothing on him. The UK government, the US government and media are the only entities embarrassing themselves here.
Any intelligent person with moral principles right now is starting to think the US is some kind of mafia state. Even patriotic American citizens are starting to denounce the government and pretending that the US government is a separate concept from the US (the country). It doesn't look good.
> Yet the question remains; on what basis are they holding him in prison right now?
sayeth Wikipedia:
> On 13 September 2019, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released on 22 September when his prison term ended, because he was a flight risk and his lawyer had not applied for bail. She said when his sentence came to an end, his status would change from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.
> Because imprisonment without trial is contrary to the presumption of innocence, pretrial detention in liberal democracies is usually subject to safeguards and restrictions. Typically, a suspect will be remanded only if it is likely that he or she could commit a serious crime, interfere with the investigation, or fail to come to the trial.
None of the charges against him are about anything that happened past 2014, and the only crime he has been convicted of is skipping bail, for which his prison term has already been served.
Yes, but had he not skipped bail, he would probably be on bail until extradited, so he’s in prison now because of the crime of skipping bail (not as part of the punishment for that crime, though.)
If only he hadn't spent the last however many years evading trial, then -- since all you fans of his seem so sure he's innocent -- then he'd have put all this behind him all those years ago, now wouldn't he?
So there was absolutely no sensible reason for him to avoid trial by holing up in an embassy for a decade, was there?!? Unless, of course, you aren't really so sure, after all...?
On the one hand, yes, I too am unimpressed with politicians who try to win by turning their opponents into clowns rather than by having their own positive message; on the other, that quote about ten lines from the hand of an honest man and finding something in them to hang him by.
so... your suggestion is to "let it slip" instead of using wikileaks as it was meant to be? I'd say theres a reason a guy like Julien runs Wikileaks instead of a guy like you.
I don’t even understand what you’re claiming I’m suggesting.
FWIW, WikiLeaks isn’t the only way to get important secrets into the public domain, not even the first — most internationally famous western newspapers have done this at some point — it merely specialised in this.
Not just that. PV also released audio recordings of Assange actually phone calling the State Department and warning them that a disgruntled ex-employee of Wikileaks was going to release un-redacted documents and the State Department should be aware of that. He didn't want anyone's life at risk because of the un-redacted release. Yet the State Department ignored his warning. He's proven to be one of the best journalists of the modern era and he's paying for it.
They have tortured Manning for decades and she hasn't corroborated that theory. She already had full access. She wouldn't have contacted Wikileaks in the first place if she hadn't seen the horrible "secret" material.
Oh, of course. She was only tortured for eight years. How silly of me! Surely everyone would be happy to receive that amount of torture!
Assange is only accused of trying to help Manning circumvent. Ergo, even evil USA prosecutors don't allege that he did help circumvent. Ergo, Manning had the same access after contact with Assange that she had had before contact with Assange. You are wrong and you should feel bad about it.
Was it eight years or was it decades?
Did she have full access or is Assange accused of trying to help her get it?
My original post here was partially about how Assange's supporters don't do their cause any good by exaggerating facts and distorting reality. My opinion of Assange's actions seems a lot more nuanced than many here - no doubt I am wrong on some points. But I refuse to feel bad just because you're trying to strawman me.
You are more "nuanced" than the my-country-love-it-or-leave-it troglodytes upthread. If you like, you can confirm that Assange didn't give Manning any access she didn't already have simply by reading the indictment. [0] In the section "ASSANGE Encouraged Manning to Continue Her Theft of Classified Documents and Agreed to Help Her Crack a Password Hash to a Military Computer", you can read:
17. The portion of the password hash Manning gave to ASSANGE to crack was stored as a "hash value" in a computer file that was accessible only by users with administrative-level privileges. Manning did not have administrative-level privileges, and used special software, namely a Linux operating system, to access the computer file and obtain the portion of the password provided to ASSANGE.
18. Had Manning retrieved the full password hash and had ASSANGE and Manning successfully cracked it. Manning may have been able to log onto computers imder a usemame that
did not belong to her. Such a measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of disclosures of classified information.
19. Prior to the formation of the password-cracking agreement, Manning had already provided WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of documents classified up to the SECRET level that she downloaded from departments and agencies of the United States, including the Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports and Iraq war-related significant activity reports.
Keep in mind that indictments only give the prosecution's opinion of the case, and are not evidence of any defendant having done or not done anything. However, if they only claim (without evidence) that he agreed to crack a hash, we can be sure they have no evidence he did crack the hash.
It took me literally three minutes to find this document and another five to find the relevant section.
