Completely different from Facebook, Google, Twitter etc where they merely provide a platform for others to upload content and aren't actively involved in sourcing illegal content.
There were additional files she was interested in leaking that she did not have access to.
She then obtained the password hash of an account that did have access and tried to crack the password, but was unsuccessful. She then sent the hash to wikileaks, not something wikileaks asked for, along with a request for help. There was no response.
Later she was in a chat with someone using a known wikileaks chat account. The identity of this person has not been established. She asked if they had been able to crack the password hash and that person said no they had not cracked it. They did not say they tried to crack it or they approved of cracking it. They answered the question factually, no, they had not cracked it.
Manning never hacked the system, but did try to. There's no evidence Assange attempted to hack the system. There's pretty solid evidence someone at wikileaks told Manning that they had not cracked the hash she had sent them, but none that they had attempted to do so. As far as the leaks that were published, none of these involved hacking, they were obtained using Manning's granted access. They were however unauthorized exfiltration of state secrets documenting war crimes.
This is the case alleging he actively assisted a leaker in hacking crimes.
This is where this breaks down. The account in question was a generic local Windows admin account, and she already had the same level of access as the desired account. It was only attempted to hide her identity.
This is clearly laid out as what happened in Assange's indictment.
This makes no difference, legally speaking. Assange was still helping her to gain unauthorized access to a computer system.
This is like giving bank robbers ski masks in full knowledge that they're going to use the ski masks to hide their identities during a robbery. You're still an accessory. It's no defense to say "Oh, I wasn't helping them to gain access to the vault, I was just helping them to hide their identities".
Yes, it does. It is the duty of the press to try to protect their sources, and the rights of a free press can not be infringed upon. While the act may be considered illegal by some other law, that law is unconstitutional.
You are thinking of reporter's privilege, but massively overextending its scope (https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1146/reporter-s...).
Jorunalists are entitled to "protect" their sources in the extremely limited sense that they cannot, necessarily, be compelled to reveal information about them. They're not in any way entitled to shield their sources from law enforcement.
No, the evidence doesn't show that and it's not been proven. Stop stating it is a fact, that is disingenuous.
Hey foldr, I got a password hash here $1$O3JMY.Tw$AdLnLjQ/5jXF9.MTp3gHv/
Try to crack that for me, it's a password to a system. Did you do it? Did you crack it?
If you say yes: you committed a crime.
According to your legal theory, if you now here say "no", you also committed also a crime since you admitted to helping me gain unauthorized access to a computer system. That is the argument you are making. It's a ridiculous argument and wouldn't stand before a jury, only before a secret national security court with no jury and the judges are all military.
Oh wait it gets worse, we don't even know who foldr is. Turns out that several different people have used this account over time and there's no evidence who was using the account when they said "No."
Do you mean "no" as in "I won't try to crack it", or "no" as in "I tried to crack it and failed"? In the first case, I'm not helping you at all and there's no analogy with the Assange case. In the second case, it depends on the details of the law. I don't know if unsuccessful attempts to gain unauthorised access to a computer system constitute a crime per se in the USA. (I wouldn't be surprised if they do, given that e.g. attempted burglary is typically a crime.) In any case, if I tried and failed to crack the password as part of a broader effort to help with your (successful) efforts to break into a computer system, then I'd pretty clearly be an accessory to that crime. Intent is really, really important.
Ineptness is not usually an excuse. If I do a poor job of hiding the murder weapon for you, I'm still an accessory. If I stall the getaway car, I'm still going to jail along with all the guys who robbed the bank.
Note that in the Assange case, I don't think anything much hinges on the password hash. He's primarily accused of helping Manning to cover her tracks, independently of the failed attempt to crack the password.
Aiding and abetting.
Citizenship and postal address are irrelevant. If you break the law in another country and there is an extradition treaty then you will face the consequences.
Clearly I was gay while doing stuff online on a Saudi Arabian server.
But in general, questions of jurisdiction are complicated. They're settled by courts, not by what people say on the internet.
Assange isn’t being accused of things that are criminal in the UK.
