He is being punished, tortured really for this “crime”.
He has been endlessly and baselessly slandered. All that alleged bad behaviour while he was imprisoned in the embassy ... funny how there’s been no footage of it, despite the fact that he was under 24/7 surveillance!
And these rape charges, clearly also designed to tarnish his name, now finally exposed as a fiasco.
Many newspapers had huge scoops thanks to Wikileaks, but have now turned on them. A particularly striking example is the supposedly liberal Guardian.
Journalists everywhere should be afraid as this sets a dangerous precedent for all of them.
Though O'Hagan is sympathetic in many ways he doesn't sugarcoat anything, and I came away with the impression that Assange is the author of a great deal of his own woes. (Among other things, much of the account involves Assange lying pretty incessantly, even to his closest allies about petty dramas, so I now find it hard to take anything he's said at face value.)
[0] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n05/andrew-o-hagan/ghost...
----
Edit to add: there's a quoted exchange in the account, which now springs to mind every time I hear about Assange.
> There are few subjects on which Julian would be reluctant to take what you might call a paternalistic position, but over Snowden, whom he’s never met but has chatted with and feels largely responsible for, he expressed a kind of irritable admiration. "Just how good is he?" I asked.
> "He’s number nine," he said.
> "In the world? Among computer hackers? And where are you?"
> "I’m number three."
But, I think this is kind of hard to swallow at this point. I know you respond to someone else comment, and not directly to the story. But in this light i think it is not time to discuss if Assange lied at some point. The man deserves a fair trial, and some nobel prizes for the good stuff he did. Before Wikileaks we were some tin-foil hat /r/conspiracy readers. And now "deep state" a term you find in the MSM. Big progress necessary on the way to fix this mess, yet Assange's life got destroyed in the process.
Wow, he has a high opinion of himself! That's just terrible. Horrible. Only the humble and the meek are worthy of support when they're persecuted.
My uncle is a general in the Air Force, all three of my grandfathers fought in WW2 (my Dad's biological father was killed by a drunk driver when he was 7), etc etc. I have pictures of my grandfather standing under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris with the tank squad he commanded.
Wikileaks helped change my mind quite a bit. Among the many things they published, there was one video that really stood out: POV camera from a apache as the pilot releases a missile into a group of civilians that included a number of journalists. Things like this couldn't be ignored, because of Wikileaks record. You couldn't start off down a path of rationalizing, etc. They made you face up to the ground-level reality.
I still support and appreciate the people who serve in our armed forces, but thanks to Wikileaks I have a much more nuanced,skeptical, and (I believe) more appropriate view.
The news media has consciously hidden and censored the ground level reality of war since Vietnam, where they made the mistake of showing families the graphic ground level realities of war in color while they ate TV dinners in their living rooms. This created what was perhaps the greatest anti war sentiment in US history -- it was not sustainable. Meanwhile Hollywood perpetually pushed out war and action movies glorifying violence while also censoring the disgusting reality of it.
To see the people responsible for getting that out - something that should never have been kept secret - imprisoned and hunted across the world has only confirmed those views.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airst...
Reading the Wikipedia entry seems to indicate the Apache’s has reason to believe they were hostile forces. Indeed, some of the men with the journalists had weapons and were in the same spot as harassing fire had come from earlier.
It made even one involved soldier to speak out: https://www.wired.com/2011/04/ethan-mccord/
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/san-francisco-tech-assange...
For example:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/why-did-wikileaks-hel...
Say I put up a website that every day posted a story about a Jewish person who had been convicted of a financial crime. Say I promoted this site and built up a fan base. If every story was 100% true, nothing but real convictions.
Would you say this is an honest, faultless website?
If we saw that this number was appreciably higher than 2%, then we could immediately draw the conclusion that the justice system in this country is biased against Jews, right?
(This would be just like we do in the case of blacks when it comes to "more dangerous" crimes like assault, armed robbery, rape, and murder.)
See what the west here does to stop rather similar practices of which Assange happens to be at the receiving end? Very little. We let him die, and I include myself into "we". This is just abhorrent. And it seems we dont even know what to point our anger to, the US govt? The UK? The fucking-were-so-enlightended Swedish govt? Any (western) govt that fails to stand up for him?
To stay in xmas spirit: Assange is the modern day Jesus of reporting dying for our freedom and our right te be informed of our sick and twisted govts.
