"At dynomight.net we don’t like to answer questions. Instead, we prefer to replace them with more abstract questions that we also don’t answer."
So, to summarize, Assange is a dick, but the real problem is the deliberate ambiguity of the statute (Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States), giving the government unreasonable powers of suppression.
I'm not holding out high hopes our current SCOTUS will either remove the ambiguity or reduce the unreasonable power to suppress.
Thanks, and I also appreciate the link to the statute.
Great write up man, really appreciated. I really hope there is some clarification of the act, which I knew was bad but not THAT bad, good lord, but I think you are right that unless the Supremes just strike it down as unenforceable there won't be much hope of improvement anytime soon. It will just be too much easier to muddle along with the current law and not worry about fixing it until people lose interest.
Conspiracy in England is considerably broader than the US provision you've cited. Here there is no requirement to take any further act beyond the mere agreement to offend. And the maximum sentence is the same as the offence one conspires to commit, potentially up to life in prison. Indeed, it is sufficient to agree to offend, conditional on some triggering event, even if that event is very unlikely.
Indeed, you don't even need to agree with anyone to offend. It is a (separate) offence to do an act capable of encouraging or assisting someone else to offend, where you intend to encourage/assist their conduct, being reckless as to whether that conduct would amount to an offence. (s.44 of the Serious Crime Act 2007.)
Many laws are like this. Doing virtually anything can amount to terrorism. Virtually any lie in relation to any kind of property can amount to fraud. And the slightest encouragement of someone else doing those things makes one an accessory to those offences.
Despite all this, these overbroad laws tend to be wielded with reasonable care. (And here the government need not fear its Acts being disapplied by the courts.) Ultimately I think legal and political culture matters a lot more than the precise scope of legal prohibitions. But perhaps this is complacent.
--
An appendix to the appendix: you don't go into the lurid details, but Assange's case is a landmark case in English criminal law, read by all law students, on the question of whether and when a deception will undermine a victim's consent to sexual activity under the general definition of consent. It's probably the most hotly debated area of criminal law since the judgment came out in 2011.
Ironically, the sequels to that case have resulted in the same kind of over-breadth as you notice about espionage. In England it is now legally viable that if A and B have a drunken one-night stand, in which B was under the mistaken (but unstated) apprehension that A would wear a condom, and A did not, then A can have committed rape.
Very interesting! When I started looking into the legal wrangling in the UK, it was frighteningly complicated, and I decided better to not even try to understand it. But I must say that I'm surprised there were rulings on the actual substance of the allegations in Sweden, rather than just procedural questions like if Sweden had had standing to request extradition or had followed all the rules while doing so, etc.
Nice and clear writeup! Thanks for doing the distillation work and sharing with the world.
I'd just like to point out that mental state is an ontologically important category in law. In particular, it looks like proving conspiracy requires convincing a jury that the act was done "with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States."
So, it's not as bad as giving prosecutors the ability to simply argue an action as being potentially harmful. IMHO, with the intent clause, it seems like a broadly reasonable definition of conspiracy. Granted, it does seem like focusing on harm to "the U.S." lets us trade off public good for other potentially harmed interests, but "public good" is fuzzy enough itself that I'm not sure what a better term would be.
You got me wondering about base rates and incentive structures, though. Like, defining espionage as anything the president decides to be espionage clearly places way too much power in the presidency, but how does USC 18 change the incentive structures relative to there not being USC 18? And what do we want those structures to look like in the first place?
Granted, law is mostly reactive, so proactively designing incentive structures is more in the mind of a policy maker than a lawyer, I'd guess.
An interesting writeup that nonetheless repeats baseless smears of Assange that have been long since debunked (link below).
Most of what you write about the Swedish debacle is also wrong or misleading (for instance, the investigation was dropped for the final time in November 2019, not "2020"). In Nils Melzer's book on the "investigation", a diplomatic assurance against US refoulment was not only possible but quite necessary, as the Swedish government was long exposed as a participant in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. Furthermore, Sweden collaborated with Britain to keep the case alive, even in spite of the reluctance of the former—so much for the fabled "Doctrine of Specialty". Assange was, in sum, wholly correct to resist extradition to Sweden. I recommend that you read the book, "The Trial of Julian Assange", in full.
I'm happy to consider any concrete corrections/errors. It would be helpful if you would point these out explicitly. (I'd also appreciate it if you could tone down the implications of bad faith.)
