Get a gig with a Russian media outlet, again... See if Roger Stone has any work for him to do? See if GRU has any more deliveries it needs him to make?
Wikileaks had no "gig" with Russia Today. They produced the series tthemselves and it was picked up by various news channels - just not any mainstream Western ones (what a shock)
According to the article you link which was posted before the series aired, but not according to IMDB or Wikipedia which anybody could have edited with sources in the 12 years since:
You could retreat into invective or you could point me to a better source than an article that came out before the show even aired. Assange has enough fuming and frustrated detractors that a verifiable source saying his show was funded by RT would have made it into the Wikipedia and IMDB pages a decade ago.
I edited the first event press mention of WikiLeaks at Wired.
I covered the early Guantanamo leaks and the Iraqi Apache attack.
I've interviewed Assange, likely before you ever heard of him.
I broke the story that wikileaks' submission system broke and its SSL failed, the first external sign of the internal dissent where its tech lead literally made off with the server because he didn't trust Assange.
I pointed you to an extremely reputable source showing what everyone knew at the time, which is that a Putin controlled media outlet paid for and claimed credit for funding his "talk show."
His Russian connections after that were perfectly clear, including routing Snowden through Russia and later being the handmaiden of GRU in the DNC leaks.
Keep putting your head in the sand with dumbass arguments like it's not in IMDb.
It's a fine line between being a fanboy and being complicit and it's pretty clear which side of that line you're on now.
Lol. If you weren't just repeating bullshit, why isn't information about the Assange series being funded by RT reflected on these sites? You have given me a line in an article that came out before the series aired, got upset and now... you have decided to list your "credentials"...
Ahem... hrm...
Edit: Haha is that you editing the Wikipedia page?
Probably the best outcome that could be expected for all involved. What a bizarre story though. Even if it causes a chilling effect on future leakers it did not make the US government look better at all, from my view.
is this supposed to read "_wasn't that_ the US was going to bring any charges at all?" Either way, I don't follow, but at least it would grammatically make more sense.
In response to the last thread I participated on about Assange, 3 months ago, in which I predicted this outcome (which was easy to do, since it's been in the offing for like 6-9 months now), I was told that all these plea agreements were just a trick to get Assange onto US soil so they could execute him. Hey, maybe that could still be the case! They're flying him to the Northern Mariana Islands for the hearing, prior to releasing him in Australia. That could be where the disappearing happens.
I don't know what this link is supposed to represent, beyond the fact that I've never been a supporter of Assange's, since long before the 2016 election shenanigans that cost him so much of his support among American nerds. I'm sure at some point I've said I didn't buy that he was a major prosecution target --- that was before I read the indictment that spelled out his conspiracy liability for computer intrusions, which, as it turns out, does make sense: you can't safely instruct people to hack into DoD computers any more than you can safely instruct henchmen to murder people in America. I'm not a lawyer, I read some stuff, I updated my take.
Could you maybe provide a more specific search through my comment history to make whatever point you're trying to make? Because "tptacek assange" isn't nearly enough, and I'm not going to do your archival research for you.
Your response is extraordinarily obnoxious given the actual search results, which include tptacek talking about charges being possible nine years ago and about him not being certain.
Your lack of integrity indicates that you should be ignored on all topics for all time.
I don’t know what your issue is, but you are extraordinarily dishonest.
And haven't they broken his brain anyway with all the solitary confinement...
Ah, Western Democracy and the rule of law and humane treatment of prisoners, how we love thee. That sounds like I'm pro-Russia or China, but no, I don't like them either.
I don't know why you are getting downvoted, your comment is spot on. The way this man has been treated should be an embarrassment to all the leaders of the so-called free world.
The kind of imprisonment that Assange was subjected to is unambiguously torture, and was unambiguously administered for the purpose of revenge.
There is no natural "need" for the conditions he was subjected to (e.g. the cost of a larger cell is negligible), and no natural purpose other than to punish.
I am deliberately ignoring the question of guilt here, because I don't believe that we should torture _anyone_, regardless of the crime. The fact that we do this is a giant ugly stain on civilisation.
What's the conspiracy? He was a known whistleblower and the U.S. was upset that he assisted in the acquisition of certain documents. All of the motivations have been quite open.
It's not really accurate to call him a whistleblower. He was acting as a conduit of information for whistleblowers, though he exercised his own discretion to decide which whistleblowers to release for.
The reason he was charged by the US is because rather than just being a recipient of leaked documents he took an active part in helping an insider obtain them by breaking internal security controls. That's crossing a line and is something journalists are careful to never do.
A google search defines "whistleblower" as a person who informs on a person or organization engaged in an illicit activity. I fail to see the material difference. He was also a journalist.
There's more to this than just googling for a basic definition.
When he provided tools and direct guidance to Chelsea Manning to access classified information and when he and others breached the Congressional Research Service to leak documents from there he went far beyond what any professional journalist would do and lost the associated protections.
Please don't patronize me just because you were wrong about the definition of whistleblower.
> went far beyond what any professional journalist would do
A useless statement without contextualization, but you can spare the contextualization because it's a moot point; Assange, running his own outfit, is free to decide for himself what kind of journalist he wishes to be. He doesn't have to follow CNN's playbook because he doesn't work for CNN.
I'm not defending the lack of censorship which may have put lives at immediate risk, but that's also not the basis on which the US government has sought his extradition. The basis of their argument had to do with the act of allegedly providing Manning the means of acquiring the data.
> lost the associated protections
You're downplaying the significance of the Cablegate leaks. The US went to great lengths to prosecute and get revenge on everyone involved, including Manning.
I'm not sure what point you're even trying to make here, as you're shifting goalposts.
Just because you call yourself a journalist it doesn’t mean you’re free to do whatever you want and still claim journalism protections.
It doesn’t matter where you are, journalism does not include hacking into or otherwise intentionally and actively stealing information. Doing that rightfully opens you up to criminal charges.
The problem with the initial response and why it was basically bad faith is that the definition of the word "whistleblower" can be broad, and it also is fairly unrelated to the central point.
So when the other person brought that up, as well as when you are arguing about it, what you are doing is being both wrong on the point and pendant in a way that is irrelevant to the central thesis.
Instead of trying to claim that someone was wrong about 1 single word, the good faith way of approaching the argument would be to talk about the thesis, which was that it wasn't really a "conspiracy" when the US government absolutely had strong motivation to go after him.
The word "whistleblower" which has multiple meaning is basically irrelevant.
And his original justification, of using a Google search definition, is absolutely valid.
Or, it is at least valid enough that I don't think you are justified in being upset about a perfectly normal way of using a word.
Especially when the use of the word, that is supported by Google, is irrelevant to the thesis statement.
> Please don't patronize me just because you were wrong about the definition of whistleblower.
1) You're coming off as pretty darn patronizing yourself, too, so stones and glass houses.
2) Dunno about "the" definition of whistleblower; in your GP you said you got it off Google. They're (so far) not King of the English Language, AFAIK. No that I am, either, but the connotations I've picked up wherever I've heard or read the term usually include that "a whistleblower" is someone on the inside dishing the dirt on their own organisation. Which isn't what Assange did.
(So by the general consensus usage, the only WikiLeaks whistleblower would be that German guy who wrote the book that showed what a general asshole Assange is.)
Part of that statement is public knowledge. Wikileaks was a trusted entity who you could release documents to that would publish and keep you private. That reputation and threat has disappeared making wikileaks a tainted brand. Assange is also tainted and has lost power. The deal he signed also restricts him.
I'm not even sure it's a conspiracy anymore as each legal procedure by nation states played out in public.
The conspiracy in principle is always a layer deeper than public view.
Assange wasn't really a threat on his own. He was merely an outlet for others (Chelsea Manning, Russian propagandists). The question was whether he encouraged others.
Snowden showed that leakers didn't need Wikileaks for Chelsea Manning-like releases and the Russians have just switched to directly releasing on Twitter.
>the Russians have just switched to directly releasing on Twitter.
Or more frequently just making shit up. Enough people will believe it anyway if they're politically inclined to do so, plausible details are not a required element.
No, governments have just realized leaks don't matter. The age of conspiracies is over; the public no longer distinguishes fact from BS so it doesn't matter what is and isn't out there on TikTok.
Assange was blatantly targeted by a US intelligence conspiracy against him and it's blindingly obvious that Sweden wouldn't have had an arrest warrant against him without their meddling. The US also brazenly suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the GWOT and was absolutely indefinitely detaining people. The secret CIA black sites that were part of the same GWOT were also very well covered. Beyond what others have said, it's already public knowledge that the possibility of assassinating Assange was discussed by US officials.
I'm not saying this would have been Assange's fate, I would expect things to play out more like the Manning case. Still if somebody makes themselves an extremely prominent enemy of US intelligence, regardless of if you're an islamic terrorist or a whistleblowing journalist, it's very reasonable to theorise that there might be a conspiracy against them.
Usually the problem with conspiracy theories and why they're so mad is they presume thousands of actors act in concert with no clear motive to do so and all can keep a secret. This is a conspiracy which didn't really need to be kept all that secret, with a pretty blatant unifying motive - taking down Assange meant stemming leaks both directly and by making an example of him.
> it's blindingly obvious that Sweden wouldn't have had an arrest warrant against him without their meddling.
No, that isn't "obvious" at all.
> Still if somebody makes themselves an extremely prominent enemy of US intelligence, regardless of if you're an islamic terrorist or a whistleblowing journalist, it's very reasonable to theorise that there might be a conspiracy against them.
Not that this has anything to do with anything, since Assange has never been neither a whistleblower nor a journalist.
I guess that is one way of attempting to rehabilitate arguments, often made here on HN, that Assange would never ever under any circumstances be extradited and had no reason to fear extradition.
Reframing that as being not merely about being extradited but being disappeared helps shift emphasis away from the other 90% of the conversation surrounding extradition fears, that proved in the end to be true.
Edit: The fears about harsh treatment were legitimate as well. Look at what happened to Chelsea Manning, charged with similar crimes. Chelsea Manning was subjected to 23 hours a day of solitary confinement, put on suicide watch, checked on every 5 minutes, forced to be "visible" at all times while sleeping, and ultimately their treatment was investigated U.N. and condemned as inhumane.
I don't understand what's so unreasonable about suspecting Assange would be subjected to harsh treatment when that's exactly what happened in the closest comparable case.
It's well established [0] that the CIA director asked for options for assassinating Julian Assange around 2017. That the US government ultimately did not do that does not exonerate them, or refute people who feared things like this.
- "This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally."
- "The CIA declined to comment. Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment."
Style tip: You claimed "options for assassination", linked to an article presumably backing that claim up, and then quoted a part of that article that does not mention "assassination", but only the much weaker "abduction". I did eventually skim the article, and indeed it does contain the stronger "assassination" claim, but I very nearly didn't bother because, from your choice of quote, I was almost certain that you were merely wildly extrapolating from "abduction" to "assassination".
> In May, two judges on the High Court said he could have a full hearing on whether he would be discriminated against in the U.S. because he is a foreign national. A hearing on the issue of Assange's free speech rights had been scheduled for July 9-10.