I'm angry now.
Psychological projection can be contagious, when used with blame: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intense-emotions-and...
There wouldn’t be. It’s an embassy. The met aren’t daft enough to do anything other than watch the front door.
https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/09/25/inenglish/1569384196_65...
> After the installation of new video cameras at the beginning of December 2017, Morales requested that his technicians install an external streaming access point in the same area so that all of the recordings could be accessed instantly by the United States. To do this, he requested three channels for access: “one for Ecuador, another for us and another for X,” according to mails sent at the time to his colleagues. When one of the technicians asked to contact “the Americans” to explain the way that they should access some of the spying systems installed in the embassy, Morales would always be evasive with his answers.
> Morales ordered his workers to install microphones in the embassy’s fire extinguishers and also in the women’s bathroom, where Assange’s lawyers, including the Spaniard Aitor Martínez and his closest collaborators, would meet for fear of being spied on.
How about this bullshit Steve Jobs AIDS diagnosis?
https://file.wikileaks.org/file/steve-jobs-hiv/steve-jobs-hi...
https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_purported_HIV_medical_...
Wikileaks explicitly noted:
> Due to the contradictory dates, possible evidence of forgery, strong motivations for fabrication, and few motivations for a legitimate revelation, the images should not be taken at face value.
Using Wayback machine, I can confirm that this text was associated with these images from the first moment that they were published on Wikileaks.
Also, HIV isn't AIDS and you should keep that in mind.
It’s hard to verify he deleted it because his Twitter account has been deactivated. Just found it interesting because I think his original tweet was accurate but it was strange that he backtracked.
Refusing to ever retract anything either means they're literally perfect. Fuck the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, Al Jareeza and every other news organisation that has ever existed.
Or they refuse to retract ever, despite sometimes making mistakes.
We - informed internet users, not just journalists - should be very worried about his treatment and try to act to support him and Wikileaks. If you can't act yourself, do consider donating:
https://defend.wikileaks.org/donate/
(there might be other relevant avenues of donating, this is one of them)
There's a Norwegian conservative newspaper who (somehow) got access to all the cable gate documents [1], and benefited tremendously on it - but now won't speak up about how Julian Assange is being treated.
(Sorry about the norwegian news article)
[1] https://finansavisen.no/nyheter/politikk/2010/12/aftenposten...
Speaking truth to power is something the corporate-owned fourth estate no longer engages in, and instead discards civil discourse and individuals with integrity because reality is inconvenient compared to fanning the flames with phony-outrage clickbait, replacing it with corporate-led fascism and intolerance masquerading as liberalism. Here are just some of the heroes of freedom:
- Phil Donahue (completely gave up a promising career)
- Jesse Ventura
- Cenk Uyghur *
- Chris Hedges
- Julian Assange
- Chelsea Manning
- Aaron Schwartz
- John Kiriakou *
- Daniel Ellsberg *
- Gary Webb
- Robert Parry *
- Max Blumenthal *
- Aaron Maté *
- Lee Camp *
- Jeremy Scahill *
- Glenn Greenwald *
* The few, lucky ones
I haven’t really been following this a whole lot, but as I understand it, the US wants him extradited because his platform was used to leak sensible information that put American soldiers in danger. But why is that a thing when it isn’t for other platforms? I mean, twitter, Facebook and YouTube have all been used as effective recruitment platforms for various Islamic terror organisations. That would have put American lives in danger as well.
Most of the people in this group were Democrats or otherwise on the Left. They cheered WikiLeaks and loved that it was exposing the abuses of a group they didn't like.
Fast forward to 2016, and WikiLeaks begins publishing damaging information related to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The same people who cheered WikiLeaks as it published very damaging information about the US Military now condemned it because it was targeting someone they actually supported.
This was a major moment of clarity and realization for me. It showed me that those who are quick to use ideals to defend their positions ("freedom of information is good, it exposes the US' crimes!") will just as quickly discard those ideals when they stop working in their own interest ("WikiLeaks should not be publishing damaging information about Clinton!").
I was disgusted, because these people were so quick to use a moralistic position built upon high ideals to attack the US but they were themselves absolutely bereft of a true commitment to ideals. Within a few weeks the group's attitude on WikiLeaks shifted from gratitude and respect to hatred.
