6 ms·

The Feds May Come to Regret Charging Assange with Espionage

37 points by matt4077 7y ago

onetimemanytime 7y ago
Very weird, they must had a reason to do so (or so they thought). They could have charged him with a lot of other things and guarantee a set prison term. Prison is prison, no?
gjmacd 7y ago
He tried to help Chelsea Manning brute force hack passwords on government computers. He's also suspected of being and taking part as Gucifer 2.0. I don't think people can call a person a "journalist" who fronts as one but is really doing illegal activities to obtain documents and data. Receiving them from someone else and publishing is a different issue. Getting them yourself and breaking the law... very fine line. My issue with this whole WikiLeaks thing is that they are clearly a Russian operation that posed as a "truth seeker" early on and then started to steer their operation 100% at damaging the US. If you're truly a journalist operation, you'd do more to publish and "seek truth" in other countries. You won't find a single story about Russia that's damaging. Bottom line for me? I think the US believes he's a Putin sympathizer. Or worse, he's a Russian asset.
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  Personally I also think that he is now a Russian asset or whatever its called. Maybe he needed their help and they were glad to welcome them into their arms, but that's besides the point. No love lost between him and 3 letter agencies BUT, as I said they could have charged him with a lot of other things that carry a long prison sentence.
  - andy_ppp 7y ago
    What evidence is there he’s a Russian asset?
    - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
      He released completely true but negative information about Hillary Clinton. That seems to be enough for some people.
    - rfugger 7y ago
      He seems to have published no embarrassing or damaging information on Russia (at least in latter years?), and seemed willing to serve their purposes when it came to the 2016 election, by releasing hacked Democratic Party emails timed to do maximum damage to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Prior to that, I had considered Wikileaks a brave experiment in radical transparency. Since then, I've considered Wikileaks a somewhat biased source. The truth is the truth, yes, but every truth is partial, and context matters. "Asset" is perhaps too strong a word, but "useful idiot" may apply, or "the enemy of my enemy".
  - rfugger 7y ago
    Or maybe he was threatened.
- roenxi 7y ago
  > My issue with this whole WikiLeaks thing is that they are clearly a Russian operation that posed as a "truth seeker" early on and then started to steer their operation 100% at damaging the US The theory here seems to be that Russia is perfidiously undermining the US by exposing the truth to the cold light of day, by nefariously revealing primary sources with limited editing. I'm not sure I'd rate that as the most successful strategy in their playbook, but maybe it'll work. If it were me, I'd go with more traditional propaganda. That is not a good theory.
  - ajross 7y ago
    > nefariously revealing primary sources Russia deliberately targeted, hacked and stole the email of a US presidential campaign manager. What kind of crazy spin is this? Whether Assange specifically should be culpable here is an open question. Whether the act was criminal is not.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      Nobody disputed that the emails were genuine. What if Russians had just released them via RT - or indeed the New York Times? It is still a story even if the source is shady. Even more impressive if the Russians are known to be involved. Releasing the emails via Wikileaks isn't evidence of anything. Someone as well resourced as the Russian Intelligence service could have released them on The Pirate Bay and had a similar effect. On my original point, Russia does not have a scary scheme to reveal the truth to unwitting Americans via Wikileaks. The idea is absurd.
      - ajross 7y ago
        > shady There's no "shade" here. It's straight up criminal. He got phished, deliberately, via a targetted human engineering operation. Again I just don't understand the desire to hide the underlying crime here. It's possible to be very uneasy with the direct prosecution of Assange for this stuff, to view Manning as having been unfairly targetted, but to also recognize that there's a really serious underlying crime here that we need to address. But no, everyone wants to pick sides here and stand with... Putin. Seriously?
- rudiv 7y ago
  >My issue with this whole WikiLeaks thing is that they are clearly a Russian operation that posed as a "truth seeker" early on and then started to steer their operation 100% at damaging the US. If you're truly a journalist operation, you'd do more to publish and "seek truth" in other countries. You won't find a single story about Russia that's damaging. Were you aware of Wikileaks prior to 2016? I can't help but think that you're unaware of their work prior to the 2016 US election cycle. Granted, you mention Chelsea Manning. But the idea that Wikileaks was a shell organisation for Russian intelligence all the way back from 2006 beggars belief, if only because of the diverse range of sources they have received material from. Regarding Guccifer 2.0, I've seen the information linking that account to Russian intelligence, but I haven't seen any evidence that Assange himself is suspected of being Guccifer and essentially orchestrating the conversation(s) between Guccifer and Wikileaks. Could you share your information with the rest of us?
  - behringer 7y ago
    How does one know propaganda works? When everyone on the internet starts spewing the same line at the same time.
    - rudiv 7y ago
      Are you addressing me? Or is that just for the benefit of other readers?
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  You’ve just made up loads of stuff with no evidence haven’t you? We should consider Collateral Murder much more damaging than the release of the video, the act itself has caused much more harm to your beloved American interests.
  - 420codebro 7y ago
    Fuck those journalists in that clip. I’m so fucking tired of the virtue signaling around this. Don’t hang around armed fighters when an American Bradley unit is getting fucked up 2 blocks away and apaches are circling. Common sense. Or rather the lack there of.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    What is collateral murder?
