WikiLeaks Founder Added To The Interpol Wanted List
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There are few better ways to damage someone's credibility than alleging rape, even if the allegations don't hold water.
As long as we're on the tin-foil hat path, being dragged to Sweden would place him into custody there. (I know, he's wanted 'for questioning' - that's what the Red Notice is based on). That would give the USA (which has an extradition treaty with Sweden) plenty of time to build a legal case against him without worrying about him disappearing or pulling more PR stunts.
As long as the USA doesn't charge him with something that is punishable with the death penalty (most EU countries won't extradite suspects that would face that), it's into the bureaucratic legal mill for him.
Most alleged rapists don't constantly relocate around the world like Assange. People who don't hop from country to country don't end up on Interpol watchlists because generally, the country that wants to take them into custody just directly negotiates with the country they're residing in.
I'm not saying Assange moves around a lot to avoid the Swedish justice system--the idea that he does it for the interests of Wikileaks is credible enough--but regardless of his motivation for moving around from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that's the kind of behavior that elevates a matter from a simple extradition matter to an international watchlist.
I have no idea whether he's guilty, but he should certainly return to Sweden to stand trial.
He hasn't been charged with anything.
If you're innocent, there's no moral obligation to stand trial. The onus rests with the accusers to make the case. It may or may not be in the accused's best interest to offer a defense, but I fail to see how he's bound merely by the accusation.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/08/20108211530...
The converse is true also. Those that support Wikileaks appear to believe that it is impossible for Mr Assange to have committed any crime and that the grievous nature of the accusations means that it's all a conspiracy.
If the accused were guilty the best thing to do would be to make a big leak (I gather they hold information and don't leak it immediately, a power play for sure) immediately before the accusations became widespread or before being arrested at the latest - that way the support of those without objectivity on your own side can be won.
In short, lack of objectivity is a two way street.
His lawyers have pointed out that it's not a valid one since an EAW requires criminal charges to be filed first (and thus no EU state is obliged to pay it any attention and there's no chance whatsoever that it will result in an extradition).
And the Swedes have refused his offer to meet them both in Sweden and in the UK in the past eight weeks...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/30/interpol-wanted-...
I'm a political science student and a web developer, and though I don't claim to be an expert on either, I think a lot of you seem to think that the world is a whole lot simpler than it actually is. I've said it before—I think a lot of what makes geeks great at conceptualizing data and logic makes them terrible at understanding nuance and subtlety, and without the ability to see shades of grey, you're always going to have simplistic, naive understandings of the world. How do you operate on a day-to-day basis when you think that the government is out there to take away your freedoms and cover up conspiracies at every turn?
I don't think anyone here (or very few at least) honestly believes that the government is foundationally motivated to take away freedoms or cover up conspiracies. I'll concede only that considering Assange's point of view as one operational principle in the complex, subtle machinery of society is at least not a bad intellectual exercise --- if not more.
Moreover, Assange's tactics are fundamentally technological. Wikileaks and its operation both depend and reflect upon the capacity of the internet to share information with very low transaction costs. This is another face of the same arguments that Zuckerberg or Schmidt have made on the intersection of society, internet, and privacy.
Finally, Wikileaks is one gigantic hack with possibly global repercussions. I'm fanatically interested to see how it plays out.
For HN to have a greater than passing interest in this seems rather characteristic of the community. Moreover, meta-discussion of this nature has been repeatedly discouraged, and ad hominem rhetoric is pretty low on the discourse hierarchy. Cut it out.
- "Anyone surprised he hasn't 'disappeared' yet?"
- "I have a conspiracy theory that the day he does get rubbed out, he won't publicly die, he'll just be "hiding" forever. Some nefarious organization will privately fill his role and take over Wikileaks."
From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1948734:
- "The value of Wikileaks is that it makes secrecy more difficult for governments [...] Sadly, much of what has been leaked shows simply that the government is putting on a show for the American people and that much of what is kept secret is done so for propaganda reasons, not security reasons."