When I pointed this out, I was kicked out of the group.
I think your expectations of some random FB group were a bit too high in the first place.
People sided with him because they believed he was impartial, and turned away from him when it was clear he wasn't.
"Wikileaks honcho Julian Assange told Andy Greenberg at Forbes that he was in possession of a trove of documents that "could take down a bank or two." The documents wouldn't necessarily show illegality but they would reveal an "ecosystem of corruption" at one of the biggest banks in the United States. Wikileaks would release it "early next year." "
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Claims_of_upcoming...
TBH, this bit in particular of wikileaks has always felt really scummy/sketchy to me. If you have the docs and have verified them and believe they are journalistically important then release them without delay. In every other scenario, why are you talking about them publicly?
Still, it's certainly better to limit such claims and it does feel a bit sketchy when they don't eventually publish something.
I want to remind us that rarely do enough credible (according to some formal and stringent definition) evidences exist for a given topic for an observer to make a conclusion with the kind of confidence we often display while remonstrating on these issues.
Specifically: it is naive to adopt a conclusive tone involving a person without liberty for over a decade, and possibly undergoing forms of punishment without due trial. I suspect not one of us here is trained enough in Law and have access to enough TRUE information to come to a judgment. If so, we are guilty of engaging in and spreading careless commentaries made about a case that combines possible human rights violation (its abundance in current time does not make this any less serious of a concern) with possible government interference in defining what constitutes journalism.
I want to leave you with this last thought - in majority cases in history, it has been profitable for the public to challenge the government on its policies, rather than to trust in its foresightedness and integrity.
And then expected the UK gov to keep him at a psychiatric ward as he seems a little unstable which they could embellish.
Did not expect him to still be in Belmarsh.
The UK spent 10s of millions on policing costs monitoring abscondment.
It is entirely right that he is serving a sentence as for reasons of deterrence.
They didn't have to. The fact they chose to throw ridiculous amount of money away besieging some guy because US dislikes him, is on them, not on Assange.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say "ill health".
My 2c
For the torture part, which is not news, please see The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture: https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...
Primary Source for the cited open letter https://medium.com/@doctors4assange/concerns-of-medical-doct...
There have been photos leaked by another person showing Assange looking relaxed interacting with other inmates. The leaker claimed that Assange was popular among the other prisoners.
In fact, Nils Melzer himself has confirmed Assange is not in solitary, but is apparently being "tortured" for other reasons. It is not clear why these reasons don't apply to every other prisoner on remand in Belmarsh.
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...
The horrors of physical violence are not often understood by keyboard heros who feel superior within their bubble of close nit computer expert friends. But as soon as things become bloody, the skillset requirements drastically change. This happens to blackmarket vendors too. They get lured into some AFK situation and quickly become victims of much less smart, yet truly hardened criminals.
Good luck hacking your way out of that.
Julian will (most likely, I have 0 contact with him) be in a most awful place with the whole "legally" allowed shit storm hitting him where it hurts. Not a place where smart skinny people flourish.
... kind of like Guantanamo.
Assange and his attorneys have, from day one, done everything possible to extend the process; there is nothing coincidental about the result.
> ... kind of like Guantanamo.
Guantanamo is a whole different problem, where people have actually received all the process there is, been determined to be innocent or not even subject to a y charges, and are still detained.
Is it:
1. Bruce Jenner won his gold medal in the Men’s Decathlon at the 1976 Olympics.
2. Bruce Jenner won her gold medal in the Men’s Decathlon at the 1976 Olympics.
3. Caitlyn Jenner won her gold medal in the Men’s Decathlon at the 1976 Olympics.
Side note: someone who goes by she/her pronouns could enter the Men's Decathlon as they don't use pronouns to determine eligibility.
So, sentence three is the most polite, but depending on the subject of the article, you may need to offer context at the top or in a footnote.
I would say there's certainly no harm in using the current pronouns
Completely different from Facebook, Google, Twitter etc where they merely provide a platform for others to upload content and aren't actively involved in sourcing illegal content.
Also, I'm curious, where is the line between investigative journalism and criminal disclosure of information?
The question you should be asking is why Assange and not journalists in NYT, Guardian etc. who published what Assange provided?
The answer is that charges against Assange are not about publishing secret information. Charges are Assange actively helping to get that information. That's illegal. Journalist should never get actively involved getting the secret information.