Regarding when the charges were dropped in Sweden, I think I agree that my statement wasn't as precise as it could be. I'll correct "The rape investigation was briefly resumed and then re-dropped in 2020." to "The rape investigation was briefly resumed and then re-dropped in 2019 and the statute of limitations expired in 2020."
Regarding Assange's requested guarantee regarding extradition from Sweden to the US, do I understand correctly that you claiming that (1) Assange only requested a guarantee that Sweden would not send him to the US as part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, not the normal extradition process (2) Sweden's constitution allowed them to guarantee this?
"It would be helpful if you would point these out explicitly."
The truth is that there are too many to name, which is why I provided Johnstone's article, as it provides a tidy list, and Melzer's book. But I will focus on one more specific mistake for the purposes of this reply. Regarding the Afghan War Logs:
Assange did redact, and this was covered in the extradition proceedings of 2020. They were not completely redacted. Before publication, Assange withheld 15,000 files and asked the Pentagon to provide guidelines to provide further protection to sources. (1) The Pentagon refused to help. So any "risks", real or imaginary, to those sources is thus on them. The testimony linked below also makes clear that the redaction process changed to be far more absolute in the Iraq War Logs, contrary to your claim that neither logs were redacted.
You further implied that the Taliban used the logs to hunt down those sources, perhaps that some were killed. They claimed so, but they clearly lied. The US could not tie a single death to the logs. This was covered in Chelsea Manning's court-martial. (2)
On Sweden: Assange wanted a guarantee of non-refoulment, period. Extraordinary rendition was illegal even then, which was why Sweden paid restitution to torture victims they handed over to the CIA (3). As for the "constitution", Nils Melzer points out that the legalism of this framing was a red herring (Chapter 7):
"According to the Swedish authorities, no guarantee of non-extradition can be given so long as the United States has not made an extradition request. Moreover, extradition decisions are a judicial matter for the courts, in which the government cannot interfere. After all, Sweden is a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law!
While this response may seem convincing at first glance, it has no basis in either law or practice. In reality, such ‘diplomatic assurances’ are a standard instrument of international relations and are widely used around the world, especially in connection with the extradition and deportation of foreigners. The extraditing or deporting state requests written assurances from the destination or transit state that the person to be extradited will not be executed, tortured or otherwise mistreated under any circumstances, that their procedural rights are guaranteed and that – in accordance with the universal principle of non-refoulement – they will not be extradited to a third state in which their human rights protection is not guaranteed. In practice, such non-refoulement guarantees are routinely given, naturally without requiring a prior extradition request by the potentially unsafe third state."
The underlying point here is that extraditions are inherently political, and that final say is up to the Swedish executive, not the courts. Further, Sweden was obviously an "unsafe third state"; Sweden's actual behavior was consistently *deferential* to Britain and the United States. So once again, Assange was wholly correct to resist extradition. That's as much as I can provide you in the space of an internet comment. The rest is up to you.
Thanks. Let me clarify a couple things. Regarding the redaction of the Iraq War Logs, I'm able to confirm that WikiLeaks claimed in 2010 that it asked the Pentagon to redact and the Pentagon refused. The Pentagon denies this, but I find the claim pretty credible, to be honest—The Iraq War Logs were released after the Afghan War Logs which WikiLeaks took brutal criticism for releasing unredacted.
Assange continued to [edit: publish] without proper redaction also after this, e.g. the social security and credit card numbers of democratic donors in 2016. So at best this would invalidate a claim that "Assange never redacted anything". But I don't mean to claim that. I mean to claim that he often did not redact and I think this is clearly true.
Regarding the Taliban, I said they were looking through the documents for names. That's true, they did say that. Yes, the government has not been able to establish that this led to deaths in any particular cases, though they claim many people disappeared—and if they had been killed this would be hard to establish. In some sense it doesn't matter if this actually happened or not—I believe that Amnesty International was correct to say that publishing these names put people at risk. My statement is correct as written.
Regarding extradition, do you have any more neutral / credible sources? Everything I've read said that (1) Assange wanted a full guarantee that he could not be extradited and (2) this was not constitutionally possible. Sure, Sweden could have "promised" not to extradite him, but with their constitution, such a promise was unenforceable and no future government would have been bound by the promise.