At the risk of sounding a tad conspiratorial, it's possible the U.S. agreed to this deal specifically to avoid the upcoming trial. As I understand it, there remains an open question of whether (or to what extent) the US constitution applies to non-citizens and it's conceivably in the government's interests if that thread isn't pulled by foreign courts and in such a public fashion.
To clarify: I don't believe the US was ever going to "disappear" him or whatever he and others hypothesized. Even outside that context, there's an interesting question of why the US suddenly decided to wrap this up after a decade of seemingly-relentless pursuit.
It makes more sense that they agreed to the deal because Assange has spent 5 years in prison, which approaches or exceeds the likely sentence he would have received (even after applying the "TOP SECRET" sentence modifier) for a conspiracy liability charge. At some point there's no longer any purpose in pursuing the case.
Later
Moreso: assume Assange spends another year or two in UK prison, and then is extradited; the trial is complicated (for the same reason the Florida documents trial is complicated: because it involves evidence that has to be cleared for and during trial) and could easily run over a year, longer if Assange wanted to --- you're now running up to the maximum possible guideline sentence even if the prosecution could establish that he led the conspiracy, rather than just participating.
I like how you think!
I think it’s some combination of this and very recent bipartisan Australian sentiment to end it that combined into enough people having a slight shift culminating in “the system” deciding to let him go
It is the same conventional wisdom that held that the Swedish state prosecutor would never break Swedish laws in order to keep a prosecution indefinitely ongoing. Naturally the US had no plan to charge Assange the same day that the Swedish state prosecutor had to drop. Then a higher court actually found the state prosecutor breaking Swedish law, because as a state prosecutor is not legally allowed in Sweden to keep a prosecution going indefinitely. Conventional wisdom among Swedish legal professors at universities held that the behavior of the state prosecutor was a bit odd given that they know from a very early on that the whole deal was illegal.
It is very strange. I wonder if it possible could have something to do with foreign affairs, which a state prosecutor is by law very much forbidden to take instructions from. That would be in defiance of the rule of law, but then, they were already in defiance of the rule of law.
Surely you don't need any conspiracy for the US to charge him at the same time as the Swedish prosecutor drops charges? That can be done unilaterally by the US prosecutor.
If the Swedish prosecutor had dropped charges before the US got around to charging him, Julian would have walked free. So it's awfully convenient that the charges were "substituted", so to speak, on the same day.
Hm, I just looked up the timeline, and I don't see any conincidence. It's like:
6 March 2018, a U.S. grand jury charges Assange, but it is secret.
11 April 2019, Ecuador expels him from the embassy, the UK arrests him for skipping bail.
11 April 2019, the U.S. unseals the charges and asks for him to be extradited.
13 May 2019, Sweden re-opens the rape investigation because he is now potentially available to be extradicted again.
19 November 2019, Sweden closes the investigation because the evidence is too old.
There is no "same day" coincidence at all, and Assange was never free to walk because he would always face criminal prosecution in Britain for skipping bail.
The conspiracy is in the coordination of charges to facilitate extradition to the United States. And it turned out there was in fact a sealed indictment in the United States this whole time.
"Conventional wisdom" is just wrong. "The US" isn't a monolithic entity; the Obama administration explicitly refused to charge him, and he wasn't charged until the Trump administration. The Trump administration tried to strike a deal way back when, which was ruined by Assange doing the Vault 7 leaks in the middle of that, after which they were fuck you and all. There's a lot of inertia to these things after the ball gets rolling.
There was a mood change in Australia, with all sides of politics wanting Assange's case to be closed [1]. Consequently in the last 12 months there has been pressure from Australia, on its "five eyes" US and UK partners, to close the case.
I'm not sure that the US gives too many fucks about Australian public opinion, or what Albanese says. I think it has more to do with US politics and the upcoming election.
But whatever, I'm glad he's free and is not being extradited to whatever hellhole the US had planned for him. I hope he's able to get a beer and a swim and put his life back together.
As an Australian, I would be blown away if our government ever tried to stand against the USA in that way. We rely too much on our alliance for defence; there's no way Australia can stand on its own militarily. So there's a lot we would tolerate to keep that relationship stable.
That isn't really true. There is no concrete threat to Australia for the foreseeable decades, and the US cannot afford to lose influence in the Pacific, so the US will be compelled to act either way much before a threat ever comes to Australia.
When you compare the relationship that Australia has to the US compared to non-EU, non-NATO US allies in Europe and Asia, it's plain to see that Australia is far, far more deferential to the US than it has to be, as nations much more vulnerable and much less valuable tolerate far less.
As expected, nothing in your link details the threat to Australia, it's just about the size of the Chinese military. The problem that no one in mainstream Australian media talks about is that there is not much China can do to Australia now it couldn't before. China's buildup is centered around invading a small island 70km away, and as of today may not be sufficient for that. To go from that to a serious threat to a continent 5000km away has zero credibility.
I think you have serious misunderstanding of what a concrete military threat is. China is 6000km away from Australia by sea, and to get there it has to get rather close to US bases. There is no way that China can do anything beyond standoff strikes to Australia without a crippling cost in the next 20-30+ years. There is absolutely no military threat to the Australian mainland. Conversely, there is very little US submarine bases in Australia do against standoff strikes, so clearly that's not what Australia or the US are worried about (nor should they). In any case any naval power or sustained air power would have to defeat the US first, ally or not, to get to Australia. And if the US can indeed be defeated, then what?
Australia is not meaningfully more threatened by China than, say Brazil. That's just how the geography works out. However, Australia is lot more useful if your goal is to block shipping to and from China, as it is not so far from the straits of Malacca and a good base to contest the island chains (and is, as we've said before, itself very secure).
Unless you think Canada is somehow under a severe Chinese threat, neither is Australia. Australia is far more useful offensively against Chinese shipping, hence why the US will never ever drop it as a basing location unless it really has to.
This, so much. There's so much discussion of "the Chinese threat", but it's just not credible.
The only thing that China would want to invade Australia for is our resources, and they can just buy those. There is at least one mining operation in WA that is Chinese-owned, Chinese-run, entirely staffed by Chinese folks flown in direct from China, and exports the mined resources only to China. They just pay some taxes and royalties to Australia. That is vastly cheaper than any military solution for obtaining the same resources.
I think there's a section of Aussie society that would like China to be a credible threat so that it justifies more military and more fear. But it's just not.
I'm not so pessimistic. Each country will put their own interests first, but they do work together. Pursuing Assange isn't central to the US/UK national interest. Part of the reason Assange languished so long was because the Australian government didn't stick up for him earlier.
> I'm not sure that the US gives too many fucks about Australian public opinion
Public opinion, maybe. And not comparing the two in size, etc., but Australia holds a bit of a privileged place in terms of some of the US resources: Pine Gap and a lot of the classified NRO/NSA equipment, deep space and classified military satellite comms, and then one of the major relays / radio systems for US submarine communications.
Well the territory that he will be tried under is a hair better than continental USA from this perspective, but extraordinary rendition would still be a concern.
It's hard to tell what your actual point is, but "the US" is not one singular entity with one singular purpose that never changes. Perhaps the thing you say was true for some people in the administration at some point, but not always true for all people.
Pretty lousy comment after the person has been outrageously persecuted for over a decade now, including spending the last five years in prison without being convicted of anything.
Why are some many people here spouting conspiracies lol? Manning, his partner in crime, has been out of prison and living a normal life for years but Assange is going to get disappeared for some reason? If the US government wanted to keep him in a hole they could have not offered a plea deal and kept going through the extradition process in the UK (where he would have stayed in jail since he has a history of fleeing).
Is Snowden a “mouthpiece for Russia”? I don’t think he is. I don’t see why Assange would be either. I just don’t see how he’d be able to continue his work _anywhere_ in the West. We have so much “freedom” these days that we imprison foreign citizens on foreign soil and fabricate rape accusations against them.
The real question you should be asking is if it's "based" to persecute your political opponents and whistleblowers to such a degree that they can only turn to the most ideologically opposed (and nuclear armed) country there is for "safety". I'm sure Snowden is REALLY HAPPY to live in Russia. Dare I say positively glowing. Ahem...
I don't have a strong opinion about Snowden, but I do not think Russia was his only option by any means. From Wikipedia's article about US extradition treaties:
The United States does not have an extradition treaty with China, Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine, Vietnam, the GCC states, most African states, and most former Soviet states, among others. Some countries with US extradition treaties have refused to extradite includes: Ecuador, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Iceland, Pakistan, Egypt, Switzerland, Venezuela, Zimbabwe etc.
He’s a Russian citizen now. He could have gone to Ecuador after he got citizenship, and possibly even before, but I think because he’s not a moron he correctly assumed that he’d end up at a CIA black site within a week of leaving Russia.
Iraq, not Afghanistan; and it wasn't an ambulance—it was private vehicle with an uninvolved civilian, and two children. You can read one account of it here (from the PoV of one of the soldiers):
We can't be a "beacon of democracy" so long as we're shooting children from helicopters, covering it up as "national security", and prosecuting journalists who disclose these things to the US public. Democracy is premised on its people understanding the things its government is doing in their name.
Maybe related to the mysterious disappearing $200M+ in bitcoin donations supposed to go to Wikileaks?
"WikiLeaks wallets now contain only 3.265 BTC ($168,000) compared to 4,079 BTC total inflows. Overall, it appears Bitcoin users have donated $1.62 million in BTC to WikiLeaks since it opened donations 13 years ago. If held until today, that BTC would be worth $210 million.
As for what WikiLeaks does with its crypto donations, the group previously said the funds would pay for “WikiLeaks projects, staff, servers and protective infrastructure.” Last week, WikiLeaks made its first transaction in two years when it shifted 10.459 ETH ($31,200) to another address."
You can't count the future investment performance when measuring the value of currency. If the Bitcoin were converted to dollars, they wouldn't have appreciated 100 fold.
Especially considering that a substantial part of the value of BTC is the fact that a lot of it has been accidentally destroyed.
Would he need to fuck up? It wouldn't surprise me if they brought up some kind of charge over the DNC leak, I just don't know how good that would look politically right now.
There is no such thing as legal leak.
Only if you leak for the right cause, which is typically to damage an inconvenient thorn of a person for the state apparatus. Then you are fine.
Exposing war crimes was an unintended self own for McBride.
He was British Army (Northern Ireland) through and through, came out to Australia, failed to make the SASR and worked instead as an army lawyer.
He leaked documents with the intent to "expose* how "increasingly restrictive Rules of engagement and the nature of investigations into members of the special forces" were making things worse for the poor squaddies doing their job.
What happened was journalists looked into all his leaked documents and focused instead on the poor squadies kicking "bad guys" off cliffs, blooding new soldiers with execution kills, etc.
His stated goal for leaking was to impede | stop investigations into war crimes:
Justice David Mossop stated "the way you’ve explained it is that the higher-ups might have been acting illegally by investigating these people too much, and that that was the source of the illegality that was being exposed."
That's fine, what he's not morally justified in doing is publishing the material without vetting and exposing people in Afghanistan and Iraq to harm from islamic radicals.
> Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, agreed to plead guilty on Monday to a single felony count of illegally disseminating national security material
Much like Snowden, people attach to whatever the highest-profile thing they released was, and act like that's the only thing they released. It's not, it's just what got the most attention. It's maybe 0.5% of the portfolio if you're being generous.
Both Snowden and Assange went far beyond "blowing the whistle" in what they leaked and/or solicited.
> Where is the punishment for the people commiting the crimes and treason that Snowden and Assange exposed?
Other funny things have been exposed too and nothing ever happens.
Like for example $12 billion, in hundred dollars bills, being send by a military cargo plane to Iraq, after the Iraq war. Of these $12 billion, $9bn are totally unaccounted for: it's not even clear if they ever made it to the plane. That is well documented.
Just imagine the number of crooked politicians and military officials involved in such a highway robbery: robbing the people, to enrich themselves.
"Which fraud are we going to commit today, we didn't steal enough money: we need to choke on more money, what's our plan?""I know, I know, let's make $10 bn in hundred dollar bills disappear!"
It is also very likely, but probably too soon to be exposed/revealed, that such similar shenanigans happened with SBF/FTX and the funding of the war in Ukraine, where monkey business happened with US donations that probably never made it to Ukraine.
To me it's no coincidence that all the charges against SBF concerning the bribing of politicians have been dropped: that's quite the can of worms for it's certainly related to money which disappeared while supposedly going to Ukraine.
Another really funny one too is the government refusing the audit of the (missing) gold in Fort Knox (yeah, no, if out of $12 bn we know that $9bn vanished, I guarantee you there's no way all the gold supposed to be in Fort Knox is there). "It's too complicated to do an audit". I read: "a sizeable amount of that gold indeed vanished, like those $10 bn in $100 bills".
That's my main reason for wanting to pay as little taxes as possible: it makes me puke to know I encourage crime.
Now although these traitors and petty thieves shall never ever be send to jail, at the end of the day there are more important things, like having a clear conscience and being able to look your kid in the eyes.
So let these traitors choke on their ill-acquired wealth, they deserve to be the miserable cockroaches they are.
The details matter because most people don't think everything their governments do should be public knowledge, but also don't think everything they do should be a secret. So most people will judge something like this based on how close they think the leaker got to hitting the right mark with what they released.
He acted in the interests of everyone who doesn't like the US, you could justifiably say the same thing about him acting in China's best interest, or Iran.
Absolute codswallop that you can't hold a government to account else you are criticised for aiding their enemies. Does that mean we should just sit down and take it because it makes us look bad?
I'm the first in line to criticise my government (UK) but that doesn't mean I'm intentionally working in the interests of it's enemies.
Sod off with these bad faith attacks espousing an opinion that no reasonable person could possibly hold.
I mean, he literally had a show on, and was paid to do so by, the Russian state media. And then later on failed to publish a set of Russian documents that were leaked to him, and also coordinated with (not just received leaks from) someone who turned out to be GRU.
Reasonable minds can differ here, I don't think it's bad faith to suggest he might have been acting specifically towards Russian interests - if not originally, then later on.
How do plea deals work for precedent? As despite the constant claim that he was only being charged for assisting in hacking US computers, the plea deal is over violations of the Espionage Act specifically about receiving and publishing classified documents. Or basically his acts as a journalist.
Can this be used to indict other journalists who receive and publish classified information? As if so, this feels like a huge loss, though I can hardly blame Assange for not continuing the fight.
They don't. Generally: lower court decisions don't create binding precedent.
Further: Assange wasn't simply charged with "receiving and publishing classified information"; he was charged with being instrumental in that information being exfiltrated in the first place.
"Generally" is one of those somewhat troubling terms on a case that has severe First Amendment implications, but that's good to know.
>Further: Assange wasn't simply charged with "receiving and publishing classified information"; he was charged with being instrumental in that information being exfiltrated in the first place.
Those charges were (presumably) dropped as part of the plea, and his plea did not mention them. The plea is only about receiving and publishing.
The standing indictment at the time of the plea deal is very easy to find on Google. And the plea is not only about receiving and publishing; what I think you're not seeing is the explicitly enumerated "overt actions" you would have seen in a full trial, but those "overt actions" are the things that connected Assange to his criminal liability in this case. But the conspiracy charge is right there.
The standing indictment was over 18(19?) charges, he plead guilty to one. A conspiracy charge, stemming from his role publishing violating the Espionage Act. Not the Computer Fraud and Abuse charge that many, including the DoJ's press release, said was the focus of the indictment.
The "overt acts" part you mention is over Title 18 793(g) which basically says if two people work together in one part of a conspiracy they're both guilty of any actions their partner made.
In any conspiracy charge, the "overt acts" are the specific things the accused did to further the conspiracy. Here, the distinction is being made between receiving a random document and publishing it, the way you would if you got, like, military information about Estonia, not caring what Estonia thinks about the classification of the documents, and joining a conspiracy to deliberately take the documents from Estonia.
By way of example: the murder-for-hire accusations against Ross Ulbricht were listed "overt acts" in his conspiracy charge.
Again, the overt acts reference a specific clause of title 18, and it would allow punishment of Assange for literally anything Manning did. It doesn't seem to be about anything further Assange did.
>By way of example: the murder-for-hire accusations against Ross Ulbricht were listed "overt acts" in his conspiracy charge.
Yes, the supposed murder for hire was something he wasn't charged with and wasn't mentioned in his sentencing. It was not a part of his trial.
No, conspiracy liability makes Assange liable for for whatever the charged conspiracy, which included Manning, did. The "overt acts" are those things the prosecution can prove Assange himself did. They're the glue that connects Assange to the conspiracy.
"Title 18" is almost the entire federal criminal code. Saying "a specific clause in title 18" is like saying "somewhere, in the entire US federal criminal code, it says...".
As I just said: the murder-for-hire scheme --- which I believe was in fact part of Ulbricht's sentencing --- was an "overt act" in Ulbricht's conspiracy charge.
>Saying "a specific clause in title 18" is like saying "somewhere, in the entire US federal criminal code, it says...
I had referenced the specific clause, 793(g), in my previous post to you. It is also referenced in the plea. I didn't think I needed to do so again. I can quote the section
>If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.
No. 18 USC 793(g) is the conspiracy charge. One of the elements of a conspiracy charge --- any conspiracy charge --- is one or more "overt acts" that demonstrate the accused was not merely associated with other members of the criminal group, but also actively participated in it. That's what the "any act" in your quote refers to --- those are the "overt acts". None are listed in this plea stipulation.
Here: a Ken White article that is almost entirely about how "overt acts" work in conspiracy charges, along with their historical purpose:
So basically, the overt acts are evidence of the crimes he plead to, which again, was receiving and publishing classified documents. The violations of 793 a, b, and c mentioned in the plea, though you're right, those aren't overt acts.
I still don't see how the plea is about anything else. That if this charge went to trial they may have brought up his supposed violations of the CFAA as some kind of evidence of his conspiracy doesn't really change things.
There are two subthreads about the structure of the plea deal, but they're both closely related; both are about the question of whether the plea stipulation drops the notion that Assange had a direct hand in the conspiracy that produced Chelsea Manning's document trove, rather than just being a passive receiver who published documents he had no real duty, as a non-American, to protect.
In both threads, the answer comes down to: the plea agreement says otherwise. Assange has stipulated to his culpability in the conspiracy --- the 793(g) charge you brought up. The plea agreement doesn't list the overt acts that substantiate the charge, and would make clearer the reasoning behind Assange's active participation. But that's because the plea agreement is a stipulation, for which the only evidence needed is that of agreement between prosecution and defense.
The superseding indictment is much more explicit. Had the case ever gone to trial, you'd have seen at its conclusion jury instructions that would have made clear the evidentiary threshold --- the overt acts, what acts qualify, etc --- to convict on the conspiracy.
What action is the court taking that you are worried about setting precedent? I haven’t read more than the linked article, but it appears the only role the court will play is accepting a plea deal.
Are we reading the same document? It clearly states Assange “knowingly and unlawfully conspired with Chelsea Manning to commit the following offenses against the United States…”
The case isn’t about Assange simply receiving classified material from Manning.
>“knowingly and unlawfully conspired with Chelsea Manning to commit the following offenses against the United States…”.
Why are you quoting that part rather than any of the actual offenses? He undoubtedly conspired with Manning to receive classified documents for the purpose of publishing them, which is what the plea details.
Part (a) even says he "received or obtained" classified documents from a person knowing that they were illegally obtained. It doesn't say he helped with the illegal obtaining.
It doesn't list any of the overt acts, because it's a plea agreement, and the defense stipulates to the conspiracy; there's nothing to prove, except that the prosecution and defense agree.
No. Overt acts are not themselves criminal charges; they're evidentiary requirements for a conspiracy charge. Individual overt acts don't even have to be backed by statutes; an "overt act" in a conspiracy might not itself be a criminal violation at all. I think you're trying to work back from some faulty first principles here.
What you should do here is compare the plea stipulation to the superseding indictment, and note that the "overt acts" of the conspiracy charge refer back to the "general allegations" section. Or: you could go track down any other conspiracy indictment (Ulbricht's is a fun one) and see examples of "overt acts" listed explicitly.
The actual offensive says he knew the documents had been and “would be” obtained illegally. The key phrase is “would be”. Once he knew documents would in the future be taken illegally and agreed to receive them and publish them it entered the realm of an illegal conspiracy to obtain classified material.
This differs from for example The Pentagon Papers where the material was delivered to reporters after already having been taken. They had no foreknowledge that they would be taken.
The original indictment goes much further than that! They didn't have him on a technicality; they had him as effectively the orchestrator of the conspiracy. Who knows if that would have held up in court; I think the case wasn't all that strong on anything more than a minor role for Assange.
News reports indicate a single alleged offence per 18 U.S. Code § 793 (g)[1] for conspiring with at least one other person in the conduct of an offence described in (a) through (f).
By way of comparison, the former US president who is also in current poll results more likely than not to be elected as the next US president is presently alleged to have conducted 40 of these 18 U.S. Code § 793 offences.
I've been in situations where there was no precedent, and in asking what would happen if this went to court, decisions were made based on how lower courts ruled. Legal analyses, law review articles, customary practice, etc. all /influence/ courts.
> Legal analyses, law review articles, customary practice, etc. all /influence/ courts.
Correct. As a general rule:
- When the "black-letter law" dictates a result (that is, a statute or binding precedent), a judge will generally follow it — unless the judge really wants to achieve a particular result and is willing to do mental-gymnastics rationalizing or to try to get the law changed.
In other situations, judges are typically very busy but they still want to get it "right," in accordance with whatever their personal mental model of life suggests, and they don't like being reversed on appeal. So they (judges) look for support — and try to anticipate possible counterarguments — from a variety of sources, as suggested by the adversaries' counsel battling each other's arguments — each of whom is motivated to help the judge do what counsel want by finding the sorts of things mentioned above.
Journalists generally avoid asking for classified information. The belief is that (in the US) a journalist that passively receives classified information & publishes it isn't committing a crime due to the First Amendment. The actual crime itself was committed by the person leaking the information.
