Assange arrested in London (BBC)
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The Swedish police decided to drop the case irrespective of ample CCTV evidence and both men having pleaded guilty. Quoting prosecutor Thomas Holst: "Were we to try to get everyone suspected of a less serious crime extradited, we would have to work around the clock."
Guardian http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978645
MSNBC http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978690
BBC http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978651
TheNextWeb http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978656
Sky http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1978613
Some of the material I've read so far is interesting. Very little surprises me. None shocks me.
There is no technological achievement here, either in the original leak, or the distribution of the material. If anything, I get the impression that Wikileaks is fairly inept.
I'm not really against the leak - I've enjoyed reading the material. One of the things (genuinely) that I've found fascinating is the quality of the writing - I wish some of the people I work with could write as well.
Irritating people do get to me though, and I'm beginning to lump Assange in with Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia, and Wikileaks both have larger than life, seemingly egocentric figureheads. Both services depend heavily on the efforts and religious-level fervour of other people who often do things for free or near-free.
Weird? I mean, if I ran a web site that distributed material which might get a governmental back up, I would probably keep a low profile.
Looking forward to some robust comments on my thoughts!
Assange explains why he is a figurehead in his Q&A session with CNN: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-12-03/world/wikileaks.assange.q...
Keeping with my 'The Matrix' / Philip K. Dick geek fantasy rant though, check out the last few sentences from his interview:
"History will win. The world will be elevated to a better place. Will we survive? That depends on you."
Love the drama!
The optimist in me is hopeful the UK is helping him to get the Interpol heat off of him and set him free on bail.
After all, Assange might help the UK in anticipating future Wikileaks releases. There's plenty of potential for deals.
If there's a weight of evidence showing he's guilty then he should be extradited and tried.
Agreed. The corollary of that is that if there isn't he should be set free.
And a more recent follow up: http://rixstep.com/1/20101202,01.shtml
Hopefully sanity doesn't desert the British legal system as well.
http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2010/11/with-conviction-of-...
The British legal system is extremely thorough, but excrutiatingly slow. The problem with this approach to justice is that we tend hand people off to foreign governments and then it's too late to recall them. Lessons be will learned, no individual blame will be attached, and Assange will be ruined.
Don't be too sure. To quote from the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/06/wikileaks-julian...):
"Assange has also said that he declined to return to Sweden to face prosecutors because he feared he would not receive a fair trial, and prosecutors had requested that he be held in solitary confinement and incommunicado."
The age of democracy is now officially over...
He has indeed demonstrated that modern technology combined with antiquated practice can enable a single person to control our institutions for his own purposes.
Not really sure how that got mistaken with democracy. Let's use our words carefully and precisely. Did you mean the "age of free speech"?
I'm sorry, but there is simply _nothing_ he could ever say to them that would make those charges go away. How is the name clearing supposed to happen?
If he's not guilty, then he's got nothing to hide. The sooner he clears his name here the quicker he can go back to doing his thing.
They would've found him anyway, so he's just complying with the inevitable.
This assumes the other side plays fair. This assumes that the judge and jury will be rational. This assumes that it's really about sexual assault, and not about politics.
Have you ever seen a rape trial? They're not known for being level-headed.
And that's totally besides my views on wikileaks, Julian Assange or anything else.
"Continued after his partner asked him to stop" is rape by definition. "Did not disclose the breakage to his partner" may not technically be rape, but I'm comfortable characterizing it as sexual assault. In either case, it sounds like an allegation worth prosecuting--and that's totally besides my views on Wikileaks, Julian Assange, or anything else.
According to this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/07/assange-bail-req...
Which has the actual charges in it there was a second occasion with the same lady, this stretches credulity I believe, one count of rape with one person according to this definition I could believe, but two are at a minimum a little strange and would require some pretty fancy footwork to be explained away. Especially with the victim throwing a party for the perp between the two occasions.
The fact that the witnesses colluded and that Assange apparently was at their places at their invitation and that he undoubtedly was not aware of any of these laws and that at least one of the women definitely was (and tweeted all over the place about it) makes this all very sordid (pardon the pun) indeed and not nearly as clear-cut as you might think at first glance.
Personally I think Julian Assange is an idiot for behaving like this while knowing he's under the microscope but given that the flesh is weak and that these women apparently only decided to go to the police after comparing notes makes the whole thing something that may have been harder to avoid than it looks.
The case is so shaky that one Swedish prosecutor already overruled another and dropped it only to have it revived again without knowledge or consent of the victims.
Pretty weird if you ask me.
...is not in the least bit suspicious, if you know anything about the psychology of rape survivors. Believe it or not, most people who have been through that situation don't really want to relive it over and over again throughout a prolonged trial. (Conversely, it's pretty easy to psychologically pressure a rape survivor into not pressing charges, or into dropping charges.) One of the only things that will actually motivate a survivor to press charges is if they discover their rapist attacked someone else, because then it's a pattern of behavior and one feels responsible to come forward so he won't rape anyone else.
If you want to go with the conspiracy theory that the CIA bribed two Swedish women to file false charges against Julian Assange just to stop Wikileaks, that's up to you. Frankly, I think that's in the same realm of plausibility as the idea that Julian Assange just happens to be a rapist. And, more to the point, this kind of uncertainty is exactly why we have trials to begin with.
I intend no such thing.
This isn't exactly to the detriment of Assange. It's easy to get away with rape if you're willing to completely tar your victim's reputation. And if you're a popular public figure, your fans will completely go along with this. Just ask Kobe.
EDIT: Although, Swedish culture might be different in this respect.
I think he'll be fine.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336291/Wikileaks-Ju...
The UK has very little to gain from his release and much to lose - it will injure US/UK relations.
