If i were to describe the Assange case in a word, it would be myopic.
once again the US has decided this is the hill it will die on. instead of reforming intelligence agencies, challenging the doctrine of mass surveillance, revisiting the manifest destiny of imperialist foreign policy, or even considering the cost to do nothing at all, the US has arrived at the conclusion that a witch hunt is the best hunt.
prosecuting and jailing Assange does absolutely nothing to stop Wikileaks or wilileaks->next(). Whatever effort the US spent to slander and discredit Assange does nothing to stop people inspired by him, or motivated by US foreign policy in countries that do not enjoy its favour. The US seems completely oblivious to the fact that whatever happens to Assange the journalist, it simply isnt enough to curtail the overwhelming cacophony of demand for free and open journalism across the internet.
Just let the guy go and focus the money, time, and effort on preventing this in the future. nearly every major news outlet and journalist all see Assange as a journalist, not a hacker.
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I don’t know - I’m quite sure a number of wannabe Assanges have decided to have other hobbies after seeing what has been done to him. It’s making an example.
He doesn’t have to actually be in jail for his life to be clearly ruined, and that’s has definitely been done. He has no real freedom, has essentially no real relationships anymore, and is a political toy batted around between nations with the future promise of jail ‘maybe’ in his future, but with no closure.
Sounds like hell to me.
And all those other things sound great to me, Joe random taxpayer, but probably sound pretty terrible to the folks inside the establishment. Have to keep the money flowing or all that work to get the pension goes up in smoke (and that’s assuming they aren’t smuggling drugs and taking a cut or whatever on the side)
They made him a "martyr" in a way, and martyrs have a tendency to have a long shelf-life. Plus, it brought a lot of questionable US practices into light and on public mind. At this point, I do not think we saw the end of it all yet.
He's been in jail (Belmarsh) over two years now (11th April 2019).
They're holding him while the US tries to extradite him. The UN has called for the end of his torture at Belmarsh, but the UK and US seem uninterested.
From Wikipedia:
> On 13 September 2019, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser (UK) ruled that Assange would not be released on 22 September when his prison term ended, because he was a flight risk and his lawyer had not applied for bail. She said when his sentence came to an end, his status would change from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.
And to that end, when you are in power, you get to choose the nature of your enemies. When you act as you have with Assange, you are effectively choosing suicidal psychos for enemies.
I feel like the mentality going after Assange so hard is that if they successfully throw him in prison it helps prove to establishment people that, no, Assange is the criminal, and establishment is doing nothing wrong. See, he's in prison. Only wrong people go to prison.
All they have to do is keep doing what they are doing - and anywhere he is becomes a prison to him. And they’ve been very successful at that.
Would it be a feather in someones hat if he actually got arrested and extradited to the US? Probably.
Honestly, it would probably also open up a giant can of worms legally and result in exposure of even more embarrassing details or BS that has been pulled. It’s actually working out pretty well for them as-is.
The US' priority in situations like this is overwhelmingly to provide evidence that the threats it makes with criminal laws and defense of national secrets are credible. It has time and time again chosen to die on hills like this. The ethics and optics of it don't seem to factor much into the decisionmaking
When power reaches a certain level, it isn’t about being seen doing the right or ethical thing. It is about demonstrating that it can and will be used against whoever they want with impunity, even if it’s clearly wrong, and they will get away with it.
It stops a lot of people from even attempting to challenge them, and just do what they want without question, which has many advantages. In some situations, it’s even legitimately necessary. It’s also prone to abuse of course.
In order to keep this kind of power, it’s necessary to demonstrate from time to time this power exists and will be used, since if people start not being afraid of having their lives ruined if they challenge said power legitimately, they also stop going along with demands from those in power unquestioningly. And a lot of the ability to destroy someone for whatever reason (including legitimate ones) depends on that unquestioning compliance.
I absolutely agree that's what's motivating the US, but it's interesting the future they're shepherding society towards via their encouragements and punishments:
- Assange: whistleblowers, journalists that embarrass the government will be pursued to the ends of the earth
- Snowden: whistleblowers will not be forgiven and will be abandoned without a home country
- Sacklers: will be protected from prosecution beyond a large fine, albeit smaller than the profits made from the activity that brought the fine
- Wall Street: government funding provided as a bailout after failure due to poor business decisions and no one held accountable or prosecuted.
