Julian Assange arrested in London

Scotland Yard has confirmed that Assange was arrested on behalf of the US after receiving a request for his extradition.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2019/apr/11/wikileaks...

Edit: Indictment: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/pr/wikileaks-founder-charg...

Edit: To indict someone, the government has to show the grand jury that there is sufficient evidence. It is very easy to indict someone (hence the phrase “A ham sandwich can be indicted by the grand jury”) but one has to acknowledge the fact that the federal government has very high win rate for the cases that do go to trial (93% in 2012)

Edit2: The above statistic is for the cases that go to trial and plea deals. Only 3% of the cases go to trial.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19633234

Julian Assange, 47, (03.07.71) has today, Thursday 11 April, been further arrested on behalf of the United States authorities, at 10:53hrs after his arrival at a central London police station. This is an extradition warrant under Section 73 of the Extradition Act. He will appear in custody at Westminster Magistrates' Court as soon as possible.

Under some circumstances a journalist can be forced to appear in court and reveal his sources. And if he refuses to answer he can be held in contempt.

Not having it...not getting any...not even showing the undercover agent even one damn tab.

His charge ended up being "Conspiracy Against the United States" or something along those lines.

So I am pretty sure the US government will come up with some rather bogus charge against Assange, considering how he humiliated it.

Edited a few times after proofreading.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/worl...

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/press-release/file/1153481...

Update

>The US justice department has confirmed that it issued an extradition request for Assange “in connection with a federal charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified US government computer”.

He has also been arrested on the extradition warrant to the US:

http://news.met.police.uk/news/update-arrest-of-julian-assan...

A difficult path, maybe, but also an avenue for setting precedent to go after the press.

Don't worry no such thing exists, it's all conspiracy theories as they said for years...

[1] I’ve been corrected; her sentence was commuted.

https://www.exaronews.com/julian-assange-to-be-extradited-wi...

Why would a government so keen on accusing people of espionage and no doubt wanting to set a precedent for various things being classified as espionage (such as leaks), settle so easily?

Well, because the charges have always been bogus and they know it. Daniel Ellsberg of the "Pentagon Papers" fame has made it extremely difficult if not downright impossible for the government to win in such cases.

If the US government will succeed in sentencing Assange, it won't be due to a espionage charge, but something else entirely, or at best, yet another plea bargain.

It's weird that for the most part, all his "crazy talk" has pretty much held up so far. I hope he's wrong about the extradition that's supposed to follow now, but honestly I doubt it. This is gonna go down in history as one of the more random biographies, and a pretty damning one at that.

>He claimed that his reason to do so was to avoid extradition to the US, but Sweden wasn't allowed to extradite him without UK's permission first [0]. He could've gone to Sweden and face the charges, and avoided this whole thing. But he had to make himself look like a victim of a conspiracy instead, and his followers eats it up.

>If this truly was some sort of grand conspiracy to get him extradited to the US, I'd imagine the CIA has more reliable and straightforward methods of arresting/disappearing someone.

>He was before he ran to the embassy, skipping bail, on the pretext that if the UK extradited him to Sweden, Sweden would extradite him to the U.S. That's an invalid pretext.

And beyond HN, journalists have some interesting articles too. The Guardian's James Ball in 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/10/julian...

>The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US, charges in Sweden have been dropped – and for the embassy, he’s lost his value as an icon

>Assange does not want to be trapped in Ecuador’s embassy, and his hosts do not want him there. Their problem is that what’s keeping him trapped there is not so much the iniquitous actions of world powers, but pride. Perhaps it’s not Ecuador and the UK that need a mediator, but rather Ecuador and Assange.

>Russia has long expressed support for Assange. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a Facebook post after the arrest that "the hand of 'democracy' squeezes the throat of freedom."

Fair. Real time reportage:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2019/apr/11/wikileaks...

>According to the Guardian, after it started to seem in recent weeks that an arrest might be imminent, big UK broadcasters had formed a "pool" arrangement to take turns staking out the building. If something happened, the footage would be shared among the pool members. >That effort appeared to have been abandoned when the arrest failed to materialize. The BBC, ITN and Sky News did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Are we not doing our ZaZen? Arest footage/story:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/uk/julian-assange-arrested-gb...

