> Via instant messenger, Manning asked Assange whether Wikileaks could crack NTLM hashes. Assange said (paraphrasing), "Yeah, we can probably do that." Manning

> Via instant messenger, Manning asked Assange whether Wikileaks could crack NTLM hashes. Assange said (paraphrasing), "Yeah, we can probably do that." Manning sent the hashes. Assange said he'd work on cracking them. A few days later, Manning asked if the hashes had been cracked. Assange replied that there hadn't been any progress. > End of story. That's a federal crime. No hashes were cracked, let alone sent back to Manning. No additional access was gained. He simply agreed to accept the hashes from Manning, which were freely offered. That actually sounds like the crime of criminal conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(criminal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(criminal) > In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime at some time in the future.... > [US] Conspiracy law usually does not require proof of specific intent by the defendants to injure any specific person to establish an illegal agreement. Instead, usually the law requires only that the conspirators have agreed to engage in a certain illegal act. > Under most U.S. laws, for a person to be convicted of conspiracy, not only must he or she agree to commit a crime, but at least one of the conspirators must commit an overt act (the actus reus) in furtherance of the crime.[24] You'd crack the hash as part of a plan (i.e. a conspiracy) to get unauthorized access to a computer system (a crime), and exchanging the hash is the actus reus. There are very good reasons why conspiracy is a crime, and it's very similar to other crimes like attempted murder. If someone plans to kill you, but they're caught before taking their shot, should they go free because no harm was actually done?