Julian Assange actively solicited leaks of information. That's where the espionage claim comes from.
There's not much precedent on this though and making a plea deal avoids establishing one. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Generally, precedent is established when someone appeals their conviction, and a higher court determines that the conviction is lawful. Higher court decisions bind lower courts, so e.g. if a circuit appeals court says the law is "X", every district court within it has to agree.
Since generally, you wouldn't appeal a plea deal, there probably won't be legal precedent from this.
That being said, I wonder if the USA will informally say "we got Assange; we can get you" the next time a similar situation comes up.
>belief is that (in the US) a journalist that passively receives classified information & publishes it isn't committing a crime due to the First Amendment. The actual crime itself was committed by the person leaking the information.
Even if you think Assange did more than this, this plea deal is very clearly over passively receiving classified information.
The precedent information is good to hear, thank you.
>Julian Assange actively solicited leaks of information.
This phrasing makes it sound like Assange asked "Do you have this?" when the accusations have always been closer to "Can you get me this? Here is how you could go about doing that." That takes it out of the realm of journalism in at least the legal sense.
When you encourage someone else to commit a crime, and then use the results of that crime in your own work you really should not be surprised that law enforcement comes after you.
> The work was not for profit and in the public interest.
Any bit of classified information can be reasonably considered in the interest of someone in the public.
Public interest can only mitigate the illegality of what you're doing, it doesn't just magically make the act illegal.
> Did he actively encourage people to do things they didn't want to do, or did people actively seek the necessary advice from him?
False dichotomy.
If you want to rob a bank, and you come and ask me to be the getaway driver, we're both going to hang. It doesn't matter who had the idea for the crime, what matters is that he materially assisted in carrying it out.
Now, if you robbed a bank, and just dropped a million dollars on my porch, that would be a different story. That's the defense journalists use when they receive illegally obtained information.
> If you want to rob a bank, and you come and ask me to be the getaway driver, we're both going to hang. It doesn't matter who had the idea for the crime, what matters is that he materially assisted in carrying it out.
Flawed analogy.
He didn't help them rob the bank. They asked "what is a good way to get away from a bank robbery." He answered "here are some ideas that have worked in past bank robberies."
And it's not a false dichotomy. The law considers mens rea to be a very important factor. The law isn't a black and white application of imputed standards to our social order. You can tell this because we allow juries to decide what happens in them.
Juries are finders of fact, not finders or interpreters of law.
Judges interpret law, and give juries specific instructions for which facts to make a determination on.
In the case of computer crime, the law treats 'getting away with it' as more or less the same act as doing it. Exfiltrating data and covering your tracks is all under the umbrella of unauthorized use of a computer system. Knowingly consulting for a particular instance of it makes you part of the conspiracy.
>The work was not for profit and in the public interest.
And so, in your world, if I rob a bank and give all the money to really good charities that measurably make peoples' live better, it's not illegal?
Or if I kill a known pedophile/child rapist to keep them from hurting more children, is that not illegal?
Is that what you believe? If so, why bother having laws at all? We just need to ask our modern-day Solomon -- akira2501, that is -- if something can be justified, and as such, is legal. Or am I missing something?
As the last paragraph points out, not a clear victory for the free press, but the Assange prosecutors know this case very well and you are absolutely right that they want to avoid another one.
If he went back to even thinking about touching classified material again in the future he would deserve to be jailed just for the stupidity of it alone after this. The takeaway here isn’t “better opsec”.
The plea deal is for “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information”. Having documents dropped in your lap and then publishing them is different than conspiring with someone to illegally obtain them in the first place.
Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible.
After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.
WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles,and for the people's right to know.
As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.
He was in isolation in a high security prison without having been convicted of any crimes since 22 September 2019. He was only released after 'admitting' that he was guilty...
I think the UK and US should abstain from criticising any countries' courts and justice system after that...
I appreciate what you’re saying here, but it’s impossible to view the opinions of residents of an authoritarian state as unbiased and unaffected observers.
They know they cannot possibly openly share their opinions without the potential for severe penalty. This is exactly why Putin did what he did to Alexei Navalny; it reminds the populace to keep the opinions to themselves or die in the most horrible way possible.
What are you, waiting for a Chinese person to come here and post things about Xi? All you are practically doing is clowning around with those statements. Try doing what Assange did and see where that gets you lol.
And you don't think that what happened to some folks that said/did stuff that displeased the US and UK rulers might have a similar effect on their population? Like, for example, what happened to Julian Assange?
I think the country that imprisons the highest proportion of its own population in the world ought to qualify, but this list doesn't think so. Interesting.
My memory is the US was trying to extradite Assange to the US and was threatening to charge him with Sedition with a possibility of decades of prison time. That was at least the stated intent of the previous CIA director
No. Until the recent convictions in relation to January 6th, the most recent US conviction for sedition was against an Egyptian for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He died in federal prison.
i was never clear on how you can charge a foreign national on foreign soil with a US Crime but that doesn't seem to mater when your the US. dont piss of the US government and dont piss off the MPAA Kim Dotcom and Assange were both charged with breaking us law while not residing in the US, being from the US, or committing their alleged crime in the US.
If I murder 2 people and reveal that john murdered 22 people and Bob murdered 36 people, does that mean I get to skip trial because I revealed bigger crimes? Sometimes, if I can get a plea deal, but this was not the case, so what is the problem here?
One does not have to believe that the state is entirely corrupt to believe that Assange's treatment by the USG in the past decades has been highly inappropriate.
The upcoming 2024 elections in the US find both parties trying to court subsets of the population who mistrust the government, so surely freeing Assange was done for realpolitik reasons.
It is not too late for Mike Pompeo to end up serving time. Let's hope that he is brought to justice ASAP.
The problem here is that Assange didn't kill any people, while Uncle Sam has killed hundreds of thousands for oil, revenge, and preserving the hegemony.
Assange is alleged to have released unredacted info that exposed informants in warzones. This while running a service - not an infrastructure, a service - for exposing information.
Arguing that he hasn't personally killed anyone is not a strong rebuke against such allegations.
Compromising informants working for a foreign government invading another foreign land is not a crime, nor much of a moral dilemma.
The risk inherent to collaborationism is also not one anyone but the informant must account for. Just as mercenaries operate in that same high-risk-reward / low-solidarity space, and accordingly join the cast of characters in war zones along with spies and informants without international sympathy.
Really bad example when the war crimes revealed were actual murders etc. of many, many civilians, and Assange’s crime was telling the secret (by the rules of a country that he was not a citizen of, and of a country where he wasn’t located) that these war crimes happened and that nobody faced any consequences for them.
Revealing information about many murders is very different from doing murder.
The Iraq and Afghanistan war logs were a highly significant piece of journalism that revealed significand (and in my opinion treasonous) misconduct by US Government officials. See my description in another thread:
This is the thing though. The cables were extremely embarrassing to the US and damaged international relationships, but they didn't really disclose any new crime that was committed.
The Iraq and Afghanistan war logs revealed significant crimes. In my view, the worst was the significant misrepresentation of civilian casualties, the level of involvement of Iran in the conflict, torture and abuse tolerated by the US. In general, the war logs revealed that the US Government had classified information specifically because releasing it would have likely led to Americans opposing the war. There was no justification for classifying most of the information other than that the truth getting out would have turned public opinion against the war.
At the time, the US Government was prohibited by law (Smith-Mundt Act of 1948) from propagandizing the American people. This was repealed by the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 which allows US Citizens to be exposed to propaganda.
Notably, one US Government strategy for propagandizing is to disseminate/test the stories in the British press and wait for them to be picked up by the US press. This strategy is still used even though the Smith-Mundt modernization act makes it less necessary for legal compliance.
Wikileaks revealed that the US Government withheld and classified information solely for propaganda purposes. In other words, a small group of people deceived the public so that a very expensive and consequential war they wanted to have would not be interrupted by common sense insights that the public would have had.
Plea deals and innocent people being pressured into accepting guilt is a huge problem in the US criminal justice system, but I'm not sure Assange in particular fits this. I think he did what is alleged. You could also separately argue that it shouldn't be a crime or that penalties should be less? I think that is a separate discussion.
‘Think’ is the operative word here. Assange would not have had a jury trial if extradited without the plea deal, and for a jury trial, mere opinion isn’t enough to convict
But certainly a causal factor in a plea deal being reached. Without the extended incarceration (and the threat of prolonging it) there would have been little leverage to get Julian to sign the dotted line.
Given that he was released with time served, I don't think US prosecutors gained much from allowing him to plea. What is the motivation for them to pressure him to do so when they are not seeking any additional outcome?
He is now a convicted felon. The US can avoid further diplomatic damage with one of its military and economic allies while still securing legitimacy for their protracted judicial overreach (across continents no less) and deterring whistleblowers in the future. In exchange, Julian gets to leave his shoebox.
You are fear mongering for the first two, and the damage for the third was already done a long time ago, would not be undone even with a full pardon.
I'll be very honest. You have a bias. You will fit everything to that bias. You don't care about how the legal system works, or that the plea deal was a great deal for him compared to what they could have pursued. Note that when they got that guilty plea on ONE CHARGE which is inconsequential for him, they dropped a lot of other stuff.
You're kidding right? This has had a chilling effect on journalists and whistleblowers worldwide. A large part of Julian's support base are journalists, including many of those that won awards from the published leaks that got him in trouble.
Blow the whistle, and then maybe be in solitary for 5 years? An agent from a three letter agency shows up in the middle of your investigation, and reminds you about your life, family, and friends, and what it might be like to not see them for a very long time. Or maybe just don't blow the whistle.
> You don't care about how [...] the plea deal was a great deal for him compared to what they could have pursued
Not sure where you got that idea. As you imply, it's not anywhere near as bad as, say, Julian had been locked up in supermax until he died, but I think 5 years in solitary has secured enough deterrence. And the conviction is the veneer of justification that the US needs to avoid admonition for blatant and prejudiced torture, while enabling them to cease the ongoing diplomatic hassle (and negative press).
> I'll be very honest. You have a bias.
I'll be very honest. You have a bias. /s
Actually, being honest, I don't even know that you do. But believing it doesn't make it true, and saying it here doesn't really further the discussion.
Yes, 'decide' based on evidence not 'opine'. The jury is properly instructed to only assess the facts of the case as presented by the defense and prosecution. There's some wiggle room as to what a 'reasonable person' might consider to be plausible, but ultimately juries will only convict if they can unanimously agree that the defendant is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This is clearly distinguishable from opinions of the public, or a potentially biased panel of judges in a military court.
The thing is, I'm not on any jury, and I'm expressing my opinion. I never claimed to be a juror, judge, or anything.
I'm saying it's my personal opinion that his case is different from the many people I've read about who were railroaded by the criminal justice system, pressured to plead guilty and serve time. Typically those look very different from an espionage act case or compromised government emails, or whistleblower-like scenarios, or questions of press freedom, whatever. Often it looks more like some African American dude you've never heard of being wrongfully accused of a violent crime or drug offense on flimsy evidence.