That's a problem given the importance of investigative journalism - which by its very nature may require breaking laws to get the goods. For example, the "ag-gag" laws in states with strong farm lobbies that make it effectively illegal to report on animal welfare issues because any honest attempt at investigating reports will necessarily mean breaking farmers' recent "privacy" laws.
Torturing even a guilty person is not acceptable. Torturing an innocent one is presumably less so.
Governments still have control over Facebook and Google. They don't like WikiLeaks because they cannot control it. But it's still a good point though; I think Google and Facebook do much more harm to American citizens than WikiLeaks ever could.
It's just that with Google and Facebook, it's less obvious because the bad is mixed in with the good.
He literally provided evidence of mainstream media being highly impartial in favor of Clinton (against Sanders and Trump). If people cared about impartiality, they’d be on Wikileaks side here.
And indeed he does. Some time ago Wikileaks/Assange distributed an encrypted insurance file. The torrent is about 90GB: https://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/2016-06-03_insurance.aes2...
There was actually multiple versions fo this file, each larger than the previous one. This is the most recent version afaik.
It's likely this particular dead man's switch is actually trusted people though.
Fairly recent article with background https://heavy.com/news/2019/04/julian-assange-dead-mans-swit...
John Podesta and Hillary Clinton's emails allegedly found its way to Wikileaks through this path.
While I don't know, I would be very surprised if Wikileaks itself wasn't sitting on more than enough information to create such a dent. It seems things are effectively at a cross between stalemate and a Mexican standoff. Poor health is better than death, I guess?
It's very sad. If I was told all the details about the sequence of events, but not told which countries were behind the subsequent response, treatment and current conditions, I would not correctly guess on the first try, and probably not the second, or the third...
That doesn't mean that there hasn't been a coordinated campaign of character attack and punishment for revealing uncomfortable truths against him. Nor does it mean that he is deserving of what has happened
[1] https://www.snopes.com/2019/02/01/snopes-fb-partnership-ends...
As for the subtext of your message, you seem to be doubtful that the justice system is biased black people. I have no doubt you are a smart person, so it baffles me why on a post about how complex issues need a broad and nuanced understanding you'd take this simple-minded sarcastic swipe.
You appear to think that the social justice issue was determined simply based on the fact the black people are incarcerated at a higher rate than the general population, and political correctness demands that it be attributed to judicial bias. There is a lot of research supporting this bias; it isn't just a PC justification.
Furthermore, announcing leaks gives the orgs being leaked on time to get their story straight and destroy evidence, so I'm really skeptical that announcing leaks like that is the responsible course of action.
What makes you so sure of this?
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture (and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment) visited Mr. Assange with a medical team and then wrote an appeal to the UK Government. The UK government should react with a prompt and impartial investigation. They did not do that. The did not even answer the question of the United Nations Special Rapporteur.
That by itself, no matter if Mr. Assange was subjected to torture, is non compliance with international rules.
Given Brexit this level of "we do not care about international rules and we do not accept the UN as an authority" is unsurprising. IMHO a western nation like the UK ignoring a member of the OHCHR is very worrisome. It shows that the UK government has little interest to participate in the trend towards "good governance".
This is blatant antisemitism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatr...
[0] So we're told by noted perjurer (it's OK because he's good) DNI James Clapper!
Sorry they are nothing more than a propaganda machine of Russia at this point.
They went political in the last election choosing to keep GOP documents silenced and release the DNC data.
I have no issue if Wikileaks wasn’t playing political games. But they are.....
Please, no conspiracy theories.
It's obvious what's going on here, nevermind the "see nothing hear nothing" attitude that's on display.
How many others were as high profile? The law has to be seen to be enforced.
Good quality newspapers tend to separate reporting and editorials/opinion fairly clearly, but have always contained both. It is also wholly common for newspapers to endorse candidates for high political office within the editorial context.
It is a matter of record that newspapers and magazines endorsed Clinton over other candidates by a massive margin in the 2016 elections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
I don't know where the idea that the news media is supposed to be a purely-objective fact source comes from, to be honest. This seems to be some kind of straw man.
The charge against Wikileaks, such as it is, is that while the material disclosed might be verbatim, it is obviously still subject to the editorial decisions of its leadership about which material to seek out and to disclose.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wikileaks-dnc-and-cnn-col...
