Coming from a third world country, whenever I see someone contrasting human rights abuses of US and China, I instantly realize the person was born and bred in the west, and does not have a meaningful realization of the level of depravity that can exist. Not saying US doesn't have his problems, it has plenty. But comparing to China is, at risk of being flippant, laughable.
Yep. Response to protests in the US is greeted with rubber bullets, lost eyesight, and maybe broken bones.
Response to protests in China leads to people being crushed into literal chutney, and deaths in the 10s of thousands. That was the nature of deaths in tiananmen square, the photos of which often do not get shown in western media.[1]
On the other hand people become complacent when they achieve relative wealthiness. Economic success is also the basis of how the Chinese regime stays in power.
The Tianmen Square protests are well known in the west (tank man is a very iconic picture known by basically everyone) contrary to your claim and if the sources on wikipedia are to be believed did not result in 10s of thousands of deaths (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...).
In general I think it is a constant struggle to keep society free from tyranny, and you should not torpedo that with comparisons with places that have it worse.
Speaking of the complacent wealthy, China disappeared Jack Ma two months ago for getting too comfortable and mildly criticizing the regime. He's China's Jeff Bezos, and he just went away with a poof.
>they are usually killed by right wing extremists who are unofficially sanctioned by government and often not prosecuted.
Big citation needed here. You'd be hard pressed to find any deaths here that weren't obvious, often video-documented cases of self-defense. Even then, the state has zealously prosecuted them, in Jake Gardner's case overriding the local prosecutor's determination that no crime had been committed and leading Gardner to suicide. Most ridiculous of them all, Kyle Rittenhouse is facing murder charges when every single one of his so-called victims is on video assaulting him.
I read it as a commentary on where the US could hypothetically end up if one just lets morals to erode slowly without bounds.
Obviously comparing in terms of absolute metrics is not going to be very similar since US and China are very different countries, but at the same time, if the hypothetical came to pass, it wouldn't be the first time in history that a "modern", "powerful" country fell into ruin.
Is it possible you also view the US with a certain rosey bias? Check out any of a bunch of major metrics, like murder, infant mortality, homelessness, healthcare, police brutality, and it must be said Covid mortality. Visit the south side of Chicago. If all you can say is "at least it is better than China, a third world country," then you aren't saying much, and in plenty of cases it actually isn't true.
> Coming from a third world country, whenever I see someone contrasting human rights abuses of US and China, I instantly realize the person was born and bred in the west, and does not have a meaningful realization of the level of depravity that can exist.
The purpose of these comparisons is to identify the similarity to the behavior of a country known to be worse. "China is worse." Yes, that's the point. We don't want to be like them, so we have to stop being like them.
Except the US is not. That's the point s/he was trying to make. Exaggeration only pushes the discussion to the most radical corners and ignores nuance.
They're trying to prosecute someone for the exact thing we need journalists to do in a free society. That's what China does, it's wrong, and we shouldn't be doing it.
You don't get to say we're not doing it until we're not doing it.
Of course it's not. But in some ways it is. China is totalitarian which the US isn't, and the US doesn't execute as many people, but still the US locks up a larger percentage of its population than China.
The US is better than China, but that's a low bar, and in a few areas it's only barely clearing that bar.
In other areas it's a lot better of course. Censorship is the big one. Also, the way China has oppressed some minorities (Uyghurs) hasn't happened in the US in decades (black people, native Americans). And the oppression did happen in a different way. But "different" isn't always better.
Actually I think the posters who make that false equivalence are often of Chinese sympathy. Whether they know they are doing false equivalence is a matter of debate.
I've heard people compare the imprisonment, re-education, forced labor, and organ harvesting of Uigher minorities in China today to the US internment of japanese in the 1940s.
Needless to say, both are bad, but if you need to reach back 75+ years in US history to find a comparable example, then the difference between the level of civil rights abuse in the two countries should be crystal clear.
It's obvious on the surface that the US still has many problems, but government sanctioned organ harvesting isn't one of them.
Whenever I see someone blindly assume everything is worse in China which just reached its goal of eliminated poverty for its massive population, I realize that person is a Trumpster
Yes I have. Have you? Eliminate poverty is not making everyone billionaires. Its getting rid of homelessness like tent farms in California. People are getting modern condos.
Btw it looks like yours is supporting Trump propaganda. Wow pot calls kettle black.
