Hacker News Reader

This would criminalize a huge amount of investigative journalism in the United States. Journalists who work in this field solicit classified information all the time. They cultivate connections inside government, and ask for information. They aren't all just sitting back and waiting for sources to fall into their lap. When sources do come to them, they encourage those sources to share more information. That's how the business works, and if the US government wins its case against Assange, that business will be illegal.

It's quite probable that he will only be convicted on the circumvention charges, helping to crack the password/cover her tracks.

The major difference is that journalists do not ask their sources to break the law to obtain information. Assange did, and that makes all the difference.

Whenever a journalist asks their source for classified information, which they do all the time, they're asking their source to break the law.

The legal theory being advanced here would basically outlaw investigative journalism into the activities of the US government, even by foreign journalists.

Whenever a journalist asks their source for classified information, which they do all the time, they're asking their source to break the law.

That's not true but I don't have time to run through an exhaustive legal explanation of why. In a nutshell: the source is responsible for maintaining security of information, because third parties like journalists don't know the bounds of what is covered by confidentiality.

Moreover, asking for information is not the same thing as soliciting information. Asking is fine, soliciting is not (in this context, soliciting means offering them something of value in exchange for the information).

Journalists normally know full well that they're asking sources for classified information. Asking for classified information is absolutely routine in investigative journalism.

> Asking is fine, soliciting is not (in this context, soliciting means offering them something of value in exchange for the information).

Assange didn't purchase the information.

The theories you're supporting would make reporting on US government secrets illegal. You should stop and think about how fundamentally this would undermine the freedom of the press and the ability of the public to know about what their government does in secret.

Black-and-white/yes-or-no/kindergarten level of analysis? Sure, that's correct.

In the real world? It's not correct at all. For starters, it's perfectly legal to ask for classified information, because it's well understood that a source generally will not provide any classified information (because the source would face criminal sanction if they do). However, if the source is willing to reveal said information, and the journalist did not solicit it, then the journalist is free to publish it because journalists are not covered by classified information laws (in the US).

If, however, the journalist solicits the information (by offering something of value, not necessarily monetary), or by assisting in the acquisition of the information, then they have violated various US laws, because they've crossed the line.

Assange is alleged to have performed acts that could be construed as attempts to access classified information, beyond merely asking for it--specifically, it is alleged that he assisted Manning with attempting to acquire and decrypt classified documents. That is the heart of the issue--if Assange had merely accepted a document dump from Manning (as he generally did with most other sources), he wouldn't be facing 18 charges today.

However, Assange is also not protected by free press rulings. Because he's not a journalist. He's just a parrot. A parrot merely passes on what's given to them. A journalist verifies their sources, the information they've received, and exercises some sort of analysis and judgment in deciding what to publish. Assange literally did none of those things until it came time to interfere in the Trump-Clinton election, when he chose to bury the Trump documents he received and time the release of Clinton-related documents, most of which are now known to have been partial or whole-scale forgeries by the Russian intelligence agencies.

You’re being downvoted for knowing factually correct information that happens to disprove some of the biases that’s HN posters hold, which is a shame. Downvotes aren’t supposed to be a consolation prize for having your inferior arguments lose.

As a reference point, season 3 of the tv show “The Newsroom” has a plot that centers around a new reporter who aids their source in collecting confidential documents from the US government, and every reporter in the newsroom immediately understands they’ve ‘solicited’ information and thus violated the espionage act. I sincerely doubt that this is a concept that a tv show writer can understand and effectively explain, yet would be opaque to a reporter.

As a minor note though, Wikileaks absolutely buried trump related documents and carefully timed the release of Clinton related dumps, which makes sense as Wikileaks had been reduced to a front for Russian intelligence by that time. But the emails they released were themselves authentic, and their veracity can be independently verified by the DKIM system they had enabled. Funnily enough, for all the sound and fury over the Clinton emails, the worst thing that they show is that Clinton received a debate in advance, just like Donald Trump did.

They're being downvoted for making up their own pet legal theories that go against settled American law. Sycophantically justifying the Trump administration's attack on the press isn't "nuanced." A lot of people dislike Assange because they're upset that Clinton's emails reflected badly on her and might have contributed to her loss, or because they're upset he published documents that embarrassed the US. That's no reason to suddenly start inventing novel legal interpretations that outlaw investigative journalism.