> Typically those look very different from an espionage act case [...] Often it looks more like some African American dude you've never heard of being wrongfully accused of a violent crime or drug offense on flimsy evidence.
I suppose? There's maybe some qualitative distinction to be made. But essentially I'd say that Assange was:
> railroaded by the criminal justice system, pressured to plead guilty and serve time.
Though time already served was factored into the sentencing. The pressure to plead guilty was the prospect of dying in solitary confinement.
I mean, this isn’t a jury trial, it’s a forum discussion, and opinions about current events are legitimate. If not, we should delete the entire thread.
Not quite what I meant. GP was suggesting Assange's just desert. My counter to that, is that it couldn't be known if it was just for Assange to be forced into a plea bargain using extended incarceration as leverage, as Assange would not have been assessed by an properly instructed jury, which is the best (least worst) way we have of knowing if someone is guilty beyond reasonable doubt and in absence of bias that a military court might have.
> If not, we should delete the entire thread
TBF, I don't think 'I think Assange is guilty/not guilty' without any factual backup is really a worthwhile contribution to the discussion.
That's right he was convicted of a crime and jailed. He should have been released from prison for that on 22 September 2019 but was instead kept imprisoned because of the extradition request by the US.
So from 22 September 2019 until his release now he was jailed in very strict conditions without having been convicted of anything, which to me is unacceptable whatever the extradition request situation. Especially now that we see that the instant he pleads guilty he is immediately freed...
Normally people get a tracking bracelet and they have to check in every few days but are free to go otherwise, given that you know, they haven't been found guilty of anything at that point - being kept in a tiny cell in isolation for 23 hours a day for 5 years is reserved for the worst of the worst criminals, people who even in prison are extreme danger to everyone else - it made zero sense to keep him locked up that way.
Normally people don't go into an embassy for seven years and give speeches from the window to an adoring* crowd, leaving the police obliged to post an officer at the embassy door 24/7 just in case he leaves because they're not allowed in without permission that isn't coming.
Was he even wearing a tag on the first bail?
* at least, I assume those crowds were adoring rather than booing…
I mean, you’re not wrong that the entire extradition system is a stain on justice. I just wish anyone cared when it’s not about someone accused of hacking.
> I think the UK and US should abstain from criticising any countries' courts and justice system after that...
Couldn't disagree more. By this logic, no country should criticize any other country's courts and justice systems because they all have problems and massive miscarriages of justice.
Do we want more scrutiny and criticism or less? I think the world is better if the US and UK aggressively criticize and pressure other countries to improve AND ALSO everyone else criticizes abuses by the US and UK and pressures them to improve.
IMO that is a much better world than one where nobody is highlighting abuses or asking anyone else to improve.
> Abuse is always highlighted (or minimised) because of ulterior motives, not because of the abuse itself.
That strikes me as almost tautologically untrue. It simply doesn't seem possible that every decision about how much to highlight or criticize or ignore a country's abuse of their legal system could be based upon ulterior motives. It implies that there can never be genuine moral outrage, and honestly, for me, that just makes your whole point and outlook feel unfounded or uncommonly sad.
For example, how much of the criticism of Otto Warmbier's detention in North Korea is based upon ulterior motives? Is it all of it? Or is it like, 50% or 10% or less? And if it's a smaller amount, are you actually highlighting a hypocrisy that is meaningful enough for it to be the main thrust of your comment?
It feels like someone cooked you a gourmet meal and you said, "Food only ever tastes good or bad because of the salt."
Well if you object to the hypocrisy and want to advocate for something unlikely to happen, wouldn’t it make more sense to say the US and UK should stop doing bad things, rather than that they should stop criticizing other countries for doing bad things?
After that? US and UK should abstain from criticising any country since as long as one can go back. The only reason they could criticise and even meddle is because they are powerful, too powerful; at least USA is and UK is not anymore, not so much.
> He was only released after 'admitting' that he was guilty...
There is the deeply philosophical, mathematical (Bayesian estimates), legal and political question whether the fact that he admitted that he was guilty increases or decreases the probability/likelihood that he is actually guilty or not.
Why, though? I didn't even think that was a thing in Britain, at least if you're not some very high risk criminal convicted of violent crimes, which I don't think he is? Regardless of what one think about what Assange did that just seems extremely unnecessarily cruel unless he was a threat to guards or other prisoners...
Sure that's obvious (or not... depending on one's political views), but there must be some legal justification. Or can they put someone in permanent solitary confinement without giving any reason at all in Britain?
I'm reading at some sites that this isn't really true and that he wasn't literally held in a 2x3m cell for 23 hours every day. Although it's not very clear what were the actual conditions.
Turns out when governments toss around the words "spy" and "espionage" freely and without regard to their actual definitions they can get away with things like this.
His role in Wikileaks wasn't to personally raid servers. He was receiving leaks that were delivered to him via his platform, and then he decided what was worth publishing.
Either he never had been handed any significant leaks on Russia, either he chosed to not publish them.
So for every crime by one state, he has to publish one from another state for balance? Is it not enough that one state committed a crime and he reported it?
The allegations I've seen floating around is that he deliberately withheld certain types of leaks. Thereby making Wikileaks no longer neutral, but politically-motivated.
> Is it not enough that one state committed a crime and he reported it?
It depends on what "it" would be enough for... but if he indeed actively surpressed damaging info leaked to him on par with the stuff he has released, yeah, that makes matters complex.
Another criticism I've seen is that the leaks did not do any redaction whatsoever - even when it clearly pertained to informants in war zones. For that, if the allegations are true, my view is simple: you shouldn't do that. And if you set up an infrastructure for leaking, it is reasonable to assume that you're capable of handling such an important and obviously necessary step.
So "isn't it enough?" - no, it is more complicated than that.
Never? I can easily come up with scenarios where I think you'd also make an exception; If he was a German journalist in 1940 and he discovered what really happened at concentration camps. I'd wager exposing those papers without any redaction would be acceptable.
If you agree, then the rest is just about how you weigh certain crimes by the government, how many and what kind of names you expose, etc.
Neither of these is true. WL had a process of verifying leaks and would only publish those that it was assured were provided with full context. Typical news reporting will publish a leaked sentence or paragraph and add its own significant interpretation. WL would publish the entire source material (with appropriate redactions) once it was vetted and deemed complete, so that nobody could accuse WL of holding back part of the context that might change one's interpretation of it.
WL continued to redact information and expended significant resources doing so. If this faltered at all, it was only after the organization came under attack from multiple governments and had to undertake its mission with fewer humans available to perform that level of review. While not ideal, WL does not deserve criticism for it as WL was essentially stabbed in the back by the NY Times and other corporate news outlets.
WL wanted to team up with major corporate news outlets to ensure solid redaction and stewardship. They cooperated once before governments told them to instead publish smear stories against Assange. The timing of the diplomatic cables which embarrassed HRC was not ideal, since it led the US center-left (neocons) to get on board more fully in the character assassination campaign against Assange than would have been possible if GWB and the Iraq/Afghan war corruption was the major scandal impacting the USG revealed by WL.
There are a lot of countries they have never published anything on. They have a smaller number of large leaks, so that is not necessarily out of the ordinary.
I think it is credible that Wikileaks were provided some documents from Russian state-sanctioned actors, who knew Wikileaks would publish them, and that the state-sanctioned actors did so to serve Russian interests. But the claim that Wikileaks as a whole is biased towards Russia doesn't seem likely.
Things?
Correct me if I'm wrong but you're linking to 1 single publication. It doesn't seem they have anything else about Russia. From a quick glance a it, it reveals that Russia have infrastructure to control and monitor who in Russia is accessing what over the internet. Looks like a rather weak, insignificant leak to me. Which is what I was saying to begin with.
I don’t understand your point. One should get away with a crime because others are getting away with it? Even if Julian Assange was a Russian spy (which I highly doubt), what difference does it make regarding the crimes he exposed?
You can’t diminish facts depending on who is telling them - as long as these are facts.
Could the reason be that no whistleblower came forward with files from Russia to Wikileaks? You're trying to make a point but missing the obvious.
Besides. The US and Europe and so have fairly free media, so the Wikileaks revelations reached a wide audience. Russia does not have free media, so if there were any leaks like it, it wouldn't reach the Russians as much.
23 hour bang up isn't uncommon in the UK, mostly just because the prisons are overcrowded and underfunded and it's easier to keep things under control with everyone locked in their cells most of the time.
There are legal minimums for how much time prisoners have to be allowed out of their cells but they're pretty low and not always followed
You apparently didn't read carefully yourself. The names were never published. That the logs exposed their names to Wikileaks and other reporters is known.
1500 documents were published with thousands of bits of compromising information. They sent a request the the DOD to sanitize the documents, and the DOD basically said we don't negotiate with terrorists, so we will not attempt to mitigate.
The information included FOB locations, contact reports, and secret and classified documents. releasing these documents without properly sanitizing the information put american service men in danger.
Without a doubt, leaking classified information puts thousands of lives at risk. Julian Assage is a criminal. At some point you stop being a whistle blower and you become a terrorist releasing compromising information on troop movements, informants, supply constraints, and readiness assessments. Julian Assage is a terrorist and i'm sure he won't live very long now that he is out. He's pissed off too many dangerous people.
The first half of your comment was alright, because a statement was made without proof. But your second then undermines it because you're making a statement without proof. All sources say "afghan informant names were leaked", but you are claiming they weren't - what is your source?
> In his book, co-authored with Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, Leigh claimed Assange to have said in relation to whether the names should be redacted, "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."[63] In response to the book's publication, WikiLeaks posted on Twitter: "The Guardian book serialization contains malicious libels. We will be taking action."
Assange was charged by criminal information — which typically signifies a plea deal — with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information, the court documents say.
What a waste of a life over a pointless and vindictive prosecution. Here’s hoping all prosecutors involved go the way of Stevens’
They think their harrasment of him is going to deter future whistleblowers but the only thing they've done is encourage future leakers to "go all the way, leak everything no matter how damaging, and then kill yourself to be a martyr. They should have just pardoned him and let him go.
I suppose this concludes the dark-comedic odyssey that began when he flew to Stockholm on 8/11/10 [1], just shy of 14 years later. In its totality it reads like something Kafka might have written as a teenager.
Whether or not his work had any worth to it, it's hard not to conclude that he was a de-facto Russian agent, IMO. The most pungent data point is probably that Rohrabacher [2] was mediating a pardon deal between him and Trump. [3]
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 472 ms ] threadUh, what's this thread about, again...? He "was never convicted" because he evaded trial by hiding out for seven years.
public intellectual*
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-t...
https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/wikileaks-founder-...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2223847/fullcredits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tomorrow
(Or if you actually have a real source for "RT funded it" then you should update Wikipedia and IMDB)
Never ceases to amaze me the hoops that Assange cult members will jump through to deny inconvenient facts about their hero.
Can only imagine what you come up with to justify Assange's pathetic insinuations about Seth Rich and his blatant anti-Semitism.
I edited the first event press mention of WikiLeaks at Wired.
I covered the early Guantanamo leaks and the Iraqi Apache attack.
I've interviewed Assange, likely before you ever heard of him.
