Julian Assange charged in superseding indictment | Hacker News Reader

Julian Assange charged in superseding indictment

justice.gov

> In 2012, Assange communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack. With respect to one target, Assange asked the LulzSec leader to look for (and provide to WikiLeaks) mail and documents, databases and pdfs. In another communication, Assange told the LulzSec leader that the most impactful release of hacked materials would be from the CIA, NSA, or the New York Times. WikiLeaks obtained and published emails from a data breach committed against an American intelligence consulting company by an “Anonymous” and LulzSec-affiliated hacker. According to that hacker, Assange indirectly asked him to spam that victim company again.

This is almost certainly sabu/Hector Monsegur. [1]

This guy put Jeremy Hammond [2] behind bars, and now he's being used to bring down Julian Freaking Assange. More lives ruined than you can count on one hand.

I hope people don't forget that Wikileaks has never published anything that has been proven false. Not once. Julian Assange is in solitary confinement in a prison on bullshit charges, and this is just another one.

Stand up for journalists. Real journalists.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Monsegur

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond

edit: as pointed out below, Assange was moved from solitary confinement in February.

>I hope people don't forget that Wikileaks has never once published anything that has been proven false.

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/885395248612085760

He has helped launder edited material from Russian state sponsored hackers in the past. That is one instance, should I find more?

Was the info false, or do you just object to the sourcing?

Yes the info was false.

>A few hours later, the assessment worsened: a friendly source from CNAIPIC was telling them that some of the documents had been forged. One document number, when checked against CNAIPIC’s system, reportedly corresponded to a wholly unrelated matter. The remaining real documents didn’t seem to have come from CNAIPIC either. Instead, police were apparently investigating “a small IT company that has worked for CNAIPIC in the past and that apparently some of the stolen data were on a machine they took to repair in Rome.” There was an immediate suspicion that it was “a giant op by the police to [discredit] anonymous and to tarnish our reputation and credibility.”

A) The CNAIPIC leaks weren't by wikileaks

B) Why do we trust the CNAIPIC to tell the truth that they weren't their docs?

So I did a brief Google search and it seems that, just like monocasa mentioned, this was not published by Wikileaks.

Are you going to change your stance or are you going to stand by your incorrect, if not slanderous, claim?

This is why they invent new greenbean accounts; they can lie without "consequences".

The whole Russian story was a scam. We have documents saying that is was told to abuse FISA powers. Not that I like the persons it was employed against, but it is far larger than watergate if we had honest discussion about it.

If you still talk about Russia, you have been fooled immensely and for me it is beyond comprehension how anyone could earnestly believe that story arc.

You are spreading lies.

>The whole Russian story was a scam.

Tell that to Adrian Chen or anyone that has actually investigated Russia's meddling in foreign affairs:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html

This was reported before the election detailing the agency that would go on to be fingered by the state department and others in their role in US election meddling.

This involved actual reported places, actual employees. Same with with "Guccifer 2.0" and "CyberBerkut" or any of the other Russian fronts Assange worked with.

>You are spreading lies.

You'll be able to find specific things I've said and detail how they are lies right? Because you have factual information about this yes?

Of course Russia meddles in election, the US does that too. That is not relevant to the FISA abuse wich let to severe surveillance of the current administration to find a straw to attach it to them. They didn't find one btw. which is unusual in politics. Trump may indeed be extremely clean and that is something quite hard to say.

I downvoted this comment because it is dizzying how quickly you moved the goal posts from "the whole Russia thing was a scam" to "of course Russia meddled".

I've got to say, when I hear 'the whole Russia thing' I assume people mean that the Trump administration broke the law to co-operate with Russia. That is a very different question from whether Russia decided to throw it's weight behind a candidate. Doesn't look to me like a shifting of goal posts at all.

A reading of the actual facts seems to be in conflict with "The trump administration did not break the law" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Donald_Trump

There's very little argument about whether trump broke the law (he did) - it was just a matter of whether his corrupt party would vote for impeachment (they didn't.)

The link you posted refers to the Ukraine aid scandal, not 'that whole Russia thing'. Do people honestly not remember that in 2016-2017 the smoking gun was thought to be 'Russian Collusion'?

Interesting. That is not what President Trump means when he talks about "the Russia scam". He still maintains (in conflict with his own intelligence apparatus) that there was no active campaign to meddle in the election at all. If he had been making the argument from the start that yes, there was meddling, but that his campaign was completely uninvolved in it, and that even if it may have benefitted him this time, we should take defensive steps for the future because that is in our nation's best interest, then I would be a lot more sympathetic to your argument here. But that is not what happened; he has maintained that the whole thing is a scam, so I think a more narrow reading of what scam we're talking about is extremely over-charitable.

Would admitting that the country of Russia exists be a goalpost move from "the whole Russia thing was a scam"?

The idea that if Russia had an opinion about a US election and utilized its diplomatic powers to encourage its preferred outcome, all of the endless conspiracies about Russian meddling have been verified - it's not good.

It's not as bad as the thing where if a Russian national ever spoke to anyone, "Russia" was involved.

Russia meddled on both sides of the political aisle in the 2016 election - The Steele dossier was primary evidence used in the FISA surveillance warrant application for Carter Page [1] despite earlier official statements from House Democrats that the dossier did not inform the FISA court [2]. We also have significant evidence in the form of State Dept official communication with Steele (released by FOIA) [3] that two of the sources for the Steele dossier information were Russian government officials, one a former head of Russian intelligence (summarized here [4]). This is not to mention the other malfeasance by the FBI including forging e-mails in order to obtain a FISA renewal. This is serious stuff.

So the one-sided reporting of Russia meddling is indeed a scam. Russia meddled on behalf* (originally said behest - wrong word as far as we know) of both candidates in order to sow discord. The meddling against Clinton is well known, probably the wikileaks emails and a bunch of Facebook ads. The meddling against Trump's campaign resulted in constitutional violations by a court which is only made accountable to the public by the Inspector General report - which the mainstream media has broadly ignored or mischaracterized because it does not support their narrative that Russia meddled only on behalf of Trump. As well as Russia, our own government also meddled against Trump's administration - and they appeared to coordinate to do so. See 18 U.S. Code § 2384.

[1] https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/o20012.pdf (pp. vii)

[2] https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/redacted_minori...

[3] https://www.scribd.com/document/409446360/CU-FOIA-Document-R...

[4] https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/16/steele-dossier-sources-st...

Adrian Chen actually complained about how people were exaggerating and misusing his reporting on the Internet Research Agency.[1]

> The thing is, I don't really want to be an expert on the Internet Research Agency and Russian online propaganda. I agree with my colleague Masha Gessen that the whole issue has been blown out of proportion. In the Times Magazine article that supposedly made me an authority, I detailed some of the Agency's disturbing activities, including its attempts to spread false reports of a terrorist attack in Louisiana and to smear me as a neo-Nazi sympathizer. But, if I could do it all over again, I would have highlighted just how inept and haphazard those attempts were.

Adrian Chen also gave an interview with Chris Hayes on the Internet Research Agency, in which he made the point that it was an unsophisticated marketing campaign, staffed by around 90 people with a poor grasp of the English language, American politics and culture.[2]

1. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/a-so-cal...

2. https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/inside-the-russian-troll-...

But it worked. Look at how easily we can be manipulated once we're told we're under attack by a foreign power. Propaganda works.

James Comey knew this just as well as Senator McCarthy did. They didn't even need to change the protagonist.

This time the candidates are going to fight over which is more antagonistic to China. Turns out Russia is a weak country that has very little reach outside of itself other than the activities of its billionaire oligarchs. China is a far more believable big bad.

There is so much to talk about with Russia though.

a) Widespread evidence not just from US but from UK and EU of efforts to interfere in elections and referenda e.g. Brexit.

b) State sponsored propaganda via social networks which even as recent as last week was having to be removed.

c) Continued meetings between Trump and Putin where only translators are present i.e. no State Dept representatives.

d) 20+ years of Trump Organization taking loans from Russian oligarchs via Bayrock.

Yes, if I need an explanation of governance failure, I would blame Russia too. I just don't get why you believe it without any evidence.

Not only was it a scam, it was the first time in US history that a shadowy cabal of unelected federal government officials tried to invalidate the results of an election. It also led to the erosion of rule of law, which will impact the US greatly in the future.

A one-off tweet from a wikileaks twitter account about some other organization publishing something questionable is not at all the same as the document dumps that wikileaks publishes and puts their name behind. I'm obviously talking about the latter.

I think it says something that this is the best you can come up with.

>I think it says something that this is the best you can come up with.

Hi I can basically see you sneering with a "gotcha" face through that text. Sorry but Assange's history of leak revisionism, favoring Russia specifically, is deep.

When Assange was working with "Anon" who was really an FBI snitch, he accepted files hacked from Syria. When they were released they were missing information about Russia including bank transfers of billions of dollars. Assange's selective leaking based on his biases has been documented for years:

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-r...

>The court records, placed under seal by a Manhattan federal court and obtained by the Daily Dot through an anonymous source, show in detail how a group of hacktivists breached the Syrian government’s networks on the eve of the country’s civil war and extracted emails about major bank transactions the Syrian regime was hurriedly making amid a host of economic sanctions. In the spring of 2012, most of the emails found their way into a WikiLeaks database.

>But one set of emails in particular didn’t make it into the cache of documents published by WikiLeaks in July 2012 as “The Syria Files,” despite the fact that the hackers themselves were ecstatic at their discovery. The correspondence, which WikiLeaks has denied withholding, describes “more than” €2 billion ($2.4 billion, at current exchange rates) moving from the Central Bank of Syria to Russia’s VTB Bank.

We know this because the courts showed the data that Assange personally held back.

Ugh, don't make me do this:

Selectively releasing documents is not the same as releasing something later proven to be false, which is what the GP asserted.

FWIW you could play devils advocate here and say that wikileaks could not independently verify the omitted things; but I'm not going to go there because it's conjecture. Just as your suggestion that it's collusion with Russia, however likely, is also conjecture.

Selectively releasing everyone else's dirt except for Russia is a strong indicator of non-neutral stance.

Sorry I must have missed where anyone in this thread-chain has asserted that statement at all.

WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...

>In the summer of 2016, as WikiLeaks was publishing documents from Democratic operatives allegedly obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers, Julian Assange turned down a large cache of documents related to the Russian government, according to chat messages and a source who provided the records.

>WikiLeaks declined to publish a wide-ranging trove of documents — at least 68 gigabytes of data — that came from inside the Russian Interior Ministry, according to partial chat logs reviewed by Foreign Policy.

>The logs, which were provided to FP, only included WikiLeaks’s side of the conversation.

>“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.

>“WikiLeaks rejects all submissions that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere or which are likely to be considered insignificant. WikiLeaks has never rejected a submission due to its country of origin,” the organization wrote in a Twitter direct message when contacted by FP about the Russian cache.

Assange would later go on to propagate and distribute manipulated leaks sent by Guccifer 2.0 and other known Russian fronts like the "CyberBerkut" promotion of his I linked at the thread top.

WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands documents about Russia[0][1] and there's no evidence for your quoted claim made by ForeignPolicy. Where are those chatlogs?

For matters about Assange you should definitely look for more independent sources than only FP. A lot has happened since 2016/17, and there's been cases which show that certain groups within the US establishment been wrong for alleging Assange of a Russia connection[2].

[0] https://search.wikileaks.org/?q=Russia

[1] https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/31/assa-j31.html

In 2016 the relationship between Julian Assange and the US is about as hostile as possible. He was seeking asylum against this very extradition process that is ongoing. A big part of that drama was also that the US secretary of state under the previous years, ie the U.S. government's minister of foreign affairs, was a candidate for the 2016 presidential campaign and thus is it likely that there is a personal grudge between Assange and her.

And he was given documents that could hurt her. He used them.

It seems pretty clear that neutrality has not been on the tables for Assange ever since he sought political asylum. As pointed out above, this does not mean he has fabricated documents, or knowingly distributed fabricated documents, but since 2012 he has been in an active conflict against the government of the USA and in particular the foreign affairs side of it and thus leaks should be seen in that context.

"since 2012 he has been in an active conflict against the government of the USA and in particular the foreign affairs side of it and thus leaks should be seen in that context."

Thanks, I think this the lense that should be used when viewing all the facts. It's very hard to view Assange as impartial, but it's too soon to tell if he's anyones agent but his own.

Hillary literally asked whether Assange could be killed in a State Department meeting.

I think there's no doubt that there was a personal grudge between the two.

There's this from the top level comment.

> Stand up for journalists. Real journalists.

I wouldn't think that "Real journalists" would selectively choose what to report based on who their friends are.

I want to downvote this for having loaded controversial commentary, but I can't as it's a direct reply.

"who their friends are" is an uncharitable interpretation of the situation. You might not like that they didn't report on some information that was Russian, but to assume it's due to friendly relations and not fear of reprisal is spinning a narrative. Just as asserting the exact inverse is also spinning a narrative.

I don't claim to know everything and people seem really emotive about this so it's common to see people finding things that please their current mindset and presenting it as if its evidence of whatever they believe.

Please attempt removing your emotions and coldly look at the facts, try to consider an alternative theory for what happened or is happening, especially if you're American because Americans seem to be _especially_ heated when it comes to Assange.

Whatever your beliefs on the subject, a lot more has happened due to wikileaks stories; over something like NYT or bloomberg stories, which are highly regarded news outlets. So a charitable interpretation is that they're doing "real journalism" because they're digging in to things in the public interest.

> not fear of reprisal is spinning a narrative

I don't simultaneously fear reprisal _while_ reaching out to Russians for help and assistance.

I don't simultaneously fear reprisal _while_ reaching out to the Trump campaign to coordinate the release of leaks.

I don't simultaneously fear reprisal from a country _while_ seeking asylum in that country.

"fear of reprisal" would be the first time I've heard _that_ particular narrative being spun.

>I wouldn't think that "Real journalists" would selectively choose what to report based on who their friends are.

Then who is a "real" journalist anymore these days? That's is exactly why so many people are abandoning mainstream media (CNN, Foxnews, NBC, BBC, Guardian, Al Jazeera), because those established entities time and time again choose to selectively report on events when it fit their political bias and omit when it isn't possible to put a spin on the story.

Lies of omission are still lies.

To use an extreme example, if a reporting organization writes a story about one nation launching missile strikes against another, and leaves out that they were retaliatory strikes from a previous attack, that dramatically changes the perception of those events. If this sort of thing is continually done to benefit one entity, it is reasonable to question the honesty of the reporter.

