Ecuador to Expel Assange Within ‘Hours to Days,’ WikiLeaks Says | Hacker News Reader

Ecuador to Expel Assange Within ‘Hours to Days,’ WikiLeaks Says

bloomberg.com

222 pointsrugger241 comments

> WikiLeaks cited the unidentified person as saying the planned expulsion is a response to the organization’s recent tweet linking to a website that alleged money laundering and corruption during Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno’s time as United Nations special envoy for the disabled in Geneva. Foreign Minister Jose Valencia said last month that the government was “very surprised” by that and other actions by Assange and his lawyers.

It's generally a bad idea to insult your hosts, and expect to remain in their home.

There were all sorts of reports that he was a pretty taxing guest as well. Cleaning, hygiene, etc.

Clearly propaganda, and there was only the single source that as we can clearly see now was adversarial.

Consistent with many descriptions of what it was like to have Assange on one's sofa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le3jrp6LzjI

Those people are so smarmy and pathetic that it's pretty laughable to hear them whine. Which, I guess, is the intended effect of the video.

The complaints are so underwhelming that you wonder if these people have ever been on a camping trip, or, dare I say, drank an entire beer in one evening.

It's like, you really have to wonder, what if he were so bold as to place a plastic yogurt cup in the recycle bin without rinsing it out first? Is he capable of such things? After watching that video, I just don't know anymore...

The fact that he is an asshole is clearly unimportant compared to what he achieved as a whistleblower. Clearly, I don't give a damn and nobody should.

What a dominant way to handle that situation. Especially the rotted fruit.

I thought I read something about his cat shitting everywhere too, which was revealing as a cat companion myself. How rude.

As Eric Weinstein put it, "we are standing on shoulders of jerks"[1]. I posted it already here once, but it is such a valuable insight that I think it's worth repeating.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKeMIWVOnbo&feature=youtu.be...

Thanks for posting this, I hadn't given that thought much time and it was interesting to hear it put so succinctly. In my opinion it's a pretty valid perspective, however, it does create a very narrow definition of genius. I'd suggest that the loud stomps unsavory genius in their sensibilities may very well create a lack of space for the quite, introverted, polite, snowflake philosophical or artistic genius, and that this to me would be equally disappointing. I think a good underlying lens is meeting people where they are, whoever they are.

I wonder if Ecuador didn’t see hosting him as a kind of insurance against being targeted by wikileaks.

Correa was a genuinely good person. There are a number of other ways he demonstrated this.

Such as? It'd be interesting to see what else he's known for

I lived down there for 7 years that coincided with his presence in the country, and I've commented on the uniqueness of Correa as a politician before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5984041

I think it's still a good comparison: Correa was his country's Bismark. He was in the right place at the right time -- Bismark himself famously having said that the job of the politician is to listen for God's footsteps and grab onto His coattails as he passes by -- and he legitimately did build a massive amount of eg. roads, hospitals (some decent multiple of the previous N presidencies combined), reformed the tax service, got a ton of small businesses paying taxes for the first time ever (by making it incredibly cheap for even the very poorest small businesses to get into the system) ... and was pretty much like Bismark in relations with the opposition press, too.

I’d love to hear how long you’ve lived in Ecuador and how do you like it there?

I have little clout but as an American who visited for 2 weeks during the whole Snowden ordeal I felt it kinda "meh" looking at the place through expatriation goggles at the time. Quito is a very religious and conservative city, Baños is a cute mountain village with a quiet reserved culture, and Guayaquil was the more liberal but raw and somewhat... "boisterous" city. Not sure that word fits but outside of smoking pot and surfing all day in the costal town of Montanita all day I would say it's not a great ex-pat country. Overall the country felt very religiously devout and not starting to hockey-stick (at the time anyway) on tech-forward business and culture. It also is an OPEC country so it is bogged down with corruption and political issues though it does seem to strive to stamp them out. However, if your goal is South America and you would like to expatriate and remain in tech, Chile would be the place I would recommend most for all the programs the government is pushing for startups. Much more to say but I'll just wrap up with that...

You got it all wrong. Guayaquil is conservative and Quito more liberal.

I lived in a small fishing village, barring the occasional tourist and surf expedition further afield, and it's still my favorite place in the world.

I loved the only street noise being the occasional donkey. I worked over a tiny EDGE connection for years until real connectivity got to my area, working over a 'screen' session to a beefy VPS in the states.

I can't help but agree with some of the characterizations of the cities in Ecuador. But then again, personally I wouldn't understand someone who would come to the country with the primary intention of seeing those cities, saying to themselves "oh, wow, I want to see Quito or Guayaquil." I wouldn't get it. Guayaquil is kinda like Bangkok or other big cities in underdeveloped areas; bustling and alive and joyous in its own sort of way, but not something that'd draw me around the world to visit. FWIW, Loja and Cuenca are more pleasant cities to visit.

But a laid-back fishing village with good neighbors? With good sand-bottom beach breaks and warm water? Tuna and dorado right from the ocean, fresh local produce ... that's ideal for me, and I was already comfortable with small-town and rural life from my time in the United States.

