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Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

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441–450 of 792 posts

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countries which do not bend before others. Russia, China, Iran to name a few examples. They can protect those fleeing from the West. Just like West can protect people from those countries. World is not unipolar.

Can't imagine why anyone would want to run to China to hide from the U.S. of all places, in this scenario. "I'm going to flee from one dystopian state, to another even more dystopian/technocratic/autocratic state!"

True, but at least they have housing & healthcare

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#442

To fully appreciate the context: - he’s not a us citizen - none of the “crimes” happened on US soil - he’s a world famous journalist with prior work - was charged with bogus crimes in Europe in an attempt to arrest him. All dropped - the person who stole the files he released is already free and the tax payers paid for their transition

> none of the “crimes” happened on US soil He is charged with helping Chelsea Manning to hack into a government computer which did happen on US soil. “ they charged him with conspiring to commit unlawful computer intrusion based on his alleged agreement to try to help Ms. Manning break an encoded portion of passcode that would have permitted her to log on to a classified military network under another user’s identity…

The implications of defining an action as "happening on US soil" whenever it had an effect that involved mere data that was situated on US soil also seem troubling, and it's easy to imagine only slightly less clear cause-and-effect relationships from actions to data that would, under this interpretation, suggest extradition to a hostile jurisdiction.

For example, Germany is well known to strictly prohibit and penalise the public display of Nazi symbols. Suppose some US citizen posted unicode swastikas in a game chat (while living in the UK), as kids seem to like to do, and this chat log got replicated on a German server, putting it in violation of German law, and now Germany wanted to throw the book at them (3 years of jail or so). Should the UK extradite this person to Germany? Would it have any bearing on this whether the kid did this with the intention of trolling Germans in game (and perhaps the awareness that it is not legal for them to display the symbol)?

For an even juicier version of this scenario, imagine that we are instead considering the case of an American journalist who tweeted some of the edgier activist-journalist rhetoric (of the "kill all $privileged_group" type) to weigh in on some German domestic dispute. This just so happened to fall afoul of Germany's domestic laws on inciting racial hatred, and the message got replicated on whatever servers Twitter's CDN has there. The intent (to reach Germans) would be there, and a crime (having a public-facing computer server display an incitement to racial hatred) would have happened on German soil. How would you feel about the US journalist being extradited from the UK to Germany to face jail time?

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most left journalists were dancing in joy when Assange got arrested. They never forgave him for exposing the Clinton emails and ensured he was heavily character assassinated over the next several years. He also became a victim of the #MeToo movement at its height. He was openly called evil/narcissist/etc in many "opinion" pieces. All the other important stuff he revealed never got the level of attention it deserved.

Democratic-party affiliated journalists. Even left-of-center journalists. But the Clinton emails were an exposure of attacks against Sanders. It's so bizarre that Glenn Beck's view of the world, making Wall Street Iraq Warriors who ended welfare as we knew it and who put more black people in prison than anyone while deregulating everything into basically Lenin, ate up even the libertarian right.

> It's so bizarre that Glenn Beck's view of the world, making Wall Street Iraq Warriors who ended welfare as we knew it and who put more black people in prison than anyone while deregulating everything into basically Lenin, ate up even the libertarian right.

Wat. Is this GPT3 or something?

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countries which do not bend before others. Russia, China, Iran to name a few examples. They can protect those fleeing from the West. Just like West can protect people from those countries. World is not unipolar.

Can't imagine why anyone would want to run to China to hide from the U.S. of all places, in this scenario. "I'm going to flee from one dystopian state, to another even more dystopian/technocratic/autocratic state!"

It depends on which state is going to imprison you. Being in prison in the U.S. is worse than living out of prison in Chian or Russia.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#445
Surprisingly few technical people understand the extent to which the CFAA charges he faces are bullshit.

It all goes back to a jabber log that they got from Manning. The gist of it is as follows:

Manning:

Manning: can you guys crack NTLM?

Assange: we have rainbow tables. I’ll forward it onto someone on our team.

Few days later,

Manning: any update on NTLM?

Assange: no luck so far.

And this is computer conspiracy. No additional access to any machine was had, and there’s no real evidence that any cracking was attempted at all. He merely agreed to take a look and reported no progress on it. It’s been a while since I looked at the details but I seem to recall that the pcap hexdump manning sent wasn’t even the correct bytes to do an attack — it wasn’t even possible.

There are so many explanations for why Assange could have said this while plausibly not attempting to crack the hash. Manning put him in a strange position to become complicit and he had to strike a balance between not saying to his source, “lol that’s illegal no way, you’re on your own dude” while simultaneously saying exactly that.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#446
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. 100% this. After 2016, i went from getting "oh you radical crazy commie" looks wearing a wikileaks shirt to immediately "oh you're a republican, let me guess you listen to alex jones and joe rogan?"

I believe somewhere in here lies a fundamental problem with today's society. We have reached an absurd level of polarization. Any opinion you hold that is in contradiction with someone else's opinion, qualifies you for membership of the opposing camp. We should really work on depolarisation.

The establishment is the enemy, not each other.

Also, I'm not sure where this "keep friends and family separate from business" idealogy came from, but business is just organizing production. If we're not going to try to hold those keys with our friends and family, then elites will hold them for us.

Side note-no actual progress can come until there is sound money again.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#447
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countries which do not bend before others. Russia, China, Iran to name a few examples. They can protect those fleeing from the West. Just like West can protect people from those countries. World is not unipolar.

Let's ask Litvinenko his opinion?

No, because it is clear? He was fleeing from Russian government. And they poisoned him.

That has nothing to do with the subject of people feeling from the US influence.

This kind of argument that you attempted is a bit tiring, don't you think? If you flee from Russian government, go to the West. And vice versa. One does not invalidate the other.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#448

The framing of Assange as an innocent “journalist” being persecuted for just doing his job is, in my opinion, disingenuous. I do not necessarily agree with all the actions the US Government has taken with him, or their handling of some of the information that was leaked. However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage, let alone encourage/incite it. In case my point is unclear, I consid…

Being an activist doesn't make you not a journalist, any more than being employed by companies that share portfolio space with the companies that get all of their revenue from supplying war material doesn't mean you're not a journalist.

> However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage

Then you don't really believe that 99% of journalists are journalists, because they would disagree with you. I'm thankful that I don't live in the completely bowdlerized history that would have been the result if more journalists agreed with you.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment about being in Afghanistan was intended to convey that assuming information was released putting people in harms way, that I and people I cared about would have been directly impacted.

Your comment basically confirms what he said > If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights. You realize you were the invader right?

No, my comment does nothing of the sort and neither you, or him, know anything about me. Believe it or not, the world is not black and white and people do the best they can given a variety of factors in front of them.

However, I am glad you are able to with criticize and judge a person with 20/20 hindsight, while simultaneously offering nothing of value to the conversation.

Thank you for taking the time to offer your opinion and I wish you nothing but the best.

Re: Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a sad sacrifice, though. Nothing (significant) has changed about the US's imperialism as a result of his disclosures, it's just mildly more acknowledged.

Most left journalists were dancing in joy when Assange got arrested. They never forgave him for exposing the Clinton emails and ensured he was heavily character assassinated over the next several years. He also became a victim of the #MeToo movement at its height. He was openly called evil/narcissist/etc in many "opinion" pieces. All the other important stuff he revealed never got the level of attention it deserved.

That's how a well articulated propaganda campaign looks like.
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