1.) Assange did not "leak" anything. He simply received and published what he received from his source, as every journalist does. He himself is a journalist and a publisher. His sources, like Chelsea Manning, are the leakers.
2.) "I believe that Amnesty International was correct to say that publishing these names put people at risk. My statement is correct as written."
No, it is not correct. If we agree that there is no evidence of any physical harm as a result of the Manning publications, the claim of "risk" becomes all the more specious. After all, it is essentially unfalsifiable. Your argument also suffers from internal inconsistency, because you then say: "it doesn't matter if this actually happened or not." So your statement is "correct", but it doesn't matter? The US, for its part, seeks to gaol him for 175 years precisely on the basis of such "risk", for what amounts to a disagreeable editorial decision.
3.) Unfortunately, Melzer's book is the only *critical* appraisal of the "investigation" as a whole. He is the former UN Rapporteur on Torture, and initially rejected Assange's request for an investigation. His read of the case at the beginning was much like yours, and changed for the better as it became clear the Swedish government was dealing in bad faith. But once again—extraditions are inherently political, and Sweden was well within its powers to provide such an assurance in spite of its "constitution". Clearly politics were the top priority when they collaborated with the CIA in 2001. So much for their precious constitution.
(1) OK, edited. (2) I think there's a pretty clear distinction between (a) risk, (b) that risk actually playing out as harm, and (c) that risk actually playing out as harm and there being evidence that this happened. You seem to be suggesting that concept (a) is not a useful or meaningful and that that the fact that (c) is false means that (a) is false. I don't agree with either of these things.
James Lewis QC, one of the British dogs on the US prosecution team, had this to say about the so-called claims of risk (1):
"The US is aware of sources, whose redacted names and other identifying information was contained in classified documents published by Wikileaks, who subsequently disappeared, *although the US can't prove at this point that their disappearance was the result of being outed by Wikileaks."*
There you have it. After 14 years (!) since the Manning publications, the US openly admits that for all their bluster about the "disappearances" of their precious sources, they cannot prove a thing. The claim of "risk" in this persecution is itself a climbdown from initial claims that Wikileaks caused actual deaths, which was disproven by Chelsea Manning's court-martial. Thus, any such government claims—or any who parrot them, like Amnesty International—require corroboration if at all possible. The US has not provided any, and will never be required to do so, especially in a US court. So what I am suggesting is that those claims should be treated, quite frankly, as gaslighting lies until proven otherwise. That is not to say that there isn't a genuine conversation to be had about risking sources in journalism, but it does not apply here at all.
Assange would say that there's a public interest to know about money in politics. It's good when the public knows who buys their politicians and that's not information to be redacted.
To the extend that publishing people social security numbers puts people at risk that's due to flaws of US law.
To the extend that credit card numbers being public is a problem it's due to the Visa/Mastercard not caring enough about authorizating payments.
There are enough leaks that contain social security and credit card numbers, that institutions should update their processes to be more secure. Putting pressure on politically connected people (those who buy the politicians) to care about progress in security is a good thing.
Thanks, this brought up the "vagueness doctrine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine. I wondered if that might apply to espionage as well and I found that... Donald Trump's lawyers have been trying to dismiss his espionage charges using exactly that argument (without success so far).
"But it seems that by 2015, China and Russia had access to basically his entire cache of 1 million documents. It’s not clear how this happened and Snowden insists that he destroyed his own access before he left Hong Kong for Russia. They might have been intercepted or turned over by journalists that were given the documents by Snowden."
Why do you belive this? I've heard this claimed by USG and UKG, but have never seen substantive evidence.
I tend to believe it because of the same claims you've heard, plus numerous newspapers (often unattributed) plus my read that this is generally "believed" to have happened.
So I agree that this isn't totally conclusive, but high level government spying is always a little tricky to decode and given the multitude of different independent sources, it seems to me like it's *probably* true. That said, I personally tend to believe Snowden when he says he never gave any information to the Chinese or Russian governments. (Unlike Assange, Snowden does not have a track record of lying.) So if this happened, my guess (hope?) is that one of the "china cloned his hard drives and broke his encryption" stories is true.
Wikileaks started out with two public faces, Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg. They claimed to be five main people but keep the identity of the other three secret for OpSec purposes. It's typical for hackers to care about privacy and not be public about their identities.
