This should be a sobering view of how the world really works. Above a certain threshold, every veneer of civilization vanishes no matter what the country (some have a higher threshold than others).
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 most infuriating among all of them has been our media - specifically mainstream media. They have played the entire saga down and in many cases many mainstream media pundits actively espoused for Assanges punishment [1].
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?
Well can you elaborate why you think it is? Because the way I see it, it gives unwavering and constitutionally guaranteed way for billionaires to control the narratives - in addition to the power they already have been wielding through owning politicians using lobbyists and having protection through section 230 in all the stakes they own in the social media companies.
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”.
My point is the way founding fathers envisioned first amendment protection, they never foresaw the rise of a small billionaires oligarchs owning large stake of media and newspapers to promote views favouring their narratives. I am not speaking of first amendment of individuals which I think is also under attack by the same group of people, look how the mainstream media would love to cancel certain people they don’t like.
> 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.
What I find inspiring about the Boston massacre is that founding father, John Adams, defended the British soldiers involved in it and doing so did not prevent him from becoming president in the future. The values of the electorate were quite a bit different in those days and really are knowing about and emulating the better parts.
> Cancelling someone is also known as freedom of association
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.
You can absolutely make a personal choice. The moment that you start tricking yourself into thinking that narrative manipulation, harassment, trolling, stalking, etc to get others to make that same personal choice are part of some high moral stance is what people get angry at cancel culture about. There is quite a distinction.
I can’t use my free speech to encourage someone to make the same choice?
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.
I don't really get your point about free speech. That's a government protection. What I am talking about is the tendency of mobs to act as conduits of misinformation and abuse while projecting some form of morality en masse. It teeters on being more harmful than the thing they're mobbing about, typically.
> My point is the way founding fathers envisioned first amendment protection, they never foresaw the rise of a small billionaires oligarchs owning large stake of media and newspapers to promote views favouring their narratives.
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.
> My point is the way founding fathers envisioned first amendment protection, they never foresaw the rise of a small billionaires oligarchs owning large stake of media and newspapers to promote views favouring their narratives.
That sounds to me like a problem with the existence of billionaire oligarchs and not a problem with the first amendment.
That journalists and individuals have separate first amendment rights guaranteed by the constitution is a lie created by the same mainstream media you’ve lost faith in.
Overcorrection? No it is not. They enjoy misleading and diverting attention away from the things that really matter. Just take a look at these lawsuits:
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.
> Look, these talking heads are simply well-paid entertainers - nothing more.
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.
Wow! You actually took my shit serious! LOL. Of course, I'm just being overly dramatic and would never support censorship in any way, shape or form. If you can't sense the sarcasm in my comment, I don't know what else to say :)
Being sarcastic on the internet is generally a bad idea and creates confusion as to whether you truly believe what you’re saying. If you want to make a sarcastic point it’s best to be explicit about it, or else risk being taken seriously.
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.
Of course, the problem with removing First Amendment protections is you only know about these lawsuits because Business Insider and Glenn Greenwald enjoy First Amendment protections.
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.
Y'all are really taking this shit serious! LMAO. I think my own First Amendment rights should be revoked, actually! LOL
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.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
> I no longer hold the view that our media deserves the first amendment protection that it does
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.
>I no longer hold the view that our media deserves the first amendment protection that it does.
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.
I mostly feel contempt for the mainstream media nowdays, but that does nothing to diminish my support for their right to freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is most important for those whose speech we think is harmful and don't want to be spoken. Nothing would be more dangerous than letting those with the greatest capacity for and willingness to use violence (e.g. governments) decide what speech should be allowed.
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.
>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?
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?
> 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.
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?
The mass holding of such a view is exactly what's going to end up with me as an American refugee in Canada sometime in the next 10 years. I grew up in Democracy and I plan to die in it. Watching the USA backslide and imagining the very real risk of Trump refusing to give up power when he inevitably gets it in 2024 is sobering... to say the least
Nah, they should keep the 1st Amendment for the journalists. The medias' marketing departments and execs, however, should be regulated to within an inch of their lives. If they let their journos spout shit, they should be legally on the hook if they EVER claim truth. If they lie, don't allow them to take advertiser or subscriber money.
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.
At this point I think the best chance of implementation would be something like the Board of Labor, OSHA, or some open source bug reporting where specific lies can be be reported and fined/punished for. Maybe random audits like the IRS. I'd like the determination to lie with the public, but the issue is coupling determination from enforcement given how intertwined information control is with power.
Right now? It wouldn't work. It's an angry pipe dream.
You have to remember that the first amendment was written to protect people like the founders - wealthy, bourgeois, powerful men. It was never intended to create a press that challenges state power.
Source? I'm pretty sure that state challenges were accounted for in 1a's derivations. The entire point of three branches was to keep the gov in check with itself. 1a helps to ensure it can be in check with its citizens as well.
This is in micro scale, so perhaps this is why the power imbalance is so painfully clear. This is one guy against the whole might of the US.
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.
if "laws" cannot protect one man, why bother with the sham that is "democracy"? its not just in the US but rest of the countries as well. when "pride" of a democracy is greater than the life of a human, it is no better than china or north korea. there at least you have the expectation of their intentions, that you are on your own. "democracies" are supposed to protect the little guy regardless of the adversary. as the other commenter said, this sets the precedent for the rest of the world. now india can go ahead and do the same to its dissenters because america could do it.
I would argue we bother with the sham because it is superior to the alternatives, the issue is human nature prevents us from ever truly reaching an ideal society. As long as there is someone standing is 3ft of shit for us to laugh we are comfortable and happy despite the fact that we ourselves are standing in 2ft of shit.
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.
It's a bit of a sad sacrifice, though. Nothing (significant) has changed about the US's imperialism as a result of his disclosures, it's just mildly more acknowledged.
Most left journalists were dancing in joy when Assange got arrested. They never forgave him for exposing the Clinton emails and ensured he was heavily character assassinated over the next several years. He also became a victim of the #MeToo movement at its height. He was openly called evil/narcissist/etc in many "opinion" pieces.
All the other important stuff he revealed never got the level of attention it deserved.
not only because of the left/right politics, but also because defending Assange as a "journalist" caused them grief. The definition of journalism is at stake: if someone who just posts to the internet is a journalist and can defend their actions as necessary for the operation of a free press, then that includes bloggers[0] and all sorts of riff-raff.
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.
Your comment reminds me of CNN's special-in-their-own-minds status where laws are "different for the media." [0]
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.
Yeah this is why laws, and even constitutions don't matter at this point. Only the anointed CIA affiliated "papers of record" are given protection. Despite the beautifully clear language in the US constitution.
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 think this is a naive and unrealistic perspective. Journalists coordinate with their preferred candidates all the time to gain better access. They shouldn't but they do.
(And, whether wikileaks meaningfully coordinated with trump campaign is debatable)
>Journalists do not coordinate news releases with their preferred candidates
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.
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?"
I believe somewhere in here lies a fundamental problem with today's society. We have reached an absurd level of polarization. Any opinion you hold that is in contradiction with someone else's opinion, qualifies you for membership of the opposing camp.
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.
This just seems like another polarization to me. Other people CAN be the enemy. Racist and White Supremacists are the enemy, especially to me. Now how we treat and decide to combat our enemies is a while other matter.
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.
> 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?"
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.
That's not it. There are meaningful differences. Which party represents the oil industry? Which party represents Hollywood? It's not the same party.
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.
Democratic-party affiliated journalists. Even left-of-center journalists. But the Clinton emails were an exposure of attacks against Sanders.
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.
> 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.
I'm not so sure a Sanders presidency with a Republican congress would have been super different. He promised to also crack down on immigration, impose tariffs, end trade deals, and pull out of Afghanistan. He is/was also very skeptical of longstanding alliances and NATO. With not power to legislate, he'd have likely done some similar things as an executive.
Would he have been as embarrassing and corrupt, probably not, but there more to an administration than all of that.
He is a great demagogue but his Congressional record indicates he is not so good at dealmaking. I think he would have been a progressive Perot that got angry a lot but those tantrums would lead to great sound bites.
Or TLDR if you're not going to get good at making sausage stop applying for positions at the sausage factory.
There are a lot of things you can do at the executive level that recent administration don't have the guts to do. Declare a medical emergency on account of COVID-19 and bam, there is a provision in the laws that allows you to expand medicare to the entire population. That alone would guarantee re-election. Free all non-violent marijuana prisoners, Forgive student debt. That alone would be a boost to the economy as a generation saddled with debt would get a reset. There are more he could do by executive order that can bypass congress. He will be attacked, but so what? The population overwhelming wants these proposals anyway.
