Was Assange in the US at the time of the hacking? What has bothered me most is that he is a non-citizen, a journalist, being dragged across the world to face US Law
In the age of the Internet the physical location of where a crime took place is complicated. If I sit in front of a computer in a foreign country, preferably one that doesn't have extradition treaties with the US, and steal money/secrets/dank memes from American citizens I don't think many people would suggest I should be allowed to get away with that based on where I happen to be at the time.
It may or may not be the case for Assange depending on the facts of the case and on your own opinion, but treating the location of the crime as "where the server is" does seem like a sensible way to deal with the problem.
He is being extradited precisely because what he did is also a crime under UK law. You typically can’t be extradited if the offense you committed isn’t a crime locally (like homosexuality).
I'm not sure that's entirely fair, as it doesn't address the posible disparity of sentencing for an existing crime.
A specific action punishable by a year in prison in my home country might be punished with a decade in another; the conditions of my home country's prison might not be the same as in a foreign country, etc.
If I had to serve a one year sentence where I live for something I consider moral I wouldn't be too bothered (not that I'd welcome it of course), but serving a year in an American prison is a terrifying thought.
I'm not a fan of countries who apply their laws globally but I don't think that is the case with the GP's hypothetical because the server is hosted in that country - thus that is literally where the crime was committed.
You may not be physically present in the same location as the server in the GP's hypothetical but the crime you committed was within the territory of that particular country.
To me, the equivalent is flying over to the country, committing a crime, then flying back before the crime had been detected and using that as a defence for why you shouldn't be extradited.
That's just my opinion though. I do agree that the age of the internet has made the issue of legal jurisdictions a murky one.
The Internet hasn't made any of this murky. It's the exact same thing you can do with the postal system, for which we have hundreds of years of precedence.
If a US citizen in the 1960s sent a leaflet containing some thought crime to the Soviet Union should the US be under any obligation to extradite that person to the USSR?
By communicating with a computer in another country you're just sending information across the high-tech equivalent of the postal system. It's up to the receiving country how strict they're going to be in auditing information crossing their borders.
If a US citizen in the 1960s sent a leaflet containing some thought crime to the Soviet Union should the US be under any obligation to extradite that person to the USSR?
Interesting example, and as I understand it, the USSR would have considered it a crime and would have requested extradition. That is their right as a sovereign nation, and it's the reason why extradition treaties exist. That's kind of the point I was making - countries get to decide what crimes have taken place within their borders, and extradition treaties are the way we decide whether or not we move people to where they need be in order to answer for their actions. Geography has never really been a way of avoiding prosecution (but using the lack of extradition treaties between rival nations absolutely has).
>If a US citizen in the 1960s sent a leaflet containing some thought crime to the Soviet Union should the US be under any obligation to extradite that person to the USSR?
Only if (a) an extradition treaty between the two countries existed and (b) the actions of the US citizen were a crime in the US as well as in the USSR. In general, you can only be extradited for something that's a crime in the country you're being extradited from.
Assange is not a symbol of free information. For all you know WikiLeaks was a honeypot. Free information isn't selectively released in conjunction with conspiracy narratives against your political foes to help facilitate your own political objectives.
Sadly, not the first time this has happened - Dmitry Sklyarov's arrest for PDF cracking was the incident which motivated me into digital civil rights campaigning, and more recently Gary McKinnon's long fight against extradition for ""hacking the Pentagon"". Or the FBI raid on Megaupload in New Zealand.
Extradition is usually done when someone commits a crime in one country, then flees to another country, and the first country requests that the second country send them back to the first country so they can be tried, right? Assange didn't break any laws inside the US. Can the US request extradition of anyone who breaks US law, even if they didn't break it while in the US? That seems pretty dangerous, and if I were a legislator in another country I would be very wary of ceding international prosecution power to the US.
If Alice in Canada, a Canadian citizen and permanent resident, tells Bob in the US that thepiratebay lets them download copyrighted content, can the US request extradition of Alice from Canada and charge them with US crimes?
