Tech journalists troubled by Assange computer intrusion charge
cpj.org
cpj.org
If Alice in Canada, a Canadian citizen and permanent resident, tells Bob in the US that thepiratebay lets them download copyrighted content, can the US request extradition of Alice from Canada and charge them with US crimes?
Basically everyone in the world can be subject to US Law, set by a government they didn't vote for.
0. Country A has an extradition treaty with country B.
1. Break a law in Country A that is also a law in Country B but the effects of breaking that law happen in country B.
2. Courts in Country A decide whether the extradition treaty applies.
3. If it's a citizen that breaks the law there are a myriad of ways for Country A to say no. If It's a non-citizen then they get exported with a quickness, usually.
Countries like Iceland usually say no to the US, see: Bobby Fischer. Other countries vary quite a lot.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but most countries only extradite their own citizens (sometimes or never) in the case where laws are broken in both countries and there's a ton of political pressure. It's not completely willy nilly though it's worse than I'd like.
It may or may not be the case for Assange depending on the facts of the case and on your own opinion, but treating the location of the crime as "where the server is" does seem like a sensible way to deal with the problem.
Yes, the person should be allowed to get away with it, because the sovereignty of that country is important.
Should every country apply their laws globally, or just the US...?
You may not be physically present in the same location as the server in the GP's hypothetical but the crime you committed was within the territory of that particular country.
To me, the equivalent is flying over to the country, committing a crime, then flying back before the crime had been detected and using that as a defence for why you shouldn't be extradited.
That's just my opinion though. I do agree that the age of the internet has made the issue of legal jurisdictions a murky one.
If a US citizen in the 1960s sent a leaflet containing some thought crime to the Soviet Union should the US be under any obligation to extradite that person to the USSR?
By communicating with a computer in another country you're just sending information across the high-tech equivalent of the postal system. It's up to the receiving country how strict they're going to be in auditing information crossing their borders.
Interesting example, and as I understand it, the USSR would have considered it a crime and would have requested extradition. That is their right as a sovereign nation, and it's the reason why extradition treaties exist. That's kind of the point I was making - countries get to decide what crimes have taken place within their borders, and extradition treaties are the way we decide whether or not we move people to where they need be in order to answer for their actions. Geography has never really been a way of avoiding prosecution (but using the lack of extradition treaties between rival nations absolutely has).
Only if (a) an extradition treaty between the two countries existed and (b) the actions of the US citizen were a crime in the US as well as in the USSR. In general, you can only be extradited for something that's a crime in the country you're being extradited from.
A specific action punishable by a year in prison in my home country might be punished with a decade in another; the conditions of my home country's prison might not be the same as in a foreign country, etc.
If I had to serve a one year sentence where I live for something I consider moral I wouldn't be too bothered (not that I'd welcome it of course), but serving a year in an American prison is a terrifying thought.
Not every country has the power to apply their laws globally, the US can.
Not many places in the world would consider that a crime, but of course he is a symbol of free information and they want him taken out
The question about helping someone hack the laptop in question (even if not successful) was a clear crossing of a boundary that I would expect most journalists would not cross.
Do you agree with this practice?
I think it is an extremely slippery slope to prosecute people for providing public information about how to find public resources to do something already publicly known.
That means that you could go to jail for merely suggesting for someone that it's possible for them to buy drugs online via a dark net market-- something I am indirectly doing now just by having this conversation.
Or for telling them to google _____ to know how to commit suicide painlessly.
Where do we draw the line? Are we sure someone won't come along and move it further down later on?
Assange broke the law—calling him a journalist is a farce and a tactic—and has to deal with the consequences. Letting him get away with it sets a precedent for interpreting the law in any way we want, effectively rendering laws useless (and creating the exact problem you've described here).
Simply put: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbOtyWTRZ_g
"Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism.
The annual prize is awarded to a journalist "whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gellhorn called it".
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jun/02/julian-assange...
In the absence of a clear legal definition of "journalist" in the US, it seems entirely reasonable to call someone who wins prizes for journalism a journalist. Why do you disagree, and why should your opinion be weighted more strongly than those who disagree with you?
I agree, however, that calling him a "journalist" is a tactic. The goal is imply that because he's a journalist, he should not be prosecuted for breaking the law. It's a strange tactic, though, since as far as I know there are no exceptions for journalists to break US federal laws.
Anyway, I'd argue that calling him "not a journalist" is a tactic as well. Why not simplify to your stronger point of "Assange broke the law ... and has to deal with the consequences"? Do you feel that if he was a "proper journalist" he should be treated differently?