I think you deeply underestimate the influence of the corporate media in influencing the opinions of the masses. But apparently America went through something like this right after the Civil War where everyone had an opinion on everything and all that led to was corporations amassing power for a half century.
That affects you when trying to get elected. I'd argue a strong candidate who takes no BS is something that the people are clamoring for. Trump fit that bill to an extant but he was an idiot and a bigot. He had a real opportunity to enact real change but he blew it.
Sure I would love a truth-telling candidate. But no existing party machine will accept such a candidate and even if elected no existing party will work with such a candidate.
And in the unlikely event you create a genuine third party, the current two parties will drop all their differences to destroy that party.
Well, sure, they would have tried the smears employed against Trump and, more relevantly, Corbyn. In fact, forget "would have", that was actually done. [0] I'm just not sure the accusations would have seemed important to voters. Trump's myriad misdeeds have been salient to public attention for decades. "Collaboration" with Russia may have been one of a few awful actions he hadn't actually attempted over his life, which is exactly why it was emphasized. The go-to war media criticisms of Sanders, e.g. "he thinks healthcare should be provided to all, even during a pandemic!" probably wouldn't have seemed so bad to normal humans. But sure, our enemies have a certain low cunning in addition to their complete control of popular media. They could have surprised us with their choice of smears.
"Supports single payer healthcare" is used against Sanders in the primary to instill fear in Democratic primary voters that he'll be too far to the left for moderates and then lose to a Republican. It wouldn't be effective, or attempted, if he was already the President.
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.
Well that ruined my day... you're right of course. Putting it that way just confirms my belief that the best course is to dissolve this union. Let's chop it into about a dozen pieces. That would be better for Americans, and also for non-Americans. Raytheon would lose some business...
The smallest US state has a larger economy than some countries. Fixing it doesn't require dissolution of shared citizenship, what we need to do is stop doing so many things at the federal level.
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.)
The thing had already gone off track in 1788. The Constitution is not compatible with democracy.
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".
I think he probably had more of an effect than is obvious. Activism raises the political price to governments of making bad decisions. When the powerful change their position as a result of activism, they always try conceal it - the effect is far in excess of what they let on.
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.
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.
In assange’e case, the opposite is true. They were avoiding paying the cost before his leaks. Now the reputational damage is done and so there is less for them to avoid.
Much was made of upholding the promise to withdraw troops from the Middle East in the last US election. You can bet Collateral Murder and a number of other Wikileaks publications helped sway public opinion of the US military presence in the Middle East
The sad part is how few people even know what he published, especially juxtaposed with his sacrifice. If I go talk to the average person about Snowden or Assange they know little to nothing about what they revealed.
I agree, but to me it's troubling so many people simply don't care.
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.
You're forgetting he tried to reach asylum but was stopped midway, and while he was stuck in limbo, he applied for multiple asylums, all of which were rejected.
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.
This is what so many people forget -- he almost surely (but frankly, even the contrary wouldn't surprise me any more) didn't start out as a Russian agent but most certainly became one.
Even if that was the case at any point, I doubt that currently he's still willing to be a martyr. He now has children and a partner that I imagine he'd like to spend time with.
My sense, and I don't think it is a popular opinion on HN, was that Assange became, perhaps unwittingly, a pawn of Russia. Selectively releasing documents, which is how I see it, doesn't show an even hand of justice exposing "the unbridled imperialist evil".
I'm no fan of Assange. But I also have not read a lot about Assange so I may be ignorant.
yeah, a pawn of russia. just like trump. yet it is biden who said yes to the biggest russian infrastructure project for germany with the pipeline.
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
Everyone loved Assange until he [entered politics, played favorites with information disclosure, and demonstrated that he is more mercenary than martyr]. I wonder why.
"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?
exactly, I'm not saying that it is perfect, but to keep comparing with Epstein and joking around won't help Julian Assange. Important is: if those Assurances could be documented and monitored by the international community, it is definitely great and TBH, would be better to Assange if he would have gotten something like that back in 2010.. he lost 10 years of his life in "prison", but it won't even be reduced from his sentence..
yes, sure. Probably he believed that Obama and the international community would save him. In another hand back in the days he didn't have the same offer on the table as he has now.
To me it feels more likely that he just wanted to avoid a few years in Swedish prison for rape and thought it would blow over soon (much faster than in the end it did), so he could slither out from the embassy in a month or three. The whole "afraid Sweden would extradite him to the USA" line felt phony then and still does now.
Sure, but still nobody's fault but his own. All the people going "But the evil U[S|K] has already kept him inprisoned at the embassy for ten years!" are totally off their heads. Nobody but he himself did that.
It might be the case right now but it came out earlier this year that the CIA was entertaining this idea in 2017. This [0] appears to be the originating story and there are corroborating accounts in many other outlets.
> Planning to commit a murder or a terrorist attack is a felony that will put an individual in prison for a long
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.
They intend, fully, to make an example out of him.
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?
I'm afraid you may have fallen for the deliberately misleading words of the supposed assurances given by the US. Here's what the Guardian[0] says of that particular claim (with my emphasis):
"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.
How is Epstein at all relevant? I believe the conspiracy theory is around powerful people trying to keep their secrets secret. Meaning not let the US government know their secrets so they can avoid prosecution. So the US government would want Epstein alive. Why do you think the US government is prosecuting Ghislane Maxwell right now?
What matters here is rule of law (and the fact that we live in a time where it is being increasingly eroded) - not Assange's internal psychological machinations.
Rule of law is being followed. A lower court judge ruled that there was a risk that Assange's well-being could not be safeguarded in the American system. A higher court judge reversed that ruling on assurances from the US that his well-being would be guarded. Now they have an opportunity to an appeal to a still-higher UK Court.
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.
It is perfectly fine to debate the prudence, or lack thereof, of the High Court's decision.
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.
"he managed to rip off the mask and expose the unbridled imperialist evil lurking"
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.
>The cables didn't unite Arabs against the US - they exposed the ruthless corruption of their own governments
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.
To play devil's advocate, there is at least some value in US diplomatic cables being secret. It allows our diplomats to pass around honest impression and sensitive information back to our government.
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.
> revealed a US Diplomatic Corps trying to do a decent job in a world rife with ugly corruption.
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?
It's not 'journalism' to release arbitrary secrets even if the transparency might be beneficial.
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.
This is basically my takeaway, I think Snowden has a lot stronger of an argument frankly.
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.
It's remarkable how casually people demand sacrifices of others as a condition for taking their activism seriously.
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.
> Above a certain threshold, every veneer of civilization vanishes no matter what the country (some have a higher threshold than others).
> 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.
There are countries which do not bend before others. Russia, China, Iran to name a few examples. They can protect those fleeing from the West. Just like West can protect people from those countries. World is not unipolar.
No, because it is clear? He was fleeing from Russian government. And they poisoned him.
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.
Bend before others. In other words, they aren't follower members of a block. That says nothing about citizens or what exactly these countries are doing.
Edward Snowden is currently hiding from US power projection in Russia. He is of course beholden to Russian law; I assume if he were gay he'd be having a much worse time of it. But the specific point here is that it is possible to hide from the US in the territory of a country that does not answer to the US.
That's one interpretation. Other one is that a technocracy regime is done IRL to push highly biased and ideological policies on the guise of being the only/best choice by the experts.
For example - given the ample (and basically) record of U.S. authorities in regard to their treatment of so-called High Value Detainees -- and even of very low-value detainees at is borders, as we have seen in recent years -- the High Court had no reason whatsoever to lend credence to the so-called "assurances" they cited in their ruling:
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.
Who is going to oversee and enforce these promises? The UK High Court? When the US violates their promises, will the High Court Judge personally fly to the US to collect Assange and bring him back to the UK?
They have no means to enforce it, the judgement is what they think will happen. If, say, North Korea gave assurances on how they would treat a prisoner their judgement would probably be different.
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.
Saying the judgement is wrong is logically equivalent to stating that one of these assurances 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 judgement relied (in part) on the Diplomatic Note (No. 169), in which the US stated;
> "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?
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.
Your original comment refers to the fact that the USA generally treats detainees poorly, not that it "brazenly breaks many other assurances it makes in this regard".
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.
not that it "brazenly breaks many other assurances it makes in this regard".
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?
In fairness, the US would be idiotic to renege on their assurances. That essentially would be a valid reason to block any future extraditions.
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.
They openly admit their willingness to break all three if "future acts" deem them necessary, not to mention they're free to stick him in another terrible jail with other restrictive measures even with the assurances.