Whether or not the requirement is met in Assange's case is to be decided by the court. There are certainly laws in the UK that prohibit hacking. Anyway, you are wrong in general about how extradition works. People are often, for example, extradited on murder charges.
While there are certainly laws in UK that prohibit hacking (which should be abolished) they are clearly not enough to perform an extradition.
If you actually read the article on the McKinnon case, you'll see that extradition was ultimately refused by the home secretary - not the courts - on largely compassionate grounds:
"Mr McKinnon is accused of serious crimes. But there is also no doubt that he is seriously ill [...] He has Asperger's syndrome, and suffers from depressive illness. Mr McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights."
Oddly, being gay is a crime in Saudi Arabia, but only committing homosexual acts is a capital offense. I would make a joke about the type of kangaroo court that would convict me of being gay, but it’s sad because they exist and people are convicted.
> The Justice Minister has, however, told the Dáil that he won’t extradite anyone who may be put to death for their crime.
More generally, you're at risk of extradition if the alleged crime is also a crime in the country you reside in [2].
The key with extradition is that it has more to do with diplomacy, geopolitics, and sovereignty than anything else.
Extradition is covered by a patchwork of treaties and laws most of which involve some kind of human judgement as well.
One core concept of extradition is the crime has to be, at least in broad strokes, illegal in both jurisdictions.
The crime in question also has to have some reasonable argument of jurisdiction for the requesting state. You might have been gay while buying things from an SA company, but you weren't doing anything in an interaction with SA that had anything to do with being gay. (The first dual criminality concept protects you way before having to think about this). It is also often the case that countries are reluctant or outright refuse to extradite their own citizens and choose to try them in court locally.
Assange wouldn't be protected by either of these. Conspiring to take classified military secrets with a member of the military in question would be illegal everywhere. As would participating in the taking and the following distribution.
The legal questions for Assange are "did he do those things, guiding, requesting, and helping Manning acquire and send the classified information?" "Do the first amendment protections of free speech and free press cover WikiLeaks model?" and "Would Assange receive a fair trial and just punishment if extradited?"
Probably not, because that's not within the scope of what Ireland would be willing to extradite for.
But that's a question of Saudi Arabia’s practical ability to bring you to trial, not one of whether or not any law they have would apply to you on principle.
That's not how laws work. Laws are limited in territorial applicability only to the extent that the sovereign adopting them so limit them, and basically no government would fail to hold foreign coconspirators in a crime occuring within their domestic jurisdiction immune to prosecution (some might not have the practical means to bring such an actor to justice, and some might not choose to apply them in most cases as a matter of policy priorities, but that's a different issue.)
1. Assange helped reveal severe wrongdoings by various governments.
2. Assange engaged in unprotected sexual activity with two women that violated the scope of their consent, because they only consented to protected sex, and also because one woman was asleep in one case. This would have also been illegal in the UK.
3. No prosecution would have been attempted if Assange has not already made political enemies.
4. Russia made hay while the sun was shining by using Assange as a conduit to publish dirt they wanted published.
5. Assange definitely and unambiguously broke UK law by fleeing to the Ecuadorean embassy.
6. The fact that the UK would not allow Assange to depart the Ecuadorian embassy was condemned by the UN as indefinite detention without trial.
7. The current condition of Assange is really suspicious and makes the UK look bad.
(Which of these are actually true is for someone more qualified than I am, but they are all compatible.)
* Sometimes individuals must break the law for greater good. This is called civil disobedience, or civil resistance.
* Just because one is breaking the law for common good, civil servants can't and should not be expected to stop enforcing the law. If you allow that, it's the end of the rule of law based society. The whole idea of just society is that you restrict what individuals in the government can do.
If you decide that civil disobedience is the way and you break the law, you should not ask to be treated differently under the law. Political pardons exist for a reason.
(I'm not taking position on the legality of actions Assage took, or justification of his actions. I'm arguing general principle.)
Breaking a law you otherwise believe in, in the service of some broader goal, is called direct action, riot, or terrorism, depending on the severity of the law broken, and/or the sympathies of the person describing it.
> Sometimes individuals must break the law for greater good. This is called civil disobedience, or civil resistance.
Which is not a complete description of civil disobedience. It is accurate, but not precise.