Coming from the US, it astounds me how uninformed people from third world countries are about the US and its staggering record of human rights abuses. I do understand that Hollywood and such are one hell of a marketing dept, but you are aware that the US has more Black people in cages than China has Uighurs, yes? I mean, when we're talking about how many lives each is destroying on a daily basis, I think they look pretty comparable.
Nothing ever happens in the USA without internal criticism. It is a cacophony of political discourse. Comparing us to China, "literally", is so off base that it makes your post look in bad faith.
Not trying to argue in bad faith, but why is it all that different if the outcome of legal avenues is effectively the same? It's not like joe schmoe tweeting about their outrage will change how the law is interpreted or what constitutes legal precedent.
One could argue that a cacophony of opinions spanning the entire spectrum of possibilities isn't necessarily much better than having no freedom of press, if the end result is people literally believing deceptive propaganda, as opposed to merely being afraid of voicing informed, dissenting opinions.
IMHO, patriotism should be about defending the values of a country and calling out BS when it's appropriate, instead of merely defending the country's name without concern for the substance of the criticism.
if the outcome of legal avenues is effectively the same?
They’re not even remotely the same. The U.S. has serious problems with racism, mass incarceration, police brutality, unaffordable health care, etc.
But that isn’t even close to the problems China has with organ harvesting, concentration camps in Xinjiang, mass corruption, food fraud, political prisoners etc.
The lies and propaganda are nothing new. The name of the game has always been to build the constituency for your issue by hook or crook. Absolute truth was never a requirement, only majority opinion. And Joe Schmoe's tweets are absolutely a part of the power structure of the country. They are the drops of water that form the wave. I have worked on policy and advocacy in Washington and seen it all in motion. Individuals, groups, states, companies, professions and each of their dollars in a mad scramble. In all its chaos, I believe our system continues to work as intended.
I would much rather be called a pragmatist than a patriot.
Again, let me preface that I'm playing devil's advocate, but one could argue that constituency is also the name of the game in China: it may sound crazy to us over this side of the pond, but a lot of mainland chinese people actually support the CCP.
Both there and here, there's political work being done, each with their own ideas of what is best for their people. We can argue that their great firewall effort is oppressive for example, but on the other hand, they are probably more than happy the US has outsourced manufacturing to China to such an extensive degree. Both countries ostensibly "work as intended". I guess the end result of all that work still remains to be seen.
Another point that I think is worth pondering about is whether majority opinion is necessarily correct. The US response to covid, for example, has been all over the place, with places like San Francisco, CA being more strict and successful, to places like Minot, ND being hit really hard.
Like you, I'm also all for pragmatism, but I think things like the early perception of the epidemic in the west shows that sometimes the right course of action might sometimes fly in the face of public opinion.
We know there is "freedom of speech" in the US and that there is no such thing in China. But with Assange, the US "freedom of speech" is diverging to the China's "no freedom of speech". Maybe the "internal criticism" you mentioned will follow soon...
Suggesting that the USA will soon adopt China's approach to censorship of public discourse is basically preposterous. Our public discourse is not some extravagance that our government allows us. It is the core of our system and has been from the moment of the country's founding in reaction to hereditary monarchy. The government's right to rule flows out of this conversation. If the conversation stops, the country will cease to be.
So while I think you are quite wrong about the current risk, we are in complete agreement that freedom of speech should be vigilantly protected.
There is a large body of philosophical work over the past 2 decades that argues that no rules is precisely the marker of an iron-clad ideological structure wherein the citizenry self-discipline so that the order functions with total freedom of choice between given options. Meanwhile, we never get any access to the frame or the economic and political decisions (QE, Current War with China and Russia through Sanctions). China, on the other hand, the argument goes, requires strict rules because the people there know that they live in a strict ideological structure and fight against it constantly. While we in the west are so certain we are free because we can choose between two candidates, zillions of types of products and popping off polemically on all our platforms.
We are already on our way to full blown censorship. Cancel culture et al is effectively the beginning of the same outcome. Censorship starts with chilling effects
>We are already on our way to full blown censorship. Cancel culture et al is effectively the beginning of the same outcome. Censorship starts with chilling effects
I suggest checking the US history, both somewhat recent and not recent at all. Cancel culture is just the continuation of the old tradition of "naming and shaming", it isn't something new.
First there was "tarring and feathering", then there were the witch hunts in MA, then, more recently, there was the red scare. Current "cancel culture" is pretty much just a much lighter version of that, and we are definitely not moving any closer to "full blown censorship". In fact, I think that the modern "cancel culture" (despite me being very much not a fan of it) cannot even hold a handle to the red scare investigations of just 60-70 years ago
There's a southpark episode about this specific scenario. The USA does a ton of awful shit, but as long as there is an outraged group, it's fine in the eyes of the world. They keep doing it though.