Because if we wait for them to be violated, Assange could already be dead? And for the nth time, why should I expect them to hold to these promises when they've already violated his right to a free trial?
"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."
Ultimately, right and wrong, good and evil are human judgments, sometimes acted upon by humans using human power. There’s nothing transcendent about 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.
> right and wrong, good and evil are human judgments
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?
> This is nonsense that opens up the possibility to justify pretty much any kind of abuse or atrocity.
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.
> Hilarious. Do you think there’s big judge in the sky that determines what’s good and bad?
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.
> This is simply insane warmongering. Since you throw such threats around casually I suspect you might be a US citizen.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 think they meant that if anyone had the power to protect people's rights, they would also have the power to violate people's rights, and they would use that power in the same way as today's rights violators. If so, I think they are absolutely right on that point, and it holds true regardless of what you believe those rights are.
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.
The thing I don't understand, given all this - and I say this with substantial study in Political Science, including a degree - is why then we still see such widespread admiration of the notion that states are legitimate organizational structures?
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?
> is why then we still see such widespread admiration of the notion that states are legitimate organizational structures?
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.
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.
He did significant help in showing a major war crime that was covered up. That is, without doubt, more important.
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.
The video that showed the deaths of journalists in Iraq was not an example of a war crime.
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.
it is also worth noting that julian didnt jump any fence. He received and published data full stop. The only espionage was on part of the whistleblowers.
> In 2010, Assange gained unauthorized access to a government computer system of a NATO country. In 2012, Assange communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack. With respect to one target, Assange asked the LulzSec leader to look for (and provide to WikiLeaks) mail and documents, databases and pdfs. In another communication, Assange told the LulzSec leader that the most impactful release of hacked materials would be from the CIA, NSA, or the New York Times. WikiLeaks obtained and published emails from a data breach committed against an American intelligence consulting company by an “Anonymous” and LulzSec-affiliated hacker. According to that hacker, Assange indirectly asked him to spam that victim company again.
> 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.
> leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI)
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.
Using the language of the prosecution's summary of a classified indictment issued by a state shown to have orchestrated 2 failed false indictments on this individual in the last decade particularly does not convey considerable confidence.
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.
If you believe that The Law defines what is right and wrong, then surely it can never be right to change The Law? Maybe you don't actually believe that, but I think it is important to consider just how large the gap between The Law and What Is Right has been, at various times in the past, and in various places.
The Law is how we define 'Right and Wrong' in the civil sense, it's all we have.
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.
The Abu Gharib whistleblower's name was supposed to not be released, but instead Donald Rumsfeld himself leaked it, and his family had to be put into protective custody because of the constant death threats they were receiving from other service members and families of service members.
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.
Well that is the claim that Assange is making. The government claims he tangibly helped. That has always been the line. You can't give your source burglary tools, ask them to break into something particular and then claim you were just a reporter. You may believe the claims from the prosecution are wrong or lies, but they don't seem on their surface to be crazy
Of course, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it in the interim. My parent comment claims (through analogy) that Assange gave secret proprietary hacking tools to Manning. I don’t believe that’s remotely true.
No, sorry I think the analogy was a bit too extreme meant only to show that under some circumstances arresting him would be fine. I think according to Wikipedia the specific claim is
> 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.
I'm not an expert, but if following @popehat on twitter has taught me anything, it would lead me to conclude yes.
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.
Would you feel the same if it was the Chinese or Russian government who wanted to prosecute a foreigner for allegedly helping one of their whistleblowers, or for just criticizing their government? Unless you want Americans sent to Beijing for violating the Hong Kong national security law, which applies to everyone in the world according to the Chinese government, I don't see how you can invoke 'the law' against Assange.
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.
> you absolutely do not have the right to break into systems of national security and release arbitrary information
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.
> you absolutely do not have the right to break into systems of national security
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.
In part of the indictment he’s accused of literally helping Manning to crack password hashes she obtained illegally.
> 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.
> This is the message to would-be activists anywhere: Stay out of the big boy pool or we'll make you regret it.
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.
> This is the message to would-be activists anywhere: Stay out of the big boy pool or we'll make you regret it.
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.
Let me ask you: have you actually read the indictment against Assange that the DOJ has published?
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.
It’s not much different at other levels. You only have public opinion and Assange wasn’t able to best Clinton in that realm. There’s a lesson about optics and choosing your enemies to be learned as well as the lesson about power.
is it possible, that the system is getting more and more vindictive and less liberal? I mean, Assange isn't saying more radical things than Chomsky, yet they tolerated Chomky somehow, for whatever reasons....
In short... One should not assume the powers-that-be provide tools freely to disassemble the powers-that-be. "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," as the quote goes.
"sobering view of how the world really works" for whom this is unexpected, which is to say, the most naive.
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.
> "sobering view of how the world really works" for whom this is unexpected, which is to say, the most naive.
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.
Imagine a parent that physically abuses their young child way less than all of the other parents on their block.
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.
As a non-US citizen, that's what I find most troubling about this. Change the countries and it's immediately apparent how absurd it is: Imagine a US citizen living in Mexico exposed some Peruvian state secrets (doing something which isn't a crime in Mexico), and now Peru is applying pressure to extradite the guy. Chances are everybody involved would laugh in Peru's face, so why does the UK entertain this in Assange's case? Why doesn't Australia get involved?
> As a non-US citizen, that's what I find most troubling about this.
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.
>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.
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.
Plenty of people get extradited from the US to face charges abroad. Sacoolas is more an exception than a rule. Likely the only reason why she would not be extradited is because she's a "diplomat" (aka a spook or the wife of a spook). It kinda sucks that the US protects members of its intelligence services from criminal charges abroad, but the fact that it does that is kinda irrelevant to whether other, unrelated extraditions should go forward.
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.
>Plenty of people get extradited from the US to face charges abroad.
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.
I guess my point is that this goes for all countries. "Diplomats" are often not prosecuted or extradited for crimes committed abroad. It's not just the US that takes advantage of this system -- and I haven't even seen evidence that the US is an exception to the norm in this space. The "uses and abuses" section of the relevant page on Wikipedia has plenty of examples, and there are probably many more that don't make the news. It is not a novel thing and is basically irrelevant to whether Assange ought to be extradited.
How about a diplomats wife? They can clearly also escape extradition. It has nothing to do with what title you hold but if the US state gives a fuck or not.
> It has nothing to do with what title you hold but if the US state gives a fuck or not.
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.
Sure, despite there being a formal agreement that people at that specific base _not_ receive diplomatic immunity.
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.
>Sure, despite there being a formal agreement that people at that specific base _not_ receive diplomatic immunity.
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.
Because the UK, and Australia are eager US vassals in this instance. They want to cooperate with the US government. The judges job here is to provide a fig-leaf of argument to justify what the executive clearly prefers.
Now is a good time for a power grab? COVID is tightening restrictions on the public, it's nearly christmas, and in the UK we have the PM's Xmas Party to talk about.
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.”
That is irrelevant if the hacker isn't at the base or in the US. This here is US law being applied outside the US to someone doing something outside the US while not being a US citizen. There not a single way to twist and turn this where it is lawful to apply it to Assange. It's just another corrupt court bending its knee.
>IIRC Manning was in Iraq at this time. Were servers they accessed in the US? Probably.
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?
The implications of defining an action as "happening on US soil" whenever it had an effect that involved mere data that was situated on US soil also seem troubling, and it's easy to imagine only slightly less clear cause-and-effect relationships from actions to data that would, under this interpretation, suggest extradition to a hostile jurisdiction.
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?
There is no evidence he helped her. Their main witness was a pedophile who lied to try get his own charges lessened. There is no case against Assange. The allegations are bogus.
> Their main witness was a pedophile who lied to try get his own charges lessened.
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.
With the pirate bay case and servers being on Swedish soil, any one who uploaded a copyrighted file helped the founders breaking copyright law. This mean millions of people, many located in the US, could be extradited to Sweden to face their crime they committed there.
How funny the world would be if laws was enforced equally.
- 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.
- 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.
>- calling him a journalist is a mighty stretch even before he started, let's call it his "full-stack collaboration" with the Russians
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?
>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.
So no matter what the US does criminal against its own or international law (yeah I know, US give a fuck about Geneva conventions and also Den Haag.. another shame) - if they declared it "secret data" they can declare a foreign journalist helping in uncovering that crime himself committing crimes and require extradition? Just so backwards...
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 :(
I restrict my definition to investigative reporting and neutral reporting of current affairs. People who write op-eds, or engage in propaganda, or (in this case) are an outlet for strategically timed leaks by foreign governments, coordinated beforehand with said outlet - that's not journalism, whatever else it happens to be.
