Shouldn't it if that access revealed information about war crimes? Or an artificial conflict that cost about 500.000 lives?
That should remain undisclosed because computer sabotage is bad? This is missing perspective left and right.
Would it still be journalism, if they hacked the database and didn't find evidence.
Should the fact that the information released, put many lives in danger when it compromised many people aiding our government?
Morally his actions can be debated, but not from a legal one, so he should be arrested and it should be up to a jury to determine if is moral reasoning and actions out way his crimes.
We don't need to make a whole new set of legal principles where people automatically get off for claiming journalism. In this case the people (here and around the world) were able to learn a lot of valuable information. Assanges actions are justified.
But that doesn't excuse him from the framework of our laws, if you break the law, even for a good reason, its a jury that decides.
Maybe it's time to adopt a more aggressive stance against immoral laws, don't you think?
But the fact that some people get away with crimes doesn't mean we should ignore all crimes and adopt a system of anarchy.
Who said it would be worse?
Where you asked before adopting the current system? Or you were just expected to sit and accept it?
Any why would a system that takes into account actual benefit to the public or not, to absolve someone of something that is otherwise a crime, would be tantamount to "anarchy"?
Without a clear set of laws things get messy really quickly.
We do allow for subjective peer input in a trial, that's exactly why the jury exists.
But to say that someone shouldn't even be put in front of a jury just because you think they broke the law with good intentions is undermining the purpose of law. Who are you to decide what was a "benefit to the public"?
There were people who thought that Guantanamo was a "benefit to the public" so should they be allowed to torture people?
There were people in the NSA who thought that mass collection of metadata from phone companies was a "benefit to the public" so maybe we shouldn't investigate those things.
That's not how I want the law to work. We should investigate all of those things, regardless of what you think is beneficial, under a strict set of rules of law. And we use democracy and international order to shape that set of rules.
If you think this is crazy and oppressive you should look around at how non-western countries handle these things.
Can cops be justified breaking into your house without a warrant, so long as they find evidence of a crime?
There is a huge difference between the state and the poeple. And they should be trated respectively.
What Julian Assange did was for the best of all poeple, not for the state.
It also follows that the state are made of the poeple, for the poeple. So anything that is "good" for the poeple, the state should do.
If your justification is that regardless of his actions the net result was "good" for the people. You run into an undefended slippery slope.
If we murder everyone in the US, that has deadly communicable diseases, or hereditary genetic disorder and we wipe the diseases out, that's "good" for the people, and the harm when compared to the whole is trivial as long as you kill less than say 30 million people. We can never hold ourselves to this sort of standard and claim we have any form of justice.
On the other hand, the law is far to ridge without the human factor, and hence the jury, a jury can nullify a case if they so choose, and simply agree that this person violated the law, but did it for a reason that his peers felt they deserved no punishment.
I'm not saying that Assange, so go to jail, I'm simply suggesting that he has to have his day in court, if what the state is saying is to be show through evidence to be true, or false. And that if his group of peers feels that after hearing all the specific details of the case from both sides, determine if what he did is right or wrong.
Nor do I see how you are suggesting what I'm talking about is some sort of proposal for a double standard.
I'm not saying out legal framework is perfect, and certainly not saying that injustices don't happen because there are bad people, doing horrible shit to innocent people.
I'm saying that you can't abandon the rule of law, just because someone did something that you see as a net positive.
I'm also against this train of thought when the government attempts to use this logic with eminent domain cases for example.
"Exigent circumstances" are, from the perspective of the law, the equivalent of a warrant, thus making any proofs legal.
If the defense challenges, and the state can not convince the judge that there was a probably threat that material evidence will be destroyed before a warrant could be obtained, then it will very likely be thrown out, and can not be used in the case at all.
And even if the judge allows it, and defense loses its an open door for an appeal.
There are literally volumes of text on this subject, there is not blanket a statement that makes incorrectly gather evidence moot, as any defense attorney, it's their first line of attack.
And one of the most common ways the defense can win a case.
We currently have the notion of exigent circumstances, that if the police have a lawful reason to enter your house without a warrant (such as believing that someone is in imminent danger) and they find in plain sight in the course of that entry evidence of a crime, it's fair game.