(Personally, I think trying to enforce US law on foreign nationals who have never set foot in your country is a terrible precedent. I believe that prosecuting him is selective-enforcement, intended to punish him for releasing true but embarrassing information about US government misdeeds, and to dissuade others who might be tempted to follow his example. While he likely broke the laws that he is charged with, I think journalists worldwide are right to be afraid of the change in policy that this implies.)
Classifying him as a journalist, though, fits the narrative that journalists writ large are currently under attack (i.e., sympathy vote).
> Why do you feel that it strengthens your argument to say "calling him a journalist is a farce"?
Because I'm an asshole and I find it humorous that he's cowering when he knew full well what he was doing.
> Why do you disagree, and why should your opinion be weighted more strongly than those who disagree with you?
I never claimed that my opinion should be. You did that. Pointing to awards is effectively just an appeal to authority.
It would be, if it wasn't followed by the (correct) fact that there is an absence of an official record of who is and isn't a journalist, and saying that this is a decent proxy. And an appeal to authority, when we're discussing whether someone is authoritatively a journalist, seems apt, to me.
Do you truly believe that a political journalist is not ethically allowed to commit digital forensics against an adversary who committed war crimes in secret? What gives the US government immunity from hacking but not Assange?
What if Assange does not recognize the authority of a State he has never set foot in?
If I am tipped off about a badly protected server in China which contains information about State-wide concentration camps and Buddhist and Muslim persecution which I think the world needs to see, am I acting unethically if I want to acquire this information?
Why the hell do I care about the laws of a foreign totalitarian authoritarian regime who commits human rights atrocities on a daily basis?
There is a strong social and institutional norm that we don't prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, even though it is against the law. The government is even sort of maintaining that norm here, by charging the password cracking instead of the publication.
And yes, this entire situation is definitely meant to create a chilling effect among whistleblowers, and simultaneously cement in the public mind that if data is protected/encrypted, you're not ethically allowed as a vigilante to use digital forensics against it in order to expose horrendous crimes committed in the name of the government.
Even though government digital forensics against a foreign political adversary is why they have these chat logs of Assange in the first place. It's about creating an uneven playing field.
That heuristic doesn't stand up to basic scrutiny.
The example under discussion can be straightforwardly applied to the topic of software exploits. By posting a proof of concept to a mailing list, one knows that previously obscure information will then be in the hands of ne'er do wells. The motivation even includes foreseeing the exploit being used, pressuring the vendor/sysadmins into fixing it. Yet we are all safer when exploits are shared publicly so that they can be patched, rather than kept in obscurity.
Providing general information, even to someone who will use it for abuse, should be protected speech. "Ammonium nitrate plus Diesel" or "Just Google Casio F-91W and thank me later" are definitively in that territory. A weaker standard is begging for selective persecution, just as we see here.
Accessory liability generally requires you to know that someone is going to commit a crime, and know that your action will help them.
Juries can make bad decisions in particular cases of course, but if I were the defense I would have a field day constantly repeating the "I can't help you" quote.
The other side would try to say that was just hand waving or insincere, and the jury would have to decide between those two alternatives based on all the facts of the case.
(This becomes a question of fact because particular facts matter. If the Godfather leans in and says the line you gave, for instance, to one of his loyal henchmen, the law should be able to punish him.)
That pretty much means that by calling someone a "godfather" I can prosecute them for things that normally wouldn't be a crime. What if I call someone a "terrorist," or a government a "regime"?
Apparently you can push a lot of people into believing a prosecution is not purely political.
I think the point is well made - the jury has to decide what "I can't help you" means, and it means different things depending on who says it. This is the nature of human communication and we can't escape from it.
That's because the threat isn't just the words; it's also a question of intent - and in the absence of time-travelling MRI machines to objectively observe people's thoughts in the past, inferring the intent from context we can observe.
Of course, you could argue that having laws that depend on people's only-indirectly-observable mental state is a bad idea - that announcing your intention to blow up an airport should either always be legal, or never be legal. If you're interested in such questions, you might enjoy reading about the Twitter Joke Trial [1] over one such incident.
"This guy murdered three other people!" is no proof that he murdered this particular person.
Because of those rules, calling someone a "godfather" in court doesn't so much get you a prosecution as it gets you an objection and mistrial.
So I used a lazy example to illustrate the point.
But this brings up another key point -- most of criminal procedure can be summed up by "you can't use irrelevant statements to prejudice the hell out of the jury."
All in all a pretty good rule.
If the person goes and then tries it, yes, I agree you share in the responsibility for their actions. It was reasonable for you to believe the intent was serious and you provided essential guidance to making it a reality.
