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This is a government that deported it's own citizens asking to remove encryption for "user safety". Okay.
by truculent 7y ago
This is a government that deported it's own citizens asking to remove encryption for "user safety". Okay.
- sneak 7y agoLet’s also not forget the illegal imprisonment of Assange without trial for the last few years in London, and now his appalling treatment in Belmarsh.
- loriverkutya 7y agoYou mean in the Embassy of Ecuador in London? That’s hardly a prison.
- jonnypotty 7y agoAnywhere you are unable to leave is a prison.
- parent5446 7y agoQuite the generalization there. At this rate my own house is a prison because I'm too lazy to be able to leave it.
- mam2 7y agoI think you broke the record on how much one can both look so retarded, and sure of his own intelligence with a single sentence. I thought the concept of of freedom was learnt in primary school but if not you should check it out its a nice one.
- dang 7y agoPersonal attacks and name-calling like this will get you banned here. Please don't! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mam2 7y agoYeah no.. imo calling people out is part of life. You cant just be nice to everyone when one is a troll
- emayljames 7y agoBeing voluntarily able to leave and not being able to voluntarily leave are not the same thing, just like being too lazy to leave your house is not the same as having the western stasi threatening you to leave.
- parent5446 7y agoIf the police are outside your house waiting to take you to jail, you are not yet in jail. Your house does not count as jail just because the police are waiting outside to take you there. It's really not that hard of a concept to understand. If you walk outside, are arrested, and brought to jail, then you're in jail.
- trothamel 7y agoAssange was able to leave whenever he wanted to. He would then have been arrested and given a trial, but it was his choice to avoid those.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago"They were free to leave Gulags whenever they wanted. They would then have been shot, but it was their choice to avoid the bullet"
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoI’m not a huge Assange fan, but his conditions there were NOT luxurious.
- nashashmi 7y agoAt one point the Ecuadorian embassy put restrictions on him.
- ben_w 7y agoAFAIK the restriction was “stop using embassy property to interfere in other people’s elections” and “you need a wash”, “clean up after your cat”, and “we don’t like that you skateboarding at night, playing loud music and walking around in [your] underwear“. I’ve not seen any corroboration for the claim he smeared excrement on the walls, but that was in the same article.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoFrom what I've heard on the matters and comparing the way Assange looks and talks before and after his time in the embassy, it appears he developed psychological issues.
- ben_w 7y agoOn that point I totally agree, despite not buying into his story/justification at all.
- ben_w 7y agoWould you prefer that the British police entered the Ecuadorean embassy without the permission of the Ecuadorean government in order to extradite him lawfully in accordance with a lawful court order to not America to face trial for not clearly political espionage claims, especially when he would not be facing the prospect of up to the death penalty and in fact would probably have been released by now anyway?
- dang 7y agoThis is the sort of adjacent controversy, a.k.a. flamewar tangent, that the site guidelines ask you not to introduce into a thread. The problem is that the topic has been gone over so often that there is no longer any curiosity in it. Curious readers move on, so only partisans—those who passionately identify with one side or the other—show up to comment. All they do is recite the same arguments that have been made countless times before, using stronger and nastier language against each other. We end up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21864054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21864054. Since HN's guiding principle is intellectual curiosity, it follows that once an ongoing story has reached a saturation level of repetition, it's off topic for Hacker News until significant new information emerges. Once that happens, discussion has a chance to attract the curious again because there's something new for the mind to sink its teeth into. Actually, one can drop the word "controversial" from the above: any story is off topic once it has been repeated to saturation level. But it's only the controversial stories that people feel compelled to keep bringing up past that point. The saturation threshold for repetition is far lower than people who feel strongly about a story think it is. That is, curious readers get bored and tune out far sooner than partisans imagine. It's not that such topics are unimportant. Usually they have large importance, which is why people feel strongly about them. Rather, this rule has to do with the HN community's limited ability to function within its values. Once we get out of the functional range of curiosity, the needle goes into the red, and discussion reduces to two sides firing at each other from fixed positions. It's not in anyone's interest for HN to host such degenerate discussions, because the more we do that here, the more we condition the site to have more of this, instead of the curious conversation it actually exists for. Keep in mind that flamewars are the default end state of an internet forum; curious conversation is not. So they aren't sideshows that have no effect on the main attraction—they are actively poisoning it and hastening its decline. Each of us has at least one topic that activates us and throws us out of the curiosity range, so the only long-term solution is to learn as a community to manage these reactions consciously in ourselves, and not let activation energy propel us mechanically into posting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sneak 7y agoI apologize for accidentally breaking the rules, and I will endeavor to follow them more closely. I hadn’t realized how deeply effective the intelligence efforts to re-polarize people on this topic had been, and walked into a minefield entirely on accident. I thought my comment was uncontroversial, but I was mistaken. Sorry for the inconvenience.
- vixen99 7y agoPlease, it's its own citizens.
- truculent 7y agoDeported it is own citizens ️ Is there an edit button?
- dredmorbius 7y agoEdit window is 2 hours. Live with the scars.
- FpUser 7y agoIt is/was never about safety. It is beyond me why would anyone ever swallow such BS. Every government be it democratic or not wants control, plain and simple. The more the better (for them).