>It was a moment that global news organizations were desperate to show their audiences. Yet it wasn't captured by leading UK broadcasters like the BBC, Sky News or Independent Television News (ITN). >Instead, the only media organization with video of the controversial moment was an obscure outfit called Ruptly. Ruptly, which has carved out a niche for itself by recording events around the world and selling the footage to other broadcasters, is a subsidiary of Russian state-backed media outlet RT. >Founded in 2013, the operation is headquartered in Berlin

It was. The U.S. could easilly extradite him from the UK.

You can both want him to face charges for rape, and also not want him to be extradited to the US.

The lack of regard for a rape case against him (mostly by male commenters, it has to be said) is very troubling.

I've never seen anyone argue that.

I've seen people argue that the idea that extradition to Sweden exposed him to greater danger of that than merely being present in the UK, and that the Swedish extradition was part of convoluted plot that existed solely so he could be extradited from Sweden to the US, was a ridiculous notion that didn't really make any sense, since if the US wanted him they would just extradite him directly from the UK. Which remains true, and is, if anything, demonstrated by today's events.

He's used up. His masters don't need him anymore, except as an 'example' that 'law and order prevails.'

It's a joke.

Guardian journalist, David Leigh, claimed that Julian Assange initially refused to redact the names of informants.[62] In his book, co-authored with Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, Leigh claimed Assange to have said in relation to whether the names should be redacted, "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."[63] In response to the book's publication, WikiLeaks posted on Twitter: "The Guardian book serialization contains malicious libels. We will be taking action."[64] When Douglas Murray relayed these comments in a debate, Assange interjected "We are in the process of suing The Guardian in relation to that comment."[65] The Guardian claimed the following day that they had 'not received any notification of such action from WikiLeaks or its lawyers', two months after the publication of the book.[66]

So what you report is a claim that Assang himself has strongly denied.

There's no clear just way to view the entire situation. Though Assange was unreasonable to call them all "spies and traitors", if that's what he did.

It's very common practice around the world if a person's circumstances change and their original country is now safe. Likewise if Ecuador believes that there is no longer a threat to Assange they can revoke it.

>retweets Russia Today and Cassandra Fairbanks

I can't believe people still defend this guy.

That’s not how that works

You might check out this[0] extremely detailed write-up from Andrew O'Hagan, the author who was hired to ghost-write Assange's autobiography, and wound up hanging around his inner circle for some months. It's a pretty sympathetic account, but it's hard to come away from it sympathetic to the man. While O'Hagan praises Assange's ideals and seems to like him personally, he doesn't gloss over his flaws, and the portrait he paints is ultimately of a supremely self-interested guy who spends much of his time scheming against his closest allies and lying to pretty much everyone.

One exchange that stuck in my mind:

> There are few subjects on which Julian would be reluctant to take what you might call a paternalistic position, but over Snowden, whom he’s never met but has chatted with and feels largely responsible for, he expressed a kind of irritable admiration. ‘Just how good is he?’ I asked.

> ‘He’s number nine,’ he said.

> ‘In the world? Among computer hackers? And where are you?’

> ‘I’m number three.’

[0] https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/andrew-ohagan/ghosting

So much for sticking it to the man, when we have to live the rest of our lives with the risk of identity fraud just because they're dicks.

- The specifics, i. e. secretly removing the condom, seem to invite all sorts of "that's not rape" opinions, making them a rather bad choice compared to stereotypical violent rape.

- The supposed CIA connection of the accuser is a laughable 10-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connection involving her attending a two-day seminar by a Cuban feminist organisation whose leader supposedly was connected to the CIA in the 1970.

- Does anybody believe the CIA has covered secret agents stationed at Swedish feminist literature departments for eight years, just in case some target comes along that needs her couch to crush on?

- Assange was travelling all over Europe and other parts of the world in those times. Why not just wait until he is in a country with the perfect extradition treaty and have him arrested at the airport?

- Indeed: what exact purpose is the rape accusation, which would have come with probably a few months in jail max, in this scheme?