Assange has not been on the wikileaks staff for 6 months, reportedly. It’s not even clear whether he has internet access anymore. And obviously, if they had been silent on this matter people would now throw accusations of a convenient coverup.

Well that's interesting. It suggests that whoever controls the Wikileaks twitter account may have intended this to happen. And it's a rather interesting time to be stirring up this particular pot in the UK...

> And it's a rather interesting time to be stirring up this particular pot in the UK...

Can you elaborate? I can't think of any reason why this would be more or less interesting than any time since the Swedes dropped the rape case. But i can't say I've been following that closely recently.

The UK is in the middle of a constitutional and social crisis that goes by the name of Brexit.

I'm aware. What's that got to do with Assange?

Assange is a polarizing figure. He's a reminder of how irritating it is to comply with international law (it wasn't an uncommon sentiment in the UK that they should just barge in to the embassy and get him anyway). He's a reminder of "overly liberal" European laws (there was a lot of talk about the supposedly unreasonable nature of Sweden's rape laws).

In other words, nothing directly, but just seeing his name again is, politically, so much fuel for the fire. In fact I see that this entire news story has been engineered by the Wikileaks Twitter account, both the actual story and the supposed reason for it.

He's a polarising figure amongst the very small number of people in the UK who a) have heard of him or Wikileaks, b) are more concerned with "overly liberal" European laws than someone who flees the country and enters an embassy to evade the laws of the country he was visiting at the time, and c} still cares about the opinion of someone who has managed to be rabidly partisan, anti-semetic, and is possibly a Russian asset.

I'm sure we're both biased by our respective echo chambers and peer groups, but the idea that Assange has or will have any impact on the current situation is just fantastical.

Is it known if he actually still is in the embassy?

Not to mention all his trouble started when he raped (allegedly) one of his former hosts, who had also put him up for free and was generally a fan until he violated the house rules on hygiene.

I can’t believe you still buy into that narrative. It has been shown over and over again that the rape accusations are questionable. Not guilty until proven so. Did we forget that?

Nobody who is a long-term friend or close acquaintance of Jake Appelbaum (ioerror), and isn't a sociopath themselves, believes he is innocent of rape. By association, it is quite hard to give Julian the benefit of the doubt, given their closeness and Julian's presence at several parties where Jake is known to have drugged and raped unsuspecting women/groupies.

Either way, Assange is free to be a man, walk outside those doors, and face his day in court for the crime he definitely committed: Violating the terms of his bail.

Bail. B-A-I-L. Assange was given bail. If he was going to be extradited to the USA, he never would have been given bail. Assange is just an attention-seeking snowflake who failed in his own Breitbart-esque attempt to control the political narrative, and now he's throwing a 7-year long pity party.

It would be nice to know if I committed a crime I could hide out in an embassy with free housing, free food and no bills.. I certainly wouldn't poop on the floor as a thank you.

He's not a guest in Moreno's home. He's a political asylum seeker in a sunless room in a sunless country, where he's been for seven years despite a UN panel ruling that he was being unlawfully detained.

Further, political pressure was put on Ecuador to mess with Assange by the US despite the above and more.

None of this is secret information. "Hacker News" letting this misinfo stand as top comment - I'm no longer surprised but I'm still disgusted.

If he liked keeping quiet he wouldn't need asylum in the first place.

After accusations of being a Russian mouthpiece during the 2016 election it might help their public image by releasing information regardless of how it might affect a former member.

Ecuadorian here.

Revealing the truth is not insulting us. Most of our people are(or at least should be) grateful that corruption activities are disclosed.

But it is not your people that are hosting, but the government. The Equadorian government are literally the only people assange should be on the good side.

the irony of what you just said.

Us: you're clearly partisan because you only publish bad things against muh abuela.

Also us: you don't self-censor to benefit your self-interest? That's just not smart.

Free Manning, free Assange and free Snowden.

These 3 individuals have shown the world the corruption and criminal activity our governments engage in and no matter how hard they try to silence them, eventually the truth will show through.

Thanks for the reminder - Manning is currently not free

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/08/chelsea-mann...

Clearly Manning is the most simpathetic of all mistreated 'leakers'. Truly, what does anyone gain by having her locked up?

I think the intent is to make life hard for whistleblowers to discourage others from doing the same.

And germany is thinking about creating laws to make the life of whistlelowers easier...

Just let that sink in..

au contraire!

There is EU wide whistleblower protection on its way. The motivation is to save money.

More details:

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2019...

The quote in the article mentions Cambridge Analytica so political whistleblowing could be part of the deal:

"Recent scandals such Cambridge analytica or Lux Leaks have demonstrated the importance of whistleblowers. That is why we need to provide them with a high level of protection across the Union. We should not expect anyone to risk their reputation or job for exposing illegal behaviour."

- Ambassador Luminița Odobescu, Permanent representative of Romania to the EU

> whistleblowers will first have to use internal channels within their organisation before calling on external ones (set up by public authorities) and, eventually, going for public disclosure.

Not helpful. The most important cases are the ones where blowing the whistle will incur reprisals and prevent the whistleblower ever reaching the other two steps.

(I don't see how "The motivation is to save money" though?)