I broke the story that wikileaks' submission system broke and its SSL failed, the first external sign of the internal dissent where its tech lead literally made off with the server because he didn't trust Assange.
I pointed you to an extremely reputable source showing what everyone knew at the time, which is that a Putin controlled media outlet paid for and claimed credit for funding his "talk show."
His Russian connections after that were perfectly clear, including routing Snowden through Russia and later being the handmaiden of GRU in the DNC leaks.
Keep putting your head in the sand with dumbass arguments like it's not in IMDb.
It's a fine line between being a fanboy and being complicit and it's pretty clear which side of that line you're on now.
Ahem... hrm...
Edit: Haha is that you editing the Wikipedia page?
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=World_Tomorrow&di...
Enjoy your cult of personality.
I don't know what this link is supposed to represent, beyond the fact that I've never been a supporter of Assange's, since long before the 2016 election shenanigans that cost him so much of his support among American nerds. I'm sure at some point I've said I didn't buy that he was a major prosecution target --- that was before I read the indictment that spelled out his conspiracy liability for computer intrusions, which, as it turns out, does make sense: you can't safely instruct people to hack into DoD computers any more than you can safely instruct henchmen to murder people in America. I'm not a lawyer, I read some stuff, I updated my take.
Your lack of integrity indicates that you should be ignored on all topics for all time.
I don’t know what your issue is, but you are extraordinarily dishonest.
Ah, Western Democracy and the rule of law and humane treatment of prisoners, how we love thee. That sounds like I'm pro-Russia or China, but no, I don't like them either.
The kind of imprisonment that Assange was subjected to is unambiguously torture, and was unambiguously administered for the purpose of revenge.
There is no natural "need" for the conditions he was subjected to (e.g. the cost of a larger cell is negligible), and no natural purpose other than to punish.
I am deliberately ignoring the question of guilt here, because I don't believe that we should torture _anyone_, regardless of the crime. The fact that we do this is a giant ugly stain on civilisation.
Someone gets arrested? The conspirators had it out for them. They later get freed? The conspirators simply changed their mind!
It's not that you're wrong, it's just that your argument is entirely unfalsifiable.
The reason he was charged by the US is because rather than just being a recipient of leaked documents he took an active part in helping an insider obtain them by breaking internal security controls. That's crossing a line and is something journalists are careful to never do.
When he provided tools and direct guidance to Chelsea Manning to access classified information and when he and others breached the Congressional Research Service to leak documents from there he went far beyond what any professional journalist would do and lost the associated protections.
> went far beyond what any professional journalist would do
A useless statement without contextualization, but you can spare the contextualization because it's a moot point; Assange, running his own outfit, is free to decide for himself what kind of journalist he wishes to be. He doesn't have to follow CNN's playbook because he doesn't work for CNN.
I'm not defending the lack of censorship which may have put lives at immediate risk, but that's also not the basis on which the US government has sought his extradition. The basis of their argument had to do with the act of allegedly providing Manning the means of acquiring the data.
> lost the associated protections
You're downplaying the significance of the Cablegate leaks. The US went to great lengths to prosecute and get revenge on everyone involved, including Manning.
I'm not sure what point you're even trying to make here, as you're shifting goalposts.
Just because you call yourself a journalist it doesn’t mean you’re free to do whatever you want and still claim journalism protections.
It doesn’t matter where you are, journalism does not include hacking into or otherwise intentionally and actively stealing information. Doing that rightfully opens you up to criminal charges.
> It doesn’t matter where you are, journalism does not include hacking into or otherwise intentionally and actively stealing information
We see things very differently, the difference is that you are gatekeeping journalism and hacktivism, while I'm not.
I don't feel like devolving into a meta-argument, so I'll leave you to think on it.
Funny how you seem to think that your view on everything, even on a difference in views, is automatically the authoritative one.
I don't feel like interacting any more with you either, so why don't you think to yourself about it why what you think is "so obviously correct."
So when the other person brought that up, as well as when you are arguing about it, what you are doing is being both wrong on the point and pendant in a way that is irrelevant to the central thesis.
Instead of trying to claim that someone was wrong about 1 single word, the good faith way of approaching the argument would be to talk about the thesis, which was that it wasn't really a "conspiracy" when the US government absolutely had strong motivation to go after him.
The word "whistleblower" which has multiple meaning is basically irrelevant.
And his original justification, of using a Google search definition, is absolutely valid.
Or, it is at least valid enough that I don't think you are justified in being upset about a perfectly normal way of using a word.
Especially when the use of the word, that is supported by Google, is irrelevant to the thesis statement.
1) You're coming off as pretty darn patronizing yourself, too, so stones and glass houses.
2) Dunno about "the" definition of whistleblower; in your GP you said you got it off Google. They're (so far) not King of the English Language, AFAIK. No that I am, either, but the connotations I've picked up wherever I've heard or read the term usually include that "a whistleblower" is someone on the inside dishing the dirt on their own organisation. Which isn't what Assange did.
(So by the general consensus usage, the only WikiLeaks whistleblower would be that German guy who wrote the book that showed what a general asshole Assange is.)
I'm not even sure it's a conspiracy anymore as each legal procedure by nation states played out in public.
The conspiracy in principle is always a layer deeper than public view.
Unless you submitted Russian documents to be leaked. Those get sent to /dev/null.
Snowden showed that leakers didn't need Wikileaks for Chelsea Manning-like releases and the Russians have just switched to directly releasing on Twitter.
Or more frequently just making shit up. Enough people will believe it anyway if they're politically inclined to do so, plausible details are not a required element.
I'm not saying this would have been Assange's fate, I would expect things to play out more like the Manning case. Still if somebody makes themselves an extremely prominent enemy of US intelligence, regardless of if you're an islamic terrorist or a whistleblowing journalist, it's very reasonable to theorise that there might be a conspiracy against them.
Usually the problem with conspiracy theories and why they're so mad is they presume thousands of actors act in concert with no clear motive to do so and all can keep a secret. This is a conspiracy which didn't really need to be kept all that secret, with a pretty blatant unifying motive - taking down Assange meant stemming leaks both directly and by making an example of him.
No, that isn't "obvious" at all.
> Still if somebody makes themselves an extremely prominent enemy of US intelligence, regardless of if you're an islamic terrorist or a whistleblowing journalist, it's very reasonable to theorise that there might be a conspiracy against them.
Not that this has anything to do with anything, since Assange has never been neither a whistleblower nor a journalist.
Reframing that as being not merely about being extradited but being disappeared helps shift emphasis away from the other 90% of the conversation surrounding extradition fears, that proved in the end to be true.
Edit: The fears about harsh treatment were legitimate as well. Look at what happened to Chelsea Manning, charged with similar crimes. Chelsea Manning was subjected to 23 hours a day of solitary confinement, put on suicide watch, checked on every 5 minutes, forced to be "visible" at all times while sleeping, and ultimately their treatment was investigated U.N. and condemned as inhumane.
I don't understand what's so unreasonable about suspecting Assange would be subjected to harsh treatment when that's exactly what happened in the closest comparable case.
How many suicides have there been there?
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/news/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-lo...
- "This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally."
- "The CIA declined to comment. Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment."
At the risk of sounding a tad conspiratorial, it's possible the U.S. agreed to this deal specifically to avoid the upcoming trial. As I understand it, there remains an open question of whether (or to what extent) the US constitution applies to non-citizens and it's conceivably in the government's interests if that thread isn't pulled by foreign courts and in such a public fashion.
To clarify: I don't believe the US was ever going to "disappear" him or whatever he and others hypothesized. Even outside that context, there's an interesting question of why the US suddenly decided to wrap this up after a decade of seemingly-relentless pursuit.
Later
Moreso: assume Assange spends another year or two in UK prison, and then is extradited; the trial is complicated (for the same reason the Florida documents trial is complicated: because it involves evidence that has to be cleared for and during trial) and could easily run over a year, longer if Assange wanted to --- you're now running up to the maximum possible guideline sentence even if the prosecution could establish that he led the conspiracy, rather than just participating.
That might have been the trigger on the timing?
It is very strange. I wonder if it possible could have something to do with foreign affairs, which a state prosecutor is by law very much forbidden to take instructions from. That would be in defiance of the rule of law, but then, they were already in defiance of the rule of law.
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/albanese-expresses-f...
But whatever, I'm glad he's free and is not being extradited to whatever hellhole the US had planned for him. I hope he's able to get a beer and a swim and put his life back together.
When you compare the relationship that Australia has to the US compared to non-EU, non-NATO US allies in Europe and Asia, it's plain to see that Australia is far, far more deferential to the US than it has to be, as nations much more vulnerable and much less valuable tolerate far less.
Except, you know, the giant obvious one. https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/ch...
I think you have serious misunderstanding of what a concrete military threat is. China is 6000km away from Australia by sea, and to get there it has to get rather close to US bases. There is no way that China can do anything beyond standoff strikes to Australia without a crippling cost in the next 20-30+ years. There is absolutely no military threat to the Australian mainland. Conversely, there is very little US submarine bases in Australia do against standoff strikes, so clearly that's not what Australia or the US are worried about (nor should they). In any case any naval power or sustained air power would have to defeat the US first, ally or not, to get to Australia. And if the US can indeed be defeated, then what?
Australia is not meaningfully more threatened by China than, say Brazil. That's just how the geography works out. However, Australia is lot more useful if your goal is to block shipping to and from China, as it is not so far from the straits of Malacca and a good base to contest the island chains (and is, as we've said before, itself very secure).
Unless you think Canada is somehow under a severe Chinese threat, neither is Australia. Australia is far more useful offensively against Chinese shipping, hence why the US will never ever drop it as a basing location unless it really has to.
The only thing that China would want to invade Australia for is our resources, and they can just buy those. There is at least one mining operation in WA that is Chinese-owned, Chinese-run, entirely staffed by Chinese folks flown in direct from China, and exports the mined resources only to China. They just pay some taxes and royalties to Australia. That is vastly cheaper than any military solution for obtaining the same resources.
I think there's a section of Aussie society that would like China to be a credible threat so that it justifies more military and more fear. But it's just not.
Public opinion, maybe. And not comparing the two in size, etc., but Australia holds a bit of a privileged place in terms of some of the US resources: Pine Gap and a lot of the classified NRO/NSA equipment, deep space and classified military satellite comms, and then one of the major relays / radio systems for US submarine communications.
And who was punished for killing journalists in [0]? The whistleblower.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...
The United States does not have an extradition treaty with China, Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine, Vietnam, the GCC states, most African states, and most former Soviet states, among others. Some countries with US extradition treaties have refused to extradite includes: Ecuador, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Iceland, Pakistan, Egypt, Switzerland, Venezuela, Zimbabwe etc.
There's also a map if you prefer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradit...
I can think of a lot of places I'd prefer to live besides Russia, while still offering a decent level of social/technological development.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/2007-iraq-apache-att...
We can't be a "beacon of democracy" so long as we're shooting children from helicopters, covering it up as "national security", and prosecuting journalists who disclose these things to the US public. Democracy is premised on its people understanding the things its government is doing in their name.