Except for the fact that the lawyer above is correct in their interpretation of the law, and you are wrong. You don’t get to decide that laws you disagree with are ‘pet’, ‘novel’ and go against ‘settled’ law. You’re trying to couch your opinion in certainty that it doesn’t deserve - again, because your interpretation of the law is wrong. You should even have a clue that the DoJ understands this difference, because they specifically allege that Assange helping Manning steal further documents constituted ‘solicitation’. Another clue should be the fact that the articles criticizing this charge, and original Obama era decision not to prosecute the violation, are based on the ‘chilling effect’ that it causes, not that no ‘solicitation’ occurred.

If you’re still confused, here’s a short clip from the aforementioned show discussing that it’s wrong with soliciting sources to steal: https://youtu.be/VSPhYdxSTRI

Their statement that American free-speech jurisprudence doesn't apply to non-journalists is a dead giveaway that they're speaking nonsense.

Maybe you're impressed when the Trump administration's DOJ comes up with a novel legal theory to prosecute a journalist for "solicitation." I'm going to rely on Hugo Black's opinion of this sort of attempt to intimidate journalists and crack down on national security reporting - that it is a fundamental threat to democracy and contravenes the First Amendment. You can trust Trump's cronies over at the DOJ if you'd like.

> That's not true but I don't have time to run through an exhaustive legal explanation of why. In a nutshell: the source is responsible for maintaining security of information, because third parties like journalists don't know the bounds of what is covered by confidentiality.

Guess what, your wrong and here's why: all gov't info is bound by confidentiality unless it's on a press release page.

That's not true at all.

See https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/why-the... which explains the SCOTUS case that describes why journalists can publish classified information.

I don’t agree. Personally I don’t feel that the government is entitled to have secrets from the governed, as the government derives its power from the consent of the governed, and you cannot consent unless you are informed. A government with secrets from those it requires the consent of to govern is illegitimate and corrupt.

The fact that some claim that it is or should be illegal to tell someone to collect evidence of uninvestigated and unpunished war crimes for publication for the edification of the public shows you just how far down we’ve slipped down the slope.

So, if the government had a weapon plan with the power of a nuclear bomb, and could easily be created with certain instructions...that should be leaked because something something the government has no entitlement to have secrets from the governed...even if it's to protect those it governs.

There idea wide gulf between completely open government and one where secrecy is the default reaponse with very few checks and balances to ensure that those items marked top secret have a valid rationale for being labelled as such.

I would argue that countries like the USA have moved too far in the latter direction and could use a good shove back to the middle.

How can we even be sure such a weapon exists or can exist if we can’t review the workings of it?

This whole “it’s for your own safety, let us protect you with it, trust us (no you can’t read it)” is not informed consent and no amount of mental gymnastics will make it informed consent.

The government requires the consent of the governed or it is illegitimate. Secrets preclude informed consent. There is nothing special or unique about the humans in the government that entitle them to access to secrets whilst denying the governed that same access.

We know that nuclear weapons exist, but generally you can't find plans on how to make the kinds we produce that yield much larger degrees of damage. So, I'm not sure what your point is. We also know that an F-35 and F-22 exist...but we have no idea what the schematics are, we don't even know what it's coated with, they are secret.

That's not true. Nuclear weapons are a 1940's technology, a fat-boy gun style device is simple enough and can be quite powerful. The only thing that's stopping everyone from producing their own is that refining uranium requires a massive amount of energy and scale. Delivery of warheads is the main problem though. What needs to be secret is the delivery / strategy part.

The technology is old, and the theory is open knowledge...it is not well documented or public on how to actually build a working bomb. Especially thermonuclear bombs. There is a reason North Korea struggles to provision a working bomb when it has all the materials in place. The reason Israel got the bomb is because France shared the information with them. Not everyone has that information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon#Public_kn...

Fission bombs are well-understood.

The secrets of constructing a fusion weapon are some of the most closely guarded secrets humans have ever had.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Teller%E2%80%93...

Then again, I think all known practical methods of setting off a fusion bomb involve using a fission bomb to do so, so the barrier to entry for even experimentation/development is extremely high.

