Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules
bbc.com
bbc.com
At this level, only power matters. And the first rule of power is: Don't embarrass the powerful unless you can call on a lot of power to defend yourself.
Laws can't protect you; they can be thwarted and bent, and the legal process "guided" to the required outcome.
International organizations can't protect you; they can only register complaints that will be duly ignored by everyone if the champion is important enough.
Even countries can't protect you at this level; they're beholden to power themselves after a certain point.
This is the message to would-be activists anywhere: Stay out of the big boy pool or we'll make you regret it.
The international rules-based order is safeguarded by powerful entities… because it’s in their best interest. One goes against that self-interest at one’s peril.
This is nonsense that opens up the possibility to justify pretty much any kind of abuse or atrocity.
> The international rules-based order is safeguarded by powerful entities… because it’s in their best interest.
If the international order was actually rules-based it would have been safeguarded by international institutions, not by a single capricious superpower.
> One goes against that self-interest at one’s peril.
This one eludes me. Who's going against who's interest?
Hilarious. Do you think there’s big judge in the sky that determines what’s good and bad? There is only human conscience, and powerful people who decide to enforce their conscience.
> If the international order was actually rules-based it would have been safeguarded by international institutions, not by a single capricious superpower.
If there’s an international institution that can enforce rules, then that institution is the capricious superpower, and woe betide those that mess with that institution.
Mankind has reached a point where it realized that certain rights (natural rights [1]) are not really arbitrary cultural constructs, but more akin to the laws of nature. We're still not at a point where we fully understand the "moral laws of nature" (e.g. I suspect if we stick around as a species we will end up extending more rights to certain other species), but we're improving (at least on paper).
> powerful people who decide to enforce their conscience
Again an attitude that can be used to justify anything. If the powerful people decide it's ok to have slaves? Or that a certain ethnicity should be cleared off the face of the earth?
Luckily, post WW2 we have established international institutions (the UN for one) that at least on paper provide legal underpinning for what the right rules should be and for how they should be enforced.
> If there’s an international institution that can enforce rules, then that institution is the capricious superpower, and woe betide those that mess with that institution.
This is simply insane warmongering. Since you throw such threats around casually I suspect you might be a US citizen. I can assure you that to the rest of us seeing this kind of attitude coming from your political/economic/intellectual leaders can be a very scary thing indeed.
It's a moral system just like how Big Judge in Sky is a moral system. You're only determining what's good and bad in accordance with this one moral system. And most of humanity does not.
> Again an attitude that can be used to justify anything.
Of course, but only if its in their interest to do so like slavery, or if they believe it's in their interest to do so like committing genocide.
Have you noticed that slavery and genocide have actually never stopped in the world? Because they can do it and nobody can really stop them. See China's actions on the Uyghurs.
> This is simply insane warmongering. Since you throw such threats around casually I suspect you might be a US citizen. I can assure you that to the rest of us seeing this kind of attitude coming from your political/economic/intellectual leaders can be a very scary thing indeed.
You should address the factuality of the statement instead of bordering on an ad hominem. Every hegemonic power in history have exhibited the same characteristics: securing its interests. European powers have done it. Asian powers have done it and are currently trying to do it (China). Americas, Africa, and Middle East too.
Well, at the very least "Big Judge in Sky" is not in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so there's that.
The fact that most of humanity most of the time fails short of our best understanding of morality doesn't mean that that understanding is a relative cultural construct. To make a parallel, even if all of humanity believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth, that still wouldn't matter one bit. The Earth would still do its thing. It's kind of like that with morality too.
It was wrong to have slaves even when having slaves was accepted. It was wrong to rape and pillage even when that was the norm in conquest etc.
> You should address the factuality of the statement instead of bordering on an ad hominem.
It's possible I misunderstood parent's intent. I actually took this part "woe betide those that mess with that institution" to mean smth like "don't you dare mess with the US". That would be an out of place, over the top threat. If I misunderstood the intent I'm sorry.
> Every hegemonic power in history have exhibited the same characteristics: securing its interests.
I don't disagree with you on this one (at least if by "its interests" we understand: "the interests of that nation's ruling elite"). It doesn't however mean that that's morally right. It is entirely possible that all hegemonic powers are acting immorally all the time.
I certainly think some things are inherently wrong, but doing those things are not any more difficult than doing other things, and it's probably easier to do them than it is to prevent them. We can't rely on an organization or institution to protect us because any such group will always promote and protect each other first. Instead, we need to promote a culture of direct action on an individual level, praise and encourage whistleblowers, activists, saboteurs and others who do what they think is right to weaken the power of institutions over individuals. We won't always agree with their goals, judgement, and morals, but as long as they don't use methods that are unequivocally wrong (such as violence against non-violent people), we should support them because individual action is in aggregate much better (and much less dangerous) than institutional actions.
Take many deep breaths and cool your jets. Think about your biases - it’s not good to go through life hating an entire nation and it says more about you than about them.
I am not American.
If you actually do want to explore this topic, read On The Genealogy Of Morality by Nietzsche.
That has nothing to do with the subject of people feeling from the US influence.
This kind of argument that you attempted is a bit tiring, don't you think? If you flee from Russian government, go to the West. And vice versa. One does not invalidate the other.
"I'm going to flee from one dystopian state, to another even more dystopian/technocratic/autocratic state!"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/technocr...
i.e it's a net positive to have a technocratic state, deferring decision making to those with the technical skills to do it.
Deferring to the technical experts is great when you want to know how to do something.
Deferring to them when you're deciding what to do is not necessarily as good.
I kind of get the impression that becoming a martyr was a sacrifice he was prepared to make if he managed to rip off the mask and expose the unbridled imperialist evil lurking underneath the "civilized press conference veneer" presented by the US government.
You are doing good, then. Need to keep talking to more people!
Every time I try to talk to my wife about what the government's doing/has done, she stops me and says, "I really don't care. So long as I can keep living my life without interference, why would I care?"
This also happens when I try to explain basic economics to her.
I find most people I talk to simply don't care so long as they get to enjoy living their dreamy lives.
In that light, I always found this story of the 6 scared, cold, humiliated and alone mothers of soldiers protesting outside the White House preventing nuclear war with Vietnam somewhat inspiring.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-har...
(The connection is tenuous, but it's not completely unreasonable.)
So I would say the effect is actually in the other direction. That is less activism of that type, not more.
And the connection is not only tenuous. You are making a very general mild claim based on scant evidence. Your consideration is valid but very weak.
Yes, governments make it hard and will go so far as to actually kill people. It’s still a moderating influence and a feedback mechanism before civil war. I may not agree with them or even care about the issue, but I still respect the sacrifice.
This is already a very big achievement for just one individual.
How many people, activist or not, have been killed without anybody noticing?
All the other important stuff he revealed never got the level of attention it deserved.
After 2016, i went from getting "oh you radical crazy commie" looks wearing a wikileaks shirt to immediately "oh you're a republican, let me guess you listen to alex jones and joe rogan?"
We should really work on depolarisation.
Also, I'm not sure where this "keep friends and family separate from business" idealogy came from, but business is just organizing production. If we're not going to try to hold those keys with our friends and family, then elites will hold them for us.
Side note-no actual progress can come until there is sound money again.
The problem with the premise that the establishment is a lot like The Matrix. Some people are so hopelessly enamoured with the establishment that they will do whatever it takes to defend it.
The flip side of this is that we're apparently focusing on the wrong things.
Assange was prosecuted under Trump, now he's being prosecuted under Biden. Who were we realistically supposed to vote for in order to make this stop? If this is the only front then we lost before there was even a vote.
The real problem is, which party represents the finance industry? Both of them. Which party is the party of small business? Neither of them. Strong antitrust enforcement? Reducing the scope of wasteful bureaucracy, as distinct from regulatory capture? It's not on the ballot.
How do we fix it? Maybe start here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/10/clinton-fracking-theworl...
https://www.salon.com/2016/10/18/leaked-email-hillary-clinto...
It's both, just the voters don't get told that.
Craig Murray's trial had a similar outcome: he's not a "proper" journalist because he doesn't work for a media/newspaper company. And the judge gave an opinion that bloggers should get tougher sentences than journalists[1].
It'll come back to bite the journos, and some of them know this and are saying it. But most are keen to carve out special exemptions for themselves from laws that the rest of us have to follow.
[0] In journalism circles, "blogger" is an insult. Source: I used to run a newspaper.
[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/06/the-mind-of-...
I agree that powerful media orgs see this as the definition of journalism at stake, and their assessment is close to self awareness in a way that falls comically short. The irony is the harder they fight the despicable internet bloggers the more credibility they lose - near zero at this point in my eyes. The media ideally is a group of citizens exercising their first amendment rights as a bulwark to government abuse; the media we've ended up today is a group of powerful entities aligned with the government. They are always on their best behavior to preserve their access to the latest carefully curated "leaks" and fat and happy in their position as lapdogs. Bloggers, citizen/independent journalists, etc. are the media, and what we call the media is at this point little more than the ministry of truth. Anyone whose worldview could consider Don Lemon a journalist and Glenn Greenwald a fringe internet blogger should be laughed out of whatever room they are in, I just can't take this position seriously.
Just so you know, if you think this is new, its not. Communist speech has been deemed illegal, and upheld by the supreme court, since the McCarthy era. This is not presented as a political view on Communism vs Capitalism, just as a fact that the constitution doesn't matter.
For more recent events, I challenge you to find where a "curfew" on peaceful protests, or "free speech zones" appear in the constitution. Again, not an endorsement of the protest, merely pointing out that laws don't matter.
Also remember that the journalist that exposed the Panama papers mysteriously died in a freak car explosion. Very sad.
I'll take off my tinfoil hat now...
It's so bizarre that Glenn Beck's view of the world, making Wall Street Iraq Warriors who ended welfare as we knew it and who put more black people in prison than anyone while deregulating everything into basically Lenin, ate up even the libertarian right.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/the-ri...
They could easily have used the same style of attacks that were used against Trump. "Kids in cages" was the case under Obama, and Trump, and Biden, but we only heard about it under Trump.
They wouldn't have used the same issues because those are the issues you use against a Republican, but the same format works against anyone. Under Sanders there would have been huge concerns about the deficit. Any tax increase impacting the middle class would be condemned but the middle class would inherently have to pay more to have single payer healthcare, so you fight it with "tax increase bad" not "healthcare bad." Not having to pay health insurance premiums would either be ignored or condemned as a giveaway to employers.
They'd find some black families who support school vouchers to go on TV and accuse him of being a racist for supporting existing "racist public schools" and things along those lines.
The general idea is to be horrified to learn that things that have been happening for years have suddenly been discovered happening under the target administration, but choose the things related to the direction they want to move. As if the Overton window is not only not covering what they want to change, it no longer even covers the status quo, and we have to go in the opposite direction or he's literally Hitler (or, presumably, Stalin). So you burn up all their political capital just to stand still while turning the viewer against them no matter what they do. Then four years later the status quo remains intact.
Why do we need a huge federal military in peacetime when we have the state national guard? Why do we need federal welfare programs instead of state welfare programs? It's not an argument against having a military or having welfare programs, it's a question of where to do it. And the US federal government is the wrong place, because it's too big.
"Laboratories of democracy" are a public good, but you can't have them if Uncle Sam is sucking up the public's money and giving it to Raytheon and drug companies and whoever instead of letting the states and the people have that money to implement a diverse set of independent programs and allowing citizens to decide which they want to live under.
Most of which was caused by 20th century screwing up of the original design. US Senators were originally elected by the state legislatures, to represent the states and temper federal power. The 16th amendment, federal taxation without apportionment, provides the perverse incentive for federal spending to increase without bound because you then have the large majority of states as net recipients of federal spending which is coming from a handful of states who are outnumbered. And guess which ones they are -- you wouldn't know it by asking their representatives because given the setup, they have no incentive not to feed from the same trough even while their residents are getting fleeced.
The good news is most of the taker states are still around breakeven and many of those (like Texas) would likely support fixing this if the likes of New York and Massachusetts would take notice that doing so is strongly in their own interest. (The biggest takers are the swing states, for reasons that should be obvious, but the red and blue states outnumber the purple states -- if they'd work together.)