    - andy_ppp 7y ago
      https://youtu.be/HfvFpT-iypw https://youtu.be/HfvFpT-iypw A video some claim was leaked by Chelsea Manning (to Wikileaks) showing what I believe to be war crimes by US military.
  - lixtra 7y ago
    > We should consider Collateral Murder much more damaging I think it was right to release the video. But to me, with no military experience and and non-native speaker, it seemed totally possible that the pilots took the reporters for combatants. I wouldn’t want to judge them. In comparison, I found the video of a cop shooting a fellow American crying in fear with an automatic rifle because he was reaching for his pants much more disturbing. Or the autistic kid tazed to death in the shower.
    - astazangasta 7y ago
      What about when they came back to shoot people who were helping the wounded? Also, "it was a war zone" is a shitty excuse given that the war was illegal and we had no business positioning helicopters over civilian marketplaces in Iraq, period.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  Assange a russian asset? Why is he not in russia then? For plausability he let himself being locked in for years? Being the selfish narcisst that he is? Not likely. Assange is a kind of internet-anarchist. He published some kind of manifest a while ago. Crypto-anarchism. Basically the idea (if memory serves right) that people need crypto etc. to balance the power with total governments. So he really is not a supporter of the russian government, except maybe as a counter to the US. He hates the US as super power number one, so thats why he might accepted help from the enemies of his enemy, but Wikileaks also published documents about russia.
lettergram 7y ago
He’s not a U.S. citizen: > As part of the Constitution, the First Amendment stands as the supreme law of the land. First amendment doesn’t apply, because the U.S. doesn’t apply the bill of rights to non-citizens. The “crime” also wasn’t committed on U.S. soil.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > First amendment doesn’t apply, because the U.S. doesn’t apply the bill of rights to non-citizens. That's absolutely not true. Precedent has been set multiple times granting constitutional protections to anyone on US soil, no matter how they got here. So sure, he isn't protected now, because he's not here, but the moment he lands on US soil he's protected by the first amendment. There is no way they would charge him if they didn't think it could stand up under the first amendment.
  - eropple 7y ago
    I am not a lawyer, and I'd love to hear from somebody who's a con law lawyer, but I'm not certain that the First Amendment is retroactive to activities that did not happen on American soil--and, going forward, it's completely within the government's power to get a gag order as pertains to an ongoing case.
  - viivaux 7y ago
    > There is no way they would charge him if they didn't think it could stand up under the first amendment. Your comment reminds me of this one from 2012, spoken with utter confidence at the time: > Your comment again puts forward the idea that the political forces aligned against Assange are so great that no amount of critical thinking, due process, or countervailing concern for the rights of victims can apply: it is, to use your word, "obvious" that the case isn't about "rape", but about an undocumented (and undisclosed) but nevertheless clear and immediate effort to haul Assange to the US and try him with espionage. No court in Europe seems to view the situation that way. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407950
  - pps43 7y ago
kstenerud 7y ago
Here are the main points of the indictment: a. They assert that he is not a journalist, and therefore cannot be protected by the first amendment. b. They limited the indictment to the publication of papers that contained unredacted names of people who were put in danger by the publication of their names (this is important to their argument against him being a journalist). c. They include conspiracy charges for his direct aid to Manning in hacking DOD computers (providing a live CD, instructing on how to use the tools, tech support, etc). d. They were too slow in bringing the charges, and are past the 5 year statute of limitations on federal crimes. Because of this, their only hope of success is to upgrade the charges to "acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries", which has an 8 year statute of limitations instead of the normal 5. The hurdles they must pass in order to succeed in this prosecution are: 1. They must successfully argue that he is not a journalist, or was not acting as a journalist at the time. 2. They must argue that the federal crimes he's accused of also constitute an act of terrorism under section 2332b (which gives the test in subsection (g)(5): "is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct") in order for the indictment to be valid under an 8 year statute of limitations rather than 5. 3. They must also argue the statute of limitations clause in the UK in order to successfully extradite Assange (with a possible second chance via Sweden). This could very well blow up in the DOJ's face if the courts side with Assange, because there's a good chance that it will further gut the espionage act, which is likely the main reason why the Obama administration didn't bother even when they had a stronger position of not needing to tack on terrorism charges.
- clord 7y ago
  > "is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct" That sounds so broad. Doesn’t it include lobbyists? voters who threaten to vote out a party if they don’t do as they like? What if the government is trump 2.0 and is acting tyrannical? What are the limitations?
  - kstenerud 7y ago
    That clause can only be used to upgrade something that is already a federal crime on its own.
devoply 7y ago
American cockeyed courts usually side with the DOJ when it comes to foreigners. It might not nothing. If they can get him to the US he's screwed despite the shoddy case against him.
austincheney 7y ago
I agree that he is not a journalist and the charges are serious, but the legal case here feels weak to me. They should have just let Sweden have him.