- If you're intent to discredit Assange among his fanbase, which is largely young, male, and online: isn't rape actually the worst possible crime to smear him? Just look at the prevalence of "obviously fake"/"not rape" and various other character assassination in this thread.

- At the time of the supposed rape incident, the most prominent leak was the "Collateral Murder" video. The war cables and Snowden leaks came later. That video was somewhat embarrassing, but in no way important enough to warrant such adventures in diplomatic subterfuge as alleged.

- All subsequent leaks, i. e. Snowden, Diplomatic Cables, were published in partnership with media organisations such as the New York Times, Guardian, or Spiegel. Why invest so much ressources and potential risk into going after Assange, and not those organisations that were arguably more important going forward? The Times may be immune because they are domestic. But the Spiegel or Guardian could certainly suffer an embarrassing loss of, say, all their subscriber data?

- Assange's credibility isn't actually that important. There is nothing Wikileaks published that I consider fake. The Clinton leak was just... underwhelming? There was nothing even remotely illegal in there, and not even much that made her look bad. The Snowden leaks were important. The earlier, lesser-known stuff from Africa etc. was fantastic. The diplomatic cables were already borderline.

- Why would the Obama administration go through the risk and difficulty of organising a breathtaking conspiracy to get at him, yet commute Chelsea Manning's sentence?

- Why would the Trump "I love Wikileaks" administration continue that adventure, instead of exposing it, damaging Obama's reputation, and helping their friend?

- Removing Assange, or even Wikileaks, doesn't actually help: leaks have become a well-known tactic now, and traditional media has actually done a better job than WL to publish them, c. f. Panama Papers.

- Hiding in that embassy for seven years is almost definitely worse than whatever may await him in the US. It's just an extraordinarily stupid move. Especially considering the endgame was always that he would face those charges someday. It's just not the decision-making process of a sound mind.

The guy is a paid actor for a murderous totalitarian regime. Literally:

"Assange became a star on Russia Today (RT), Russia’s state-funded English-language propaganda outlet."

"Assange used the WikiLeaks Twitter account to attack the 2016 Panama Papers leaks, which disclosed a $2 billion overseas account of Vladimir Putin’s. Assange labeled the leak a US-sponsored plot to undermine Putin and Russia."

If that doesn't scream "I have no ethics" to you, I'm not sure what will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Allegations_of_Russi...

But how do you get actual value out of it, i.e. currency? AFAIK most exchanges have pretty strict money laundering rules these days, it's not like Wikileaks could just open an account to liquidate those BTC donations...

Sweden’s chief Prosecutor Ingrid Isgren, has issued this statement: “This is news to us too, so we have not been able to take a position on the information that is now available. We also do not know why he is under arrest. We are following the developments.”

So, yes, he was arrested on behalf of the US and not Sweden.

If he’d left earlier, he’d have had a chance to appeal to the ECJ too. Ooops

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_the_Unit...

It's not like that bunch is known for their loyalty, but even sheer self preservation would suggest that they not meddle with somebody who doubtlessly has ample receipts of their interactions.

1. He was wanted for questioning for rape and sexual misconduct in Sweden. According to police records, he had sex with a woman who demanded that he wore a condom, which he did at first. Then next morning she wakes up by him penetrating her without consent. She then asks "are you wearing anything", to which he replies "I'm wearing you". The sexual misconduct charges are dropped due to statutes of limitations, and the rape case is dormant due to low probablility of resolving it. Maybe they will open it up again.

2. Assange fought the extraditions through several UK courts. He had multiple chances do defend himself, and lost every one. He lost a high court appeal, then when the supreme court upheld that decision he fled to Ecuador.

3. He claimed that his reason to do so was to avoid extradition to the US, but Sweden wasn't allowed to extradite him without UK's permission first [0]. He could've gone to Sweden and face the charges, and avoided this whole thing. But he had to make himself look like a victim of a conspiracy instead, and his followers eats it up.

He's been in self imposed custody because he refused to accept the lawful rulings of two democracies, and Wikileaks has promoted conspiracies like Pizza gate and Qanon, they are not a poor organization to fight for freedom of speech.

[0] https://www.aklagare.se/en/nyheter--press/media/the-assange-...