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.
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.
The UK govnement has passed extremely draconian laws in the last year. The government is trying to to power grab while covid is still around and people are focused on covid.
Laws banning protests, surveillance and others.
This isn't a surprise but doesn't make it acceptable.
I really hope the scandal around Downing Street throwing raucous parties while the rest of the country suffered under a strict lockdown is the final straw that breaks the back of Johnson’s government. At the very least he’s being extraordinarily dishonourable by going on TV and lying through his teeth to the country about it while bringing in fresh restrictions to keep his hypocrisy out of the news (and fortunately failing) rather than resigning as soon as the scandal broke. He’s presided over an accelerating slide into authoritarianism and oligarchy and will no doubt be remembered as one of the worst Prime Ministers to hold the office.
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 cynic in me says that the EU wouldn’t have been able to do much about this anyway, the impression I get from episodes like the Greek debt crisis is that the EU as a political establishment has a similar strain of the disease Westminster has: the idea it’s healthy and natural for a powerful socio-political clique to piss in the eyes of the plebs and tell them it’s raining regardless of the humanitarian consequences. This paternalistic, hierarchical view of society is the source of so much banal evil in the world I think.
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.
It's a fact he's world famous. We've heard of him.
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.
Just to nitpick on your logic a little. Your first two statements might be true without the statement that he is a world famous journalist is. Trump is world famous, and he's a golfer. But he's not a world famous golfer, at least not in the usual sense of the word.
Just to nitpick right back at you, if Assange had not published his journalism and its source materials you'd never had heard of him and he would not qualify as famous. So that makes him a world famous journalist.
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.
I knew him as the founder and director of Wikileaks, and that Wikileaks collaborates with a number of publications to get the content of some classified information known to the general public. I didn't know that Julian Assange wrote much himself and in similar fashion worked directly as a journalist. So I'd say that at least one person (me) knew about him without knowing him as a journalist.
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.
The reason you heard of Wikileaks and Assange isn't for golf. 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.
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.
I cannot recall a single journalistic work of Julian Assange.
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.
Why do use so many words where one, "publishing" is more accurate?
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.
> The reason you heard of Wikileaks and Assange isn't for golf.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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".
>Wikileaks chucked what they received up on a web page
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 leaked /nothing/. No really. Absolutely nothing.
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.
What point about Chelsea Manning are you trying to make? I'm sure she could engage in journalism if she chose. Her and your rights should be protected. Daniel Elsberg does regularly.
> It's a fact he's a journalist. We've all read his journalism or at least know of its existence.
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.
Do you think siding with Pompeo on this issue is more sensible than "siding" with NGOs like ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders?
> It’s also possible he was an asset for a hostile intelligence service posing as a journalist.
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.
What exactly is the bright line between a good newspaper and an intelligence service that broadcasts information? News is that which someone doesn't what known.
Pre-Trump, I used to joke that American foreign policy was determined by oil companies and defense contractors. Then Mike Pompeo became Secretary of State, and it wasn't funny anymore. Well, it hadn't been funny since Trump; Pompeo took over, of course, from former ExxonMobile CEO Rex Tillerson, who headed the Department of State for the first Trump year.
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?!
What difference does it make if he’s a journalist, an astronaut, or a haberdasher? Shouldn’t the law apply equally regardless of your profession and level of celebrity?
Yes I agree. He himself declared numerous times that his intention was to be hostile to the US (and going as far as naming the Clintons explicitely as a target of his campaign).
none of these things matter when charging someone with a crime? non-citizens are charged for hacking from foreign countries all the time. You’re also making an unwarranted dig at trans people.
They will always vet, synthesize, secure and edit their material. That's what makes it journalism. There's a reason Snowden went to The Guardian and not WikiLeaks.
Julian Assange is as much of a journalist as Mark Zuckerberg is.
We're witnessing the difference between someone who faces justice head-on (Manning) and someone who spends a decade evading a court.
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.
Yeah the fact that it all happened outside of the USA and by someone who is not beholden to the USA is kind of amazing. Putin and Xi will now be able to demand (with a straight face) any government leaks out of their nation as criminal and demand that US journalists publishing such "state secrets" immediately be extradited to said countries and face charges in court.
Surprisingly few technical people understand the extent to which the CFAA charges he faces are bullshit.
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.
Manning was chatting with "Nathaniel Frank". That was understood to be a pseudonym for someone at Wikileaks, but there's no proof of any of that. So, these charges are even more bullshit.
So Assange can say, under oath, that he is not Nathaniel Frank. Boom. Case closed- US govt looks stupid. Assange walks.
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.
I fully expect the US to select a judge for this case that will not give Assange the slightest bit of generosity. I hope you're right, but I'm much more cynical about the impartiality of the judiciary.
Criminal conspiracy in the US is defined in Title 18, U.S.C. § 371:
"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."
The elements of the crime of conspiracy are:
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.
This was inevitable to anyone who read the original ruling.
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."
I don't know how other countries deal with treaties, but the USA tends to ignore all the treaties it has signed unless it has also created a statute in federal or state law to enforce it.
The US is actually quite far in the "monist" side of the spectrum when it comes to ratified treaties but it has such a divided and dysfunctional political culture coupled with an executive which has wide latitude in foreign affairs that many agreements are signed up to by the executive without being ratified by the senate. Monism basically means that properly entered into, international treaties have force as domestic law as well.
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.
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".
Propaganda isn't trying to subvert the truth, whether quoted or unquoted. Propaganda is trying to promote a particular position. Nobody has as a goal to subvert the truth, that's just a caricature of one's enemies.
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?
seth rich probably had nothing to do with wikileaks, but there's no doubt that he was murdered.
and honestly i can't hold it against assange for being on the lookout or even paranoid about things like that, given his circumstances. being wrong about that simply puts him in the company of a huge section of the political establishment that was promoting the case.
i also don't really care if the source of the leak was a Russian hacker. the damning part is the data was real.
Just to be more forceful on one point - Seth Rich had absolutely nothing to do with Wikileaks and it's extraordinarily shameful that Assange winked and nodded like he did.
Rich was a low level staffer working for the DNC to help voters find polling stations - he wouldn't have had any access to their email systems (and of course wouldn't have had access to Podesta's emails since Podesta didn't even work for the DNC and it was his private Gmail that was compromised).
Are you saying that just because they released truthful information that was supplied to them (and it happens to be against your preferred side of the political spectrum) they are guilty of propaganda, or is there any proof that wikileaks rejected authentic documents concerning "the other side"?
Sure, but without any proof, in the form of other leak organizations that released something that WikiLeaks withhold, or any other type of proof that they did, you are sharing with us your pet conspiracy theory, not facts.
Fabricate a narrative that allows your country to murder tens of thousands of people == fine and not illegal.
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.
As an American, I find it very hard to decide what to think about these issues.
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?
> 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.
I'm ashamed to admit I forgot about that once the news cycle moved on. Someone should definitely be held accountable, especially since all evidence points to it not even being an honest mistake, but rather a PR move made against the advice of ground commanders.
It was Biden who was accountable. What are we gonna do, hold re-elections? Just after the democracy was shaken to its core by the January 6th attack? Hand over the control to the republicans who have shown themselves to be absolutely incapable of formulating rational thought or speaking the truth to their own voter base? Admit that the democratic party is so thoroughly corrupt that even after losing the easiest election in US history to a buffoon, they could not come up with a candidate with the smallest amount of integrity or backbone, and pushed up some guy who would step over the bodies of children just for a shot of giving the illusion that the US is actually in control of the rushed evacuation from a war he's been losing for a decade.
If a country uses military force beyond its borders far more than any other nation (let's ignore actual border/territorial disputes), I don't think it deserves much credit for being, let's say, only 90% as brutal (which I would dispute as well, but it would take really getting into the weeds -- start off with some examples from https://archive.md/20211006055938/https://www.newyorker.com/...).
As awful as the cops relatively often are, I've never heard of one "accidentily" killing a bunch of kids because they were near a white pick-up truck. The wrong pick-up truck by the way, it didn't even have terrorists in it.
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".
> the U.S. upholds much stricter rules of engagement than any of its enemies
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?
> 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?
Why comparing with enemies?
Should one or an org strive to be the best according to a universal standard?
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.
If we’re talking about murder veiled in suicide then this has a good point but what about an individual’s right to end their own life, to choose how their life should end?
Having just recently got out of jail, I can tell you it is infinitely easy to kill yourself. You would not believe the ingenuity of some of those attempts and successes.