37 points by matt4077 7y ago

Very weird, they must had a reason to do so (or so they thought). They could have charged him with a lot of other things and guarantee a set prison term. Prison is prison, no?

gjmacd 7y ago

He tried to help Chelsea Manning brute force hack passwords on government computers. He's also suspected of being and taking part as Gucifer 2.0. I don't think people can call a person a "journalist" who fronts as one but is really doing illegal activities to obtain documents and data. Receiving them from someone else and publishing is a different issue. Getting them yourself and breaking the law... very fine line. My issue with this whole WikiLeaks thing is that they are clearly a Russian operation that posed as a "truth seeker" early on and then started to steer their operation 100% at damaging the US. If you're truly a journalist operation, you'd do more to publish and "seek truth" in other countries. You won't find a single story about Russia that's damaging. Bottom line for me? I think the US believes he's a Putin sympathizer. Or worse, he's a Russian asset.

onetimemanytime 7y ago
Personally I also think that he is now a Russian asset or whatever its called. Maybe he needed their help and they were glad to welcome them into their arms, but that's besides the point. No love lost between him and 3 letter agencies BUT, as I said they could have charged him with a lot of other things that carry a long prison sentence.
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  What evidence is there he’s a Russian asset?
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    He released completely true but negative information about Hillary Clinton. That seems to be enough for some people.
  - rfugger 7y ago
    He seems to have published no embarrassing or damaging information on Russia (at least in latter years?), and seemed willing to serve their purposes when it came to the 2016 election, by releasing hacked Democratic Party emails timed to do maximum damage to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Prior to that, I had considered Wikileaks a brave experiment in radical transparency. Since then, I've considered Wikileaks a somewhat biased source. The truth is the truth, yes, but every truth is partial, and context matters. "Asset" is perhaps too strong a word, but "useful idiot" may apply, or "the enemy of my enemy".
- rfugger 7y ago
  Or maybe he was threatened.
roenxi 7y ago
> My issue with this whole WikiLeaks thing is that they are clearly a Russian operation that posed as a "truth seeker" early on and then started to steer their operation 100% at damaging the US The theory here seems to be that Russia is perfidiously undermining the US by exposing the truth to the cold light of day, by nefariously revealing primary sources with limited editing. I'm not sure I'd rate that as the most successful strategy in their playbook, but maybe it'll work. If it were me, I'd go with more traditional propaganda. That is not a good theory.
- ajross 7y ago
  > nefariously revealing primary sources Russia deliberately targeted, hacked and stole the email of a US presidential campaign manager. What kind of crazy spin is this? Whether Assange specifically should be culpable here is an open question. Whether the act was criminal is not.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    Nobody disputed that the emails were genuine. What if Russians had just released them via RT - or indeed the New York Times? It is still a story even if the source is shady. Even more impressive if the Russians are known to be involved. Releasing the emails via Wikileaks isn't evidence of anything. Someone as well resourced as the Russian Intelligence service could have released them on The Pirate Bay and had a similar effect. On my original point, Russia does not have a scary scheme to reveal the truth to unwitting Americans via Wikileaks. The idea is absurd.
    - ajross 7y ago