Even if the released documents are all accurate, the previous lies of omission would cause a reasonable person to question whether or not the released documents provide adequate context.

This is the primary reason why every time I read a news article that seems to have a bit "too perfect" narrative about who is good and who is bad, I go and check Wikipedia or other news sites. It usually result in a broader context. Few things tend to be black or white, and never in any political topics.

Out of all news I read there is maybe one small set of investigative journalist that I trust to give me a balanced amount of context to from my own opinion, and as a mark of quality, they are disliked by the government, activists, the left and the right.

What most people seem to fail to realize is that in of itself is not necessary proof of collusion. There is the "street" theory that publishing records on powerful Russians ends with a bullet in your head( or worse) and not jail or any legal proceedings. Something to think about.

Well, yes, getting to Russia's shit list is a nasty experience even for non-Russians, as well known examples show, such as that of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessikka_Aro

Is it really necessary to leak information on Russia? Outside Russia we already know that they have done bad things. Besides was the information he leaked untrue? As an US citizen I am most interested in when is going on inside my own country not only because it affects me but also because I have the ability to push for change.

Assange asking Guccifer 2.0 for Hillary leaks: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dt6BBwBXcAEL-Fj?format=jpg&name=...

Assange helping Guccifer 2.0 distribute manipulated Hillary leaks: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/764256561539735552

How the leaks were taken from other sources and manipulated: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjevd/guccifer-2-is-bull...

>Guccifer 2.0 — believed to be a misinformation campaign operated by Russian intelligence — posted an 860-megabyte file on Tuesday afternoon that he claimed was donor information he hacked from Clinton Foundation servers.

>A sampling of the posted documents include a spreadsheet of big bank donations, a list of primarily California donors, an outdated spreadsheet of some Republican House members — and a screenshot of files he claimed to have obtained, one of which was titled “Pay to Play.”

>But there are a number of red flags that suggest the documents are in fact from a previous hack on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), not a new hack on the Clinton Foundation.

>A spot check of some of the people on the donor list against FEC filings found that they all lined up with DCCC contributions.

This does not alter the claim that info released by Wikileaks was never fake.

It is not worth engaging. I have met powerful people who have an unreasonable bug up their ass about Assange.

These are Americans who state that this Australian is a traitor who should be prosecuted and executed for treason over the collateral murder video. It is the same exact moral and ethical rot that has corrupted our police forces.

Edit: These downvotes are enlightening.

Any proof that WikiLeaks actually had the emails about that particular Russian bank transfer?

The theory you're promoting is that Assange leaked a huge trove of emails on Syria, a Russian ally, including large numbers of emails detailing Syria's relationship to Russia. But then, because Assange is secretly a Russian agent, he removed one particular set of emails.

The obvious question is: why did he publish the emails in the first place?

Selective leaking and selective redaction do not correspond to any US crimes and if they did could be leveled against many publishers.

What is the point of raising this in the context of a criminal indictment? I haven’t even examined what you are raising for accuracy, I’m merely asking, what does this have to do with throwing someone in prison?

This is a politically motivated perversion of Justice , you here are implying he is loyal to Russia and therefore deserves it.

You know, even if you were right, you are not helping your case?

Its not just my opinion, its the UN opinion. https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

>Its not just my opinion, its the UN opinion.

From the article you linked:

Mr Nils Melzer, Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; is part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

>they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

I see two possible interpretations:

A - This is a special process meant to assure that reports are truly independent and neutral. These conclusions are even more trustworthy.

B - UN Special Rapporteur can't be trusted, it's is a random nobody that can publish untrue allegations and slap UN logo on top.

It appears you are implying B is the correct interpretations. If so, why? Additionally, can you suggest a more trustworthy, unbiased party than the UN?

OK I'll be explicit.

You attempted to spin the opinion of special rapporteur into that of the UN. In every special rapporteur article they have to put the disclaimer I posted because of people like you attempting to frame something in false or malicious ways.

To recap your claim:

>Its not just my opinion, its the UN opinion.

UN's actual position as stated in the article you posted:

>The Special Rapporteurs are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council's independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures' experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

That line is meant for you:

>they are not UN staff

The UN's own press statements refer to the Special Rapporteurs as "UN Experts"

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

There is a reason people have to put annoyingly long official titles in when discussing persons and their opinions. "UN Special Rapporteur" does not equal the UN, it specially does not equal an official position of the UN which is what the user tried to do.

You have to be specific. "UN Special Rapporteur" does not equal the UN, which is why that specific language is put onto the footer of all their articles.

> it specially does not equal an official position of the UN

I don't know how you cans ay that, when the UN press briefings literally refer to them as a "UN expert".

Yes it's a financially independent position to remove as much bias as possible, but it is very much an official UN position.

>I don't know how you cans ay that, when the UN press briefings literally refer to them as a "UN expert".

His claim:

>Its not just my opinion, its the UN opinion.

It's not the UN's position, its a position of a Special Rapporteur for the UN. Thats why I can say it. You are arguing a different subject, if he is a UN expert. Notice I'm not debating his affiliation with the UN. A position of the UN would be a decision made by council, not by someone who:

>are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

According to UN, the body.

See my comment above. This argument is a total red herring.

This paragraph contains neither "UN's actual position" nor a disclaimer, so I don't why you keep posting it.

If you actually understand how the UN works, clarify for the rest of us, who would be the UN authority on the matter. I would humbly accept the enlightenment.

Alternatively, if you don't know, you should not be running around and accusing people of "false or malicious ways" and "spin". You seem to be misinterpreting the statement .

Not everything UN does needs to be a resolution passed passed by 194 countries in the general assembly.

Where there is smoke, there is fire.

Ask yourself this: why is it so important to leak information that is being held in secrecy by a state that is committing war crimes at an alarming rate?

The answer is: because the 5-eyes War Coalition is committing war crimes at an alarming rate. It literally started what it hoped to conflagration into World War 3, by invading Iraq illegally and on false pretences in 2003. And every day since that invasion, the world has been on fire.

The world has not forgotten the victims of these wars. Millions of innocent people have been massacred by the USA and its War Coalition in an utterly dire conflagration. The sheer SCALE of the war, of which the Western public are indeed extremely ignorant, is staggering.

If you had two criminals in the room, one of them was thieving the cutlery and the other was burning a pile of dead bodies in the corner, which would you want to deal with, first?

The USA and its War Coalition has a lot of criminal activity going on. Like, a lot. And every twenty minutes for twenty years, it has been dropping bombs - mostly on innocent people - for its own economic purposes.

That is a fire that the leaks will put out.

(The leaks will continue, because the crimes are huge.)

> And every day since that invasion, the world has been on fire.

Obviously things were peacable around the world beforehand, and every conflict or human rights violation since then can be blamed on the Iraq invasion.

Never mind that civilian casualties by coalition forces are absolutely dwarfed by those by the opposition, or that US in general gets an extremely high degree of scrutiny and commits relatively few war crimes / civilian casualties.

This is a brilliant attempt at distraction from the incredible corruption and human rights violations from other countries such as Russia. Should the US get a free pass? Of course not, but it's rather tiresome to hear Chinese and Russian agitators say "but what about the 10k civilian casualties over 10 years" while asking the world to please ignore the Uighur genocide or the invasions of Ukraine.

The fact is that Wikileaks has a well established bias. They publish things that are true when it harms the US, and often leave out as much exonerating context as possible. Collateral murder for instance specifically tried to downplay the aspects where the gunner provided a rationale for engaging and sought approval, instead using voiceovers and editing to imply a lack of ROE.

>Millions of innocent people have been massacred by the USA and its War Coalition in an utterly dire conflagration.

I'd love to see a source on this. The most critical estimate I've seen (Iraq Body Count) has coalition innocents killed around 30k, Over 15 years. While opposition are over 300k. Please source your facts.

"The world is always at war" is not an excuse for the following illegal military murder and death campaigns waged against innocent people: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen.

The bombing must stop. The drones must be denied.

>Body Count:

https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/

2 million people lost in one war 'arena' is one thing. Another war arena, is another thing. 12 of them, for 20 years, is shear lunacy.

Iraq lost 5% of its population to US war.

You should probably read the source you provide. Like many of these body counts, they make no attempt to differentiate US-caused, coalition-caused, Russian-caused, or opposition-caused deaths--or even whether the rise in mortality was actually caused by the war!

So, as is reasonable, you are just blaming them all on the US.

...even whether the rise in mortality was actually caused by the war!

You need proof that war causes death? This seems like some sort of nadir of tabula rasa foolishness.

If you're going to choose to misrepresent / misunderstand what I said, there isnt going to be much point in discussion.

But in case there was confusion here, I would like a claim that X deaths were caused by Y war to be backed up by evidence rather than "obviously war causes death, so this war must have caused that death!"

The rise in mortality could be partly caused by war, and partly by changing political factors, and partly by changing responses to vaccinations (relevant in Pakistan re: polio), and partly by a hundred other factors.

When you ask how many deaths in Iraq were caused by "the Russians", you lose any assumption of intent to engage in good-faith discussion. We know you didn't read the 97-page study linked by GP, because it discussed the question of who caused the many deaths in several sections, including one beginning on page 28. Before examining the figures more closely, the Physicians for Social Responsibility observe the following:

A priori, of course, those who started the war also carry the main responsibility for all victims. Since the assault on Iraq unequivocally constituted an aggression in violation of international law, the U.S. and its allies are also responsible for all its consequences.

What could you possibly be thinking? "Of the million violent combat deaths in Iraq through 2012, we should only blame USA for 600k, not 850k!" Such an argument would be silly, if it weren't completely monstrous.

It is utterly monstrous, and you've successfully pointed out the culturally disastrous moral authority that Americans use to justify their nations heinous crimes against humanity.

For every George Floyd there are a thousand unnamed Iraqi's. The outrage isn't there for those victims. Yet.

But there will be a time when Americans are confronted with their nations horrendous legacy for the last 20 years, and it will erase, entirely, any pretence of moral authority. One hopes that day comes sooner, and with fewer victims, but as we can see the stubborn "might makes right" attitude so many of us are exhibiting in the West, alas makes it more likely that this won't happen until even more innocent bodies are thrown on the pile ..

So few see the connections between slaughter/persecution of non-whites overseas and slaughter/persecution of non-whites here, among those indigenous both to this continent and to Africa. No sooner had we extended our predations to the whole of our territory than we set our sights abroad. The script used in Philippines was a farcical echo of that followed in America over the preceding 150 years, just as numerous massacres there echoed that at Wounded Knee just a decade before. Emilio Aguinaldo would have done better if he had taken notice of previous American treaties and their aftermath. Shortly after he allied with Admiral Dewey against the Spanish, he found the Americans rather wanted to replace the Spanish as imperial overlords, except with more murder. Anywhere from a quarter to a whole million Filipinos were murdered while suffering vicious libel in the USA press. Six decades later, similar numbers of Indonesians suffered the same fate, although in that case CIA was running the show rather than Navy and Army.

Indeed, if there has been any innovation in our racist slaughters, it has been to occasionally keep our fingerprints off the machetes. All the bombs falling in Yemen still say "Made in USA" on the side, though.

The USA political system is a machine that transforms the blood of non-white people into the profits of armaments manufacturers and (sometimes) resource extraction firms. This has been true since before the founding of USA. Even many minorities in USA would rather not acknowledge this awful legacy. Your appeals to the judgment of history will eventually be answered, but I expect that to happen only after this totalitarian polity is replaced by more humane ways to organize life here in North America.

>The USA political system is a machine that transforms the blood of non-white people into the profits of armaments manufacturers and (sometimes) resource extraction firms.

This statement is now incorporated into my own mindset.

Thank you for your courage.

I think you didn't read the report. It very definitely does make an attempt to differentiate. If only this task was made more reliable and accurate by way of true facts from the very people dropping the bombs.

Alas, the American military is as terrified of the true statistics as anyone could be. Even General McMaster, an utter war criminal, has made an effort to ensure all his peers know how much danger they are all in, should the true scale of the wars be revealed to the American public.

"Good thing" there is a lot going on right now to distract people from the burning piles of rubble America has left all over the world.

I assure you, the victims and the families of those victims, and the friends of those victims HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2016/9/9/12864328/wiki...

Assange censors whistleblowers against the Russian government who he openly collaborated with. Do you think this is ethical behavior?

1. Why is your account just 2 weeks old? 2. Apparently the testimony is based on the story told by who are trying hard to get their sentences reduced.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/25/assa-j25.html

> Why is your account just 2 weeks old?

It was made then. This was a very dumb question. One that tells more about where the person asking it is coming from than what could possibly be put into the answer itself.

What did you expect?

"Oh yes I made this account for the purposes of manipulating public opinion about Assange in this specific thread. Muahaha and I would've gotten away with it if it wasn't for someone looking at my profile creation date."

1. Why is your account just 2 weeks old?

Maybe he created his account two weeks ago? How old was your account two weeks after you created it?

New accounts are welcome on HN. Your comment breaks the site guideline against insinuation of astroturfing, shilling, etc. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do that. The rest of your comment is fine.

Hello fellow concerned citizen!

Did you create that throwaway account in anticipation of yesterday's release of this story, or do you keep a stack to pick from?

Considering you only comment on my account age I'm assuming you've seen all my comments on my profile page as well.

That you cannot address any of the comments and only wish to speak of my account age says volumes about where you are coming from.

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style and using HN for ideological battle? You've done these things repeatedly already, and it's not what this site is for. Indeed it's destructive of what the site is for, so we eventually have to ban accounts for doing it. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

There are others in this thread arguing both sides of this debate respectfully and within the guidelines, so you needn't look far for good examples.

That crosses into personal attack and breaks HN's guideline against insinuations of astroturfing etc. You can't do those things here, regardless of how strongly you disagree with someone, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

He also tweeted this, saying the UFO story by the NY Times was a hoax. But then he deleted it-

https://imgur.com/gallery/XubrM3g

Despite the Pentagon and Navy’s recent actions, Julian was right — all of this is a sophisticated operation that uses bad actors to perpetuate disinformation. It is probably illegal but concerns national security with China.

And how does that prove the published contents as false?

Real journalists don't just publish anything they can get their hands on with no regards for where the data came from, for what purposes it was given to them and whom their publication might harm.

True. They first ask their editor what the agenda is that week and then selectively and out of context craft the narrative. Case in point NYT in the past decade. Or WaPo. Or Fox in ages past.

