He is a legend and should inspire future whistleblowers. Both his leaks and trials exposed how corrupt the justice system is.
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Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
281–290 of 1001 posts
Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
#282What could he possibly do next (if he avoids a prison term)?
Get a gig with a Russian media outlet, again... See if Roger Stone has any work for him to do? See if GRU has any more deliveries it needs him to make? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-t...
Wikileaks had no "gig" with Russia Today. They produced the series tthemselves and it was picked up by various news channels - just not any mainstream Western ones (what a shock)
Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
#283He is a legend and should inspire future whistleblowers. Both his leaks and trials exposed how corrupt the justice system is.
I'm glad Assange is free, but he really pushes the definition. He wasn't a whistleblower, he actively pushed whistleblowers to deliver information that he wanted to publish. He frequently revealed sources in active warzones, and redacted a bunch of Russian financial information from their leaks on Syria.
Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm personally glad that the Allies were able to keep the information about their plans to land on the beaches in Normandy from "being free", in order to catalyze their victory in WWII. But I think, charitably, what people mean when they say things like this is that more information should be free. And I think agree with that. But I'm not entirely convinced it applies to everything Assange is responsible for releasin…
Does this qualify as some sort of variation of Godwin's law? Keeping war crimes classified until everyone responsible is dead is not the same as keeping plans secret during a war. Hard to mix those two up to the point I'd say it was done in bad faith.
The commenter you are replying to is not the one who mixed those things up. Julian Assange did that.
Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Responsibility has to be pretty defuse, right? You can at least begin with all the presidents in office since he was prosecuted, until N-1 since presumably the Nth just released him.
Diffusion of responsibility is definitely a defense in these cases, but the system should recognize this shortcoming and assign accountability (at least in an ideal world). Although I'm willing to bet that the true actors here weren't necessarily presidents (even though they would ultimately be accountable like you say). Would be interesting to see who demanded what and when.
It's not to lionize Assange, but these are almost crimes against humanity, they stole peoples tax dollars and then built a surveillance state used against the citizens. When that was revealed they then used the same tools to destroy a single human being for the purposes of creating a decade long chilling effect for anyone who might consider doing the same.
There shouldn't be any diffuse responsibility for participating in this farce at any level. When the information was released the public never clamored for it to be investigated and for people to be hunted down and jailed for releasing it. It was entirely a captured administrative state claiming for itself rights it demonstrably never had, such as claiming a foreign national committed treason, or that he could be viewed as an "enemy combatant."
To have gone along with this willingly deserves the same scrutiny we gave German officers at the end of WWII.
Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
#286Despite what his defenders claim, he went beyond journalism and actively engaged in process to obtain and disclose national defense information. Now he will pledge guilty for that.
False. What they are charging him with is a brief speculative chat discussion about potentially having Manning provide the hash of a password to Assange to help crack it. But this discussed behavior never actually happened and was never referenced by them again.
That's the conspiracy charge they indicted Assange for. If you don't believe me then read https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wikileaks-founder-julian-assa... . If you say that's too long to read then just read the last 4 paragraphs.
They've bent over backwards to charge him here over something that literally did not happen and was only discussed as an option in passing. If they had anything else to charge him with they would. But they don't and rely on people like you propagating falsehoods.
Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
#287Can someone who has an accurate source post when Wikileaks cryptographic canary expired? I'm unable to find a source and it's important to know they shouldn't be trusted. Here's when their key expired in 2007: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks_talk:PGP_Keys From another below: vikingerik A canary goes something like "This website has not received or acted on any government orders to disclose or modify or remove ma…
I remember at the time that it expired, all of the moderators on their official subreddit also got replaced.
The insurance file also got changed out at some point as the hash changed.
Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
#288It’s wild that Julian Assange is going to do five years in prison and Bush Jr and Dick Cheney are walking around free.
Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
#289In an ideal world we would get to do a reverse investigation to understand which government officials were complicit in his very obviously politically motivated detention, action would be taken upon those individuals to ensure accountability, and the system itself would be updated so powerful interests can't abuse the law like this. How far are we from this world?
> action would be taken upon those individuals to ensure accountability
Out of genuine curiosity: what "actions" do you want taken and what accountability are you interested in? I mean, to be blunt: you think this is a crime, right? You want someone charged and prosecuted in a court, with due process, in front of a jury of peers, yada yada.
So... what if your imaginary prosecutor jumps ship to somewhere else where they get arrested and detained, and then refuse to come back to the US to face trial. Are they not then a political prisoner? Why not?
The point being: Assange wasn't thrown in jail without trial, he was thrown in jail because he refused trial. And there's an important difference.
Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
#290> Julian's freedom is our freedom. A little too heavy handed. Yeah it seems like from the outside he was potentially overly punished, pending further details that may never materialize, but “his freedom is our freedom” is pretty extreme given what he did. He’s not relatable.
Yes the world is clearly a worse place because of Snowden, without him just imagine the true power the national security state could have achieved and how much safer we’d all feel.
What if I respect what Snowden did and believe he should be pardoned and at the same time believe Assange should have been prosecuted.