Fully accepting this, can you give me one example in the past 20 years that this cacophony of political discourse led to changes in political economy in the Western World for those who have no inherited wealth?
Oh yes, that's such a easy one that I'll give you a few.
BLM: People at the bottom of our society are pooling their political power and changing the conversation about policing, police budgets, racism and racial divide.
Me too: Everyday women are being heard and taking down men of wealth and power.
Gay rights: a small minority has won equality in the eyes of the law and public opinion.
Occupy: Raised class consciousness and set the stage for political movements such as Trump, Bernie, and the Tea Party.
Ok. I am going to push back on this: So, you believe that african-americans, working class women, LGBT+ and homelessness has improved over the past 20 years? I know that culturally all of these things have changed. There is no socially acceptable forum to be sexist, homophobic, racist (8ken, redpillsubreddits aside). But - has any actual change happened for anyone outside the 20% of us in the, from Peter Sloterdijk's 'spherology, cupoloa of privilege? Or are we imagining an outside of improvement from inside our safety? Thinking of the work of Moten/Harney/Agamben here and destituent power. How do we, in here, know these things work? Or do these stories circulate to buy our peace at night? Like buying products from black-owned stores or RT Rose McGowan or put up rainbow flags.
I am a gay man. I don't believe things have changed for the better in the past 20 years. I know so. I now enjoy wide social acceptance, legal protection, and rights I absolutely did not have before. This has given me more opportunities in life and I can live my life with more happiness and less fear. I am not alone in this experience. Every LGBT+ person in the country over the age of 30 has lived it.
Based on your post, you must be very isolated from society if you think the improvements minorities have won are just fake news, telling you what what you want to hear.
Agreed. I would add to this, after reading through the comments, that there is a naive idea of how a civilization or order works. The question is not whether or not we are worse in the west than China, but why we need the supplement of China to maintain the coherence of our order. If we are in fact reacting to timing and criticism to China, how come, as superpower, the US even compares itself in any way? In what ways do we create China/Russia/X as enemy to crisis manage the collapse in the belief of the goodness in the West? The current line of thought across all platforms about China ask questions that guarantee no answers save for reactions and war.
I think this is different. China just sends their people to other countries to abduct people whose speech they don't agree with (e.g. how they got that Swedish citizen in Thailand). The USA actually has to go through a legal process.
Journalists are arrested in China on legal grounds as well. Such laws are arguable/unjust from a typically western perspective, but are formally legal nonetheless.
The question is therefore not legality in itself, but whether the (US) laws themselves are sensible and/or egalitarian. It's implied by the OP that they aren't (and I personally agree).
Journalists are arrested in China purely because they criticize the government. Can you provide a case in China where a journalist stole troves of information and published it?
They are arrested in China because certain journalistic actions are illegal under Chinese law, under the (given) justification (stated or unstated) that it destabilizes civil society. For example, in the case of HK, journalists are prosecuted under Article 38 of the National Security law. That's the whole point of GP's post - legality by itself has no prima facie moral weight, an observation that applies also to whatever US laws the fed gov. is charging Assange of violating.
Here's the wording of the HK-specific law:
"The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organisations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organisations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organisations or bodies."
To further clarify, holding a clearance is basically an NDA a person signs with the government. If you don't sign the NDA, it's ok for you to know the information. The question is, what crimes were committed to give you that knowledge? And how complicit were you in aiding those crimes? For example, hearing a classified fact that was inadvertently leaked in a briefing is different than paying people to break their NDA and give you secrets.
Thanks (and to parent comment); I did not know this is how it worked.
So then this appears to be the difference between the Manning/Assange and Snowden/Greenwald cases: both Manning and Snowden held security clearances and violated them by sharing with Assange and Greenwald. But while Assange may have solicited and/or assisted Manning's crime, Greenwald just passively received the materials from Snowden's crime. So Greenwald is innocent and Assange is prosecuted.
Controversially, courts have upheld that citizens can sign away their right to a trial by jury; it's called binding arbitration.
Also normal (non-government) NDAs let you sign away your right not to be punished for speaking about certain matters. I don't like it, but it's pretty well established.
Point is that—legally speaking—rights aren't actually inalienable.
