
You Don't Have to Like Assange to Defend Him - zwieback
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/julian-assange-arrested-journalists-defend/586936/
======
onedognight
Assange is accused of working with Manning to crack a Linux password hash of a
government computer so Manning could gain access. It’s not about publishing
any data obtained; he was, it seems, not a passive receiver.

[https://games-
cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/docu...](https://games-
cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/3add1fee-2dcb-40d9-b260-a5bf4eee3e56/note/584d0e06-4701-4fee-
ad79-82c4e6509c83.pdf)

~~~
ordinaryradical
This is _the_ critical difference. If the NY Times stole the Pentagon Papers
themselves, they committed a crime regardless of whether or not they choose to
publish the material. If Daniel Ellsberg steals the Pentagon Papers and the
Times and Washington Post choose to publish them as part of their reporting on
the Vietnam War, they are not somehow made accessories to his crime through
publication.

Assange can publish whatever he wants* (*according to the US laws that govern
freedom of speech, etc.) but as soon as he becomes actively involved in the
exfiltration of classified material he is breaking the law.

~~~
deogeo
> *according to the US laws that govern freedom of speech, etc.

He's an Australian currently in the UK though. I don't like the global reach
of US laws.

~~~
ordinaryradical
The US isn't special in this regard. Many nations have extradition treaties
with each other and they are often invoked in cases of espionage. To paint
that as US law "reaching the globe" is a bit facetious; everyone is entangled
in everyone else's law—especially when it comes to espionage.

~~~
deogeo
I couldn't find any good comparative statistics, but I hear about people being
extradited _to_ the US a lot more than _from_ , giving the appearance of a
rather one-sided relationship. The treaties may be the same, but they don't
seem to be used the same.

~~~
yorwba
According to the UK's Home Office, the US requests more extraditions of UK
citizens than vice versa, but that might be due to the relative population
sizes.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/extradition-
reque...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/extradition-requests-
between-the-uk-and-us-from-april-2007-to-may-2014/extradition-requests-
between-the-uk-and-us-from-april-2007-to-may-2014)

~~~
lamarpye
Your link doesn't list the reason for extradition, doing some research on this
issue, I see parental kidnapping generates a fair number of extradition
requests.

------
calhoun137
The attempt of the US government to prosecute Assange is the gravest possible
threat to press freedom imaginable.

People are talking about a hashed password like its something new, but this is
not new information at all. The Obama justice department had all the same chat
logs - no new evidence has been discovered since then - and knew all about
this but decided they couldn't prosecute without endangering press freedom.[1]

So if you don't think this is a major assault on press freedom, you should at
least realize you are disagreeing not only with me but literally the Obama
justice department which looked at this for _years_. Why is it that they came
to this conclusion and never moved forward with the case, but now the __TRUMP
__administration is pursuing it anyway?

It's not just american journalists that are at risk, but this is meant to send
a chilling message to anyone anywhere on earth that you better not report on
the US government negatively or else we will have you extradited, prosecuted
as a spy, and thrown in solitary.

Anyone cheering on the US government as they try to set a precedent for
prosecuting journalists as spies needs to think more carefully about this
issue.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-
security/julia...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-
security/julian-assange-unlikely-to-face-us-charges-over-publishing-
classified-
documents/2013/11/25/dd27decc-55f1-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.871739c8b0c9)

~~~
dahdum
The article you posted highlights exactly what's happening here, he's being
charged with hacking, not publishing.

> One former law enforcement official said the U.S. government could bring
> charges against Assange if it discovered a crime, such as evidence that he
> directly hacked into a U.S. government computer. But the Justice officials
> said he would almost certainly not be prosecuted for receiving classified
> material from Manning.

~~~
calhoun137
The indictment is not only about hacking, but about aiding the source in
avoiding detection, and encouraging them for more documents.

There is zero allegation of hacking. Rather they are saying Manning sent a
hashed password and Julian said in the chat he sent it to his team and then it
never went anywhere. Calling this hacking is a big stretch.

This article from 2011 shows the Obama justice department knew all about
this[1], check out the last two paragraphs which I will post here:

"In the exchange prosecutors showed in the courtroom, Manning appeared to have
sent Assange a “hash,” or encrypted, password. Assange said he’d passed it on
to members of his team, but the exchange prosecutors showed did not indicate
whether WikiLeaks ever actually helped Manning with the password.

That chat could be a critical one for the parallel criminal investigation the
Justice Department is pursuing into Assange and WikiLeaks. If Assange gave
Manning advice or assistance in breaking into computer systems, that could
transform Assange’s role from a mere recipient of secret data to a conspirator
in efforts to steal it."