In most cases I can remember, including the most high-profile ones, internal channels were indeed used. They were just ignored. It's the act of going outside those channels which triggered the disloyal reprisals.

I don't see much of a problem with making it mandatory.

You seem to be agreeing with the GP, so why do you say "au contraire"?

I mean, Manning is in jail because Manning chooses to be in jail. Manning had an immunity deal to testify in front of a grand jury and refused to do so, leading to the contempt of court charge that currently has her in jail.

She says she doesn't believe in the concept of being compelled to testify, which is fine, but the penalty for that is jail.

She is being held in solitary for 22 hours at a time. Isn't that a bit harsh for contempt of court?

Manning has been moved out of solitary confinement. https://thehill.com/homenews/437454-chelsea-manning-removed-...

depends upon the security stuff she holds secret...yes it sounds bad...but the other prisoners do not have security clearances and this the solution military justice came up with..is the best solution? probably not but tis the on they went with

She's not locked up for leaking, she's locked up for flagrant contempt in an active grand jury investigation, one which otherwise poses her no legal jeopardy, since she has both immunity and, for much of the subject matter, double jeopardy protection since she's been tried, convicted, and served her sentence for her involvement.

I'm rather struck by the realization here that if a person has spent significant amounts of time in prison being locked up for following their principles, they may start looking at getting locked up for their principles as, well, just something they do.

Is this a traumatic response to the initial experience or something more? After all, being willing to go to prison for your principles underlies much of 'real' activism.

Probably a mix of both.

There's also a certain sort of immunity brought about by the initial exposure.

There are a lot of reasons to not want to be in jail: not wanting to be confined, fear of physical violence... but as a middle-aged person with a family, friends and a job, being in jail for any length of time would just wreck my life. I'd lose my job, my relationship with my family would be strained, and I'd probably lose touch with most of my friends. Rebuilding afterwards would be difficult or even functionally impossible.

If I did have my life burned down around me once, my personality would probably tend towards not wanting it to happen a second time, but I could see another person saying "you can't burn ashes" and leaning into it.

I suspect she holds a tremendous amount of resentment towards her government and basically wants to give them the middle finger because she doesn't respect their legal process after it failed her so miserably

What about this "perjury trap" thing?

https://shadowproof.com/2019/03/21/chelsea-manning-believes-...

Either she committed perjury earlier or she didn't.

That's a thing in the past.

If she has perjured herself she certainly has no legal right not to be punished for it. Immunity agreements come in the form "come clean and tell us all". If she didn't, well, that was a stupid decision.

If she did not perjure herself there is no trap to be laid.

Principles aren’t principles if you only have them when they’re easy.

The US government shoved her in isolation for years. Even with immunity why should she help them now?

> Even with immunity why should she help them now?

Because if her previous testimony was not perjury, and the government is looking to probe around it, she is likely withholding exculpatory evidence that, were it in the hands of the government, they would be subject to sanction if they failed to turn over to the ultimate target of the prosecution and which might, simply by existing, result in abandonment of some or all of the charges being pursued.

Of course, if the prior testimony was perjury, the calculus is different.

She has actually just been released from a months stay in solitary confinement to general prison - for refusing to testify against Wikileaks and Assange

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3mnjz/chelsea-manning-i...

"The judge said she will remain jailed until she testifies or until the grand jury concludes its work."

Wow. Not even some specific number of months or anything. Appears not as a punishment but a blackmail. (edit: yes I miss the right word for this is, there is certainly a better one, I'd be happy to read a better one; edit2: right, extortion, thanks).

Its not a penal sentence, no; insofar as it is a pinishment it is a punishment for an ongoing offense, and continues as long as the offense continues.

And, blackmail is threatening to reveal a secret to get someone to comply, so, no, it's not that.

Yeah, those insignificant pedantic reasons make it not a punishment and not blackmail /s

I didn't say it's not a punishment.

But it's far closer to extortion than blackmail.

But that's true of compulsory legal process generally, not a special feature of confinement for contempt.

What happened to that whole fifth amendment thing?

> What happened to that whole fifth amendment thing?

Hence the immunity.

“But the Fifth Amendment doesn’t provide an absolute right to remain silent and not answer any questions. Rather, it protects people from having to answer incriminating questions about themselves.”

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/immunity-exchange-te...

That's literally how contempt of court works. The alternative is chaos, as people would just refuse to participate in the legal system with no repercussions.

There are all kinds of ways the justice system can induce compliance with legal orders, from fines to imprisonment, and none of them constitute extortion.

Free Ross Ulbricht as well. I feel more for him, to be honest. https://freeross.org

He was akin to a one man cartel, why shouldn't he be locked up? I'd guess there is a high risk he'd do it again if he had the chance. Unless you think it was OK because he was 26 years old and first time offender...

He definitely should have been locked up, but a double life sentence plus forty years without the possibility of parole for selling drugs on the internet seems like overkill

Sure, if "selling drugs on the internet" were his only crime.

I vaguely recall reading he (unsuccessfully) paid to assassinate people.

Edit:

Read it here https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

  Later that day, DPR messaged Nob.

  DREAD: ok, so can you change the order to execute rather than torture?

  DREAD: he was on the inside for a while, and now that he’s been arrested, I’m afraid he’ll give up info.