If constitutional rights can be signed away with the stroke of a pen since they are alienable... then a lot of absurdities become possible, such as someone selling themselves into slavery and so on.
Do you know the prominent cases of the examples you mentioned?
> citizens can sign away their right to a trial by jury; it's called binding arbitration
You can contract with another private entity to resolve disputes via arbitration, yes, but not with the state. The closest thing might be a plea agreement, but that happens after an indictment. You still have the right to a trial, but you may forego it if you choose.
I suppose if you're saying that a security clearance is like an NDA with the state, it's a reasonable comparison in function, but the means of prosecution is entirely different. It's like saying that everyone could be subject to UCMJ because of conscription.
Isn't that the same than a doctor signing away his right to divulgate his parent information (or a lawyer), or even more mundane, for a tech guy to publish the source code of his company ? (it's an actual question)
Is it important for the public to know the exact coordinates of troop movement in Syria? No, but the journalist can say there are troops operating in eastern Syria. A journalist without many scruples like Assange would publish the coordinates.
I think this changes from country to country. For instance, Gleen Greenwald published illegally obtained conversation in Brazil and had any investigation on how he obtained the data suspended by supreme court. Later was found out that his source was a politician that had interest in the leak, and she also claimed was doing "jornalism work" to avoid legal repercussions. As long you claim to be journalist you have carte blanche.
Assange is responsible for compromising US Diplomatic relations, placing diplomats and, along with Snowden, informants in actual real life danger, and breaking countless US and international laws. To compare the two is laughable. (aside: This single side of this issue is overrepresented here and in tech circles in general. Talk to an FBI agent or a diplomat sometime that was working on key issues to hear their takes to at least balance the perspective.)
This comes up every time Assange comes up. He’s not being prosecuted for being a journalist. The US has very strong protections for journalism that stand up to just about anywhere—-and honestly look great compared to things that have happened in the UK. Assange is charged with actively working to steal classified information.
There’s a huge difference between A) someone gets classified information through nefarious means and shares that with a journalist, and B) “journalist” actively works to steal said classified documents. This case is about “B” not “A” but yet we keep seeing people trying to make the argument that this is some sort of attack on journalism. That’s a gross misrepresentation of the basic facts in this case.
I don't suppose that this opens up the door to challenging other US extradition requests based on the appalling track record of human rights and standards of care in US prisons, in which rape, murder, and torture are not only common but widely culturally accepted as part of the standard punitive aspects of imprisonment?
How do european (or perhaps just the UK's) legal system(s) work in that regard?
I have a lot of hope that this is a first crack appearing in the western cultural monolith; at some point civilized countries will have to somewhat politically break from the US so long as the US continues its domestic institutional torture programs (american prisons and the tradition of extended solitary confinement) and human rights violations (capital punishment). With luck that means that MLAT will eventually start to be unenforceable.
>How do european (or perhaps just the UK's) legal system(s) work in that regard?
The general rule is that the laws by which other nations have to abide and the standards other nations have to meet don't apply when the USA is involved.
I seriously had to read the headline twice, to make sure I'd got it right, I was so stunned at the UK not kowtowing to the US, as a matter of course.
I, too, am surprised. Perhaps the US has given up on threatening his custodians to get their way, now that so much damage has already been done to Assange, both in the embassy and now in Belmarsh.
I still wonder what the CIA must have done to get those Swedish prosecutors to spin all of that bullshit for the original arrest warrant.
I'd also have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the phone calls were made to those in charge of European airspace when Morales' jet was forcibly grounded over Austria for no reason other than the US incorrectly suspected Snowden being aboard.
> I still wonder what the CIA must have done to get those Swedish prosecutors to spin all of that bullshit for the original arrest warrant.
What would it take to convince you this didn't actually happen? It still doesn't make legal sense - Obama's DOJ publicly declined to charge him given the evidence, and extradition from Sweden would still have required extradition from the UK since he would've been serving time in both countries.
Assange never got charged by the US administration he actually embarassed, successfully jumped bail, waited out the clock on the rape charges, and finally got his extradition denied. It seems to me he got everything he wanted out of this - he just wasn't careful what he wished for.
The charges the US attempted to extradite him for were based primarily on things he did or allegedly did or which came to light after the rape charges.
Ockham's razor also applies. If you want Assange charged in the US on 'espionage' or similar and you have a choice of notifying the Swedish authorities that he is wanted for serious crimes in the US or instead relying upon separate local allegations that are so vague the Swedish legal system has to work its way through an appeals process to even decide to whether to pursue the case or not whilst leaving him at liberty to leave the country, you're unlikely to choose the latter.
