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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

Not really. Tweeting your opinion is legal, leaking state secrets not so.

What the GP comment is saying is 100% true. Julian Assange is being persecuted because he published damning Truths about the people in power.

He was lauded as a hero when he published damning Truths about things like the War in Iraq, this did not hurt the people in power, but when he started publishing Truths about Hillary Clinton, that's when he started hurting the people in power.

He was persecuted well before Hillary. The only interesting thing the whole Hillary situation did was rearrange some of his supporters and detractors

Not really. Leaking state secrets isn't a crime under US federal law for people who have no security clearance. Julian Assange is charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/pr/wikileaks-founder-charg...

Yeah, I technically can't leak state secrets because I'm not privy to them. So if I have them, they're already leaked. I would be post-crime.

Strange, the US newspapers that wrote articles based on WikiLeaks leaks won prices.

And WikiLeaks isn't the leaker but the publisher of that leaks.

That's pretty arguable.

Assange is in chat logs with Manning who then passed Assange a password hash and with Assange saying he will attempt to get it cracked. The password would have given Manning admin privileges on SIPRNet, allowing her to pull more files to leak and better cover her tracks.

That's being pretty directly involved in leaks imo.

src: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/5816949/Julian-Assang...

Meanwhile Trump had top secret documents at his house while a private citizen that he wasn’t supposed to have there even while President.

What do you think his punishment will be? A decade in jail? Having to flee to another country and hide in an embassy to escape extradition and torture? No? Why not?

Upsetting people in power is a “crime” in every country, with the corollary that the reverse is not true: people in power can do whatever they want to the weak without fear of consequence.

If you think otherwise, come back in a few months and comment below about how many years in jail Trump got for actually doing something much worse than what Julian failed to do.

That claim is pretty arguable itself.

"Forensic expert questions US claims that Julian Assange conspired to crack military password"

"Manning already had legitimate access to all of the databases from which she downloaded data,” he said. “Logging into another user account would not have provided her with more access than she already possessed"

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252489645/Forensic-exper...

So if I leaked Saudi state secrets, should I be extradited to Saudi Arabia? Or is that only if I leaked the secrets of a state you consider a "good guy" state?

Yep, and actually I'm ok with that. We don't have to be blind to the fact that Saudi Arabia locked a bunch of people in a hotel until they agreed to give money and control to a dictator. We don't have to forget that they killed a journalist in one of their embassies for the crime of being one of their critics.

And it's not like Saudi Arabia, China, or certainly Russia would be very fast to extradite someone to the US anyway so this is just sort of the way it works.

Ah, so it is just how things work. Strange argument on context of womens liberation in my opinion.

Well the person I was replying to seemed to be implying that we can't be mad at people who hurt the US unless we'd also be mad if they hurt say Russia or Saudi Arabia, but that's just extreme rule brain taking over. We can totally say Saudi is bad and therefore leaking their secrets is ok and, in fact, that's how it's always worked. Rules don't have to be blind to values and probably shouldn't be

> Or is that only if I leaked the secrets of a state you consider a "good guy" state?

Of course. There’s a difference between good and evil, as much as you’re trying to pretend otherwise.

Have you considered that after seeing how the US handled Manning, handled Assange, handled Snowden, handled Ellsberg, handled Martin Luther King Jr, handled the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, Guantanamo Bay, and the countless other shit just in the last half century, I might have a hard time putting them squarely into the "good guys" bracket?

That isn't to relativize in any way what others are doing - which is often even worse, no argument there - but I'm not grading on a scale where you get a passing grade at 40% just because China and Putin - and others - are even worse. Being the lesser evil doesn't make you "good".

Also these countries are not monoliths. Some actions may be good and some evil. "good and evil" is for children's fairy tails and Star Wars. International politics is sociopathic game theory.

I'm not sure the criteria for being good is being perfect and "never making a mistake".

Are you talking about Assange? He is not being charged with leaking state secrets, because it's not against the law if you didn't steal them firsthand, especially for non-citizens outside of the country.

If state secrets contain incriminating contents and are of interest to the public, leaking them is ethically mandatory. Very likely legal as well in any free country.

Assange is Australian

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