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Comment by citilife | Hacker News Reader

I still don't really understand how a journalist, non-U.S. citizen, operating entirely outside the U.S. is being indicted for anything.

I understand he obtained U.S. documents and published them.

However, if I obtain on-the-ground images of the Tiananmen Square protests and share them on Facebook with my friend group, should I be subject to Chinese laws?

I don't live in China, I don't have Chinese citizenship, I've never been to China. Should I be subject to Chinese law?

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China would say yes, and in such a case you should not ever be in a state that has and/or requires good diplomatic relationship with, or economic support from, China.

Law is, after all, what gets executed, and debating whether it's right or wrong is a luxury you don't have when it's executed on you.

China actually hasn't overstated its jurisdiction anywhere near as egregiously as the US has.

I'm sure it's just because they aren't in a powerful enough position to, not that they have qualms about it.

Where they do have power, they wield it. See: international relations regarding Taiwan.

They don't see their relations with Taiwan as international.

Read it as "See: international relations [with the rest of the world] regarding [the subject of] Taiwan"

Heard of Causeway Bay Books? One of the men was a Swedish citizen and was taken from his home in Thailand.

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

China absolutely extends its jurisdiction to anywhere it thinks it can get away with it.

cf. https://www.wsj.com/articles/famous-rich-powerful-missing-15...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...

There's a difference between doing it 'legally' and illegally though...

Kim dotcom

Yes, this is the entire premise of extradition treaties. If you conspire to commit a crime in a different country, you are potentially able to be sent there to be put on trial. As to whether or not those laws are just is a separate issue.

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

This is not a good understanding of Extradition. Extradition before the age of the internet involved identifying people who had in the past committed a crime in a certain jurisdiction and transporting them back there to face justice. So for example, I murder someone, I flee to the UK, the USA asks the UK to extradite me back. Or indeed JA (allegedly) rapes someone, flees to the UK, Sweden asks for extradition.

What's at question here is: Given Assange was never in the US, how has he committed a crime in the US and the answer is that the US has a funny idea jurisdiction.

Crimes committed against the United States are seen as crimes committed in the United States. This is an issue of sovereignty, as there is no (for most intents and purposes) higher, international court to pursue the case in. Therefore, the case is tried in the United States. It's similar to any other foreign national conspiring in crime in the United States. They don't have to physically be in a country to break a country's laws.

The country that the individual was in when the crime was committed can certainly handle the issue and not extradite, however, generally these agreements avoid that.

This existed before the internet as well.

If US acknowledged international courts, you could make that argument. But as of now, the US doesn't acknowledge some of the most important international courts, like the ICC. Thus the argument that there are no higher courts is entirely bogus, as it is so by choice.

The idea of extraterritorial jurisdiction has existed for centuries with piracy laws being some of the earliest examples. Most countries have enshrined the idea into their laws in some manner especially when it concerns laws in which the victim is the nation itself. Many countries go way beyond what the US has. For instance France claims the right to prosecute anyone for any crime committed against a French national regardless of where the crime was committed.

The US has extradition treaties with most countries it seems:

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

> Should I be subject to Chinese law?

Only if China can exert it's influence in the US. And it can, to a certain extent. It's not unheard of for China to demand that a citizen return home by threatening legal action against his or her family. If China had the same influence over the US as the US does over most of the European countries, then yes, you would be subject to Chinese law if they care enough to pursue it.

Laws aren't magic. They're enforced by power. If any country has the power to enforce their own laws in foreign countries, they'll do it if it's important enough to them. In this case, the upside is definitely big enough.

I'd be more worried and angry if I were a citizen of a European country. This isn't the first time this decade the US has violated the sovereignty of a European country.

> I still don't really understand how a journalist, non-U.S. citizen, operating entirely outside the U.S. is being indicted for anything.

> I understand he obtained U.S. documents and published them.

> However, if I obtain on-the-ground images of the Tiananmen Square protests and share them on Facebook with my friend group, should I be subject to Chinese laws?

> I don't live in China, I don't have Chinese citizenship, I've never been to China. Should I be subject to Chinese law?

No but I wouldn't travel to China in that case.

I am fairly certain that Julian Assange is doing or attempting literally everything theoretically or practically possible to avoid traveling to the United States.