In the eve of 2005, the year before Wikileaks got founded Rop Gonggrijp and Frank Rieger lay out the need for an organization like https://media.ccc.de/v/22C3-920-en-we_lost_the_war . Rop Gonggrijp was publically working on the Collateral Murder video with Wikileaks later.
Assange himself did not control the technical infrastructure of Wikileaks at that time as you see in the split when Daniel Domscheit-Berg and others left Wikileaks. They took the harddrive which according to reports contained among other a big dump from Bank of America. After that episode Wikileaks submission pipeline did not go back online which suggests that Assange didn't run that.
Assange or Wikileaks never claimed to be neutral in the way you are implying. Wikileaks promise is that it takes the side of whistleblowers. It's neutral in the sense a lawyer is neutral. A lawyer takes anybody as client even when the political opinions of the client don't match the opinions of the lawyer. Wikileaks was founded to empower whistleblowers regardless of the political leanings of the whistleblower.
If Wikileaks would have been an outlet for Russian interests, you would have expected that they wouldn't have leaked the Syrian government data when Syria was an US enemy and Russian friend.
Neither Trump nor Biden cared significantly about Julian Assange. After the Vault 7 leak, people like Mike Pompeo cared a lot about persecuting or killing Assange. Fighting the CIA who wants revenge for the Vault 7 leak costs political capital and neither Trump nor Biden wanted to spend that political capital.
Thanks for making me read the Espionage Act. Seriously. That's wild.
yes thanks for taking me back to core documents
You buried the lead. This is priceless!:
"At dynomight.net we don’t like to answer questions. Instead, we prefer to replace them with more abstract questions that we also don’t answer."
So, to summarize, Assange is a dick, but the real problem is the deliberate ambiguity of the statute (Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States), giving the government unreasonable powers of suppression.
I'm not holding out high hopes our current SCOTUS will either remove the ambiguity or reduce the unreasonable power to suppress.
Thanks, and I also appreciate the link to the statute.
That's... hmm, yes, that's a pretty fair summary.
But I really, really liked reading your long version. Thanks for writing it.!
Great write up man, really appreciated. I really hope there is some clarification of the act, which I knew was bad but not THAT bad, good lord, but I think you are right that unless the Supremes just strike it down as unenforceable there won't be much hope of improvement anytime soon. It will just be too much easier to muddle along with the current law and not worry about fixing it until people lose interest.
Conspiracy in England is considerably broader than the US provision you've cited. Here there is no requirement to take any further act beyond the mere agreement to offend. And the maximum sentence is the same as the offence one conspires to commit, potentially up to life in prison. Indeed, it is sufficient to agree to offend, conditional on some triggering event, even if that event is very unlikely.
Indeed, you don't even need to agree with anyone to offend. It is a (separate) offence to do an act capable of encouraging or assisting someone else to offend, where you intend to encourage/assist their conduct, being reckless as to whether that conduct would amount to an offence. (s.44 of the Serious Crime Act 2007.)
Many laws are like this. Doing virtually anything can amount to terrorism. Virtually any lie in relation to any kind of property can amount to fraud. And the slightest encouragement of someone else doing those things makes one an accessory to those offences.
Despite all this, these overbroad laws tend to be wielded with reasonable care. (And here the government need not fear its Acts being disapplied by the courts.) Ultimately I think legal and political culture matters a lot more than the precise scope of legal prohibitions. But perhaps this is complacent.
--
An appendix to the appendix: you don't go into the lurid details, but Assange's case is a landmark case in English criminal law, read by all law students, on the question of whether and when a deception will undermine a victim's consent to sexual activity under the general definition of consent. It's probably the most hotly debated area of criminal law since the judgment came out in 2011.
Ironically, the sequels to that case have resulted in the same kind of over-breadth as you notice about espionage. In England it is now legally viable that if A and B have a drunken one-night stand, in which B was under the mistaken (but unstated) apprehension that A would wear a condom, and A did not, then A can have committed rape.
Very interesting! When I started looking into the legal wrangling in the UK, it was frighteningly complicated, and I decided better to not even try to understand it. But I must say that I'm surprised there were rulings on the actual substance of the allegations in Sweden, rather than just procedural questions like if Sweden had had standing to request extradition or had followed all the rules while doing so, etc.
Nice and clear writeup! Thanks for doing the distillation work and sharing with the world.