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.
Heard an intesting analysis of this on BBC news. The court was more or less bound to accept the 'assurances', as they were an underlying predicate for the whole extradition framework. To challenge that would be to unpick a lot more politics.
I'm not sure the judges were naive enough to believe the US government, but they probably had no choice.
Unless he kills himself, not a chance. He's done his damage, unlike Epstein who had whole houses of closets with skeletons in them; nobody wants him dead.
There's a 0% chance that Epstein is alive and a 0% chance she walks on those charges. Miscarriages of justice do happen but for the most part life is not a poorly written TV drama.
The framing of Assange as an innocent “journalist” being persecuted for just doing his job is, in my opinion, disingenuous.
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).
If you think that is the information that he is being punished for is that video, you clearly did not look at what he leaked closely enough.
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.
> 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.
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.”
Many corporations publish "leaked" documents because they want to make a profit and they realize that it appears to a certain demographic. They aren't doing any activism. They are just trying to make a buck.
Very interesting. The actual war crimes are brushed aside but the person who revealed those war crimes are punished. I wonder how this would have played out if China or Russia did it.
He shouldn't be in prison and we should have a public holiday in his honor for informing the American public about the war crimes our government commits in our name and with our tax dollars.
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.
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.
Editors/publishers exercise judgement and take responsibility for what they put out into the world. AFAICT, Assange's best argument for his innocence is that he bears no responsibility because... he neither took nor accepts any responsibility.
Everyone is responsible for everything that is unacceptable, but it doesn't really help to try to enforce that.
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.
I've never heard of any law that requires a publisher to review / filter information for public consumption. The only responsibility that a publisher at a capitalist media outlet has is to make sure their publications bring in a profit. That is their only "obligation".
> I've never heard of any law that requires a publisher to review / filter information for public consumption
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, which Assange leads, is more than just an editor and/or publisher.
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.
This can definitely be one reason but I find your cherry picking very disingenuous.
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.
This is completely untrue. He used to be loved by the Democrats when he was exposing Bush's war crimes. The claim that he was working with Russia to help Trump came from the Hillary campaign.
It might have been partially activist, that still doesn't justify the extradition. The US had no standing, as I believe it's called. They can declare whatever they want "top secret", but that doesn't make a crime for a citizen of another country to publish it. The hacking and conspiracy claims have been added to make it appear as if they have standing, but these are empty. It's another triumph for big budget lawyer corporations, and an actual loss for the freedom of the press.
I do not think it is a loss for freedom of the press, I think it is an opportunity for the courts to define what a journalist actually is, vs. not. Perhaps the courts will side with Assange and we will find that this is First Amendment protected activity. I personally do not believe it is, but I do think that this situation is a bit unique to modern times and is likely to set precedent one way or the other.
Sure, that could happen and be the result out of all this. I think that is jumping to the worst possible conclusion though and the result will be a bit more nuanced than that.
If a Russian citizen exposed evidence that the Beslan massacre of schoolchildren was staged by the government and Putin tossed them in prison under an espionage law that explicitly criminalizes leaks, would you consider that situation "nuanced"?
"Russia also does this. Inconvenient journalists are designated "foreign agents", for instance."
Inconvenient journalists financed from abroad. And "foreign agents" are not imprisoned, they just obligated by the law to remind their readers about this fact.
I think it shows that you can put a lid on foreign journalism by drawing your chequebook. Just add a few indictments from the extradition agreement. The UK courts clearly haven't sided with Assange.
Zeems awfully convenient to label anything that embarrases the government as 'secret national security matter'. The government can literally get away with murder
>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.
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.
No, that is not what I said, nor is that what my point is/was.
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.
>No, that is not what I said, nor is that what my point is/was.
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.
The comment about being in Afghanistan was intended to convey that assuming information was released putting people in harms way, that I and people I cared about would have been directly impacted.
> 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.
No, my comment does nothing of the sort and neither you, or him, know anything about me. Believe it or not, the world is not black and white and people do the best they can given a variety of factors in front of them.
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.
Glad they were in Afghanistan and had any kind of level of understanding beyond superficial to make that evaluation.
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.
I'm not sure how you get to a less superficial understanding than
> 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.
During the Manning trial and sentencing, the prosecution and their witnesses finally admitted that there was no evidence that anyone was harmed from the releases.
My only take away after reading everything you've posted in this thread is that you are committed to the idea that exposing war crimes is a bigger crime than war crimes themselves.
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.
"However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage"
"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.
"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.
> 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?
Fortunately you and I do not individually make that decision. Society does and it has deemed, through democratically elected leaders and participation in a social contract that there is a case to be made to state secrets.
The fact that something can be done doesn't mean it should.
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?
"If only we could all flee when faced with consequences for breaking laws that we disagree with."
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.
I am a non-native english speaker typing on a phone without a spellchecher. I also have dislexia. If you have some specific complaints then please do point them out, I would love to improve.
I am not sure why you think that this is the case given that the person that I am replying to literally worked for an organisation made for killing people and with a known record of torture and warcrimes. Would you welcome a proud ISIS fighter? I would not.
If they killed nobody then they just can say so. I just do not wish to talk to people who murdered people in illegal invasions.
What does it matter if he's an "activist" or "journalist"? He exposed war crimes. He IS being persecuted and that fact is being waved in our face out in the open. The punishment doesn't fit the crime, that's the problem.
> 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.
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?
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...
>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.
You think Oskar Schindler was wrong not to hand himself in?
Judging if any given law is or isn’t just is too far outside my skills to have strong feeling about what Assange did one way or the other.
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 hope I would’ve recognised the law as unjust at the time.
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.
I hope I am the sort of person would have supported Rosa Parks — if I’d been on a jury, I want to be the sort of person who would have voted “not guilty” by way of jury annulment.
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.
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."
I think you’ve misunderstood me: I’m agreeing with MLK — It’s not my call to make to say when someone moves from one to the next, and I will only go so far as to place those four boxes in that sequence.
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.
Thank you for the thoughtful response and I especially liked the way you put the dilemma related to how the internet breaks borders. Similar to you, it's challenging to wrap my head around and is a pretty big paradigm shift in terms of the sovereignty of countries, let alone the legal implications of that shift.
I respect your perspective but wholly disagree with your conclusion. There is not a viable concept such as whether a journalist “enables espionage.” Journalism is necessarily adversarial, not pliant.
Thank you for the tactful disagreement and I appreciate your perspective. I also believe journalism is necessarily adversarial and should be allowed to exist with little encumbrance. However, I do think there is a line that needs to be drawn at some point as to what is journalism, versus what is propaganda for a specific agenda masquerading as journalism.
> However, I do think there is a line that needs to be drawn at some point as to what is journalism, versus what is propaganda for a specific agenda masquerading as journalism.
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.
You do not draw a distinction in intent between informing the public and furthering the goals of a foreign adversary? Not saying he was, just an example, of how intent absolutely does matter from a legal perspective.
1. If the interests of the public and US adversaries coincide, then there may not be a distinction. For example, if the US government had gone rogue and was spying on literally everyone (as, indeed, appears to have happened) then it is useful to both the public at large and the US's adversaries to know about it. It is good journalism to report on it. Ditto war crimes and all sorts of other shenanigans that Wikileaks has uncovered.
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.
What if accomplishing the first thing necessarily accomplishes the second thing? For example, informing on any nation's heretofore unknown war crimes hurts them on the world stage.
That's a good question and I am not 100% sure where I would personally/morally draw the line. I think the conversation would be much different if all that were released was the evidence of what people consider to be a war crime. However, there was a lot more than that released than just that. Whether A (benefit to society) is greater than B (risk/damage) is always a hard distinction to make and up for significant discussion/analysis.
> That's a good question and I am not 100% sure where I would personally/morally draw the line.
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.
The Abu Ghraib whistleblower(s?) revelations certainly diminished the USA's reputation internationally, so weren't they, too, "furthering your adversaries'interests"?
> Why does the intent/purpose of the publisher matter here in any way from a legal prospective?
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.
There's no way to draw this line. The vast majority of commercial journalism is propaganda, unsubstantiated by tangible facts and portrayed in directions strictly favorable to power and pleasing to the audience. Far from jesters speaking truth to power, commercial media are largely courtesans.
How do you draw a clear line between what Assange disband what other journalists do? Most journalists have agendas, if we allow our government to prosecute journalists with agendas they don't like, then we don't have a free press.
Lots of words. What crime do you think Assange has committed, specifically?
> 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?
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.
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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.
Being an activist doesn't make you not a journalist, any more than being employed by companies that share portfolio space with the companies that get all of their revenue from supplying war material doesn't mean you're not a journalist.
