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Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

stundin.is

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Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#51

Post by Applejinx »

pstuart wrote: post #16
gonehome wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re overconfident in what you believe to be true based on the evidence that exists. The Russian bit can be politically inconvenient for you and yet also be true.

It is interesting that apparently the GOP's email server was hacked as well, but nothing was ever released publicly. I'm no fan at all of the DNC but if "all politicians are dirty" is a thing, then why did no dirt spill out from the other side? Was it more valuable as kompromat?

Yup. Looks like it still is. You don't burn your own people unless they are very bad.

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#52

Post by fscksnowden »

If Greenwald suggest to Snowden in Dec 2012 that he should steal more, is comrade Greenwald complicit

We all know Assange not only encouraged but participated.

Snowden is a thief and liar who encouraged others to leak in his capacity at fpf. Complicit.

Snowden and Assange are traitors, in the non legal definition

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#53

Post by rbanffy »

fscksnowden wrote: post #52

If Greenwald suggest to Snowden in Dec 2012 that he should steal more, is comrade Greenwald complicit We all know Assange not only encouraged but participated. Snowden is a thief and liar who encouraged others to leak in his capacity at fpf. Complicit. Snowden and Assange are traitors, in the non legal definition

Assange is not even a US citizen. How can he be a traitor?

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#54

Post by johnchristopher »

sonnyp wrote: post #34
johnchristopher wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the US gov is a healthy, democratic, open gov, how and why can Wikileaks be so damaging? Because we are still humans and fallible. No matter how healthy, open gov or democratic our governing bodies are I suppose there will always be something going off rails at some points and it's much easier to spot it in transparent governing structures (which usually means democracies) than in non-transparent ones (which usu…

> Because we are still humans and fallible. Did you look at what Wikileaks revealed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Leaks I don't think you realize the scale of what is happening. These aren't some cute human mistakes or tax evasion. We are talking war crimes, environmental disasters, political corruption, ... And yes - lots of it targets the US gov, maybe time to rethink what the US (and others) gov is and…

> This is why the reasoning that Wikileaks helps dictatorships is absurd.

I never wrote that nor implied it. I wrote and I maintain that wikileaks deals more blows to democracies than dictatorships and that it's because of the very nature of democracies (edit: notwithstanding the whole anti-US bias of Assange).

I don't know how to make my point clearer:

- Wikileaks's leaks are mainly about democracies, not dictatorships.

- It creates tensions in these democracies and it does not in dictatorships.

- This consumes resources and has consequences in democracies (civil unrest, lack of trust from the population, investigations, weakening of governments, tensions in relationships with other nations, etc.)

- Whether it's a good thing or not, it's desirable or not doesn't change the fact that dictatorships are not diminished and are not the target of wikileaks while democracies are.

> We are talking war crimes, environmental disasters, political corruption, ...

And regarding my last point: I do not believe for a second that we should ignore those facts in order to appear strong or clean or whatever.

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#55

Post by Applejinx »

rendall wrote: post #43
extra88 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claims are not extraordinary. The Trump Tower meeting [0] is clear evidence Trump campaign members' interest in colluding with foreign agents. Donald Trump personally had a fig leaf of deniability about that meeting but in interviews [1] he expressed his willingness to collude. The Trump campaign, at minimum Paul Manafort, colluded with agents of Russia [2]. I'm not going to research how strong the public evidenc…

Before you continue with a flood of poor and circumstantial evidence that's hard to sort through and falsify, the claim that a President colludes with a foreign power is extraordinary.

[flagged]

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#56

Post by Applejinx »

johnchristopher wrote: post #14
gonehome wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine. It’s hard to know the trut…

> At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent.…

Lanier's smart, isn't he? It sounds like he was ahead of the curve, here.

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#57

Post by stordoff »

sneak wrote: post #23
plandis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He has also been effectively imprisoned without trial for about a decade now. It’s a bit dishonest to claim he’s been imprisoned without a trial when he skipped on bail in 2012 and chose to stay in an embassy instead of turn himself in to the UK government. He was arrested in 2019 and promptly convicted of skipping on bail in the same year by the UK government.

Not at all. The UN's human rights department has found it to be so: from https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/02/521632-wikileaks-founde... > The founder of the WikiLeaks website, which published confidential diplomatic information, has been arbitrarily detained by Sweden and the United Kingdom since his arrest in London in December 2010, as a result of the legal action against him by both Governments, the United Nation…

> not skipping bail means you get extradited to a country that will torture you via extended solitary confinement

An extradition request which has so far been denied, in part due to the conditions he will face in the US, FWIW. I'm not sure that it can be taken as given that an earlier request (to the UK or Sweden) would have been successful:

> Faced with conditions of near total isolation and without the protective factors which moderate his risk at HMP Belmarsh, I am satisfied that the procedures described by Dr. Leukefled[sic][1] will not prevent Mr. Assange from finding a way to commit suicide. [...] I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate causing him to commit suicide with the "single minded determination" of his autism spectrum disorder. I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.[2]

[1] "[Dr. Leukefeld] is a psychologist employed as the administrator of the psychology services branch in the central office of the [Bureau of Prisons]" ([2] at 350)

[2] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/USA-v-As... at 361-363

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#58

Post by johnchristopher »

namdnay wrote: post #33
johnchristopher wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent.…

I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted so much, the point is definitely interesting Imagine a leak comes out about Putin (you don’t have to imagine that hard..). It would hardly make any noise: there’s no more free press to raise a stink about it, and the population is so used to swimming in the post-truth sewage spewing from the top that they’ll just ignore it

> I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted so much, the point is definitely interesting

I have observed a `shark smelling blood` thing going sometimes on HN. If the timing is right and if a child comment in an upvoted parent that is at the top of post gets one or two downvotes then it has some visibility and then it attracts downvote clicks. If there are 4 or 5 other children they get ignored (I believe the last one gets all the downvote because people parse from top to bottom and only bother interacting with first or last elements... so some posts will get buried while others will sail through) shrug, it might be all in my head though ;).

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#59

Post by rbanffy »

pstuart wrote: post #16
gonehome wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re overconfident in what you believe to be true based on the evidence that exists. The Russian bit can be politically inconvenient for you and yet also be true.

It is interesting that apparently the GOP's email server was hacked as well, but nothing was ever released publicly. I'm no fan at all of the DNC but if "all politicians are dirty" is a thing, then why did no dirt spill out from the other side? Was it more valuable as kompromat?

Also note that, at that time, the Trump organisation was running an EOL’ed MS Exchange server. It’s reasonable to assume it was vulnerable and that all information it contained was leaked.

Re: Key witness in Assange case admits to lies in indictment

#60

Post by philjohn »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #13
gonehome wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine. It’s hard to know the trut…

>The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. The US government claims this, but it's not been proven. > At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniabi…

The bar for extradition doesn't require the US to prove it - the only place they need to prove it is in court when he's in the US.

And "Russiagate" is a bit more nuanced than that - Wikileaks claimed to have GOP emails as well but for some reason never released them.

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