- "If public release of this information is damaging to US interest, the answer should not be to suppress this information, but rather to behave in an agreeable way in the first place."
- "So, yes. I do say that governments should have no secrets."
- "Every time I hear someone criticize Wikileaks it just seems to me like they simply don't want to know what's happening in the world."
From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945352:
- "...the only reason for political parties is to have places where various special interests can line up against each other."
- "The government is censoring our means of communications, end of story."
- "While it no longer makes economic sense to manufacture buggy whips, perhaps there is a Renaissance in the construction and sale of jack boots?"
I'm not 100% pro-government, and I'm not at all pro-American (though I think America has not-completely-deserved bad reputation), but these issues are complicated and nuanced, and I get the impression many of these commenters think they know a whole lot more than they actually do. A lot of this stuff is on the same level of discourse I expect from YouTube comments, not Hacker News, and I find it kind of upsetting because this is one of the few public communities where I'm pretty consistently impressed by the level of discourse.
So my apologies if it seems like I'm lashing out, but I really don't like seeing this bizarre late-night-AM-radio underside of HN.
2. The belief that shutting down a few domains selling counterfeit goods and trafficking stolen goods is the first step toward widespread government censorship of the internet. My thoughts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945648
Americans need to personalize the enemy. It's one reason China is so confounding - Americans simply have no idea who's in charge there, and hating 'the Chinese' as a nation has more than a whiff of bigotry... yet it's hard to get worked up about nebulous concepts like 'the Communist party'. Americans need their Hitler or Tojo, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam, Ahmadinejad, or Bin Laden.
Assange is just the poster child. He's not the phenomenon. Literally any college student has the tools to leak stuff to the Web in a way that will be difficult or impossible to suppress. Just post it all over. Stick it on Digg and Facebook, link to it on Twitter, upload it to a few filesharing networks. Wikileaks is helpful to a leaker because everything that appears there gets instantaneous publicity and a slew of immediate mirrors, which gives authorities a very short window within which to try and censor it. But Wikileaks is hardly essential, and Assange is even less so.
So turning the guy into a martyr is utterly counterproductive. That'll just spawn copycats. Angrier copycats. A better strategy is to make his life seem miserable. Just the total opposite of fun. Try to convince people that leaking stuff onto the net is a recipe for being slandered, being followed, and being subjected to endless, unglamorous, thoroughly unsexy bureaucratic harassment. One parking ticket per day for the rest of your life.
He will be dragged into court over and over. On the days when he isn't in court they will make him out to be a fugitive, forced to live in caves and avoid all his friends and loved ones. On the days when he is in court he will tend to look like either a criminal or a victim. None of this will stop Assange, of course, but Assange is powerless without the rest of the world: The people who are in a position to leak stuff to Wikileaks. They are the audience. And the message to them is: You can leak, sure, but you'll be found out, and then you'll either be arrested or be followed continuously for the rest of your life by men in black who are just waiting for you to slip up.
That one left me breathless. Surely no government would be that cruel.
FSB could make him disappear (they could fake a botched kidnapping operation by CIA or FBI) and everyone will instantly suspect the Americans, and it will damage relations between US and EU countries.
The police have been proven to be rather.. sub-par in politically-loaded cases.
An example: Claiming Peter Sunde wrote the pirate bay search engine when the name and phone-number of the programmer who did was in the sourcecode on one of the seized harddrives.
The prosecutor in Assange's case has also been questioned by peers and media alike for questionable behaviour and decisions from day 1 of Assange's case.
He offered to give statements and be questioned in Sweden, and his lawyer asked the authorities for permission to leave Sweden. They declined his offers, and gave Assange permission to leave the country.
It's not being handled very well at all.