0. Country A has an extradition treaty with country B.
1. Break a law in Country A that is also a law in Country B but the effects of breaking that law happen in country B.
2. Courts in Country A decide whether the extradition treaty applies.
3. If it's a citizen that breaks the law there are a myriad of ways for Country A to say no. If It's a non-citizen then they get exported with a quickness, usually.
Countries like Iceland usually say no to the US, see: Bobby Fischer. Other countries vary quite a lot.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but most countries only extradite their own citizens (sometimes or never) in the case where laws are broken in both countries and there's a ton of political pressure. It's not completely willy nilly though it's worse than I'd like.
Depends on the country. Germany for example doesnt allow the extradition of German citizens outside the EU unless its to the international court of justice. Before the European arrest warrant it was completely unconstitutional to extradite any German citizen to anywhere. You instead get put on trial in Germany.
The including of the espionage act is a reasonable concern.
The question about helping someone hack the laptop in question (even if not successful) was a clear crossing of a boundary that I would expect most journalists would not cross.
>The question about helping someone hack the laptop in question (even if not successful) was a clear crossing of a boundary that I would expect most journalists would not cross.
It seems fairly analogous to the famous 1973 burglary of FBI offices that uncovered J Edgar Hoover's blanked surveillance of civil rights movements and his attempt to coerce Luther King into committing suicide:
A pity he is not in Sweden. Just four months ago a number of journalists from a tech news site accessed an unprotected medical server as part of verifying the claim that it was indeed unprotected. 2.7 million patient calls to Swedish healthcare hotline left unprotected online (https://thenextweb.com/eu/2019/02/18/2-7-million-patient-cal...). The journalists downloaded one audio file during verification.
The company filed a police complaint and claimed the journalists unlawfully accessed a computer without authorization, conspired to access a computer without authorization, and access with the intention to disclose patient confidential information (https://www.svt.se/nyheter/medhelp-anmaler-computer-sweden). I strongly doubt it will go anywhere or any of the journalists will see a day in prison.
When your business card reads "wikileaks" I think the parties involved have a decent idea of what they where doing.
I can see how the attempt might be viewed as a hostile act towards the Americans as a "military entity" but i also strongly belive that Wikileaks has done amazing work with their dumps.
If he wants to try and brute a few encryptions to support wikileaks i dont really mind quite frankly. The amount of shit we (europeans++) take from the American tech/some enterprises on behalf of the us goverment i legitimatly feel that the citisens that have been illegal spied on by a foreign goverment that could not possibly care less about protecting their fundemental privacy rights, lose their privilige to complain when citizens of said foreign nations with "nobel" causes tries to fuck them back.
Im sorry but with the revelations of the past decade my strong support of the status quo in regards to American dominance has withered some. There is a point where i just want to tell the American military machine to "ta deg en bolle" (Norwegian for its time to shut the fuck up and deal with it)
So, did you know that in the US you can face years in prison for just telling someone, "I can't help you commit check fraud, but Google _____ if you're interested in learning how others do it"?
Accessory liability generally requires you to know that someone is going to commit a crime, and know that your action will help them.
Juries can make bad decisions in particular cases of course, but if I were the defense I would have a field day constantly repeating the "I can't help you" quote.
The other side would try to say that was just hand waving or insincere, and the jury would have to decide between those two alternatives based on all the facts of the case.
(This becomes a question of fact because particular facts matter. If the Godfather leans in and says the line you gave, for instance, to one of his loyal henchmen, the law should be able to punish him.)
> (This becomes a question of fact because particular facts matter. If the Godfather leans in and says the line you gave, for instance, to one of his loyal henchmen, the law should be able to punish him.)
That pretty much means that by calling someone a "godfather" I can prosecute them for things that normally wouldn't be a crime. What if I call someone a "terrorist," or a government a "regime"?
If one actor threatens to kill another on stage as part of a play, then says exactly the same words in the same tone to the same person off stage, the former threat isn't real and the latter case is real.
That's because the threat isn't just the words; it's also a question of intent - and in the absence of time-travelling MRI machines to objectively observe people's thoughts in the past, inferring the intent from context we can observe.
