This and the new anti-encryption bills...
I am happy to know the existence such a lot of great American minds, mathematicians, scientists, visionaries, because, else, with only the kind of ugly news such as above, my image of US would have been tainted for good.
(*) I'm not American. I'm neutral about not being American, thanks to the existence of both plus and minus items. By the way of course you can say the same about pretty much any country.
Fortunately there are places like Germany where things like CCC.de can exist and the Chaos Communication Congress can happen.
From my time living in UK, Germany, Mexico (where I am from) and travelling every 3 months to the USA, my [subjective] appreciation is that Germany is "freer" that the USA can ever aspire to be.
By "American great minds", I was thinking about all the American mathematicians and scientists whose books I passionately devour, and the splendid futuristic projects of some tech corps, which bring sci-fi dreams to reality.
If you want to feel contempt strongly towards someone - the UK, Ecuador and Sweden governments are the ones to blame so far.
You're right that what's happening in UK with Assange is very disturbing... I followed Craig Murray's blog posts.
First of all, why had he to skip this bail at all.
All of his suspicions about the first sex offense case being a pretense to extradite him were confirmed.
And then, the way he is treated in the UK tribunal, like a slaughterer scum of the worst kind, denied all dignity, is revolting.
If you had not seen the Craig Murray reports, I would warmly advise you to give them a look, they are rich in details.
But once again - he hasn't been touched by US so far. There are numerous governments that could have given him asylum, and the EU court of human rights is suspiciously silent.
I think they did what they could given the circumstances.
Not a first amendment scholar but Assange is probably pretty safe on disseminating the information.
But they claim he committed felonies obtaining it.
People should understand this. US is a stabilizing force in the world but they are not about universal human rights or world peace.
So, that's what personally I would have expected and hoped about Assange too.
The reality is different from what you present: it is not common that journalists opposing to US are (internationally) repressed at all. And, of course, because such repression is illegal, it is not expectable.
For example: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/09/27/business/hacker...
So, to answer your question: they do not try to extradite the foreign operators responsible to the leaks, and they do everything to strengthen their IT security. Also, they possibly build or reinforce their cyber-defense team to cyber-counter or cyber-retaliate.
This kind of response is just how it happens when abiding to the international law. Still, they are far from doing nothing, and they are efficient.
Do you think that would change if they had more power?
It's like criticizing the response of a super corporation like Microsoft and saying a smaller company like GitLab handles the same scenario better. Probably true, but also if you scaled GitLab to the size and power of Microsoft, maybe they would've had a different response.
On the other hand, let's analyse:
- on the "means" side: France certainly has a lot of military power. It does drone-killing of terrorist heads in African Sahel. It launches successful intelligence operations abroad. It also succeeds to counter foreign agents on its own soil (ref the identification in 2018 of a GRU cell in France). It has a very solid cyber-defense.
Also, between strengthening the IT, cyber-army, and intelligence services, and just extraditing journalists after-the-fact (or, imagine, abduct them, drone-kill them, etc), which is most resource-intensive? As an engineer, you know that the part where you develop your own system to be more robust and more capable is harder than just band-aid retaliation around past mistakes.
Guess what, US is doing both, so it's seat-belt and airbag at the same time. Very great, France is doing only seat-belt.
- on the "results" side: France tries (currently) to preserve its image, to appear as "good" (not judging if that's true), by playing by the rules internationally, fighting great causes, etc. Whereas US soft power took a huge tall in its (indirect) handling of Assange case. It is now seen as more "evil" as before. More people, especially a lot of intelligent people, are despising US more.
So, supposing the overflow of power hasn't busted the brains out of the government, they should be weighting means and results, and decide in consequence.
If they are more offended by treatment of Assange than innocents kept in Guantanamo Bay 'camp' without a trial and summary drone executions with huge collateral death toll I'm not sure I would call them that intelligent.
I mean really, US government has a huge assassination list whose targets are taken down by bomb raids killing and maiming civilians and one hacker being manhandled pushes you over the edge? Those are some sick values.
The supporters of Assange are guaranteed to be also revolted by Guantanamo Camp and drone executions.
Assange's supporters like him precisely because, among other things, he (and Wikileaks) is a champion of the cause fighting against the wrongdoings of US army and US extrajudicial penitentiary system:
- Guantanamo Files https://wikileaks.org/gitmo/
- Collateral Murder https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
These are actually precisely the reason why US government is extraditing Assange.
We are speaking about the here and now, how we should abide by the international law when responding to cyber threats, in the context of a transparent and globalized world.
[1] Suddenly, I'm feeling old.
My point was to illustrate what I call a good response. The bad ones just illustrate the bad responses, that's all. Good for contrasting, maybe. But the way you bring it does not seem to make clear anything, to the contrary. And it is not even remotely about "cyber" anything, nor about journalism or the right to know the truth about anything. And for contrasting we already have the example at hand, the case of Julian Assange!
So I really don't understand your point.
Sounds like you hate France and you disliked that I used a French example as a good response to a cyber threat. I don't know why you want so much to avoid giving a nice role to France, personally I don't care, but I am a positive person, so I'd like you to find a good response example by an other country (easy, there are plenty) to balance my comment, instead of balancing it trying to find a bad cyber-response from France (which you failed to do).
Also, the world was hardly as transparent as today. No social media, hardly any internet, newspapers in different languages but few people knowing anything else than their mother tongue...
Years after, there was investigation by news agencies in France about the Rainbow Warrior tragedy. The government did not throw them in jail! So that, too, is really different from the Assange case.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/23/us-justificati...
the take away is this, when you're on the US Gov. shit list you're safe until you're not.
So he was totally not helping people know the truth, as a journalist would be, and instead he was totally trying to kill or help killing people and destroy civilizations.
Also, this was the context of war, on a war field (and with a terrorist organization).
This is why journalism is mainly about publishing information. The part where the writer gives their opinion is actually optional.
Also, this is why good news organizations (Reuters, etc) are doing investigations (this is investigative journalism). They do not just publish already available data, they go seeking the truth where it is.
Btw, the sheer existence of investigative journalism is also what makes difficult to believe all the conspiracy theories. If something fishy that huge was going on, there is an overwhelming likelihood that some news organization (also, some whistle-blower) would have revealed it. (that shows also the importance of the existence of whistle-blowers)