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No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a com

No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine. It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play. To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling? At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. So, who knows?

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
>The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. The US government claims this, but it's not been proven. >At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. This is just more Russiagate nonsense: https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the-dnc-emails-that-showed-they-34778084.png https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the... >To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling? There are no charges. There never were any charges. There was an investigation and that's as far as it went. >UPDATE GREAT NEWS: Swedish prosecutors are about to announce the dropping of the investigation into Julian Assange on sexual offence allegations. There never were any charges and the allegations were always nonsense, as detailed in the below article I wrote a month ago: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-charges-julian-assange-sweden-espionage-charges-julian-assange-usa/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-char...
- fossuser 5y ago
  I think you’re overconfident in what you believe to be true based on the evidence that exists. The Russian bit can be politically inconvenient for you and yet also be true.
  - pstuart 5y ago
    It is interesting that apparently the GOP's email server was hacked as well, but nothing was ever released publicly. I'm no fan at all of the DNC but if "all politicians are dirty" is a thing, then why did no dirt spill out from the other side? Was it more valuable as kompromat?
    - zionic 5y ago
      Highly misleading. The DNC’s mail servers got hacked and they got everything done The “RNC hack” was one guy’s old laptop with a years out of date local outlook db. Not even in the same league.
      - pstuart 5y ago
        > The “RNC hack” was one guy’s old laptop with a years out of date local outlook db. You have proof of that? This says otherwise. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-... I'm replying for the sake of challenging your statement but I know it's likely not possible to have an honest discussion about it because you appear to be taking a partisan stance. I have no love for either party, and even if I did love the Dems, I'd be more than happy to acknowledge any and all failings of theirs. Can you say the same thing?
        ta2162 5y ago
        That article literally agrees with the GP that the RNC was not hacked but the DNC was...
      - pstuart 5y ago
        What do you mean by "they got everything done"?
- philjohn 5y ago
  The bar for extradition doesn't require the US to prove it - the only place they need to prove it is in court when he's in the US. And "Russiagate" is a bit more nuanced than that - Wikileaks claimed to have GOP emails as well but for some reason never released them.
  - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    >Wikileaks claimed to have GOP emails as well but for some reason never released them. [citation needed]
    - extra88 5y ago
      I haven't heard that claim before either. The Wikipedia sources for the DNC hack article [0] say the RNC wasn't successfully hacked. "GOP" refers to the entire Republican Party so I suppose there could be emails from a different Republican origin than the RNC. > intelligence organizations additionally concluded Russia attempted to hack the Republican National Committee (RNC) as well as the DNC but were prevented by security defenses on the RNC network. Searching for a source for the GOP claim did remind me of internal WikiLeaks messages from 2015 showing at least Assange's preference for the GOP over Hilary Clinton. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak#United_States_intelligence_conclusions [1] https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks-election-clinton-trump/
    - slg 5y ago
      Emails specifically? I'm not sure if that has ever been confirmed, but this is directly from Assange[1]: >“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” he said Friday, according to The Washington Post. >“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Assange said. When it comes to leaks about Democrats, everything is worth publishing. When it comes to leaks about Republicans, it needs to "controversial" to be worth publishing. [1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/293453-assange-wikileaks-trump-info-no-worse-than-him https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...
- ozfive 5y ago
  >The US government claims this, but it's not been proven. Well now with their only witness coming out and saying that he lied about the whole thing and is receiving immunity for his testimony they've got shit-all.
johnchristopher 5y ago
> At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent. You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships. These initiatives are doomed to be used at some points as tools against healthy democracies/open states. edit: the passage > Among the few who saw the threat clearly was computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who, in 2010, warned the public of a new danger: WikiLeaks. At the time, free speech advocates were hailing WikiLeaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, as defenders of government transparency. Their lionization of the leaker organization was largely due to frustration with the criminal impunity of the Bush administration. In February 2010, soldier Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes by sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks then published online. The emphasis on civilian victims led human rights advocates to believe that WikiLeaks would prove a formidable opponent for autocratic regimes. But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them: >> The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn’t have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does. >> If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. WikiLeaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites. >> This is the world we are headed to, it seems, since people are unable to resist becoming organized according to the digital architectures that connect us. The only way out is to change the architecture. > Social media sites didn’t change the architecture. Instead, over the course of the 2010s, the architecture changed us. The calculus of post–Cold War politics—that democracy spreads through engagement, that technology enhances freedom—was reversed. Hostile states used digital technology not only to attack their own citizens but to attempt to transform foreign democracies into dictatorships. We saw this with Russian influence operations in elections in the United States, France, and in the Brexit referendum, among others.10 The social media corporations that had once bragged of the internet’s liberating power now helped the hijackers of democracy. Networks like Facebook abetted, whether intentionally or not, the “iron triangles” of organized crime, state corruption, and corporate criminality, and they were aided by complicit Western actors content to let their own countries die while turning a profit.
Miner49er 5y ago
> No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. Yeah, but that's not stopping the US for charging him with the Espionage act for it anyway. Most of his charges are for leaking/seeking secret info. The charge for assisting Manning is 5 potential years of the 175 he faces.
h_anna_h 5y ago
His crime was that he ran hashcat https://blog.erratasec.com/2019/04/assange-indicted-for-breaking-password.html https://blog.erratasec.com/2019/04/assange-indicted-for-brea... > Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine. They would just invent something else.
FireBeyond 5y ago
> It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play. To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling? I think that, even in and of itself, if a nation state intelligence agency is attempting a smear campaign or outright character assassination, and the very best they can manage is "may have had sex that was consensual but unprotected without agreement"? That's one hell of a sad state of affairs for that intelligence agency. Like beyond "never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity", "government incompetence" cliches. Like amazingly pathetic. I can't fathom that being the line they'd go for. "Sir, we came up with a plan to destroy his character in the public's eye!" "Great, what is it?" "Well, uhh, he had a bit of a threesome-like affair, and he may not have used a condom even though he said he would... we can spin that so well that everyone will disown him!" "..."
- freeflight 5y ago
  > I can't fathom that being the line they'd go for. That's literally the line they went for, thanks to Snowden we do know Five Eyes runs programs exactly for these kinds of character assassinations [0]. Or why do you think we had all these amazing headlines about how badly Assange allegedly treats his cat and how dirty his bathroom is? How is that of relevance to anybody on a global scale? It's all pure ad-hominem to keep the narrative about him as a person, and not what he actually did and blew the whistle on. [0] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
raxxorrax 5y ago
> It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play. Not really and not after they faked witness reports. It is completely in line with what was published and there was no alternative in acquiring this information, which there certainly being enough public interest.

