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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

> “You’ve now got China using the Assange case as a sort of moral equivalence argument. So the message [of the Australian delegation] is going to be: this is very dangerous for journalists around the world and a race to the bottom that’s going on.”

That’s such an incredibly weak argument. Russia and China engage in whataboutism all the time. Why is this the case to listen to them?

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Because they have a point. People justify the actions of the US constantly with the argument that they are a 'force for freedom and democracy in a world of tyranny', or something to that effect. Just last week I had a discussion on HN with people who were rooting for the US to be the first to develop autonomous AI killer drone swarms, because clearly the US of all nations could be trusted to use such technology without devolving into a police state like China or Russia would. I'd love to share their optimism, but such arguments and sentiments are meaningless if the US is just going to behave like Russia and China anyways.

And I think the more valid concern there anyways is the 'race to the bottom' part, not necessarily the 'moral equivalence' part

Because you lose the moral high ground and then have to pull out of Afghanistan with people hanging on the side of airplanes so you can say things like invading Ukraine is bad mkay.

Either hacking up journalists is ok or it isn't. HN has a really tough time with this one.

This perspective ignores the facts of the case. Freedom of the press never protected the unauthorized release of classified military secrets. That's completely different from being prosecuted simply for publishing articles critical of the CCP. We cannot give journalists blanket immunity to publish military secrets just because the CCP will try to equate it with their jailing of people who simply advocate for democracy.

> Freedom of the press never protected the unauthorized release of classified military secrets.

Yes, it did and does. If you agree not to divulge a military secret as a condition of gaining access to it (for example, as part of the terms of your employment with the government), then you can be prosecuted for reneging on your promise. But if you are a journalist who learns the info secondhand, you never agreed to anything and freedom of expression sanctions your actions.

What if you're a journalist who assists someone looking for help to access/exfiltrate documents they're not supposed to be handling or sharing externally? Or a journalist privately pushing people to commit crimes and assisting them in ways to share those documents with you? Doesn't that then make you a conspirator to a crime?

There's a big difference between someone uploading a collection of secret files to a website you run and actively communicating with someone trying to get them to commit crimes on your behalf, or knowingly helping others commit crimes.

I'm not arguing Assange did or did not do those things, I don't know. I'm just saying if he did those things, he did commit a crime separate from just publishing documents the government would prefer the public to not see (which according to New York Times Co. vs United States it is not a crime).

Hacking up a journalist who says some things a king doesn't like and charging someone with supposedly assisting in hacking classified networks and computer systems in a court of law to maybe eventually serve some prison time are two radically different things.

Hell, the person who actually did the hacking and extracting the classified documents only served 7 years of prison time. Are you seriously comparing butchering someone to serving 7 years of prison time after an investigation and public trial?

I don't understand how you seem to have a really tough time with that.

Manning and Collateral Murder was only mildly embarrassing. So we blow up a few reporters and ambulances. Zzzz

A better comparison would be the Snowden treatment. The grounding of Evo Morales' plane suggests we'll violate national sovereignty if you really embarrass the intel community.

Would the intel community like to wire up Assanges reproductive organs to a high voltage source? Idk, they've done it to others for much less. But that's the price of freedom right

Asking a few friendly countries to deny airspace to a flight is still pretty radically different from hacking up a reporter because they said something the Prince didn't like.

Try again.

Maybe if the Western governments stopped any activities which could be pointed to during the 'whatabout' game then China and Russia would stop... and many people in the Western world would be very happy too.

News story today about Germany refusing to extradite a criminal (alleged) to the UK because the conditions in UK prisons are so bad due to governmental neglect. Kind of hard for the UK to talk about human rights in other countries when it can't even run a prison.

The point of the whatabout tactic is that there’s always something to critique. You can never have a perfect society.

The story about Germany is very different which is they are expressing a concrete concern about a specific situation, not trying to equate one situation to other unrelated situations. There’s also the fact that the UK and Germany are largely allies with similar principles of government and human rights. And of course UK can talk about human rights if it’s explaining how it’s improving it’s prisons or talking about human rights unrelated to prisons.

None of this is true for Russia and China which equate trying to prosecute potentially illegal behavior on the part of Assange (potentially as a Russian asset) to jailing people who expose embarrassing secrets for members of the government or report information not favorable to the government’s perspective. The closest the US comes to that in recent memory that I can think of is what happened with Valarie Plame and her husband (although neither was a journalist nor did they go to jail).

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