> A state wishing to prosecute a surrendered person for offences committed before his or her surrender, or extradite a surrendered person to a third state, must, subject to certain exception, obtain the permission of the executing judicial authority. Such a request is made in the same form as a European Arrest Warrant, and granted or refused using the same rules which determine whether surrender would be granted or refused.
> the fact that the US has now tried to extradite him proves that.
It proves they care now, under a wildly different (and totally clownshoes) DOJ, which if anything lends more credence to the theory they did not care back then or we would have seen them try back then.
> What would it take to convince you this didn't actually happen?
What it would take to convince me would be for Assange to not be literally fighting a US extradition order, right now.
What was always going to happen, is what is happening now.
If a person was one of the people who said things for years like "Well, actually, the US is not trying to extradite Assange", then they were completely and totally wrong, and should be embarrassed as to how they could have possible thought that.
What makes it impossible to believe the DOJ under one outgoing president declined to prosecute a case, and then a new DOJ under a new infamously press-hostile president took it up?
Extradition requests are not platonic and timeless, they are issued by specific people for specific reasons at specific times.
No, people don't get to retroactively make up new excuses as for why this doesn't count.
This is was what always was going to happen. The motivation for the US to extradite him was always clear. And exactly what people predicted was going to happen, did indeed happen.
And the people who predicted otherwise were wrong, and should be made fun of for how wrong that they were, and how misinformed they were to think anything else could have happened.
The Obama administration prosecuted Manning, and would have had an equal amount of reason to prosecute Assange, and the extradition request is exactly what happened at the end of the day.
The only possible situation for me to believe that they were not prospecting Assange would have been if Obama simply pardoned Assange, which did not happen.
> how misinformed they were to think anything else could have happened.
How exactly am I misinformed? What facts am I wrong on? What inconsistency is there if I believe that Obama's DOJ genuinely never intended to charge Assange with anything?
> The Obama administration prosecuted Manning, and would have had an equal amount of reason to prosecute Assange
No, because Manning and Assange did different things. A key claim in Assange's defense in this case is that Manning did all the illegal things!
> The only possible situation for me to believe that they were not prospecting Assange would have been if Obama simply pardoned Assange, which did not happen.
Obama repeatedly stated he would not pardon anyone not convicted of a crime (e.g. in the context of Snowden) and as far as I know held true to this for all 1927 of his pardons.[0] So why would he pardon Assange, who was not even accused of a crime?
> So why would he pardon Assange, who was not even accused of a crime?
What do you mean why? To prevent literally what is happening right now, and to make it impossible for any US government agency to ever prosecute either Assange or Snowden.
Thats why! Because he is subject to an extradition request. All of that could have been prevented, with a pardon.
This is Kafkaesque levels of reasoning here. Literally what was predicted was going to happen, did indeed happen.
And every justification for "Well, why would you pardon someone who is not being arrested", is literally proven wrong, because this is what ended up happening! The current state of Assange is the proof and the reason why everyone who was arguing against a pardon were wrong.
> Obama repeatedly stated he would not pardon anyone not convicted of a crime
Yes, because he wanted those people to be sent to jail. Because of the efforts that he was doing to get them sent to jail. Thats why. Obama could have stopped all this stuff from happening, but he didn't. Thats the evidence.
I suspect it's because Trump is so staggeringly unpopular outside the USA. American soft power has taken a massive hit with this presidency, and there's domestic political upside to being seen to publicly rebuke the Trump administration - and since he's leaving, there's no foreign policy downside.
While Trump definitely impaired US soft power, I doubt that's the reason a judge decided to rule this way.
You are essentially implying that "District Judge Vanessa Baraitser" is making a political calculation -- under pressure from who?
At her own discretion?
Do you have ANY evidence to suggest the judge is corrupt?
Because isn't that is exactly what you're implying, isn't it?
Given that this is the UK, with a fairly reputable court system, let's assume the judge made a ruling on the basis of the reasoning she gave, quote:
"Faced with the conditions of near total isolation without the protective factors which limited his risk at HMP Belmarsh, I am satisfied the procedures described by the US will not prevent Mr Assange from finding a way to commit suicide and for this reason I have decided extradition would be oppressive by reason of mental harm and I order his discharge."
Given that US prosecutors are part of the administration, I'm inclined to think that they may have political motivation here.
But why would british politicians get involved. Regardless of how they got involved it would be political suicide if they were caught doing so.
