Julian Assange: Home Secretary Signs US Extradition Request
bbc.com
bbc.com
Assange helped shed light on all of it, and one would think that after such a humiliating series of revelations the US would find it harder to sell the public on new wars and new enemies. Unfortunately that has not been the case.
Remember in 2016 when Clinton was accused of getting leaked debate questions? Personally I expected that to be the end of her run. At the very least for everyone to say "wow, she actually did that. A candidate should never be able to do that". Instead, assange was the bad guy. People who believed it were nutjobs. Bernie and trump were the "real" bad guys. No accountability - they just misdirected and anyone in Clinton's camp or even the anti trump camp said "well so?"
So im not surprised now that people are being led to this propaganda like sheep. Our populace has disgraced any sense of intelligence it may have had. We really cant look at our average citizen and think anything positive about their critical thinking.
Edit: Downvote if you can't provide any logical counter to what I've said. Nothing up there is untrue, but there are a lot of butt hurt Clinton fans still lingering I'll say.
Another view is that he published evidence of alleged American war crimes. Then he published a bunch of other stuff of zero public interest, but damaging to innocent people (e.g. medical records of gay Saudis, rape victims, et cetera [1]).
The former should be clearly held as being First Amendment protected. The latter is reasonably questionable. The merit of the former does not automatically absolve the harms of the latter.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/new-report-highl...
That's not what he's extradited for.
"The 17 counts were tacked on to a single count accusing Assange of conspiring with Manning to crack a Department of Defense password." [1]
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-founder-julia...
I am not aware that Mr. Assange ever published anything 'showing US armed forces murdering unarmed journalists and civilians,' although I have read allegations in the press that he published video of people being killed collareally to lawful military action. Collateral damage is not murder. Yes, innocents get killed in armed conflict. The frequency needs to be minimised, of course.
International law forbids intentionally attacking civilians or attacking an otherwise-legitimate military target when civilian casualties are clearly excessive in relation to the military advantage; it doesn't forbid belligerents from taking a course of action which will result in unintentional civilian casualties.
I am neither a lawyer nor a targeteer, though, so I could have gotten some of the wording or details wrong, but I believe the general principle is true.
Murder is the unlawful killing of another human. Unintended civilian casualties or collateral damage in war are a tragedy but they are not murder and are almost never a war crime.
[Voice 1] Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.
[Voice 2] That's right.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&has_verified=1&t...
"Battle" my ass.
Maybe you haven't seen the whole video -- they were laughing about it during and afterwards, and then blamed the people they just killed for "bringing their kids to a battle" (ignoring the that US was invading the country, so really the US had brought the "battle" to them).
In addition, the reporter's deaths were covered up by the government instead of being honest to Reuters and the reporter's families -- saying they were collateral deaths. In addition, the war logs showed evidence of civilian death and friendly-fire figures being intentionally manipulated by the US government (as well as many other things such as blatant examples of corruption).
That said I'd recommend a quick keyword search on "assange" + "collateral damage" (which was the name of a polished version of the video he helped leak).
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-founder-julia...
Was it Turkey (I forget) recently that was trying to accuse people of crimes for writing anti-government pieces online and everyone says how bad it is, but, people seem to be cool when it's the USA doing it.
I don't understand the modern world and the reach of governments/where the crime actually occurs etc.
Going to Assange now - I can understand if he hacked the American government and you could state that the crime took place in America, but, if he passed around information outside of America, surely the offence didn't actually occur where the USA have jurisdiction?
I mean look at the international outrage when people from country A commit a crime INSIDE country B and country B punishes based on their own laws. The north Korea prisoner who was tortured and died shortly after release stands out, but there are plenty of other examples.
To just say "I don't see how anyone has a problem with this" makes you sound like a shill or someone trying to look enlightened, because it's not hard at all to see how this is complicated.
I'm hoping that he is extradited and stands trial because I can't think of an alternative. It will settle the issue as best as we humans can.
The players might change, but the game is the same.
I think it’s totally reasonable to argue that Assange did not do what he is accused of, but what he is accused of is not journalism or simply the expression of free speech.