Look, there's a woman somewhere in Sweden who claims that Julian Assange raped her. Either he did, or he didn't. If he did, he should be hung from the tallest tree. If he didn't, she should be hung from the tallest tree. But it's an extremely serious charge either way.
a) Whether wikileaks's recent actions have been good or bad, and
b) Whether one individual forced sex upon another individual in a hotel room in Enkoping last August
would be uncorrelated. And yet I can predict your opinion on one with quite high accuracy based on your opinion on the other.
I mean, not only don't you have any evidence, you don't even have a formal accusation. I'd think we can leave politics out of this one and delegate to common sense. As far as the guy's personal character, he's probably a bit of a prima donna -- that doesn't mean he robbed any banks (no evidence of that, either).
They're looking for some way to crucify him; do you really think he'd just hand them something?
The dude doesn't exactly seem to be one of life's alpha males. Suddenly getting a lot of action at the age of 39 due to newfound fame could easily have gone to his head. Who knows?
I thought the criminal corrections system was about rehabilitation, not Hammurabi-style eye-for-an-eye justice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_law#Objectives_of_Crim...
The desire to revenge ourselves upon those who do us wrong is a perfectly natural and normal part of human nature -- as natural as curiosity or love. If you've ever been the victim of a crime or another injustice you'll know the strength of the feeling. Where there is no functioning criminal justice system, private vengeange is a major problem, often tearing societies apart in murderous generations-long feuds. So as a major part of civilization, we outsource our revenge to the state, allowing victims to gain satisfaction against their attackers in an ordered and sensible way.
Deterrence of future crimes, temporary removal of criminals from the streets, rehabilitation of bad people into good people (which, incidentally, hardly ever happens) -- these are all secondary goals. The primary goal is to enable our natural human thirst for vengeance to be satisfied in a neat and controlled way.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101118/wl_afp/swedencrimeinter...
However, tarring and feather his political/espionage/leaking work with personal allegations seems wrong to me. His work at Wikileaks and drunken party happenings don't bear any relation to each other. Pursue him for being reckless with stolen diplomatic materials and prosecute him for it if there's a case under the law. Don't tar and feather his reputation like this, I think it's the wrong way of going about it.
Then you are starting to believe all the misinformation that the government is trying to spread about him. This is how the discredit people and this information, since they can not actually deny it.
I really believe that this is one of the greatest actions to happen to democracy in a long time, and everybody should be rejoicing in these leaks.
We need more transparency in government, and there are people out there willing to do this, and get in all sorts of trouble for it. Fortunately he has left Australia, the government here would be more than happy to send him over to the USA on any trumped up charges.
Do you remember when wikileaks launched, it was described as an anonymous organization "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa"? When their website had a raw archive of documents on the front page?
The changes in wikileaks started happening before the government became very interested in them. They became much more focused on fund-raising, manipulating the media to their advantage, editorializing the leaked material, and Assange became the figurehead associated with every release of information.
Apple has Jobs. Microsoft has Gates. It was Jordan and the Bulls. Wales is calling for donations on Wikipedia.
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20101027_wikileaks_and_cultur...
by and large, people with a problem with WL have a problem with the implementation. they want the warning messages to be reworded, and maybe have a 3px box-corner radius. i dunno, you think 5px would look too soft? anyway, what harm is there is letting him do whatever he does? he's not taking info himself, he's at the mercy of his submitters. i'd certainly love to see a zynga tag go up on WL, but until then we have our wonderful government and military to pay attention to and read about. consider it political pornography.
That's nice. Because it's not the greatest thing to happen to Afghanistan democracy for a long time, given the vigour with which the Taliban seem to be using it (and previous leaks) to identify and punish (ie, murder) Afghani informers.
They've said they intend to hunt down and punish informants named in the Wikileaks docs, and they have a long enough history of brutality towards informants (as you'd expect of any side in a military conflict) that it's only prudent to take them seriously.