In a blessed future when we figure out a less totalitarian way to organize ourselves, Americans can still live together and trade with each other. The value of federal spending can be overstated, even for "net winners". Sure it's free money, but it's calibrated to the needs of those who hire lobbyists. No existing entitlement program is as beneficial to the population as just giving directly to individual humans would be.
Several factors that keep some Americans opposed to entitlements would no longer apply in the "laboratories of democracy" situation. No population is actually as hard-ass about deficits as some current representation claims, due to nondemocratic aspects of how such representation is currently elected. Simply redirecting the spigot of "free money" deficit spending away from armaments toward anything beneficial to humans would be a windfall. Spending on children would encourage young families to locate nearby instead of moving to the coasts, so eventually the hollowing-out middle states would see the benefits no matter their "traditional" opposition.
In fact, much of the traditional politics of both the "winners" and "losers" are simply negotiating positions that would disappear without a federal government. "Loser" states sending resources to "winner" states is the way that they "bribe" seemingly opposed representatives into accepting entitlement spending. It has much more to do with politics than with what particular areas "need" or "produce".
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/45vsg1/til_c...
(He's old, so a natural heart attack is certainly plausible. But, the powers that be had means, motive and opportunity)
Would he have been as embarrassing and corrupt, probably not, but there more to an administration than all of that.
Or TLDR if you're not going to get good at making sausage stop applying for positions at the sausage factory.
This is 100% a perfect distillation of a great criticism of Sanders from the left and on merits.
I think it's often also undersold how often he's been terribly wrong about foreign policy in the past and how he almost never walks it back.
And in the unlikely event you create a genuine third party, the current two parties will drop all their differences to destroy that party.
Wat. Is this GPT3 or something?
The better ones you can't tell so easily.
The issue there was precisely how he was emphatically not acting as a journalist.
Journalists do not coordinate news releases with their preferred candidates.
Political operatives do.
No, they would never do anything like that:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...
(And, whether wikileaks meaningfully coordinated with trump campaign is debatable)
That's basically a press conference, which are both a mainstay of journalism and you'll see particularly well connected journalists leak what a press conference will be about before it happens.
Not really the mark of someone who wanted to be a martyr as opposed to someone like Navalny, for example.
More an indication of someone who didn't really know what he's doing and became an accidental but very effective Russian agent who ended up being a major contributor to shaking the very foundations of democracy in America.
What's inconvenient here is that the rule of law is operating in the context that the US and UK are allies and therefore take each other's statements on good faith. The United States assures he will be protected, they are not an enemy nation, and there are extradition treaties between the US and the UK. Unless the UK has some kind of carve-out for countries with bad track records of keeping their word, that might be sufficient to satisfy the rule of law.
My point is that, in this context, speculations as to whether Assange secretly desired this outcome, due to some supposed martyr complex ... are plainly irrelevant.
That's a bit absurd given showed the total opposite:
Gigabytes of diplomatic cables of highly sensitive data revealed a US Diplomatic Corps trying to do a decent job in a world rife with ugly corruption.
The 'Arab Street' saw the information and they saw the US trying to assuage and nudge brutally corrupt leaders.
The cables didn't unite Arabs against the US - they exposed the ruthless corruption of their own governments and 'united' them against their own governments.
I was in Tunisia near the time of the revolts and I can tell you the thing that pissed them off the most was probably the fact that their disgraced PM had Canadian citizenship (i.e. citizen of convenience, as many do) and simply flew to Montreal to enjoy Canadian Constitutional protections and avoid prosecution.
It's shocking that someone could read about Arab governments doing 'very bad things', the US government trying to stop them, and then come away with the notion that the US is the bad actor.
It speaks to some kind of deeply held ideology or perspective that can make facts that point one way, seem like they point in the other direction.
Assange will have to face trial given the fact that he may have explicitly helped Manning break into systems of National Security, which is definitely illegal. I don't think he did, but there's been some evidence made public that indicates that it's possible. Soon we'll have a court case and see the evidence.
I'm sensing that you believe that this is something you think that should have been concealed from them for their own good.
>It's shocking that someone could read about Arab governments doing 'very bad things', the US government trying to stop them, and then come away with the notion that the US is the bad actor.
Collateral murder is mostly what people are condemning. Also what this extradition was all about.
It's weird that you seem to believe that the war crimes are not relevant to the discussion about whether the US is "the bad actor".
Well, perhaps not that weird. Your reply suggests that you may have been part of the institution that committed and covered up the war crimes (unless you were in tunisia for a different reason).
>Assange will have to face trial given the fact that he may have explicitly helped Manning break into systems of National Security, which is definitely illegal.
Oh yes. Exposing US war crimes IS definitely illegal - more illegal than committing them, apparently.
Just like Rosa Parks sitting at the back of a bus - that was illegal too.
Oh no, you outed me! I'm a CIA plant!
How were you able to slyly prove my complicity in war crimes from a mere comment about travelling abroad?
A testament to brilliant and rational deductive thinking and logical inference, that must prove 'America is Evil' as well of course ...
If all diplomatic channels were transparent, diplomats would treat it like a twitter account. If the US's Saudi Ambassador thought the Saudi leadership was unstable, they'd never write that in a cable if it was going to be released publicly.
And nobody would tell our diplomats uncomfortable truths.
Assange also editorialized his leaks to be damaging towards the US rather than just leak them. IIRC this lead to conflict within the org. The CM video was awful, but as I understand it was a mistake made within the bounds of acceptable ROE? Similar to the recent drone strike mistake in Afghanistan. War sucks and these accidents are awful, but we live in an imperfect universe. These things don’t really say much in isolation. If anything the cables showed the US in a positive light (most on HN probably didn’t actually read them).
I found the US’s media response to be stupid as it often is, rather than engage honestly on these issues. Over the years Wikileaks went from something that could have had a genuine media purpose to a way for intelligence agencies hostile to the US to leak hacked materials to the world with plausible deniability. It was no longer a neutral actor (and frankly the editorialization by Assange in the “CM” video wasn’t neutral either).
He crossed the line with aiding the hack which gave legal recourse - this is the rule of law bit, we’ll see what happens.
I do think the “sex crimes” stuff could have been Intel doing stupid shit (imo) but that’s just speculation on my part.
This, too, is journalism. Showing that the world isn't black and white, that sometimes the US does bad things that we should work against and sometimes they do the right thing, that's important too. Secrecy is harmful to democracy.
It's obvious why the state department tries to keep their internal communications secret, but it's also obvious why journalists have a public interest in trying to reveal them. We should let them both make their attempt instead of bringing criminal charges against one side for doing the job we need them to do.
Notice that the job is the same regardless of what's in the cables, because you (along with the public) don't know that ahead of time.
But to be clear, a strong argument against your point is that he's being prosecuted. All the government insiders who leak classified information to the media in order to advance the government's interests are not sitting next to him in a cell, are they?
Secrecy can be harmful in some cases but it's also essential in many ways, it's really not an argument at all. Nobody would be able to do their jobs otherwise.
Uncovering and publishing secrets is the core of journalism.
> Secrecy can be harmful in some cases but it's also essential in many ways
Then they should do a better job of keeping the important things secret. But it's good that they occasionally fail.
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london...
CIA, DoD, and lots of agencies “entertain” lots of ideas, and even develop plans, for lots of things that never get close to being policy.
Unless it is with other people and, more critically, at least one of the people involved goes beyond planning and takes some concrete step to advance the execution of the plan (at which point it becomes the separate crime of conspiracy), no, planning a crime, even of that seriousness, is not itself a crime.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikram_Buddhi
No other concrete step is needed.
Planning to kill someone is not a crime. Threatening to is, even if they aren't the President.
I’m not saying it’s ok - just that now he’s in custody it’s a little different.
Why murder him when he's no threat to them anymore, and they can drag him through more hell for the next decade in order to show what happens when you cross the line?
"and could apply, if convicted, to be transferred to a prison in Australia."
My understanding is that his application could be denied, without any recourse, by the DoJ (of whichever administration is in power at the time), and probably by the Australian government too.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/dec/10/julian-assange...
And Epstein committed suicide. Right?
"The US had offered four assurances, including that Mr Assange would not be subject to solitary confinement pre or post-trial or detained at the ADX Florence Supermax jail - a maximum security prison in Colorado - if extradited.
Lawyers for the US said he would be allowed to transfer to Australia to serve any prison sentence he may be given closer to home.
And they argued Mr Assange's mental illness "does not even come close" to being severe enough to prevent him from being extradited."
So assuming that the international community cannot avoid his extradition, to make sure that those assurances are true and can be hold, would be already a win, no?
US assurances aren’t worth the toilet-paper they’re written on.
Totally his own fault. Neither the USA nor the UK told him to hole up in that embassy; he did that all on his own.
There's basically no limit to how much someone can demand, e.g. "Well, if he was really committed to transparency, he would have tried breaking into the White House with a camera", or "If he was really prepared to risk dying to bring these leaks to people's attention, he should have self-immolated in front of the US embassy".
Personally, the metric I use is, if someone has achieved more for a good cause than me, and suffered more for it than I would, then they are a martyr for that cause and deserve my respect.
I'm no fan of Assange. But I also have not read a lot about Assange so I may be ignorant.
the narrative of being a russian pawn doesnt work. everyone loved assange until he underlined the oblivious corruption of clinton and hence contributed to make her loose rightfully so the election. I am no trump fan and I am for a non partisan vision of the world. a vision where freedom means telling the truth even if it hurts yourself or your political leaders. Assange is a victim of usa and it is sad to bring russia to the equation
- Logan Roy, Succession, HBO
"How do you ensure the green? You can't. As in life, in traffic, you leave yourself an out... You move diagonal, you turn the wheel when you hit a red light. You don't try down Broadway to get to Broadway. You are going to butt heads with these friends of ours? You are going to come at them head on? They got lives, Freddy, families."
- Cop Land
I no longer hold the view that our media deserves the first amendment protection that it does. Mainstream media right now has no other purpose other than being active vehicle of the powerful and billionaire oligarchs to control the narrative. When 70% of the media empire are owned by billionaires why are we pretending otherwise? How different is that than state sponsored media in North Korea?
[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/julian-assange-loses-appeal...
That, uh, might be a bit of an overcorrection.
That’s what has been happening in the media space - Murdochs, Turners and Bezos now own vast sum of media sphere. And social medias just use them as proxy for “fact checks”.
Because "we'll revoke your First Amendment rights if we don't like how you're using them" is a very big step on a very steep and very slippery slope.
Assange's defense is likely to revolve around the First Amendment. Weakening it would hurt him, even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Brown_(loyalist)
> Brown requested the liberty to hold his own opinions, saying that he could "never enter into an Engagement to take up arms against the Country which gave him being", and finally met their demands with pistol and sword. The crowd seized him and struck him with the butt of a musket, fracturing his skull. Taken prisoner, he was tied to a tree where he was roasted by fire and scalped before being tarred and feathered. Brown was then carted through a number of nearby settlements and forced to verbally pledge himself to the Patriot cause before being released. This mistreatment resulted in the loss of two toes and lifelong headaches.
Cancelling someone is also known as freedom of association.
edit: Media stirring shit up was a thing pre-Revolution, too, including at least two Founding Fathers participating themselves! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Massacre#Media_battle
Personally, I don't care that it's age old. It's still not okay, and I don't care whether it's better or worse in modern times. I'm not even sure how far outside of propaganda some of this stuff falls, which ironically has the opposite reception from the public.
Trying to conflate “cancel culture” with the already-illegal concepts of stalking and harassment is disingenuous. Trolling and “narrative manipulation” are pretty clear protected free expression.
That sounds to me like a problem with the existence of billionaire oligarchs and not a problem with the first amendment.
The founders largely were oligarchs, heirs of oligarchs, or married into the families of oligarchs,and certainly were not people to whom the idea of someone, or some group, within that class investing heavily in media to promote their political ideas would be surprising.
> look how the mainstream media would love to cancel certain people they don’t like.
Both before and after independence, political cancel culture in the early US involved much more forceful, and often permanent and total, cancellation than what is complained about today.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddow...
https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-karen-mcdougal-case...