Or how many will, when given a choice between:

(a) a wild conspiracies theories about a totally-average Swedish woman being paid by the CIA to make up some not even that damning rape charges, then asks him for an $20/5min STD test in exchange for dropping the charges, knowing too well that Assange will be stupid enough to refuse, so as to enable execution of a convoluted three-country extradition plan when they could just as well wait for Assange to travel to whatever country has the extradition treaty they liked best

or (b): guy with a history of being egotistical, who rarely managed to work with anybody, and who has a history of ignoring the house rules on hygiene (cf cat) thought nothing of discreetly trying again without a condom

...choose the former for no reason but political or personal sympathy.

"He skipped bail so he should be arrested". No one can seriously be this dead in the brain... Staying in the UK which is a bitch state of the US who wants him gone was equal to life in prison or worse which he of course knew.

Actually we should all know by what happens when the US has a target, laws no longer apply and the media will make it look like some heroic action, as you can see by some reactions on this site...

During the Iran-Iraq War the CIA knowingly and deliberately helped Iraq launch poison gas attacks against the Iranians, resulting in more than 100,000 casualties, most of them civilian. So, par for the course isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War#Iraq's_u...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_attacks_against...

Can we both agree that war is bad and things are always more complex than they seem? In the grand scheme of things these events rank pretty low on the list of priorities when you are fighting a war.

Say you have some embarrassing docs about the CIA/military and you threaten to release them automatically if you're killed. Have you considered that there are plenty of people in the world who would want that to happen? People with lots of money and their own highly trained murderers?

Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, possibly Mexico or Columbia (considering the shit the CIA's pulled there). Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if some US government agency, rich dude, or corporation murders you for some weird internal power struggle.

Who's going to protect you? The CIA/military? The very organization that couldn't prevent its documents from getting stolen? How can you be certain they haven't shifted damage-control planning?

The idea of a "dead man's switch" plays into the conspiratorial black-and-white view of the world where there's a single, unified cabal. Reality is more complex.

Interesting how the UK laid siege to the embassy at vast expense. Had they not done that and just snitched silently with someone watching the normal CCTV that the UK is famous for then they would have had him getting used to nipping outdoors. But no, they made an example of him, and at considerable taxpayer expense.

It would only be a matter of time before the government of Ecuador would change to an American rather than a Bolivarian one, so even if they could not coax him out by having the absence of police then he would get himself having 'new landlords'.

Regarding Sweden, women are not 'mere chattel' in Sweden. To claim that the original allegations were just trumped up US bullshit is nonsense and a failing to understand that Swedish law is serious about equality. I don't think that the English speaking nations are anywhere near Sweden when it comes to treating everyone equally in law.

The law is a double edged sword, Assange could have understood Swedish law a bit better and respected it. That would have served him better than British law.

Is he being carried out? Yelling "UK must resist".

The sexual charges really don't look fabricated or to have had any political motive at all. The wikipedia article on the allegations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Swedish_sexual_...) makes it clear that the charges were dropped after Assange was initially questioned by the police, then a special prosecutor reopened the case.

It's not unlikely that the special prosecutor had a political motivation for reopening the case, but it's not at all clear that the women who made the original allegations did.

From my reading anyway, Assange crossed a line, perhaps not realising that what he was doing was sexual assault, molestation and "lesser rape" under Swedish law, and he would have gotten away with it if he wasn't Assange, which makes the special prosecutor's reopening the case suspicious. But I can't see any fabrication here. Nobody forced Assange to do what he did (which, as I remember it, was to initiate sex with a sleeping woman who therefore could not give consent). The women who accused him were well within their rights to do so.

He just screwed up bad and that made him vulnerable to political persecution.

Collateral Murder was published in April, 2010. The warrant came in November of that year, seven months later.

Yes, sure, it possibly takes that long to organise a conspiracy, especially if you have to recruit a Swedish feminist student into the CIA and also get at multiple prosecutors in one of the least corrupt countries in the world. But the connection still seems tenuous.

It's true that the german military is under constant scrutiny, but a lot of bad stuff has been covered up in Germany as well, especially in the world of sexual abuse by churches and institutions that is being uncovered in slow-motion these days.

The idolization of this guy on web forums is like the college kids of the 90s wearing Che Guevara T-shirt’s.