Of course, you could argue that having laws that depend on people's only-indirectly-observable mental state is a bad idea - that announcing your intention to blow up an airport should either always be legal, or never be legal. If you're interested in such questions, you might enjoy reading about the Twitter Joke Trial [1] over one such incident.
I think the point is well made - the jury has to decide what "I can't help you" means, and it means different things depending on who says it. This is the nature of human communication and we can't escape from it.
To clarify further, generally past convictions are inadmissible, because you don't want to bias a jury about the facts of the specific case.
"This guy murdered three other people!" is no proof that he murdered this particular person.
Because of those rules, calling someone a "godfather" in court doesn't so much get you a prosecution as it gets you an objection and mistrial.
So I used a lazy example to illustrate the point.
But this brings up another key point -- most of criminal procedure can be summed up by "you can't use irrelevant statements to prejudice the hell out of the jury."
How about if you're talking to someone fuming about a local politician and he's talking about making an explosive and you say "I can't help you make a bomb but Google _____ if you're interested in learning how others do it"
If the person goes and then tries it, yes, I agree you share in the responsibility for their actions. It was reasonable for you to believe the intent was serious and you provided essential guidance to making it a reality.
There's that word "just" again. "just telling someone" adds deceptive misdirection. The context of who you tell and how and why are all important.
If you say "idk, maybe Google 'how to make a bomb,'" then that's not essential guidance. If you say "Google for [list of specific key ingredients]," that's a bit different.
> but Google _____ if you're interested in learning how others do it.
> ...and you provided essential guidance to making it a reality.
That's called essential guidance? Man, I guess I could be an educator and mentor, providing essential guidance on software. I guess people are serious when they say software is Google-fu.
Considering how the internet is full of questions that could be solved by googling them, you could make the argument that it's essential.
It becomes even more essential if you provide them with the proper search terms that would give them better results. Interpreting what "better search terms" is, is something a good lawyer should be able to manage.
> So, did you know that in the US you can face years in prison for just telling someone, "I can't help you commit check fraud, but Google _____ if you're interested in learning how others do it"?
To the extent that would be illegal, it would only be illegal because the other person was first asking how to commit a crime. If you walked up to a random person and told them "Google 'How to commit check fraud'" then you'd be 100% in the clear.
I remember an article of a woman getting around seven years for this exact thing, but I wasn't able to find it, you'll just have to take my post with a grain of salt even though I vouch for it.
I think it is an extremely slippery slope to prosecute people for providing public information about how to find public resources to do something already publicly known.
That means that you could go to jail for merely suggesting for someone that it's possible for them to buy drugs online via a dark net market-- something I am indirectly doing now just by having this conversation.
Or for telling them to google _____ to know how to commit suicide painlessly.
Where do we draw the line? Are we sure someone won't come along and move it further down later on?
That's the point of due process: to make a conscious judgment about intent based on evidence. In your case, any intelligent person—short of corruption—would realize you were stating an example, not encouraging me to commit a crime.
Assange broke the law—calling him a journalist is a farce and a tactic—and has to deal with the consequences. Letting him get away with it sets a precedent for interpreting the law in any way we want, effectively rendering laws useless (and creating the exact problem you've described here).
Why do you feel that it strengthens your argument to say "calling him a journalist is a farce"? Clearly, lots of people consider him a journalist. He's even won several prizes for being a journalist. Here's one from 2011:
"Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism.
The annual prize is awarded to a journalist "whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gellhorn called it".
In the absence of a clear legal definition of "journalist" in the US, it seems entirely reasonable to call someone who wins prizes for journalism a journalist. Why do you disagree, and why should your opinion be weighted more strongly than those who disagree with you?
I agree, however, that calling him a "journalist" is a tactic. The goal is imply that because he's a journalist, he should not be prosecuted for breaking the law. It's a strange tactic, though, since as far as I know there are no exceptions for journalists to break US federal laws.
