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Comment by loup-vaillant | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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