Don’t worry, he doesn’t publish everything he’s given.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2016/9/9/12864328/wiki...

He has published numerous falsehoods. Please don’t buy this uncritically.

Please list your sources when discrediting someone

Assange is not in solitary confinement, please don't spread falsehoods

He used to be until end of january this year. While outdated it's not a falsehood per se.

Thanks for this, I hadn't seen the news that he had been moved out of solitary confinement. I'm happy to be wrong, that's good news. I'll edit the parent comment.

> Jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is no longer being kept in solitary confinement and his health is improving, his spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told reporters on Tuesday.

- Feb. 2020 [1]

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-assange/wikileaks...

I don't believe he was in solitary confinement up until then.

Here is the UN (Nils Melzer) saying he is not, in May 2019 [0]

> "Although Assange is not held in solitary confinement..."

There were photo leaks early on showing Assange interacting with other prisoners, with the leaker saying he was popular.

I believe what Wikileaks refer to as "solitary confinement" is being put on the medical wing, and not in his normal cell. Obviously Wikileaks are interested in making his imprisonment seem as harsh as possible.

[0] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

Not sure I understand your point, he is not being indicted for publishing false information. Assuming he never did, why would that make the charges bullshit?

I'm not saying his record means the charges are bullshit, but I'm saying if the charges are bullshit and his record is infallible then the implication is that we live under a government without freedom of the press, where truthful hard-hitting journalism gets you put in prison.

If you don't believe that Assange has done truthful hard-hitting journalism, or you believe that he isn't a journalist at all, then you can maintain the belief that we don't put journalists in prison while sitting idle as he rots in prison, because he is not a True Journalist. "We wouldn't do that to True Journalists. Assange is different."

To be fair, true journalists don’t host shows on RT.

Freedom of the Press doesn't give you carte blanche to disclose state secrets without repercussions. Just because the information is hard hitting doesn't give you a pass on the crimes you committed to get it.

Freedom of the Press has limitations.

Example, as a journalist you cannot just walk into a US Army base and start reporting.

Gee, that sounds problematic. We give them $750B/yr, they kill innocent people around the world, and they don't submit to public oversight? I wish we lived in a free society...

The Senate Committee on Armed Services is the public government "group" charged with oversight of the US Military.

I don't know if that meets your definition of public oversight.

Congress is infamously bad at overseeing anything. For that reason, from time to time journalists have helped the public to make direct policy recommendations. Of course the bureaucratic state prefers not to accommodate that form of oversight.

It’s a common talking point people use to obfuscate and defend wikileaks.

As you note, it’s irrelevant but also, if true, illustrates how selectively showing true info is deceptive.

The better question is whether he’s buried true facts in order to help public figures. There’s strong evidence he’s censored whistleblowers leaking damaging documents about Russia involvement in syria[0], along with his pretty open partnership with the Russian government.

[0]https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2016/9/9/12864328/wiki...

> Stand up for journalists. Real journalists.

Of which Assange isn't

He was more than happy to support the current administration in the electoral process, with heavy editorializing and biases

So, I guess sorry they renegued on their promises? Oh but he should have guessed it.

I'm generally on Assange's side in all of this. I agree he shouldn't be charged and this is all a disgrace.

Having said that, I once went to wikileaks and found a PDF of Steve Job's supposed STD test which claimed he was HIV positive. That was a surprise to me as my understanding was that he died of cancer. I looked into it and no one could corroborate the story and the general consensus seemed to be that it was faked.

Even if it was real, I struggle to see why it's important to leak the private medical records of someone with a deadly STD, although I'm sure there are multiple perspectives on this.

HIV can cause Kaposi’s sarcoma, so that could have caused his cancer. It’s actually not that far outside the realm of possibility. Condom use was not very common in the 70s and one can live with HIV dormant for many years.

But the relevant question is "Why should a person's private medical history be public knowledge?"

As an officer of a public corporation, how much privacy can one expect? I agree that he had a right to privacy, same as anyone else.

> I agree that he had a right to privacy, same as anyone else.

Agreed.

> As an officer of a public corporation, how much privacy can one expect?

So we should violate his rights without repercussion? Lost me.

As a public figure you cannot have any reasonable expectation of privacy. That’s different from saying what should be done with his private medical records.

The only reason public figures don't reasonably have that expectation is because so many people are willing to break the law to leak their personal data. That this happens so often is not a valid justification for it happening.

That makes no sense, he is not a publicly elected official where disclosing health issues is expected. He is a private citizen running a company, the fact that the company is popular and successful should have no bearing at all. Should everyone who starts a company expect to lose all privacy especially health related, or only those that are successful above a set threshold?

It should definitely be on your list of considerations. It's the sad reality.

People must have their privacy, that is for sure.

If I invest something in your company, and you are sick, should I know it?

Probably not, as if you are a normal everyday investor like me you should not be investing in companies where its success hinges on a single person. I love Tesla but I have not invested in it because Musk could get hit by an electric semi tomorrow and the stock would tank.

This seems to fly in the face of the prevailing opinions on this site about Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex having his full name printed in the NYT.

He’s not an officer of a publicly traded corporation, and has no fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. It’s a completely different case from being doxxed.

That wasn't your distinction, though. You used the term "public figure" and I think it's a bit dramatic to say that he was doxxed when he wrote under his full name until 2013, references those writings frequently and used that full name on the blog as recently as last year.

Either public figures deserve a measure of privacy or they don't.

> Either public figures deserve a measure of privacy or they don't.

Don't put words in the other person's mouth.

Instead, what people are saying is that if someone has a huge amount of power, then we don't really care about their privacy.

Someone running a blog does not have a huge amount of power.

Someone running a trillion dollar company, or running or president, or whatever, does have a huge amount of power.

Thats the difference.

Not sure how I was "putting words in the other person's mouth" by making that statement.

I agree that Steve Jobs is more powerful than even an influential blogger, but they are both public figures. Who exactly is allowed to do the calculus about how much private information is appropriate to publish about someone according to their level of power? To me it seems to be a binary: are they a public figure or not.

When it's a breach of journalistic ethics to publish information about a blogger that's provided on or linked to from said blog (I think it is a breach, he made a specific request not to) it's much more egregious to publish an apparently forged health record of a CEO.

At no point do I think that not caring about someone's privacy means it's acceptable to publish false information about them.

> To me it seems to be a binary

It doesn't have to be binary. Instead, we can say that the more power someone has, the more it is ok to reveal info about them.

You can pick public figure, but I wouldn't do that.

> Who exactly is allowed to do the calculus

Anyone at all times. That's how society works. Everyone has their own opinions.

I don't agree with your binary opinion though.

> Of a CEO

CEOs have lots of power. They don't need to be protected as much as everyone else in the world.

> Either public figures deserve a measure of privacy or they don't.

The real answer is that it depends. If a public figure is abusing their position, then yes, it is in the public interest to know about this abuse of power.

Imagine for a second if every politician’s financial history for all of their financial accounts were on an immutable ledger. That is something that is desirable, though it violates those individuals’ privacy. In this case we would say the public interest supersedes their right to privacy.

It seems to be a very fluid standard, for sure, but there are other variables that are brought up in these discussions beyond whether or not a public figure is abusing their position. Who is publishing? How well-liked the public figure is and by who?

If the standard boils down to there being a journalistic interest in publishing relevant information about a public figure in relation to their abuse of power then I'm not sure how possibly-faked medical records pass that test.

"Why should a person's private medical history"

Well, it depends on which public person we are talking about.

A random nobody? Yeah, privacy is important for them.

Someone running for president, or someone who is a CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world? I don't really care much about their privacy, in either circumstance.

What grave scandal is uncovered by knowing that Jobs had AIDS?

Who will get justice or recompense by knowing that?

What future benefits or change of course will this bring for you, or me, or society?

Don't get me wrong, I don't care about this guy's privacy either -- plus he's dead, so privacy is mostly moot -- but it's hard to see what anyone stands to gain from airing inconsequential medical history.

I would argue that it became public knowledge the moment that the would-be leaker (along with any 3rd parties) learned about it, not the moment that it was leaked.

HIV wasn't around in the 1970s (in Western countries at least) and also Jobs wasn't in the more at-risk demographics for the disease.

Right, but my point is that those who grew up in that era did not adopt condom use until much later. Old Steve was known to get around a lot.

It very much was around in the 1970s, and you have no idea what his sex life was. But none of this is any of our business.

Given that the first recognised death from AIDS was in the 80s, I'd dispute your saying that it was very much around in the 70s. I don't know what his sex life was like but as far as we know he wasn't a prostitute, a I.V. drug user or gay, so yeah he wasn't in any of the demographics hardest hit.

The AIDS might have been identified by the CDC in 1981 but testing of remains shows that the virus was in the US and killing people well before then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_early_HIV/AIDS_cas...

"(...) These specimens are significant not only because they are the oldest specimens of the virus known to cause AIDS, but because they show that the virus already had an extensive amount of genetic diversity in 1960.[10] This suggests the virus had either undergone recombination or been circulating for years or perhaps decades in the Kinshasa population. (...)"

Additionally,

Richard Edwin Graves Jr., a 28-year-old World War II veteran who had been stationed in the Solomon Islands, died on 26 July 1952 in Memphis, Tennessee with pneumocystis pneumonia, CMV and what some authors suggest are a sufficient number of opportunistic infections for a clinical course suggestive of an AIDS diagnosis.[8][9]

Sadayo Fujisawa, a sixty-year-old Japanese-Canadian woman, died in Montreal on 28 June 1945 of pneumocystis pneumonia with Human cytomegalovirus (CMV), diarrhea, and wasting, a group of symptoms which some authors conclude would have led to an automatic diagnosis of AIDS in the early 1980s.[6][7]

The virus was already circulating globally in the early 1900s.

This evidence is not very compelling.

The genetic diversity might be indicative of widerspread infection in sub-saharan Africa, and then two immuno-comprimised cases, are not specifically indicative of HIV.

...and then this statement has absolutely no basis in evidence: "The virus was already circulating globally in the early 1900s."

I had not heard of that and I am surprised that they would publish something so tabloidish. For what it's worth, I found this page [1] where they state:

> Due to the contradictory dates, possible evidence of forgery, strong motivations for fabrication, and few motivations for a legitimate revelation, the images should not be taken at face value.

And I found this reddit thread/comment from 11 years ago (when Wikileaks released it) that contains the same text, so it's not as though they released the document and then corrected themselves after the fact -- they published it alongside a warning that it's probably bogus. [2]

[1]: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_purported_HIV_medical_...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7qo8n/steve_job...

I too am shocked that Wikileaks would publish tabloidish material with little public value.

Next thing you know, I'll hear that Wikileaks posted private emails of a government official talking about pizza. Emails which spawned ridiculous conspiracies about satanic child abuse cults headquartered in the basement of a pizza shop that doesn't have a basement.

That would never happen. Not at an august, hard-hitting journalistic outlet like Wikileaks. /s

Still waiting for a valid explanation of what pizza is code for because they certainly aren’t talking about pizza the food in those emails.

Don't forget the 65K in hot dogs.

Has it been proven that those emails were real in the first place?

I too was confused by the use of what appears to be coded language, but then thought to myself: wait, is what I am reading authentic?

Yes, the emails were real. It was proven and never denied.

Would you even bother trying to confirm or deny emails about pizza? I'd consider it an even bigger waste of time than supplying the long form of a birth certificate after someone decided that the short form wasn’t good enough proof of nationality for someone who was by that point already the elected president.

The DKIM signatures were valid.

Drugs maybe?

You may be waiting for a long time. That doesn't really provide any support for the satanic child sex cult thing either though.

I don’t know what they’re talking about. Could literally be anything but they would only codify something they wanted to hide. It’s very weird but I’m not into speculating.

You’re outwardly speculating that it’s coded speech simply because you lack context.

I somehow hope they were talking about light drugs. Given the amount of storm it caused, it's beyond me why there was no official examination, to say nothing about explanation.

Official examination of what? I mean, yeah, you're probably right. More likely than not they were talking about weed. Or plausibly sex workers. Something embarassing. Certainly not child trafficking in a literal pizza shop.

> Given the amount of storm it caused

It really didn't. Except for the lunatic who walked into the restaurant with a gun, almost none of this stuff penetrated mainstream media. FOX watchers got their fill, but they weren't swayable votes, by definition. To the eyeballs the Clinton campaign cared about, Pizzagate was a non-issue.

Lefties like me only like to talk about it because it was so crazy insane. This isn't what cost the election.

Why are you certain they aren't talking about pizza?

Okay, I'll bite. I don't think John Podesta has officially commented on what the emails mean, but I think it's pretty safe to assume it is actually quite literal, and they were indeed talking about a handkerchief, a map, and pizza.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/32795

> Subject: You left something at the Field house > Susan & Herb > I just came from checking the Field house and I have a square cloth handkerchief (white w/ black) that was left on the kitchen island. > Happy to send it via the mail if you let me know where I should send it.

> I also meant to inquire yesterday about the pillows you purchased. I can send them as well, if you let me know where they are in the house.

> Safe travels to all > Kate

> Hi John,

> The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related. Is it yorus? They can send it if you want. > I know you're busy, so feel free not to respond if it's not yours or you don't want it.

> Susaner

I mean, they're talking about a handkerchief with a pattern of a map, with various food items on it, like pizza. I have never seen such a handkerchief, but this is almost certainly some sort of a novelty handkerchief with a map of Italy, featuring various types of cuisine common to the region. Which kind of makes sense, since it's a napkin.

Why would you assume it is coded? The realtor emails and says, hey, you forgot your handkerchief. Podesta's friend, who was with him, emails him and says, hey, I think that's your handkerchief, the one with the map and pizza and stuff.

And this is supposed to be unusual? This is just how people talk.

It is so ridiculous to call the emails that WikiLeaks published "tabloid" just because a conspiracy theory sprung up around bizarre language which was used in a subset of them. Taken as a whole, they revealed absolutely rank corruption in the higher ranks of the DNC.

Yeah, the conspiracy theory is just insane. Almost as insane as the conspiracy theory that one of the world's largest religious organizations was engaging in something similar, except at a scale spanning every continent except Antarctica and having done so for at least as long as living memory.

For another conspiracy theory, what about the idea that if a conspiracy was uncovered, instead of denying it those with something to lose would double down on the most exaggerated parts of the conspiracy to down out the less insane and more likely parts. Get the public to focus on the pizza shop and not on the (since deceased) billionaire.