Maybe some people are tempted to on-the-one-hand-on-the-other this case because it's confusing and that seems somehow fair. The case is inherently unbalanced, however. On one side is a man who, by himself, has suffered isolation and imprisonment for years and faces the prospect of "decades" more of the same. On the other is the giant secret bureaucracy who inhabit the forever-face-stomping boot. No one on that side will spend a day in prison. Their obvious overreach and abuse of process should mean that Assange doesn't either. Normal cases in which investigators and prosecutors violate the Constitution are thrown out by judges.
> If you like, you can confirm that Assange didn't give Manning any access she didn't already have
Sure, nobody is arguing over the basic, well-known facts of the case. We don't need to re-hash the indictment to agree on that.
The question that remains, though (because I am not so familiar with the US legal system) is if failing to commit a crime absolves you of the crime of conspiring to commit it. But I guess there's plenty of case law and precedent around it, being that criminals seem to be constantly a) conspiring and b) failing to commit crimes.
The first 5 sentences of your last paragraph describes pretty much every private citizen facing serious charges in any legal system on earth (maybe not the "forever-face-stomping boot" bit, but I am assuming that was just added for colour). I'm not being facetious, because there are people who genuinely do not believe in crime or punishment - are you one of those? Because this case hasn't been put in front of a judge, so how could it have been thrown out?
All but one of the charges are for espionage, a crime the Obama Justice Department decided they couldn't charge against journalists, whether USA citizens or not. This was called the "New York Times Problem". [0] Espionage, since it is a "political" crime, also wouldn't sustain extradition from UK.
The 18th and final "conspiracy to hacking" charge, tacked on to give the UK judges (who should have thrown this case out years ago) a fig leaf, pretends to be of a different nature, but it isn't really. This is the charge for which notorious sociopath, conman, fraudster, and convicted pedophile Thordarson provided the supporting testimony he has now recanted. [1]
The bastards had hoped to bolster a very particular interpretation of a chat log with Thordarson's now-recanted testimony. That interpretation is now very weak. First, they can't actually prove that "Nathaniel Frank" was a pseudonym for Assange. Who's to say it wasn't a pseudonym for Thordarson? In addition, although it is the prosecution's theory that it was possible to crack a password given the partial hash Manning had, testimony before the UK court has contradicted that. [2]
IANAL, but my observation of USA court proceedings leads me to suspect that your question about conspiracy has no definite answer. Conspiracy is always a discretionary charge, which makes sense because there is no victim and no harm. "Discretionary" is nearly synonymous, in this context, with "political", which quality of espionage charges typically excludes extradition. It's often used against criminals who have been careful to leave no evidence of the underlying crime. It is also used to bully innocents without evidence of underlying crime.
Prosecutors in normal criminal cases don't push conspiracy as far as they theoretically could, because normal USA juries don't have infinite patience for pursuing the worst possible interpretations of inconclusive evidence. "National security" cases, however, aren't heard by normal juries. Usually some pretext is found for excluding a jury trial altogether, but when that doesn't work they rely on the TLA-friendly hang'em-high juries found in the Eastern District of Virginia where all these cases are tried.
However, this case isn't currently being tried anywhere in USA. Right now it's a UK extradition case. In such cases justice should override deference to zealous prosecution, as the same judge's previous ruling with respect to squalid USA prison conditions acknowledges.
I mean I went to MSNBC on Saturday and the front page had like 5 stories about Trump.
Julian Assange just isn't going to drive enough clicks.
There is no conspiracy here, this is a side effect of the internet destroying the media's business model.
Julian Assange would have been a really interesting Sunday morning discussion in the 90s. The media can't really afford interesting discussion at this point though.
What a surprise, the entire media history against Assange is a bunch of bullshit. Blows my mind that people can be so critical of mainstream media and doubt everything they say, but suddenly believe them 100% when it comes to something like Assange.
The media commentary I saw in the U.K. before I left was generally on the lines of “US shouldn’t be going after him this was journalism, and he should’ve gone to Sweden instead of hiding from the law”. People can be more than one thing.
The Sweden charges and investigation were an obvious pretext to have him extradited to the USA. The UN special investigation concluded as much. So this is just like accusing a Russian dissident fleeing Russia that they didn't attend some fake trial in Belarus.
Given that he is in fact being extradited to the US from the U.K., the US trying to get him from the UK to Sweden does nothing to achieve this end and actually makes it slightly harder for them to ultimately extradite him owing to the weaker political connection that Sweden has with the USA relative to what the UK has with the USA. (The U.K. like to think it has a “special relationship” with the USA, Sweden isn’t in Five Eyes and is not a member of NATO).
Do you have a link to the original UN report, because the newspapers reporting on the report are very obviously engaging in a game of telephone with what it actually says. I don’t know which newspapers are closer to the truth, but they’re sufficiently dissimilar that some of the claims I have encountered must be outright false.
