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Comment by trevelyan | Hacker News Reader

Claims that Assange assisted Manning with hacking the documents released by Wikileaks are obviously false. Those claims are inconsistent with the indictment and the publicly-released evidence such as the Manning-Lamo chat logs. There is no public evidence that Assange conspired with Manning to get those materials.

All you are alleging here is conspiracy with regards to targeting of a separate server that was never hacked. If that is the case then evidence can be certainly presented with regards to it, but the burden is on the prosecution not the defense and the statements alleged as regards it do not seem to indicate much beyond a vague excuse for inaction.

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A conspiracy to commit a crime is a conspiracy to commit a crime whether or not it was successful. An attempt to help a break-in implicates him in the conspiracy. Assange, by his own words, indicated that he was trying to crack the password hash that Manning gave him. Assange appears to be admitting through his own words that he was assisting in the attempt to commit a crime. What he said is written - verbatim - in the indictment. The indictment was approved by a grand jury. We'll see whether he is guilty if he pleads out or if he is convicted at trial.

The law is pretty clear here. You, on the other hand, are making up the law as you go along. And you're also saying Assange is a liar.

The law is extremely clear: you have to prove intent not just infer it from a vaguely worded chat message that reads the other way. I guess we will see how your predictions about a public trial hold out.

> you have to prove intent

The intent is proven from the in which Assange agrees to provide assistance cracking a password.

That is the textbook definition of "conspiracy to commit a hacking crime".

It seems like your only justification here is outright denial. That's an interesting tactic for someone who claims to care about the law and logic.

Have you read a lot of indictments around conspiracy to commit crimes that end up with convictions? Because I think you have far too naive of a viewpoint about what constitutes evidence.

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