What WikiLeaks revealed was the extent of this bias. If what the mainstream news networks and their executives are doing is acceptable, then what's the problem with WikiLeaks revealing it? The problem is that opponents of the Right understand how damaging it is to the image of the mainstream news networks - which shape the opinion of tens of millions in America and across the world - for the people to understand just how biased they really are.
I didn’t think it was some great revelation about the US military.
Then firing on the dad who stopped his car to try to help the civilians injured by our strike, killing him and injuring his kids? Yeah, I had no idea that medical assistance was no longer considered protected in war.
Made his bed and now has to lie in it.
> "...although Assange was not being held in solitary confinement at HMP Belmarsh..."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/julian-assan...
A good question is whether he needs to be held in a maximum security facility. He's a bail flight risk, but is he an escape risk? I would think he's at most a moderate escape risk (has some capabilities and has shown his contempt for the legal system previously) and would be fine in something less than maximum security (so long as protective custody could be maintained).
I do know Assange has a competent legal team that would fight his being held in maximum security if Assange wanted them too. I wonder why he hasn't instructed them to do so.
They also said "like him or not". Not everyone likes the outcome of his leaks. Many do. Many like some, but not others. Regardless, he's had a major impact on politics based on very true information Wikileaks has made available to the public.
If the Ashley Madison password leakers were helping expose corruption in the government, I'm sure some would view them as folk heroes too.
To theorists chaos is destruction (of their precious models). To practitioners chaos is a ladder. Those with real Skin In the Game.
Economist vs. Trader.
And as has been pointed out the Podesta emails were taken through a phishing email which was sent to thousands of people (so it wasn't spear phishing) and which he foolishly fell for.
HMPS are solely responsible for the conditions in which somebody is held, the legal team can do nothing for him.
There's two aspects to the time stamps. One is that based on the time stamps, the emails were all copied on Nov 7 2016 at rates of up to 49.1 megabytes per second.* This is fairly high for internet transfers. The other aspect is that the last modified timestamps of all emails and attachments were quantized to a 2 second granularity. This means this was not a hacked internet server to server transfer but was a copy to an intermediary drive that was formatted with the old FAT format.
The forensics show it wasn't a hack. No one competent in security or forensics would honestly come to that conclusion based on what is known. When coupled with Murray's testimony that he personally couriered the emails from a park near American University in DC back to Assange himself, it's curious Murray has not been subpoenaed to name the leaker, also it's curious the FBI had no interest in inspecting the DNC servers or drives.
* The wikipedia article deceptively misrepresents this as 49.1 megabits per second. Both its own sources explicitly say megabytes, and this is confirmable by examining the original data, which anyone competent can easily do themselves if they have doubts.
The veteran members of the intelligence community, including NSA whistleblower William Binney, analyzed a set of DNC emails released by Guccifer 2.0 which consisted of 1,976 megabytes of data that were downloaded or copied over a period of 87 seconds on July 5 2016.
https://www.salon.com/2017/08/15/what-if-the-dnc-russian-hac...
I don't have that original leak and therefore can not verify their claims.
Being in the company of armed men who aren’t friendly forces while US forces are under fire in close proximity seems like a bad idea as well t wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume you are hostile forces.
And as for the ambulance - “The van had no visible markings to suggest it was an ambulance or a protected vehicle”
I'd be curious how close the proximity was. What I've read indicated that somewhere in that region, and somewhere earlier in the day, they had been under fire. If US forces were under fire in that area recently, it seems like it'd make sense for the journalists to bring security with them.
> “The van had no visible markings to suggest it was an ambulance or a protected vehicle”
Sure, but you can see that all they were doing was collecting the injured.
From the Wikipedia article it seems to state that the armed men were in an area where shooting had come from before and were in the path of oncoming soldiers.
And in terms of loading injured people, the enemy does pick up their own injured. My understanding is unless you’re clearly marked as medical personnel, you’ll be regarded as hostile.
Can clearly see where the concern comes from, but at least my own perspective is that it’s not that unusual in war.
One doesn't always want to be known as the source of information, for a variety of reasons.
> "Also, I'm curious, where is the line between investigative journalism and criminal disclosure of information?"
Can depend on the jurisdiction and one's own perspective. The "ethical dilemmas" section of this Wikipedia article on ethics in journalism provides a taste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/julian-assan...