Personally I find it disgusting that you'd dismiss these charges so quickly out of hand because they don't fit your existing bias surrounding this guy. But hey, rape isn't a big deal, right?

I'd not want to rely on that if it touches something "important"/secretive. Minor issues that can be clearly blamed on a single person are easier to admit and follow up on than things that would have widespread impact.

The collateral damage video was published on April 5, 2010. Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy on 19th June 2012. The Interpol warrant for his arrest is dated 30 November, 2010.

1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2f...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/23/chelsea-mann...

Is this common in US?

The maximum punishment for that is complicated, but as far I can see it is either max 3 months or it can be sent to the Crown Court where it is max 2 years.

Free press my ass. The UK and US are fucking banana republics. The problem is that thanks to them controlling the biggest propaganda machine which has ever existed, their stinky ideas constantly rub off on other Western countries.

Anyone from the US still pointing the finger at China or Russia for being non democratic, not free, backward or whatever, deserves exactly what is coming.

Pity whomever has to fumigate the room.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NatWest_Three [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon

The UK courts are still yet to decide whether there is a legal basis to extradite Assange. For example, the extradition of Lauri Love was denied by the court, which was also for computer related crimes allegedly carried out outside of US territory.

1. The Mueller report presents uncomfortable yet legal, coordination with WikiLeaks, in which case extraditing and prosecuting Assange would allow administration to distance itself and present any coordination as incidental.

2. Assange releases were cited in FISA requests. If intelligence agencies had an established assessment on Assange's ties to Russia, and requests were authorized with elements contradicting those assessments, it could raise eyebrows. It seems firmly establishing presence or lack of Russian backing, along with sources would bring clarity to several matters.

His own OkCupid listed that he loved everything Russian (except the food) long before the 2016 election:

https://mashable.com/2010/12/13/julian-assange-okcupid/

That being said, while he's a piece of shit we need to be careful we don't erode press freedoms we've had for a very long time just because we really don't like one jerk.

Julian didn’t have internet access so I don’t see how he could have done it.

Not the same issue as Assange of course, unless, as Assange claims, this too is the long arm of the US secretly trying to get whistleblowers extradited. I'm not sure that's the case here, though; I think the Swedish rape allegations have merit, and unlike Snowden, I don't think Assange has broken any US laws for which he can be extradited; he's just doing journalist work. Sloppily and with grandstanding megalomania, perhaps, but that's not illegal and thus no basis for extradition.

They can do that to Bolivia but just try to force Air Force One to land...

Just another example of the US bullying other countries, and Americans get all pissy with the GDPR.

I appreciate your positive contributions to this site, but we've had to warn you about breaking the guidelines so often that if you keep doing it we're going to ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632957 and marked it off-topic.

The UK won't extradite if the death penality is on the cards. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/41/section/94

The "public mood"? Seriously? That's a pretty ridiculous phrase. There is no "public mood" in the US about Julian Assange. In fact outside of today's news cycle he's barely been mentioned. Wikileaks itself has been mentioned mostly as part of Mueller investigation stories but there's not been much about Assange personally in years.

It's going to be interesting. On the one hand it's a great opportunity to shit on Trump, on the other hand he's doing their bidding. My guess is that it's going to be a variation of "we hope the cruel man-child in charge isn't going to overstep the lines of due process, we will pay close attention #DemocracyDiesInDarkness", which he won't, and that will be it and everybody is happy, because "he did get his chance in court", like Manning.

Charges (which were ridiculous to begin with) were dropped.

>The "immoral" course of evens would be if he was extradited to the US or some other country, receive an unfair trial, or having to defend against other charges.

That's horrible, but what I expect. Extradition to a country that has the death penalty from a country that doesn't shouldn't be a thing.

Assange refused to disclose info on Russia's aggression in Ukraine - FP

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-other_news/2288391-assange-...

Wikileaks: A new angle on MH17: Rebels fired at Ukraine fighter jet which was using MH17 as decoy http://www.maxkeiser.com/2014/07/weeks-ago-they-wanted-to-pr... … and

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/492033939142619136?lang...

Uh, the snowden leaks?

Guess all Snowden posts is curated by KGB.