[Edit: On second thoughts I think I'm expecting a bit too much rational behavior from our legal system, they'd probably extradite him if he was accused of shooting Abraham Lincoln]
I come to Hacker News to see people talk about technology, innovation, trends, start-ups and tiny projects that pop up that do things that seem so obvious in hind-sight, but are in fact really clever. This recent news about WikiLeaks and Assange I feel don't really fit in any of these categories.
The Hacker News Guidelines [1] may be open to interpretation, but it does explicitly state:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics
and
> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
There is a bit after the first quote that states "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon," which I suppose is where we disagree. Nonetheless, if you and others feel it fits here, I'll respect your opinions.
If that was what this post was about then you'd have a point. Wikileaks and Assange's private life are almost entirely orthogonal IMO.
I don't see you complaining about things being 'off topic' in those threads.
This sort of argument should have a name (I'm sure it does) - "but gov, you didn't complain last time I cleaned your windows badly".
Oh and one more thing: topic, topic, topic topic.
How I look at it is that you are never going to be reading all the articles on the front page right? So if this doesn't interest you it is as simple as skipping it. If one day there is 15+ of these type of grey area links on HN, then that will be a problem, but I just don't see that happening.
On the whole, Hacker News is a great place, arguably the best of the news aggregation sites on the Internet. Even people who disagree with me here have upvoted other excellent submissions and posted excellent comments, so I'll at least thank them and the community as a whole for those.
Both of those topics have nice subtle 1984-ish smell, though.
* "freedom of information should end where it endangers...people's lives"
* "expose the wrong, not the mundane"
Who exactly has been endangered by the leaks? No concrete example has been given so far, and if there had been any, the US government would have jumped on the occasion to demonize Wikileaks even more. Without any proof, those allegations amount to FUD and hypocrisy, since the death toll caused by the US government is considerable.
Taking the Irak war as an example (but others abound, e.g. Chile or Vietnam): Bush attacked Irak based on lies, and, by 2006, the war had caused 654,965 excess deaths (direct and indirect casualties) [1]. I couldn't find a more recent estimate, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number had doubled by now.
Now that is a big death toll caused by hidden information, isn't it?
--
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casu...
Only one point: Neither Iraq war nor War in Afghanistan is justified by ANY argument at all.
If WikiLeak is so powerful then it should have exposed how Bush conspired to destroy these two countries, kill millions of people over there and get its own soldiers killed in a war no one can justify.
Michael Moore did more to expose the wrongness of Iraq war through his book "Dude, Where's my Country" then WikiLeak can claim to have done. Michael Moore was the first American celebrity who opposed Iraq war from Oscar podium and for that he was booed. He stood against the general public sentiment and two years down the line, people realized how right he was. Please read that book if you can, you can find some information about that book in Wikipedia, here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude,_Where%27s_My_Country%3F regards.
"Freedom of information and expose MUST be for common man's good,"..... spoken as someone who's been brainwashed (pardon the use of that word) to be spoonfed information by those who control it. Who decides what's for "the common man's good" ? Why can't we see all the information and then decide for OURSELVES what's for our good?
"...and it destroys my reputation " .... just listen to yourself, man! Stop being scared of openness! Please, do us all a favor, go through the 1000+ cables and point us to 1 where someone's reputation is being destroyed.
WHY ARE PEOPLE SO SCARED OF WIKILEAKS??
That’s why we so often end up with this uncomfortable decision between accepting a topic and the accompanying occasional article avalanches or locking out a topic completely, neither of which seems entirely appropriate Wikileaks on Hacker News.
The site had - and I guess it still has - some non-trivial (at least at such scale of pressure and exposure) operational issues: DoS attacks, denials of DNS service, hosting refusals, bank-accounts freezings, institutional threatening reactions from the mightiest states in the world... ...and yet it's still on-line under different URLs and mirrors.
Isn't that a true hackers' achievement worthy for discussing here at length?
I'm not quite sure, of course, but maybe hundreds of future PhDs in the history and political sciences - getting their degrees in the very same elite universities whose alumni now rule in US & UK - will be indebted to this man and this project that shed light on all the data.
Just think about that.
The world is changing, the definition of "journalist" is changing. In a different time such leaks would have come from a spirited and lively free press, but today our traditional forms of journalism (newpapers, radio, tv) are utterly mainstream, moribund, and very much part of the establishment. Wikileaks throws the new order into sharp contrast and raises questions about what is journalism, what legal protections journalism deserves, etc. Some of these questions had been answered (especially in the US) but the question now is to what degree and in what way do those decisions carry over to the brave new world of the internet.
The worst case scenario is that courts, the public, etc. decide to keep an antiquated cargo cult definition of journalism, restricted to newspapermen and television reporters. The danger there is that the flourishing of journalism on the internet in unfamiliar forms will lack the protections (legal and societal) that traditional journalism has had.
This is all the more sensational because Assange and wikileaks have become the poster boy / touchstone for these issues. This is troubling to me because wikileaks is not the best archetype for nouveau journalism. Firstly he has a very significant political ax to grind (though he has not been grinding it as sharply as in the past such as with "Collateral Murder"). Secondly the revelations that have come from wikileaks have tended to be comparatively minor, especially when judged against the cost of obtaining the leaked information. This sets him up as the perfect target for governments and traditionalists to tar and feather him and use him as an archetypal example of why new media is not journalism and does not deserve the same protections as traditional journalism.
Is this correct?
Someone in the mainstream media (one of those investigative journalists that they have so many of there) should dig in and find out.
Why would Julian's arrest/conviction/disappearance affect whether or not you see the documents? He has nothing to do with the leaking effort.
If there was no misconduct, then we will find out, and the charges will be dropped.
I'm not going to play PI, but it seems to me that if a woman is that upset after sex, then something went wrong. Maybe he refused to spoon.