      > shady There's no "shade" here. It's straight up criminal. He got phished, deliberately, via a targetted human engineering operation. Again I just don't understand the desire to hide the underlying crime here. It's possible to be very uneasy with the direct prosecution of Assange for this stuff, to view Manning as having been unfairly targetted, but to also recognize that there's a really serious underlying crime here that we need to address. But no, everyone wants to pick sides here and stand with... Putin. Seriously?
rudiv 7y ago
>My issue with this whole WikiLeaks thing is that they are clearly a Russian operation that posed as a "truth seeker" early on and then started to steer their operation 100% at damaging the US. If you're truly a journalist operation, you'd do more to publish and "seek truth" in other countries. You won't find a single story about Russia that's damaging. Were you aware of Wikileaks prior to 2016? I can't help but think that you're unaware of their work prior to the 2016 US election cycle. Granted, you mention Chelsea Manning. But the idea that Wikileaks was a shell organisation for Russian intelligence all the way back from 2006 beggars belief, if only because of the diverse range of sources they have received material from. Regarding Guccifer 2.0, I've seen the information linking that account to Russian intelligence, but I haven't seen any evidence that Assange himself is suspected of being Guccifer and essentially orchestrating the conversation(s) between Guccifer and Wikileaks. Could you share your information with the rest of us?
- behringer 7y ago
  How does one know propaganda works? When everyone on the internet starts spewing the same line at the same time.
  - rudiv 7y ago
    Are you addressing me? Or is that just for the benefit of other readers?
andy_ppp 7y ago
You’ve just made up loads of stuff with no evidence haven’t you? We should consider Collateral Murder much more damaging than the release of the video, the act itself has caused much more harm to your beloved American interests.
- 420codebro 7y ago
  Fuck those journalists in that clip. I’m so fucking tired of the virtue signaling around this. Don’t hang around armed fighters when an American Bradley unit is getting fucked up 2 blocks away and apaches are circling. Common sense. Or rather the lack there of.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  What is collateral murder?
  - andy_ppp 7y ago
    https://youtu.be/HfvFpT-iypw https://youtu.be/HfvFpT-iypw A video some claim was leaked by Chelsea Manning (to Wikileaks) showing what I believe to be war crimes by US military.
- lixtra 7y ago
  > We should consider Collateral Murder much more damaging I think it was right to release the video. But to me, with no military experience and and non-native speaker, it seemed totally possible that the pilots took the reporters for combatants. I wouldn’t want to judge them. In comparison, I found the video of a cop shooting a fellow American crying in fear with an automatic rifle because he was reaching for his pants much more disturbing. Or the autistic kid tazed to death in the shower.
  - astazangasta 7y ago
    What about when they came back to shoot people who were helping the wounded? Also, "it was a war zone" is a shitty excuse given that the war was illegal and we had no business positioning helicopters over civilian marketplaces in Iraq, period.
hutzlibu 7y ago
Assange a russian asset? Why is he not in russia then? For plausability he let himself being locked in for years? Being the selfish narcisst that he is? Not likely. Assange is a kind of internet-anarchist. He published some kind of manifest a while ago. Crypto-anarchism. Basically the idea (if memory serves right) that people need crypto etc. to balance the power with total governments. So he really is not a supporter of the russian government, except maybe as a counter to the US. He hates the US as super power number one, so thats why he might accepted help from the enemies of his enemy, but Wikileaks also published documents about russia.