Civil disobedience implies the actor wishes the law to be changed. They might expect not just a pardon for themselves, but a pardon for everyone who broke the unjust law. It's a distinction with a difference.
We agree that its effectiveness depends on accepting the punishment, sure.
> In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
The US Civil Rights movement generally practiced civil disobedience because the views the laws, the law making process, and the process of selecting who could even participate in the law making process as unacceptable.
The key assumption was that enough of the people who could participate in that process were nevertheless moral enough to reform all of those aspecta given a vivid enough demonstration that they could not turn away from of the top-to-bottom injustice of the system.
I don't think Assange was engaging in civil disobedience, nor do I think he would have been justified if he were, but doing so does not and never has relied on faith in the justice of the existing law-making process any more than it does in the law being violated itself.
This is conflating two aspects of the civil rights movement. It's of course true that there were also objections to the law-making process. But the segregationist laws would be unjust (and hence require violating under MLK's civil disobedience) even if the law-making process perfectly reflected the majority will of the people. It's this latter point that is relevant to INGELRII's comment.
> I don't think Assange was engaging in civil disobedience, nor do I think he would have been justified if he were, but doing so does not and never has relied on faith in the justice of the existing law-making process any more than it does in the law being violated itself.
If the law-making process is illegitimate (e.g., if there is a dictator), then no one thinks you have a moral duty (in the deontological sense) to obey the laws, nor to accept the consequences for breaking them. It's only the situation where the law-making process is legitimate -- reflecting the immoral will of the majority -- where the question comes up of whether (1) you can morally violate the unjust law and (2) whether you are duty-bound to accept the resulting punishment.
You won't consciously break a law that you believe in. "otherwise believe" means that you don't believe in the law.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/03/katharine-gun-...
Except there weren't. The attachment of authoritarians to the rule of law is merely a posture. They set it aside whenever it suits them to. They could set it aside in this case.
In general, criminal law permits but does not mandate prosecution and every prosecution is a judgement about not only the law but policy priorities. This argument is almost completely vacuous where it concerns offenses primarily against the state (it has some weight in equal protection terms when there are victims besides the state and the issue is whether the state is discriminating among victims on improper grounds in the manner in which it chooses to prosecute or not prosecute offenses against them.)
A group of judges met behind closed doors to discuss the incident involving Judge Patricia Curtin and concluded that she "intended eventually to give it back."
This is apparently part of a much larger pattern of "unequal protection under the law" in Massachusetts:
It was an immoral act done as far as I can tell, for immoral purposes, which were successfully attained. That it was also illegal is why it can be punished rather than merely pointed to as the kind of thing that must be tolerated despite its immorality.
The argument has, however, been made that the law as it is prohibits some other acts that are not so immoral and it could not effectively address what Assange did without so doing, and so it should be narrowed (or treated as more narrow by the executive) so as to let Assange go free in order to not chill more legitimate acts. This is, IMO, a not entirely unreasonable argument that I can respect, though I am unconvinced by it as yet.
The immoral purpose of letting the people know of the crimes that the US army has committed?
Also, I'm curious, where is the line between investigative journalism and criminal disclosure of information?
One doesn't always want to be known as the source of information, for a variety of reasons.
> "Also, I'm curious, where is the line between investigative journalism and criminal disclosure of information?"
Can depend on the jurisdiction and one's own perspective. The "ethical dilemmas" section of this Wikipedia article on ethics in journalism provides a taste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/julian-assan...
Try to keep up!
Unsure why so many people are invested in arguing that this is just the routine functioning of the law when it certainly isn't
He's already served his time. He's currently being detained prior to his extradition hearing:
That was the exact point that the user sneak above was making.
This is what happens to anyone who isn’t granted bail. Unless you are granted bail, you are kept in custody in the period between being charged with a crime and being tried for it.
As I mentioned above, it’s not difficult to see why Assange has not been granted bail in this instance. In fact, he didn’t even apply for bail.
There is no pleasing Assange supporters, though. If they'd stuck him in with a bunch of other people, you'd probably be complaining about that instead.
I have zero sympathies for the guy. His intentions might have been honorable, but when you play with fire, you are bound to get burned.