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Comment by pera | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand how the Eastern District of Virginia can claim that "Nathaniel Frank" was in fact Julian Assange. The reasoning presented in their affidavit looks clearly fallacious to me (starting at p13):

https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2019/04/2017-12-21_Vir...

There are two assumptions they use to infer the identity of NF:

1- The belief of two persons that the person who they were talking with was probably Assange.

2- That only one single person was using that jabber account.

The only thing I can personally infer from the information they presented is that NF was (very likely) a member of Wikileaks at that time.

What am I missing?

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Your not missing anything. this isn't a criminal trial it's an extradition hearing. They're not required to prove their case on the merits, just show they have sufficient facts to make a pro forma case at the criminal trial.

The argument is based on NF referring in the first person to doing things that JA did (debate in Iceland, conference in Norway), that other members of Wikileaks didn't do.

As far as I can tell they only state that for the conference in Norway: "[...] Assange was identified as a 'lecturer.' A review of the other names on the list revealed no other persons known to be associated with WikiLeaks"

To me the fact that they wrote "other persons known" indicates that they are not sure if there were other members present.

other persons known sounds like normal legalese to me.

That's standard legalese since they don't have any context to identify who "I" is. And the real identity of many people involved with WikiLeaks seems to be unknown, so it isn't impossible that it was someone else. It makes it the weakest evidence that NF is Assange, but it has some circumstantial value.

> the real identity of many people involved with WikiLeaks seems to be unknown

It seems I wasn't clear before but this is exactly what I intended to imply: If they cannot attest that JA was the only member present at that conference then that line of argument is insufficient to make the claim they are making.

You're not missing anything. This is a mockery of an extradition hearing, designed to give an air of legitimacy to an act of naked corruption.

Nothing - those kind of shady "proofs" are used all the time by states.

"Take a word for it" has been taken to a whole new level in the 21st century...

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