> 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.
A journalist is /any/ citizen engaging in journalism. ANY. As soon as you have to "qualify" to be a "journalist" and can't be an "activist" What you have is state controlled media.
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.
Do you think that the comments that are furiously ignoring this and pretending that there is some sort of official journalist title are genuinely ignorant or trying to sow confusion?
I think it is mostly driven by emotion and it would be very easy go that way if you didn't follow the story closely and from multiple media sources. It's easy to believe in another context eg pick one of "Maddow/Hannity/Limbaugh/Moore" is not a real journalist by which you mean good source of factual information. This is wildly different from "should/should not have the legal rights of a journalist."
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?
If publishing leaked information is punishable by the state, than what kind of press would you have? Its precisely the most contentious things that the state wants to hide, is what often the public needs to know about.
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.
> 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.
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.
>that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.
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.
By your definition, 99.9% of “journalists” aren’t journalists because they are all activists. Assange is the purest form of journalist, especially considering things he published were mass reported by other journalists who got awards for their reporting.
For further context I highly suggest the articles from Nils Melzer (UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment):
> "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.
History is fiction in the not-fiction area. 95% is missing taken to the grave in silence and the 5% that is allowed to be there is embellished according to a reinforcing narrative agenda of a kind that sells enough copies to make it worthwhile.
As Frank Herbert said: "History is written by the historians". And they are part of the system. Just look at history books which are thought in schools.
History gets rewritten constantly. An example: Julius Caesar, hero, martyr or villain? Ask an Italian or a French, probably two different versions. But also ask to an Italian 50 years ago (probably a hero, maybe even a martyr) or today (maybe a war criminal to be judged in the International Court of Justice.)
Of course a correct judgement should apply the mindset of when the facts happened.
I hear you, but why do we have to reduce this guy, of all people, to mere labels. Just reading story of him coming to power makes you gasp in awe at the sheer force of will and confidence that you are being destined for something greater.
I dunno, I just like dislike this kind of, whats the word, reductionist approach to a human being. Million things made Julius the man that he was. If he ever had avocados, would we consider him proto-vegan?
The people are just the cells of the same beast since ancient times. Empire. In all shapes and forms, it devours what it grew in and becomes the same brutish atrocity over and over again.
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.
One problem is that he likely won't be held in a prison, he'll be held in a pre-trial detention facility. The conditions in pre-trial detention in the USA, on the whole, are considerably worse than any prison because they are designed for "short-term" holding only.
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.
> 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.
So the relevant measurement ought to have been the average stay of the inmates actually there at any one time, right?
Assange is sort of my barometer for US politicians views on the 1st amendment. If they don't support a pardon, clemency, or an end to the harassing investigation into him then I know they are bereft of any moral compass and will happily shred the US constitution for campaign contributions.
Both a pardon and clemency imply that he committed crimes and the politician is just in favor of forgiving him for public support. This could still have damming repercussions for a free press, as his case could set precedent that publishing documents is illegal. The charges should be dropped.
This happening on Human Rights Day is ironic.
Plus looks like US and the UK today also grandstanding by “sanctioning” countries with human rights abuse. It’s all such a farce.
At least they should clean their own house first. Let say by punishing everyone who participated in or voted for wars and voted for politicians who voted for them...
So if I post something criticizing China's policies towards, say, Tiawan or the Uyghurs, I must include some criticism of a random terrible US policy or I'm a hypocrite? Do I need to also include a criticism of, say, Russia's policies towards the Ukraine or is it only the US?
This depends. When it is reported as a news or one simply wants to discuss details sure there is no need to bring other's wrongdoings.
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.
RIP Assange, he sacrificed himself to reveal what everyone knew. I'm not sure that this was good, lately I think politicians just kind of stopped pretending and I liked it better when they at least put their human faces on for the public ...
Shocking as it was, the Collateral Murder video was nothing exceptional. It didn’t reveal any secret truth or grand conspiracy. The unfortunate fact is that this is just what war is like.
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.
100% agree on everything you said. I would just add that all this violence should be shown without any kind of censorship to (in this case) the american people at supper time. I wonder how fast the public opinion would change then...
Why report on, or even prevent war crimes? You can't help but commit war crimes, and you can't help but cover them up, even if your intentions were wonderful. What's important is that we're theoretically capable of holding people to account, even if in practice we're burning videotapes of torture.
Since I don't understand this, I will ask it here and maybe someone can give me a clear answer.
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.
This was the US government's appeal because the US lost at first instance. However Assange will now also have his own cross-appeal because even though he won at first instance, the court rejected all but one of his arguments.
Aside from that, it will go to the Court of Appeal and/or to the UK Supreme Court.
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.
The jury will be sequestered to avoid media influence. This is common practice in high-profile cases.
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.
I've seen "non peripheral issues" blocked by hostile judges in plenty of cases, especially cases when classified information comes into play. I hope you're right, but think the USA will make sure this is heard by a judge who will happily toe their line.
Almost 50% of Americans voted for Trump. Almost 50% did it again a second time.
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.
Trump's feelings could get hurt at some perceived slight at any moment, and he could suddenly turn his cult against Assange on a dime, just like he did with Netanyahu. Like if he got the idea in his fat head that Assange didn't do enough to help him overturn the election that he lost due to his own incompetence and corruption.
‘F*ck Him!’ Trump Reportedly Furious With Netanyahu Congratulating Biden, Hasn’t Spoken to Him Since
>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.”
Almost 50% of Americans voted for Biden. Almost 50% did it again a second time.
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 internet has predicted the imminent assassination of every prominent opposition politician, journalist and speaker for as long as I've been online and it's never happened. Glenn Greenwood is fine, Sy Hersh is fine, Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul are fine. Meanwhile Julian Assange was happy to have people believe the DNC leak came from Seth Rich despite knowing he got it from Russia.
They apparently plan to stick him in the court in East Virginia, which is effectively an intelligence court given the group of people who live in that region and the political bias. He will not receive a fair trial.
Exactly, with this relatively low support for extradition it would be surprising to see a jury conviction. And that's with abuse of the jury selection process, presumably in both directions.
I think it's a little silly to extrapolate from a general opinion poll to a trial result. An honest poll on this subject would result in about 99% "I don't know much of anything about him", and jury selection is intended to find people without a set opinion already.
>Will he be tried by a common jury or a military one? No way a common jury finds him guilty.
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.
there is no way he will ever be free. it's just 1 man vs multiple governments. US gov is in no rush to bring it to trial. they'll keep him in solitary to die waiting for a trial that will never come
If he does eventually leave UK, we should all pray he does actually appear in USA at some point. Lots of "enemies" just disappear.
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.
LOL. I've been waiting almost 9 years on a 120 day Speedy Trial. While you are 100% technically correct (minus COVID extensions), the defense team will need a bunch of extensions to go through everything and file motions. And that is where the delays will come from - the prosecutor and judge will make sure any motions take years to process and he'll languish in jail for infinity.
He won't get a bond either because of all the stuff that happened with the Bolivian Embassy.
Agreed. But "in front of a jury quickly" might be forensically a better idea than "wait in jail for years" while the prosecutor drags things out. [Edit: assuming that his team are confident in getting at least one vote to acquit from somebody angry]
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.
This is not the end of the world -- he has not been convicted of any crimes in the United States; there is just sufficient prima facie evidence to warrant extradition.
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.
I always compare this case with Pinochet, when he visited the UK and a Spanish court asked for his extradition for crimes against humanity. Of course, he wasn't and returned to Chile.
Legality of publishing leaked or stolen materials, is essential part of press freedom. So it will be an interesting case to watch to go through the US courts.
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.
There is a lot of "he will be killed" in this thread. I suppose that's not impossible, but it seems remarkably brazen for almost no real benefit to the government.
"Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks" [0] 26th September 2021
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.”
No, they just installed spy cameras in the embassy, hijacked the embassy's own surveillance system, tried to still Assange's kid's diapers to run a patpaternity test, all things that are apparently perfectly normal for the US to do on foreign soil.
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.
If Assange is transferred to US custody, there is a strong chance he will be killed (and possibly in a way that makes it look “accidental”). The CIA was actively planning for such scenarios in 2017: https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london...
"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
So here we go again... Number of journalists in jail reaches global high (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29495145) and United States would like to contribute to this high number...
The only difference between what Assange did and what "legitimate" journalists do is to publish embarrassing truths about those in power instead of uncritically publishing what the national security apparatus intentionally leaks.