Pizzagate != Epstein

Leaking Podesta's email spawned a conspiracy theory that high-ranking Democrats were a part of a satanic child abuse and traffic ring. It was specifically partisan.

Meanwhile there are multiple layers to the Epstein case. Yes, Epstein was a nexus of child abuse. He was a terrible human being who got away with years of child abuse because of his money and powerful connections. Yes, he died under mysterious circumstances. And Epstein's close friends and confidants included both Democrats and Republicans.

Conflating Pizzagate with Epstein is just moving the goalposts to exonerate Wikileak's publishing of private emails. Are some of the people involved in the email dump known associates of Epstein? Yes. But that's not what Pizzagate is, nor was Epstein associated with the email dump.

Don't forget how Epstein had a girlfriend.

Girlfriend's dad was a Big Deal with the Mossad. Like, awarded medals by the Israeli government Big Deal. Like, we can't talk about him in the UK unless we make it an official Parliament discussion -- that is, by law, on the record and can't be sued as libel or slander -- kind of Big Deal.

Imagine if there was something larger than just what that one billionaire was involved in. Kinda like how when stories about the Catholic Church broke there were just a few high level Bishops involved until much more work was done to pull back the curtains.

Now imagine some of that gets leaked in a partisan fashion. Maybe on purpose. Maybe by chance. A cover up could be attempted, but that might bring in more investigation. Maybe it would be better to forcefully corrupt it instead. Go from MK Ultra conspiracy theory to moon landings were faked and the earth is flat conspiracy theory. All you have to do is purposefully 'leak' even crazier stuff while making it hyper partisan so that our existing political divide feeds into it.

Not saying they are equal, but what if they are both views into a larger conspiracy, though one of those views was purposefully corrupted to try to make any similar conspiracy theory be viewed as utter nonsense. Make it so people think moon landings or flat earth instead of MK Ultra or Operation Northwoods.

"I'm not saying it's true, but what if it was true enough?"

You could speculate that about literally anything. It's meaningless conjecture.

It isn't meaningless anymore when we have found that there are multiple national level or greater conspiracies involving some of the most vile things known to mankind. We are 2 for 3 with these three cases and we have seen how corrupted the media and legal system is with handling those two cases (yes, the media eventually did report on them, but go back and look at how the media treated reports on the Catholic abuse before the main story broke and how many individual reports were silenced).

It is like if you catch someone gas lighting you twice, and now this time they are telling you they really didn't do it and are definitely not gas lighting you again. At some point their demand to prove their gas lighting becomes part of the attack itself.

There were 300,000 children stolen by the Catholic church in just Spain alone and sold for adoption.

My favourite conspiracy theory is the Out Of Africa conspiracy theory.

The Petrolonas Cave findings of Thessaloniki debunked it and suggest the Europeans diverged from Africa probably upto a million years ago. Cambridge University verified the findings and they're the most woke campus in town so it must be true.

> Yeah, the conspiracy theory is just insane. Almost as insane as the conspiracy theory that one of the world's largest religious organizations was engaging in something similar, except at a scale spanning every continent except Antarctica and having done so for at least as long as living memory.

One is a conspiracy about a pedophile ring in a pizzaria basement when no such basement exists. The other is a conspiracy that has dozens if not hundreds of convictions and at least a tacit admission from the institution that it's a problem.

> For another conspiracy theory, what about the idea that if a conspiracy was uncovered, instead of denying it those with something to lose would double down on the most exaggerated parts of the conspiracy to down out the less insane and more likely parts. Get the public to focus on the pizza shop and not on the (since deceased) billionaire.

The mastermind (Ailes) behind the news network responsible for pushing the former conspiracy and distracting from the latter admitted to starting the network for the express purpose of running political interference. It's not really a conspiracy when the conspirators are blatantly open about it - at least not in the colloquial sense. Political interference they're running now against SDNY in order to obstruct the investigation.

The difference in circumstance should be apparent - it's the existence of actual evidence and reliable first hand accounts.

I'm generally against Assange on all of this. Hacking is an illegal activity that results in the disclosure of information that the hacker does not own. This is theft of information and a federal offense. Anyone engaging is nefarious hacking should be jailed, if caught, and never allowed to use technology again. We have very lax laws when it comes to hacking - they need to be stronger.

Some of what he leaked showed criminal activity at high levels and yet nothing was done about that. There's no point discussing justice and who should be jailed as long as it's selective justice. It means the justice system has become just a blunt instrument to be used for some criminals and against others.

Having a bigger hammer means nothing as long as it's always selective with criminal interests, protecting some and not others. Just means they have a bigger hammer to use against anyone threatening those interests, criminals or not.

And if it exposes war crimes? Crimes against humanity?

I’m not against use of hacking to reveal higher crimes.

I am against hacking in general.

I see no good reason for him to have targeted a newspaper.

I do see good reason to target secretive government agencies.

I see good reason for those agencies to have a problem with this and go after anyone who does it.

I am against government agencies having bad enough security that they can be so targeted.

Assange isn’t in prison right now for any of this, he’s in prison because he skipped bail to avoid extradition for a completely different charge to a completely different country to face his accusers for a potential maximum penalty less than the time he spent in the embassy he got kicked out of for breaking their rules, and which he fled to because for some reason that never made sense to me he claimed that going from the UK to Sweden put him in danger of the thing which actually happened in the UK.

> he got kicked out of for breaking their rules

This was not really the reason.

> and which he fled to because for some reason that never made sense to me he claimed that going from the UK to Sweden put him in danger of the thing which actually happened in the UK.

He feared that either the UK or Sweden would send him to the US.

> This was not really the reason.

While I am not naïve enough to ignore the possibility of dishonesty, the official statement was:

“We cannot allow our house, the house that opened its doors, to become a center for spying, … This activity violates asylum conditions. Our decision is not arbitrary but is based on international law.”

and also accusations of blocking security cameras at the embassy.

> He feared that either the UK or Sweden would send him to the US.

And yet, he initially submitted to the UK authorities while trying to deny access to the Swedish ones. That never looked sensible to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I paid attention when the UN accused the UK of torturing him, and the fact that the UK told the US about arresting him at the embassy before it told Sweden even though the latter had an outstanding warrant stinks — but thinking poorly of how governments treat a (very unusual) investigator who showed the world a whole bunch of the skeletons in their closets does not mean I have to think the investigator was doing anything other than fleeing justice in 2011.

> Hacking is an illegal activity

And it should not be

> that results in the disclosure of information that the hacker does not own

Good thing I do not believe in intellectual property/owning numbers.

> This is theft of information

Copying is not theft.

> Anyone engaging is nefarious hacking should be

...given a monetary reward if they publish how they were able to gain unauthorized access.

Is criminal hacking such a awful crime that the punishment should include a custodial sentence and never having access to technology.

A lifetime ban seems completely inappropriate. Which specific technology did you have in mind?

Consigned to a fate only understood by the Amish

No reasonable person can believe that leaking this kind of information (regardless of [in]accuracy) is appropriate.

HIPAA (1994) enshrined legally what is one of the few moral absolutes in healthcare - your health issues are nobody else's business with few caveats. HIV is reported to the government. Knowingly infecting someone with HIV is a crime. The reasonable safeguards are there and dumping someone's records does nothing to make anyone safer.

What does that have to do with Assange being charged?

EDIT: It seems any effort to seek clarification is discouraged here. My apologies.

It doesn't, it's a response to "I hope people don't forget that Wikileaks has never published anything that has been proven false. Not once."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the comment was a response not about proving that claim to be false (as the commenter pointed out there was no evidence either way), but rather the ethics of releasing data protected under HIPAA.

Sorry you were downvoted. Here's an upvote on me because clarification is good.

The context you are missing is that there are some sibling comments here claiming that wikileaks has never posted info with questionable veracity. I believe the Steve Jobs leak is one such case.

I also was pointing out that sometimes certain types of information don't need to be leaked at all. I personally believe medical info should be very private unless perhaps you are running for the office of the President. But, as I said, there are probably multiple perspectives on the issue (particularly perspectives of people who would want Apple's stock price to go down, or might think of Steve Jobs as evil for the Foxconn scandals, for instance).

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the context--that definitely makes sense. It seems fair to say that legitimate leaks were probably diluted by baseless and largely irrelevant claims such as the Steve Jobs leak. Definitely fair to say if it can be done to Steve Jobs it can be done to Joe Sixpack as well.

In case the leak is true, this poses an interesting question, to why he received a liver... This cannot be standard ethical practice either?

Reading this almost instantly modified my opinion of wiki leaks. I can’t believe they published something so sensitive without justification. Is there a wider context that the leak occurred in, maybe via some oversight? I know they used to publish large dumps of email exchanges from large corporations - did this get mixed up in one of those?

I’m honestly upset that this sort of information was released

> Stand up for journalists. Real journalists.

Are you trying to imply that assange is a journalist?

> I hope people don't forget that Wikileaks has never published anything that has been proven false.

That is a very odd misdirection given the context. He's not accused of lying, he's accused of computer crimes.

I mean, your medical records and browsing history may be 100% true and verifiably copied from original sources, but if I steal and distribute them I'm still going to jail.

>>I hope people don't forget that Wikileaks has never published anything that has been proven false. Not once.

Assuming what you said is true, don't you think that some things should be secret, at least for a while?

War crimes?

wikileaks published just vids of war crimes right? At some point they lost it. Maybe going against USA drove them to the arms of Russia but they lost their innocence.

Even if you think that, the charges are all still from the period of the Iraq leaks.

Wait. Are you taking these accusations at face value and saying that is okay here? Or are you contending that the accusations are false? I think it is a pretty big deal if you ask a hacking group to hack for you.

> I hope people don't forget that Wikileaks has never published anything that has been proven false.

This talking point is frankly irrelevant. Actually it itself illustrates how only cherry picking info to reveal is as deceptive as out right lies, but even more difficult to combat.

Want a clear example of how showing only true information is deceptive? Google Mormon bubbling. Yes the example is distasteful but it’s a very clear illustration of how easy it is to use selective information to deceive perception and make people appear to be doing something they are not, potentially hurting them.

>> I hope people don't forget that Wikileaks has never published anything that has been proven false.

Not really relevant. Assange was acting directly against the interests of the United States. He was indiscriminately dumping large quantities of classified (or otherwise secret) information on the internet for the world to see.

In which jurisdiction is it illegal for an Australian to publish evidence of American war crimes?

> I hope people don't forget that Wikileaks has never published anything that has been proven false.

You need an edit for that incorrect statement as well, as many comments have already pointed out.

"Never proven false" is an Orwellian turn of phrase, because WL's concern with accuracy is obviously not overriding:

https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/757599082928082944?lang=en

Also: why would I care that Hammond was prosecuted? Hammond was caught dead to rights.

FWIW Zeynep isn’t concerned with accuracy either, WL did not dump private info of almost every woman in Turkey. This is simply a strange misattribution, the dump came via Emma Best of DDoSecrets, http://web.archive.org/web/20160727193612/https://twitter.co...

Why is this being downvoted? It's true and has been explained by Emma Best herself https://archive.is/0VsQR

The parent says

> Zeynep isn’t concerned with accuracy either

But your link says

> Zeynep Tufekci never lied, exaggerated or retracted her article (which was accurate).

So I don't see how one explains the other.

Emma Best published those documents and not WikiLeaks. That's what I thought was the correction.

Emma Best isn’t being very clear here. In her tweet she very clearly disagrees with Zeynep Tufekcis claims, but for whatever reason the blog is more forgiving.

In any case it’s quite clear that Zeynep wasn’t correct when she claimed that WL dumped this data. WL only tweeted a link to the dump shared by Emma Best, who now operates a “competitor” to WL, DDoSecrets.

I’m not trying to suggest that WL has an amazing track record. I just think that if Zeynep wanted to do the right thing she’d have retracted her claim that WL dumped this data.

Thanks for chiming in. I would also add that he put aid workers and activists at risk [1] and caused potential harm, torture, and death to dissidents in Afghanistan and Iraq [2].

Indiscriminate doxing to accomplish a radical agenda is not journalism. My view-- which I admit is broader than the point you made-- is that he is a criminal and should be tried and convicted. It makes me sick to my stomach that he cloaks his actions in the hard work and bravery of our free press.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37165230 "Human rights groups have asked Wikileaks many times to do more to censor information found in documents. They fear reprisals against aid workers, activists and civilians named in the leaked data."

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51616077 "Mr Lewis said the dissemination of specific classified documents unredacted put dissidents in Afghanistan and Iraq at 'risk of serious harm, torture or even death". The US identified hundreds of "at risk and potentially at risk people' around the world, he said, and made efforts to warn them."

"The burden of proof is on state power to justify itself." It seems very plausible that WL/Assange disclosed information irresponsibly, and if so, he should be held to account. The real concern is that I think we all know he isn't going to get anything resembling a fair trial; The Powers That Be are looking to send a message to any other would-be leakers and journalists with the audacity to challenge unaccountable state violence.

Many of the things he's charged with have nothing to do with whether Assange disclosed information "irresponsibly". On a message board, the entire debate is over whether WL is a good thing or not. But that's not at all the matter that is put before the court.

Your comment is well taken. However, I would point out that with respect to the disclosure counts there is some legal relevance to the frequent message board debate about whether he is a "journalist" or not. The false claim that he is one is made due to the belief it will provide him with a modicum of legal protection against some of the disclosure counts. It wont help him at all when it comes to the computer intrusion count and I also don't think it helps with the conspiracy to obtain NDI (though I am less sure on that one). Either way I would expect to see the journalism issue discussed and ultimately debunked at trail.

There's an awfully tough hill to climb for any argument suggesting that any kind of intentionality, journalistic or humanitarian or otherwise, might immunize someone for literally dispatching Lulzsec with a list of targets. The law will see the winged monkeys and draw the obvious conclusion about what kind of person dispatches those.

Of course, we're working solely from the indictment, and Assange will make his own case rebutting those claims. But if the DOJ's informant holds up, I'm not sure what the persuasive argument is going to be. Maybe he'll hold out for nullification.

I agree, as I mentioned the debate about "journalism" has no relevance when it comes to computer intrusion and some of the other crimes in the indictment. It is a good point that it could bear some relevance on jury nullification or one juror causing a mistrial. In the end though I think we are of the same mind that it holds no water.

By far the most likely outcome is that he will receive a fair trial, be convicted, and then justice will be done.

> he cloaks his actions in the hard work and bravery of our free press.