Anyway, I'd argue that calling him "not a journalist" is a tactic as well. Why not simplify to your stronger point of "Assange broke the law ... and has to deal with the consequences"? Do you feel that if he was a "proper journalist" he should be treated differently?
(Personally, I think trying to enforce US law on foreign nationals who have never set foot in your country is a terrible precedent. I believe that prosecuting him is selective-enforcement, intended to punish him for releasing true but embarrassing information about US government misdeeds, and to dissuade others who might be tempted to follow his example. While he likely broke the laws that he is charged with, I think journalists worldwide are right to be afraid of the change in policy that this implies.)
>It's a strange tactic, though, since as far as I know there are no exceptions for journalists to break US federal laws.
There is a strong social and institutional norm that we don't prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, even though it is against the law. The government is even sort of maintaining that norm here, by charging the password cracking instead of the publication.
From my understanding, part of the requirement in Assange's defense against the extradition treaty (which the US and Equador swore wasn't going to happen) is that he must prove he was acting as a journalist.
And yes, this entire situation is definitely meant to create a chilling effect among whistleblowers, and simultaneously cement in the public mind that if data is protected/encrypted, you're not ethically allowed as a vigilante to use digital forensics against it in order to expose horrendous crimes committed in the name of the government.
Even though government digital forensics against a foreign political adversary is why they have these chat logs of Assange in the first place. It's about creating an uneven playing field.
> Pointing to awards is effectively just an appeal to authority.
It would be, if it wasn't followed by the (correct) fact that there is an absence of an official record of who is and isn't a journalist, and saying that this is a decent proxy. And an appeal to authority, when we're discussing whether someone is authoritatively a journalist, seems apt, to me.
Do you believe that journalism at large isn't under attack?
Do you truly believe that a political journalist is not ethically allowed to commit digital forensics against an adversary who committed war crimes in secret? What gives the US government immunity from hacking but not Assange?
What if Assange does not recognize the authority of a State he has never set foot in?
If I am tipped off about a badly protected server in China which contains information about State-wide concentration camps and Buddhist and Muslim persecution which I think the world needs to see, am I acting unethically if I want to acquire this information?
Why the hell do I care about the laws of a foreign totalitarian authoritarian regime who commits human rights atrocities on a daily basis?
> They can do whatever they want. But they need to be aware of and accept the consequences of doing so.
Okay, and are you willing to stand behind journalists who accept these consequences in order to make the world a better place while you sit on your thumbs playing the blame game? Are you willing to fight for their freedoms, or just reap the benefits of their actions while throwing them under the bus and saying, "Well, they should have known better before attacking an authoritarian state"?
> Not really. There's a lot of tantrum throwing, though.
Tantrum throwing != fighting for journalism rights. The general decline of journalism quality is part of this attack on journalism, btw. Surely you would agree that journalistic integrity in the last two centuries has suffered greatly.
> The world's largest military.
This doesn't grant them any ethical passes, it just allows them to enforce their totalitarian practices and silence dissenters.
Using this as an excuse literally makes you an authoritarian, and means you accept human rights violations such as Collateral Murder, one of the main leaked elements which Assange is now under threat of extradition for.
Do you stand by the soldiers' actions in Collateral Murder? Do you think these actions should have stayed secret?
> What if I don't recognize the authority of local law enforcement? Can I start doing as I please?
You can certainly try. And if I feel you have been unjustly persecuted for actions which should not be illegal, I will be there protesting for your freedom.
Remember, the government is a public service meant to keep us safe and protect our rights, not our daddies and mommies whose job is to teach us right and wrong. It's the public's job to teach the government what is right and wrong, through public education, voting and protesting. Law and ethics are entirely orthogonal, the only people who try to purport they are the same seek to benefit from this lie.
> If you're referring to the U.S., it's not a totalitarian, authoritarian regime. There's just a stubborn asshole in charge that a lot of people don't like.
> And based on your overall tone, I'd assume you lack focus, emotional composure, and have struggled to find meaning in life (using politics as an outlet for your anger).
Wow. You really like to presume things. So because I am politically engaged, I lack focus and emotional composure? Lol what?
