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For the crime of reporting information that embarrassed the US government.
sadly Assange was not a "funny man" and totally lacked the gift of humor. So the only tool he had was his rightousness coupled with his will to embarrass.
Sadly for him he is a self obsessed and attention seeking cretin. Would he have had any charisma or the gift of humor the outrage of what was done against him would be a lot bigger. One can only dream of the damage that could have been done against these criminals in the US and Britain (and the EU) by somebody who knows how to package these things into better. The raggedy Wikileaks outlet was never going to be capable of this. A shame because anyone who believes in civil rights all over the world deserves better.
It's also a national pastime to crap on the government. Are you not aware that thousands of reporters and millions of people embarrass the US government every day?
The release of "Collateral Murder" damaged public opinion of the US invasion of Iraq and US foreign policy in general. If journalists embarrass the US government by telling them their nose looks funny, Assange embarrassed them by pulling their pants down at the half time show at the Superbowl.
Embarrassing leaks have happened many times (pentagon papers*, watergate, Iran–Contra affair among others) and the leakers didn't go to jail
Even worse his ego took over and wikileaks became the julian assange show; he reminded me of every cult leader I've ever seen. He's now experiencing FAFO for his arrogance.
*Though the gov't tried to charge Ellsberg with stealing/releasing classified data, the fact that he was highly selective is what saved him from jail time.
I care for their safety as much as they care for my privacy.
Could also be the guy behind having US troops guard the opium fields of pedophiles during a opioid epidemic
Leaking government misdeeds is whistle-blowing and has legal and moral justifications (and when wikileaks first arrived on the scene I was 100% supportive of it). Leaking troves of generic government data that's unrelated to any misdeeds, is a crime. Assange, for a host of reasons, decided to do the latter and is now in a FAFO situation.
Nobody went to jail. The only people who go to jail for government malfeasance are the people who expose it (Manning, Snowden). That is nonsense, We can all just ignore the "rule of law" if that's how its going to be.
let me fix it:
For reporting on a bunch of war criminals sitting in a shipping container in Nevada drone striking brown combatants.
also let's not forget that what we see here is propaganda at its best. Anyone in InfoSec in the West who has in 2012 been outraged by what Snowden revealed, and by what Wikileaks helped publish, has meanwhile condemned the whistleblowers and sided with the terrorists in Washington.
Americans are the most propagandized[1][2] people on the planet, and compared to Russians living under Putin, or Chinese under Xi, ... they're totally oblivious to it.
As Jacques Ellul says[3], well made propaganda is invisible to the person who are the target of it (while usually visible to everyone else).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act
[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
At the very least, I see him now as a warning to others that powerful state actors are happy to use free-information advocates as pawns in their agenda to destabilize their opponents.
I think the guy is getting fucked over in this unfairly, but let's not pretend he has released information to a reasonable standard.
He then got a team of journalists together to sift through the documents to make sure things were properly disclosed. Some Guardian journalists then published the encryption keys in a book.
Snowden's mistake was revealing himself. He should've done what the Panama Papers leaker did.
After the keys had already leaked, there was a disagreement whether Wikileaks should continue their plan of slowly publishing things as they went through them or dump everything since it was already in the public.
But before "the Journalists" leaked the keys, Assange was in charge of a massive undertaking to sort through the documents for responsible disclosure.
US spies that knew the risks of their profession.
What about their sources?
Multiple human rights organizations criticized the underacted release of information:
https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_why_america_is_facing_off...
See also the "Invade The Hague Act": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Prot...
When I served in Afghanistan the locals would tip us off about ambushes or IEDs. Should those people be killed for warning us and potentially saving my life?
Stated otherwise, if US Gov could be relied on to honor it's ethical obligations to taxpayers and release the entirety of info that it ought, I argue that fewer unqualified people would feel responsibility to take that upon themselves.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak#Civili...
> "Some of the new cables have reportedly not been redacted and show the names of informants in various countries, including Israel, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan," it said in a statement. "While it has not been demonstrated that lives have so far been put in danger by these revelations, the repercussions they could have for informants, such as dismissal, physical attacks and other reprisals, cannot be neglected."
* https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/sep/02/wikileaks-publ...
> The letter from five human-rights groups sparked a tense exchange in which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange issued a tart challenge for the organizations to help with the massive task of removing names from thousands of documents, according to several of the organizations that signed the letter. The exchange shows how WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange risk being isolated from some of their most natural allies in the wake of the documents' publication.
> The human-rights groups involved are Amnesty International; Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or CIVIC; Open Society Institute, or OSI, the charitable organization funded by George Soros ; Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; and the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, or ICG.
* https://archive.is/XPuki / https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/SB1000142405274870342860457...
> “We are deeply concerned that WikiLeaks decided to make public the names of diplomatic sources who may face reprisals by oppressive governments,” said Elisa Massimino, president of Human Rights First, an independent nonprofit organization.
* https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-xpm-2011-aug-30-la-fg-wiki...
Whether reprisals then occurred I do not know.
> "We fear the names could create new targets", Nader Nadery, the president of the AIHRC, told the French news agency AFP.
> The WikiLeaks editor, Julian Assange, replied to the letter by asking the groups concerned to help WikiLeaks redact the names. He also threatened to expose Amnesty if it refused to provide staff to help with the task, according to the Wall Street Journal.
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/10/afghanistan-wa...
Assange "threatened to expose Amnesty" International?
To me it seems that Assange was not pursuing some noble cause, but was on some kind of vendetta, given all the (collateral?) damage he was causing to others.
(Generally I knew of him, given he often made headlines, but have never really dug into the details.)
He’s just another biased media source with an agenda.
Which? Collateral Murder didn't depict war crimes.
The treatment of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison is a war crime. The raping of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi is a war crime. The subsequent killing of her and her family is a war crime. The Haditha massacre is a war crime. And these are just _some_ of the most well-known ones.
Also, Collateral Murder is not any less gruesome, just because it isn't "terrible enough to be a war crime". That is absurd and dangerous thinking. In the very least, the actions shown, especially the attack on the van, can, without a doubt, be classified as murder. Murder is a crime, and the people who commit crimes should be held accountable for them.