Edit: yikes—you've been repeatedly posting a bunch of these flamewar comments. That's obviously a bannable offence on HN. Also, you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's also a line at which we ban accounts: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
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.
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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.
Surely he has some sort of a dead man's switch aka doomsday files that US doesn't want out there, there was something about encrypted 'insurance' files. I don't think US is doing it out of principle, they want to have a deal with him. Or maybe that data is no longer relevant or was a bluff to begin with.
> This is the message to would-be activists anywhere: Stay out of the big boy pool or we'll make you regret it.
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.
Assange knowingly became a front for a Russian disinformation op against the US. he was a factor in helping Putin bring the US to its darkest days politically. He also released a lot of important factual information Americans did not know. Both are true. One does not negate the other.
This is all entirely unsubstantiated. There is no evidence for any of this, and it's very blatantly misinformation and propaganda. It keeps getting repeated so frequently as to look like astroturfing.
What do you mean by the blackout of the Maxwell case? Do you mean that maxwell trial tracker was banned? That account was from a guy who isn’t at the trial heavily editorializing and frankly bullshitting and speculating about the case. You can see the sort of fabricated nonsense he’s posting on gab if you want. If Twitter is going after true, factual accounts of the trial I would be very interested to know that
Wait, if you don’t know who they are then how do you know they are “breathing, ideologically bent individuals” right before asking who they are?
What if instead they are ego fragile and angry at Assange for daring to challenge the unchallengeable order?
Or what if this is a case of banal evil?
I’m not suggesting any of qualities exist in the persons who are implicated in the question of “who.”
I do want to use this opportunity to point out that if you expect to find some quality in someone else you will find it, if it is truly there or even if it really isn’t. This is motivated reasoning and if not handled appropriately then it can backfire in very serious ways.
I hope this doesn’t come off as insulting. @the_optimist I’m not a saint, I’m not perfect. My only hope, selfishly, is to surface desirable qualities (open to truth vs motivated reasoning) and hope my friends and family will echo the desirable qualities back when I inevitably stray.
This is what the HN thread looked like last time. People were claiming the judge was corrupt, colluding with the Americans, and/or was herself deciding issues in a pre-determined way when she didn’t accept the “political crimes” argument from his defence after her very thorough analysis of the treaty. It was pretty awful, and that was a judgment that denied his extradition! The truth is the issues in this case are simply out of the realm of understanding of most people. There’s not much you can do.
The legal aspects may be hard to understand, and we may not precisely understand the underlying motivations of either Assange or the government, but the general dynamic is not hard to figure out. Assange spat in the face of the giant, and the law is now only an obstacle for the punishment they want to dole out. My country is throwing its weight around like a petulant bully.
I'm starting to accept that lies grease the gears of society somewhat, that we can't always live up to the ideals we propagandize about. Sometimes tricking people is the best way to get them to behave.
But I also think that the leaks themselves and the response to them show how far out of bounds our government is with its lies and liberties. The undermining of our diplomatic position began with our diplomacy, our military action. You can argue Assange released "too much", but that doesn't forgive the reaction.
I expect a government with some integrity would admit mistakes and do some house cleaning to regain the lost trust. Maybe I'm not following well enough, and there was some of that? But it seems to me like they went straight to trying to punish Assange with dirty tricks; no real admissions of guilt or plans to improve. That speaks to a pervasive lack of integrity, and so has undermined confidence in the fairness of these legal proceedings.
I don’t think you will see any real discussion on those points until it goes to trial. The case here barely touched on those things at all, and if that’s the entire frame you have, then you are missing that extradition is a matter of international relations over anything else. You’re talking about the US as “the government” but Assange and US are before the UK courts.
> they went straight to trying to punish Assange with dirty tricks… no plans to improve
I take “they” to mean the US, right?
> That speaks to a pervasive lack of integrity, and so has undermined confidence in the fairness of these legal proceedings.
The US’ “dirty tricks” somehow implicate the UK court system and the integrity of their judges? This is the exact illogical step I was referring to from the last thread. If you do not understand that the Americans are in a UK court, asking another sovereign power to let them have him, you should not be commenting on it at all. Even if you made the argument that the UK’s government employed dirty tricks too, you would be ignoring the fact that their democracy has an incredibly rigid separation between executive and judicial power. Your understanding has lumped together the American executive government with the UK judiciary, which would be a stunning display of ignorance were we not on the Orange Website, where it is just the usual amount of ignorance.
I'm ignorant of a lot of detail here (though not that the US is arguing to the UK for extradition) but let me explain: I'm lumping the US and UK together only to the extent that I think their intelligence services work together on things (they do) and their power/influence is kind of super-legal; it crosses borders and ignores laws. Dirty tricks would include having apparently fake rape charges made against him, also in a country that wasn't the US. When I said "these legal proceedings" I did mean everything, across jurisdictions, up to the point where the US gets their way and prosecutes him. I'm not saying the UK judge is complicit, but the outcome may still not be beyond influence.
While I'm not particularly sold on the shadowy organisation argument, what the majority of Americans want should be fairly irrelevant to a matter of British law.
One would presume that Americans want possible crimes against them to be tried in their courts, but the purpose of an extradition hearing is to determine whether what the other country wants is acceptable.
The entire US military and intelligence apparatus? If you want to know names, just look at the most senior people in the intelligence world. Good luck.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. You can't do "race and religion" (to use your euphemism) flamewar on this site.
> just to be clear, the perpetrators of those barbarous war crimes, and their superiors, never had to face justice.
This is the big one. I can totally see how Assange handled some of the data irresponsibly, and I can understand if he deserves a firm slap on the wrist for that. But they're asking for 175 years for this, while the war crimes he reported on go unpunished, and that is the real injustice here.
The US clearly doesn't care about war crimes anymore, but it does not tolerate criticism of crimes committed in service of the government.
Thanks for making that short summary for the people who have not followed the saga since the beginning. I believe wikileaks bother many/much more people (remember paypal and visa not taking donation for the site) but what you added is short and concise to put someone up to speed quickly.
He mentioned a single thing that Assange has done. That's not bringing people up to speed. Its disingenuous because its a more complicated situation than that one thing describes. And that statement stands whether a person supports him or is hell bent on seeing his life permanently ruined or ended.
Sure, it's more complicated, but that the basic truth. That's why everything stated. Then people can dig all the details and the 10 years of twist and turns.
Its a tiny part of the basic truth that leaves out any criticism of Assange. It doesn't entirely revolve around the leaking of a single video of a US helicopter killing civilians.
There is absolutely tons of justified criticism of Assange. And there are tons more details about the crimes he reported on. But going into all of that requires a massive article that doesn't fit into a short comment; this stuff is documented elsewhere.
Despite all of Assange's many flaws, it boils down to this: he reported on war crimes, those crimes go unpunished and uninvestigated, but the US wants to punish Assange, severely, despite the fact that he is not American and never even set foot there.
War crimes would generally refer to breaching international treaty and/or conventions.
The "Patriot" Act rebranded torture/abduction so as to not fall foul of these. "Advanced interrogation techniques" ....
> War crimes would generally refer to breaching international treaty and/or conventions
Understood. But there are international laws and conventions with no binding effect, and there are those ratified and incorporated into the domestic bodies of law of its members. I’m curious if Assange’s allegations are in respect of the former or the latter.
> (a) Offense.—
Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.
> (b) Circumstances.—
The circumstances referred to in subsection (a) are that the person committing such war crime or the victim of such war crime is a member of the Armed Forces of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act).
> (c) Definition.—As used in this section the term “war crime” means any conduct—
(1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party;
(2) prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907;
(3) which constitutes a grave breach of common Article 3 (as defined in subsection (d)) when committed in the context of and in association with an armed conflict not of an international character; or
(4) of a person who, in relation to an armed conflict and contrary to the provisions of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended at Geneva on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II as amended on 3 May 1996), when the United States is a party to such Protocol, willfully kills or causes serious injury to civilians.
If a terrorist is hiding amongst civilians and is engaged, is the collateral damage a war crime? If an operator attacks someone she believes to be a terrorist in a war zone but ends up being civilian is it a war crime?
There are not easy questions to answer when you consider the difficulties of operating in war. Many times, people in those situations are moving on incomplete or even incorrect information and lives of their fellow soldiers hang in the balance. It’s easy to look back at hindsight and judge it harshly but in the moment, put yourselves in their shoes, what would you have done?
Assange reported on information. That's what journalists do. Hillary sabotaged her own campaign by the actions she/her team/the DNC took. You can't put the blame on the journalist.