Further, the person who actually committed theft has been pardoned serving less time than Julian spent in the embassy. It makes no sense that he would receive any punishment at this point for the lesser crime.
Then again the US has a rather schizophrenic approach to prosecuting 'hackers.' Aaron Schwartz was looking at 35 years prison time for what basically amounted to a wget loop, or he could give the state its prosecutorial pound of flesh and plead guilty for six months house arrest. Faced with this he took his own life in 2013.
Kevin Mitnick was once damned to prison for actual hacking, and was sentenced to a paltry 4 years in jail for hacking some of the largest telecom providers in the world. These days he runs a security company that has the US government as a client.
* Juries cannot be punished or reprimanded for coming to the "wrong decision". * A defendant who is acquitted cannot be tried again in front of a jury because of the defense of double jeopardy.
The reason for that bias might be more complicated (the view of the local community which will be selected for a jury might be influenced through various means -- but that's a secondary question to the primary point that there is a statistical bias regardless of the reason for it).
The alternative was him being locked in self-imposed exile forever. By getting him out, extraditing him, and finally sentencing him to a min term sentence, they can say they did something and still let him go in a reasonable amount of time.
Why would USA do this?
Since when has any country acted with benevolence towards those individuals it deems its enemy?
Swartz accessed a system he did not have permission to access. He did so by entering a restricted area he did not have permission to access. While I agree with his general ideal, what he did was an act of civil disobedience.
The single most basic tenet of civil disobedience is that you are willing to go to jail.
Swartz was apparently unable to think beyond the immediate and to the inevitable, obvious, end result of him being charged with a crime that he blatantly and admittedly committed.
Six months house arrest, which given that he had no criminal record, would likely have been halved or reduced even further. This is absolutely in line with the crime that he, again, admitted to committing.
Mitnick's sentence shows exactly what these maximums mean in regards to real-world sentencing.
These two sentences appear incorrect. I can simply refer you to Wikipedia, where it states that he accessed "JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT."
If Wikipedia is wrong, please correct them. Certainly, if you know facts about this case that Wikipedia is getting wrong, then the whole world would benefit by the modification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
"Swartz was never going to get anywhere remotely near 35 years and people need to stop spouting this nonsense as it makes them look completely ignorant of every single fact in the case."
Incorrect and inflammatory; again, a simple check of Wikipedia suggests that you don't have your facts right.
From Wikipedia: "Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release."
Again, if you know something that Wikipedia doesn't, please update them; however, it certainly doesn't make ANY sense to say that others are "spouting nonsense" simply because they've received what may be incorrect information from a source like Wikipedia.
> These two sentences appear incorrect. I can simply refer you to Wikipedia, where it states that he accessed "JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT."
He was not a student at MIT and was initially looked at for trespass, though the Institute declined to prosecute.
If trespassing is _not_ "entering a restricted area he did not have permission to access", what is?
> "Swartz was never going to get anywhere remotely near 35 years and people need to stop spouting this nonsense as it makes them look completely ignorant of every single fact in the case."
> Incorrect and inflammatory; again, a simple check of Wikipedia suggests that you don't have your facts right.
Being theoretically possible to be sentenced to 35 years in jail does not in any way say that it is assured that you will. You willfully ignore context in the posts that discuss the difference between what a realistic sentence is, and how it differs at times from the sensationalist maximum sentence.
Just yesterday, a man was sentenced to 12 years jail for rape, despite there being a maximum sentence possible of 72 years. It is not incorrect or inflammatory to say that it was unlikely that person was ever going to get sentenced to 72 years in prison.
A reminder/correction: According to the CFAA, if you use perfectly valid and correct credentials to do things you aren't supposed to do, you are "violating your access". IE, if I were to become a teller at a bank, and use the bank's software and my access to steal $100, that is a violation of the CFAA and considered accessing a computer "in excess of authorization" which is the actual terms used in the law
Accessed a controlled access server room to attach his computer to so he could download from the JSTOR repositories. Learn to read.