Look, these talking heads are simply well-paid entertainers - nothing more. All they spew is lies, propaganda and downplay the things that are really happening. Unfortunately they have a willing audience in the majority of Americans who cannot see through all the bullshit. I personally cannot recall when last I tuned in to any of the mainstream media outlets.
So I'd recommend that they be stripped of all of those protections and get the same punitive treatment that we, the People (we are the ones who pay taxes, BTW), get when we talk shit. Trust me, that'll make them sit up.
Entertainers have First Amendment rights, too.
> They enjoy misleading and diverting attention away from the things that really matter.
If I feel your argument does that, do I get to revoke your rights?
> So I'd recommend that they be stripped of all of those protections and get the same punitive treatment that we, the People (we are the ones who pay taxes, BTW), get when we talk shit.
We, the People, are similarly protected by the First Amendment. Weakening it would impact us, too.
There's no way to tell these days. I feel bad for The Onion, really. Parody is dead.
Nobody here knows what you actually believe. Without the benefit of that shared context, a sly vocal intonation, or a wink of the eye all we can do is take you at face value as someone who actually believes what you’re saying.
That having been said: the First Amendment is not absolute, and there are exceptions to the general principle that people are free to say what they feel (Assange, for example, could be tried on espionage if he's extradited). But in general, exceptions are carved with a jeweler's chisel, and only when extremely necessary and when there are no other possible remedies.
In this case, the sickness you've highlighted has several potential non-first-amendment remedies, including enforcing monopoly laws, passing new monopoly laws, and taxing billionaires at a rate that would make it difficult for them to keep the surplus cash-on-hand to buy 70% of the US's newspapers. And changing the market via law to find a new way to pay for news since the Internet era has completely ingested and digested their traditional advertising model.
Jokes aside, I'm against censorship. I think information should be available to all but maybe with caveats and accountability.
BTW, I agree with the proposed remedies. But - Who's gonna bell the cat though? It ain't going to be any of y'all's Senators, CongressPeople or the Executive Branch. And we all know for damn sure that it's never going to be the Supreme Court.
... emphasis on the last part.
You can say whatever you want, but you can't charge people for it and you can't lie and pretend you're selling one thing (truth) when you're selling another (self-righteous feelings).
Won't ever happen because the government and media are in bed with one another, but that's what I'd like to see.
If the media and government are in bed today, won't that get worse when the government can arbitrate what truth is harming the not mainstream media?
Right now? It wouldn't work. It's an angry pipe dream.
Point taken.
Also I always love a good Orwell reference.
I'm sure if you thought through the implications of removing Constitutionally recognized, inalienable rights, you wouldn't say this. Let's assume it is done, the press is now stripped of its rights, and ask some questions about the world and political reality thereupon:
Do individuals still have this right to free speech or is it only media that no longer does?
Does an individual who becomes a journalist still have the right to free speech?
Who would oversee the speech of journalists? Would it be you or right-thinking people like you who decide what is acceptable for the media to say? Or would it be whichever political party were in power at the time? Or billionaire oligarchs?
How would this oversight work? A "free speech oversight" committee? How does one get into the committee? Appointment? By whom? Election?
If I want to run for election in the committee, can I say unpleasant things about my incumbent opponents? Or will the committee declare this speech to be out of bounds? What if they become corrupt? Who can report the truth about that corruption?
If I dislike the committee for some reason, can the committee oversee my criticism, declare it out of bounds?
Could the legal precedence of overriding the inalienable right to free speech also be used to override other inalienable rights? My right not to have to barracks soldiers in my house, for instance.
Free speech is the only thing that makes it slightly possible to not parrot the official government narrative.
If you take away the first amendment protection, doesn't that just mean that the government controls 100% of the media instead of 70% or whatever you think the number is?
I think the Assange case is an excellent reminder that "our media" doesn't really have any First Amendment protection. You don't need First Amendment protection if you are spewing DC blob talking points all day. And if you challenge the DC blob, like Assange did (or Gary Webb and others), it very quickly becomes clear that those protections don't exist at all.
Anyone who cares about freedom of speech for anyone should defend it for everyone because if nazis, tankies, and journalists can't have freedom of speech, none of us can. First they came for... you know how the rest goes.
You think the oligarchs should hold the media they allegedly control accountable for the things they say so that we can get less biased media? What?
Assange is alleged to have cooperated with a member of the US forces to release gigabytes of diplomatic cables etc. - which is possibly a crime.
In all but rare cases, you absolutely do not have the right to break into systems of national security and release arbitrary information under the guise of 'journalism'.
His extradition is perfectly rational, legal and judicially legitimate.
The Abu Garib whistleblower didn't face criminal charges, and has been relocated and protected by US Justice System, because he did the right thing, not the wrong thing.
Assange will face a trial like everyone else, he is not above the law.
While I think he's probably not guilty in this scenario, there is evidence made public that possibly points to criminality, I'm looking forward to seeing the facts of the case.
And who defines the right or wrong? Assange revealed among many things how CIA collects data of US citizens abusing patriot act without warrants.
The Law under the purview of the Justice System, which is why they are pressing for a trial.
Obviously, we us a moral sensibility in the community, but that's more nuanced.
Laws change all of the time, especially as different cases with different characteristics are brought before the courts and they set precedent.
Assange is accused of working with people to hack into sensitive systems in which gigabytes of arbitrary government data were stolen and published.
If true, this is definitely within the realm of what we would generally accepted to be illegal, there's not going to be much controversy there.
The issue is whether or not Assange has actually committed a crime, and to what extent his prosecution is political.
I suggest we'll be able to get a sense for that when he is put on trial and the evidence is presented.
If it turns out the FBI paid a guy to lie about him, and that's all the evidence they have, then Assange will walk away a free man, but otherwise we'll have to wait to see the evidence.
As a journalist, you sometimes have to jump a fence - that is generally, and legally, accepted. Else writing 'do not view or publish' on your crime diary would be sufficient to conceal it.
Just because it's tragic, and maybe one might not like 'the war' etc. doesn't make it a 'war crime'.
It was a glimpse into the horrors of war for many and that can be enlightening, but doesn't necessarily justify whistelblowing, even if the information does materially shape our views.
The issue with Assange boils down a bit to whether or not Assange 'published' or 'stole' the information along with Manning, there's a material difference there.
I'll gather he was on the side of publishing, not stealing, but I have not seen the evidence.
> In addition, the broadened hacking conspiracy continues to allege that Assange conspired with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash to a classified U.S. Department of Defense computer.
10 seconds of perusing the indictment against Assange alleges he actively did things other than merely publish data that was given to him.
Is this the same hacker who has gone on public record that he got paid by the FBI to lie , and as a result was later redacted from the court documents?
Paying for false witnesses is such a classic and really makes for a strong case.
These are two very different things. Is Assange suspected of doing the first? The second I wonder how it can be a crime if it is a non-US citizen doing it on non-US soil.
It's worth noting that Manning, his alleged co-conspirator in this thing, was declared guilty by Obama, in public, before her trial ever began (when she was, under the law, to be presumed innocent). She was also tortured in jail prior to conclusion of the trial, to such an extent that she attempted suicide twice.
The extradition is only rational, legal, and judicially legitimate if he can be expected to receive a fair trial and not be tortured before/during/after. None of these assumptions hold true in the United States, as we both know.
That's not how it works. Biden made similar public declarations about Rittenhouse, who was subsequently found not guilty.
Now, none of them should be talking about, but that they did does not imply a miscarriage of justice.
The extradition is legitimate, and Assange will receive a fair trial in the US where the whole world will see the evidence against him.
You may now look at the disparity in treatment.
Drop the analogy, what did Assange actually do to help Manning?
I’d maintain that it’s not unreasonable for a journalist to ask a leaker for documents about a particular topic.
> The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents and avoid detection.
He's charged with 18 counts, each with a 10 year maximum sentence, except 1 with a 5 year sentence. Manning faced 22 charges, including one that carried a potential death penalty, so broadly speaking Assange is facing fewer and less serious charges. If we take Manning's sentencing as a reasonable upper bound, he'd face 35 years in prison, with potential for early release. He's 50 now, so there's a chance he'd die in prison, but I'd give him better than even odds. And that's assuming what I'd argue is a worse than could be expected sentencing.
But in general the likelyhood of him facing a life sentence (or what amounts to a life sentence, 50+years) is low.
He didn’t do that, he didn’t help Manning get any additional access, the whole basis of their case is in Assange agreeing to look at some stuff for Manning and then never getting back to him. Assange didn’t hack or crack anything.
> The superseding indictment alleges that Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions regarding Manning’s transmission of classified records to Assange. The discussions also reflect that Assange actively encouraged Manning to provide more information and agreed to crack a password hash stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a United States government network used for classified documents and communications. Assange is also charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to crack that password hash.
Donald Rumsfeld then later wrote a letter to the whistleblower telling him to stop telling people that Rumsfeld had been the one to leak his name.
The Abu Garib leaker was treated as a true whistleblower, because he was, not a criminal.
In your very comment you indicate that the Justice System even went out of their way to protect him.
In the case of Assange, they are after him, so we'll wait to see what kind of evidence they have.
Regardless, laws are completely irrelevant to what's right or wrong. Laws are basically just threats, and it's not wrong to do something just because someone threatens to harm you. It doesn't matter if that someone is the Chinese government, the US government, the Taliban government, or some local street gang.
There is a material difference between 'Whistleblowing' and 'Stealing and Releasing Data Because You Want To'.
Those releasing documents regarding arbitrary imprisonment of people because of their ethnicity are 'Whistleblowers'. I would argue that the release of the video showing US accidental killing of Journalistgs in the friendly fire incident, may fall under that.
But the diplomatic cable leaks I don't think constitute whistle blowing.
"Laws are basically just threats,"
Total rubbish, I can't fathom that someone would believe this.
The Law is the most foundational aspect of civilization, probably more important than democracy itself.
It's a set of codified rules that we roughly agree upon, or at least are aware of, that we are all equally subject to, not one above the other - or at least it's supposed to be, and when it's not, we consider that a form of corruption.
Assange is possibly guilty of the crime of breaking into private government systems to release arbitrary data to the public, which is probably a crime.
When the trial starts, we'll get to see the evidence, one of the advantages of living in a Western Liberal Democracy is that most of this information is available to anyone, another key aspect of a functional Judicial System BTW.
[citation needed]
The High Court said Friday that it had received appropriate assurances from the U.S. to meet the threshold for extradition, including:
Assange will not be subject to “special administrative measures” or be held in a notorious maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado.
Assange, if convicted, will be permitted to serve out his sentence in his native Australia.
Assange will receive appropriate clinical and psychological treatment in custody.
Why are you outraged about things that have not happened? Has the US Govt broken those promises? Y/n?
The point is, saying the judgement is wrong is logically equivalent to stating that one of these assurances is going to be broken, which is an actual falsifiable proposition - I'm just asking which one you think is going to be broken.
No - that plainly does not follow.
All that is needed is to apply the standard of reasonable doubt: in this case, that the party in question (the U.S. government) can be trusted not to act contrary their assurances on these matters.
Which we are compelled to adopt, based on the very ample track record of their conduct in this regard.
> "The United States has provided assurances to the United Kingdom in connection with extradition requests countless times in the past. In all of these situations, the United States has fulfilled the assurances it provided."
Are you saying this is false? What track record of breaking assurances are you referring to?
We're going in circles. This was already referred to in my original entry into this thread, 5 or 6 levels up.
The fact that the U.S. may keep some of its assurances to some parties (if in fact this is the case) does not obviate the fact that frequently and brazenly breaks many other assurances it makes in this regard. It is this, much bigger fact (which is pretty obvious and doesn't need substantiation as to the particulars) which takes precedence.
You haven't convinced me why the court is wrong to believe the USA on this point. You just seem to repeatedly state that it's ridiculous without saying why.
But anyway, ultimately we will be able to see whether or not the USA does let Assange (if convicted) serve his sentence in Australia or not.
Are you referring to the CIA's famous "We don't do torture" promise, here?
Or the implicit promise to the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan that they would be treated humanely when they came in contact with our armed forces and their surrogates? And most certainly when they ended up in our ... detention centers?