"WikiLeaks wallets now contain only 3.265 BTC ($168,000) compared to 4,079 BTC total inflows. Overall, it appears Bitcoin users have donated $1.62 million in BTC to WikiLeaks since it opened donations 13 years ago. If held until today, that BTC would be worth $210 million.
As for what WikiLeaks does with its crypto donations, the group previously said the funds would pay for “WikiLeaks projects, staff, servers and protective infrastructure.” Last week, WikiLeaks made its first transaction in two years when it shifted 10.459 ETH ($31,200) to another address."
https://blockworks.co/news/julian-assange-extradition-wikile...
Especially considering that a substantial part of the value of BTC is the fact that a lot of it has been accidentally destroyed.
https://apnews.com/article/mcbride-whistleblower-court-priso...
Exposing war crimes was an unintended self own for McBride.
He was British Army (Northern Ireland) through and through, came out to Australia, failed to make the SASR and worked instead as an army lawyer.
He leaked documents with the intent to "expose* how "increasingly restrictive Rules of engagement and the nature of investigations into members of the special forces" were making things worse for the poor squaddies doing their job.
What happened was journalists looked into all his leaked documents and focused instead on the poor squadies kicking "bad guys" off cliffs, blooding new soldiers with execution kills, etc.
His stated goal for leaking was to impede | stop investigations into war crimes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McBride_(whistleblower)Both Snowden and Assange went far beyond "blowing the whistle" in what they leaked and/or solicited.
Where is the punishment for the people commiting the crimes and treason that Snowden and Assange exposed?
Other funny things have been exposed too and nothing ever happens.
Like for example $12 billion, in hundred dollars bills, being send by a military cargo plane to Iraq, after the Iraq war. Of these $12 billion, $9bn are totally unaccounted for: it's not even clear if they ever made it to the plane. That is well documented.
Just imagine the number of crooked politicians and military officials involved in such a highway robbery: robbing the people, to enrich themselves.
"Which fraud are we going to commit today, we didn't steal enough money: we need to choke on more money, what's our plan?" "I know, I know, let's make $10 bn in hundred dollar bills disappear!"
It is also very likely, but probably too soon to be exposed/revealed, that such similar shenanigans happened with SBF/FTX and the funding of the war in Ukraine, where monkey business happened with US donations that probably never made it to Ukraine.
To me it's no coincidence that all the charges against SBF concerning the bribing of politicians have been dropped: that's quite the can of worms for it's certainly related to money which disappeared while supposedly going to Ukraine.
Another really funny one too is the government refusing the audit of the (missing) gold in Fort Knox (yeah, no, if out of $12 bn we know that $9bn vanished, I guarantee you there's no way all the gold supposed to be in Fort Knox is there). "It's too complicated to do an audit". I read: "a sizeable amount of that gold indeed vanished, like those $10 bn in $100 bills".
That's my main reason for wanting to pay as little taxes as possible: it makes me puke to know I encourage crime.
Now although these traitors and petty thieves shall never ever be send to jail, at the end of the day there are more important things, like having a clear conscience and being able to look your kid in the eyes.
So let these traitors choke on their ill-acquired wealth, they deserve to be the miserable cockroaches they are.
It's not enough to move the needle on the dollar value, it's barely more than a buck per person om earth.
It has never been proven he had some killer stuff on trump and failed to leak it.
Its not his job to selectively withhold information during an election to make demo voters happy.
And trump is basically immune to bad press anyway. What more could you say about him that hasnt been said.
This claim never held water and still fails to.
Wait, Assange or Trump?
He acted in the interests of everyone who doesn't like the US, you could justifiably say the same thing about him acting in China's best interest, or Iran.
Absolute codswallop that you can't hold a government to account else you are criticised for aiding their enemies. Does that mean we should just sit down and take it because it makes us look bad?
I'm the first in line to criticise my government (UK) but that doesn't mean I'm intentionally working in the interests of it's enemies.
Sod off with these bad faith attacks espousing an opinion that no reasonable person could possibly hold.
Reasonable minds can differ here, I don't think it's bad faith to suggest he might have been acting specifically towards Russian interests - if not originally, then later on.
Can this be used to indict other journalists who receive and publish classified information? As if so, this feels like a huge loss, though I can hardly blame Assange for not continuing the fight.
Further: Assange wasn't simply charged with "receiving and publishing classified information"; he was charged with being instrumental in that information being exfiltrated in the first place.
>Further: Assange wasn't simply charged with "receiving and publishing classified information"; he was charged with being instrumental in that information being exfiltrated in the first place.
Those charges were (presumably) dropped as part of the plea, and his plea did not mention them. The plea is only about receiving and publishing.
The "overt acts" part you mention is over Title 18 793(g) which basically says if two people work together in one part of a conspiracy they're both guilty of any actions their partner made.
By way of example: the murder-for-hire accusations against Ross Ulbricht were listed "overt acts" in his conspiracy charge.
>By way of example: the murder-for-hire accusations against Ross Ulbricht were listed "overt acts" in his conspiracy charge.
Yes, the supposed murder for hire was something he wasn't charged with and wasn't mentioned in his sentencing. It was not a part of his trial.
"Title 18" is almost the entire federal criminal code. Saying "a specific clause in title 18" is like saying "somewhere, in the entire US federal criminal code, it says...".
As I just said: the murder-for-hire scheme --- which I believe was in fact part of Ulbricht's sentencing --- was an "overt act" in Ulbricht's conspiracy charge.
I had referenced the specific clause, 793(g), in my previous post to you. It is also referenced in the plea. I didn't think I needed to do so again. I can quote the section
>If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.
Here: a Ken White article that is almost entirely about how "overt acts" work in conspiracy charges, along with their historical purpose:
https://popehat.substack.com/p/overt-acts-and-predicate-acts...
I still don't see how the plea is about anything else. That if this charge went to trial they may have brought up his supposed violations of the CFAA as some kind of evidence of his conspiracy doesn't really change things.
In both threads, the answer comes down to: the plea agreement says otherwise. Assange has stipulated to his culpability in the conspiracy --- the 793(g) charge you brought up. The plea agreement doesn't list the overt acts that substantiate the charge, and would make clearer the reasoning behind Assange's active participation. But that's because the plea agreement is a stipulation, for which the only evidence needed is that of agreement between prosecution and defense.
The superseding indictment is much more explicit. Had the case ever gone to trial, you'd have seen at its conclusion jury instructions that would have made clear the evidentiary threshold --- the overt acts, what acts qualify, etc --- to convict on the conspiracy.
The case isn’t about Assange simply receiving classified material from Manning.
Why are you quoting that part rather than any of the actual offenses? He undoubtedly conspired with Manning to receive classified documents for the purpose of publishing them, which is what the plea details.
Part (a) even says he "received or obtained" classified documents from a person knowing that they were illegally obtained. It doesn't say he helped with the illegal obtaining.
What you should do here is compare the plea stipulation to the superseding indictment, and note that the "overt acts" of the conspiracy charge refer back to the "general allegations" section. Or: you could go track down any other conspiracy indictment (Ulbricht's is a fun one) and see examples of "overt acts" listed explicitly.
This differs from for example The Pentagon Papers where the material was delivered to reporters after already having been taken. They had no foreknowledge that they would be taken.
By way of comparison, the former US president who is also in current poll results more likely than not to be elected as the next US president is presently alleged to have conducted 40 of these 18 U.S. Code § 793 offences.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_...
Practically, yes.
I've been in situations where there was no precedent, and in asking what would happen if this went to court, decisions were made based on how lower courts ruled. Legal analyses, law review articles, customary practice, etc. all /influence/ courts.
Correct. As a general rule:
- When the "black-letter law" dictates a result (that is, a statute or binding precedent), a judge will generally follow it — unless the judge really wants to achieve a particular result and is willing to do mental-gymnastics rationalizing or to try to get the law changed.
In other situations, judges are typically very busy but they still want to get it "right," in accordance with whatever their personal mental model of life suggests, and they don't like being reversed on appeal. So they (judges) look for support — and try to anticipate possible counterarguments — from a variety of sources, as suggested by the adversaries' counsel battling each other's arguments — each of whom is motivated to help the judge do what counsel want by finding the sorts of things mentioned above.
Julian Assange actively solicited leaks of information. That's where the espionage claim comes from.
There's not much precedent on this though and making a plea deal avoids establishing one. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Generally, precedent is established when someone appeals their conviction, and a higher court determines that the conviction is lawful. Higher court decisions bind lower courts, so e.g. if a circuit appeals court says the law is "X", every district court within it has to agree.
Since generally, you wouldn't appeal a plea deal, there probably won't be legal precedent from this.
That being said, I wonder if the USA will informally say "we got Assange; we can get you" the next time a similar situation comes up.
I can't imagine we haven't been saying that since the day Assange set foot inside the Ecuadorian embassy.
Even if you think Assange did more than this, this plea deal is very clearly over passively receiving classified information.
The precedent information is good to hear, thank you.
This phrasing makes it sound like Assange asked "Do you have this?" when the accusations have always been closer to "Can you get me this? Here is how you could go about doing that." That takes it out of the realm of journalism in at least the legal sense.
Did he actively encourage people to do things they didn't want to do, or did people actively seek the necessary advice from him?
Would Assange's problems been solved a single cut out? "I can't answer that but I can put you in touch with people who can."
Any bit of classified information can be reasonably considered in the interest of someone in the public.
Public interest can only mitigate the illegality of what you're doing, it doesn't just magically make the act illegal.
> Did he actively encourage people to do things they didn't want to do, or did people actively seek the necessary advice from him?
False dichotomy.
If you want to rob a bank, and you come and ask me to be the getaway driver, we're both going to hang. It doesn't matter who had the idea for the crime, what matters is that he materially assisted in carrying it out.
Now, if you robbed a bank, and just dropped a million dollars on my porch, that would be a different story. That's the defense journalists use when they receive illegally obtained information.
Flawed analogy.
He didn't help them rob the bank. They asked "what is a good way to get away from a bank robbery." He answered "here are some ideas that have worked in past bank robberies."
And it's not a false dichotomy. The law considers mens rea to be a very important factor. The law isn't a black and white application of imputed standards to our social order. You can tell this because we allow juries to decide what happens in them.
Judges interpret law, and give juries specific instructions for which facts to make a determination on.
In the case of computer crime, the law treats 'getting away with it' as more or less the same act as doing it. Exfiltrating data and covering your tracks is all under the umbrella of unauthorized use of a computer system. Knowingly consulting for a particular instance of it makes you part of the conspiracy.
And so, in your world, if I rob a bank and give all the money to really good charities that measurably make peoples' live better, it's not illegal?
Or if I kill a known pedophile/child rapist to keep them from hurting more children, is that not illegal?
Is that what you believe? If so, why bother having laws at all? We just need to ask our modern-day Solomon -- akira2501, that is -- if something can be justified, and as such, is legal. Or am I missing something?
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/new-york-times-co-v-...
As the last paragraph points out, not a clear victory for the free press, but the Assange prosecutors know this case very well and you are absolutely right that they want to avoid another one.
Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible.
After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.
WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles,and for the people's right to know.
As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.