That was never proven, yet they used an unproven accusation in the case against him and nobody seemed to think that was an issue.

That's part of the controversy, everyone vaguely recalls that but is unaware that those accusations weren't even brought to trial (https://freeross.org/uncharged-crimes/). He was convicted of money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics by means of the Internet.

Why would anyone support this, the man is a psychopath willing to make money any way he can

I agree with free Snowden. But Manning and Assange had a history of leaking unredacted personal information that is indefensible. In the case of Manning, I might add that the leak didn’t show any major wrong doing. It illustrated some case of collateral damage, which we always knew (and the US military keeps public records of). It showed the underbelly of the US diplomacy, which turns out to be rather clean (some ambassadors commenting that the memos look generally very insightful and professional). And it caused some red faces of people who shared thoughts with US diplomats in confidence, and I don’t see how that could possibly be a good thing. Assange and Manning is really leaking for the sole purpose of leaking.

Manning revealed war crimes, yet the only person who went to prison was Manning.

That's all we need to know really. The system is broken und unable to fix itself.

Edit: Free Reality Winner

The system is not perfect, but the reason Manning went to jail is because she made an indiscriminate leak of secrets of which she did not review before she released them.

Had she only released material on stuff she had thought to be a crime, then there would have been a much stronger case to be made as a whistle blower.

It would be like if someone working at a hospital exposed a medical fraud scheme but leaked all the patient records of thousands of people who had nothing to do with scheme. They'd probably get hit with criminal HIPAA violations.

The reason Manning is in jail right now is because she refused to testify to a grand jury about WikiLeaks and got hit with contempt of court. She had been given immunity to testify so the jail time is purely on her.

>The system is not perfect, but the reason Manning went to jail is because she made an indiscriminate leak of secrets of which she did not review before she released them.

And what gives a government a right to have secrets in the first place? Except itself of course...

Normal operation of government is going to require some secrets.

One of the things leaked by Manning was blunt assessments of foreign figures by diplomatic staff. That's exactly the sort of thing that needs to be kept secret for international relations to function.

You mean like if manning had done as Daniel Ellsberg, she would not have been charged and put on trial?

Not saying she wouldn't have been charged anyway, just saying she would've had a stronger case that might have been winnable.

That Manning matter is settled. She has immunity and double jeopardy protection. Sitting in jail in protest of a grand jury is a futile gesture that says more about Manning’s need for attention than anything else.

I don't understand how you can claim this is a futile gesture. If she doesn't want to talk on the record, or state things which might involve snitching on someone I find that to be an admirable action to take.

By the end of the grand jury she will be freed, and she will be freed with the moral high ground. If you think having morals about not snitching is 'futile' that is your choice but many people take it very seriously.

Manning is willing to talk on the record and "snitch". She just doesn't want to do it behind closed doors. But all grand jury proceedings are done behind closed doors for good reason. Manning has no moral high ground here.

Secret proceedings simply shouldn't exist. I think personally that grand juries that are allowed to hold people indefinitely because they don't want to talk in a secret proceeding is wrong. Also, if she talks in a secret proceeding nobody will know if she deliberately said something incriminating aka 'snitched' or just gave innocuous information.

Since her giving secret testimony would raise doubts as to whether she snitched or not, she wants to do so openly in order to maintain her public good-will as a non-snitch. I think you are mistaken in saying that she doesn't have the moral high ground here. These proceedings should be illegal in this country, you shouldn't be allowed to hold someone for unspecified sentences to torture them into talking. That isn't how testimony should be gotten. I'm appalled by some of the opinions here.

I think it is far more defensible than illegally collecting this information and making the leak necessary and required in the first place. Since there are no repercussions for the latter, I don't see how you could call it indefensible. Since allegedly nothing happened.

You don’t think gunning down journalists and innocent civilians from a helicopter is “major wrong doing?”

War is messy, imprecise, and inevitably involves unintended (or possibly intended) civilian casualties. It’s a great argument for avoiding wars that aren’t absolutely necessary.

I think we all got caught up in wiki leaks and the seemingly good fight for truth, but to me, their truth looks biased.

I mean, you have to wonder why wiki leaks helped Trump win the election and then pretty much stopped their American leaks. Did the American military stop using murder drones? Wouldn’t Trumps taxes or the Mueller report be interesting? Why have all the abundance of White House leaks ended up in traditional media instead of on wiki leaks?

I’m not American though, so I’m not really that interested in your domestic politics. I prefer you to be working well with Europe, so it’s fair to say I don’t like Trump, but it’s not like your democrats were really a beacon of freedom and justice internationally either.

Living rather close to Russia, so close that they practice airplane bombing runs on our yearly political summit (folkemødet) and regularly fly on the border of our air space, I do wonder why wiki leaks never houses any Russian leaks. The Ukraine was invaded by the Russian military. Sure they dress up and use local militias to be able to deny it, but that’s exactly what happened. They even hacked the entire power grid, and left fallout which is still effecting Maersk because Maersk happened to use similar software. Yet not a single word on anything on wiki leaks?

Maybe it didn’t start out that way, and maybe Assange is not involved with it, but it sure seem like wiki leaks turned into something anti-democracy.

