181–190 of 646 posts
Astonished to see this but hopeful for Julian. Very sad state for journalism and prison conditions
Assange is not a journalist. He wrote software until he started leaking documents. That isn’t journalism.
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"Mr Assange was jailed for 50 weeks in May 2019 for breaching his bail conditions after going into hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London." Given that the US Government is appealing and he has a record of skipping bail, I'd guess no. I suppose they might possibly let him out with an ankle bracelet, but no idea for sure.
(Most) English prisoners only serve half the given sentence in prison before being released on license, so he won't go back to prison for that. I don't know if he can be held pending a US appeal on the extradition case, given his history of skipping bail.
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Given the apartment disconnect between the reality Murray describes in his reports and the reality we can observe today, do you think you'll read his content with a higher degree of skepticism in the future? His headlines are all calibrated for maximum outrage, that alone turns me off from reading them. Edit to eat crow: only one article has a sensational headline
Honestly, his articles where so overwhelmingly obviously biased and lacking any sense of journalism that it was actually painful to watch the number of people on this very site enthusiastically promote him as some kind of truth-seeking hero. It's valid to oppose the Assange extradition, be concerned about the impact on free speech, and any number of other things; Murray is not a reliable narrator on any of these issu…
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'she had to kill the guards at the door' . Why stop there, while we are at it, imagine she had to commit a terrorist attack and a genocide at once and Assange volunteered to help
A crime is a crime, justice doesn't care. A journalist should not be accessory to a crime when receiving infornations. I made that example to make it clearer, but if you don't like it I can make another one: to get the documents she needed to open the door, so she Asked Assange if he had a crowbar. The simple fact that he didn't say "no, I can't help you with that" is the problem.
Which is why all the war crimes detailed in Manning's leaks have been prosecuted with the criminals behind bars.
Further, a crime isn't just a crime. A journalist attempting to protect their source is an essential part of their freedom of the press. Prosecuting them for that action infringes on their rights, making it unconstitutional. Even if you disagree with my assessment of Assange's actions, it should be clear that justice does care about the context.
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It's an awful ruling overall, from what I can tell from skimming it. It's great Assange won, but this ruling is not at all support for freedom of expression. This is the one part the judge agreed with the defense on as far as I can tell: > 363. 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. For anyone not suffering from severe ment…
Yes, the fact that the extradition wasn't rejected on press freedom grounds makes me think maybe it's just a way for the judge to shake it off so that it's not HER who goes down in history books as to have made the decision to extradite. But having sided with the U.S. on pretty much all of the counts concerning press freedom, an appeals court may well 'find' that the heath condition is not enough. I REALLY hope am wr…
It is highly likely that the High Court will be asked to re-examine pretty much the whole judgment; it's highly unlikely that the defence won't question the holdings that they lost.
(It is also pretty likely that this will then be appealed to the Supreme Court, and relatively likely the case will be heard there too.)
In my mind, what distinguishes the Snowden case from the Assange/Manning cases is the distinction between whistleblowing [1] and a fishing expedition [2]: > A fishing expedition is an informal, pejorative term for a non-specific search for information, especially incriminating information. It is most frequently organized by policing authorities. The question is whether it is lawful for any group to mine a corpus of p…
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Assange is not a journalist. He wrote software until he started leaking documents. That isn’t journalism.
And I suppose anyone with a journalism degree isn't a journalist because they were a student until they started working?
Just as I wasn’t an engineer until I started designing and making things.
The entire US prison system feels abusive to me. I've said before that if I somehow magically were to find myself on a US jury (can't happen - I'm not resident in or a citizen of the US; this is a pure hypothetical), I'd be hard pressed to be able to justify voting "guilty" on a moral basis even for quite serious crimes. It feels designed for vengeance and inducing harm rather than for safety for society and rehabili…
In my mind, what distinguishes the Snowden case from the Assange/Manning cases is the distinction between whistleblowing [1] and a fishing expedition [2]: > A fishing expedition is an informal, pejorative term for a non-specific search for information, especially incriminating information. It is most frequently organized by policing authorities. The question is whether it is lawful for any group to mine a corpus of p…
He didn't just collect relevant documents, he collected a massive cache of documents and instead of vetting them himself (someone who is at least vaguely cleared to read the documents) he turned all of it over to the press to review instead.