Lol, how to actually build it is the easy part. Again, the hard part is the refining uranium to get Uranium-235 and that's (thankfully) mostly a highly resource intensive job with large scale industry needed.

Note that we are talking about 1940's "fat boy" here.

Also, note that the fact that the poorest nation on Earth can do this today kinda says everything.

I think this is one of the things that we should be alarmed at, at how easy it is to make nuclear weapons in today's age. Putting your head in the sand and refusing to accept reality is dangerous.

The Supreme Court addressed this in New York Times vs. United States (1973), when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, which were classified, and which the government argued must remain secret in order to protect the national security.

The court ruled that in order to restrict freedom of the press, the government "carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint." The court further ruled that freedom of the press can only be restrained if there is clear, serious, immediate harm that would result directly from the publication of the material. Speculative arguments about what could happen are not sufficient to block publication.

Justice Hugo Black's argument is really quite beautiful: "The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."

Remember what publications we're talking about here. These were documents detailing a war that the US and British governments entered into under false pretenses, and which they continued to lie to the public about. The public was served by knowing this information, and trying to put the people who published it behind bars, and treating them as if they were spies, is disgusting.

Wikileaks is not the New York Times. Wikileaks did not redact certain documents that ended up burning sources and agents, putting lives in danger. Major news publications don't do that. Major news publications also don't tell someone exactly how to hack into something to get a story. They can massage a source, they can solicit sources, they can contact a source...but you can't tell someone how to hack into a military data bank for the purpose of a story and then say it was free speech. The publishing is -not- what the government is charging Assange with.

Hugo Black didn't write that only the New York Times had the right to publish government documents. He also didn't write that only organizations that meet partiallypro's liking can publish government documents.

Wikileaks is fulfilling an important role, publishing documents that shed light on the secret actions of governments. That's a service to democracy.

The US doesn't either. That is why there are declassification rules that reduce the secrecy level of information after a while.

So yes, you are correct and this trust the government gets to declare something a secret has been abused and the ONLY way to get to the truth was what Assange and Manning did. That this is the ONLY way is pretty important for the legal defense.

I'm not convinced that his source broke the law. At the time, Manning was a legal agent of the US gov and presumably had the clearance to view confidential information. The information he attempted to obtain was password protected, but putting a password on a file doesn't doesn't make it a crime to access it if you have legal secret clearance. The crime was handing the info to Assange, which was committed by Manning and who was prosecuted for it.

By analogy, an employee at a bank isn't a criminal for spinning the dial on the vault. They are a bank employee, they have permission to work on-site with the bank's money, be in the vault, and operate their teller station which has the vault's money. it may be against the bank's regulation to open the vault without authorization, but a guy on the outside asking a bank employee to try a vault combo isn't breaking the law if the bank employee was previously authorized to access it. The crime is taking the green papers from the vault and transporting them off bank premises.

Just because you have a secret clearance, and the information is classified at the secret level, doesn't mean you're authorized to view it. You also need to have a "need to know", and considering that Manning wasn't given the password, I doubt she needed to know what was in the document.

Oh, I get that. Unauthorized access is a violation of Manning's military policy. But she was cleared to view confidential information and had access to other military networks. I contend it's not a crime for Assange to aide her in breaking an employment policy, not an espionage law.

It was a crime (on Manning's end) to hand the information over, but it would not have been a crime on Assange's end to receive it...if he had been protected as a journalist.

And even if he had been a journalist for purposes of these laws, he crossed the line when he helped Manning trying to crack the password. It doesn't matter that he failed--the problem is the attempt.

To use your bank analogy, the scenario would be that a guy without a bank account at the bank wanted money from the vault and helped the bank employee figure out the combo. Both the employee and the guy are guilty. On the other hand, if the employee had just given the guy some money from the vault, the guy isn't guilty of anything.

Clearly you aren't a journalist. Journalists solicit leaks all the time from people who would be breaking the law by leaking that information. There is no difference. This indictment specifically criminalizes journalism and runs directly contrary to the 1st Amendment - period.

Clearly you don't know anything about the law, which is what matters here.

This indictment does not criminalize journalism and does not run directly contrary to the 1st Amendent. Period. Full stop.

