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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

If someone from country A travels to country B and uses an informant to gain access to information in country C without permission, and then distributes that information through a telegraph in country D to people in country E, then I think just about any legal outcome is bizarre to some extent, including acquittal.

Why is "but on a computer" your focal line of reasoning here and not "distributes information"?

If someone from country A distributes highly inconvenient but true information about country B, then is apprehended by country C, I think just about any legal outcome except acquittal is a gross miscarriage of justice.

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This is the crux here: whatever Assange did, he did it out of US jurisdiction. Unless we accept that US jurisdiction span well beyond their borders, and we don't even care about the illusion of sovereignty outside superpowers.

And that's if we can establish that Assange did anything more than normal investigative journalism.

> Unless we accept that US jurisdiction span well beyond their borders

Hypothetically, if an Italian citizen, living in Italy, hired an American hitman to kill someone in the US, would it be unjust for the US government to ask the Italian government to extradite the Italian?

Two things. First, in your hypothetical the crime and I believe the hiring take place in America, while if memory serves Manning was in Afghanistan during their communication.

Second, Italy presumably has a law against hiring hitmen. Printing classified US documents is unlikely to violate any Italian law.

It seems unlikely that Italy doesn’t have any legal protections for government secrets. I don’t think it’s so clear that the “dual criminality” requirement would only be satisfied if Italy had laws against publishing documents classified by the US government. You could try to argue that, but it seems a rather pedantic semantic argument.

I also wouldn’t necessarily assume that Italian law only covers Italian government documents. For example, the Official Secrets Act in the UK can apply to intelligence information more broadly in some cases.

Anyway, extradition cases like this tend to raise quite complex legal issues, and the way the law works isn’t always very intuitive or in line with what you might think is fair and just.

It's not uncommon for countries to claim jurisdiction outside their borders. For example, you can be prosecuted in France for killing a French person anywhere in the world.

The US certainly claims the most extraterritorial jurisdiction, though.

You can be prosecuted in the US for paying a bribe or having sex with a minor outside of the US.

It is hardly some unique thing. Many countries prosecute child sex tourism and paying bribes, even though no crime occurs inside their borders.

Presumably the "you" in question would have to be an American resident though, which Assange is not and never has been.

I mentioned "a computer" to highlight the fact that the person was never physically in "country C", but you're right that in this specific case the jurisdictional questions are made more complicated by the (alleged) involvement of an accomplice who was physically present in country C.

I suppose, from the prosecution's perspective, the involvement of an accomplice may make the jurisdictional questions more simple, but I still think that if a computer has been accessed illegally and classified government documents have been leaked by a citizen, all with the help of a non-citizen, then at least some people would find it bizarre if the non-citizen wasn't considered legally culpable.

If Person A steals from (or rapes, murders etc.) entity B, then the nullification of their crime by some kind of international legal quagmire would be a miscarriage of justice.

The question is whether or not Assange materially participated in the theft of classified information from the US government.

I'm sure if US citizens stole from the German government or private entity, they would respect the legitimacy of the German governments concerns.

This is why we have at least some international laws and legal conventions and this issue should see it's day in court, after which, we'll have to see how well the proceedings went, and what kind of evidence is brought to light.

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