Or to the migrants detained by the ICE, who were told they were merely being "detained"... not that they would one day find an officer
"sitting on her like one would on a horse", with his "erect penis on her butt"
to quote just one of 1,224 reports of recent sexual abuse at these facilities?
Saying that, we live in strange times where countries like the UK, which always used to play by the rules, albeit the ones they wrote, now backs out of treaties where the ink is barely dry.
It is dubious that soliciting government documents and publishing them would be illegal in the UK.
Of course events like this have been happening for centuries, recent decades included. The people in various countries caught up in wars had their lives ruined or lost. At best, this was despite all efforts to safeguard them and a price to pay for some greater good, at worst footnote to some uncaring Grand Plan. The end result is the same though.
The machine of Western Democracy devours those who cross it hard enough. Maybe to protect those inside the bubble, or maybe because it's still floating in the same Big Bad World as the less democratic counterparts around the world.
While statistically better the democracy on its own does not stand for being "humane". Masses love government "being tough" and do not care much about them destroying lives.
Laws don't go beyond who enforces them. And this is as expected, they're not an omnipotent/divine construct.
The general public view of Assange is not so great and it went down with time. Manning is probably viewed more favourably.
States that were too tolerant with those who "skirt the rules" (or just do very serious crimes) usually end up regretting it (or not living to regret it, which is worse). I would be very happy if those involved in some January events at D.C. got a similar treatment.
I think perhaps you're giving too many people too much credit. I would assume that the vast majority of people in the USA think it's a functioning democracy, subject to the rule of law, with human rights.
None of these things are true, and, yet, these beliefs are very widely held.
We wouldn't be talking about Assange having legal recourse had he got in the wrong way of a lot of other places.
The buck stops somewhere, no system is perfect and special cases are special cases. As again per the last paragraph in my initial response.
It's not really a defense. The USA, and in particular the parts of the USA that have the most power, do not really care at all about human rights, and are not held accountable for not caring about human rights.
You also need to take care of your big boy pool. When you make friends by force they will leave you the moment another stronger friend will come. And when you eroded all your credibility will be a bit difficult to regain it back. Of course you think you have control over everything.
> At this level, only power matters. And the first rule of power is: Don't embarrass the powerful unless you can call on a lot of power to defend yourself.
Steven Donziger is another great example of this rule: https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-...
Chevron has decided to make an example of him by ruining his life in return for a $9.5 billion judgement he won against them in Ecuador.
Don't get me wrong. If there will be a good deal from US - Russia is going to hand him over in a blink of an eye.
But he is an example that you still can play it out between big boys and not all is lost.
Ostensibly they are different than corporations and other private entities specifically in that the standard by which their mandate exists is a public one. But once we see that that's not true (and we have seen it throughout history, but with astonishing clarity in the past two decades), isn't it time to move on?
Because the states (indirectly, carefully, and tactfully) guide the media in those states, and the majority of people uncritically assume that the narratives they hear over and over again ("land of the free", "rule of law", "innocent until proven guilty", "justice is blind", "a free press") are true and correct, simply because they've been repeated at them so often.
Information that contradicts those beliefs is ignored, discredited, or discarded.
Hard to see the forest for the trees, I suppose
You are aware he is alleged to have pointed Manning to which files to illegally obtain and offered to help her cover her tracks, right? These are real crimes — not, as you allege, for embarrassing the US government.
Check your expenses before waging war.
Or, you need to band together with an international band of investigative journalists like the ICIJ: https://www.icij.org (who released the Pandora Papers) or do it intelligently like Snowden.
The most Ballsy of people in this category has to be the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny: https://youtu.be/kHgI6um1BMc IMO.
- he’s not a us citizen
- none of the “crimes” happened on US soil
- he’s a world famous journalist with prior work
- was charged with bogus crimes in Europe in an attempt to arrest him. All dropped
- the person who stole the files he released is already free and the tax payers paid for their transition
Laws banning protests, surveillance and others.
This isn't a surprise but doesn't make it acceptable.
When the politicians, media outlets, top civil servants, and other people in the corridors of power are drawn from the same Eton to Oxbridge to power pipeline you end up with a proper British Bulldog of a political culture: a creature so heavily inbred it can’t even breath properly.
The cure in my opinion is to break these cliques up by getting a far wider diversity of human experience into politics, my local MP is a former physics teacher for instance and I have nothing but respect for her especially compared to the line-up of the corrupt on the front benches. We can’t expect the cadre of ex-Etonians who’ve had every advantage society has to offer to even understand the plight of the ordinary person much less empathise and use their power to do something about it.
What better time to slip Uncle Sam a favour?
The judge in this case, followed the rule of the extradition treaty law...
...but then again, ALL laws are rooted in the initial power politics that set them in motion.
Extradition isn't unique to the United States, though. It's a common feature of most large country's legal systems.
This doesn't mean that any country can prosecute foreign people with arbitrary laws at their leisure, though. Most extradition agreements would require that the offense be a crime in both countries, for example, and require a reasonable expectation that the punishment will be proportional to the crime (i.e. not petty political retribution).
In your US-Mexicon-Peru example, Mexico would indeed be likely to hand over the US citizen to Peru if (and only if) the accused criminal act was a crime in both countries. Mexico has additional constraints that would forbid the extradition if the death penalty was a likely outcome, but if the likely sentence was a prison term, the evidence was sufficient, and the crime was reasonably serious then the person would be on their way.
Ok but Anne Sacoolas ran over and killed a kid (definitely a crime here) and she wasn't extradited.
While Julian Assange exposed a US war crime and is extradited because US espionage law literally counts that as spying. Not a crime in the UK.
It really does appear that "at their leisure" is precisely how it works. There's the exercise of raw power with a thin veneer of false legal pretext on top designed to manufacture consent and convince those susceptible to the just world fallacy.
I have to admit though it would be interesting if the UK played a game of tit for tat here. We will extradite Assange, but only after you send us Sacoolas. But they probably won't because Assange being prosecuted is also in their national interest, whereas Sacoolas facing her charges has little bearing on UK national interests.
Sure. People whom the US doesn't give a fuck about.
"At their leisure" and "one rule for us; another for you" still applies. Sacoolas wasn't an exception in any meaningful sense. She is very much the rule.
The US cares about US operatives because they have a job to do on behalf of the US. The operatives can't do their job if the host nation holds the prosecution of their spouse over their head. I think you may be under the false impression that the United States is unique in this regard but it's basic diplomacy as standardized by the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations [1] - Article 37 specifically.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Diplomati...
It's conventional for the diplomatic immunity to be waived if an actual major crime took place as a gesture of good faith.
The fact that the US doesnt do it here demonstrates just how little respect it has for the UK.
I'm my opinion though, this just reinforces the idea that it didn't matter what the rules were - people in power were sufficiently motivated to justify what they wanted to do, they just needed a way to make it relatively palatable to the general public.
At least one UK court disagreed with your interpretation. AND the US and UK re-wrote the agreement after the incident, which strongly suggests the agreement did originally allow families to receive immunity.
There were often such empires around the world. Rome for example.
The timelines of the extradition and the submarine deal don't match up exactly... but the idea that the English-speaking countries can rely on one another runs deep and long.
He is charged with helping Chelsea Manning to hack into a government computer which did happen on US soil.
“ they charged him with conspiring to commit unlawful computer intrusion based on his alleged agreement to try to help Ms. Manning break an encoded portion of passcode that would have permitted her to log on to a classified military network under another user’s identity.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/world/europe/julian-assan...
IIRC Manning was in Iraq at this time. Were servers they accessed in the US? Probably. But that would be a crime Manning committed.
With Assange as an accomplice.
Should the military personnel who were responsible for abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib not have been charged with crimes because they weren't in the US?
For example, Germany is well known to strictly prohibit and penalise the public display of Nazi symbols. Suppose some US citizen posted unicode swastikas in a game chat (while living in the UK), as kids seem to like to do, and this chat log got replicated on a German server, putting it in violation of German law, and now Germany wanted to throw the book at them (3 years of jail or so). Should the UK extradite this person to Germany? Would it have any bearing on this whether the kid did this with the intention of trolling Germans in game (and perhaps the awareness that it is not legal for them to display the symbol)?
For an even juicier version of this scenario, imagine that we are instead considering the case of an American journalist who tweeted some of the edgier activist-journalist rhetoric (of the "kill all $privileged_group" type) to weigh in on some German domestic dispute. This just so happened to fall afoul of Germany's domestic laws on inciting racial hatred, and the message got replicated on whatever servers Twitter's CDN has there. The intent (to reach Germans) would be there, and a crime (having a public-facing computer server display an incitement to racial hatred) would have happened on German soil. How would you feel about the US journalist being extradited from the UK to Germany to face jail time?
As far as I understand it, that witness admitted to lying about a lot, but I can't find where he ever was the witness to Assange helping Manning, or that he even claimed it happened. The original article[1] that exposed Thordarson's lies doesn't even mention that; it's only tangentially tied to the claim that Assange was Manning's accomplice because they used it to say, "See? He helped Thordarson, too". As far as I know, we don't yet know what other proof the government may have that Assange helped Manning along the way simply because there hasn't been a trial yet. Until that happens, it's impossible to say that there is no proof.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
How funny the world would be if laws was enforced equally.
> - none of the “crimes” happened on US soil
Not commenting on the legitimacy of the underlying accusations, but neither of these have ever been obstacles for extradition treaties.
Generally, as long as the actions are a crime in both countries (the country where the crime was committed and the country where the person currently resides) then it would fall under most extradition treaties.
There are additional hurdles such as sufficiently believing that punishment will be proportional tot he crime and that the trial will be fair, but simply being in a different country doesn't mean someone is free from the consequences of committing crimes against victims in other countries.
Some countries do have exceptions that their own citizens can't be extradited for treaties in foreign countries, but that doesn't free the person from being prosecuted for the crime in their own country either.
That’s a claim not a fact. It’s also possible he was an asset for a hostile intelligence service posing as a journalist.
I’m not normally one to side with Mike Pompeo, but I agree with his assessment on this one:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/us/politics/mike-pompeo-c...
“‘WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service,’ Mr. Pompeo said.”
It's a fact he's a journalist. We've all read his journalism or at least know of its existence. [1]
It's a claim that "he was an asset for a hostile intelligence service" and one with zero evidence to back it up. Everything Assange has done the New York Times has also done. Every single thing he has been charged with in this case. That's also a fact.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/author/julian-assange
Pompeo walks and talks like a traitor. There, that's a claim, you might find the evidence a little more compelling.
The idea that Trump is famous for playing golf is risible is your point but it does not apply here. There is nothing else that gained Assange fame other than publishing more scoops than any other journalist ever has. by orders of magnitude. Your nitpick is like trying to claim Tiger Woods is world famous for being the victim of domestic violence who also happens to play golf.
Your last sentence make it sound like understood the complete opposite of what I said.
Anyway, I'm not interested in having a discussion about Julian Assange, where I think we probably are on the same side. I just wanted to make a the small side remark about the fault in the logic.
If you believed wikileaks and Assange were famous for golfing or hacking or leaking or baking pie I have sympathy because the smears on what they did and do have been as relentless as they have been obviously false, (one example that won't go away: "he's a leaker who never actually leaked anything but instead published leaks like the New York Times does which makes him a leaker").
Now you know better. He's a worlds famous journalist and publisher. Without publishing and journalism you don't know him from a bar of soap.
Another, separate point worth making. You don't have to like /him/ and support /him/ to support his rights which are also every person engaging in journalisms rights and also /your/ rights. You don't have to hate a government or a nation to oppose when it overreaches. This is a pretty big overreach.
All I know is that he facilitated the dumping of US classified documents onto a publicly accessible webpage. Not making a moral judgment about that here, but that is _exclusively_ the way in which I know him.
The New York Times facilitated the dumping of the then President's tax returns onto a publicly accessible webpage without being able to confirm they were not stolen by russian spies.
Exactly like the reason you've heard of Trump isn't that he's such a great golf player. But he plays golf, and he is famous... And still not "a famous golf player" like, say, Tiger Woods.
> It is for publishing journalism and in particular journalism containing a vast number of journalistic scoops. So many that it catapulted him to international fame.