British politicians have very little to win by getting their hands dirty here. For them it would be preferable to tell the Americans that they can't interfere.
Seriously, UK politicians have a perfect excuse for not having to make a choice and take a political risk -- they are not allowed to!
Give a politician the option of passing a hot potato to someone else, and you can be sure they'll pass the potato :)
Why would there be no foreign policy downside? The mutual relationship does not "reset" after Trump leaves office. Most of the time, diplomats stay the same and even if they change, surely the new ones will remember such occurrences.
> The mutual relationship does not "reset" after Trump leaves office.
Well, it does and it doesn't.
After all, why should today's politicians feel they owe you a favour just because you helped their predecessors? George W Bush may have warm feelings about the UK after Blair helped him with the war in Iraq, but would you expect to cash that favour in with Obama, Trump or Biden?
Of course not - A new president comes in, they decide to impose new tariffs on imports from the UK, of course something that happened 17 years and two presidents ago doesn't give him much pause.
Obviously there are longstanding structures of cooperation like NATO and suchlike, which don't get reset. But an awful lot does.
Besides, Assange is old news now. America's message to other would-be whistleblowers has been delivered. If the UK releases him, no American politicians will have to face scrutiny or look weak over the decision. And British politicians won't face any domestic blowback, post Harry Dunn.
It would require a judgment from the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court to be able to use this to challenge any future extradition requests from the US.
This is because binding precedent is only set by the appellate courts and while this judgment is persuasive, other judges sitting in this court can ignore it since they're not bound to follow it.
Deciding whether under s91 of the Extradition Act, "the physical or mental condition of the person is such that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him", is a very fact-specific issue rather than a legal question though.
The appellate courts are generally there to resolve legal questions not factual ones—I'd question the Assange case, or other similar cases would raise a similar legal rather than factual question.
There has been a trend towards applying s91 cases for defendants with autism spectrum disorders: the courts didn't in Gary McKinnon's case, but the Home Secretary (Theresa May, before she became PM) justified her denial of the extradition order on that basis. In Lauri Love's case, the magistrates' court allowed the extradition order but it was overturned on appeal in the High Court on the basis of Love's not being able to cope in US custody with Asperger's syndrome. In the Assange case, the magistrates' court followed this established and rather persuasive precedent.
FYI this isn't the first time a similar extradition to the US has been denied by the UK. Lauri Love (allegedly affiliated with Anonymous) successfully fought against extradition in 2016.
Court originally ruled that extradition can happen, but the appeals court ruled differently, citing that extradition would be "oppressive by reason of his physical and mental condition".
As far as I'm aware the case never made it to the Supreme Court.
For clarity: European Convention (and Court) of Human Rights law, not EU.
There's post-Brexit significance since the UK continues to be a signatory to the ECHR even though they've now left the EU. Being an ECHR signatory is a requirement of being in the EU, not vice versa. (Countries like Turkey and Russia are also ECHR signatories.)
I mean, how much pressure do you think Trump can put on a British judge? Or the British political establishment, for that matter? The British judiciary is quite independent; for evidence see the various cases that the government lost over Brexit.
Pretty sure the UK reduced cooperation with the US after it refused to extradite Anne Sacoolas to face fair trial in the UK after accidentally killing Harry Dunn.
I was wondering how old he is, thinking that he might be spending the remaining years of his life dealing with this. So I looked it up and found out he is only a year older than me. I’m honestly surprised. Just looking at him I would have guessed he was in his 70s. Maybe it’s the result of all the stress?
Amazing! I hope he gets access to the Bitcoin funds Wikileaks got to help him cover the bail and set him on a path to recovery where he can be with all of his family and children after this horrible ordeal.
Julian has a very rating personality, that goes without saying, but I cannot see a single erson who is still alive that has done so much to help disclose these atrocious crimes to the Public and has risked his life to help other whistler blowers than him.
Our false narrative of heroes don't actually exist, and the resolve and conviction to some of the most impactful things in regards to Freedom of Information and disclosing classified information isn't going to be from some polished Captain America figure. it only makes sense it was from someone like Assange who has pretty much lived his entire life from a young age in some form of activism as a result of his Mother.
I'm going to bypass the CCP v US thing as my stance is clear and u/dang has already told me that I take things too far with little to no benefit. But suffice it to say the two are similar but not compatible systems, the US still has the ability to re-direct it's course as it slips further into abject authoritarianism where as the CCP cannot exist without it.