Try to keep up!
I have zero sympathies for the guy. His intentions might have been honorable, but when you play with fire, you are bound to get burned.
Citizenship and postal address are irrelevant. If you break the law in another country and there is an extradition treaty then you will face the consequences.
That's not how laws work. Laws are limited in territorial applicability only to the extent that the sovereign adopting them so limit them, and basically no government would fail to hold foreign coconspirators in a crime occuring within their domestic jurisdiction immune to prosecution (some might not have the practical means to bring such an actor to justice, and some might not choose to apply them in most cases as a matter of policy priorities, but that's a different issue.)
Aiding and abetting.
Assange is in jail because his lawyers are challenging the US extradition request and there is legal process going on.
There is no evidence of him being tortured. He seems to have mental problems. People getting mentally ill in jails is very common.
[1]: https://semanticscholar.org/paper/8f8fbb6bd68357311bb82e48a8...
[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/hellhole
[3]: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/appsych/opus/issues/2015/spring/co...
It seems that John Shipton (father of Assange) used therm solitary confinement to describe situation where Assange's access to outside is limited to his lawyers and family.
I thing Assage is currently in the the prison’s medical ward.
* Sometimes individuals must break the law for greater good. This is called civil disobedience, or civil resistance.
* Just because one is breaking the law for common good, civil servants can't and should not be expected to stop enforcing the law. If you allow that, it's the end of the rule of law based society. The whole idea of just society is that you restrict what individuals in the government can do.
If you decide that civil disobedience is the way and you break the law, you should not ask to be treated differently under the law. Political pardons exist for a reason.
(I'm not taking position on the legality of actions Assage took, or justification of his actions. I'm arguing general principle.)
Breaking a law you otherwise believe in, in the service of some broader goal, is called direct action, riot, or terrorism, depending on the severity of the law broken, and/or the sympathies of the person describing it.
> In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
You won't consciously break a law that you believe in. "otherwise believe" means that you don't believe in the law.
Except there weren't. The attachment of authoritarians to the rule of law is merely a posture. They set it aside whenever it suits them to. They could set it aside in this case.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/03/katharine-gun-...
In general, criminal law permits but does not mandate prosecution and every prosecution is a judgement about not only the law but policy priorities. This argument is almost completely vacuous where it concerns offenses primarily against the state (it has some weight in equal protection terms when there are victims besides the state and the issue is whether the state is discriminating among victims on improper grounds in the manner in which it chooses to prosecute or not prosecute offenses against them.)
A group of judges met behind closed doors to discuss the incident involving Judge Patricia Curtin and concluded that she "intended eventually to give it back."
This is apparently part of a much larger pattern of "unequal protection under the law" in Massachusetts:
It was an immoral act done as far as I can tell, for immoral purposes, which were successfully attained. That it was also illegal is why it can be punished rather than merely pointed to as the kind of thing that must be tolerated despite its immorality.
The argument has, however, been made that the law as it is prohibits some other acts that are not so immoral and it could not effectively address what Assange did without so doing, and so it should be narrowed (or treated as more narrow by the executive) so as to let Assange go free in order to not chill more legitimate acts. This is, IMO, a not entirely unreasonable argument that I can respect, though I am unconvinced by it as yet.
The immoral purpose of letting the people know of the crimes that the US army has committed?
1. Assange helped reveal severe wrongdoings by various governments.
2. Assange engaged in unprotected sexual activity with two women that violated the scope of their consent, because they only consented to protected sex, and also because one woman was asleep in one case. This would have also been illegal in the UK.
3. No prosecution would have been attempted if Assange has not already made political enemies.
4. Russia made hay while the sun was shining by using Assange as a conduit to publish dirt they wanted published.
5. Assange definitely and unambiguously broke UK law by fleeing to the Ecuadorean embassy.
6. The fact that the UK would not allow Assange to depart the Ecuadorian embassy was condemned by the UN as indefinite detention without trial.
7. The current condition of Assange is really suspicious and makes the UK look bad.
(Which of these are actually true is for someone more qualified than I am, but they are all compatible.)
> «He continues to be detained under oppressive conditions of isolation and surveillance, not justified by his detention status,” said Melzer
Melzer fairly clearly states that he believes there is credible evidence that Assange has been subjected to psychological torture.