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

>The crime he’s charged with is that he was willing to (and I think did?) assist in breaking into a computer system to get the docs. I think under the CFAA. They have communication records of this because the person he was talking to was working for the USG. The US government claims this, but it's not been proven. >At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. This is just more Russiagate nonsense: https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the-dnc-emails-that-showed-they-34778084.png https://pics.me.me/russiagate-explained-wikileaks-posted-the... >To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling? There are no charges. There never were any charges. There was an investigation and that's as far as it went. >UPDATE GREAT NEWS: Swedish prosecutors are about to announce the dropping of the investigation into Julian Assange on sexual offence allegations. There never were any charges and the allegations were always nonsense, as detailed in the below article I wrote a month ago: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-charges-julian-assange-sweden-espionage-charges-julian-assange-usa/ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2017/05/no-rape-char...

fossuser 5y ago
I think you’re overconfident in what you believe to be true based on the evidence that exists. The Russian bit can be politically inconvenient for you and yet also be true.
- pstuart 5y ago
  It is interesting that apparently the GOP's email server was hacked as well, but nothing was ever released publicly. I'm no fan at all of the DNC but if "all politicians are dirty" is a thing, then why did no dirt spill out from the other side? Was it more valuable as kompromat?
  - zionic 5y ago
    Highly misleading. The DNC’s mail servers got hacked and they got everything done The “RNC hack” was one guy’s old laptop with a years out of date local outlook db. Not even in the same league.
    - pstuart 5y ago
      > The “RNC hack” was one guy’s old laptop with a years out of date local outlook db. You have proof of that? This says otherwise. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/obama-russia-election-... I'm replying for the sake of challenging your statement but I know it's likely not possible to have an honest discussion about it because you appear to be taking a partisan stance. I have no love for either party, and even if I did love the Dems, I'd be more than happy to acknowledge any and all failings of theirs. Can you say the same thing?
      - ta2162 5y ago
        That article literally agrees with the GP that the RNC was not hacked but the DNC was...
    - pstuart 5y ago
      What do you mean by "they got everything done"?
philjohn 5y ago
The bar for extradition doesn't require the US to prove it - the only place they need to prove it is in court when he's in the US. And "Russiagate" is a bit more nuanced than that - Wikileaks claimed to have GOP emails as well but for some reason never released them.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  >Wikileaks claimed to have GOP emails as well but for some reason never released them. [citation needed]
  - extra88 5y ago
    I haven't heard that claim before either. The Wikipedia sources for the DNC hack article [0] say the RNC wasn't successfully hacked. "GOP" refers to the entire Republican Party so I suppose there could be emails from a different Republican origin than the RNC. > intelligence organizations additionally concluded Russia attempted to hack the Republican National Committee (RNC) as well as the DNC but were prevented by security defenses on the RNC network. Searching for a source for the GOP claim did remind me of internal WikiLeaks messages from 2015 showing at least Assange's preference for the GOP over Hilary Clinton. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak#United_States_intelligence_conclusions [1] https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks-election-clinton-trump/
  - slg 5y ago
    Emails specifically? I'm not sure if that has ever been confirmed, but this is directly from Assange[1]: >“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” he said Friday, according to The Washington Post. >“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Assange said. When it comes to leaks about Democrats, everything is worth publishing. When it comes to leaks about Republicans, it needs to "controversial" to be worth publishing. [1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/293453-assange-wikileaks-trump-info-no-worse-than-him https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...
ozfive 5y ago