Pretty much the whole Russia angle was a big pile of crap for democrats to save face.

In my opinion, this hysteria is a big scandal for parts of the media, US institutions and the democratic party.

Not saying that Putin is our friend or that republicans are the better choice in the US (not from there).

What about all the actually guilty?

> Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team indicted or got guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies during their lengthy investigation, which is now complete.

> That group is composed of six former Trump advisers, 26 Russian nationals, three Russian companies, one California man, and one London-based lawyer. Seven of these people (including five of the six former Trump advisers) have pleaded guilty.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/m...

Not relevant to the accusation in my opinion. I also have trouble with indictments for making false statements to the FBI, since this institution has become part of a problem itself.

Comparatively, these people don't seem to be clean but I am lacking a reference here.

If you spend two years investigating _anyone_, chances are you can find a law they violated sometime in their life.

What a strangely disingenuous comment. If the FBI investigated me for two years they wouldn't be able to charge me with high profile financial crimes lol. How absurd.

You're 100% certain you've complied with all 70,000 pages of federal tax law and regulations? You've paid sales or use tax on all of your online purchases?

I said "high profile financial crimes" not obscure and rarely enforced legal technicalities.

Could it be that no Russian citizen is leaking because reasons? If there are no leaks from Russia what can they do?

I remember that the leaks about money hidden in the paradise countries contained a lot of russians too.

There are leaks from Russia though, like when their entire Olympic athlete program was outed in the doping scandal, or when they hacked the Ukrainian power grid, or the troll factories.

The leaks just never make it to wiki leaks.

So was those leaked by local press or other institutions? Were those leaked documents also sent to Wikileaks and they refused to analyze or host them? If not I see no problem in the fact that you have many options on how/where to leak, especially if you are in Russia/China you will have a better reach tif you expose politicians and corruption if you use local (in your native language) press, the local journalists can also have the advantage they do not need translates,they are already in the country and can travel and verify things, they have contacts.

Snowden and Assange are not being detained.

The very second Assange walks out of the embassy he will be.

Snowden too. He can't go anywhere outside Russia without the threat of capture and extradition, and Russia is only keeping him 'safe' because it pisses off the USA.

Did they change anything? Did anything they do matter in the end?

Yes, and by a great deal.

And what pray tell have you done?

I still can't believe he has been there for 7 years.

If nothing else, his persistence has been fairly impressive.

I'm still bitter that he became so thoroughly partisan, though. Especially since his organization has or had the motto: "to publish fact-based stories without fear or favour".

He's certainly just exhibited some behavior true to that statement.

>Especially since his organization has or had the motto: "to publish fact-based stories without fear or favour".

I honestly can't believe why anyone thought this after he published the first thing that put Wikileaks on the map, the embarrassing Collateral Murder video.

It's funny because before that came out, I considered donating money to Wikileaks because I thought it'd be more like an organization like Wikipedia. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people were seduced by the name "Wikileaks" piggybacking off the credibility and mission of Wikipedia.

I guess no one had any critical thinking skills or were prone to conspiracy because everyone from progressives to libertarians started eating everything he did up.

EDIT: Wow just did a search on HN to see what people said back then about it and it seems a few people had the same take I did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1243842

Wikipedia is extremely biased.

[citation needed]

Yes but that's inherent in how Wikipedia works. Wikileaks was just Julian Assange (and whoever else worked with him).

You don't think Collateral Murder should've been released?

No I don't think an organization that was ostensibly trying "to publish fact-based stories without fear or favour" should have published the highly edited and misleading video which was packaged to go viral. That told me everything I needed to know about his intellectual honesty and what to expect from Wikileaks. I guess no one else had the same takeaway.

That video clearly showed disgusting and murderous behavior of US armed forces. They opened fire on and killed a passing motorist who stopped to help a wounded individual. Are you aware that that is what happens in the video?

It made it clear to the world that American armed forces could never be trusted to behave honorably in a very different country full of brown people that they think are “terrorists”.

He editorialized that video to hell and back, removing audio which humanized the chopper pilots, condensing 40 minutes into 2, and a whole bunch of other editorial tricks to make the people getting murdered more sympathetic.

The only difference was that it was under a Republican administration and Democrats were all for it.

They released an edited and unedited version, as you should know if you indeed watched it.

As far as the ethics of it go, it is pretty typical for media not to air a forty minute video in a one minute news segment. Perhaps the other thirty eight minutes of the killers just chatting was more newsworthy though.

I absolutely agree with you and him.

What I find distasteful is that the people who were cheering him on when he was doing it to Republicans are now calling him a Russian asset for doing it to democrats.

And vice versa for the Republicans.

> Democrats were all for it.

Er, no, they generally weren't. WikiLeaks support on the left at the time was mostly from the far left that sees the Democrats as virtually indistinguishable from the Republicans. WikiLeaks has never had support (except maybe in the context of the Trump campaign) from any substantial portion of either major US party.

I mean, it's possible that he's lost his mind during the 7 years of imprisonment without trial.

The leaked chat logs don't sound like he's lost his mind

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4378830-Excerpts-Fro...