No, the reason I've heard of Assange is that he helped people leak the content of what became a vast number of journalistic scoops to actual journalists, who wrote it up and published it.
Leaking is leaking and journalism is journalism, but leaking is not journalism.
One more time.
Chelsea Manning leaked the documents. Wikileaks _published_ the leaked documents leaked by Chelsea Manning along with commentary on those documents.
Wikileaks did _not_ leak - they had no access to anything to leak.
Once the doucments were sent to wikileaks they were leaked. They received the leaks and published. Just like the New York Times does. Just like the New York Times did for Donald Trump's tax returns where they did not know the source of the leak. Just like the New York Times did for the Pentagon Papers (where they did know the source) and the Post did for Watergate & "Deep Throat" where they did know and assisted to conceal the source of the stories that ended Nixon's presidency. Do you really not see this? No amount of "Assange is not a journalist!" Can possibly work unless you also make the New York Times journalists not journalists. Or you have politicians approving who is and isn't journalists just like Stalin used to. It's flipping amazing that we're looking at a Stalinist "you're not a journalist, gulag for you!" Approach in the USA. Un-flipping-believable to be honest.
"Ah but they helped their source not be found out..." Just like the New York Times does. The Washington Post. Or any serious news operation. Every one.
The actions taken by wikileaks are the exact same actions taken by the New York Times. Journalism is journalism. Any citizen can do journalism. Any citizen has the right to do journalism. Any citizen has the protections accorded by law for doing journalism. Unless you make journalism itself illegal.
What about Wikileaks secure, anonymous drop boxes for leaked documents where they don't even know who's sending them. The New York Times has that too and published the President's tax returns without knowing who provided them. Could it have been Russian Spies? Who knows! Authentic, newsworthy so publish has always been the test.
And that's the story here. Making journalism illegal.
You can keep trying to frame wikileaks as "not journalism" but if you do down that road you get state media because what the Times does, the Post, everything more than petty gossip magazines, ie actually breaking stories of corruption and illegal activity, as Wikileaks did, is /no/ different according to the whatever law you have.
Again you don't have to like Wikileaks or Assange to object to the massive overreach here impacting /your/ rights. Neither do you have to even so much as mildly dislike the USA to object to the massive overreach and actually defend what the USA and its armed forces are meant to stand for. You can do that if you love the USA and what it represents for sure.
I can't stand Michael Moore nor could I stand the late Rush Limbaugh. They both make my blood boil. But I'll absolutely support their rights because those rights belong to everyone. There's no "yeah but we'll take them away but just for this asshole."
The rights exist, even for those you loathe, or they don't exist, for you or everyone you love, like and respect.
Wikileaks chucked what they received up on a web page. They're "journalists" in the same sense that the guy running the printing presses at the NYT is "a journalist".
After partnering with the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, redacting anything putting people in danger and inviting the US Govt to tell them anything they wanted redacted (who did not suggest a single redaction, nothing) and then writing their own stories on it then, yes, they did put the source materials on the website so you /you/ can decide their and their partners' reporting is accurate, all of whom linked to specific source documents in their stories. About the Afghanistan war there doesn't seem much doubt anymore does there? Another decade of increased resources got nowhere with President Trump, then President Biden and a majority of Americans agreeing that it is a failed mission and withdrawal the correct option. The level corruption involved, snouts in the trough, is astounding.
The quantity of lies about Wikileaks is also astounding. They're as much like the printing press operators as your favorite goldfish. I doubt you're deliberately lying and pretending they didn't redact documents, nor partner with newspapers, nor write their own stories and you actually believe what you wrote there. How badly have you been lied to, it's astounding, huh? Why? Do you think another expensive in lives and money decade of the Afghanistan war had anything to do with it? Who did that benefit? The answer is many different parties for many different reasons all of whom /hated/ being called on it with very strong, published evidence.
He published documents leaked by others as supporting evidence for his journalism and to allow other journalists to use the source material. The documents were redacted in partnership with the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, El Pais, Le Monde and various others who also linked the source documents.
As soon as you have a standard for what doesn't qualify as journalism because you don't like it you have state controlled media.
The sheer quantity of lies about what he did or didn't do is really quite mind-boggling - it's so easy to check.
That's circular reasoning. He's a journalist because we read his journalism. And, ergo, his work is journalism because he's a journalist.
It all works out... unless of course, he was just pretending to be a journalist/ activist and was actually working in concert with a hostile intelligence agency to other, less noble, ends.
Given Pompeo's business history, I think it's fair to understand everything he says with the knowledge that he's an avatar of the American military-industrial complex [0]. With that lens in place, of course WikiLeaks is "hostile", have you seen Collateral Murder?!
Also possible he's the flying spaghetti monster. There's equal evidence for both (none)
Mike Pompeo sounds extremely salty about negative press coverage. Of course they're going to do their best to discredit Assange after he embarrassed them so thoroughly.
I don't see how the court can say he's not in danger of ill treatment by US given that fact alone.
- calling him a journalist is a mighty stretch even before he started, let's call it his "full-stack collaboration" with the Russians
- Manning served the time and is thus free. Assange did not serve time, so from the perspective of the US justice system is a few steps back in the process of paying for his crime. Regardless of guilt or innocence, nothing seems strange about this concept itself. If you're caught for a crime committed with others back in the 90s you're also gonna go to prison, even if your co-conspirators are out free already.
Yeah I know, we can argue endless forever about the details, real lawyers too.. but to be honest on a higher level: It is such a shame for the US as a country claiming "democracy", "freedom" and more to go on with this ridiculous show trail, just such a ridiculous shame.
For the UK the same, of course.
Just read that overspecific prepared weasel language... I cannot stand it.
> But in their ruling on Friday, they sided with the US authorities after a near-unprecedented package of assurances were put forward that Assange would not face those strictest measures either pre-trial or post-conviction unless he committed an act in the future that required them.
We all know what will happen.. as a Westerner ashamed myself :(
This is wildly unsubstantiated and at best fear mongering propaganda.
>- the alleged crimes were committed against the US, i.e his participation in the exfiltration of secret data from US government. Surely his physical location when committing these crimes should have no bearing on whether it's a criminal matter.
It absolutely should matter. Why should someone who's not a citizen and wasn't located in the US be held to US laws? Does every person on the planet now need to memorize the laws of every country and fear extradition if I were to accidentally view gay porn, which is illegal in Saudi Arabia?
Your example doesn't really work because it is illegal to view gay porn in Saudi Arabia. If Saudi Arabia decided to outlaw viewing gay porn worldwide, and then another country's government decided that its extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia covers this law, and then you decided to visit such a country and viewed gay porn - yes, you should fear extradition in that case.
By your logic, all one needs to do to hack into US companies and, say, steal trade secrets or money with impunity, or demand ransom, is to be outside the US. But that's not how the world works. In addition, you gotta find a country that doesn't extradite to the US on charges of fraud, and/or theft of trade secrets.
Or, in Assange's case, actively and persistently convincing and coaching someone to exfiltrate top secret data from a US government computer system. Something that, BTW, I look forward to hearing which country in the world does not outlaw and pursue criminal convictions for.
The framework is logically and legally sound, a good idea and a good thing. As to the inputs to the process - quality of laws, wording of extradition treaties - that does vary, so choose travel destinations and elected officials carefully.
How is he not a journalist? What's your definition? Is the garbage that CNN, MSNBC and Fox News spews out journalism? Is Chris Cuomo a journalist?
Where is you evidence of Russian collaboration? Or did you hear that from a "journalist"? It seems you have no clue what journalism is.
The evidence of Russian collaboration is detailed in the Mueller indictment, numerous investigative pieces about e.g. the kinds of people who visited Assange in the embassy, the obviously coordinated timing of DNC leaks, etc. etc. A preponderance of available evidence, let's call it.
Didnt Obama commute his sentence?
B) Only after she'd served most of it, AFAICR.
Julian Assange is as much of a journalist as Mark Zuckerberg is.
This is essentially false as his ostensible crime relates to participating in the hacking of US systems.
By your inference, Russians hacking into US Hosptials would not be committing a crime on 'US Soil' as though that would make a difference.
Let's have the trial and see the evidence.
> This is essentially false as his ostensible crime relates to participating in the hacking of US systems.
A crime happens where you do it. His arse wasn't sat in the USA when he did it.
Is this a criticism to tax policies or an underhanded insult to trans people?
The justice system can determine a person's guilt or innocence, but only when they're brought before it. The enforcement system may, depending on their cost / benefit analysis, spend disproportionate resources to make that happen.
It all goes back to a jabber log that they got from Manning. The gist of it is as follows:
Manning: <some bytes from a hexdump>
Manning: can you guys crack NTLM?
Assange: we have rainbow tables. I’ll forward it onto someone on our team.
Few days later,
Manning: any update on NTLM?
Assange: no luck so far.
And this is computer conspiracy. No additional access to any machine was had, and there’s no real evidence that any cracking was attempted at all. He merely agreed to take a look and reported no progress on it. It’s been a while since I looked at the details but I seem to recall that the pcap hexdump manning sent wasn’t even the correct bytes to do an attack — it wasn’t even possible.
There are so many explanations for why Assange could have said this while plausibly not attempting to crack the hash. Manning put him in a strange position to become complicit and he had to strike a balance between not saying to his source, “lol that’s illegal no way, you’re on your own dude” while simultaneously saying exactly that.
s/Assange/Nathaniel Frank/
I do not care about the verdict of the trial. I care a lot that a trial takes place. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Everybody is presupposing the result of this and being outraged rather than waiting and seeing what happens. He is innocent until proven guilty.
"If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."
1. Two or more people
2. Intentionality
3. An agreement
4. An underlying crime
5. An overt act
The discussion you post seems to point to all 5 being met, although additional evidence would be needed to prove it. Obviously there are two people here discussing "cracking" something. Assange agrees to the overt step of taking the data and forwarding it to his team, ostensibly with the intention that this team would do the cracking.
When asked for an update, Assange states "no luck so far". Do we take that to mean they are currently working on it and have not succeeded? Or is Assange saying that there's no luck, but he hasn't really done anything with the data? It really doesn't matter according to the statute, which defines the overt act as any act done to further the conspiracy. So it doesn't matter if there was no other access to any machine or if there is no evidence cracking was attempted. If Assange took that data and sent it to anyone else, then he's part of the conspiracy.
Actually, according to the statute, it doesn't even matter if he took an overt action. If he agreed with Manning to implement the crime, and Manning on her own did the cracking, then Assange would still be part of the conspiracy due to the first 4 elements.
What I said 11 months ago:
" actually don't think this is such great news for him. Extradition was specifically blocked on the grounds of a particular regime he might be subjected to (to be fair, probably the only legal grounds on which he had any chance of succeeding). That leaves the US with a way out if they want to proceed with the extradition - guarantee a different set of circumstances.
If the judge had found on more substantive grounds, those would have been much more resistant to that. For instance, all the claims based on language in the extradition treaty and other international agreements failed and they failed for pretty fundamental legal reasons. English courts only have regard for domestic law and it is for parliament to pass laws consistent with the treaties that have been signed, therefore claims based on treaty language won't work.
That means that none of the claims on the political nature of his activities were upheld and those would have provided a much more robust and durable bar to extradition."
Yes, 100%. I think the documents he released were all authentic, but that’s a great distance from either being “the truth” or being in service of “the truth”. The majority of propaganda is factual while attempting to subvert "the truth".
What we do is public relations, what they do is propaganda.
It's just a rationalization to disregard the standards that one would normally use to judge information i.e. its accuracy.
Seriously? This is priority #1 of anyone with alignment with authoritarian goals. Does the phrase "alternative facts" ring a bell? Ever heard of Joseph Goebbels?
if you pick and choose which ones to release, you absolutely are propagandizing, trying to use selective information to misinform.
The UK is one of the world's most dualist countries. No treaty has any domestic legal standing whatsoever. Until 2010, the government of the day could ratify treaties without recourse to parliament although there has been an observed rule since the early 20th century called the Ponsonby rule that parliament have time to debate and vote on important treaties. The government cannot make domestic statute law without a parliamentary vote therefore dualism emerged.