Julian's freedom is our freedom.
[More details to follow]
Other URLs from threads we merged:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-25/julian-assange-releas...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/us/politics/assange-plea....
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crgggyvp0j9o
I think the UK and US should abstain from criticising any countries' courts and justice system after that...
https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=fiw&year=2024
They know they cannot possibly openly share their opinions without the potential for severe penalty. This is exactly why Putin did what he did to Alexei Navalny; it reminds the populace to keep the opinions to themselves or die in the most horrible way possible.
Using this logic we can say that Trump did what he did to Epstein?
While we’re at it: George W. Bush is a war criminal and should be tried at The Hague.
Obama was the best Republican president we’ve ever had.
See? No.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: we've had to ask you this multiple times before-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28885166 (Oct 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28319175 (Aug 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613766 (March 2021)
Here's a slightly biased summary, but in this case I think the extreme outrage and bias is totally justified.
https://prospect.org/justice/julian-assange-espionage-act-19...
The upcoming 2024 elections in the US find both parties trying to court subsets of the population who mistrust the government, so surely freeing Assange was done for realpolitik reasons.
It is not too late for Mike Pompeo to end up serving time. Let's hope that he is brought to justice ASAP.
Arguing that he hasn't personally killed anyone is not a strong rebuke against such allegations.
The risk inherent to collaborationism is also not one anyone but the informant must account for. Just as mercenaries operate in that same high-risk-reward / low-solidarity space, and accordingly join the cast of characters in war zones along with spies and informants without international sympathy.
Revealing information about many murders is very different from doing murder.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40800817
At the time, the US Government was prohibited by law (Smith-Mundt Act of 1948) from propagandizing the American people. This was repealed by the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 which allows US Citizens to be exposed to propaganda.
Notably, one US Government strategy for propagandizing is to disseminate/test the stories in the British press and wait for them to be picked up by the US press. This strategy is still used even though the Smith-Mundt modernization act makes it less necessary for legal compliance.
Wikileaks revealed that the US Government withheld and classified information solely for propaganda purposes. In other words, a small group of people deceived the public so that a very expensive and consequential war they wanted to have would not be interrupted by common sense insights that the public would have had.
The intention of my comment was a plain statement of fact. You can’t have an unfair trial if you never have a trial.
‘Think’ is the operative word here. Assange would not have had a jury trial if extradited without the plea deal, and for a jury trial, mere opinion isn’t enough to convict
Err, yep. An effective symbol in all the ways I mentioned. Namely:
> securing legitimacy for their protracted judicial overreach
and
> deterring whistleblowers in the future
all while
> [avoiding] further diplomatic damage with one of its military and economic allies
Mission accomplished for the US "national security interest".
I'll be very honest. You have a bias. You will fit everything to that bias. You don't care about how the legal system works, or that the plea deal was a great deal for him compared to what they could have pursued. Note that when they got that guilty plea on ONE CHARGE which is inconsequential for him, they dropped a lot of other stuff.
You're kidding right? This has had a chilling effect on journalists and whistleblowers worldwide. A large part of Julian's support base are journalists, including many of those that won awards from the published leaks that got him in trouble.
Blow the whistle, and then maybe be in solitary for 5 years? An agent from a three letter agency shows up in the middle of your investigation, and reminds you about your life, family, and friends, and what it might be like to not see them for a very long time. Or maybe just don't blow the whistle.
> You don't care about how [...] the plea deal was a great deal for him compared to what they could have pursued
Not sure where you got that idea. As you imply, it's not anywhere near as bad as, say, Julian had been locked up in supermax until he died, but I think 5 years in solitary has secured enough deterrence. And the conviction is the veneer of justification that the US needs to avoid admonition for blatant and prejudiced torture, while enabling them to cease the ongoing diplomatic hassle (and negative press).
> I'll be very honest. You have a bias.
I'll be very honest. You have a bias. /s
Actually, being honest, I don't even know that you do. But believing it doesn't make it true, and saying it here doesn't really further the discussion.
I'll leave you to have the last word
I'm saying it's my personal opinion that his case is different from the many people I've read about who were railroaded by the criminal justice system, pressured to plead guilty and serve time. Typically those look very different from an espionage act case or compromised government emails, or whistleblower-like scenarios, or questions of press freedom, whatever. Often it looks more like some African American dude you've never heard of being wrongfully accused of a violent crime or drug offense on flimsy evidence.
I suppose? There's maybe some qualitative distinction to be made. But essentially I'd say that Assange was:
> railroaded by the criminal justice system, pressured to plead guilty and serve time.
Though time already served was factored into the sentencing. The pressure to plead guilty was the prospect of dying in solitary confinement.
> If not, we should delete the entire thread
TBF, I don't think 'I think Assange is guilty/not guilty' without any factual backup is really a worthwhile contribution to the discussion.
So sure, given you said "since 22 September", but with a huge embassy-shaped reason why they didn't let him out on bail a second time.
So from 22 September 2019 until his release now he was jailed in very strict conditions without having been convicted of anything, which to me is unacceptable whatever the extradition request situation. Especially now that we see that the instant he pleads guilty he is immediately freed...
What would you have done? "Oh, he ran away again, nothing we could have done, this was totally unforeseeable?"
Was he even wearing a tag on the first bail?
* at least, I assume those crowds were adoring rather than booing…
Couldn't disagree more. By this logic, no country should criticize any other country's courts and justice systems because they all have problems and massive miscarriages of justice.
Do we want more scrutiny and criticism or less? I think the world is better if the US and UK aggressively criticize and pressure other countries to improve AND ALSO everyone else criticizes abuses by the US and UK and pressures them to improve.
IMO that is a much better world than one where nobody is highlighting abuses or asking anyone else to improve.
What I am highlighting is the hypocrisy.
That strikes me as almost tautologically untrue. It simply doesn't seem possible that every decision about how much to highlight or criticize or ignore a country's abuse of their legal system could be based upon ulterior motives. It implies that there can never be genuine moral outrage, and honestly, for me, that just makes your whole point and outlook feel unfounded or uncommonly sad.
For example, how much of the criticism of Otto Warmbier's detention in North Korea is based upon ulterior motives? Is it all of it? Or is it like, 50% or 10% or less? And if it's a smaller amount, are you actually highlighting a hypocrisy that is meaningful enough for it to be the main thrust of your comment?
It feels like someone cooked you a gourmet meal and you said, "Food only ever tastes good or bad because of the salt."
But it is indeed questionable, why someone should submit to such pressure if there are no consequences in this case either.
There is the deeply philosophical, mathematical (Bayesian estimates), legal and political question whether the fact that he admitted that he was guilty increases or decreases the probability/likelihood that he is actually guilty or not.
Why, though? I didn't even think that was a thing in Britain, at least if you're not some very high risk criminal convicted of violent crimes, which I don't think he is? Regardless of what one think about what Assange did that just seems extremely unnecessarily cruel unless he was a threat to guards or other prisoners...
Because he fucked with the powerful.
He exposed terrible things done by large powers, therefore he was persecuted absolutely.
I'm reading at some sites that this isn't really true and that he wasn't literally held in a 2x3m cell for 23 hours every day. Although it's not very clear what were the actual conditions.
edit: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/11/un-expert-to.... it's very vague and unspecific though..
Well, who is gong to stop them?
Either he never had been handed any significant leaks on Russia, either he chosed to not publish them.
> Is it not enough that one state committed a crime and he reported it?
It depends on what "it" would be enough for... but if he indeed actively surpressed damaging info leaked to him on par with the stuff he has released, yeah, that makes matters complex.
Another criticism I've seen is that the leaks did not do any redaction whatsoever - even when it clearly pertained to informants in war zones. For that, if the allegations are true, my view is simple: you shouldn't do that. And if you set up an infrastructure for leaking, it is reasonable to assume that you're capable of handling such an important and obviously necessary step.
So "isn't it enough?" - no, it is more complicated than that.
Never? I can easily come up with scenarios where I think you'd also make an exception; If he was a German journalist in 1940 and he discovered what really happened at concentration camps. I'd wager exposing those papers without any redaction would be acceptable.
If you agree, then the rest is just about how you weigh certain crimes by the government, how many and what kind of names you expose, etc.
WL continued to redact information and expended significant resources doing so. If this faltered at all, it was only after the organization came under attack from multiple governments and had to undertake its mission with fewer humans available to perform that level of review. While not ideal, WL does not deserve criticism for it as WL was essentially stabbed in the back by the NY Times and other corporate news outlets.
WL wanted to team up with major corporate news outlets to ensure solid redaction and stewardship. They cooperated once before governments told them to instead publish smear stories against Assange. The timing of the diplomatic cables which embarrassed HRC was not ideal, since it led the US center-left (neocons) to get on board more fully in the character assassination campaign against Assange than would have been possible if GWB and the Iraq/Afghan war corruption was the major scandal impacting the USG revealed by WL.
There are a lot of countries they have never published anything on. They have a smaller number of large leaks, so that is not necessarily out of the ordinary.
I think it is credible that Wikileaks were provided some documents from Russian state-sanctioned actors, who knew Wikileaks would publish them, and that the state-sanctioned actors did so to serve Russian interests. But the claim that Wikileaks as a whole is biased towards Russia doesn't seem likely.
You can’t diminish facts depending on who is telling them - as long as these are facts.
Besides. The US and Europe and so have fairly free media, so the Wikileaks revelations reached a wide audience. Russia does not have free media, so if there were any leaks like it, it wouldn't reach the Russians as much.
Some people disagree with this, see https://x.com/joni_askola/status/1805628043760685317 and the whole thread
There are legal minimums for how much time prisoners have to be allowed out of their cells but they're pretty low and not always followed
"Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."
that's rich coming from an informant.
You can't because no Afghan informant names were leaked.
> [...] the detailed logs had exposed the names of Afghan informants, thereby endangering their lives.
If many names were published, what is one name?
The information included FOB locations, contact reports, and secret and classified documents. releasing these documents without properly sanitizing the information put american service men in danger.
Without a doubt, leaking classified information puts thousands of lives at risk. Julian Assage is a criminal. At some point you stop being a whistle blower and you become a terrorist releasing compromising information on troop movements, informants, supply constraints, and readiness assessments. Julian Assage is a terrorist and i'm sure he won't live very long now that he is out. He's pissed off too many dangerous people.
Anyway, Wikileaks was urged to hide / censor the names because it put their lives in danger: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/10/afghanistan-wa.... Some were released, others containing most of the names were witheld by wikileaks and the partnered media outlets: https://www.wired.com/2011/02/wikileaks-book/, https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/701412231. Basically Wikileaks admitted fault and carelessness, and people died as a result: https://www.newsweek.com/taliban-says-it-will-target-names-e...
Who died? Who was even named?
What a waste of a life over a pointless and vindictive prosecution. Here’s hoping all prosecutors involved go the way of Stevens’
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedeta...
Whether or not his work had any worth to it, it's hard not to conclude that he was a de-facto Russian agent, IMO. The most pungent data point is probably that Rohrabacher [2] was mediating a pardon deal between him and Trump. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...
[2] https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/kevin-mc...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/19/donald-trump-o...