1. Our western "liberal" democracies stop being liberal when the government gets angry at you at a personal level.
2. With enough propaganda, you can make people believe anything, even that Snowden is a "traitor" to the US.
3. Politically vociferous people (the mob) don't give a shit about you unless you're instrumental to support the cause du jour
That's a fairly weak observation both because liberal democracies still punish criminals and many people do take serious issue with what Assange is and has done - it's just not a common thing to say on hackernews.
It's a heavily penalized sentiment in this portion of the internet.
I can’t find any information about that.
> ...
> Let’s say he steps one foot out of the UK to another country that has an extradition treaty
Very much agree with this take, after all the US already forced the landing of the Bolivian presidential plane in Austria when they believed that Snowden could be aboard it in order to capture him and extradite him to the US
What would they do if Snowden was actually on the plane and the Bolivian president had a reason not to land the plane?
I bet they would do nothing. Or do you think they would literally down a plane with a president of another country?
The only reason they landed was because they had nothing to hide. I am also pretty certain American politicans are smart enough to realise that the only reason that plane landed was because there was no one there.
So why are Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon still free after the same extradition denial years ago?
US government secrets are not expressly protected by UK law.
Consider this absurdity: you could be extradited to South Korea for having some North Korean songs on your phone.
When you do things like https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1266892/exclusive-ns..., no propaganda is necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Lincoln_Laboratory
It'd be pretty surprising if no one was attempting to spy on such organizations
I don't know what Tsinghua does but I can imagine a top school doing similar government-funded work anywhere
Just last year a professor and two Chinese nationals at Harvard were indicted for something similar: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-...
....are by far not all like the United States.
The lesson is that the US and the UK are the same power structure.
When he exposed Bush, the media and journalists celebrated him as a hero. I believe he was even given some awards. When he exposed Hillary, the media and journalists attacked him. Journalism is political activism at its core.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Reading from that to my "purpose" for being here, and moreover calling it a "political" purpose (ignoring the fact that basically everything is political) is entirely spurious.