There is a SCOTUS case on why journalists can publish classified information without fear of reprisal. That same case is why Assange is SOL.

The Constitution is the ultimate law of the land.

In that case you and other Americans probably break laws in China and Russia. Should you be handed over to those countries because of that? Because that's what you're saying here

No actually it wouldn't. It's already a crime to encourage people to act illegally -- that's technically a conspiracy.

Journalists that have ethical standards wouldn't do this.

> Journalists that have ethical standards wouldn't do this.

Then all journalists who publish classified information - which are most investigative journalists of any note who cover government - have no ethical standards.

There's a difference between merely publishing classified materials and conspiring to access a classified computer system.

Gleen Greenwald was the former, Snowden was more the latter.

If this goes through with Assange, there's nothing preventing the government from also putting Glenn Greenwald behind bars, along with half of the investigative journalists in Washington, DC.

Let me lay out the case to you. Glenn Greenwald conspired with a government employee to access classified information. He knew that Snowden was offering classified information. He hatched a conspiracy with Snowden to meet in Hong Kong, beyond the reach of the United States government. They intentionally obfuscated their communications. They set up a secret meeting point. They decided on a secret signal that would allow Greenwald to identify Snowden. This looks very much like a conspiracy in which Greenwald knows that Snowden is breaking the law, and in which Greenwald is helping Snowden work out a way to do so.

Of course, prosecuting Greenwald for the Snowden leaks would be a disaster for democracy. Prosecuting Assange would also be disastrous.

I have the feeling that a lot of Democrats have decided to throw in their lot with the intelligence agencies that want Snowden behind bars, because they can't forgive him for publishing Hillary and the DNC's emails. For them, this is political payback. If we start throwing journalists to the wolves because we don't like them politically, that will be a very dark day for democracy.

Just wanting to quickly point out that unlawful != unethical.

That's true, but someone who is doing something unlawful that they believe is nevertheless ethical is engaged in civil disobedience and should be prepared to face the civil consequences, including being convicted of a crime and going to jail.

> So this isn't as simple as "a journalist received classified information and is being prosecuted for it." This indictment lays out a very specific crime, which is (Assange) directly encouraging and enabling another individual (Manning) to commit a crime (Espionage) on his behalf.

Nothing about that interpretation is new, thus plenty of high-profile journalists, and journalistic NGO [0] have already responded to that particular "charge" back in April. Like Glenn Greenwald pointing out that "massaging sources" is a major part of investigative journalistic work [1].

[0] https://rsf.org/en/news/rsf-calls-uk-protect-role-journalist...

[1] https://theintercept.com/2019/04/11/the-u-s-governments-indi...

Massaging resource isn't the same as telling someone exactly how to break into a computer system, and Greenwald knows that.

I really fail to see how it's criminal for someone in another country to explain how to hack a computer system our govt has. I fail to see how it's criminal for them to even encourage someone to hack the system. They aren't our citizen, they don't get our benefits and rights, they don't have to act the way we want them to.

This isn't different than the Chinese govt demanding us citizens be surrendered who break Chinese social laws.

> I really fail to see how it's criminal

Seems like classical, straight-up espionage. The only confounding factor is that Assange wasn't (as far as we know) working on behalf of a foreign power. But these days, that's what spies are - not James Bond, but merely a guy who coerces and helps his assets to gain access to and then exfiltrate secret information. Espionage.

So, if China were to steal our plans for the thermonuclear weapons, the F-35 and F-22 by using and instructing a US asset...China is off the hook, even though they facilitated the entire operation? How is this not espionage? Is it suddenly not espionage because Wikileaks made their findings public? So what if China did that? What if Russia did that? How is this any different than Mueller charging Russian nationals (nationals we know Russia will not extradite,) in regards to election interference? That was ultimately published information in regards to Podesta and Clinton emails. The people indicted were not all hackers, some of them just instructed...so I guess they are innocent? Your argument makes no sense.

ryanlol, you appear to be shadowbanned

why not use the correct analogy?

e.g. if a journalist (in the usa or outside) knows your employer (gov or private) committed crimes against the population and kept proofs of it inside a toy safe, that you can open easily just by fiddling with it, and the journalist motivates you to go fiddle with the children's toy safe to get the evidence, is it: a) you and the journalists high profile spy-hackers? b) you employer a criminal, and incopetent at security?