>Although Mr. Assange is not being held in solitary confinement, Mr. Melzer said he was gravely concerned over the limited frequency and duration of lawyers’ visits and lack of access to case files, which make it impossible to prepare and adequate defense.
sources:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/05/1039581
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...
Clearly I was gay while doing stuff online on a Saudi Arabian server.
Extradition is covered by a patchwork of treaties and laws most of which involve some kind of human judgement as well.
One core concept of extradition is the crime has to be, at least in broad strokes, illegal in both jurisdictions.
The crime in question also has to have some reasonable argument of jurisdiction for the requesting state. You might have been gay while buying things from an SA company, but you weren't doing anything in an interaction with SA that had anything to do with being gay. (The first dual criminality concept protects you way before having to think about this). It is also often the case that countries are reluctant or outright refuse to extradite their own citizens and choose to try them in court locally.
Assange wouldn't be protected by either of these. Conspiring to take classified military secrets with a member of the military in question would be illegal everywhere. As would participating in the taking and the following distribution.
The legal questions for Assange are "did he do those things, guiding, requesting, and helping Manning acquire and send the classified information?" "Do the first amendment protections of free speech and free press cover WikiLeaks model?" and "Would Assange receive a fair trial and just punishment if extradited?"
But in general, questions of jurisdiction are complicated. They're settled by courts, not by what people say on the internet.
Assange isn’t being accused of things that are criminal in the UK.
> The Justice Minister has, however, told the Dáil that he won’t extradite anyone who may be put to death for their crime.
More generally, you're at risk of extradition if the alleged crime is also a crime in the country you reside in [2].
The key with extradition is that it has more to do with diplomacy, geopolitics, and sovereignty than anything else.
Probably not, because that's not within the scope of what Ireland would be willing to extradite for.
But that's a question of Saudi Arabia’s practical ability to bring you to trial, not one of whether or not any law they have would apply to you on principle.
There were additional files she was interested in leaking that she did not have access to.
She then obtained the password hash of an account that did have access and tried to crack the password, but was unsuccessful. She then sent the hash to wikileaks, not something wikileaks asked for, along with a request for help. There was no response.
Later she was in a chat with someone using a known wikileaks chat account. The identity of this person has not been established. She asked if they had been able to crack the password hash and that person said no they had not cracked it. They did not say they tried to crack it or they approved of cracking it. They answered the question factually, no, they had not cracked it.
Manning never hacked the system, but did try to. There's no evidence Assange attempted to hack the system. There's pretty solid evidence someone at wikileaks told Manning that they had not cracked the hash she had sent them, but none that they had attempted to do so. As far as the leaks that were published, none of these involved hacking, they were obtained using Manning's granted access. They were however unauthorized exfiltration of state secrets documenting war crimes.
This is the case alleging he actively assisted a leaker in hacking crimes.
This is where this breaks down. The account in question was a generic local Windows admin account, and she already had the same level of access as the desired account. It was only attempted to hide her identity.
This is clearly laid out as what happened in Assange's indictment.
This makes no difference, legally speaking. Assange was still helping her to gain unauthorized access to a computer system.
This is like giving bank robbers ski masks in full knowledge that they're going to use the ski masks to hide their identities during a robbery. You're still an accessory. It's no defense to say "Oh, I wasn't helping them to gain access to the vault, I was just helping them to hide their identities".
> Sometimes individuals must break the law for greater good. This is called civil disobedience, or civil resistance.
Which is not a complete description of civil disobedience. It is accurate, but not precise.
Civil disobedience implies the actor wishes the law to be changed. They might expect not just a pardon for themselves, but a pardon for everyone who broke the unjust law. It's a distinction with a difference.
We agree that its effectiveness depends on accepting the punishment, sure.
The US Civil Rights movement generally practiced civil disobedience because the views the laws, the law making process, and the process of selecting who could even participate in the law making process as unacceptable.
The key assumption was that enough of the people who could participate in that process were nevertheless moral enough to reform all of those aspecta given a vivid enough demonstration that they could not turn away from of the top-to-bottom injustice of the system.
I don't think Assange was engaging in civil disobedience, nor do I think he would have been justified if he were, but doing so does not and never has relied on faith in the justice of the existing law-making process any more than it does in the law being violated itself.