>The US government claims this, but it's not been proven. Well now with their only witness coming out and saying that he lied about the whole thing and is receiving immunity for his testimony they've got shit-all.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> At some point Russia was also using Wikileaks as a place to target the USG with some plausible deniability and Assange’s personal anti-US politics became a corrupting influence too. There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent. You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships. These initiatives are doomed to be used at some points as tools against healthy democracies/open states. edit: the passage > Among the few who saw the threat clearly was computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who, in 2010, warned the public of a new danger: WikiLeaks. At the time, free speech advocates were hailing WikiLeaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, as defenders of government transparency. Their lionization of the leaker organization was largely due to frustration with the criminal impunity of the Bush administration. In February 2010, soldier Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes by sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks then published online. The emphasis on civilian victims led human rights advocates to believe that WikiLeaks would prove a formidable opponent for autocratic regimes. But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them: >> The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn’t have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does. >> If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. WikiLeaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites. >> This is the world we are headed to, it seems, since people are unable to resist becoming organized according to the digital architectures that connect us. The only way out is to change the architecture. > Social media sites didn’t change the architecture. Instead, over the course of the 2010s, the architecture changed us. The calculus of post–Cold War politics—that democracy spreads through engagement, that technology enhances freedom—was reversed. Hostile states used digital technology not only to attack their own citizens but to attempt to transform foreign democracies into dictatorships. We saw this with Russian influence operations in elections in the United States, France, and in the Brexit referendum, among others.10 The social media corporations that had once bragged of the internet’s liberating power now helped the hijackers of democracy. Networks like Facebook abetted, whether intentionally or not, the “iron triangles” of organized crime, state corruption, and corporate criminality, and they were aided by complicit Western actors content to let their own countries die while turning a profit.

Miner49er 5y ago

> No, that’s not illegal for somebody without a clearance. Yeah, but that's not stopping the US for charging him with the Espionage act for it anyway. Most of his charges are for leaking/seeking secret info. The charge for assisting Manning is 5 potential years of the 175 he faces.

h_anna_h 5y ago

His crime was that he ran hashcat https://blog.erratasec.com/2019/04/assange-indicted-for-breaking-password.html https://blog.erratasec.com/2019/04/assange-indicted-for-brea... > Had he just been accepting docs as he was initially that would have been fine. They would just invent something else.

FireBeyond 5y ago

> It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play. To what extent were the sex related charges against him political or flared up by nation state meddling? I think that, even in and of itself, if a nation state intelligence agency is attempting a smear campaign or outright character assassination, and the very best they can manage is "may have had sex that was consensual but unprotected without agreement"? That's one hell of a sad state of affairs for that intelligence agency. Like beyond "never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity", "government incompetence" cliches. Like amazingly pathetic. I can't fathom that being the line they'd go for. "Sir, we came up with a plan to destroy his character in the public's eye!" "Great, what is it?" "Well, uhh, he had a bit of a threesome-like affair, and he may not have used a condom even though he said he would... we can spin that so well that everyone will disown him!" "..."

freeflight 5y ago
> I can't fathom that being the line they'd go for. That's literally the line they went for, thanks to Snowden we do know Five Eyes runs programs exactly for these kinds of character assassinations [0]. Or why do you think we had all these amazing headlines about how badly Assange allegedly treats his cat and how dirty his bathroom is? How is that of relevance to anybody on a global scale? It's all pure ad-hominem to keep the narrative about him as a person, and not what he actually did and blew the whistle on. [0] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

raxxorrax 5y ago

> It’s hard to know the truth here though when nation state interests are at play. Not really and not after they faked witness reports. It is completely in line with what was published and there was no alternative in acquiring this information, which there certainly being enough public interest.