China and other countries do steal our IP routinely and get away with it no punishment. What point are you trying to make?

My argument makes plenty of sense and it's very easy to ingest - if you aren't a member of my country and receive no privileges as tho you're a member of my country then you shouldn't be punished like you're a member of my country. What about that are you exactly arguing against?

> The first section of the indictment describes the various ways in which Assange and/or Wikileaks said, more or less, "gee, it sure would be nice if someone got these classified documents for us."

A lot of news orgs, and individual reporters, have explicitly asked for information about specific topics. Yes, usually not by explicitly mentioning it being classified, but for plenty topics that's basically implied.

By my read the indictment doesn't formulate any limiting principles on the more broad charges that could be levied against many reporters.

> Finally, we have a section labeled "C. ASSANGE Encouraged Manning to Continue Her Theft of Classified Documents and Agreed to Help Her Crack a Password Hash to a Military Computer". This described how Assange provided Chelsea Manning with tools allowing her to circumvent passwords and other protections on classified computers.

Which is why the previous version, which had only this charge, was much less heavily criticized.

The charge could have been limited to working on cracking the password. Instead it explicitly describes activity common to reporters and critical for democracy: publishing information the source obtained "illegally". In quotes because a government with something to hide will generally hide it under a national security secrets act.

Why make charges that could destroy journalism when you could charge with something that doesn't? It's hard to understand, unless of course the press is "the enemy of the people".

It describes cracking and then leaking it.

I don't think you could manage the same legal challenge with just the latter. Often charges describe all sorts of things that themselves aren't illegal.

At face value it doesn't seem so crazy to charge him for this. I mean it is committing a crime by proxy as opposed to passively obtaining information from a source (the latter of which journalists should be protected for).

If I give tools and a robbery checklist to someone and tell them to rob a bank, surely I'm still able to be charged and probably for a higher crime right? At least that's how these charges seem to me. I guess I don't see how it's invalid.

I do however see how this could set a dangerous precedent should the courts allow loose interpretation of the outcome to mean "reporting leaked information is illegal"

what "crime by proxy" ? Manning was an agent of the US. He (must have) had some level of secret clearance. Just because he didn't know the password to a database doesn't make it a crime.

Those databases are illegal for non-government employees to access. If Manning had secret clearance for database {A, B, and C} but not D, it's an internal IT violation between him (at the time he was male) and his boss. If you or I (presuming you're not a gov employee) tried it, we don't have clearance and therefore it would be a crime, aka hacking.

Yes that she was an agent at the time. But no that she had access to those materials. There are various levels of government access. Even if documents are marked "secret" and you have secret clearance if you don't have the passwords you don't have access. And actually in government sometimes you do have the passwords and still don't have granted access. Any tampering with a computer to gain access you didn't have approval for from your supervisors is considered hacking. Yes it's an internal IT violation, but at a government office which makes it a government offense. I hope that makes sense. It's not like a normal company where you get repercussion from that entity alone at these sorts of government orgs.

You are right, we should be clear about what is being claimed by the government.

However, is there any legitimate alternative method for a whistleblower to expose the US government of warcrimes, as WikiLeaks did? It seems quite unfair for a government to murder innocent civilians and then protect itself by putting the evidence behind a password.

To be clear, the evidence was not behind a password (at least, it was already accessible to Manning). The purpose of cracking the password was to allow Manning to download the information from a different account, in order to obfuscate the source of the leak.

This makes an important difference!

That's incorrect. Assange was trying to brute force the administrator password on a DoD system to give Manning elevated access on the host that she didn't have at the time. It wasn't an obfuscation exercise, it was an attempt to uncover classified information Manning wasn't privy to with her current account access.

*Edit: and it was done after Manning had handed over everything she could access with her own account. At least that's what the charge is in the initial indictment.

Only the last section has any legitimacy IMO. And I suspect it is something along the lines "well, you can google for something called John The Ripper".

And about "gee, it sure would be nice if someone got these classified documents for us." As long as the POTUS is not charged for asking the exact same things to Russians publicly, it would be a shame that a foreign person be charged in US for that.