I don't know my meaning in life? What shit are you smoking? My meaning in life is to fight for individual freedoms and spend my time helping others, which I am literally doing right now. Methinks you doth project too much.
Sounds like you have an arbitrary heuristic for what defines a journalist, which possibly takes into account political motivation and what organization the journalist works for.
That heuristic doesn't stand up to basic scrutiny.
I think it's a hard line to draw. Did you just tell someone to Google the anarchist cookbook? Or did you tell them to Google a specific nitrate group that is easily accessible but requires specific knowledge and likely wouldn't be found by a novice searching (which novices will find a lot). I think it also matters if you explicitly know they are going to commit a crime vs just being curious (you do have to know how to commit a crime to defend against it). I don't think it is simple.
I think it's an easy line to draw - it just looks difficult because it has been repeatedly stretched to catch one "bad guy" or another.
The example under discussion can be straightforwardly applied to the topic of software exploits. By posting a proof of concept to a mailing list, one knows that previously obscure information will then be in the hands of ne'er do wells. The motivation even includes foreseeing the exploit being used, pressuring the vendor/sysadmins into fixing it. Yet we are all safer when exploits are shared publicly so that they can be patched, rather than kept in obscurity.
Providing general information, even to someone who will use it for abuse, should be protected speech. "Ammonium nitrate plus Diesel" or "Just Google Casio F-91W and thank me later" are definitively in that territory. A weaker standard is begging for selective persecution, just as we see here.
While I can understand that, the root issue is that this “hacking” is in fact a public service—whistleblowing. There was much more support for Assange, even from the political establishment, before he published the emails in the lead up to the election. I can’t even be mad at that because it showed what a corrupt organization the DNC was at the time (and probably still is, although there is the Unity coalition now).
So I would argue he embarrassed both the military industrial complex AND the DNC to get him where he is now. It’s also much harder to see publishing internal documents of a campaign/political party as a public service or whistleblowing, though I think the case for “russian interference” is entirely overblown compared to, say, blatant interference via the incestuous political/media blob.
> While I can understand that, the root issue is that this “hacking” is in fact a public service—whistleblowing.
How do you establish that a given act of hacking is or is not a public service? Especially in cases where there isn't a bright line like "someone broke law XYZ".
It seems like going to court & having a jury decide that is not obviously the wrong solution. So even if one supports your position, it seems like the issue would still end up in court with a jury deciding whether someone spends years in jail or goes free.
>How do you establish that a given act of hacking is or is not a public service?
If you hack and then publish embarrassing material to the whole world it's a public service.
If you hack non-embarrassing operationally sensitive material and then leak it selectively to foreign governments then it's espionage.
There's some fuzziness but it's not a bright line to cross and Julian Assange is very, very far away from it.
The fact that the murders that were uncovered are still going unprosecuted adds considerable weight to the idea that it was a public service. If Assange had done the exact same thing to Russia the idea that it was espionage would be justifiably mocked. It's not mocked because nationalism is a potent drug, essentially (here, it's not like Russians aren't looking at this and shaking their heads).
Well it depends on how straight our heads on are for what we consider embarrassing. That "a human has a naked body" is embarrassing while "detaining suspects indefinitely without a trial and torturing them while using an utter bullshit pretext of a loophole which wouldn't survive an unbias court" isn't says a lot of things about us and none of them good.
Only with a very disingenuous reading of the parent comment out of context can you imagine the definition was intended to imply in a case of hacking someone’s private life.
What laptop? I thought the issue was credentials for some sort of online database of war crime videos? Manning already had personal credentials, but thought that if the videos were accessed with other credentials the source of the leaks would be less obvious.
Not sure what you are hoping for beyond the self-evident unwillingness of most journalists to challenge state enthusiasm for the Foreign Intervention of the Month.
This has less to do with most journalists consciously doing it and more to do with people just riding the wave of their biases and their editor's biases.