I am curious why you think the Trump administration is pursuing this now
whereas the Obama DOJ declined to prosecute sighting the "new york times
problem" as described in the previous link.

[1] [https://www.politico.com/story/2011/12/defense-manning-
was-o...](https://www.politico.com/story/2011/12/defense-manning-was-
overcharged-070787?paginate=false)

~~~
dahdum
I've always assumed Obama's DOJ would act once they were able to, and that the
DOJ itself was always intent on pursuing. He finally wore out his Ecuador
welcome and so it's happening now. Had Clinton won, I think the outcome would
be the same, if not far more aggressive (due the DNC email leak).

------
matt4077
Being given government secrets and publishing them for the public interest
should not be a crime, and it isn't. The New York Times won that case 8-1 or
9-0 at the Supreme Court for the Pentagon Papers.

Assisting with the exfiltration of that data is clearly a different beast.
Professional journalists know the difference, and stay clear of it to protect
themselves, their employer, and the trust journalists are granted.

Helping to crack a password clearly crosses the line, even if it's minor in
the scheme of things, or unsuccessful. There will be endless handwringing here
on HN over the precise definition of "assistance", because somehow the tech
community cannot handle the ambiguity of non-binary real world situations.
Would it be material assistance to let your whistleblower use your USB stick?
What if you bought them a coffee on the morning they did the deed? etc... But
the inability to precisely define the single tree that makes the forest
doesn't stop us from making any "forest or desert?" decisions.

Of course this sets an ugly precedent. To the ignorant, it suddenly becomes
far less extraordinary to see a publisher of secrets in jail. The Atlantic is
rightly worried here, because who knows how long the courts will still operate
independently, considering the current trajectory of other institutions like
DoJ?

~~~
alexandercrohde
So he helped crack a password like, what a decade ago?

Time served for having to live in an embassy for the last several years?

You're right, it's illegal, but it just doesn't feel that _bad_ to me. Not
even remotely on the level of the problems we face as a country this day. It
almost feels petty.

~~~
dahdum
He didn’t have to live in the embassy. Sweden was by all accounts far less
likely to extradite him, but he choose to flee rather than face his rape
charges.

Even if he had been convicted in Sweden he would have been out by now.

------
jmull
I don't think the fact that he once worked with a sincere whistleblower to
release information in the public interest should automatically excuse
anything else he may have done.

~~~
stale2002
Well, he is only being extradited to the US because of the time that he worked
with the sincere whistleblower.

He hasn't been charged for anything else "bad" that you think he has done.

So it seems like it would be pretty easy to denounce this extradition, because
it specifically relates to the sincere whistleblower "crime".

~~~
aeturnum
It would be unfair to say that we must grapple with the particular, legal
questions of the current charges but don't have to speak about the general,
not-necessarily-legal, questions of Assange's overall behavior.

Al Capone was indicted under charges of tax fraud, though that was not
primarily why authorities wanted him. We must consider both consider the
justice of _those particular_ charges as well as the justice of general
punishment of Capone, whatever the source.

What I mean is that we have to consider both things separately and
simultaneously. You're correct that we need to think about if we agree with
this particular charge. I'd also say that you have a similar responsibility to
say if Assange should be charged for, as you said, "anything else 'bad'" he's
done.

~~~
nailer
Are you saying that, like Al Capone, Assange has somehow threatened people
with knowledge of some greater crime?

If you're referring to the Swedish allegations, keep in mind Assange
constantly made himself available to the Swedish prosecutor to answer
questions at any time the prosecutor asked: via video conference, in person or
otherwise. The prosecutor declined.

To compare that behavior to Al Capone is odd.

~~~
aeturnum
> Are you saying that, like Al Capone, Assange has somehow threatened people
> with knowledge of some greater crime?

I'm not sure what you mean by this, so I'm not sure how to answer - if you
expand I'm happy to respond.

I'm not an expert on Assange or Capone. I invoked the example because I
understand that people dislike Assange for reasons related that are unevenly
covered by the law. That seemed similar to Capone who, as I understand,
operated at a time where little of his actual behavior violated the law
(though he was at the top of a violent criminal organization).

The things people dislike Assange for may or may not be narrowly legal - but
their feelings towards him will affect how they treat these charges against
him.

> The prosecutor declined.

This is a longer discussion, which we can have. Generally, for the Swedish
legal system to be able to take action, it must have power over the object of
its action. Saying you will "cooperate" as long as you aren't subject to the
power of a process which demands power over you seems, to me, like a
rhetorical maneuver than genuine effort to engage. His arrest illustrates why
he was nervous about leaving the embassy, of course, but doesn't make evasive
representations more true.