What specifically are you invoking here as the "free press" ? There is very little free press in the United States. The overwhelming majority of what is called the press consists of mouthpieces for the ruling power structure, analogous to state media in the USSR.

I agree it would have been better for documents to be reviewed before publication rather than dumped. But I just don't see how that was possible given the limited resources of the non-corrupt press, and the tendency of the government to go after anyone in possession of leaks. Assange being considered a journalist has much to do with the rot of the institution itself.

The WSJ, WaPo, and NYT are not analogous to the state media of Russia or the Soviet Union, however fun that might be to say on a message board.

Unsubstantiated rebuttals are fun to say on message boards too, I guess.

It certainly seems like when the de facto government has an agenda (eg attacking Iraq), they all broadcast that message simultaneously. It certainly seems like they choose which presidential candidates are "electable" and then downplay the others (Sanders, Paul, Dean). It certainly seems like they suppress narratives that are unfavorable to the shared business interests of their owners. It certainly seems like they all cooperate with the government to get easy access (embedded reporters, etc) rather than doing the hard work of adversarial investigation.

There are differences of course, like how we get to hear two similar options and pick between them. And how this simple act of choosing makes the population absorb the propaganda better. But I'd call those internal differences in structure, with the overall result being similar.

If you're happy within the Overton window, then of course it looks like Wikileaks is some crazy actor that came out of nowhere. But if you see mainstream media repeatedly acting in concert, then Wikileaks is a predictable reaction.

The bar for how good an argument needs to be before it demands substantiation on HN is low, but it does not in fact touch the ground. Sometimes, it's worth pointing out that a piece of hyperbolic rhetoric is just that, just so we can keep our premises clear. "I don't trust the WSJ or NYT" is a colorable argument we could debate. But "The WSJ and NYT are analogous to state-run media" is not; if you believe that, there's little point in continuing to debate.

You wrote just minutes before this post that wikileaks "literally dispatching Lulzsec". Seems quite hyperbolic to claim that they had any power to control lulzsec and dispatch them as if Lulzsec was their underlings.

So maybe we should all just tone down the colorful language a bit and use a bit less extreme rhetoric to make our points.

This would be a better mic drop if several pages of the indictment weren't dedicated to establishing that fact pattern.

Obviously, you can dispute the indictment --- the veracity of the indictment isn't my point. But I contend: any argument you make about my summary of that portion of the indictment is going to illustrate exactly what I mean by the difference between a colorable argument and the mind 'mindslight made upthread.

"In 2012, Assange communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack. With respect to one target, Assange asked the LulzSec leader to look for (and provide to WikiLeaks) mail and documents, databases and pdfs. In another communication, Assange told the LulzSec leader that the most impactful release of hacked materials would be from the CIA, NSA, or the New York Times. WikiLeaks obtained and published emails from a data breach committed against an American intelligence consulting company by an “Anonymous” and LulzSec-affiliated hacker. According to that hacker, Assange indirectly asked him to spam that victim company again."

The language used by the justice department uses less harsh rhetoric to describe its own indictment than your summery. The difference between providing a list of targets in a communication with a group leader, and literally dispatching a group against a list of targets, is two different statements. The later is more colorful and implies relationships which is not found. Asking and dispatching also have a very different implied tone, one being a request and the later being an order.

I'm now working from memory on this, and you can correct me and I'll listen, but what I read in that indictment was:

* Assange had direct contact with some Lulzsec members.

* Assange recruited "Teenager" to liaise with the computer underground.

* "Teenager" represented themselves as an agent of Wikileaks reporting directly to Assange.

* "Teenager" arranged for Lulzsec to take target lists from Wikileaks.

* The transactions in which those target lists were communicated were overseen by Julian Assange; in at least one case, there's video evidence of that occurring.

If your argument is that members of Lulzsec were free to disregard Wikileaks directives, that's a distinction without a difference, at least legally. The same fact pattern is true of most criminal conspiracies.

I used the term "winged monkeys" to describe Lulzsec, which might have been part of what set you off, because, like, Topiary was not literally a simian thrall to Assange. My point there was simply that the law, and the DOJ, and, probably, juries will look at Lulzsec as an purely criminal element of the case; there will be no regard to any larger political goals Lulzsec might have had.

I feel at this point like, unless I got the indictment completely, dramatically wrong, my point about "colorable argument" versus "bullshit rhetoric" has been made.

Okay then, your comments have been hyperbolic viewpoint-dismissing rhetoric, along with the one I responded to - "It makes me sick to my stomach that he cloaks his actions in the hard work and bravery of our free press."

Sure, my original comment was too general. I've come to that pattern over many specific occurrences, and it keeps my headspace clear by tying mainstream media to a powerful other. But I understand that stating it head-on won't convince anyone.

Narrowing down that heuristic to what is pertinent here:

The mainstream reporting on Iraq from 2003-2007 by (NYT, WSJ, WaPO, FOX, CNN, etc) all overwhelmingly marketed the war to the population. Referring to an alternative of some noble vibrant "free press" is ridiculous when they all were pushing the same government-friendly narrative. Wikileaks was an inevitable response to the lack of investigative journalism opposing the unilateral war, and thus had to function independently with much fewer resources. If anybody from the traditional institution had been doing their purported job, they would have easily scooped Wikileaks and could have spent effort scrubbing the sources. In fact, we saw a lot less of Wikileaks when the mainstream media actually bothered to report on the Snowden revelations.

I don't know that we even need to reach the question of whether the NYT, WaPo, and CNN uniformly marketed the Iraq war to dispose of this argument. Consider: the NYT, WaPo, and CNN are unanimously pushing the same narrative about combating the pandemic, and, with one very notable exception, that narrative is the same as the public health establishment. The pandemic will kill far more Americans than the Iraq war did; it's a generation-defining story. Is the press "un-free" because they're warmly reporting on lockdown, social distancing, and mask-wearing measures by the government? Or can the press sometimes simply agree organically about things?

If the press needs to function like a series of warring contrarian subreddits to validate itself for you, we're operating from incompatible premises.

You're comparing sensible response to a shared public health issue, with an elective war for economic empire? Mainstream media also agrees that you should brush your teeth every day, but I don't attribute that to business relationships with P&G/Unilever. Continuing your argument, you're implying that invading other countries is just common sense, or at least was at the time. Maybe it seemed that way to you, but most everyone I knew was ardently against the war.

The press certainly can agree organically about things. We generally talk in terms of causality, but feedback cycles mean that things act mutually on each other - including the population being preached to (eg choosing to promote those fucking yellow ribbons). But exploring this way leads us deeper into handwaving territory, which is a lot easier to shoot down with a dismissive blunt response, as you did to my initial comment.

For the Iraq war specifically, I do agree that many journalists were likely in agreement to begin with. But the ones that were not were filtered out by management and ownership (cf Clear Channel's list of songs to censor), resulting in the unified presentation. I'm not claiming grand conspiracy, but rather emergent behavior with the net effect of squashing big-business-inconvenient narratives.

Also, I'd be thankful to anybody who leaked information that punched holes in the COVID-19 narrative. I don't think that will happen, because I think it is a very real crisis, but I would welcome being wrong. That's another huge difference between your points of comparison - COVID-19 analysis survives open discussion, while the pro-war camp relied on silencing dissent.

Where by "filtering out by management", you mean "ran front-page stories condemning their own coverage", as early as 2004, in the cases of both the NYT and WaPo. Just like state-run media from the Soviet Union.

You'll try, of course, to recover the irretrievably bad position of your argument comparing the NYT to Pravda by trying to get me to defend the NYT, WSJ, and WaPo's 2003 Iraq coverage. But of course, I don't have to do that. My case is not that journalism is faultless; it's called the "first draft" of history for a reason. Rather, the burden is on you to support the extraordinary claim that the NYT, WSJ, and WaPo are effectively equivalent to state-run media, the claim you stated plainly upthread.

I already admitted my assertion is a heuristic - I find it more useful than not. The standards I used my preceding comments were "analogous", "overall result being similar" and "overwhelmingly marketed the war".

So no, I have not been arguing that the two are "effectively equivalent" or "just like", nor that the government (whatever that may be) has an iron grip on the press - just that the press successfully propagandizes the people with the desires of the ruling power structure. Stating it a different way, one cannot rely on mainstream news outlets and consider themselves informed.

FWIW there is a more direct mechanism of action put forth by Moldbug, but I figure you'll be even less receptive to something of the opposite political flavor.

(Although at this point in our present catastrophe I admit I'm missing the days of competent leadership, even if it was somewhat exploitative of the plebs)

You're right about one thing: I'm not generally going to be receptive to the arguments of people who believe in genetic intellectual superiority of white people over black people, not to mention, for this discussion, people who believe that democracy itself is a mistake, and with it the free press. I'm surprised to see you warmly referencing an authoritarian white supremacist, and won't forget you did. Unlike Yarvin, I don't think you're a white supremacist, not for citing him. Rather, I've concluded that this is all a joke to you.

No doubt Yarvin himself could contribute a pointless 5,000 words to this already pointless thread explaining how I've summarized his beliefs poorly. I'm happy to tie it off here, though.

meh. Truth can be found anywhere, and it's foolish to close your mind based on who is speaking.

FWIW reading Moldbug's analysis of left versus right is what made me return to self-identifying as liberal.

The Twitter link you provide does not claim that wikileaks spread false information.

In fact following the huffpost link it appears as if wikileaks pointed to private (and not of public interest) information published by a third party:

> WikiLeaks has not taken down its social media links to the now dead link.

If that is all you got, then I have to believe gp that wikileaks doesn’t spread false information.

False. Emma Best (then Michael Best) published the information about turkish women, not WikiLeaks, and was explained by Best here https://archive.is/0VsQR

Wow. I had no idea the guy being HackThisSite was involved in the Stratfor leaks, nor that he was imprisoned for it.

thank you for speaking up - there's a lot of fake noise, don't mind it - the message carries through: glad to know others are out there!

This smells to me just a bit.

If this knowledge was disclosed sooner (Because, lets face it, they've loved to spurt out claims about bad things Assange has done,) I would expect a non-negligible number of Wikileaks supporters to stop.

It's one thing to have leaks fed to you, it's another to actively encourage people to do so and name targets.

So... Why are we only hearing about this -now-?

> Stand up for journalists. Real journalists.

Are you trying to claim Assange is a journalist? How many credible journalists do you know that provide lists of targets with the intent to illegally hack?

Assange is not a journalist of any sort, real or otherwise. Journalists don’t actively participate in espionage, they don’t cozy up to ratfucking crooks like Roger Stone. They don’t withhold potentially damaging information because it might harm that align with most closely with their views. And if you believe nothing Wikileaks has ever published has been proven false, then I have a great opportunity for you to buy some waterfront property in Florida.

I will give you a upvote and it will clean my conscience, so I don't have to do anything about this anymore.

Whatever your opinion of Assange is, make no mistake that actual criminals he released info on are still walking free, including war criminals killing civilians and reporters, because the U.S. government does not want them prosecuted.

I feel nausea...

This and the new anti-encryption bills...

I am happy to know the existence such a lot of great American minds, mathematicians, scientists, visionaries, because, else, with only the kind of ugly news such as above, my image of US would have been tainted for good.

(*) I'm not American. I'm neutral about not being American, thanks to the existence of both plus and minus items. By the way of course you can say the same about pretty much any country.

I may be misunderstanding your comment, but Assange is Australian.

Oh, sorry if it was not very clear, I was saying that US treatment of the Assange case was disgusting me.

By "American great minds", I was thinking about all the American mathematicians and scientists whose books I passionately devour, and the splendid futuristic projects of some tech corps, which bring sci-fi dreams to reality.

I mean ... the US has not even got hands on him yet. He hasn't been in US custody for a second. There is absolutely no case. Yet.

If you want to feel contempt strongly towards someone - the UK, Ecuador and Sweden governments are the ones to blame so far.

Yes, you're right. But the pressure to do so comes from the US all the same...

You're right that what's happening in UK with Assange is very disturbing... I followed Craig Murray's blog posts.

Assange is in prison in the UK because he skipped bail.

That's not what I am upset about.

First of all, why had he to skip this bail at all.

All of his suspicions about the first sex offense case being a pretense to extradite him were confirmed.

And then, the way he is treated in the UK tribunal, like a slaughterer scum of the worst kind, denied all dignity, is revolting.

If you had not seen the Craig Murray reports, I would warmly advise you to give them a look, they are rich in details.

There is a United Nations report detailing how Assange is being politically prosecuted. This is no longer merely an opinion of his sympathysers.

He is not politically prosecuted, he is politically persecuted by prosecution that is pulled out of someone's ass.

But once again - he hasn't been touched by US so far. There are numerous governments that could have given him asylum, and the EU court of human rights is suspiciously silent.

To be fair the Equador government helped him a great deal but apparently even them got tired of it.

I think they did what they could given the circumstances.

It's a different government now. The previous leftist one was doing inconvenient things so the USA had to get rid of it. The current one is doing what it is told though, so everything is fine: https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/12/latin-america-neoliberali...

So you are saying charging a journalist with these things is OK?

Well ... a prosecutor can charge anyone with anything. Winning a case is a whole different matter.

Not a first amendment scholar but Assange is probably pretty safe on disseminating the information.

But they claim he committed felonies obtaining it.

Assange case? It's been a very bad idea for decades to get on US governments shit list. The range of options range from financial restraints to summary assassination without a trial.

People should understand this. US is a stabilizing force in the world but they are not about universal human rights or world peace.

Lots of journalists, say, in France for example, hurl shit in the face of US every day, with lots of investigations, and they still are more or less protected and the country where they live abide by the law...

So, that's what personally I would have expected and hoped about Assange too.

The reality is different from what you present: it is not common that journalists opposing to US are (internationally) repressed at all. And, of course, because such repression is illegal, it is not expectable.

What do you think would happen if an <insert nation> journalist started trying to help hackers recover secrets from French Intelligence agencies and then published them for the whole world to see? What if the leaked secrets were mostly true? Do you think the French Government would celebrate the <insert nation> journalist? Or would they do everything in their power to stop them?

That's an easy one, because spying on France industrial or state secrets by foreign powers happens all the time.

For example: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/09/27/business/hacker...

So, to answer your question: they do not try to extradite the foreign operators responsible to the leaks, and they do everything to strengthen their IT security. Also, they possibly build or reinforce their cyber-defense team to cyber-counter or cyber-retaliate.

This kind of response is just how it happens when abiding to the international law. Still, they are far from doing nothing, and they are efficient.