Totally agree with your point.

We're seeing the US flex its international power to get revenge rather than justice, and it's disconcerting to see how many "free" nations are allowing it to happen.

Although I don't pretend to understand the specifics, I expect that any charges against him will be on the corner cases. They won't be a frontal assault on Wikileaks. After all, what's the difference between WL and the New York Times when you get right down to it?

My guess is that hidden on page 1050 (or whatever) of the charges, the meat of the matter will be some sort of Swiss Army knife of Justice Department power involving a kind of conspiracy, meeting with C. Manning, or whatever. Truth is, they can put anyone in prison any time they like.

Thank goodness the intelligence nomenklatura in this country isn't joined at the hip with the Googles, Facebooks, and AT&Ts of the world. Then where would we be?

> After all, what's the difference between WL and the New York Times

The difference between WikiLeaks and the New York Times is that WikiLeaks would not have kept Bush's warrantless wiretapping program secret until after the 2004 election - at the request of the Bush administration.

What? NYT regularly publishes information unfavorable to the US government. WikiLeaks on the other hand participates directly in advancing Russian state aims.

"The New York Times had held the story at the request of the government."

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

One of the most incredible things about that is that the New York Times only published the story when the journalist who had uncovered it threatened to publish it outside the paper. They were willing to sit on one of the biggest stories in their history, at the request of the government, until they were faced with the prospect of getting scooped. Wikileaks would have published right away, informing the US electorate (I mean, "interfering in the 2004 election by providing truthful information to the public").

The actual charges hinge (at this point) on Assange supposedly helping someone to bypass some security to obtain that information.

I don't think they were successful (legally that likely doesn't matter), and we'll how much actually counts as "help".

So with your analogy you obtain information release it, and then help someone try to hack a computer to access more .... that's where we are at this point.

It's a difference. Generally journalists don't help their sources hack into anything.

I suspect if you did China would be happy to take you if they could extradite you.

The heart of their indictment [1] is the conspiracy charge. Basically if you conspire to access a computer system, especially one owned by the US Military and containing classified information, they will come after you.

1: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/press-release/file/1165566...

He instructed and encouraged Manning to steal information for him while Manning was on military duty.

It is not clear he is a journalist as traditional journalism is pretty far away from what Wikileaks has done.

It is also still not legal for journalists to direct people to steal classified information. Publishing it is not necessarily the crime, being involved in the acquisition is. This is why nobody is talking about charging or extraditing Glen Greenwald (published Snowden's materials). Assange was directly involved in getting the materials and exposed himself pretty easily to espionage charges.

If you don't agree about classifying that as espionage, what is espionage to you?

> traditional journalism is pretty far away from what Wikileaks has done.

What you're describing is exactly what investigative journalists do all the time: they encourage sources to leak classified information, which they then publish.

> If you don't agree about classifying that as espionage, what is espionage to you?

Espionage is when a government uses covert means to obtain information on a foreign government for its own gain. When an independent organization obtains and publishes government secrets that it deems to be in the public interest, that's normally called "journalism."

> they encourage sources to leak classified information, which they then publish

Where's the line between "encouraging a source", and trying to crack a salted password hash on their behalf so they can say "Here's the password, use this to get into this classified system"?

That's not what he's accused of doing. The password would not have given Manning access to additional information - just a way to cover her tracks. Whether Assange even tried to crack the password is just speculation, though.

> just a way to cover her tracks.

So actively assisting in knowingly concealing a crime is no longer a crime, now?

> Whether Assange even tried to crack the password is just speculation, though.

Assange is quoted saying to Manning that he was "still trying, had had no luck yet, trying different tools".

> Assange is quoted saying to Manning that he was "still trying, had had no luck yet, trying different tools".

Which is evidence that he probably wasn't trying at all (and was lying to Manning) because any moderately-competent teenager with a computer can tell you that the only tool you need to use is johntheripper.

A lot of Americans think he is the reason Trump got elected.

Ofcourse not. That’d be ridiculous. But the US is somehow special.

Where's the line though? What if you manage to blow up a building using nothing but your computer, outside of the US, as a non-US citizen. Should you then be subjected to US law?

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