Julian Assange is not on trial for his personality | Hacker News Reader

Julian Assange is not on trial for his personality

independent.co.uk

52 pointsk1m18 comments

Good point by Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker:

> You've probably heard the refrain from well-meaning pundits: “You don't have to like him, but you should oppose threats to silence him.” But that refrain misses the point by reinforcing the manipulative tropes deployed against Assange.

> When setting a gravely dangerous precedent, governments don't typically persecute the most beloved individuals in the world. They target those who can be portrayed as subversive, unpatriotic – or simply weird. Then they actively distort public debate by emphasizing those traits.

I agree with half of it. Criticizing Assange for his hygiene or bringing into focus Manning's gender identity are obviously attempts at character assassination as the article points out but:

>for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk

his political affiliations and motivates as well as intent matter. The public has a legitimate interest to figure out if whistleblowers act on behalf of foreign powers, cooperate with domestic political parties or are in some other way potentially influenced. It can determine what they decide to leak, who they aim to attack, and so on. If it turns out that someone who leaks documents that concern national security has ties to a foreign power the situation becomes immediately much more suspect and it becomes much more likely that leaks are chosen in such a way as to deflect or confuse.

If Russia or China exposes some crime that my government hid from me I will thank those governments and act to remove the corrupt officials from my own government. You are implicitly arguing Americans should allow corrupt government officials be above the law.

no, what I'm arguing is that you may not know if you get selective information, potentially taken out of context, to advocate some cause that's actually harming the national interest.

Pretty trivial example, create a leak or scandal about a relatively minor issue that discredits a candidate that would have threatened the interests of China or Russia.

> what I'm arguing is that you may not know if you get selective information, potentially taken out of context, to advocate some cause that's actually harming the national interest.

Of course you can know: you _always_ get out of context, selective information. But the thing to do for a good faith government when this happens is to provide context, not to silence the people that provided the information.

Anyone who leaks national security will of course in the end of the day have links to or formed such with foreign powers, otherwise, they won't be able to sustain themselves in the most fundamental way possible.

Litvinenko was when I realized that nation states only play by rules when it suits them and break them when they can get away with it. Putin can get away with murdering individuals or invading Crimea without any major repercussions. The US and Europe can extradite and jail spymasters (if the independent can assert Assange was a journalist I can assert he's a spymaster).

I don't find this situation to be black and white, I personally want Assange extradited and brought to trial. I'm sorry that Chelsea isn't cooperating.

Realpolitik: He played a game that regular people shouldn't participate in and after a decade he's experiencing the repercussions.

If his releases had been more even-handed towards Russia or he had not tried so hard to damage Hilary Clinton I may think he was some goodhearted neutral observer that just wants the truth out there, but it looks to me like he wanted to leverage the information he had to achieve desired outcomes (just as a spymaster at a nationstate agency would).

Should any of that matter if the information he released is the truth?

Let’s say Russia releases the names and pictures of 100 active CIA agents who they uncovered as having done their country harm but are now active in other countries and out of their reach. It’s the truth, now what are your thoughts?

I.... I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone would have a moral problem with that? It isn't even 100 active CIA agents who have nothing to do with Russia, apparently these agents actively damaged them.

For agents in the wrong country at the time of the announcement, it may just condemn them to torture or death.

I mean, sure and that sucks for them but I kinda think that is part of the risk of being an agent. Don't want to get killed by foreign governments? Then don't go and do espionage in their countries.

These are agents who have materially harmed another nation, it isn't as if they have only been acting in a purely defensive capacity and working on the internal security of the US.

I don't think you can know for sure what exactly they did. Does the crime merit death?

You raise a point that they weren't acting in a purely defensive capacity - for all we know, "did Russia harm" could mean they were a counterintelligence agent that successfully sounded the alarm on a Russian intelligence operation on US soil. From that perspective, wouldn't Russia be the aggressor now?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com