> So, to answer your question: they do not try to extradite the foreign operators responsible to the leaks

Do you think that would change if they had more power?

It's like criticizing the response of a super corporation like Microsoft and saying a smaller company like GitLab handles the same scenario better. Probably true, but also if you scaled GitLab to the size and power of Microsoft, maybe they would've had a different response.

I honestly don't know. It really is very difficult to resist the temptation to misuse power, when a lot of it is concentrated in one's hands.

On the other hand, let's analyse:

- on the "means" side: France certainly has a lot of military power. It does drone-killing of terrorist heads in African Sahel. It launches successful intelligence operations abroad. It also succeeds to counter foreign agents on its own soil (ref the identification in 2018 of a GRU cell in France). It has a very solid cyber-defense.

Also, between strengthening the IT, cyber-army, and intelligence services, and just extraditing journalists after-the-fact (or, imagine, abduct them, drone-kill them, etc), which is most resource-intensive? As an engineer, you know that the part where you develop your own system to be more robust and more capable is harder than just band-aid retaliation around past mistakes.

Guess what, US is doing both, so it's seat-belt and airbag at the same time. Very great, France is doing only seat-belt.

- on the "results" side: France tries (currently) to preserve its image, to appear as "good" (not judging if that's true), by playing by the rules internationally, fighting great causes, etc. Whereas US soft power took a huge tall in its (indirect) handling of Assange case. It is now seen as more "evil" as before. More people, especially a lot of intelligent people, are despising US more.

So, supposing the overflow of power hasn't busted the brains out of the government, they should be weighting means and results, and decide in consequence.

"More people, especially a lot of intelligent people, are despising US more."

If they are more offended by treatment of Assange than innocents kept in Guantanamo Bay 'camp' without a trial and summary drone executions with huge collateral death toll I'm not sure I would call them that intelligent.

I mean really, US government has a huge assassination list whose targets are taken down by bomb raids killing and maiming civilians and one hacker being manhandled pushes you over the edge? Those are some sick values.

They are on your side.

The supporters of Assange are guaranteed to be also revolted by Guantanamo Camp and drone executions.

Assange's supporters like him precisely because, among other things, he (and Wikileaks) is a champion of the cause fighting against the wrongdoings of US army and US extrajudicial penitentiary system:

- Guantanamo Files https://wikileaks.org/gitmo/

- Collateral Murder https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/

These are actually precisely the reason why US government is extraditing Assange.

This articles is not about journalists, but it is somewhat related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

You are saying France did bad shit, and that's true, you forgot Napoleon slaughters throughout Europe, Nazis collaboration and Petain, colonial rule and enslaving of American, African and Asian nations, nuclear tests, and I forgot a lot. Still, you are hardly touching the subject.

We are speaking about the here and now, how we should abide by the international law when responding to cyber threats, in the context of a transparent and globalized world.

This was like 35 year ago [1]. I'd say this was already a "transparent and globalized world".

[1] Suddenly, I'm feeling old.

No, this is just a different topic. What I brought up was an example of good response to a cyber threat. You bring up some bad things, be it old or new it does not matter, it still is a different topic.

My point was to illustrate what I call a good response. The bad ones just illustrate the bad responses, that's all. Good for contrasting, maybe. But the way you bring it does not seem to make clear anything, to the contrary. And it is not even remotely about "cyber" anything, nor about journalism or the right to know the truth about anything. And for contrasting we already have the example at hand, the case of Julian Assange!

So I really don't understand your point.

Sounds like you hate France and you disliked that I used a French example as a good response to a cyber threat. I don't know why you want so much to avoid giving a nice role to France, personally I don't care, but I am a positive person, so I'd like you to find a good response example by an other country (easy, there are plenty) to balance my comment, instead of balancing it trying to find a bad cyber-response from France (which you failed to do).

Also, the world was hardly as transparent as today. No social media, hardly any internet, newspapers in different languages but few people knowing anything else than their mother tongue...

Years after, there was investigation by news agencies in France about the Rainbow Warrior tragedy. The government did not throw them in jail! So that, too, is really different from the Assange case.

It depends on what line is crossed. Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize and still assassinated a US citizen on foreign soil without due process and justified it with a loop hole in the law.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/23/us-justificati...

the take away is this, when you're on the US Gov. shit list you're safe until you're not.

Yeah but, 1/ not a journalist, 2/ member of a huge killers club, 3/ propagandist of religious numbness contrary to the diffusing of facts and contrary to the useful understanding of the world's mechanics.

So he was totally not helping people know the truth, as a journalist would be, and instead he was totally trying to kill or help killing people and destroy civilizations.

Also, this was the context of war, on a war field (and with a terrorist organization).

point made, what I cited is an extreme case. However, i think the point stands that push far enough and everything becomes on the table and what "far enough" means isn't clear and always changing.

US seems to be totally fine about opinions expressed from freely available data. They don't like a campaign to leak everything that can be caught hold of. So I would not compare the reaction to Assange to a general reaction to journalism.

How can you form adequate opinions if you know only one part of the truth? The part you know can be easily manipulated so that your opinion corresponds to the wishes of the government in control.

This is why journalism is mainly about publishing information. The part where the writer gives their opinion is actually optional.

Also, this is why good news organizations (Reuters, etc) are doing investigations (this is investigative journalism). They do not just publish already available data, they go seeking the truth where it is.

Btw, the sheer existence of investigative journalism is also what makes difficult to believe all the conspiracy theories. If something fishy that huge was going on, there is an overwhelming likelihood that some news organization (also, some whistle-blower) would have revealed it. (that shows also the importance of the existence of whistle-blowers)

I didn’t say truth seeking was not valuable. I totally agree what you said. I would just not assign the professional title of journalist to Assange. I’m not sure if there even is a proper current term for his professional-like activities.

How has the US mistreated him? He’s not even in US custody and the charges are public information. He he’s done what he’s accused of I think he deserves to be in jail.

As someone not from the USA as well I have always chuckled at the "Land of the free" sentiment that is there (how Americans really believe it when it is the complete opposite).

Fortunately there are places like Germany where things like CCC.de can exist and the Chaos Communication Congress can happen.

From my time living in UK, Germany, Mexico (where I am from) and travelling every 3 months to the USA, my [subjective] appreciation is that Germany is "freer" that the USA can ever aspire to be.

While I’ve met some people who truly assert that statement (land of the free,’ I don’t think too many people are fully convinced (or, indeed, even want to be ‘free’)

It’s not hard to work out what it means, but the headline should probably either be:

“Julian Assange Charged...”

or the original

“Wikileaks Founder Charged...”

The current half-and-half is a little strange (who founded Julian Assange?).

I agree, I figured they were charging someone else that helped found the Julian Assange Foundation or something.

My first sleepy-brained thought was that they charged his parents for creating him.

Thanks. I thought i am missing something fundamental in English Grammar.

> "Since the early days of WikiLeaks, Assange has spoken at hacking conferences to tout his own history as a “famous teenage hacker in Australia” and to encourage others to hack to obtain information for WikiLeaks. In 2009, for instance, Assange told the Hacking At Random conference that WikiLeaks had obtained nonpublic documents from the Congressional Research Service by exploiting “a small vulnerability” inside the document distribution system of the United States Congress, and then asserted that “[t]his is what any one of you would find if you were actually looking.”"

I don't remember that detail at all, but I did see him at HAR 2009, at a panel discussion about censorship and how to fight it. Afterward we set up a mailinglist for sharing information about censorship-related issues, especially laws and protests against them. It was never terribly active, unfortunately.

I remember him very carefully offering a distinction of what hacking meant in terms of him. He describes the old school term, meaning hacking programs together to make something, not the one meaning to break into/steal.

In the earlier days he very clearly stated he was a hacker “in the Australian scene” and name dropped various IRC channels etc. I have no idea if it was true or not, but I recognised some of the channels mentioned hence it stuck with me.

Feels like the last decade has shown Leaking to the General Public is not very productive. As in outcomes are poor.

There is always something else lined up every 2 minutes to pull attention away from the leak.

I am not sure if anyone studies "leaking effectiveness" but I am guessing in info tsunami conditions larger the leak less impact it has. Cause no one knows whose network of power is going to get impacted so everyone does nothing.

So now more and more mainstream OS have storage encryption easily enabled, everyone in tech seems to need to communicate about how much their product is privacy friendly and you would still say that the last decade of tech leaks hasn't been very productive? I'm not saying that it changed everything and that we're now safe, far from that. But at least that topic is now unavoidable.

Is this a joke? We have an innocent man in prison and war criminals beyond reproach. I am for setting realistic goals, but letting this fly will have severe long term repercussions.

Valid point about technical changes. But most of the big leaks were sold as if they would lead to social/political/economic changes.

Technology doesn't exist in its own bubble isolated from society, politics, and economy. Changes in mainstream OSs and mainstreaming privacy concerns are absolutely the result of social, political, and economic change.

Keep in mind the companies involved in these technological changes make up a huge portion of our economy, and their users affected by their app store changes, for example, touch every sector. These changes come due to social pressure--these companies aren't doing this out of the goodness of their heart. And particularly with regards to Facebook, political pressure is being placed on them to self-regulate with regard to user data to avoid government regulation.

I am not accusing you of being anti-leaking (or pro-leaking), but it does sound like you've fallen for an anti-leaking narrative here.

I was just wondering about effectiveness of large leaks in a environment of info overload. Not in any camp...more like a layman passing through :)) I get your point about it all being interconnected though and thanks for making it.

The fact that the media is largely refusing to give proper attention to the few primary sources we have on government affairs, preferring to print statements and tweets is the real problem here. If journalism looked the way it is often pictured in movies, this would go vastly differently.

> Feels like the last decade has shown Leaking to the General Public is not very productive. As in outcomes are poor.

Who cares about "productivity" or outcomes? I am in for the truth. And WikiLeaks really helped.

Maybe? It's true that the outcomes have not been what I'd have hoped for, but I'm not sure we can say that leaking has had no impact. It's hard to A/B test what the outcome would be if the leaks hadn't occurred. Things might be worse. Hard to imagine how, exactly, but it's possible the leaks had enough positive impact to be worthwhile...

How is hiding information help. There will always be distracting news.

What I think is actually worse is that the majority of people dont even care, actually. Not a very woke world we live in

So Americans love nothing more than to see the world as a collection of slippery slopes so there'll be the Assange defenders who argue this is an attack on press freedom but... I urge you to look a little deeper.

There are two major issues here:

1. Assange actively participated in the acquisition of classified material. This came up in the Chelsea Manning. Pointing to tools that can be useful. Prompting action. That sort of thing; and

2. Assange was playing politics. This should've been clear from Assange's actions with respect to the DNC emails.

Think about (1) for a second. Imagine the Attorney General had committed a crime. Proof of that was in a safe in his house. Which of the following is acceptable conduct in obtaining that information?

- Breaking into his house to get it;

- Destroying the safe to get at the contents;

- Holding him at gunpoint to open the safe;

- Holding his family hostage until he provides the information;

- Hiring someone to do any of the above;

- Someone offers the information to you without you knowing how it came to be in their possession;

- Someone notifies you of the information's existence and location. You pay them to acquire it. Or give them a gun. Or threaten them if they don't.

The point of these examples is to show that:

1. There is no absolute defense here and certainly not "journalism". The alternative is robbing banks as an expression of journalistic freedom; and

2. If you commit a crime, you commit a crime and the authorities can prosecute you for that.

The other side of this is recent administrations seem to have adopted a disproportionate response approach to dealing with leaks and whistleblowers, likely as a deterrent (they hope).

Imagine for a second, someone telling you there is proof in safe, you telling them to acquire this proof from this safe (which has access), then this person is caught and later pardoned by potus.

Later they come after you.

I am not from US, but this kinda doesnt look right.

Hang on, did they just accuse Chelsea Manning of attempting to hack computer systems? Is that a new allegation? To the best of my knowledge she only ever used access she already had, not attempted privilege escalation.

Correct me if I'm wrong here.

That was my understanding, as well. I was under the impression that Manning already had pretty carte blanche access to a lot of stuff, and that was how she was able to get it in the first place.

Maybe one of the items she provided to Assange was encrypted, and he worked to break the encryption, without consulting Manning.

It's so much worse than this.

Via instant messenger, Manning asked Assange whether Wikileaks could crack NTLM hashes. Assange said (paraphrasing), "Yeah, we can probably do that." Manning sent the hashes. Assange said he'd work on cracking them. A few days later, Manning asked if the hashes had been cracked. Assange replied that there hadn't been any progress.

End of story. That's a federal crime. No hashes were cracked, let alone sent back to Manning. No additional access was gained. He simply agreed to accept the hashes from Manning, which were freely offered.

Maybe he agreed because he didn't want to spook his source. Maybe he never even started hashcat. We'll never know.

edit:

source: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/886185-pe-123.html (middle of page 6)

Ah. Yes. That makes sense.

People like Manning and Snowden expose nastiness, but, at the same time, we absolutely need to ensure military and espionage secrets (Full disclosure: my father was in the CIA, but quit on moral grounds - http://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm).

People die when military secrets get exposed. That's often completely unintended, but it happens anyway.

My father had a post similar to that held by Valerie Plame. If he had been exposed (like she was), then all his contacts would have been murdered, along with, I am sure, folks he worked with legit.

When we have unfallable machinery in place to keep secrets safe, and no honorable people to leak them what will we have then?

Is the world worse off because of the Pentagon papers?

You bring up Plame, but I think you are doing your readers a disservice in not citing that she was exposed not by journalist, but by a people in power to silence the truth that her husband was speaking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair#Civil_suit

I'm actually aware of the story. I'm outraged.

My father was quite liberal. You may have missed the part where I mentioned that he quit the CIA on moral grounds?

It's just that if he had been outed, there's a better than even chance that I would have been killed, so you might say that I have a right to my opinion.

I can't argue against what could have happened, all leaks are not bad. Yes, your timeline would have changed if your father had been killed by a leak.

But if we look at what did happen with Wikileaks esp relative to what Richard Armitage did to Valerie Plame and the CIA and that no known violence has occurred against [redacted] folks from the Wikileaks releases.

All leaks and all leakers are not the same. Wikileaks put great effort in working with journalists to carefully redact information and report the news, to shine light where it needed shining. And Dick Army outed an agent and her team and forced it to shut down to harm a political opponent.

If anyone belongs in jail it is Dick Army and not Julian Assange.