lettergram 7y ago

He’s not a U.S. citizen: > As part of the Constitution, the First Amendment stands as the supreme law of the land. First amendment doesn’t apply, because the U.S. doesn’t apply the bill of rights to non-citizens. The “crime” also wasn’t committed on U.S. soil.

jedberg 7y ago
> First amendment doesn’t apply, because the U.S. doesn’t apply the bill of rights to non-citizens. That's absolutely not true. Precedent has been set multiple times granting constitutional protections to anyone on US soil, no matter how they got here. So sure, he isn't protected now, because he's not here, but the moment he lands on US soil he's protected by the first amendment. There is no way they would charge him if they didn't think it could stand up under the first amendment.
- eropple 7y ago
  I am not a lawyer, and I'd love to hear from somebody who's a con law lawyer, but I'm not certain that the First Amendment is retroactive to activities that did not happen on American soil--and, going forward, it's completely within the government's power to get a gag order as pertains to an ongoing case.
- viivaux 7y ago
  > There is no way they would charge him if they didn't think it could stand up under the first amendment. Your comment reminds me of this one from 2012, spoken with utter confidence at the time: > Your comment again puts forward the idea that the political forces aligned against Assange are so great that no amount of critical thinking, due process, or countervailing concern for the rights of victims can apply: it is, to use your word, "obvious" that the case isn't about "rape", but about an undocumented (and undisclosed) but nevertheless clear and immediate effort to haul Assange to the US and try him with espionage. No court in Europe seems to view the situation that way. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407950
- pps43 7y ago

kstenerud 7y ago

Here are the main points of the indictment: a. They assert that he is not a journalist, and therefore cannot be protected by the first amendment. b. They limited the indictment to the publication of papers that contained unredacted names of people who were put in danger by the publication of their names (this is important to their argument against him being a journalist). c. They include conspiracy charges for his direct aid to Manning in hacking DOD computers (providing a live CD, instructing on how to use the tools, tech support, etc). d. They were too slow in bringing the charges, and are past the 5 year statute of limitations on federal crimes. Because of this, their only hope of success is to upgrade the charges to "acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries", which has an 8 year statute of limitations instead of the normal 5. The hurdles they must pass in order to succeed in this prosecution are: 1. They must successfully argue that he is not a journalist, or was not acting as a journalist at the time. 2. They must argue that the federal crimes he's accused of also constitute an act of terrorism under section 2332b (which gives the test in subsection (g)(5): "is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct") in order for the indictment to be valid under an 8 year statute of limitations rather than 5. 3. They must also argue the statute of limitations clause in the UK in order to successfully extradite Assange (with a possible second chance via Sweden). This could very well blow up in the DOJ's face if the courts side with Assange, because there's a good chance that it will further gut the espionage act, which is likely the main reason why the Obama administration didn't bother even when they had a stronger position of not needing to tack on terrorism charges.

clord 7y ago
> "is calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct" That sounds so broad. Doesn’t it include lobbyists? voters who threaten to vote out a party if they don’t do as they like? What if the government is trump 2.0 and is acting tyrannical? What are the limitations?
- kstenerud 7y ago
  That clause can only be used to upgrade something that is already a federal crime on its own.

devoply 7y ago

American cockeyed courts usually side with the DOJ when it comes to foreigners. It might not nothing. If they can get him to the US he's screwed despite the shoddy case against him.

austincheney 7y ago

I agree that he is not a journalist and the charges are serious, but the legal case here feels weak to me. They should have just let Sweden have him.