~~~
nailer
> I'm not sure what you mean by this, so I'm not sure how to answer - if you
> expand I'm happy to respond.

People were unwilling to testify against Capone due to fear of violent
retribution. That's the basis of going after him for tax evasion.

Saying you must have power over someone before you can talk to them gives the
lie to the Swedish prosecutor aim being determining the facts of the Ardin
case

------
dragonwriter
> The effort to extradite and prosecute the WikiLeaks founder threatens the
> free media.

No, it doesn't; press freedom is the right to publish, not the right to
actively participate in breaches of non-social (e.g., physical or technical)
security measures.

> The charges leveled against Assange stem from the 2010 Manning leaks, which
> were judged to have been in the public interest by some of the world’s most
> significant and thoughtful news publishers, who ran some of the revelations
> in their pages.

News publishers don't have any binding authority to decide what is in the
public interest; there is no Constitutional prerogative to an institutional
press pardon for criminal offenses. Further, this claim is outright dishonest:
the decision to publish _some of_ the information as being information whose
publication was in the public interest _is not_ a judgement that the leaks
themselves were, on balance, in the public interest.

------
gwbas1c
I love this quote:

> Assange may be an asshole. Scratch that, Assange is an asshole. But we’re
> going to have to stand up for him anyway.

That being said, the more I read into the story, the harder and harder it is
to defend him.

------
JohnFen
True, I don't have to like him to defend him. I do, however, have to feel
confident that I know the facts -- and I don't feel confident at all about
that.

~~~
awakeasleep
Actually this is the opposite of the American system of justice.

People are presumed innocent until the facts are known. So it's only
afterwards that we should, according to our culture, give up his defense.

~~~
jcranmer
The judicial system presumes innocence. The media, and public opinion, does
not. It's debatable if the court of public opinion should presume innocence as
well.

~~~
mLuby
It _should_ but does not. The court of public opinion should be subordinate to
the judicial system. When it isn't, you end up with a kind of cognitive
dissonance where someone is legally declared not guilty but still suffers
social consequences due to bad optics.

~~~
JohnFen
> The court of public opinion should be subordinate to the judicial system.

I don't think I agree with this. The legal system decides whether or not an
action was legal, not whether or not an action was acceptable in society. The
court of public opinion decides whether or not an action was acceptable in
society, not whether or not it was legal.

They address two different things, and I think that's proper. You don't really
want the legal system deciding social mores, and you also don't really want
legality to be determined based on the public's emotional reaction to things.

~~~
dwaltrip
> The legal system decides whether or not an action was legal

This isn't quite right. The legal system decides if a person is guilty of
committing an illegal act, and if so, what the sentence should be. The system
may find that the person did not actually perform the act they were accused of
doing, regardless of the legality of that act.

------
heyyyouu
I think there is the small chance the extradition won't go through.The UK
courts are particularly considerate when it comes to extraditions -- when
compared to other countries, it's not just a a hand-stamp (usually). In fact,
Google the term "uk refuses to extradite" and there's pages upon pages of
results.

It's probably his best hope. The current charges are thin -- based on one
statement he made to manning -- and the feds know this. BUT the reason you
never talk to the feds is that it is way, way to easy for them to get you on
other charges: purgery (generally the main one if they can't get you for
anything else), conspiracy, racketeering, and of course with this one they
have a litany of government security charges they can cherry pick as well.

If he doesn't have excellent legal representation (even with) he's in real
trouble. His best shot is to fight to not come here in the first place -- if
he can make a case that they may bait and switch the charges to national
security, and somewhere put the death penalty into play, that could work.

Note that I don't know how it works being that he is actually an Australian
citizen -- does the UK care if it's not one of its citizens facing what their
courts would consider unfair charges overseas? (which is their standard for
denying extradition -- I'm not judging the charges either way)

~~~
fmihaila
> ... purgery (generally the main one if they can't get you for anything else)

Perjury (for the benefit of those who were as confused as I was).

~~~
arthurcolle
A rather spooky Freudian slip that suggests purging Assange...

~~~
heyyyouu
I won't fix it for that reason...

------
throwaway66666
Barrack Obama pardoned Manning on his last day in office. If Assange's only
crime is assisting Manning, and Manning's sentence has been commuted by the
very President of the United States and is now free, why are we on a hunt for
Assange?