He lives in a diplomatic compound that he is free to leave at any moment. He's gone without trial by choice. The real victims here are the poor Ecuadoran diplomatic staff, and his ex-cat.

Oh, and his victims, of course.

What victims?

His rape victims.

This has been disproven, so: citation needed, please...

No it hasn't, there hasn't been a trial. That's kinda the whole point of him being in the embassy.

Well, the recent immediate point of him being in the trial is avoiding the British bail jumping charges from his flight to the embassy to evade the extradition on the rape charges; the extradition is no longer active.

But it could become active again very quickly while he is held by the UK authorities. The rape case is still open afaik.

In Britain, people are innocent until proven guilty.

Pulling out the chloroform jar?

>He lives in a diplomatic compound that he is free to leave at any moment

He will be arrested if he leaves. How is that particularly different from say HMP Prescoed?

Or from cowardly refusing to face his trial.

On the 20 August 2010 the police got the report and on the same day the duty prosecutor got the information.

On 30 August, Assange was questioned by the Stockholm police

On 1 September 2010, Överåklagare Marianne Ny decided to resume the preliminary investigation.

On 27 September 2010 assange left the country, now a month after he had been at the police.

On 18 November 2010, Marianne Ny ordered the detention.

Now that sound like a person running from their crime. Its the most slow motion running of any reported case to reach the news. I also must applaud the Swedish legal system for effective and swift action, in particular for reaching a conclusion three months after the initial investigation when no new facts had been established. If only the prosecutor had reached the decision from the beginning, rather than wait until the accused leave the country, wait a bit longer and then order the detention.

Did I mention rape cases are about the second highest prioritized crime in Sweden, next after murder? There were no murder spree between 20 August 2010 and 18 November 2010.

It’s disingenuous to imply he’s being held against his will in violation of his human rights when in fact the UK government has gone to great lengths to get him to show up to a criminal investigation, and his appeals in the courts were entirely ordinary.

In effect he is being held against his will, since he will almost definitely be extradited if he leaves the embassy.

No, he really isn't. But he will almost definitely be extradited the moment he lives the embassy. It might be a refugee situation, fleeing the US in fear of his life, but he's from Australia..

His choice is either stay in the embassy or extradition to the US where he will face a very severe penalties, possibly the death sentence.

Technically he's not being held against his will. But the reality is he can't leave.

> possibly the death sentence.

What? Is there any reasonable source claiming that's remotely possible?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/11/assange_death_penal...

Penalties have gone pretty sideways in the US when it comes to being associated with terrorism, and what qualifies as terrorism extremely broad and nebulous.

An EU country cannot fulfil an extradition if there's a chance of the death penalty.

My impression of the question is if there's a credible threat of death penalty, not if the EU would extradite should there be one.

> An EU country cannot fulfil an extradition if there's a chance of the death penalty.

Who says the UK will be an EU country if/when it gets around to extraditing him? I mean, the bail jumping charges should give them some leeway on timing.

That might be an argument today but hardly 7 years ago.

I've read that, and then I've also read cases of Sweden doing exactly that anyway.

There is close to no chance of this; the UK government is prevented by law from extraditing people into situations where they may face the death penalty.

> But the reality is he can't leave

Of course he can. He can walk out the door right now.

He chooses not to leave because he doesn't want to deal with the consequences of what he has done. You may not agree with that but it's an undeniable fact.

I've been to prisons where you can simply walk out of the door, are those not prisons?

Yours is the weirdest argument imaginable, he's forced to stay in the embassy or he'll be arrested. That is exactly how essentially all western prisons work, some of them might throw minor obstacles on the way to prevent you from walking out but it's rarely that hard.

If you walk out of a prison you are guaranteed to be arrested, charged, have a lengthier sentence and then placed in a prison where you can’t simple walk out.

Assange is in a diplomatic embassy. He can walk out. He may not even be arrested, detained or extradited. In fact nobody knows what will happen.

>He may not even be arrested, detained or extradited. In fact nobody knows what will happen.

Ah yes, all those cops have spent years outside the embassy just for fun.

>Police said in a statement there is an active warrant for Assange’s arrest and that the police are “obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the Embassy.”

Either the Police are being dishonest or you are.

People in prison have had a trial.

He has not had a trial, so he neither belongs in prison nor doesn't belong in a prison. He needs to have a trial first.

Do you use the same argument for people that jump bail? "He's on the run because if he wasn't on the run he would be arrested and face trial, therefore he has no choice in the matter?" Because that's the argument you're making, and it's a ridiculous one.

>He has not had a trial, so he neither belongs in prison nor doesn't belong in a prison. He needs to have a trial first.

The British government has already kept him confided for 7 years, what good would a trial serve at this point?

>Do you use the same argument for people that jump bail? Because that's the argument you're making, and it's a ridiculous one.

In practice this "ridiculous" argument is probably the very reason why the punishments for jumping bail tend to be quite low, no?

It's pathetic pedantry to say he isn't, as if you can even begin to imagine his situation.

> I'm still bitter that he became so thoroughly partisan, though.

I don't think it's a matter of becoming partisan, I think it's more a matter of getting new opportunities for the orientation he's always had and pursued.