> I cannot see a single erson who is still alive that has done so much to help disclose these atrocious crimes to the Public and has risked his life to help other whistler blowers than him.
Well, Chelsea Manning was the actual whistleblower in this situation. She also went back to jail for refusing to testify against Assange. (Conversely Assange said he would turn himself in if Manning was given clemency, then obviously did not when her first sentence was commuted.)
Reality Winner is also still in prison, due to The Intercept's egregious mishandling of her leaks.
> Well, Chelsea Manning was the actual whistleblower in this situation
Granted, Manning was the one who provided Wikileaks the files. But, lets not omit that Sara Harrison and Julian were critical in getting Edward out of Hong Kong and his gravitas made the Bitcoin community to go against Satoshi and donated to keep Wikileaks alive and made all of this possible.
Cypherpunks are not going to live up to people's ideal image but they sure as hell get a lot done. And Julian is yet another reminder of that fact.
> Reality Winner is also still in prison, due to The Intercept's egregious mishandling of her leaks.
To be fair it was shared amounts of mishandling [0], which for someone who worked as an NSA contractor in cryptology related fields should have some understanding of OPSEC; but maybe she rished it and hoped they would do it on their end?
I'm not victim blaming, and the Intercept clearly dropped the ball and should have sat on it and taken care of this before running it. But this is why I think Defcon and the CCC should be mandatory watching for people in and especially in tech before anyone decides to do involved in 'hacktivism' or anything like it.
In fact, in the early days of Bitcoin they wanted to create an anonymous drop for journalists and leaders that would pay bounties to gray/white hats to do go over these kind of things, but this opened the door to so much foul play that it was dropped all together. Still, I hope Reality takes solace in knowing that Trump will be out of office when she gets out, but that her Obama bias was probably not everything she thought it was when you look at the amount of Whistleblower cases that were prosecuted.
Either way, I hope she is well and that the Intercept do the honourable thing make amends and give her a well paid role there.
> someone who worked as an NSA contractor in cryptology related fields
She worked at Meade as a linguist during her time as an airman, and after in an even more detached role as a translator. Neither in a cryptology-related field unless you consider the entirety of SIGINT to be cryptology-related (and her contract job wasn't even SIGINT).
Leaking should not be reserved for those with technical skills; anonymity is one of the aspects real journalists should consider themselves bound to help their sources with.
I saw her title (cryptologic language analyst) in the articles that I read looking into her role(s) [0], but you seem to far more informed than those journalists.
> Leaking should not be reserved for those with technical skills; anonymity is one of the aspects real journalists should consider themselves bound to help their sources with.
Are you not at all familiar with the relationship Ed had with Glen Greenwald? I taught my mom how to use PGP over text and that was entirely painful, so I can relate, even though the thing is my Life wasn't on the line with the World's biggest intelligence agencies were after me.
Journalists have a responsibility to protect their sources, and the Intercept having had Ed, Laura Poitras and Greenwall all on their staff at one point you'd think this would be a part of a basic training. But then again, that may be why they also left?
But even as a person with a healthy sense of paranoia and understanding of OPSEC, true anonymity is a pipe-dream in this perverse panopticon that's been created and emphasizes why we need to build another a new Internet.
> Sure, ok, yeah. Whatever dude.
Shrug... you want to pretend that isn't a massive blind-spot that's up to you.
Making heroes out of corrupt members of the State, politicians, is in large part how we got to this situation in the first place. And that includes the normalization of 'rendition' black sites, torture, and 'extra judicial' killings of US Citizens and their children under Obama.
> Mr McKinnon is accused of serious crimes. But there is also no doubt that he is seriously ill [...] He has Asperger's syndrome, and suffers from depressive illness. Mr McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights.
So the UK now has 2 trading cards and the US has none to exchange them with. Also they previously disposed this card, most probably a win-win situation:
Of late there has been lot of chatter regarding ppl like Edward Snowden trying to get Trump to pardon Assange. Considering the pardon spree that Trump is on, I was hoping Assange would get pardoned.
I see this as UK stalling till Biden comes in power. They fear Trump might just pardon him.
Why would Trump consider Edward Snowden's opinion on pardoning Assange, and where is this chatter? Trump has never been supportive of Snowden in the past, as far as I have read.
He's never been vocally against either one. He has been asked about it and has suggested that he is considering it and recognizes that a lot of people think he should, but has never said one way or another.
What is he even talking about? Snowden got his records from the NSA and passed it onto journalists. He had nothing with him by the time he got to Russia. How could he possibly reveal Obama's records, even if he wanted to? I feel like at least one Presidential briefing should have covered this.