The reality is that most journalists are not proficient in the content they try to cover, and for the select "elite" that are proficient and considered to be "experts", they almost always come with some sort of insanely strong bias that made them proficient to start off with. There's almost a revolving door between "expert" journalists and think tanks/pressure groups.
I see this heavily with Middle Eastern coverage. It's basically an all-out shitfight of the most bigoted, racist and sectarian people war mongering through fear, dishonestly and in some cases outright lies. In some cases this has had tragic consequences - things like ISIS' adventure through Iraq could have almost certainly been avoided.
Sometimes the dog whistling moves from just dog whistling and we see writers that have written for publications like The Boston Globe outright tweeting that they wish for the suffering of Syrian children - verbatim - and then deleting the tweets after realising they're on a public platform.
I don’t think it reaches the journalist level, though, in my experience journalists are far more willing to publish things than the people and organizations that fund them. Sometimes they’re even allowed to provide a veneer of plausible deniability wrt bias, although not enough to actually inform the reader regularly of perspectives that are unpopular in washington, wall street, etc.
There are also independent media groups that still provide high quality analysis that don’t appear to be bought.
As they should be it's concering that reporting the truth can get you arrested and have this much bullshit be brought up against you the government always gets bad when anything negative comes out about them it's disgusting, imo this is more of a freedom of the press issue rather than an espionage issue.
Is there anyone who believes the various branches of the military, nsa, cia etc. are subject to the same law interpreted the same way and would face prosecution for doing exactly what is accused here? I really don't and that's the thing that bothers me the most. Giving up equality before the law is huge. It's really quite revolutionary, no? Clapper is clearly as guilty as sin by his own admission but the law doesn't apply to him at all. Without talking about what is right and wrong morally, that loss of what is and isn't legal and has consequence to be decided on court no matter who you are is deeply and profoundly worrying to me.
A novel interpretation and prosecution for one man (right or wrong) while not pursuing a very well trodden prisecution path for another. It's no light thing.
Is your position that because the US engages in espionage that we can't prosecute foreign spies? (otherwise we should hold our own spy agencies guilty of espionage?)
The point is someone doing exactly what has been accused here, exactly, but to leak stories in support of whoever is in charge of various military branches. Would that same law apply for exactly the same thing? I strongly doubt it. "Unnamed official sources"
Perjury is not exactly a novel prosecution to run, nor would be something setting precedent. This (right or wrong) sets precedent in it's interpretation and effect and will create case law either way it goes. Do you see the point I'm making? I can't see prosecution hesitating for a second to prosecute someone like Assange for perjury if there was even a hint of a case for it. That doesn't make Assange right and Clapper wrong or indeed say anything at all about that. It's just a worrying thing.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The point is the rule of law is worth standing up for when it is threatened, surely. The rule of law isn't gravity, it doesn't continue to exist if nobody cares. Without it, life looks quite different.
How is he a tool for undermining the proliferation of facts? Just because facts come from a sexual predator doesn't make them any less true. If someone isn't willing to put in the effort to validate truth, then they can't handle it.
I think they meant a tool for the government (in the sense that they can use him as an example to pass laws limiting press freedom or to punish him to dissuade others).
Also the sexual crimes related to Assange (regardless of whether you think they're true or not) are allegations.
Assange is alleged to have performed acts that could be construed as attempts to access classified information, beyond merely asking for it--specifically, it is alleged that he assisted Manning with attempting to acquire and decrypt classified documents. That is the heart of the issue--if Assange had merely accepted a document dump from Manning (as he generally did with most other sources), he wouldn't be facing 18 charges today.
"he wouldn't be facing 18 charges today" - I think it's pretty clear the US has been working on charging and imprisoning Assange since around the time of "Collateral Murder". They would have found something else!
Assamese already was facing a sealed indictment on other charges related to the Manning dump, charges that the Obama administration carefully drew up to avoid any 1st amendment implications. The charges being discussed here, being brought by the Trump administration, are the charges with first amendment implications.
Really, and you have the proof of this? I'm not saying you're wrong but I'm led to believe that both Assange and WikiLeaks are not innocent even if they did some good.