"Nothing bad did happen, so nothing bad will happen." is not an especially compelling argument.

If we talk specifically about this one instance, with this limited set of actors, then nothing bad happened, but spilled secrets have killed a lot of people, throughout history.

Some, it is good (like cracking ENIGMA), and some, it is bad (like that old H-bomb thingy). Both of those examples are because of dedicated espionage (and luck). In both of those cases, there were people that believed they were on the right side of history. There were also absolute scoundrels.

The simple fact of the matter is, it's dangerous to greenlight reckless transparency. There's probably a number of folks that are ferociously dedicated to finding out where other folks are, so they can do Very Bad Things to them. In some cases, we might cheer them on, and in other cases, we might be horrified at what happens.

One man's "freedom fighter" is another man's "terrorist." There's a number of folks that regret that the Germans lost WWII. They are absolutely, ferociously dedicated, and they'd like another crack at it. They would love to know a whole lot of things. There's also people that would like to change leadership in Damascus. Some of those folks are ones we'd like to have over for dinner, and some are ones that'd like to have us for dinner.

It's not simple, and there's very, very few "white hats" in the game. Everyone is convinced they are the ones wearing the white hat, and anyone who dies is just "collateral damage."

It's all fine and good, until we become "collateral damage."

For example, I have friends with kids in the military. Some of them are in clandestine service. They may be doing nasty things, or they may be preventing others from doing nasty things to us. Chances are better than even, that it is both (maybe at the same time). I don't want to see my friends have to deal with their kids' death.

We can't have every person that feels they are in the right simply leaking stuff. We also need to shine the light on some of the rot that grows in the dark.

There's no simple solution.

I should add that I have lived in nations run by dictators and thoroughly despotic governments. By the time I was 11, I had lived in two nations that experienced brutal, genocidal war. It can get very, very bad. Many of the kids I played with were likely tortured to death in secret detention centers. I think that the "dark rot" can be downright evil, and it does need to be unearthed. I'm not jingoistic, but I am someone that has been shown both sides of the issues.

> Via instant messenger, Manning asked Assange whether Wikileaks could crack NTLM hashes. Assange said (paraphrasing), "Yeah, we can probably do that." Manning sent the hashes. Assange said he'd work on cracking them. A few days later, Manning asked if the hashes had been cracked. Assange replied that there hadn't been any progress.

> End of story. That's a federal crime. No hashes were cracked, let alone sent back to Manning. No additional access was gained. He simply agreed to accept the hashes from Manning, which were freely offered.

That actually sounds like the crime of criminal conspiracy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(criminal)

> In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime at some time in the future....

> [US] Conspiracy law usually does not require proof of specific intent by the defendants to injure any specific person to establish an illegal agreement. Instead, usually the law requires only that the conspirators have agreed to engage in a certain illegal act.

> Under most U.S. laws, for a person to be convicted of conspiracy, not only must he or she agree to commit a crime, but at least one of the conspirators must commit an overt act (the actus reus) in furtherance of the crime.[24]

You'd crack the hash as part of a plan (i.e. a conspiracy) to get unauthorized access to a computer system (a crime), and exchanging the hash is the actus reus.

There are very good reasons why conspiracy is a crime, and it's very similar to other crimes like attempted murder. If someone plans to kill you, but they're caught before taking their shot, should they go free because no harm was actually done?

I don't think this is new, she is suspected of sharing a password hash that JA tried to help break. This was the original basis for JA's extradition

e.g. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrew...

I'm not a fan of Assange and I think the allegations in Sweden were credible. But what is currently happening to him is beyond unjust.

Why do you think they are? I ask because I haven't researched beyond the initial news stories.

Aren't the initial news stories credible?

Aren't the news dead silent in regards to that accusation?

Moment US raised its charges, the Sweden rape case is nowhere to be found.

Not to mention, Assanage agreed to that investigation if they could guarantee not to be extradited to US.

That's because Sweden allegations are discontinued. Quick time frame of the latest development:

2017-05-19: Suspended investigation, revoked arrest warrant. Statement that the investigation can be resumed if Assange visited Sweden before August 2020.

2019-04-11: Case re-opened following his arrest. In September of this year 7 new witnesses were revealed.

2019-11-19: Investigation discontinued, stating "the evidence is not strong enough to form the basis for filing an indictment", adding that "the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed", but the prosecutor was still confident in the complainant.

I personally believe that he's guilty due to the sheer amount of witnesses, but that circumstances around it will result in the victims never achieving justice.

> I personally believe that he's guilty due to the sheer amount of witnesses

Yeah because the Swedish police is totally credible at this point.

So this is what we know of the first woman who went to the police, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, starting this whole charade:

- There were no rape allegations. She described the sexual intercourse as consensual. Instead she was worried Assange may have HIV and asked whether the police could force him to take a test.

- Instead, and for no apparent reason, police try to pressure her into accusing Assange of rape. She refuses. She also refuses to sign the interrogation transcript created by the police.

- Finally, and emotionally exhausted, she goes home and writes one of her friends a SMS: "I don't want to report him. I just want him to take a test, but police want to get him for rape." and the next day: "Police is fabricating this."

- Then, that very next night, newspaper are already calling Assange a rapist.

Another fun tidbit:

- Some time later Swedish police was ready to come to the UK to interrogate Assange, but was asked not to by the UK.

- Also Swedish police was worried because their highest court wanted them to either charge him or drop the case, and was told by the UK: "Don't get cold feet now."

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kha_5G70pi0

The ones that were curiously timed with the US wanting him brought to heel for wikileaks?

The ones that were curiously dropped late last year when extradition from Sweden was no longer needed?

I don't know Assange, and don't find him a likeable character from the reports I've read, and don't think much of wikileaks and its lack of filtering, but the whole Assange sexual assault allegations case stinks.

No, there weren't any initial allegations in the first place. The "raped" (not really) women only went to the police to force Assange get an STD test - even they didn't consider themselves victims!

A quick example might be that during his extradition trial in the UK earlier this year, Assange was kept in a locked glass box, unable to communicate effectively with his legal team:

The Armoured Glass Box is an Instrument of Torture

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/03/the-armoured...

If you are up for a deep (and biased) dive, the rest of Craig Murray's daily blog posts from that trial give many more reasons that his treatment might be considered unjust:

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/02/your-man-in-...

Murray is definitely a partisan in the camp of Assange, but I think his factual reporting is accurate.

Given that the UN investigation considers that the allegations were not credible, and that the Swedish prosecutors had all the access and precedent they needed to carry on their investigation remotely if they had wanted to, I see much more reason to think they were not credible.

They were credible until they were revealed as complete fabrications by no other than the UN human rights reporter:

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2018/02/13/news/few_documen...

https://english.elpais.com/spanish_news/2020-05-01/why-julia...

This is a highly deceptive description of the UN human rights rapporteur's report. The report claimed nothing about the veracity of the allegations that led to the Swedish investigation. Instead, it objected to the fact that Assange was detained without formal charges being made by the Swedish government.

To complain that this report reveals the allegations as "complete fabrications" is in itself a complete fabrication, and you ruin your own credibility by saying it.

The human rights rapporteur published an essay describing his experience investigating the allegations made by Assange’s lawyers. (I don’t have the link handy. It starts with a few paragraphs explaining that he did his best to avoid investigating the matter because it seemed like a politically wrought waste of time.

Among other things, he concluded that the investigation conducted by the Swedish government violated many of their own standard procedures in unprecedented ways, and also, at no point did the “accuser” accuse Assange of a crime or attempt to press charges.

Apparently, during consensual sex, a condom broke (I think there was slightly more to the story), and she wanted Assange to get an AIDS test. She asked the police if there was any way to compel him to get one.

That somehow then escalated (against her wishes) to a rape charge and an extradition battle.

So, “complete fabrication” is a slight exaggeration of the situation (the “accuser” exists, but didn’t accuse anyone of a crime).

I think the facts more than support the statement that it was a “politically-motivated, fabricated accusation”.

There were two women who went to Swedish authorities and accused Assange of committing a crime: one who reported that Assange tore his condom intentionally before ejaculating, and a second who reported that she awoke to find Assange penetrating her without her consent. You left out the second woman. In fact it is this second woman whose lawyer requested in 2019 that the investigation by Swedish prosecutors be resumed [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/13/sweden-reopens...

So no, the allegations were not "revealed as complete fabrications" by the UN rapporteur's report, and it is more than a mere exaggeration to say they were.

I hadn't the right link at hand, but here we go: By Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, https://medium.com/@njmelzer/demasking-the-torture-of-julian...

And an interview of the same Nils Melzer in a Swiss newspaper : https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikilea...

Quote: ...A made-up rape allegation and fabricated evidence in Sweden...

"Complete fabrication" seems fair enough to me.

You wrote: "They [the rape allegations] were credible until they were revealed as complete fabrications by no other than the UN human rights reporter [Nils Melzer]."

I had not read his blog post, so thank you for providing this. Unfortunately, his claims about Assange's accusers are so totally unsubstantiated that it's hard to believe they were written by a law professor. One of Assange's accusers didn't appreciate Melzer's attempts to tar her as a fabricator. According to Der Spiegel [1]:

  So he blames the victims, the woman writes; it was "a classic patriarchal technique to define the 
  conditions for how 'a real rape victim' should behave". It also accuses the lawyer of personally
  slandering her and, in some cases, spreading the untruth about the investigation, such as Assange's
  willingness to testify about the incidents. This is "completely unacceptable, shocking and a
  reason to quit his job at the UN".

Melzer, on being challenged by the victim, seems to have been less sure about his facts. In email correspondence with the victim, he writes, "My understanding of the situation may still be incomplete." He also writes: "I do not believe that your own information has been faked by the police."

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/julian-assange-opfer-...

Regarding the allegations, many do not believe they are credible. See for example this comment by the UN's Nils Melzer:

> Surely, I thought, Assange must be a rapist! But what I found is that he has never been charged with a sexual offence. True, soon after the United States had encouraged allies to find reasons to prosecute Assange, Swedish prosecution informed the tabloid press that he was suspected of having raped two women. Strangely, however, the women themselves never claimed to have been raped, nor did they intend to report a criminal offence. Go figure. Moreover, the forensic examination of a condom submitted as evidence, supposedly worn and torn during intercourse with Assange, revealed no DNA whatsoever — neither his, nor hers, nor anybody else’s. Go figure again. One woman even texted that she only wanted Assange to take an HIV test, but that the police were “keen on getting their hands on him”. Go figure, once more. Ever since, both Sweden and Britain have done everything to prevent Assange from confronting these allegations without simultaneously having to expose himself to US extradition and, thus, to a show-trial followed by life in jail. His last refuge had been the Ecuadorian Embassy.

https://medium.com/@njmelzer/demasking-the-torture-of-julian...

From wikipedia. Two women did accuse him, one of taking off a condom during sex without her consent and the other for having sex with them while she was asleep.

> On 20 August 2010, two women, a 26-year-old living in Enköping and a 31-year-old living in Stockholm,[6][7] reported to the Swedish police that Assange had engaged in unprotected sexual activity with them that violated the scope of their consent, also because one woman was asleep in one case.[8][9] The police told them that they could not simply tell Assange to take an STD test, but that their statements would be passed to a prosecutor.[10]

> The next day, the case was transferred to Chefsåklagare (Chief Public Prosecutor) Eva Finné. In answer to questions surrounding the incidents, the following day, Finné declared, "I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape". However, Karin Rosander from the Swedish Prosecution Authority, said Assange remained suspected of molestation. Police gave no further comment at the time, but continued the investigation.[11]

> After learning of the investigation, Assange said, "The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing".[12]

> The preliminary investigation concerning suspected rape was discontinued by Finné on 25 August,[13] but two days later Claes Borgström, the attorney representing the two women, requested a review of the prosecutor's decision to terminate part of the investigation.[13][14]

> On 30 August, Assange was questioned by the Stockholm police regarding the allegations of sexual molestation.[15] He denied the allegations, saying he had consensual sexual encounters with the two women.[12][16][17]

I think this really kills the idea that Assange was ever a real journalist. Directing cyber attacks and theft of information is not journalism.

Being a journalist is not an endorsement of character.

You can be a criminal and a journalist, a thief and a journalist, a horrible person and a journalist.

But how you obtain your information definitely does change whether or not you should be called a "journalist". If your information is obtained through blackmail, for instance, you are not a journalist you are an extortionist.

>journalist: a person who writes for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or prepares news to be broadcast.

Even mainstream Vox [1], NBC [2], and NYT [3] reporters have recently contacted corporations and individuals threatening to name and shame them if they do not issue an apology, assist with a story, or add their weight to a deplatforming/demonetization campaign.

Do those acts of extortion render those individuals and their supporting editors not-journalists too? I don’t think so. Ethical lapses, deplorable though they may be, are perfectly compatible with still fulfilling the role of a profession.

[1] YouTube adpocalypse effort led by Carlos Maza

[2] NBC’s repetitive naming of Google Ads and brands alongside cherry picked comments on Zero Hedge and The Federalist to delist those competitors.

[3] NYT recent threat to doxx the Scott Alexander blog

But then you can't use being a journalist as a shield for illegal behavior.

Being charged with something is a far cry from being found guilty of something!

This is a federal court finding that people that revealed the war crimes its government perpetrated "did so illegally". Meanwhile they of course don't file charges against the war criminals.

I feel you are talking about a more abstract concept here where of course there can be truth in it. I'm talking about a very specific set of actions that look absolutely nothing like journalism https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbWxt13XsAIaOTm?format=png&name=...

Again, these are allegations by the federal government and an informer for the FBI (presumably someone black mailed with the threat of unreasonably long prison sentence).

That does not make it untrue - but it's not like it's evidence weighed by a jury in a fair trial - it's very much one side of the story?

"Julian Assange Founder"? Headline needs a fix. Though, it may be speaking to that cog association that people have formed: 'Assange=wikileaks'....

bugger yes indeed, ... apologies. it originally said "wikileaks founder" which I sloppily editorialized. I should not have bothered with it.

Let's not forget that the Obama administration refused to prosecute Assange because they couldn't find a way to do it that wouldn't criminalize ordinary journalism (talking to sources, encouraging them to give you more info, telling them how to stay safe). The current administration is perusing this case precisely because they would like the power to criminalize investigative journalism, the only kind that's actually valuable. Without it, everything that appears in the news is just stenography of state propaganda.

"As the Obama DOJ Concluded, Prosecution of Julian Assange for Publishing Documents Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom" by Glenn Greenwald

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-conclud...

