While the eyes of the world are on Ukraine for obvious reasons, let us not forget Brave Belarussians who decided to fight for their freedom a few years ago but were brutally squashed by their dictator but are actively fighting with Russia, both in Ukraine as well as by sabotaging Russian transports inside Belarus.
Here’s some “original research”: Mark’s trial started today. The prosecution is requesting 3 years of some sort of home detention (“home chemistry” in local parlance). He will be allowed (or maybe required) to go to work, otherwise he needs to stay at home. Moving farther than some distance from home is prohibited. Alcohol consumption is also prohibited. Electronic surveillance is mandatory.
This is insane. How can this be normalized? Are there people on here who think this is okay? How can this not be downvoted to oblivion? If this is normalized, all is lost, and I do mean all.
I'm far from normalizing it and I don't know why you think I'm normalizing it. The prosecution could have asked for a time in a penal colony, or time in prison. With the rubber-stamp courts they have in place, the prosecution would have got what it asked. Is this normal? No, far from it. I'm just pointing out that it could have ended much, much worse for Mark.
Not familiar with the specifics of Mark’s case, but a possibly comparable trial of Pavel Pernikaŭ resulted in him being sentenced to 2 years in a penal colony.
Assange is a political prisoner, for publishing secrets of USG's military industrial complex. Bernstein is a political prisoner, for merely acknowledging Putin's invasion and genocide. Is there some comparison you wish to make, beyond the realpolitik of powerful entities going after individuals for political reasons?
To me, the comparison of the two is that the conspiracy persecuting Assange is actually much more restrained than the one persecuting Bernstein. Assange had to directly poke the hornet nest to get attacked, while Bernstein seemingly just stated basic public truths.
> Assange is a political prisoner, for publishing secrets of USG's military industrial complex.
> Assange is a political prisoner, for publishing a video depicting war crimes conducted by US military personnel.
I mean, both are true, right? Why is Assange's predicament so much less objectionable? Why is it so certain that Assange's detainment is because of one and not the other?
> Assange had to directly poke the hornet nest to get attacked, while Bernstein seemingly just stated basic public truths.
It seems to me than when Assange published the collateral murder video it was congruent with stating "basic public truths". I don't see how his actions were necessarily more inflammatory than Bernstein's; certainly not to the point where the former's detainment is acceptable and the latter's is not.
> Why is Assange's predicament so much less objectionable?
I didn't say that Assange's resulting predicament is less objectionable. I pointed out to end up in that position, Assange had to commit more offensive actions (to the relevant party). This implies the system he pissed off is more constrained, which would seem to indicate progress.
You also can't point to collateral murder as a single action that led to Assange's persecution. Rather, he kept doing things that pissed off the entrenched power, and eventually they had enough.
None of this is to condemn Assange's actions, or justify his persecution. Rather it's only possible to productively reason about these topics with a sense of magnitude - falling into binary thinking leads to contradictions or concluding that many things are equally bad, which is ultimately useless.
> I mean, both are true, right? Why is Assange's predicament so much less objectionable?
Have we lost all ability to consider magnitude and context? Or did we never as a society have a good grasp of this most basic part of critical thinking?
Timings of postings correlated with tcp connection timestamps, obtained from the state controlled ISP (Belarus has single state monopoly ISP for international connections).
Have not seen any information to support this claim. Appears that his edits were public and he self identified via his Wikipedia profile. Possible that non-government actors supportive of the current Belarus government reported him, but have not seen any information supporting methods you posted above.
Of course if his profile was public then there's no need for that.
By the way, I know way more about Belarus that average HN dweller, and I'd estimate number of "non-government actors supportive of the current Belarus government" same, if not less than government actors.
There are dozens of govt-paid internet trolls/experts/bots working literally from KGB office. They are paid reasonably well ($1k+/month) and are constantly under pressure to report any success up the chain of command. Being so overstaffed, they are not as lazy as regular govt workers, and really do organize cross-agency investigative operations to make arrests of people like those who wrote "NO WAR" or "NOT MY PRESIDENT" on a random wall.
Same as analyzing ISP logs -- they are overstaffed and pushed, so not lazy to do that.
Might be wrong, but doesn’t appear he was not doxxed — but that he knew the risks, publicly identified himself via his profile, his edits were traceable to him, etc.