I'd just like to point out that mental state is an ontologically important category in law. In particular, it looks like proving conspiracy requires convincing a jury that the act was done "with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States."
So, it's not as bad as giving prosecutors the ability to simply argue an action as being potentially harmful. IMHO, with the intent clause, it seems like a broadly reasonable definition of conspiracy. Granted, it does seem like focusing on harm to "the U.S." lets us trade off public good for other potentially harmed interests, but "public good" is fuzzy enough itself that I'm not sure what a better term would be.
You got me wondering about base rates and incentive structures, though. Like, defining espionage as anything the president decides to be espionage clearly places way too much power in the presidency, but how does USC 18 change the incentive structures relative to there not being USC 18? And what do we want those structures to look like in the first place?
Granted, law is mostly reactive, so proactively designing incentive structures is more in the mind of a policy maker than a lawyer, I'd guess.
I'm dumb and I don't read the news, who else was charged with espionage?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_(classified_documents_case)
(Sorry, I knew I should have explained, but I didn't want to ruin my little joke.)
no, explanation kills humor, you did the right thing
This is just evidence that my self-imposed censorship of the election is working. I'm thrilled!
An interesting writeup that nonetheless repeats baseless smears of Assange that have been long since debunked (link below).
Most of what you write about the Swedish debacle is also wrong or misleading (for instance, the investigation was dropped for the final time in November 2019, not "2020"). In Nils Melzer's book on the "investigation", a diplomatic assurance against US refoulment was not only possible but quite necessary, as the Swedish government was long exposed as a participant in the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. Furthermore, Sweden collaborated with Britain to keep the case alive, even in spite of the reluctance of the former—so much for the fabled "Doctrine of Specialty". Assange was, in sum, wholly correct to resist extradition to Sweden. I recommend that you read the book, "The Trial of Julian Assange", in full.
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/debunking-all-the-assange-smears-a549fd677cac
I'm happy to consider any concrete corrections/errors. It would be helpful if you would point these out explicitly. (I'd also appreciate it if you could tone down the implications of bad faith.)
Regarding when the charges were dropped in Sweden, I think I agree that my statement wasn't as precise as it could be. I'll correct "The rape investigation was briefly resumed and then re-dropped in 2020." to "The rape investigation was briefly resumed and then re-dropped in 2019 and the statute of limitations expired in 2020."
Regarding Assange's requested guarantee regarding extradition from Sweden to the US, do I understand correctly that you claiming that (1) Assange only requested a guarantee that Sweden would not send him to the US as part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, not the normal extradition process (2) Sweden's constitution allowed them to guarantee this?
"It would be helpful if you would point these out explicitly."
The truth is that there are too many to name, which is why I provided Johnstone's article, as it provides a tidy list, and Melzer's book. But I will focus on one more specific mistake for the purposes of this reply. Regarding the Afghan War Logs:
Assange did redact, and this was covered in the extradition proceedings of 2020. They were not completely redacted. Before publication, Assange withheld 15,000 files and asked the Pentagon to provide guidelines to provide further protection to sources. (1) The Pentagon refused to help. So any "risks", real or imaginary, to those sources is thus on them. The testimony linked below also makes clear that the redaction process changed to be far more absolute in the Iraq War Logs, contrary to your claim that neither logs were redacted.
You further implied that the Taliban used the logs to hunt down those sources, perhaps that some were killed. They claimed so, but they clearly lied. The US could not tie a single death to the logs. This was covered in Chelsea Manning's court-martial. (2)
On Sweden: Assange wanted a guarantee of non-refoulment, period. Extraordinary rendition was illegal even then, which was why Sweden paid restitution to torture victims they handed over to the CIA (3). As for the "constitution", Nils Melzer points out that the legalism of this framing was a red herring (Chapter 7):
"According to the Swedish authorities, no guarantee of non-extradition can be given so long as the United States has not made an extradition request. Moreover, extradition decisions are a judicial matter for the courts, in which the government cannot interfere. After all, Sweden is a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law!
While this response may seem convincing at first glance, it has no basis in either law or practice. In reality, such ‘diplomatic assurances’ are a standard instrument of international relations and are widely used around the world, especially in connection with the extradition and deportation of foreigners. The extraditing or deporting state requests written assurances from the destination or transit state that the person to be extradited will not be executed, tortured or otherwise mistreated under any circumstances, that their procedural rights are guaranteed and that – in accordance with the universal principle of non-refoulement – they will not be extradited to a third state in which their human rights protection is not guaranteed. In practice, such non-refoulement guarantees are routinely given, naturally without requiring a prior extradition request by the potentially unsafe third state."