This is conflating two aspects of the civil rights movement. It's of course true that there were also objections to the law-making process. But the segregationist laws would be unjust (and hence require violating under MLK's civil disobedience) even if the law-making process perfectly reflected the majority will of the people. It's this latter point that is relevant to INGELRII's comment.
> I don't think Assange was engaging in civil disobedience, nor do I think he would have been justified if he were, but doing so does not and never has relied on faith in the justice of the existing law-making process any more than it does in the law being violated itself.
If the law-making process is illegitimate (e.g., if there is a dictator), then no one thinks you have a moral duty (in the deontological sense) to obey the laws, nor to accept the consequences for breaking them. It's only the situation where the law-making process is legitimate -- reflecting the immoral will of the majority -- where the question comes up of whether (1) you can morally violate the unjust law and (2) whether you are duty-bound to accept the resulting punishment.
Unsure why so many people are invested in arguing that this is just the routine functioning of the law when it certainly isn't
He's already served his time. He's currently being detained prior to his extradition hearing:
There is no pleasing Assange supporters, though. If they'd stuck him in with a bunch of other people, you'd probably be complaining about that instead.
No, the evidence doesn't show that and it's not been proven. Stop stating it is a fact, that is disingenuous.
Hey foldr, I got a password hash here $1$O3JMY.Tw$AdLnLjQ/5jXF9.MTp3gHv/
Try to crack that for me, it's a password to a system. Did you do it? Did you crack it?
If you say yes: you committed a crime.
According to your legal theory, if you now here say "no", you also committed also a crime since you admitted to helping me gain unauthorized access to a computer system. That is the argument you are making. It's a ridiculous argument and wouldn't stand before a jury, only before a secret national security court with no jury and the judges are all military.
Oh wait it gets worse, we don't even know who foldr is. Turns out that several different people have used this account over time and there's no evidence who was using the account when they said "No."
Do you mean "no" as in "I won't try to crack it", or "no" as in "I tried to crack it and failed"? In the first case, I'm not helping you at all and there's no analogy with the Assange case. In the second case, it depends on the details of the law. I don't know if unsuccessful attempts to gain unauthorised access to a computer system constitute a crime per se in the USA. (I wouldn't be surprised if they do, given that e.g. attempted burglary is typically a crime.) In any case, if I tried and failed to crack the password as part of a broader effort to help with your (successful) efforts to break into a computer system, then I'd pretty clearly be an accessory to that crime. Intent is really, really important.
Ineptness is not usually an excuse. If I do a poor job of hiding the murder weapon for you, I'm still an accessory. If I stall the getaway car, I'm still going to jail along with all the guys who robbed the bank.
Note that in the Assange case, I don't think anything much hinges on the password hash. He's primarily accused of helping Manning to cover her tracks, independently of the failed attempt to crack the password.
Yes, it does. It is the duty of the press to try to protect their sources, and the rights of a free press can not be infringed upon. While the act may be considered illegal by some other law, that law is unconstitutional.
You are thinking of reporter's privilege, but massively overextending its scope (https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1146/reporter-s...).
Jorunalists are entitled to "protect" their sources in the extremely limited sense that they cannot, necessarily, be compelled to reveal information about them. They're not in any way entitled to shield their sources from law enforcement.
Whether or not the requirement is met in Assange's case is to be decided by the court. There are certainly laws in the UK that prohibit hacking. Anyway, you are wrong in general about how extradition works. People are often, for example, extradited on murder charges.
While there are certainly laws in UK that prohibit hacking (which should be abolished) they are clearly not enough to perform an extradition.
If you actually read the article on the McKinnon case, you'll see that extradition was ultimately refused by the home secretary - not the courts - on largely compassionate grounds:
"Mr McKinnon is accused of serious crimes. But there is also no doubt that he is seriously ill [...] He has Asperger's syndrome, and suffers from depressive illness. Mr McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights."
Oddly, being gay is a crime in Saudi Arabia, but only committing homosexual acts is a capital offense. I would make a joke about the type of kangaroo court that would convict me of being gay, but it’s sad because they exist and people are convicted.
This is what happens to anyone who isn’t granted bail. Unless you are granted bail, you are kept in custody in the period between being charged with a crime and being tried for it.
As I mentioned above, it’s not difficult to see why Assange has not been granted bail in this instance. In fact, he didn’t even apply for bail.