The crime he was accused of by the US is helping someone try to break into a laptop. That's beyond most journalistic standards for conduct and a criminal act.
He is also being accused of 17 counts of breaching the Espionage Act with a maximum sentence of several lifetimes in prison. The conspiracy to break the CFAA charge was just the taster -- and I would argue that it was done tactically so that the discussion of Julian would be "he's a hacker not a journalist". If I was working for the DoJ that's without question what I would've done -- whether the accusations were true or not.
We live in a society based on the presumption of innocence. Just because the US government says something (which happens to be incredibly helpful for their narrative) does not make it true.
Also, he wasn't accused of trying to break into a laptop. He was accused of allegedly offering to help Chelsea Manning crack a password hash (which he never did). Aside from the fact that johntheripper is free software and is so trivial to use that teenagers know about it (making the entire story seem suspect on its face) it completely ignores that this is ridiculously minor compared to the Espionage Act indictments.
Which should be legal since the US does breach privacy around the world (with the help of his awfully quite home country).
So I don't see the justification to prosecute him. Of course governmental data of the US isn't protected from non-citizen access. Why should it, these are the rules they themselves set. It is naive to think that governmental actors have an advantage at espionage. On the contrary. The most advantages has anyone without critical secrets.
I think the espionage act topic is worthy of discussion.
The question about the laptop is pretty settled to me. It's against the law to help someone try to break into something like that. I think that is a valid law, doing so is step well outside what a journalist should do, and all of that is regardless if you are successful or not. Also we'll see what he says in court about that, I could have sworn he or his lawyer already noted their lack of success, that sounded like they were talking about actually trying to do it.
I do think in my mind the two topics are tied together, if someone is not behaving as a journalist then I think the context of the charges changes dramatically.
> The question about the laptop is pretty settled to me.
Why do you keep repeating that he "hacked into laptop"? As I mentioned above, the accusation is related to Chelsea Manning asking him to help them crack a password hash that Manning acquired by dual-booting on a Linux machine and him agreeing to (and Assange never did help Manning crack it).
As I said, I seriously question the truth of such a claim because anyone even slightly technical knows that there's effectively just one tool you use to crack Unix hashes -- johntheripper. I knew that in high-school.
> I don't think how well you know the application in question really has anything to do with the viability of the claim.
My point is that Assange knows what johntheripper is. Any 15-year-old that has downloaded Kali Linux knows what it is. So it seems incredibly strange to act as though breaking a hash is any more complicated than just running johntheripper (or hashcat, or any other brute-force tool) on it.
Assuming their claim is true (that he did actually offer to do it), I would think it most likely he was lying to Manning in order to get them to leak more things. According to most accounts he isn't a particularly nice person, so that seems far more in-character to me.
You're behind. That was one charge. That charge doesn't really matter anymore. It wasn't really the attack on freedom of the press that the new charges are.
He's now being charged under the Espionage act for asking for classified info and publishing it. The new charges are what matter and what everyone is talking about.
The crime he was accused of by the US is helping someone try to break into a laptop. That's beyond most journalistic standards for conduct and a criminal act.
We'll see what can be proved in court from here.