But sure, let's all sit behind the safety of our computer screen in our (relatively) free and democratic society, and scoff at the possibility that this might make the struggle yet more difficult for people fighting for a chance at freedom and democracy in their own land.
But we haven't. So until someone shows that they have been killed, I presume that they haven't. That doesn't mean that it won't happen in the future.
Still, it'll hardly embolden anyone who might've been considering becoming an informant.
So, fair enough of you to presume no killings have eventuated _yet_, but it's a diversion from the main point: you can't call it a step forward in the struggle for freedom and democracy in Afghanistan.
Actually, I haven't heard a single government report about Assange or Wikileaks at all. It's my own judgment I came to.
There's a big gap between Wikileaks' stated goals and the actual results of their actions. I'm looking at the potential consequences of some of this - releasing documents related to nuclear disarmament in Pakistan, a Politburo agent risking his life to protect dissidents - this isn't greater transparency, this is stupidity.
> We need more transparency in government, and there are people out there willing to do this, and get in all sorts of trouble for it.
There's a place for secrecy - counter-terrorism, investigating human trafficking smuggling, sensitive negotiations where a local population is sympathetic to violence against minorities, but the country's leaders want to work with the USA to stop genocide and suicide bombing. Transparency sounds great as a buzzword, but you need some pragmatism and discretion too. That's not government misinformation - just my researched and studied opinion on the matter.
There is nothing in what you say that constitutes a critique of the project management going on at Wikileaks. You're saying their schedule is slipping, or that the goal is succumbing to yak shaving? Look at what site you're on.
You can't always plan the outcome and/or the effect of a project. It is the nature of the entrepreneur to execute on their idea and let the chips fall where they may, and indeed the very site that you've spent enough time on to earn a five-figure karma has a culture and a tradition that glorifies the MVP: minimum viable product. What of WL in that light? How is it that your judgement comes down so squarely against such a central concept of the HN world this time? I don't think politics is a good enough reason here, and Assange cannot be faulted for not being able to predict the future. Shorter: let's look at YouTube's original plan, shall we?
Maybe the lesson you're teaching is that the best MVP is an appropriate MVP? An MVP that has a known outcome and thus is the perfect project: one with a known need and no competition, a pure niche?
The above may be blunt, and I don't mean to raise a One True Scotsman specter, but I think it's appropriate to question why WL is not given the conceptual-outcome leeway generally allowed to MVPs, or whether they need it at all.
(Yes, this also applies to the poorly planned and poorly executed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government doing stupid shit in a war is not a justification to leak unrelated diplomatic cables that risk getting good people killed for no good reason)
At least provide some evidence of a great increase in risk that people will be killed.
I've heard of few to no claims that people are now at a high risk of death due to these cables from anyone other than the Sarah Palins and Congressman King's of this world. Sec. Def. Gates stated that the consequences for U.S. foreign policy will be fairly mild.
Once such inflamed rhetoric is removed form your comments, I can't see how your position holds water.
Further, I fail to see a gap between Wikileaks stated goals and the results. The results you claim (potential consequences related to Pakistan nuclear activity, protection of dissidents), even assuming they are valid and therefore in opposition to Gates concern level, are relatively minor in comparison to the stated goals: much higher degrees of government transparency brought about by the constricting of secret communication. That being the (summarized) stated goal of Wikileaks, the reality is it is long term. If this is step 1 of 100 that leads to a government that cannot maintain the levels of secrecy necessary to fabricate a path towards something like the Iraq War, then the results align perfectly with the goal.
However biased / inaccurate they may be, sites like http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ claim ~100k documented, civilian casualties in this past war. Lets divide by 100. If a leak prevents an action which would kill 1,000 civilians, and ends up causing a couple, is it worth it? Is it morally correct? Do the ends justify the means? Is not leaking something you believe could save 1,000-x lives morally correct?
I'd say slowing down an aggressive empire could be classified as a "good reason" likely to save many lives.
