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Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules

bbc.com

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

#761

Post by harry8 »

nostrebored wrote: post #490
harry8 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He leaked /nothing/. No really. Absolutely nothing. He published documents leaked by others as supporting evidence for his journalism and to allow other journalists to use the source material. The documents were redacted in partnership with the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, El Pais, Le Monde and various others who also linked the source documents. As soon as you have a standard for what doesn't qualify a…

Wait, are sources journalists now?

What point about Chelsea Manning are you trying to make? I'm sure she could engage in journalism if she chose. Her and your rights should be protected. Daniel Elsberg does regularly.

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

#762

Post by jollybean »

dane-pgp wrote: post #705
jollybean wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And who defines the right or wrong?" The Law under the purview of the Justice System, which is why they are pressing for a trial.

If you believe that The Law defines what is right and wrong, then surely it can never be right to change The Law? Maybe you don't actually believe that, but I think it is important to consider just how large the gap between The Law and What Is Right has been, at various times in the past, and in various places.

The Law is how we define 'Right and Wrong' in the civil sense, it's all we have.

Obviously, we us a moral sensibility in the community, but that's more nuanced.

Laws change all of the time, especially as different cases with different characteristics are brought before the courts and they set precedent.

Assange is accused of working with people to hack into sensitive systems in which gigabytes of arbitrary government data were stolen and published.

If true, this is definitely within the realm of what we would generally accepted to be illegal, there's not going to be much controversy there.

The issue is whether or not Assange has actually committed a crime, and to what extent his prosecution is political.

I suggest we'll be able to get a sense for that when he is put on trial and the evidence is presented.

If it turns out the FBI paid a guy to lie about him, and that's all the evidence they have, then Assange will walk away a free man, but otherwise we'll have to wait to see the evidence.

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

#763

Post by jollybean »

monocasa wrote: post #703
jollybean wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. Assange is alleged to have cooperated with a member of the US forces to release gigabytes of diplomatic cables etc. - which is possibly a crime. In all but rare cases, you absolutely do not have the right to break into systems of national security and release arbitrary information under the guise of 'journalism'. His extradition is perfectly rational, legal and judicially legitimate. The Abu Garib…

The Abu Gharib whistleblower's name was supposed to not be released, but instead Donald Rumsfeld himself leaked it, and his family had to be put into protective custody because of the constant death threats they were receiving from other service members and families of service members. Donald Rumsfeld then later wrote a letter to the whistleblower telling him to stop telling people that Rumsfeld had been the one to l…

That there are irresponsible actions taken by political actors (possibly mistakenly so) doesn't imply a lack of integrity in the system overall.

The Abu Garib leaker was treated as a true whistleblower, because he was, not a criminal.

In your very comment you indicate that the Justice System even went out of their way to protect him.

In the case of Assange, they are after him, so we'll wait to see what kind of evidence they have.

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

#764

Post by jollybean »

themself wrote: post #730
jollybean wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. Assange is alleged to have cooperated with a member of the US forces to release gigabytes of diplomatic cables etc. - which is possibly a crime. In all but rare cases, you absolutely do not have the right to break into systems of national security and release arbitrary information under the guise of 'journalism'. His extradition is perfectly rational, legal and judicially legitimate. The Abu Garib…

Would you feel the same if it was the Chinese or Russian government who wanted to prosecute a foreigner for allegedly helping one of their whistleblowers, or for just criticizing their government? Unless you want Americans sent to Beijing for violating the Hong Kong national security law, which applies to everyone in the world according to the Chinese government, I don't see how you can invoke 'the law' against Assan…

Neither of these sentiments are true.

There is a material difference between 'Whistleblowing' and 'Stealing and Releasing Data Because You Want To'.

Those releasing documents regarding arbitrary imprisonment of people because of their ethnicity are 'Whistleblowers'. I would argue that the release of the video showing US accidental killing of Journalistgs in the friendly fire incident, may fall under that.

But the diplomatic cable leaks I don't think constitute whistle blowing.

"Laws are basically just threats,"

Total rubbish, I can't fathom that someone would believe this.

The Law is the most foundational aspect of civilization, probably more important than democracy itself.

It's a set of codified rules that we roughly agree upon, or at least are aware of, that we are all equally subject to, not one above the other - or at least it's supposed to be, and when it's not, we consider that a form of corruption.

Assange is possibly guilty of the crime of breaking into private government systems to release arbitrary data to the public, which is probably a crime.

When the trial starts, we'll get to see the evidence, one of the advantages of living in a Western Liberal Democracy is that most of this information is available to anyone, another key aspect of a functional Judicial System BTW.

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

#765

Post by harry8 »

frabbit wrote: post #693
harry8 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A journalist is /any/ citizen engaging in journalism. ANY. As soon as you have to "qualify" to be a "journalist" and can't be an "activist" What you have is state controlled media. Indiscriminate publishing. So you think the vetting done in partnership with the Washington Post and the New York Times was not journalism and the employees of the NYT and WaPo who are now not journalists should be prosecuted along side hi…

Do you think that the comments that are furiously ignoring this and pretending that there is some sort of official journalist title are genuinely ignorant or trying to sow confusion?

