U.S. will continue to seek Assange’s extradition – U.S. Justice Department
reuters.com
reuters.com
If the UK is really serious on the well-being of Assange, they should allow him to seek asylum and relocate elsewhere, without obstructing him as they did in the case of Ecuador.
it also stands to be said that America doesnt exist as America, instead as a revolving door of loosely defined groups that step up to the levers of power and try their luck.
Its best to understand the actors instead of the machine. Its most often where the problem is.
You can blame the current power-hungry narcissistic wealthy sociopaths who are doing what power-hungry narcissistic wealthy sociopaths can be expected to do, or you can accept that there will always be people who fit that description and try to fix the incentives and checks that they're responding to.
US has the most credibility. Europe is great, but they live in a protective bubble offered by the US. Russia and/or China would steamroll them if able to. And those two countries are autocratic. We wouldn't even have a hackernews type thing there.
So just because you don’t like a loud subset of the US... you would rather support autocrat countries like China and Russia that are “quiet” and not vomitous.
What a naive outlook.
He sabotaged the United States' most ambitious, long-term well-planned program to completely privatise spying around the world (through tech companies that would make money off it - a true capitalist wet dream), thus helping democracies around the world survive a bit more longer.
To this end, Hollywood had also slowly changed the tone of their content to carefully push narcissism to the public, so that people would overshare information about themselves, the people they know and their own activities, publicly on the internet. Private tech companies (like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook etc.) meanwhile slowly moved on to harvesting more and more data, testing the boundaries each time slowly, to create profiles of their users they could analyse for behavioural insights and this allowed them two streams of income - from providing access to personal data of individuals to government agencies and by using this personal data to manipulate the users to sell something.
Another big goal, with the "cloud computing" push is to get government agencies and companies worldwide to store their privileged information on servers online that can be easily accessed. This serves two main purposes - the push to "computing on the cloud" means access to technology can be highly controlled, and denied to other countries. (In today's connected world, US companies can deactivate and cripple nearly all computers, including smartphones and tablets, if it wants, of any country, if it is connected to the internet). The other purpose is that corporate espionage is easier if all data is on the cloud, thus allowing the US and the west to maintain a technological lead over others.
Ofcourse, it's easier to do this with some help with allies and thus we have the "5 eyes" and "9 eyes" program, where other spy agencies of other countries agree to share each others database.
It is a brilliant program but against democratic values.
People like Assange, who help whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, deserve our full praise and support. Democracy cannot survive in darkness and denial of information. The public are not dumb, as some politicians like to think so.
Then we lose our democracy that you and I both cherish.
Also these things don't even impact 99.999% of people.
Passive surveilling (esp the mass metadata type) doesn't hurt anybody.
Yes. You want democratic values to survive over generations, not "democracies". Spying on your own citizens, to figure out how to manipulate them better through corporates, transfers the power from the people to select corporates and government. It upsets the balance of power that democracy promises. And is thus an attack on its very essence.