There's that word "just" again. "just telling someone" adds deceptive misdirection. The context of who you tell and how and why are all important.
> ...and you provided essential guidance to making it a reality.
That's called essential guidance? Man, I guess I could be an educator and mentor, providing essential guidance on software. I guess people are serious when they say software is Google-fu.
It becomes even more essential if you provide them with the proper search terms that would give them better results. Interpreting what "better search terms" is, is something a good lawyer should be able to manage.
If you say "idk, maybe Google 'how to make a bomb,'" then that's not essential guidance. If you say "Google for [list of specific key ingredients]," that's a bit different.
To the extent that would be illegal, it would only be illegal because the other person was first asking how to commit a crime. If you walked up to a random person and told them "Google 'How to commit check fraud'" then you'd be 100% in the clear.
So I would argue he embarrassed both the military industrial complex AND the DNC to get him where he is now. It’s also much harder to see publishing internal documents of a campaign/political party as a public service or whistleblowing, though I think the case for “russian interference” is entirely overblown compared to, say, blatant interference via the incestuous political/media blob.
How do you establish that a given act of hacking is or is not a public service? Especially in cases where there isn't a bright line like "someone broke law XYZ".
It seems like going to court & having a jury decide that is not obviously the wrong solution. So even if one supports your position, it seems like the issue would still end up in court with a jury deciding whether someone spends years in jail or goes free.
If the court process was reasonably expected to be impartial and fair, then you'd have a point.
That's very much not the case in this instance. :(
If you hack and then publish embarrassing material to the whole world it's a public service.
If you hack non-embarrassing operationally sensitive material and then leak it selectively to foreign governments then it's espionage.
There's some fuzziness but it's not a bright line to cross and Julian Assange is very, very far away from it.
The fact that the murders that were uncovered are still going unprosecuted adds considerable weight to the idea that it was a public service. If Assange had done the exact same thing to Russia the idea that it was espionage would be justifiably mocked. It's not mocked because nationalism is a potent drug, essentially (here, it's not like Russians aren't looking at this and shaking their heads).
By that definition, hacking a celebrity's iCloud account and leaking their nudes is a public service. I think that's a bit of a stretch.
Regardless, hacking a celebrity's icloud account and releasing the images is still more journalism than it espionage.
It seems fairly analogous to the famous 1973 burglary of FBI offices that uncovered J Edgar Hoover's blanked surveillance of civil rights movements and his attempt to coerce Luther King into committing suicide:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/fbi-office-bre...
Retrospectively, it's easy now to call these people heroes who uncovered a rather evil conspiracy.
The company filed a police complaint and claimed the journalists unlawfully accessed a computer without authorization, conspired to access a computer without authorization, and access with the intention to disclose patient confidential information (https://www.svt.se/nyheter/medhelp-anmaler-computer-sweden). I strongly doubt it will go anywhere or any of the journalists will see a day in prison.
When your business card reads "wikileaks" I think the parties involved have a decent idea of what they where doing.
I can see how the attempt might be viewed as a hostile act towards the Americans as a "military entity" but i also strongly belive that Wikileaks has done amazing work with their dumps.
If he wants to try and brute a few encryptions to support wikileaks i dont really mind quite frankly. The amount of shit we (europeans++) take from the American tech/some enterprises on behalf of the us goverment i legitimatly feel that the citisens that have been illegal spied on by a foreign goverment that could not possibly care less about protecting their fundemental privacy rights, lose their privilige to complain when citizens of said foreign nations with "nobel" causes tries to fuck them back.
Im sorry but with the revelations of the past decade my strong support of the status quo in regards to American dominance has withered some. There is a point where i just want to tell the American military machine to "ta deg en bolle" (Norwegian for its time to shut the fuck up and deal with it)
/end of anti-America rant
A novel interpretation and prosecution for one man (right or wrong) while not pursuing a very well trodden prisecution path for another. It's no light thing.
The point of the rule of law is one doesn’t have to. This comment is orthogonal to the article.
Perjury is not exactly a novel prosecution to run, nor would be something setting precedent. This (right or wrong) sets precedent in it's interpretation and effect and will create case law either way it goes. Do you see the point I'm making? I can't see prosecution hesitating for a second to prosecute someone like Assange for perjury if there was even a hint of a case for it. That doesn't make Assange right and Clapper wrong or indeed say anything at all about that. It's just a worrying thing.
Absolutely not.
Even more effective than the blind defense of Khashoggi's murders and the "enemy of the people" language.
Also the sexual crimes related to Assange (regardless of whether you think they're true or not) are allegations.
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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.
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