Absolutely demonstrated where 'the power' exists, and there's no overlap with 'for the people'.
If you go back into the history books, I think it’s wishful thinking that it was ever any other way - plus or minus some ebbs or flows over the years. COINTELPRO and J. Edgar Hoovers blackmailing of government officials and other shenanigans being a pretty solid recent examples that just so happened to be exposed, but especially when you look at how few media outlets were willing to publish the COINTELPRO documents along with how many of the packets just ‘disappeared’ in the mail, it’s clear we just got lucky to know about these. For every one of them that gets out, I’m sure there are 3-5 or more that get caught and stopped.
Yup! And I attribute that in large part to more wealth distributed more widely, which allows more people to have the time and ability to do something to protect their rights. It takes education, time, courage, and treasure to fight these kinds of things.
The more people stand up and say ‘No’ - and show it matters - the better for everyone.
It is also a constant ongoing fight that is never truly won.
Nothing to do with my morals, it’s good old realpolitik/fate of nations type stuff. I stay out of these type of games. If you think anyone who IS into those games cares much about morals or ethics instead of ‘national interests’, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
That doesn’t mean I don’t understand it or why it is the way it is.
I disagree about prosecuting him doing nothing. You can disagree with it, but jailing snowden and assange will reduce the risk of similar people committing similar crimes. If they don't do something now, more snowdens and assanges will emerge, they cannot let it go.
When was the last serious like from within US IC? They jailed reality winner and that seems to have worked the last couple of years at least. It wasn't that she was caught but that they caught her using a technique unknown to her. It has a chilling effect for sure.
It is a risk reduction and diplomatic strategy. It has little to do with the pursuit of justice.
> once again the US has decided this is the hill it will die on.
Nah. This is their standard playbook. If someone undermines them they bash them publicly with a rubber hose, for decades. Maybe it's as an example to others.
And it seems in most cases, once this sort of behaviour is brought before a USA judge it's squashed, but before immense damage done has extracted the pound of flesh they appear to be after. So it's not the entire system that's rotten, just some apples within it.
Clearly, this sort of harassment is illegal. Ebay was a recent example, and they were prosecuted with the full force of the law. Nonetheless these rotten apples, who seem to be within the security apparatus (the CIA and NSA) seem to know how to work the system so they can get away with this with no personal repercussions on them. Until you yankees fix that, this is going to keep happening.
Assange belongs in jail for his role in the Russian disinformation campaign. He is not a journalist in any sense of the word. At best he's a website operator that has occasionally been used for good by other people who took real risks.
I assume you're also opposed to the charges he's currently facing? As none of them have anything to do with the Russian disinformation campaign you think he's involved in.
So push for the current charges against him to be dropped and then presumably the US will charge him with the crime you think he's guilty of. Until then the US is attacking him for publishing documents, which is journalism.
> once again the US has decided this is the hill it will die on.
Wat? If it's too much of a pain to prosecute somebody then they should give up?
> nearly every major news outlet and journalist all see Assange as a journalist, not a hacker. .
So is he a journalist or a hacker? It would sure be nice to know. If he is a journalist then I support him, if he is a hacker then I do not. I'd love an answer to this.
I'd like to see what comes out in court that is not public right now.
I'm tired of everybody presupposing that a trial must be unfair therefore people like Snowden or Assange have a license to do whatever they want.
I went over this with you a few weeks ago. Only one of his eighteen charges has anything to do with hacking, and what actions he took is already very clear from the Manning trial.
The "hacking" he did was saying he'd try to crack a generic Windows password that provided zero additional documents. There's little chance anything else could come out in court as if they had proof he did something else they would have charged him with it. Even further, he'd still be a journalist if found guilty on this charge, as every other charge is for actions that are unquestionably journalism.
And I don't care if you're sick of hearing he can't get a fair trial, it's still true that he can't get a fair trial. Things like his attorney client privilege have already been compromised, and witnesses the US offered deals to for testifying have already recanted their testimony. This isn't a presupposition, it happened.
> There's little chance anything else could come out in court
Famous last words.
You can't have an unfair trial unless you have a trial. He needs to stand trial and if the US govt pulls some unfair BS then I'll be right there to condemn them and I'll be sure to let my representatives know.
Not really, a court case only deals with the charges the accused would be on trial for. While it's possible that they'd try to pull out another witness like Thordarson to try and claim he has a history of hacking, anything they had actual evidence of him doing would be a new charge.