I think it is mostly driven by emotion and it would be very easy go that way if you didn't follow the story closely and from multiple media sources. It's easy to believe in another context eg pick one of "Maddow/Hannity/Limbaugh/Moore" is not a real journalist by which you mean good source of factual information. This is wildly different from "should/should not have the legal rights of a journalist."

Many of the larger newspapers lean toward the former kind of "he's not one of us" and clearly hate him on a personal level, for many reasons one of which is that he de-values their prestige currency of the scoop by having achieved many orders of magnitude more important scoops than they reasonably ever dreamed of without having to have the crap beaten out of him as a young person joining a newsroom like they did. "My editor would never allow me to publish that even though it's completely true and backed with documents proving it." He doesn't have that problem.

There's no doubt that the litany of CIA, NSA & FBI openly employed as analysts are pushing a false narrative about it which is repeated often. We saw evidence of that kind of ting pretty clearly with the evidence free suppression of Hunter Biden's laptop contents as "Russian disinformation." Now we know it's real. The contents are minor league attempted sleaze but true. The suppression of it and the constant refrain of "Russians" is vastly more significant and pretty worrying.

People have be led to think of Wikileaks and Assange as "Anti-American." Pretty obvious that the Military would want to frame it that way. And it's reasonable not to like anti-american stuff. It's not so very far to go from there to thinking CIA lies are actually anti-american and reporting the truth about massive corruption and illegality in government is what has made the American experiment with democracy work and so is pro-american.

I don't know the extent to which the CIA and NSA etc actually use social media comments to push a narrative, I'd really, really hope it was none. Was there anything about that in Edward Snowden's revalations?

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

#766

Post by CRConrad »

pelasaco wrote: post #737
JCharante wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well nobody has ever died while in custody of US law enforcement, so this seems reasonable

exactly, I'm not saying that it is perfect, but to keep comparing with Epstein and joking around won't help Julian Assange. Important is: if those Assurances could be documented and monitored by the international community, it is definitely great and TBH, would be better to Assange if he would have gotten something like that back in 2010.. he lost 10 years of his life in "prison", but it won't even be reduced from hi…

> he lost 10 years of his life in "prison", but it won't even be reduced from his sentence..

Totally his own fault. Neither the USA nor the UK told him to hole up in that embassy; he did that all on his own.

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

#767

Post by CRConrad »

sumedh wrote: post #707
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- the alleged crimes were committed against the US, i.e his participation in the exfiltration of secret data from US government. Surely his physical location when committing these crimes should have no bearing on whether it's a criminal matter. - calling him a journalist is a mighty stretch even before he started, let's call it his "full-stack collaboration" with the Russians - Manning served the time and is thus fre…

> Manning served the time Didnt Obama commute his sentence?

A) Her sentence.

B) Only after she'd served most of it, AFAICR.

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

#768

Post by CRConrad »

harry8 wrote: post #403
Ma8ee wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew him as the founder and director of Wikileaks, and that Wikileaks collaborates with a number of publications to get the content of some classified information known to the general public. I didn't know that Julian Assange wrote much himself and in similar fashion worked directly as a journalist. So I'd say that at least one person (me) knew about him without knowing him as a journalist. Your last sentence make…

The reason you heard of Wikileaks and Assange isn't for golf. It is for publishing journalism and in particular journalism containing a vast number of journalistic scoops. So many that it catapulted him to international fame. If you believed wikileaks and Assange were famous for golfing or hacking or leaking or baking pie I have sympathy because the smears on what they did and do have been as relentless as they have…

> The reason you heard of Wikileaks and Assange isn't for golf.

Exactly like the reason you've heard of Trump isn't that he's such a great golf player. But he plays golf, and he is famous... And still not "a famous golf player" like, say, Tiger Woods.

> It is for publishing journalism and in particular journalism containing a vast number of journalistic scoops. So many that it catapulted him to international fame.

No, the reason I've heard of Assange is that he helped people leak the content of what became a vast number of journalistic scoops to actual journalists, who wrote it up and published it.

Leaking is leaking and journalism is journalism, but leaking is not journalism.

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

#769

Post by CRConrad »

jollybean wrote: post #332
lettergram wrote: post #183

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" This is essentially false as his ostensible crime relates to participating in the hacking of US systems. By your inference, Russians hacking into US Hosptials would not be committing a crime on 'US Soil' as though that would make a difference. Let's have the trial and see the evidence.

> [>] "none of the “crimes” happened on US soil"

> This is essentially false as his ostensible crime relates to participating in the hacking of US systems.

A crime happens where you do it. His arse wasn't sat in the USA when he did it.

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

#770

Post by CRConrad »

queuebert wrote: post #471
realce wrote: post #246

Fabricate a narrative that allows your country to murder tens of thousands of people == fine and not illegal. Tell soldier how cryptographic maths work == double castration and the CIA tries to assassinate you. Don't forget that the Collateral Murder video showed not only Iraqi citizens but also Reuters journalists being machine-gunned from the sky. No person has ever been criminally charged for these murders.

As an American, I find it very hard to decide what to think about these issues. Our military certainly makes mistakes, and people should be held accountable, but on the other hand the U.S. upholds much stricter rules of engagement than any of its enemies (hell, even stricter than our cops). Should credit not be given for that?

> the U.S. upholds much stricter rules of engagement than any of its enemies

Hm, good so far...

> (hell, even stricter than our cops).

Muahahahahaa! You just blew your own argument out of the water.

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