>Incorrect and inflammatory; again, a simple check of Wikipedia suggests that you don't have your facts right.
Again, learn to read. "Cumulative maximum" means that if every single crime, which he admitted to committing I remind you, was given the maximum sentence he would have spent 35 years in jail.
Except he was never going to get 35 years or anything even close to it. Its just disingenuous jackoffs such as yourself that propagate this number because you can't fucking read and can't be bothered to learn facts.
Swartz was offered six months. He killed himself instead. Swartz was a fucking privileged pussy that likely never had a hard day in his life and bailed the moment reality hit him.
"Learn to read", "disingenuous jackoffs", "can't fucking read", "fucking privileged pussy" -- these are all your words. I call them inflammatory. You seem to disagree, but the consensus will line up with me on this one. Please realize that. Your initial post was modded down by others for a reason.
You appear hypersensitive to people who disagree with you. Dude, this is the sign of emotional problems. You need to calm down and realize there's something wrong in your head or in your life, and when you can begin to write like an emotionally secure adult, you'll be taken seriously.
I implore you, please, to analyze your life, find the things that are harming you, and rectify them. I believe, given this interaction with you, that you would benefit from this kind of introspection.
As an example of your extreme sensitivity, when you say "the maximum sentence he would have spent 35 years in jail", on this issue we are in agreement. Somehow, you turn this into an opposition. You seem to be looking for a fight, and you're trying to do it on the Internet. I will not fight you on the Internet, my friend. That would be counter-productive.
He’s being charged with stealing the information and actively supporting others in doing so. That activity is a crime.
Every US journalist knows if someone secretly gives you some secret document it’s fair game. If you go and steal said document then different story.
If you like leaks, you have to accept that it is going both ways.
And Snowden has never mislead anyone about why he's in Russia. He's said that he would love to come home. And if U.S. whistleblower protections was stronger he could.
Snowden was openly revealing violations of the U.S. constitution.
Assange was covertly acting as an agent of a hostile foreign government with the intention of interfering in U.S. domestic politics.
There is no comparison between these two, at all.
You're gonna need proof for that, staunch.
The rest of us can, with some basic level of objectivity, just look at the preponderance of the evidence and come to a conclusion. I believe that any reasonable person that looks into the publicly available evidence would come to the same conclusion.
On the other hand, if you're one of the rubes that bought the Seth Rich story from Assange you can be 100% sure that you're terrible at objective analysis.
And I do assert that anyone with an objective point of view would come to the same conclusion.
We should presume innocence until more qualified people beholded to a strict investigative and judicial process make their ruling, which will hopefully not be tainted by outside interests.
Innocent until proven guilty does not mean that we get to make premature assumptions and pass them off as fact because "this isn't a courtroom". It is not something just lawyers and judges are beholden to, it's something we as a society are beholden to. Everyone has to play along.
You can have your own thoughts, but you cannot just pass them off as objective fact without hard proof.
So I ask one more time, what evidence have you prepondered to ascertain Assange's guilty status? You're speaking in vague nothings instead of providing real data.
I generally vote Libertarian, so realistically this didn't effect me, but I am glad that a lot of people got to see a lot of the dirty deeds that politicians abuse. I've known since Bill Clinton was President that Hillary is not a good person and now the world knows it.
I can heartily support protests against a policy I consider bad while being less-supportive of protests against a policy I support.
I can support responsible disclosure while not supporting 0-day drops.
In this case, I haven't seen a credible case that Wikileaks endangered anybody, but I can still see a distinction to be made between leaking documents related to national security and leaking documents solely to discredit a political candidate one dislikes.
Assange, in all his years, never actually released anything on the U.S. government that I found to be damning or evidence of illegality. I don't think he did any good by leaking that Iraq war video, the embassy cables, or CIA tools.
I went from being ambivalent about Assange to thinking he was a terrible person based on his incredible dishonesty regarding the Clinton emails. I had no problem with the leaking of her emails itself.
He, like some kind of weasel lawyer, claimed that he did not receive the emails "from a state actor" and directly implied that they came from Seth Rich. He intentionally mislead a lot of very naive people.