>You can't have an unfair trial unless you have a trial.
You absolutely can. Prosecutorial misconduct in the pretrial stages can cause there to be an unfair trial before the trial ever begins. Things like the instances of misconduct mentioned in my previous post, which you should condemn and contact your representatives about already.
This is a standard of US law. As an easy example, an improperly acquired warrant can cause an unfair trial causing a case to be thrown out.
> It would sure be nice to know. If he is a journalist then I support him, if he is a hacker then I do not. I'd love an answer to this.
You mean you decide whether to support someone based on someone else's arbitrary classification, and not on the merits of their actions, like, I don't know, exposing the US' atrocious war crimes?
A court decision is literally someone else's arbitrary classification, namely the judge's. Have you agreed with every court decision ever made?
I suggest you think for yourself as to what's right and what's wrong and vote according to your own conscience, rather than relying on other people thinking for you. You know, how democracy is supposed to work.
My own conscience? I don't have the facts. I don't know what Assange or US prosecutors know. I think, without evidence, that he was working with a US adversary and his entire public image will collapse under scrutiny in court. Should I follow that or wait for more information?
I'm done talking about this on this forum for awhile. Every discussion is the same.
You could know. Transcripts for Assange's convos with Manning are publicly available.
Furthermore, even if Assange did break a law that doesn't mean he did anything wrong. Or do you disagree with the notion of civil disobedience?
Do you also think Snowden did something wrong? He very clearly violated the oath he took, but the government was itself breaking the law and the system was immune to change from the inside.
I don't see why Assange's classification as either a hacker or journalist should affect your moral judgment in any fashion. The point I've been trying to make is that your original moral argument for judging Assange is simplistic, and doesn't apply on the fringes of human behaviour where powerful players are trying to influence the outcomes, because any narratives or facts are guaranteed to be distorted. Why do you think the US just wasted 20 years fighting wars in the middle east?
>I think, without evidence, that he was working with a US adversary and his entire public image will collapse under scrutiny in court. Should I follow that or wait for more information?
None of the charges have anything to do with him working with a US adversary, it's silly to think revelations about that will come out in a trial for a completely unrelated incident.
Remember, the hackers that supposedly stole the DNC documents have already been indicted, and the US Justice System was so convinced that Wikileaks and Assange were not involved in criminal activity that they called them something like "organization A." If he was knowingly working with them, they would have charged him in those indictments. Even from a PR standpoint, why would the US spend years getting negative press about their treatment of Assange if they had a slam dunk like that.
I think he's won a direct trip to Guantanamo for torture if the US gets their hands on him. You aren't going to see a trial, those aren't needed for non Americans
> So is he a journalist or a hacker? It would sure be nice to know.
He clearly isn't a hacker, so of those two he got to be a journalist. He publishes information that might have been acquired by hackers, but nobody claims he hacked anything himself, all he did was make a website for publishing stuff (WikiLeaks). If you are one of those who call programmers "hackers" then you could call him a hacker, but he isn't a hacker in the popular definition of "someone who illegally breaks into others computers".
He was the illegal form of hacker a long time ago and was properly charged for it, but that was decades before wikileaks.
Edit: To be clear, not even USA claims he hacked anything in order to get it published on Wikileaks. People calling him a hacker refers to what he did in the 80's and is completely irrelevant to this case.
The US is charging him with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, for "hacking" into government computers. They are very heavily trying to convince the public he's an evil hacker not a journalist.
once again the US has decided this is the hill it will die on. instead of reforming intelligence agencies, challenging the doctrine of mass surveillance, revisiting the manifest destiny of imperialist foreign policy, or even considering the cost to do nothing at all, the US has arrived at the conclusion that a witch hunt is the best hunt.
prosecuting and jailing Assange does absolutely nothing to stop Wikileaks or wilileaks->next(). Whatever effort the US spent to slander and discredit Assange does nothing to stop people inspired by him, or motivated by US foreign policy in countries that do not enjoy its favour. The US seems completely oblivious to the fact that whatever happens to Assange the journalist, it simply isnt enough to curtail the overwhelming cacophony of demand for free and open journalism across the internet.
Just let the guy go and focus the money, time, and effort on preventing this in the future. nearly every major news outlet and journalist all see Assange as a journalist, not a hacker. .