A case like this is how we determine if journalists are allowed to hack into government databases. This precedent will be instructive to future activists regardless of how it turns out.
Which, considering the broad definition of "journalist" here, might mean that we're free to hack anything as long as we publish it.
Would I have the right to hack your web service and leak that data because "journalism"?
And if I get caught hacking something could I simply say that my intent was to publish it?
To take a direct example, a Swedish TV crew smuggled a person through several nations in order to report on experience a person went through during the migration crisis. The maximum punishment for human smuggling is 6 years in Sweden (and this is not counting all the other countries which this TV crew traveled through), and the verdict was of course a small fine (basically one month of pay) after going through two courts.
When you have a person with no priors, low risk for repeat offense of the specific crime they are accused of, for the intent of journalist reporting, and a single offense, what you get is a small fine.
The US do not do extraditions from other nations when the expected punishment is a small fine.
So much FUD and dangerous hypotheticals to justify /their/ crimes. At this point accountability and transparency need to be held far higher because the alternative is so much worse and corrupted.
If you don't want whistleblowers there is an easy answer - not being so fucking corrupt and they will have nothing to whistleblow on!
How about starting with the solid facts, that what was unearthed is justified to be unearthed?
>Would it still be journalism, if they hacked the database and didn't find evidence.
We could just say no -- or, if they did find evidence, yes.
This keeps the risk of violating the law, but makes it OK if you indeed unearth something beneficial.
You know, as if we can make rational value judgements given the end result, and not give everyone a free pass, or condemn everyone from the start.
But as I've said, this is the human element, and is why we have a jury, if the jury feels that his actions though criminal were justified.
They can hold him free of punishment, this is why our judicial system is structured this way, because the letter of the law, doesn't understand the context of a situation, and a jury can.
Who in your opinion makes the choice of "what was unearthed is justified to be unearthed?" A judge, a police officer, a prosecutor, or a jury of his peers?
That value judgement you are talking about is literally the roll of the jury, but to get to that point, they have to be arrested, and prosecuted.
Well, that's bad. And it has been known to be bad since the time of Les Miserables at least...
>Who in your opinion makes the choice of "what was unearthed is justified to be unearthed?" A judge, a police officer, a prosecutor, or a jury of his peers?
The jury of peers. But we're still on the court of public/pundit opinion, and many are making arguments as if the technical aspects of the law outweigh any benefits -- in fact as if breaking the law itself is morally condemnable whatever the circumstance. So I wanted to counter that.
Besides, are the people which will be jury really "peers" when the act might benefit humanity at large, but they are tied to a particular nation state (one he doesn't even belong to)?
"Peers" original intention was to be people "related to the community/society the accused lives in" with the same public interests (and moral ideas).
My disconnect is because I think I already know the value judgement the law will end up making.
But the court has the burden to prove that the person is guilty of a crime, to 12 different people. You are required by law to be given a lawyer to assist in your case if you can't afford one.
That is a better shake than probably 75% of the world right there. Hell its better than you get in the military in the US.
That's not how the legal system works and that's not how ANY legals system COULD work, because it would require the process to be finalized and the outcome known before any legal enforcing to happen).
Basically you're bringing an utterly irrational viewpoint to the discussion then you end up with " we can make rational value judgements".
Actually that's how many regional and "local customs" legal systems works all around the world.
And it's even part of standard roman-legacy law, to take into account the outcome (and also thinks as intentions, circumstances, and so on).
Given Gitmo and the practices disclosed from there the US government seems to follow that rationale
That's because your formulation of the principle is too general. If everyone acts on their own subjective law then collective law would break down. But no one is arguing for that.
Wikileak's defenders would do better to point to the particular conditions that have led to mass whistle blowing: permanent wars in the Middle East and North Africa (the US is in seven wars right now); the creation of a massively powerful surveillance state; and the lack of legitimate channels for political and military transparency and accountability.
The case for whistleblowing hinges on that reality.
It's not about whistleblowing it's about hacking a DoD account to access classified military intelligence.