The underlying point here is that extraditions are inherently political, and that final say is up to the Swedish executive, not the courts. Further, Sweden was obviously an "unsafe third state"; Sweden's actual behavior was consistently *deferential* to Britain and the United States. So once again, Assange was wholly correct to resist extradition. That's as much as I can provide you in the space of an internet comment. The rest is up to you.
1.) https://www.tareqhaddad.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2020.09.16-Assange-Extradition-Hearings-Statement-of-John-Goetz.pdf
2.) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/bradley-manning-sentencing-hearing-pentagon?CMP=twt_fd&CMP=SOCxx2I2
3.) https://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/prisoners/agiza_elzery.html
Thanks. Let me clarify a couple things. Regarding the redaction of the Iraq War Logs, I'm able to confirm that WikiLeaks claimed in 2010 that it asked the Pentagon to redact and the Pentagon refused. The Pentagon denies this, but I find the claim pretty credible, to be honest—The Iraq War Logs were released after the Afghan War Logs which WikiLeaks took brutal criticism for releasing unredacted.
Assange continued to [edit: publish] without proper redaction also after this, e.g. the social security and credit card numbers of democratic donors in 2016. So at best this would invalidate a claim that "Assange never redacted anything". But I don't mean to claim that. I mean to claim that he often did not redact and I think this is clearly true.
Regarding the Taliban, I said they were looking through the documents for names. That's true, they did say that. Yes, the government has not been able to establish that this led to deaths in any particular cases, though they claim many people disappeared—and if they had been killed this would be hard to establish. In some sense it doesn't matter if this actually happened or not—I believe that Amnesty International was correct to say that publishing these names put people at risk. My statement is correct as written.
Regarding extradition, do you have any more neutral / credible sources? Everything I've read said that (1) Assange wanted a full guarantee that he could not be extradited and (2) this was not constitutionally possible. Sure, Sweden could have "promised" not to extradite him, but with their constitution, such a promise was unenforceable and no future government would have been bound by the promise.
Evidence that Assange was asking for a full guarantee that he not be extradited: https://www.thelocal.se/20120928/43510
Allow me to clarify some things myself:
1.) Assange did not "leak" anything. He simply received and published what he received from his source, as every journalist does. He himself is a journalist and a publisher. His sources, like Chelsea Manning, are the leakers.
2.) "I believe that Amnesty International was correct to say that publishing these names put people at risk. My statement is correct as written."
No, it is not correct. If we agree that there is no evidence of any physical harm as a result of the Manning publications, the claim of "risk" becomes all the more specious. After all, it is essentially unfalsifiable. Your argument also suffers from internal inconsistency, because you then say: "it doesn't matter if this actually happened or not." So your statement is "correct", but it doesn't matter? The US, for its part, seeks to gaol him for 175 years precisely on the basis of such "risk", for what amounts to a disagreeable editorial decision.
3.) Unfortunately, Melzer's book is the only *critical* appraisal of the "investigation" as a whole. He is the former UN Rapporteur on Torture, and initially rejected Assange's request for an investigation. His read of the case at the beginning was much like yours, and changed for the better as it became clear the Swedish government was dealing in bad faith. But once again—extraditions are inherently political, and Sweden was well within its powers to provide such an assurance in spite of its "constitution". Clearly politics were the top priority when they collaborated with the CIA in 2001. So much for their precious constitution.
(1) OK, edited. (2) I think there's a pretty clear distinction between (a) risk, (b) that risk actually playing out as harm, and (c) that risk actually playing out as harm and there being evidence that this happened. You seem to be suggesting that concept (a) is not a useful or meaningful and that that the fact that (c) is false means that (a) is false. I don't agree with either of these things.