It may sound a bit silly but is an honest question.

It's like... if I commit a robbery and you drive the getaway vehicle, I am
(the actual robber) deemed innocent and let go, but you still go to prison for
being an accomplice. It makes little sense?

~~~
leetcrew
a president commuting a sentence is orthogonal to whether or not a crime
actually occurred. imo, the president was reacting to the political reality
that, in the public eye, manning was becoming a sympathetic character and had
already been punished enough. there's no particular reason why the same deal
would be extended to assange, who has essentially spent the last several years
thumbing his nose at the US government.

> it's like... if I commit a robbery and you drive the getaway vehicle, I am
> (the actual robber) deemed innocent and let go, but you still go to prison
> for being an accomplice. It makes little sense?

it could easily be the case that there's enough evidence to show that a
robbery occurred and that I drove the getaway car, but not enough to convict
you of the robbery itself. the fact that one of the accused in an alleged
conspiracy is found not guilty really has no bearing on whether others can
still be convicted.

~~~
throwaway66666
Got it, thanks for your comment. Makes sense.

------
tssva
> As an organization that believed in radical transparency, WikiLeaks wanted
> all the material in the public domain.

Wikileaks and Assange only believe in radical transparency when it isn't
applied to themselves.

------
cmroanirgo
What I particularly don't understand is how his government, my government,
Australia, has left him hanging for all this time with never a reproach about
the situation. I can only assume that the 5 eyes network is so tightly knit
that it's inconceivable to our politicians to do the right thing and say "No,
he's one of ours: you might have grievance with him -- but tough luck".

Instead, he's been holed up in the embassy of a country that initially had the
fortitude to say just that. But since the Equidorian political landscape had
shifted, so has the message it has sent. Sadly it shifted to what the
Australian government has been doing all along, and has colluded in hanging
him out to dry.

Tragically, when he arrives on US soil I suspect he in for a very bad time.

I don't particularly agree with Assange's methodology, but I find the actions
of the Australian and UK political landscape utterly deplorable.

------
goldcd
Indeed - I don't like him (but on this basis I'm not a great fan of myself
either) - but what wikileaks exposed is important. I'm not even saying it's
true, or of importance, or of anything.

Just, as an example:

[https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/](https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/)

Here's something I hadn't seen before. I didn't see this on my "morning news"
\- and I'd really just like to know if this is:

a) true b) if it is, somebody I've employed will step up and defend/explain
it.

~~~
hlurhhh
What do you mean is this true?

------
peteradio
I don't have to defend him either.

------
madrox
There was no principle at play when Assange choose to publish the material he
did. I fail to see what principles we're defending by choosing to defend him.

------
irrational
I don't dislike him, but I won't defend him. I feel that what he did was
wrong.

------
sugerman
The idea that Wikileaks and Assange are members of the "free media" is a joke.

~~~
deogeo
Yeah, if the free media is told something is classified, they will do the
_responsible_ thing and not pursue the matter any further. They know the
government has everybody's best interest at heart, and that if something is
classified, it's probably classified for your own good.

~~~
rjplatte
> They know the government has everybody's best interest at heart, and that if
> something is classified, it's probably classified for your own good.

I really hope you're being facetious

~~~
deogeo
I think I laid it on pretty thick.

~~~
msla
Poe's Law. It's impossible to lay it on so thick that someone doesn't already
believe that version.

------
norin
I don't think we have all the facts, though I think he's going away longer
than Noriega when the US gets their hands on him.

------
trpc
Imagine these comments in pre-Obama era, I remember when the left and liberals
considered Assange a hero because he exposed the American right wing
government back then, no wonder that the tech industry is so left wing to an
unbearable and dishonest degree, just because they lost an election to a TV
celebrity that they can't imagine despite controlling the entire media and
government, the American people could dare challenge them and elect an
outsider even if he's a joke like Trump, it must be a Russian conspiracy! it
must be everything except that there are other people with other views,
right?! The people can't have a another view when we control everything? how
dare they? We must destroy even the heroes we made to make sure the people
don't dare and have a choice we don't like again ever!

------
michaelmcmillan
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDnt_CYDiuE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDnt_CYDiuE)

This debate totally changed the way I look at Assange. So no, I don't have to
defend him.

~~~
JudgeWapner
glad you're persuaded by a one-sided "debate".

~~~
michaelmcmillan
Congratulations on finding yourself in a bubble, where no argument can
persuade you. Maybe you should watch the whole debate before declaring it one-
sided.