It takes some imagination to suggest that what Wikileaks has has done has cost lives. Approximately 3 million people have access to SIPRnet. It seems unlikely that Wikileaks could compromise it, yet foreign state intelligence would be unable.
Hasn't happened.
He'll certainly be written into the history books* for it.
*wikipedia edit logs
The rest of the world already knows that the US will break any law if it sees fit (GTMO anyone?) and is a morally and financially bankrupt state. I understand: if the US invades a country, it is "bringing democracy"; if the US spies and gets information it is foreign policy/diplomacy; if the US through buying oil and selling ammunitions supports a totalitarian regime like Saudi Arabia, it is business as usual, but if Wikileaks publishes damaging material a US soldier submitted without coercion, it is terrorism.
[1] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/clinton-ordered-diplomats...
And remember, he is an Australian citizen so the whole treason thing doesn't apply.
In the olden days (like, a couple of years ago) classified documents would get leaked to newspapers. The newspapers would take a look at them and publish them in excerpt alongside an editorial talking about how they thought long and hard about whether it was in the public interest to publish this particular document and blah blah blah. As I understand it, based on my reading of the law, they were technically committing a crime by doing so, but the authorities never bothered to pursue prosecution against the media outlets and just prosecuted the original leaker. Why not? I don't know, maybe because responsible publication of leaks is acknowledged to be a good thing, or maybe because it's not worth going to war with anyone who buys ink by the gallon.
Wikileaks, on the other hand, will publish huge swathes of documents in a much less restrained manner than the New York Times would. It's concievable that they can be charged.
As far as I know, the law states that it's illegal to pass along classified documents, and it doesn't restrict the applicability of this law to the people who were supposed to have the documents in the first place.
Note that this does not apply to Bradley Manning or others who may be sources and who may have committed crimes in passing classified information to uncleared people. But as much as our political elites might wish it; embarrassing the government is not a crime.
International law can be very quirky (IANAL, but my work sometimes requires me to deal very directly with particular specific aspects of international law). Much of it comes down to precedent: if you can enforce a claim consistently for a long enough time, it becomes accepted and legitimate international law, which is the reason for the U.S. military's Freedom of Navigation (FON) operations. Conversely, if you allow others to regularly violate your national sovereignty in a particular manner without responding (even if only by formal diplomatic protest), then those particular rights may come to be accepted as no longer belonging to your nation.
A meta-observation: I've noted that posts saying, "he can't be prosecuted by the U.S." are generally getting many upvotes, while posts explaining how and why he could (not that he SHOULD, just that it's possible) are getting few or none. I can't know what other people are thinking, but it seems to me that people are voting based on what they would like to be true, rather than on what actually is true.
And even in this specific case, in espionage cases, the US can choose to prosecute and basically abduct anyone in the world they want, provided they're willing to put up with the political consequences. Not saying it's right, but if you think you can spy against the US (or many other countries) and face no consequences because you're not a US citizen, you might be in for a nasty surprise.
And yes, the U.S. can kidnap him and bring him into U.S. so they can charge him with U.S. law...but they can't charge him in another country under U.S. law and expect him to get arrested...not unless they go through the whole extradition thing.
But that's like saying, you fall under Chinese law, because they might send a hit squad to take you out for breaking their laws.
Yes might generally equals right internationally, but for now they are trying to put up the pretense that U.S. cares about foreign relations.
The people who abducted the suspect might be operating under USA law, and they might not be guilty when they go to the USA. However just because it's legal to do it in USA doesn't mean it's legal in the country they do it in. They would still be breaking the law in that country. Would you like if a person broke a USA law while in the USA and then said "But it's OK, it's legal under Irish law?"
To the person who posted this and those who upvoted this: you have power over the quality of the conversations on this site. Please give some thought to how you use it.
You know he is basically living as a fugitive, moving from place to place, working underground, etc.
This has nothing at all to do with any actual investigation, and everything to do with appearances in the American press. It's spin.