This means that the UK has to pass a "back to back" law to give legal effect to any treaty it signs where that is required. The US only has to do so when there are elements of the treaty that are plainly not "self executing" i.e. if the US signs a treaty creating a personal right for its own citizens then no further legislation is required but if it signs a treaty agreeing to do something that requires new appropriations, a new agency, or whatever then additional legislation is required.
Quite a long-winded way of saying that Assange never had recourse to certain claims his legal team attempted to make about conflicts between his treatment and the extradition treaty - the extradition treaty does not directly drive UK domestic law on extradition.
Tell soldier how cryptographic maths work == double castration and the CIA tries to assassinate you.
Don't forget that the Collateral Murder video showed not only Iraqi citizens but also Reuters journalists being machine-gunned from the sky. No person has ever been criminally charged for these murders.
Our military certainly makes mistakes, and people should be held accountable, but on the other hand the U.S. upholds much stricter rules of engagement than any of its enemies (hell, even stricter than our cops). Should credit not be given for that?
In all honesty and at the very minimum, being criticized openly and fairly for atrocities is the cost of being seen as capable of virtuous military action.
The older I get though, the less objective distinction I see. I'm sure that's how the dead felt in their last moment as well. Just look at the last US bombing in Afghanistan where they hit the car full of water and children. We like to act like there's a higher standard, but who will ever be held accountable for that mistake? Nobody.
And where did you hear that from? Our "independent" papers of record aka state department stenographers?
Is that a joke?
And that's just one example from dozens many we only know about because of Assange's hard work.
And with regards to the enemies of the U.S., and their "rules of engagement" it's quite likely they don't adhere to any, but I don't know how much worse that is than "attack without warning on there being a 1/100 chance of you being a terrorist who is not even near any US asset".
Where is your evidence of this? I can't remember the last time a drone attacked US soil and killed innocent civilians. And have you actually seen the main video that Assange released with Apaches killing civilians?
Hm, good so far...
> (hell, even stricter than our cops).
Muahahahahaa! You just blew your own argument out of the water.
Why comparing with enemies?
Should one or an org strive to be the best according to a universal standard?
Like Epstein?
Let this be a point, there is no press freedom in the United States.
Prison is worse.
Exactly. You can't prevent prison suicides.
In 2012, when she was home secretary, Theresa May stopped Gary McKinnon's extradition to the USA, on the grounds that he was a high suicide risk, and therefore the extradition violated his human rights. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon). If only I had similar expectations of our current home secretary.
I wonder how much pressure the Lib Dems put on her.
I'm not sure the judges were naive enough to believe the US government, but they probably had no choice.
If the institution gets a hint that you are suicidal you will be placed in some sort of anti-suicide cell, which generally means that you are in solitary, you wear a paper or foam suit with no other clothing, you have no bed linen or any paper materials in your cell, and all your food comes on foam trays without any cutlery and has to be eaten with your fingers.
I also failed to mention the light in the cell will be set to bright and will be on 24x7 and your cell will almost certainly have a completely glass door and you will be under camera and guard surveillance 24x7 to make sure you don't do anything stupid. If you are very lucky, some of these cells have a small wall in front of the toilet so you can at least get a tiny amount of privacy - they'll only be able to see you from the waist up.
The evidence pretty much all point to something other than suicide...
This is global jurisdiction and enforcement, that's what the extradition is about.
I do not necessarily agree with all the actions the US Government has taken with him, or their handling of some of the information that was leaked.
However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage, let alone encourage/incite it. In case my point is unclear, I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy.
Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.
Assange is an activist, not a journalist. He should not be treated as such and much of the consequences he suffers now (e.g., confinement during appeal) is directly related to his own actions (e.g., fleeing to an Embassy).
As a reminder, this is why the US wants to punish Assange:
> Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians > https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-a...
Likewise, if you think leaking the pentagon papers is the same as leaking all diplomatic cables and operational communications from a period of time is the same thing, not sure I can say much to change your opinion.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/indictment...
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wikileaks-releases-classifie...
The overarching question is at what point does a private citizen/activist become culpable. Developing technologies and social networks (old school kind, not facebook) which are explicitly designed to enable the stealing/leaking of state secrets would seem to be skirting pretty close to the line of "I'm just a private citizen/journalist." This is doubly true if said leaks end up putting military personnel and government assets in harms way.
We don't need to consider that possibility. It has been over a decade since this information was released. If anyone about whom USA government cares had ever suffered any harm (even if they actually deserved it) as a result, the USA war media would have crowed about it until we had all memorized all details. Not even a rumor exists of anything like that, so we know it didn't happen.
If you think it wasn't about that you clearly didn't follow the lawsuit.
What something is ostensibly about -- like for instance, what's spelled out in a lawsuit -- is not necessarily what it's actually about.
It would be very difficult, because you believe that journalists enabling the distribution of secret government documents means they're not journalists, they're activists. That equally condemns the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. You agree with their opinion, which is why you can't say much to change it.
edit:
Daniel Ellsberg: “Whatever Julian Assange is guilty of, I’m guilty of.”
https://www.exberliner.com/features/julian-assange-trial-202...
Scoping to a reasonable level, publishers' primary job is to review and filter information for quality, safety, and fitness for mass consumption. Assange and WikiLeaks explicitly do not do that. At best, they are a distributor.
The law generally views the publisher as responsible for unlawful (defamatory, copyright infringing, etc.) content without evidence of specific knowledge, whereas distributors are generally liable only when they have specific knowledge of the facts that make the content unlawful. This, in effect, makes publishers responsible for reviewing/filtering content, because if they fail to do so, they will be held responsible.
That's the whole source of significanxe of, e.g., the section 230 protection against hosts or other users of online services meeting certain descriptions being treated as the publisher of other-user submitted content.
WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia granted Snowden asylum.
As a reminder, the post you show isn't when the aggression against Wikileaks escalated. You reminder is not true.
His disclosures have shown a consistent bias to damage the Democrats, support the Republicans, Trump, and the Putin regime. He also endangered the lives of multiple assets by revealing their names and locations.
It's a lot more nuanced than you portray it.
Redefining journalist can let you imprison any and every journalist.
Inconvenient journalists financed from abroad. And "foreign agents" are not imprisoned, they just obligated by the law to remind their readers about this fact.
Why does the intent/purpose of the publisher matter here in any way from a legal prospective? I fear that your opinion of his purpose is forming your opinion of its legality.
What benefits or harms a country is orthogonal to what is factual. Any law that claims a moral high ground in protecting facts from being publicized, is used as a club to suppress speech. That is the moral issue, not some misguided idea that you are beholden to where and when you were born over reality to make statements. When you chase people after the fact (information is already published), you're doubling the moral insult. This isn't he ruin of the US, so it's transparently a petty vendetta.
There are practical problems (like state secrets in larger war games, ie Game Theory), which countries have historically forgone any nuance for the club, in the interest of expediency and simplicity. This isn't so complicated. Everyone understands. This is not a justification for totalitarian behavior, regardless of how dressed up the process is.
2. I don't think Assange is accused specifically of furthering the goals of a foreign adversary. If there was evidence of that then he would presumably have been charged with it somewhere.
Motive is incredibly important from a legal perspective. It's the difference between self-defense and murder. I believe you have the burden of proof suggesting why motive shouldn't be considered from a legal perspective, and I believe you'll have an uphill battle doing so.
As far as I'm aware his activities regarding the whole guccifer, Seth rich, etc. affair make me think a mere journalist he is not.
Your point is pretty clear. You designated exposing war crimes a criminal conspiracy no different from any other.
This view isn't compatible with a belief in human rights and democracy.
To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."
You cannot look at just one small part of what was leaked and ignore the rest. If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.
I see no substantial difference.
>To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."
I really don't understand what you being in Afghanistan is supposed to prove. If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.
Is that not the case?
>If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.
Oh, we absolutely would. The case was built specifically around the leak of collateral murder.
American espionage law criminalizes leaking evidence of war crimes. Snowden has offered to come home if its scope was tightened to only include actual espionage. Congress demurred.
This is what you were fighting for in Afghanistan like it or not - for a group of elites who would toss you in prison for exposing their war crimes without a second's thought.
> If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.
You realize you were the invader right?
However, I am glad you are able to with criticize and judge a person with 20/20 hindsight, while simultaneously offering nothing of value to the conversation.
Thank you for taking the time to offer your opinion and I wish you nothing but the best.
Yet your comment history on this subject ("activist" vs "journalist") indicates that's how you see the world. My contribution is to expose the cognitive dissonance surrounding your comments.
I've yet to see anything that makes your time in Afghanistan relevant to this conversation. In fact another person already posted a source debunking the claims that anyone's life was in danger due to the Wikileaks releases.
Aside from that, I did not ask about, nor do I care, what you think of my time in Afghanistan. I am more than capable of evaluating my own life choices through a critical and charitable lens.
Thank you for taking the time to contribute to the discussion and wish you the best.
> Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet.
That is, unless there were somebody they could point to who was dead as a result. Then they would describe what happened.
Or stay silent - if there were no examples.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/bradley-mannin...
Hopefully that's not what you mean to convey.
Some clarification would go a long way.
What was indiscriminate about it? Wikileaks reached out to other journalists to sort through and publish the information. The full release of the diplomatic cables happened only after some of those journalists (David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian) failed to keep that content secure.
I feel that an Australian citizen should not expect to be extradited to the USA for publishing information the USA would rather not be published. Still true even if he is an activist, would still be true even for someone genuinely trying to systematically destroy America and American values, if it’s just publication. Free speech etc.
For encouraging Americans to break American laws, which I think is the non-legalese summary of the accusation? I don’t know how I feel. The internet (telecoms in general) breaks borders and jurisdiction in ways that are not yet settled even in my own head.
Fleeing to an embassy definitely looked dumb to me at the time, and still does now. If someone is told to eat oranges, refuses because they are afraid oranges might be poisoned, volunteers to eat apples instead, runs away when someone tries to force them to eat an orange, then gets given a poisoned apple… I still don’t understand why people say this vindicates the original no-oranges stance.
Were Gandhi/MLK/Rosa Parks wrong when they made a point of breaking unjust laws and encouraging others to follow along?
Many liberals at the time thought yes - "the law being the law" and all that. It does sound like you're making the same argument they were?
Remind me about how Rosa Parks ran and hid?
Your question of right/"wrong" is a matter of morality, not legality. Stealing bread to feed a starving person might be morally good, but legally wrong, and nobody should expect to avoid legal consequences because of it.
In the case of civil disobedience, those involved do NOT attempt to flee from justice. Being arrested and facing the legal system is an integral part.
Assange may just get his chance to emulate Ghandi by spending years in prison...
You think Oskar Schindler was wrong not to hand himself in?
I do know that rule of law doesn’t function if everyone gets to decide for themselves what is and isn’t an unjust law, even though I can say with the benefit of hindsight that Rosa Parks deserved her Congressional Gold Medal, and that I hope I would’ve recognised the law as unjust at the time.
The reference that comes to mind is the four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and cartridge, which should be used in this order. Breaking unjust laws counts as #3, normal journalism is #1, Assange didn’t have the option of #2 with regard to the USA.
I'd have hoped so too, but from what you've written it sounds like you would have slotted in with the liberal whites who declared support-for-ending-segregation-in-theory but would also say that "this isn't the right way" or "this isn't the right time".
They made rather similar arguments to yours about the primacy of the rule of law as a principle.
Four boxes is a reason to take things slow, not a reason to say “no not like that” when the first steps have failed. And when the law bites someone for breaking it, if you think the law is wrong you should support the victim of the law; but that’s not the same as saying the law should not bite at all. A court case is by itself a powerful bite for most people, even without conviction.
I can also see that someone who is constantly being ground down and dehumanised by the law isn’t going to care about an end to the rule of law. I can’t expect someone in that situation to care if rule of law is damaged, because it never protected them in the first place. I suspect the feeling the law is a bludgeon rather than a shield is the cause of the current “ACAB” and “defund the police” slogans.
But is Assange even in that category? I don’t think so, so I do not feel confident predicting how I would vote if I was hypothetically on a jury. I do think the Guardian newspaper in the UK was in the “law is wrong” category, and that it was wrong for the UK government to destroy their copy of what Snowden gave them.
Like I said, complicated.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to. MLK had a specific, rather famous riposte to this attitude because of how common it was:
"I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
Emphasis mine.