Also, what the fuck? That's not even a sentence. Was it so hard to find someone who could construct coherent sentences?
Chatter has been at couple of discord servers I am on. It has been going on for long. But since Biden's win, it has picked up steam.
Trump has always avoided the whole Snowden Assange wikileaks saga - for a guy with too much to say, it's interesting to note.
Obama was quite tough on Snowden and Biden will continue. Trump will just do it out of spite against Obama & Dems and also hoping to get more followers with good hacking skills. Trump will do the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
The crazy thing is that Trump hasn't even come close to previous administrations in number of pardons or clemency, nor even the types of offenders who were granted leniency.
That article was written almost a month before Trump's recent pardons, and only tallies through FY2020, ending Sept 30. In the meantime, trump has pardoned war criminals and several people who have done crimes on his behalf. In pretty much everything I've read on the subject, that is not the average sort of offender who is granted leniency.
A lack of a large number of pardons is no surprise, really. By all appearances, he's pardoning his partners in crime and war criminals. Traditionally, pardons are granted to folks who haven't gotten a fair shake, or whose sentences are disproportionate to their crimes. Contrast the number of pardons with the recent spree of executions -- this is all in line with the "tough on crime" narrative. Forget about justice, the goal is brutality and death to the enemy.
1. I think the US has pretty much succeeded in their goal of essentially canceling Julian Assange. Being holed up for years in the Ecuadorian Embassy had to have taken a toll mentally. As much as some might say it's not prison, it effectively is.
2. There's an interesting question of where the line is between journalist and not journalist. As much as some might argue otherwise, being a "journalist" doesn't mean you can break the law. And yes there's a difference between publishing classified material that comes to you vs actively engaging in, supporting and enabling the behaviour that led to obtaining that material. Assange clearly had prior knowledge of Manning's actions and was more of an accomplice. Being a "journalist" isn't a defense here, at least not a legal one;
3. Here's my other issue with treating Assange as a journalist: he was clearly playing politics. You saw this in the Democratic email hacking and publication. This undermines the whole theory that Wikileaks was somehow different, impartial or open. It is and always was another tool to further a political end. At some point you aren't a journalist anymore;
4. The UK court upheld all the prosecution's points of law so it really was simply a matter of health grounds. I honestly don't know how an appeals court will treat that. I guess we'll see.
5. Interestingly I think Brexit works against Assange here. I don't believe this case can be appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (or Justice?). Obviously the UK isn't in the EU anymore but I don't know the law well enough here. Like it might be that the case was brought while the UK was an EU member so it's possible the ECHR/ECJ has jurisdiction? Probably not but it's not impossible.
6. It's unlikely the incoming Biden administration is going to be sympathetic towards Assange. There's probably no will to spend political capital on that and the Democrats are probably still made about Assange's (active) role in the email hacking and the 2016 election.
Addressing point 2 from your post: during the extradition hearing, a couple of witnesses declared that sometimes journalists are actively helping sources to avoid detection. See on Craig's Murray blog[1], I remember Daniel Ellsberg also had a similar comment but I can't find it at the moment:
> Lewis You have as a journalist merely been the passive recipient of official information. Presumably you have never done anything criminal to obtain government information?
> Hager You said “passive”. That is not the way we work. Journalists not only actively work our sources. We go out and find our sources. The information might come in documents. It might come on a memory stick. In most cases our sources are breaking the law. Our duty is to help protect them from being caught. We actively help them cover their backs sometimes.
In point 3 you're convinced that the timing for releasing the Democratic papers was related to undermining the presidential bid intentionally. However I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that an impartial journalist would release sooner rather than later documents that pertain to a current developing event. Withholding them would have been "actively" getting involved in the presidential election. I think the blame for the leak lays solely with the people that leaked them, not with Wikileaks or Assange.
(Also, I see that someone else already clarified the situation about the European Court of Human Rights.)
> Here's my other issue with treating Assange as a journalist: he was clearly playing politics. You saw this in the Democratic email hacking and publication. This undermines the whole theory that Wikileaks was somehow different, impartial or open. It is and always was another tool to further a political end. At some point you aren't a journalist anymore;
How should 2016 Bernie supporters feel seeing the leaked emails showing the establishment conspiring against him? “Political” in the pejorative really depends on which side you’re one.
Wikileaks is/was a threat to the establishment. That’s why he’s currently locked up.