Also remember Julian Assange promised to turn himself in if Chelsea Manning was granted clemency. Obama commuted Manning's sentence towards the end of his second term and Assange immediately backtracked.

https://thenextweb.com/world/2017/01/18/assange-backtracks-o...

That isn't a great look for him, but given he's not a US citizen and the alleged crimes were not committed in US territory, and the crimes in fact were the publication of information embarrassing to the government means the US is claiming global jurisdiction to criminalize press freedoms.

The issues at stake are greater than the dumb things the overconfident and sometimes assholish Julian Assange says.

Wow some actual hacker news.

Maybe I'm just too much of a pessimist, but I think Assange (and others like him) are naive to assume that bringing leaks to the general public really has that much of an effect in today's world - people just don't care enough. You won't find many people actually reading the documents... maybe they notice those going viral, but that's probably it. People don't associate WikiLeaks with the idea of transparency, they associate it with scandals. A tabloid newspaper isn't something the majority of the population respects. WikiLeaks seems to share that negative image. Most of my (Gen Z) peers don't even know WikiLeaks exists.

What are they meant to do then? Nothing? I'm super confused by your comment

I'm not saying they shouldn't have done what they did. I'm just saying that, from what I've read from him, Assange totally miscalculated the effect this would have on the public. The Manning Documents didn't lead to fundamental changes in society. Neither did leaking US diplomatic cables.

I'm not really criticizing their actions (well, I'm calling them naive, which, in retrospect, seems like a bad choice of words). If I'm criticizing anyone, it would be our society in general, which only engages with information in a very shallow fashion.

Given that there's no way countries would consider acceding to an extradition request for one of their spooks how is it legal to extradite a citizen doing the same thing the government does?

What this man did was a significant benefit to humanity, but an embarrassment to the US. Most American leaders probably wouldn't refute that on an individual level, but would be risking their political careers to openly admit it.

Dropping charges entirely would send the wrong signal to the world. Hopefully the UK just holds him indefinitely and treats him with respect. A US trial would turn into a political shitshow.

> the broadened hacking conspiracy continues to allege that Assange conspired with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash to a classified U.S. Department of Defense computer.

Can you imagine the euphoria in the moment they cracked the hash? Feels like something out of a Nicolas Cage movie.

Wikileaks is just a Russian propaganda unit disguised as wind of change.

Interesting that Russia would publish self incriminating documents and evidence of their own malfeasance within Ukraine and corruption elsewhere. Really makes you think.

Source? Because the majority of the 'leaks' posted by WL about Russia were outdated/minimal.

Meanwhile, Julian Assanage has a television show on RT[1], the state-sponsored media for the Russian government [2], meaning he's literally paid by a Russian propaganda organization.

[1] https://www.rt.com/news/456280-julian-assange-rt-show/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Assessments_an...

RT was just one of a dozen media outlets Assange had offered his show to in 2012. His show was produced completely independent from RT. By the way, Larry King had a show on RT. Is he a russian stooge now too?

Except Julian Assange's show premiered specifically for and on RT[1], and it would have been weird for RT to produce it as a news network. Larry King didn't premier on RT and didn't leak emails from Russian state-sponsored hackers Guccifer 2.0.

You've created an HN account for the sole purpose of astroturfing this thread to apologize for Assange against Russian allegations - Why is that?

[1] https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/assange-tv-pres...

>specifically for

No, it wasn't produced specifically for RT and nowhere does it say so in your source, but RT were the only one of around 12 media outlets he offered it to buy the rights of his show, so it did premiere there.

>You've created an HN account for the sole purpose of astroturfing this thread to apologize for Assange against Russian allegations - Why is that?

I'm not astroturfing. I'm a HN reader since many years but never bothered to make an account since I'm not knowledgable on most topics here anyways and just read comments. But since I follow the case of Assange for a long time and know a lot about it I made an account to correct people.

It is not unexpected. Annoying, but not unexpected.

Incidentally, since Assange technically helped current president win, I am surprised he is not getting more lenient treatment. With Hillary I fully expected a vendetta.

Indeed. On the day of the election, Assange and Donald Trump Jr. engaged in a direct message conversation via Twitter, where Assange stated:

“Hi Don if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do."

These are the words of a political actor, not a journalist.

A month after the election, Wikileaks requested an extraordinary favor from Trump: to ask the Australian government for Assange's appointment as ambassador to the U.S.

“Hi Don. Hope you’re doing well! In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to [Washington,] DC.”

With requests like these, it becomes clear why Assange was helping Trump win the election. It was to improve his chances to escape detention in the UK. It had little to do with exposing the truth.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...

Assange helped Trump win the election. Now, the administration that he enabled is coming for him. What a turn of events.

I don't know why you're being downvoted.

Assange leaked the DNC emails, hacked by Russian-controlled Guccifer 2.0, in weekly bundles as an effort to manipulate news headlines leading up to the November 2016 election.

inb4 people turn on Julian Assange because they think he's the reason Trump got elected. SMH.

Wikileaks used to be something, then Assange decided to filter leaks based on whatever biases he felt that day. He alienated a lot of his initial supporters doing this, focusing only on leaking content from "the west." Later fully engaging with state sponsored hackers to meddle in the US election[1] while again ignoring any leaks about Russia[2] and friends.

As far as I can tell there is nothing left of Wikileaks, its just Assange now.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dt6BBwBXcAEL-Fj?format=jpg&name=...

>"if you have anything hillary related we (Wikileaks) want it in the next tweo(sic) days prefable(sic) because the Democratic National Convention is approaching.."

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...

>“As far as we recall these are already public,” WikiLeaks wrote at the time.

>By June 2016, Assange had threatened to dump files on Clinton that would be damaging to her campaign prospects. A month later, on July 22, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails out of the Democratic National Committee — preceding the massive dumps in October of emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

>In late August 2016, when WikiLeaks’s Clinton disclosures were in full swing, Assange said he had information on Trump but that it wasn’t worth publishing. (In a message to FP, WikiLeaks now says the organization “received no original documents on the campaign that did not turn out to be already public.”)

Weird that data "already being public" didn't stop Wikileaks from forwarding the content before when it came from Russian backed fronts:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/885395248612085760

>@wikileaks

>Pro-Russia hacker site (or front) "Cyber Berkut" publishes alleged links between Ukraine and Clinton

Every account of Assange shows a deeply flawed man. Even the generous ones - and whilst he was painted as a freedom fighter for a short period, I'm not convinced that was ever due to anything more than his agenda accidentally aligning with pro government accountability campaigners for a very short time. Also, it seems unlikely there was ever anything to wikileaks beyond Assange - that's certainly what his colleagues from the early days say. Just a man with many different sock-puppet accounts.

I find this fascinating. You excuse a state apparatus who you are responsible for as a democratic voter. That state apparatus had clear interests in a certain region and fabricated evidence to justify a war.

And you moan about character flaws of someone who helped get evidence of misbehavior to the public? Seriously? No other problems?

edit: You know that intelligence agencies try to discredit dissidents and make up fake evidence, do you?

Sorry what? At what point did i excuse anything the state has done? I didn't even mention the state, I talked about Assange. Also, I'm not moaning about him, I'm just talking candidly about who he is, and that's not based on some massive government conspiracy its based on the accounts of the people who have worked with him - people who also risked their livelihoods to publish the early leaks.

As a non US person is clear that his support in US fall because of Russia-Trump business (I have no idea if that was clarified by an investigation or it was suppressed) anyway the hypocrisy is clear: "We like lacks about corruption in Russia or China abuses but if you upset my favorite politicians then justice and laws are irrelevant, we can find some bullshit reason to suicide you or put you in prison". what is extremely disappointing is UK and Sweeden authorities abuses revealed by UN , I did not expect them to still be ass kissing US so deep.

> As a non US person is clear that his support in US fall because of Russia-Trump busines

His support in the US was only ever on the fringes (because they liked anything damaging to the then-current war efforts regardless of methodology) and ,because of the partisan affiliation of the President, that was mostly on the left fringes, and the reason they supported it was partisan politics.

Naturally, even without the Russia connection, the “Trump business” destroyed that. But it's not “hypocrisy” the lost him support.

> Every account of Assange shows a deeply flawed man.

All humans are deeply flawed, but just some of them get to change the world for the better. That is certainly the case for Julian Assange.

So not only are Assange and the people who gave him information supposed to risk their lives to bring these things out to the public, they are also supposed to do it in an objective balanced manner?

Facts are facts. As long as they are printing true facts, they can only be doing good, even if they are only printing the truth about one particular country. Even if they were only printing leaks from a single policital party in one country (which is not the case), as long as all that they are printing is true, they are helping much more than they are hurting.

If you know that Russianoor Chinese or whatever else leaks exist, and if you have enough access to know that they are also true and that WikiLeaks refused to print them, why don't you print them yourself?

I don't think that's what OP meant. At one point, I also thought WikiLeaks was going to be a new type of internet-era news organization pushing for full transparency, regardless of the target. I was disappointed when it turned out they were aimed solely at discrediting America and would editorialize and time their drops for maximum damage. They decided to become that kind of an organization, and they lost credibility in my and many other people's eyes.

>Facts are facts.

No. Facts are never enough. "The Sun sets in the west" is a true fact ... that is compatible with both the heliocentric and geocentric models of our solar system. Facts always need to be contextualized in some narrative or ideology before they are useful (for a specific purpose). True facts can be used to lie about the greater context. That's why objectivity and fairness is so important for news organizations. WikiLeaks is a dishonest organization.

Any government discredits itself when it commits horrible acts, like torture. When these actions become public, their reputation suffers, that's right and proper.

> Facts always need to be contextualized in some narrative or ideology

Like we contextualized Covid19 in Republican ideology to refuse to wear masks? Facts stand for themselves, ideology is harfull.

>Facts stand for themselves, ideology is harfull.

When the George Floyd protests were ramping up 3 weeks ago, the media and many public health officials made statements in support of them and minimized (or outright dismissed) the risks of breaking bans on large public gatherings. Apparently the facts around COVID infection rates couldn't be taken at face-value but needed to be balanced with the righteous intent of the protests. So don't pretend one side is different from another. That one politicizes the pandemic, and the other doesn't.

You missed the salient point though. Facts do not imply policy. They can inform policy, but policy comes out of ideology. You can state a fact about poverty rates, but you will get radically different answers about how to solve it from a Marxist and a Libertarian.

Your observation supports my point of view: when ideology trumps facts and proper understanding, it is harmful.

We have a moral obligation to have policy that makes best use of available facts. And for most areas of policy we have a lot of knowledge: we know that 'broken windows policing' delivers terrible results, we know that rehabilitation services deliver better ones. We know that advocating abstinence is worse that contraception at reducing teenage pregnancies, and we know "trickle down economics" is a joke, and a thousand other things.

Sure there are areas that are largely unknown, but even there the people of relevant expertise are not described as "a Marxist and a Libertarian"

Is it not possible that Wikileaks decided it was safer for them to report on the US, given our supposed press freedoms?

It's possible. Has Wikileaks ever stated as such?

Has Wikileaks ever stated "they were aimed solely at discrediting America"?

> As long as they are printing true facts, they can only be doing good

This is obviously not true. Releasing a fact has a tangible effect on the world, usually a slight change of opinion in the minds of those who learn the fact. Sometimes the effect is more dramatic, for example a government changing policy or someone being killed.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could go very wrong very quickly, which is why the entire journalistic profession, counted among whom are many moral and intelligent individuals, decided not to simply release facts as they received them.

I happen to believe Assange affected the world negatively by releasing the facts he did. I’m not asking you to agree with me, but to suggest that he not only did not but could not is perfectly ridiculous.

Reporting about western countries isn't expected to land you in a jail cell or early grave, as is the case with Russia and China.

The current title is “Julian Assange Founder Charged in Superseding Indictment”. The original title is “WikiLeaks Founder Charged in Superseding Indictment”. It really seems like someone forgot to remove the word “Founder”.

"wikileaks" missing in the title

I do not see president Biden pardoning Assange

That's why I voted for Tulsi.

Tulsi is on the BJP/VHP payroll and if you think Trump has a thing for Muslim bans/camps and cozying up to dictators, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Nobody's perfect. Tulsi was the only presidential candidate to credibly (because we remember the false promises of W, O, and T) speak about reigning in our omnicidal war mania.

If you're referring to her "cozying up" to Assad... a) he's also Muslim, b) [EDIT:] why tell lies? When Tulsi joined the diplomatic mission to Syria, it was entirely appropriate given her service on the House Armed Services Committee. She never said anything to support him. She just said she wasn't afraid to talk with him. Furthermore, the international inspectors who actually inspected the supposed gas attacks [0] determined they were obvious false flags. Then the OPCW home office threw out their analyses and just had bellincat write some bullshit. Of course it's easy to pretend one doesn't know about this because NYT etc. will never retract their cheerleading for war.

[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/22/ian-henderson-opcw-whistl...

I guess I'll just have to keep voting for Libertarians.

https://joj2020.com/

I love how part of the evidence is Julian’s public talks. I do not trust US Attorneys because they have a habit of lying and twisting facts. The original indictment against Julian was very short and ridiculous.

Let’s hope those around President Trump encourage him to pardon Julian on principle. If it’s not him, a future President will pardon him.

... more shooting the messenger... villains.

The judgement was made long before Assange even set foot in the US. This is just a show to try and deter other people from exposing their dirty secrets. If they could get Snowden, he'd be treated in the same manner for exposing their misdeeds. It's a rigged game.

Do you have proof of that?

Shouldn’t the burden of proof be on the government at this point that they wouldn’t do everything in their power to spy on citizens and punish people for trying to stop them?

The burden of proof is on the accuser not the accused.

Assange is the one in jail. If "proof" had any chance of putting e.g. Pompeo in jail, we'd be happy to provide it.

I'm not defending anyone. In my opinion everyone involved in this stinks. Everyone on both sides has been doing shady and questionable things.

What judgement? This is an indictment. If the government can prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt and he is convicted, then that would be a judgment. These are simply charges that Assange would face if he is ever extradited to the US.

Snowden undoubtedly committed a crime, I don't think even he disputes that.

Decades ago it wasn't a crime to own a slave, hit your wife or stop certain groups from voting. Now it is. Just because what Snowden did (whistleblowing) was a crime at the time, doesn't mean that it should've been / should be. Especially if he was given no recourse. IIRC there were others before him who tried to go through the "legal channels", but got nowhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com