But let me turn this around to demonstrate why such an ordering is desirable: lynchings in the USA disproportionately targeted African Americans. Those mobs were full of people who often claimed to be enforcing justice, but they were reaching straight for the 4th box.
And again, this is only even a consideration for people who care about rule of law. I can easily believe that many rights activists — women’s equality, race equality, Stonewall, independence movements in then-European colonies — had no possible reason to care about rule of law, because the law was never on their side. Anyone in that situation, I’d expect to reach for #4 first because it’s the only tool even available.
The difference between their civil disobedience and Assange's actions is that they took their punishment.
"Espionage" like publishing warcrimes.
"I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy"
Transparency is a government duty. It is a shame but totally justified that private citizens have to enforce it. As for "criminal", sounds like yet another victimless crime. If anything they are exposing crimes.
"being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did"
Thank you for disclosing that. How many people did you kill (directly or indirectly) and why didn't you try to expose warcrimes?
"Assange is an activist, not a journalist. He should not be treated as such"
Activists, journalists, and regular citizens should all be treated the same.
"is directly related to his own actions (e.g., fleeing to an Embassy)."
Yet given how the events turned out it seems that he was right. He was hiding in the embassy in fear that they would try to send him to the US.
If only we could all flee when faced with consequences for breaking laws that we disagree with.
"Transparency is a government duty. It is a shame but totally justified that private citizens have to 3nforce it. As for "criminal", sounds like yet another victimless crime. If anything they are exposing crimes."
There are absolutely reasons for state secrecy and the breadth of information crossed a line between what was necessary for informing the public, versus damaging to the diplomatic relations and ability to conduct diplomacy with much of the rest of the world.
"Thank you for disclosing that. How many people did you kill (directly or indirectly) and why didn't you try to expose warcrimes?"
Oh, goodness. Thanks for adding to taking the time to provide your perspective and add to the discussion.
These who can flee the overreach of foregin countries trying to enforce their unjust laws on them, do so.
"versus damaging to the diplomatic relations and ability to conduct diplomacy with much of the rest of the world."
Yeah, if a country commits horrible warcrimes then most of the world will not want to deal with them. It was not assange who was responsible for this but the US itself. One would not accuse a rape victim of ruining the reputation of their abuser.
"Oh, goodness. Thanks for adding to taking the time to provide your perspective and add to the discussion."
Pray tell. If it is zero then you can just say so, and if you did try to expose warcrimes I will take it back.
Tell that to Snowden.
> There are absolutely reasons for state secrecy and
Sorry, I have to: that's just, like, your opinion man. Have you ever thought that you might be wrong on this? How about the state stops doing the things they need to keep secret? You may call it naive, but some will call it being just, you know?
At one point, society deemed it acceptable to amputate various parts of a body as a form of punishment. Imagine you have a time machine and get to go watch a public torture and execution ca. 1200AD. Would you consider literally frying someone slowly into charcoal something you can "make a case" for? Why not? The social contract of there and then says it's fine?
There are places today where the social contract is still pretty much the same it was throughout human history: "we'll murder our way to any resources we need, and if you try to stop us you're dead (and if not, we might even share a bit)". Would you say this contract is good and just? Would you support it? And if not, why should we support yours, if it's precisely how your own "social contract" looks like to anyone that is not you?
Which part of the Afghan society voted you and your friends in? Why is your social contract important and just, yet theirs doesn't mean anything to you? Moreover, you went there specifically to break their contract: there's no way a full-scale invasion doesn't break at least the guarantee of single jurisdiction. So, your social contract - good; their - bad. Because terrorists?
On a related note: "society does and it has deemed" sounds to me like "and God said it was good". It's not an argument, it's an observation at best, but most often utterly empty. If you want to tell us that killing civilians with an attack helicopter should be kept under wraps, you should really give us the reasons why you personally think so. You really cannot speak for the "society", now can you? Or are you Borg?
How many members of Western society do you think would agree that war crimes should be routinely covered up? I'd guess very, very few.
> Assange is an activist, not a journalist.
Assange has broken two of the biggest stories of our era and literally hundreds of stories each of which would be a reputation-maker for a lesser individual.
Just because you don't like the truths that Assange reveals, doesn't mean he isn't a journalist.
> any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.
Wikileaks tried to get cooperation from the US government to redact the sensitive parts. They refused to cooperate.
Your way would have meant nothing at all.
Can you explain what harm you believe these leaks caused, compared to their value in knowing that the US engages in war crimes and covers them up?
The US invasion of Afghanistan was a complete failure and one that allowed the actual guilty party, Osama Bin Laden, to escape.
The Taliban offered twice to give up Bin Laden but Bush refused even to discuss it with them. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
Both the CIA and the FBI concluded that no one in the Taliban had any idea of 9/11 before it happened, which is very logical, because you aren't successful at conspiracies by telling everyone.
And yet Bush invaded Afghanistan, because he needed to invade somewhere and couldn't invade the actual culprits, Saudi Arabia - Al Qaeda being founded, funded, manned and managed by Saudis.
---
Participating in a great war crime that killed hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people and completely failed militarily, economically, diplomatically, and strategically should not be a matter of pride.
Indiscriminate publishing. So you think the vetting done in partnership with the Washington Post and the New York Times was not journalism and the employees of the NYT and WaPo who are now not journalists should be prosecuted along side him? That's pretty radical.
Many of the larger newspapers lean toward the former kind of "he's not one of us" and clearly hate him on a personal level, for many reasons one of which is that he de-values their prestige currency of the scoop by having achieved many orders of magnitude more important scoops than they reasonably ever dreamed of without having to have the crap beaten out of him as a young person joining a newsroom like they did. "My editor would never allow me to publish that even though it's completely true and backed with documents proving it." He doesn't have that problem.
There's no doubt that the litany of CIA, NSA & FBI openly employed as analysts are pushing a false narrative about it which is repeated often. We saw evidence of that kind of ting pretty clearly with the evidence free suppression of Hunter Biden's laptop contents as "Russian disinformation." Now we know it's real. The contents are minor league attempted sleaze but true. The suppression of it and the constant refrain of "Russians" is vastly more significant and pretty worrying.
People have be led to think of Wikileaks and Assange as "Anti-American." Pretty obvious that the Military would want to frame it that way. And it's reasonable not to like anti-american stuff. It's not so very far to go from there to thinking CIA lies are actually anti-american and reporting the truth about massive corruption and illegality in government is what has made the American experiment with democracy work and so is pro-american.
I don't know the extent to which the CIA and NSA etc actually use social media comments to push a narrative, I'd really, really hope it was none. Was there anything about that in Edward Snowden's revalations?
The modern corporate press is bad enough as it is. But do you really want to live in a country where legit journalists are jailed for publishing things the government does not want you to know about.
Just this week, state prosecutor blanked out almost all the names on Epstein flight logs. Fairly obvious its in the public interest to know which powerful people went there. But powerful people will try to protect other powerful people.
> However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage
Then you don't really believe that 99% of journalists are journalists, because they would disagree with you. I'm thankful that I don't live in the completely bowdlerized history that would have been the result if more journalists agreed with you.
> I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy.
He exposed crimes committed by war criminals. "Criminal conspiracy" is disingenuous. Furthermore the "classified" label is defined by the organization that committed those crimes. Do you think murdering innocent civilians indiscriminately should be classified?
You seem to be arguing semantics more than establishing any sort of moral or ethical argument against what he did.
Shouldn't you be pushing for the prosecution of the Guardian journalist that published the encryption keys then? Not Assange who actively worked to get both press and government help to ensure safe disclosure.
It's funny to me that you were marauding around Afghanistan a couple of years ago and would use the word indiscriminate to describe Assange.
https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikilea...
https://medium.com/@njmelzer/demasking-the-torture-of-julian...
https://medium.com/@njmelzer/response-to-open-letter-of-1-ju...
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/22/nils_melzer_julian_a...
> "He will be certainly exposed to an arbitrary trial, if he — in the U.K., extradition trial. The choreography is clear. Whatever his lawyers say, in the end, the U.K. judges will say, “Yes, of course, we cannot extradite him if there’s death penalty or torture or treatment, so, please, U.S., make assurances.” The U.S. will obviously make these assurances, and then the U.K. will say, “Then we have no reason not to trust the U.S.” And they will extradite him to the U.S. That’s what I foresee. And that’s what he expect he will hear. And that’s the crux here. In addition to the ill treatment he has already suffered, I am absolutely convinced that he will not get a fair trial. He’ll get a show trial in East Virginia, and he’ll end up in prison under inhumane conditions for the rest of his life. That needs to be prevented."
The whole article is worth reading: Melzer initially was extremely opposed to even looking into Assange's case (his negative view of Assange having been molded by media, as he states), and describes how his view evolved immediately after starting working on this, assessing him, etc.
Seems like the "assurances" given by the U.S should not be taken seriously. Previous actions speak (or should I say shout) much louder than words.
P.S : Adding "FREE JULIAN ASSANGE" to my personal website, I encourage everyone to do the same
Great idea. I would suggest to link to this page https://defend.wikileaks.org/
And it stays alive as "wannabe big" again dream long after. This is why britains elite aligns so flawlessly with the atrocities of the usa imperial bloom. The institutions recognize themselves from 100 years ago, when the trampled and maimed people like ghandi.
I did a deposition a few years back with the warden of a detention facility and asked him why the conditions were so bad. "The average stay here is 30 days", which justified everything. That figure came because a large number of people were able to bond out on day one and skewed the average he was using. It did not take into account the significant number of people who were in the facility for close to a decade or more awaiting trial. For instance, at the Cook County Jail in Chicago there are several people who have been waiting over 11 years and still have no trial in sight.
A lot of pre-trial facilities do not have any access to sunlight. I was held in a windowless room for five years with 24x7 fluorescent lighting and no access to sunlight or fresh air. Then I was held at another facility for three years that had a sealed "window" but also, essentially, no access to sunlight or fresh air.
In prisons you will generally find that you can get outside several times a week. But prisons are usually only used for those who have been convicted of a crime, and not those presumed innocent.
So the relevant measurement ought to have been the average stay of the inmates actually there at any one time, right?
This gov page is such a joke: https://www.state.gov/subjects/press-freedom/
(I shouldn't have to point out that was sarcasm, but I fear I need to, these days.)
I know it's a pretty common troll tactic on Reddit and Twitter, it's a shame to see it here.
But when it is used as at least partial propaganda (and it often does) in line of "look at good us and bad them" or comes from the government / affiliates then they better look in the mirror first. One thief has no standing criticizing the other. The fact that one had stolen $1000 and the other went for $2000 does not make much difference.
War means high-stakes decision-making using low-quality information by agents who are human and therefore fallible. War means chaos and brutality and unjust death on a grand scale. When you vote for war, this is what you get, no matter how good your intentions. It happens every day in every war. The only difference here is that it was caught on camera and released.
So what did Assange achieve by releasing this video? We already knew war is bad. The existence of the video just evidences that the US military is good at record-keeping, which if anything points to an institution that cares about the actions of its soldiers and is capable, in principle, of holding them to account, rather than just unleashing men with guns to do random unsupervised violence, which is what war looks like in many corners of the world.
The people to get angry with are the politicians and media pundits who who rush other peoples’ kids to war for trumped up jingoistic reasons, not the kids who inevitably fuck up the operation on the ground.
Then they get home and become cops.
When are the suppressed Abu Ghraib tapes coming out?
It's all terribly sad isn't it?
Best thing we can do it sweep it under the carpet and make sure it's easy for all the people who might be upset by it to not see it.
George Orwell
What exactly does this mean for Julian Assange? I mean, in terms of this repetitive circle of going to court and then coming back empty handed.
How often can Assange's defense team appeal these decisions and at what point can we expect the "final" decision to be made? E.g. Julian is either released or he is extradited.
Aside from that, it will go to the Court of Appeal and/or to the UK Supreme Court.
So potentially 2 or 3 further appeals.
Seeing the injustice of how one of the greatest journalists of our age is being treated literally hurts. And not just by the US power system, but also most of the media, even people who pass as liberal like John Stewart are almost spitting in his face and treating the US repression as justified.