Here is official correspondence between the UN special rapporteur and the Swedish Foreign Ministry on this topic - this was easier to find for me than the official report, but I think it contains the relevant claims:
In particular, section 3 - Reported arbitrariness of the preliminary investigation - raises 11 ways the judicial proceedings were highly problematic, each with numerous instances of such behavior. Quoting a few of the more egregious ones, an order for his arrest was issued a few hours after two women first contacted the police about the possibility of compelling an HIV test for Assange; an official statement hadn't even been collected from one of the women yet; no statement from Assange had been requested or collected before emitting the arrest warrant; official statements made by the accusers were modified post factum in the police databases; and that both the investigating officer and an attorney for the two accusers (who sought to reopen the case after it was first closed) were both friends of a former Swedish minister of justice "at the time when Swedish security police unlawfully kidnapped and handed over two persons to CIA-custody and subsequent torture".
This final collaboration may be exactly one of the reasons why Sweden would have been preferred as the extraditing state vs the UK. It's also important to note that, unlike Swededn, the UK is a common law country where the mechanisms for protecting individual rights are significantly different from the civil law system in Sweden.
They trumped up fake rape case in order for him to be brought to Sweden when they would extradited him to us.
Rape is serious accusation, but if you look at this case you can clearly see she got paid to go to court. They had sex, he left the sweeden and months after that she changed her mind and decided it was a rape.
The closest I have to the original statements are reports in newspapers such as the following. At the very least the acts described here seem to me to be in violation of either section 1 or 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (I don’t understand the difference) by the standard of section 75.2.d (being asleep). IIRC this is basically why the UK judge agreed to the extradition to Sweden, as I think extradition generally needs the act to be an offence in both places? Though I may have misunderstood that.
To clarify a little bit: according to the UN special rapporteur, the two women whom he supposedly rape did indeed NOT accuse him of rape - it was Swedish authorities that extended their request (forcing him to undergo an HIV test) to charges of rape. I believe this is what GP is referring to.
"People can be more than one thing" is VERY important.
Guys like this are free candy for foreign intelligence agencies and vital tools in waging war against the United States. It would be useless to create them as spies and saboteurs out of whole cloth, when it's so much more effective to find guys with a grievance… a REAL grievance… and turn them, own them, use them to full advantage.
Assange is a pawn and, like so many of us, not a good person. Doesn't mean he can't have had good motivations and goals. Doesn't mean those goals can't have proven useful to others.
"Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
I'm no trump supporter, but that shouldn't mean I or anyone else think he should go to jail for maybe costing her the election. Being a useful idiot or costing someone an election aren't (or at least shouldn't be) crimes. Also, its really questionable whether the US should be pursuing criminal charges against anyone who's never been to the States.
I think this whole case demonstrates what a nightmare the authorities can put you through in a supposedly Liberal, Democratic, Law abiding set of nations, just because they want to. That should scare us all.
My point (that I think you're referring to?) is that US law shouldn't apply to people not in the US. There are a few well established exceptions (Murder, Rape, Piracy (with boats) and terrorism), but aside from those most nations accept that things happening outside their borders aren't subject to their laws...
That is most definitely untrue, especially with the nowadays. If I steal someones credit card information in Australia and use it, I am most definitely breaking Australian law even though I never set foot on Australian soil. My company had a ransomware attack in Germany, the people committing the crime did not reside in Germany, we still filed charges in Germany and the attackers did break German law. The police did of course not tell us:"Oh well, the attackers don't live in Germany, so no law was broken."
I think we all agree SOME crimes should be prosecuted irrespective of where they happen.
Maybe Ransomware attacks should meet that standard? Maybe Assanges acts should too.
But now you have to be careful. Who decides which crimes? What if they get it wrong? Should I face prosecution for legally drinking at 18 in the UK when the US sets a higher age limit?
I think there are a lot of crimes that US takes no interest in, that are much MORE arguably worthy of extraterritorial prosecution.
So at best this is very selective prosecution. And that's unjust by definition.
Looks like some places have added planes from/to/through their airspace, sex crimes against minors and space craft to the list of extraterritorial coverage. No one else is doing espionage, computer crimes, fraud, etc like the USA...
Assange's main mistake is that he underestimated how corrupt politicians are and how apathetic citizens are.
I wonder if he would have started Wikileaks if he had understood human nature. What's the point of helping society if it's a steaming pile of crap?
This is a lawless dog-eat-dog world. The laws only serve criminals who are able to disregard them and not get caught. These are the real beneficiaries of our system.
> But if Assange wants freedom, all he needs to do is leave the embassy.
> But if Assange wants to get out of jail, he just needs to go through the UK courts.
> But if Assange didn’t commit any cyber-crimes, the evidence will show that.
> But if the evidence was made up, it probably wasn’t important to the case.
>>> YOU ARE HERE
> But if Assange dies in jail, that’s life.
> But if Assange had fought his case in the American legal system, we could have had a real discussion in this country about the relationship between journalism and the regime, before it was too late.