> Especially since his organization has or had the motto: "to publish fact-based stories without fear or favour".

If you had an organization designed from it's inception to selectively leak information with a clearly biased perspective, it would defeat the purpose if you labeled it that way.

>If you had an organization designed from it's inception to selectively leak information with a clearly biased perspective, it would defeat the purpose if you labeled it that way.

For some reason, The Intercept comes to mind, and people here just love em…

I've always gotten the impression that people here mostly either disliked the Intercept for its perceived agenda or disliked it for it's perceived incompetence, such as that which burned Reality Winner as the source of the leak for which she was then imprisoned.

> perceived incompetence, such as that which burned Reality Winner as the source of the leak for which she was then imprisoned.

Yikes. Just read up on this. Pretty damning.

>I've always gotten the impression that people here mostly either disliked the Intercept for its perceived agenda

From my experience commenting on the meta stories surrounding them and alluding to the bias always seems to illicit more downvotes than up votes.

Though I would love if there was some kind of agreed upon sentiment analysis algorithm we could run we can go back through all of the meta Intercept posts on HN and calculate the percentage of comments weighted by upvotes for/agaisnt them as an organization.

> designed from it's inception to selectively leak information with a clearly biased perspective

What was "biased" about the early wikileaks? It was a general repository of leaked documents uploaded and commented by users

What they chose to host, and what they didn’t. I don’t believe that Wikileaks has ever posted anything about the Russian government, despite there being a massive amount of corruption to expose there.

?!?! of course they did, the early wikileaks was full of documents on corruption in russia

PS: wikileaks didn't "post" documents. users posted documents on wikileaks. it was an anonymous platform

He became something else as well. Maybe he always was, maybe he turned into a Russian pawn but by now there seems to be a huge amount of suspicious things pointing him working with Russia.

This lists like six such things https://www.salon.com/2017/01/07/donald-trump-julian-assange...

This one https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/303172-pus... is particularly damaging because one of the arguments of the "Wikileaks is not a Russian org" is that it sympathetizes and works with Pussy Riot...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/wikileaks-inside-the-farage-as...

https://gizmodo.com/assange-turned-down-dirt-on-russia-stron...

Being declared a terrorist, drone target, suggestion to thrown him into guantanamo, and talks about death penalty, it likely biased him a bit against the US and in particular against the former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

I would not expect anyone to continue be neutral during such state of affair.

Partisan? Hasn't he always been quite transparent about his desire to destroy the US?

If Assange is partisan who is he partisan for?

Russia?

Why Russia? Does being anti-US automatically make you pro-Russia? Does accepting aid from Russia against the US automatically make you pro-Russian?

I'd imagine that WL just doesn't care very much about Russia, an insignificant, poor country with relatively little international influence.

He knows what's is waiting for him in US prisons. A lifetime of legalized torture

Free rent in a prime central London location? Why would you ever leave!

This day and age, exposing truth about governments is a harsher crime than killing your neighbor.

Well I guess it’s actually always been the case.

Free Manning, Free Snowden. these two individuals I support whole heatedly. Snowden needs to come home.

There's a live feed of the Ecuadorian Embassy -- I don't remember this happening in the last few expel "scares" (for lack of a better word).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6a9fgsTfBk

This is the actual live HD feed with audio, helpfully provided by our Russian friends from Ruptly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlqmKcPS0I8

Haven't there been rumors along these lines published on multiple instances in the past? I'll believe it when it happens.

In July 2018 he was going to be kicked out "within the next several weeks". Now it's "hours to days", so it's closer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17582652

If you're interested in Assange, check out Andrew O'Hagan's piece 'Ghosting' about being hired to ghost write Assange's autobiography. It's in his collection 'The Secret Life.'

How many years holed up in the embassy?

If he ends up serving jail time he won't get his sentence reduced for time spent in the embassy..

Perhaps would have been better off going to jail at the start.

>his sentence reduced for time spent

You think they do that in gitmo?

dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19578706

Considering the other links express.co.uk, it's probably best to let it die...

So much pro-western sentiment in the comments, a little shocked, but not surprised

Well everyone knows and should accept that you cannot indiscriminately reveal information, to the public (that pays for it with increasing debt loads and taxation on income) for all to know, regarding people who empower an industrial complex that kills and maims people around the world for any classified reason of the day, because god forbid people working in a back-office somewhere for the DOD/State Dept/etc get exposed and face some kind of repercussions for their banal participation in the war circus, the unmourned innocents killed in the wake are just collateral damage and we as citizens already know it happens, just the price of democracy.

Might as well put John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, and William Binney back in a cell while we're at it.

Of all places I don't expect to get the truth about WikiLeaks from WikiLeaks.

I don't find them credible about much, certainly not their own story.

His development from a someone with a idea that could have made whistle blowing a trend, to a FSB asset and annoying twitter troll is really...unfortunate. I wonder what his right wing followers in the US will say when US agents pick him up in the UK.

The only unfortunate thing is how many people turned on him when he started exposing people who they liked. Turns out that all the people who I thought were on the side of truth in the Bush years were just on the side of Democrats.