This man is not a USA citizen, and was not in USA when he did the journalism that so offends the USA deep state. He will be extradited for purely political "crimes". Let's not pretend anymore that any of us live in societies governed by laws.
He won't get a bond either because of all the stuff that happened with the Bolivian Embassy.
Personally, I don't think we should extradite him simply because it's arguably a political 'crime'. The US/UK extradition treaty is so one-sided, though, and British extradition law so Executive-friendly, that that is essentially an impossible case to win if the Secretary of State wants to extradite.
He is charged and being extradited under criminal code. As a non-combatant, I don't think he could be charged by an Article I court.
Quick search for numbers show:
"53% of Americans say Julian Assange should be extradited to America"
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
I wish I could still have your faith in my fellow countrymen. Sadly I believe yours won't survive this trial.
Rehashing US war crimes, which would certainly come up, won't be great for the prosecution either.
Assuming the judge doesn't block that line of argument.
It's not that Voting for Trump is in any way related to being against Assange (It's my understanding that Wikileaks is well liked within that community), but I've learned to to speculate on what Americans might do.
I've taken to just expecting the worst possible outcome from any decision.
‘F*ck Him!’ Trump Reportedly Furious With Netanyahu Congratulating Biden, Hasn’t Spoken to Him Since
https://www.mediaite.com/trump/fck-him-trump-reportedly-furi...
>Former President Donald Trump is reportedly livid with Benjamin Netanyahu. At issue? Congratulations that former Israeli Prime Minister expressed to President Joe Biden following the 2020 general election.
>This is according to a new book from Axios writer Barak Ravid who reports:
>>Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu were the closest of political allies during the four years they overlapped in office, at least in public. Not anymore. “I haven’t spoken to him since,” Trump said of the former Israeli prime minister. “F*k him.”
>>What he’s saying: Trump repeatedly criticized Netanyahu during two interviews for my book, “Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East.” The final straw for Trump was when Netanyahu congratulated President-elect Biden for his election victory while Trump was still disputing the result.
>“The first person that congratulated [Biden] was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with. … Bibi could have stayed quiet,” Trump is quoted by Ravid as saying. “He has made a terrible mistake.”
It's not that Voting for Biden is in any way related to being against Assange (It's my understanding that Wikileaks is well liked within that community), but I've learned to to speculate on what Americans might do.
I've taken to just expecting the worst possible outcome from any decision.
The judge will set firm boundaries for what the jury can and cannot consider in their deliberations and while the jury is actually free to use any criteria they want, it will be very heavily implied that they cannot. The court will do everything in their power to make the jury believe they must convict based on the evidence presented and the rule of law.
Similarly the court will put significant limitations on what can and cannot be presented as evidence. US's commission of war crimes is (arguably) irrelevant as regards the crime in question, so I won't be surprised to see that bringing it up will not be permitted.
This is all fairly standard US court stuff.
Yes, that means juries are usually composed of uninformed idiots. Lawyers mostly like it that way.
Neither. This is the Espionage Act, so he's going to the spy court. Those doors will be closed and the jury will consist of people who work for the government. The court case will be over way way faster than you might expect.
No, he isn’t going to a FISA court, those don’t try criminal cases…
Never said he was. He's going to the spy court in virginia. It's obviously not something you list on wikipedia.
FISA is too monitored. The court he'll be going to always sides with the government.
Assange is going to the same place Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, Paul Manafort, various terrorists.
I wonder if Assange will ever see if he is guilty or not. Epstein treatment incoming. Though I do believe he will be treated properly, no enhanced torture or anything.
Manafort and Hale weren't tried in any sort of special court, and it's definitely on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_f.... Manafort proceedings were public; reporters live-tweeted it. Hale pled guilty pre-trial.
I'm hopeful that in a trial he'll be able to mount an effective defense and that in the end we'll get a wonderful victory for free speech. I'm looking forward to being able to donate to his legal defense fund; I see that there are some gofundme things out there, but I worry they might be scams so I'm waiting until I see something more official to contribute.
Given his poor physical and mental health, however, that may not be in the cards; he may end up not making it to trial or compelled to accept a plea bargain for a lesser charge in order to put the matter to rest.
Recently James Okeefe was raided by the FBI. The reason was that he was given Ashley Biden's Diary (President Biden's adult daughter), and published things in it. He offered to return the diary to Ashley's Lawyers, but that would have authenticated it. The FBI raided him, which I suppose they would not do for a fictional diary. But I think its fairly obvious journalists should be able to publish leaked information. Not so obvious who the FBI works for.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/us/politics/james-okeefe-...
https://www.change.org/p/free-julian-assange-before-it-s-too...
Signed by 666,000 people.
I even donated 10 bucks or so back in the day to advance this petition.
Did UK court take this public opinion into consideration when when ruling the verdict?
I'm pissed as hell. What are the realistic options for ordinary people like me to stop Julian's torture?
Yahoo News Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff September 26, 2021, 10:00 AM·39 min read In this article:
In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation.
Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request“sketches”or“options”for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred at the highest levels”of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”
[0] https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london...
I don't expect Assange to get murdered in the US, but I swear, if he does, all the people here who are talking about how the US would never do that and how shocking it would be if they did, these same people would be rushing to rationalize it away and say it's perfectly normal and Assange was a security threat and countries do what need to perserve national security or whatever.
"The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country." — Winston S. Churchill
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1910/jul/...
USA the country with the most jailed in the world, even China with 4x more population
It is baffling how they keep lecturing the world
I'm not going to ban you right now, because you've also posted good comments in the past—but if you do anything like this again, we will have to. If you want to continue to be part of the community here, you're welcome, but we need you to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended. That means thoughtful, substantive conversation—no more ideological flamebait and certainly no more vandalism like you've been doing lately.
---
original comment:
Please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN, regardless of which country, and regardless of how right you are (or feel you are) about the underlying issues. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The thing is they did this so systematically, Jacob Applebaum also got hit with rape allegations and that took out a very vocal person in the OPSEC/INFOSEC community at TOR who openly engaged in the various communities that were most afflicted by Imperialism and needed this tech the most in the developed World.
I don't know Jacob, and never met him in person the closest being with him on a few chatrooms I joined late around one of the CCC conferences; it was very telling that after Julian's rape charges were dropped Jacob (a very well known cypherpunk within Julian's circle) had his fall from grace at the height of the me-too craze and this happened when Laura's documentary came out on Julian Assange after Edward Snowden's had come out earlier in 2014.
The cynic in me said this looked like typical Media Blackout but with Nation-State repercussions. The State of the Onion was always covered in so many media outlets, and Jacob's candor and open hostility towards tyrants was partly the reason for that. I still remember the face of all the suits when he went to Egypt after the Arab Spring and told off the Telecoms for being aligned with the Mubarack regime until the last days, all while trying to play up the idea of Egyptian solidarity post-collapse.
I doubt this will ever entirely deter whistleblowing and freedom fighting entirely, it's never been a large segment of the population, either. But those who do so have an immense impact is often felt all over the World: Steven Donziger after being jailed, and now released on house arrest, seems undeterred from continuing what he started [0]:
> Donziger, who had already spent over two years under house arrest before his prison sentence, vowed to continue fighting for his freedom and to hold Chevron accountable for its crimes.
People forget that prior to Wikileaks, and the Cypherpunk mailing list, Julian was the son of a politically active, anti-nuclear mother and that he had hacked into several departments of the DoD, supposedly to find more intel on Nuclear sites. He pleaded guilty in 1994 and got a fine and it only made him more determined than he was before. He was a known target by the intelligence agencies for some time.
Having been in the CCC (I miss these so much as they were the best part of this time of year for me) and Bitcoin community for over 10 years Julian was always around; Julian thanking the US for making Wikileaks millions (from donation appreciation in 2010 onward) after denying Wikileaks Visa and MC payment processing and forcing them to use Bitcoin was the highlight of that year for me.
It has been hard to see what has happened to him since he was forced to stay in the Ecuadorian embassy, it was clear his mental health was degrading and the once flamboyant and silver-tongued activist was slowly being destroyed from within.
I'm not sure how much of him is left anymore, and I even spoke to a friend about this over the summer during the hearings, that the guy in prison is likely no longer the same person who ran wikileaks. He seems like a shell of his former self that I'm afraid to say seems in poor physical and mental after all he has gone through--it's why I don't be grudge Jacob from simply fading into oblivion, it's simply self-perseverance. I say this with a hjeavy heart: I doubt he would even make it to trail at this rate.
A part of me always wondered if this was always going to be Julian's fate, hoping it never would of course, but when you're this prominent and this big a threat to the intelligence agencies of the only super power left in the World known to commit crimes against Humanity you have to believe you're probably on borrowed time the moment they know who you are.
Which to me is why projects like anon-based whistle blowing, an early Bitcoin project that never gained much traction and eventually abandoned, was always fundamental in order to avoid situations like these while still enuring a viable option for those who want to release info to the public. I fear a World in which whistle blowing doesn't take place, and I don't mean the kind like Frances Haugen who is looking at an immense payday for stating the obvious on a platform that is becoming less relevant by the day and have even re-branded entirely, but those like: Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, Bill Binney etc...
May those who do have the courage to come forward have unwavering souls, because the World is a darker place without them.
0: https://www.democracynow.org/2021/12/10/headlines/environmen...
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-r...
And the right thing to do is to denounce evil as it comes. Journalism is a requirement for democracy.
USA the country with the most jailed in the world
It is baffling how they keep lecturing the world
Reality Winner will be released from prison soon. Chelsea Manning, who leaked the info to him, the actual whistleblower who broke the laws, is a free woman. (Could you imagine if Chelsea tried to transition to a woman in Russia or China or other nations that are coming up in this thread in comparison? Just goes to show how fundamentally different these societies are, that she could transition to a woman while incarcerated!)
If Assange hadn't played his games avoiding the court for the better part of a decade, the dude would probably already have done his time and be free.
Although it's entertaining to read the astronomically terrible takes in this thread, I did hope to see a little more intelligence in this community.
Also, Chelsea could transition to a woman without prison too. The fact that they ended/will end in prison while people who actually committed crimes that these two (and Snowden) exposed speaks volumes about how fundamentally different USA is.
What "games" would YOU play to get out of being extradited to a foreign country for crimes of publishing factual information? Your consolation is that it's only a decade or so of his life in a cage unjustly, no big deal?
You think it is the definition of intelligence to submit to that?
The crime he is charged with has nothing to do with publication of anything, it's a charge stemming from his help attempting to crack a password hash of military computer accounts to help gain unauthorized access to military systems.
Are foreigners allowed to hack military networks in your country?
> You think it is the definition of intelligence to submit to that?
Considering that you're giving me an emotional tale of "CRIME OF PUBLISHING" which is completely contrary to the facts, I would say that the definition of intelligence at the very least includes setting your emotions aside and learning the basic information of a situation before coming to a conclusion
Since the answer to both of these questions is no, what does it have to do with Assange's situation?
I do hope the US files charges against Israeli hackers who have targeted American organizations though. No country should get a free pass.
Yes, it happens all day every day. Assange didn't even "hack" anything, he allegedly helped educate Manning, no different than a text file or a 2600 article. Manning committed the crime, she was the one bound by US laws, not Assange. We could hand over every journo who has aided classified foreign information being published in US media, it's the same thing.
The crime of publishing is the truth, not an emotional tale, regardless of the official charges, unless your definition of intelligence is believing the charging documents of the American government as truth.
He later asks for the status on the hash.
Do reporters usually help people break the law?
Truthfully that question is hard to answer, you must be specific - do you mean reporters helping people jaywalk? Source the law that this Australian citizen ran afoul of. Greenwald provided protection and services to Snowden where the case for espionage is much stronger, we do not consider him a criminal however.
https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london...
Assange showed America necessary truth, and even as you admit this you argue Americans would be better left ignorant, digesting whatever shit the billionaire class decide to feed them. That's not just short sighted, my friend, it's fucking evil. That's not hyperbole - that's evil by about every definition ever invented.
translation : killed a lot of innocent people. Men, Women and Children.
I am emotional about this, and rightly so.
Why do you think everybody on the world has to work in the interests of the United States? He is not a US citizen and he did not operate on US soil.