The fact is that they almost certainly came through an intermediary of a Russian state actor and almost certainly did not come from Seth Rich.
So me disliking him has nothing to do with politics. I would have found him just as much of a dishonest weasel had Trump been the target instead of Clinton.
And yet I still think the First Amendment should protect him because I believe American freedoms should remain extremely broad.
Honestly, I don't even have a problem with the stuff against Hillary either. They were doing bad things and got caught.
fyi i’ve got no problem with leaking emails or whatnot. but i do have a problem when the FSB uses your org in order to further their interests.
Assange was a useful idiot that got played OR he was willing and just good at acting. Either way, WikiLeaks is not our friend.
1. They must successfully argue that he is not a journalist, or was not acting as a journalist at the time.
2. They must successfully argue that the federal crimes he's accused of also constitute an act of terrorism under section 2332b (which gives the test in subsection (g)(5): "is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct") in order for the indictment to be valid under an 8 year statute of limitations rather than 5 (because they waited 7 years to indict).
This is on top of actually proving he did what he's accused of. It's a big gamble for the DOJ, because if they fail in applying the espionage act in a US court (which would be required in order to prosecute him at all), the result would gut the espionage act with the precedent it sets.
The Obama administration, even with its hardline stance against whistleblowers, didn't touch this case for good reason.
> Many jurisdictions, such as Australia, Canada, Macao, New Zealand, South Africa, and most European nations except Belarus, will not allow extradition if the death penalty may be imposed on the suspect
Hellooo! Oh those pesky americans
How the media's weapons fetish primes us for war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cADiZii4X8s
Assange has insisted he was 'doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many, many people'.”
“If found guilty of all the charges against him, the Wikileaks founder could be jailed for 175 years.”
Oh BBC, still with the smearing. Can't you at least pretend to be objective. Assange/Wikileaks have always maintained that he was taking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid extradition to the US for Wikileaks activities. i.e. exactly this thing that is happening right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Virgina%27s+Eastern+District...
He'll be tortured for the rest of his life as a message to anyone else who would dare to oppose the current order in such a flagrant and public way and without the backing of a nuclear state.
And, unlike Snowden, none of what she leaked revealed violations of the U.S. Constitution. Her judgement was terrible and she deserved to spend some time in prison for what she did.
Assange is a journalist, not a member of the military or even a U.S. citizen, and all he did was assist and enable the publishing of this classified data.
The cases are completely different.
Assange "conspiring" with manning to crack a password is not
And IIRC the pentagon papers involved journalists helping to photocopy the documents.
Seems totally fine for a journalist to assist someone that's leaking classified data. They're not the ones committing the crime, the person violating their privileged access is IMO.
If you try to rob a bank but your car breaks down before you get there, so you give up, that's not bank robbery.
You may still be guilty of criminal conspiracy or something but not bank robbery. These are legally technical areas that are more complicated than what you're portraying.
I guess I can now be arrested and extradited for terrorism.
I'll guess that this is a true statement, but which law, and does it support extradition? Oh, it must be 'skipping bail', on what seem to be exaggerated charges. So a kind of 'you broke the law because you didn't admit to the charges' kind of thing. Hmmm.
It appears quite clear to me, whatever you think of Assathat he is now a political prisoner.
Also: https://www.shoutoutuk.org/2019/02/26/sajid-javid-broke-the-...
'
the guy ran from the law and the law caught up with him. like any one of us, breaching bail put him in prison.
Bail isn't ordinarily an option in the UK. But these people were so certain that their friend Julian would show up that they signed over their money. The judge asks them if it occurred to them to actually supervise him and make sure he showed up, and IIRC they had never even considered it. If you're a con man looking for victims, that list of people who promised a court money for Assange's bail is a good start.
again, wikipedia is your friend: “Assange was accused of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion in order to help Chelsea Manning gain access to privileged information which he intended to publish on Wikileaks. This is a less serious charge in comparison to those leveled against Manning, and carries a maximum sentence of five years with a possibility of parole.[2]”