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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Here is the superseding indictment itself: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1289641/downl...

Assange is alleged to have actively recruited hackers and directed them to find particular information from particular sources. Among other things, agreed to assist Manning in deriving a password from a hash file. (It is irrelevant whether he succeeded or not—the crime of conspiracy is complete upon taking the first substantial step toward achieving the goal of the conspiracy, such as passing the hash to someone else for cracking.)

According to the indictment, he was closer to running an operation to expropriate sensitive data from all over the world than being a journalist neutrally publishing documents that people sent him.

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The allegation is made in paragraph 26 of the first section of the document you linked to. The conversation I understand this allegation relies on is on page 6 & 10 here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/886185-pe-123.html

Manning is the one who passed the hash, not Assange. If it even is a hash, Manning is unsure. Assange never agreed to crack the password. There is no evidence Assange communicated the alleged hash to anyone else let alone attempted to crack it. A couple of days later Assange asks manning about it again, and there's no response. Assange never inquires about how Manning got this 16 byte value, nor does he offer any instructions on how to extract password hashes.

If this had been a chat log from a legal pentest that was being conducted by Manning then nobody would claim that Assange helped or contributed to it in any way. If there was an actual conspiracy going on here the logs would look much different.

The rest of the allegations basically claim that putting out a general call for people in possession of state secrets leak them is conspiracy ipso facto, as is taking any step to follow up with anyone who is interested in leaking, or taking any step to prevent a source from getting caught. It's ridiculous.

Is there some additional evidence in support of the allegation that Assange conspired to crack a password that I've missed?

It's there on page 6: something they thought might be a hash was handed over. Assange represented they had resources to throw at it, and did so. It doesn't need to actually have been a hash, Assange doesn't need to actually have succeeded. He provided assistance, however ineffective, to help break into and exfiltrate classified systems and data. At that point he stopped being a passive recipient of leaked data and stepped over into helping steal it.

> something they thought might be a hash was handed over.

What? Was handed over by who? Manning gave it to Assange, we have no evidence to suggest Assange did anything with it. By this logic you might as well argue that Assange was actively conspiring because he provided an SFTP server for Manning to upload stuff to.

Think of it this way: You're sitting at a bar and I'm selling you drinks. You're drinking and talking about how you want to steal some cars. You ask me, "Do you know much about defeating car locks?"

I say, truthfully, "Sure, I have a huge collection of dealer keys"

Then you pull out a picture of a Telsa, show me, and say "I want to steal one of these!"

And so I say, "Right, well I'll ask a friend about that. How about another drink?"

Then a couple of days later you come to the bar and I ask you, "Have you stolen a Tesla yet? No luck with my friend". You don't reply and we never speak of it again.

Did I actually help you try to steal the Tesla? Did I conspire with you to do it? Did I take any active steps to help you? I don't think so. If you disagree I'm curious why you think I'm wrong, either in this analogy or in what the chat logs actually say.

We do have evidence Assange did something with it. Again, right there on page 6, he "passed it on to our lm guy".

I guess theoretically he might have been blowing smoke, but that doesn't matter: he said that he had done something with it. If he was lying, it's very unfortunate, because the lie claimed he committed a crime.

A server to send data to doesn't help Manning steal the data. She had to steal the data before she could leak it.

Don't go reading into what you think my logic is in the broader issue. I'm talking about the very narrow question of whether Assange crossed over from receiving data into trying to provide the ability to steal more of it. My opinion on this case as a whole is not at all reflected by analyzing my stance on that one specific legal question.

It's a lot more than theoretical that he was blowing smoke. It's almost certain that he was. Assange is personally aware of how to crack NTLM hashes. If there was any actual intent to crack that hash I'd expect to see a lot more follow up in the conversation... like "ok I'm running john/hashcat with the common word list... how about you upload the SAM/try mimikatz? What do you know about the local password complexity policy?", and stuff like that.. but there's none of it.

If "I'll ask a guy" is all that's required to make something into a conspiracy that is incredibly, mindblowingly flimsy.

I suppose as a starter, can we redefine journalist to be more of that? Wikileaks is a rare source of information that is both international and relevant to me; more news like that would be very welcome.

Secondly > It is irrelevant whether he succeeded or not...

I mean, that is sort of the complaint. He annoyed powerful people doing something that isn't a crime (the leaking) and then they're combing through hitting him with random charges that nobody cares about. We haven't been watching an 8 year circus because of a failed password crack. None of the response is proportionate to that bullshit crime. They've made everything around leaking illegal so they have fig-leaf excuses to prosecute whistleblowers and journalists.

Furthermore, the security apparatus could probably just make something up if there were no crimes. They've lied to everyone else, why not the UK justice system?

This logic would render all national security reporting illegal. The job of national security reporters is to convince people in government to divulge information they're legally barred from divulging.

I'm sure there is a joke there somewhere as to how it was meant for them not us

In this case we're not talking about documentation of wrong-doing on the part of the US government. In this narrow instance, we're talking about a government employee providing the hash of a password to a journalist who will then try to find another person capable of "decoding" that hash to yield the clear-text password.

To me, that seems very different then what I normally think of as investigative journalism.

In my opinion I'm not sure how much or how heavy a book should be thrown at someone trying to decode a hashed password, but that's not really what is at issue. Perhaps the issue is, "is this a crime in the UK".

Journalists will themselves sneak into physical venues if they can. The example I can recall is of a reporter crashing a meeting/party of a financial fraternity in NYC.

And trespassing is a crime and those people could probably press charges if they want

What you describe isn't necessarily a crime. But if the physical venue happened to be a secured area on a military base or intelligence installation, there's a good chance they'd go to jail. And even if the didn't, it would still be a crime.

This sounds like an extremely weak and contrived excuse to go after someone who reported something that embarrassed the government.

Just because the government pushes harder due to being embarrassed doesn't mean it wasn't a criminal act.

If you're okay with politically motivated persecution of journalists, using extremely contrived charges...

Hitler did nothing illegal!

Convincing people to leak stolen information to you is one thing. (And legal). Attempting to use your own tools to help that person steal more stuff is another thing entirely. (And illegal)

He didn't do the latter.

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