James Lewis QC, one of the British dogs on the US prosecution team, had this to say about the so-called claims of risk (1):
"The US is aware of sources, whose redacted names and other identifying information was contained in classified documents published by Wikileaks, who subsequently disappeared, *although the US can't prove at this point that their disappearance was the result of being outed by Wikileaks."*
There you have it. After 14 years (!) since the Manning publications, the US openly admits that for all their bluster about the "disappearances" of their precious sources, they cannot prove a thing. The claim of "risk" in this persecution is itself a climbdown from initial claims that Wikileaks caused actual deaths, which was disproven by Chelsea Manning's court-martial. Thus, any such government claims—or any who parrot them, like Amnesty International—require corroboration if at all possible. The US has not provided any, and will never be required to do so, especially in a US court. So what I am suggesting is that those claims should be treated, quite frankly, as gaslighting lies until proven otherwise. That is not to say that there isn't a genuine conversation to be had about risking sources in journalism, but it does not apply here at all.
1.) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51616077
Assange would say that there's a public interest to know about money in politics. It's good when the public knows who buys their politicians and that's not information to be redacted.
To the extend that publishing people social security numbers puts people at risk that's due to flaws of US law.
To the extend that credit card numbers being public is a problem it's due to the Visa/Mastercard not caring enough about authorizating payments.
There are enough leaks that contain social security and credit card numbers, that institutions should update their processes to be more secure. Putting pressure on politically connected people (those who buy the politicians) to care about progress in security is a good thing.
Seems similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act situation as discussed on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_8LPFBzKU. I wonder what are the other such "acts" out there
Thanks, this brought up the "vagueness doctrine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine. I wondered if that might apply to espionage as well and I found that... Donald Trump's lawyers have been trying to dismiss his espionage charges using exactly that argument (without success so far).
"But it seems that by 2015, China and Russia had access to basically his entire cache of 1 million documents. It’s not clear how this happened and Snowden insists that he destroyed his own access before he left Hong Kong for Russia. They might have been intercepted or turned over by journalists that were given the documents by Snowden."
Why do you belive this? I've heard this claimed by USG and UKG, but have never seen substantive evidence.
I tend to believe it because of the same claims you've heard, plus numerous newspapers (often unattributed) plus my read that this is generally "believed" to have happened.
So I agree that this isn't totally conclusive, but high level government spying is always a little tricky to decode and given the multitude of different independent sources, it seems to me like it's *probably* true. That said, I personally tend to believe Snowden when he says he never gave any information to the Chinese or Russian governments. (Unlike Assange, Snowden does not have a track record of lying.) So if this happened, my guess (hope?) is that one of the "china cloned his hard drives and broke his encryption" stories is true.
Wikileaks started out with two public faces, Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg. They claimed to be five main people but keep the identity of the other three secret for OpSec purposes. It's typical for hackers to care about privacy and not be public about their identities.
In the eve of 2005, the year before Wikileaks got founded Rop Gonggrijp and Frank Rieger lay out the need for an organization like https://media.ccc.de/v/22C3-920-en-we_lost_the_war . Rop Gonggrijp was publically working on the Collateral Murder video with Wikileaks later.
Assange himself did not control the technical infrastructure of Wikileaks at that time as you see in the split when Daniel Domscheit-Berg and others left Wikileaks. They took the harddrive which according to reports contained among other a big dump from Bank of America. After that episode Wikileaks submission pipeline did not go back online which suggests that Assange didn't run that.
Assange or Wikileaks never claimed to be neutral in the way you are implying. Wikileaks promise is that it takes the side of whistleblowers. It's neutral in the sense a lawyer is neutral. A lawyer takes anybody as client even when the political opinions of the client don't match the opinions of the lawyer. Wikileaks was founded to empower whistleblowers regardless of the political leanings of the whistleblower.
If Wikileaks would have been an outlet for Russian interests, you would have expected that they wouldn't have leaked the Syrian government data when Syria was an US enemy and Russian friend.
Wikileaks worked to redact names from the Afghan warlogs (https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252489197/WikiLeaks-partners-developed-software-to-redact-400000-Iraq-war-logs). Wikileaks however released an encrypted version of the Afghan and Iraqi warlogs with the full names (and other files) and invited people to download it via torrents. A Guardian journalist who previously worked with Wikileaks published the password to decrypt the files in his book. (https://wikileaks.org/Guardian-journalist-negligently.html)
Neither Trump nor Biden cared significantly about Julian Assange. After the Vault 7 leak, people like Mike Pompeo cared a lot about persecuting or killing Assange. Fighting the CIA who wants revenge for the Vault 7 leak costs political capital and neither Trump nor Biden wanted to spend that political capital.
That is an insanely dense law. I wish the gov could use brackets or something else to contain the lists
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