The guy considered himself some kind of anarchist once. I remember some big speech he had about his independence etc. Now after becoming a cheap tool for the FSB he turned into just another right-wing conspiracy troll on twitter and it's not just "US Democrats" who don't bother about him and his platform anymore. He's just not trustworthy. His platform is not trustworthy. His independence is broken. So why should Democrats side with him?

Clinton was predicted to be the next president by everyone. If you had to choose the target of your limited efforts the person who was projected at winning with 70% by the most conservative estimates, and had already turned the middle east into a charnel house, she would have been the one you should spend all your efforts on by any sane calculus.

There should be a name for the mental disorder where you see one group of people being behind everything that's gone wrong with the world. It's probably racism, since s/Russians/Jews/g makes you sound like an anti-semite.

So you deliberately chose to ignore the personal/conspiracy/bs dirt he was throwing all over the place even after the Clinton show was over?

I have no idea what you want to say with the second paragraph since even the 4-page summary confirms that the Russians did it.

The Clinton show isn't over until Sanders gets the Democratic nomination.

Yeah sure and the kids are down in the Pizzeria.

That to normal people sounds as ridiculous as the idea that Trump and Assange are Russian assets.

Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks. Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election.

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/democrats.judiciary.house....

Yes, selling Bill Clinton "Bimbo" t-shirts on their online store certainly screams "exposing the secrets of the powerful".

next stop Moscow I assume?

Don’t shit where you eat!

For the US, the ultimate move at this point would be to do absolutely nothing. Imagine how much of a prat he would look if he's been sitting in that embassy for 7 years for absolutely no reason.

Well, I suppose he is learning that the world is a nasty place and that outing the truth has its share of consequences.

What truth, exactly?

Take your pick - https://wikileaks.org

the hillary clinton email archive. says it all really about the value and importance of wikileaks for the FSB.

It shows how important dishonesty is in keeping the system alive and healthy. Without the lies the whole thing starts falling apart.

Which system do you have in mind and what's going to fall apart 'without the lies'?

I'll give you one example. France has recently made it illegal to do paternity testing. Someone clearly understands that without all the lies their population of single mothers would skyrocket.

To be clear: France has made private paternity testing illegal, while you can still do it through a court decision.

Still weird and the reasoning behind it seems backwards.

But why make private testing illegal. It's very clear that only a very small percentage of people who wish to get a test done would approach the court, and how many of them would get the order? E.g. I suspected my child was not mine, so I got a test done secretly only to find out my suspicion was wrong and I was actually the father. Would I have approached the court for the test, if it was illegal? Most likely not, and I would have lived the rest of the life in a doubt. And even if I did approach the court, it would have affected my already strained relationship with my wife.

You'll be even more surprised when you hear that they said something alo g "this rule is good for the piece of mind of the French families".

If by "recently" you mean 5 years ago. And by "illegal to do paternity testing" you mean "illegal to do secret paternity testing by private citizens without a court order". So your claim seems very false, and doesn't back up your idea that "their populations of single mothers would skyrocket".

What an ignorant and snarky comment.

The World IS a vile place not because there is any truth to learn but because the system is made with the intention of deception and corruption.

Snarky, maybe, but I wouldn't say it's that ignorant. Truth is just facts. If you're someone approaching it rationally it should empower you to make more informed decisions from then on. But I think we can agree that not everybody react to it or perceive it the same, people sometimes behave in ways completely unexpected. So there truly are consequences to laying it bare. Are all truths good to tell? It depends who you ask and it's often only in hindsight that we figure out that something should better have been disclosed or kept hidden.

I've come to accept that only a few people genuinely value the truth. But most people do not value the truth, especially if it gets in the way of things they value more like money, convenience and material possessions.

Your comment seems like a vast overcorrection from it's parent.

Whatever the base cause, he has unlawfully avoided due process by abusing international treaty.

Could Russia save him ?

they already completed their work with him.

When was Assange last actually seen or hear from? Some people think he isn't actually alive anymore and/or he's been taken away from the embassy for some time. What evidence do we have that he's actually still at the embassy?

He's done this many times, disappeared from the internet for a few weeks. This is the normal state of things. Nobody seriously thinks he's left the embassy already.

This is not a "few weeks." They took away his internet access years ago and before that he stopped sending his PGP keys. There has been no "proof of life" for a very long time.

Keep up the great Wikileaks!

“In one of the messages, sent at 6:35 p.m. on the day of the election, Wikileaks wrote, "Hi Don if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do." Wikileaks reportedly claimed contesting the election could help his father further delegitimize the mainstream press and build the new media network he seemingly desired”

Also without Wikileaks no one on planet earth would have never discovered that diplomats sometimes engage in diplomacy AND that wars are terrible

"created: 33 minutes ago" just to post this?

It's not the new accounts to watch out for, they are obvious. Military industrial congressional academic think tank complex (as Ray McGovern has been calling it) psyop sockpuppetry is much more subtle and yes, they are here on HN. Hell, the irony is that their plan to deligitimize Assange was leaked... but people are still falling for it.

It shouldn't surprise you in the slightest that people don't want their regular accounts associated with political hot potatoes. HN in particular has a lot of accounts which link back to semi-professional personas on GitHub, SE, etc.

It is a depressingly low effort and poorly articulated comment though.

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