No, it refers entirely to the despicable sentiment expressed above by 'seoaeu. Once upon a time Americans would have pretended to value speech and journalism enough to feign concern at the prospect of vote-for-every-war chickenhawks assassinating a news editor via remote deathdrone just to distract from and cease reporting of their own crimes. Many Americans no longer pretend to value freedom: the masks are coming off.
That loathsome comment wasn't even [flagged]! Good grief.
That war hawk has been openly calling for Assange to "answer for what he's done" for years; ever since he showed people just how bought she is with her own campaign manager's emails.
And on this "who has lied more" chart, we can see Hillary is up there in the hundred of verified lies area, while Assange and Wikileaks are on 0 verified lies.
Having hidden agendas and hidden organizations is an act of War and government officials should be dealt with the harshest sanction for the crime of Treason to Humanity. I'm not even trolling, and I'm not even started.
The histrionics, conspiracy theories and outright lies in this thread are outrageous. The US justice system is not the same as despotic countries like Russia or China.
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.
Reality Winner and Manning are American citizens. Assange is not.
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?
>"What "games" would YOU play to get out of being extradited to a foreign country for crimes of publishing factual information?"
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
> Are foreigners allowed to hack military networks in your country?
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.
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.
Why would he do any time at all? Because the people who actually should be doing time are the people in power so they are somehow immune?
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.
A whole paragraph dedicated to how anonymous internet commenters could be fake spin delivery vehicles, then the suggestion that Assange has been charged with "a relatively minor criminal offence", completely eliding a bunch of politically-motivated now-dismissed sexual assault charges that were the actual impetus for him to hide in a foreign embassy for years.
It'd be one thing if he was hiding from a "5 year max" charge of "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers", but despite your comment clearly implying that this was the case, it's not.
I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor, but what a weird coincidence.
> "completely eliding a bunch of politically-motivated now-dismissed sexual assault charges that were the actual impetus for him to hide in a foreign embassy for years"
Isn't this the total opposite of what Assange and his supporters were saying? He was claiming that we wasn't avoiding the sexual offence EAW, but hiding in the embassy because of the US indictment, to which the Swedish allegations were (he claimed) somehow connected.
The evidence revealed during the US case has basically shown that the Obama DOJ in fact had decided against prosecuting him, so at the time this UK->Sweden->USA scheme could never have happened because there wasn't, at that point, a US indictment (ignoring that fact it made no sense when he could have always simply gone UK->USA).
Yep. The Assange story that he was totally willing to answer to the rape charges but had to flee to a country that wouldn't extradite him to the US for something else isn't really helped by him being extradited by the "safe" country for charges filed years later after a change of government. I'm not convinced of the merits of the DOJ case against Assange either technically or politically, but its notable how many other people publicly known to have been involved in the dissemination of the Collateral Murder video have continued to do investigative journalism without having charges of any sort filed against them, never mind two separate Wikileaks supporters accusing them of sex offences ...
Julian Assange getting away with his sexual assault of a woman due to his politics is very reminiscent of how Donald Trump avoids blame for his sexual crimes through the lens of politics. Very smart tool to ensure you can never be guilty of anything and your supporters will deny any wrongdoing as politically motivated. It's no surprise that Assanage and Trumps people communicated and coordinated, as these devious tactics sure look familiar.
Reminds me of Assange's "Seth Rich" gamble, how he supercharged a heinous conspiracy theory on behalf of fake news purely to earn political approval and gain loyalty from folks who, like you, will not do their homework to validate the claims they make.
>It'd be one thing if he was hiding from the charge "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers", but despite your comment clearly implying that this was the case, it's not.
Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related. It's a red herring for you to bring it up, and I think either evidence of ignorance (you thought the US was extraditing him for his sexual crimes in Sweden ...?) or malfeasance (you know it was espionage, but you brought this up to muddy the waters intentionally).
>I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor, but what a weird coincidence.
It's always cute when people try to repeat your lines back to you as a weak "gotcha" but completely fail. You're not going to make that accusation because I'm obviously not.
I will accuse you of being a victim of fake news and implicit supporter of sexual violence though.
>Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related [...] I think either evidence of ignorance (you thought the US was extraditing him for his sexual crimes in Sweden ...?) or malfeasance (you know it was espionage, but you brought this up to muddy the waters intentionally).
No, that's not true. It's easily shown that Assange's first charges were laid in Sweden in November 2010 [0]. He was granted political asylum in Ecuador's British embassy precisely because it was so clear that the charges weren't about sexual assault but rather about his involvement in leaking things. The Yanks were still investigating him at this time [1][2], and didn't lay charges until years afterwards [3], in 2018.
Since you've accused me of being a victim of fake news, I assume you've got the Real Truth hidden away. You've got actual reasons to claim the things you've claimed, which AFAICT are just lies, right? You're not just muddying the waters intentionally?
> Julian Assange getting away with his sexual assault of a woman due to his politics
This is far from an accurate representation of the events. You seem consistently misinformed on key points. Perhaps you should do some more research before spreading that misinformation further.
> Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related. It's a red herring for you to bring it up,
You are the one who brought it up. Assange faces up to 5 years for the "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash" and up to 170 years for the crimes he is being charged with under the espionage act.
> I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor,
Then don't bring it up, it doesn't add to the discussion.
> he is charged with a relatively minor criminal offense stemming from his assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers
That was only the first charge he was indicted on.
> Imagine hiding from a 5 year max sentence for 10 years.
Assange currently faces up to 170 years in prison.
He was hiding from a one of the worlds largest perpetrators of targeted assassination, one which we know has debated assassinating him at its highest levels.
> As for Reality, she really could not have transitioned in Russia and China regardless of prison, that was the point you missed.
You seem to be confused. Reality Winner did not change genders and was not working for the military when she leaked documents to the Intercept.
> I do think that the idea of classification and state secrets have merit
Just because there is merit to the idea doesn't mean that everything that gets classified deserves that classification, nor does it mean that the government doesn't use that classification infrastructure to hide things that the American public needs to know about. The prosecution of Assange absolutely represents an unacceptable expansion of the USA'a ability to suppress such information.
I’m from the US and from my perspective he’s certainly an enemy of my country and working to undermine it. A country cannot function if nameless underlings do not carry out the agenda set forth by the elected and appointed people in charge. There are many problems with entrenched bureaucracy but having secrets leaked weakens American power and our government’s ability to handle the problems we face. If you see mudge’s talk about him from way back when, the grudge he holds against the US may be just over funding research. Inciting and assisting Americans who have sworn to protect our secrets to leak them is something I think needs to be stopped as a National security threat. There are a lot of disingenuous comparisons calling this guy a journalist, he’s a lot more than that. Assange is a former hacker and professor and present day activist. Undeniably bright and I respect his technical skills but he’s working against the United States. I’ll say this, though, he’s probably the most trustworthy journalist that walks the earth, sadly
The problem is not that he's an enemy of US government interests. Sure he is. The problem is the hypocrisy. The US claims moral superiority, advocates for the non-persecution of journalists, free speech, rule of law and judicial due process, "democracy" etc. in other countries, but it's all lies and hypocrisy. The US criticizes "authoritarian regimes" like Russia in cases like Navalny, whereas the US is no different in treating those it deems to be enemies of the state.
Please show me any country on this earth that doesn’t have its share of hypocrisy. I cannot think of a single one. I know and agree that the US is hypocritical but abusing the law to get a guy who’s inciting American security personnel to break their oaths is not the same as poisoning a citizen of the same country for disagreeing over politics and it’s disingenuous of you to equate that. Just as many China boosters here are trying to equate Assange’s treatment with concentration camps for millions of people
American “democracy” is a facade and none of these people work for you. They think of you as livestock. There isn’t any hope of this changing without challenging our corrupt government.
If you love America then why would you allow brazen warmongers to put us trillions in debt, profiting immensely while doing so? Do you have any idea how far America's international reputation has fallen? Do you have any conception of the debt that has been incurred in the name of the American taxpayer? Do the lives of millions of dead and tens of millions of displaced people around the world mean nothing to you?
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.
I don’t see what Assange really showed me that I didn’t know from reading most anything else before his leaks. Your post is highly politically motivated, I’m not emotional about this, just thinking rationally. I agree that the US has overextended its military and is involved in a lot of conflicts and operations that seem very irrelevant and poorly reasoned. I want a revamp of the military industrial complex and a change to entrenched, unaccountable bureaucracy. I don’t think any of those things have anything to do with Assange however, and I don’t see any connection between them
>> I agree that the US has overextended its military and is involved in a lot of conflicts and operations that seem very irrelevant and poorly reasoned
translation : killed a lot of innocent people. Men, Women and Children.
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.