Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible.
After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.
WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles,and for the people's right to know.
As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.
He should not have spent all of this time being persecuted by the US government, but he should have been ostracized by the public long ago. I believe that if not for the prior, the latter would have occurred much more readily.
> A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.
Can someone who has an accurate source post when Wikileaks cryptographic canary expired? I'm unable to find a source and it's important to know they shouldn't be trusted.
A canary goes something like "This website has not received or acted on any government orders to disclose or modify or remove material." When they ever do, then they remove that notice. The government enforcement usually includes a gag order prohibiting the target from saying that they're under orders, so the intent is that you can infer government gag pressure by the canary having been removed. Wikileaks used to have such a notice and no longer does, so we assume government enforcement is why.
I'd encourage people to read this excellent piece in the London Review of Books by someone who was contracted to ghostwrite Assange's autobiography, and who initially felt very sympathetic towards the aims of Assange and Wikileaks: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n05/andrew-o-hagan/ghost... I found it very insightful and nuanced when it comes to Assange and his motivations, presenting him as neither hero nor villain, but someone who started something that he couldn't really handle.
All around my neighborhood is the graffiti of "Free Assange, Oz hero". Just this morning I saw a large amount of it in a new place. Was thinking "I really hope one day it happens but I am doubtful".
And then I just saw this... wow! I am so glad to be wrong, to see my pessimistic side be completely wrong. Julian is free!
Is anyone else here surprised that the reaction to him being free is so overwhelmingly positive? Assange certainly did great work to reveal government corruption and abuses of power. At the same time, some state secrets are best kept secret for national interests and Assange seemed to show a lack of regard for protecting this type of information. It often seemed that he was working in his own self interest rather than one that prioritized the interests of the US, humanity and civilization on the whole. I guess.. I just expected more nuanced discussion around this on HN.
I don't think Assange operated in any kind of self-interest per-se, I think he operated based on a principle of maximum transparency.
I definitely don't think that is always a positive thing but I struggle to think of anything which Assange leaked which I really disagree with. Probably some parts of cablegate should not have come out as they were very "inside baseball" talk between diplomats and were too easily construed negatively in the media, though, I think for the most part our allies realized that they said the same things about us in their private communications and there was really no major fallout from it.
Now, all that said, Assange did break the law and I don't think there should be no consequences for that but the way the US went about this (across 3 different presidencies) is just terrible. Nudging and cajoling and perhaps berating our Swedish allies to jin up a "rape" case against him so he could be extradited from the UK to Sweden and then obviously to the US, and, denying that we were doing that was just dirty on our part. I'm sure if there is a cablegate 2.0 we'd find we did some fairly terrible stuff to persuade our Swedish allies to prosecute this.
Ultimately the simple reason I think there is near positive reaction to this news is that everyone understands that even given what he did, it does not merit almost 15 years of prison in some really terrible conditions. Should he have walked away free? Maybe, maybe not but he should have had a fair trial with fair charges and faced a fair jury and he never got any of that, he was effectively extrajudicially jailed.
> Is anyone else here surprised that the reaction to him being free is so overwhelmingly positive?
Not really, though I am frustrated as it does feel like he's only popular because he's an underdog sticking it to The Man.
Even in isolation and ignoring the preceding case — for which he fled to the embassy in order to not risk the very outcome he's now facing (c.f. going to the USA, "Assange would appear in court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S.-controlled territory north of Guam", even though that wasn't even on the cards at the time he fled) — many other journalists manage to publish damning evidence that seriously upsets their governments without having to solicit for it (AFAICT, no journalists have gotten into trouble for publishing Snowden's leaks, just Snowden himself), while some other journalists who broke the law to get their scoops also faced court for breaking the law to get their scoops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_arrested_in_the...
> At the same time, some state secrets are best kept secret for national interests and Assange seemed to show a lack of regard for protecting this type of information.
Julian Assange was an irresponsible arsehole. Doesn't mean his treatment was anything resembling just. While he probably put a lot of people at risk, I've not heard of anyone actually getting hurt as a result of his actions. Given that, and given his treatment in prison, he's more than served his time.
> At the same time, some state secrets are best kept secret
Yes, war crimes committed by USA and its allies are best kept secret and those committed by others are best exposed, right?
He’s not American and America are not “the good guys”. For any given secret, consider if you feel that USA should honor a request by Russia to keep it secret for the best of Russian interacts, if you don’t feel the same then its best exposed.
It’s redicules that so many Americans feel that war crimes committed by it and its allies should be kept secret because “we’re the good guys” then turn around and argue that the reason “we’re the good guys” is because we don’t commit war crimes, or when we do we at least have the decency to try to keep it secret because we know it’s bad, unlike the evil enemy who commit war crimes and try to cover it up!
But of course it is positive. This is a huge deal, even if only one that will benefit himself. I don’t know anything about any secrets that he showed any lack of regard for, but I definitely know about the files he exposed that showed the US government is a bunch of cowards who manipulate people and then use the full force of the law to defend themselves when caught with their pants down.
Instead of making people guess what you mean by nuanced, you simply should go ahead and provide that nuanced perspective and see if anyone wants to engage it.
The right time for a nuanced discussion of the material published by Wikileaks was actually before the US/UK imprisoned this innocent-until-proven-guilty individual, not after putting him in soletary confinement for 5+ years. So no, not surprised. If there's need for a nuanced discussion, a course of action like this will never be the way to go about it. The time for a nuanced discussion has been over for more than ten years, and the argument was lost by the people who incarcerated him.
> At the same time, some state secrets are best kept secret for national interests
a) This applies to nuclear launch codes, not to the kind of things that Assange leaked even if leaking this is inconvenient or embarrassing for the nation.
b) Many of us aren't Americans and don't really care that much about US "national interests".
Same. Assange was an actor for Russia, and acted against American interests, whether by design or by accident. He played a role in the election of Trump and in the weakening of US standing and intelligence.
This soft-handed approach towards anti-American behavior is the culmination of multiple movements in the post-Soviet era where the remnants of Soviet-sponsored communists and other home-grown agitators align themselves with anti-western groups around the world (Russia, Iran, China, various terrorist groups, etc). These groups have a lot of influence in the left in general, and in the current US administration, so it's not surprising that now is the time that Assange gets a friendly deal. Between this and Manning's sentence being commuted, I think a lot of damage has been done to our security apparatuses. What's the dissuade the next kid with delusions of toppling the corrupt American empire from exposing state secrets in a noble act on behalf of our comrades in the benign and honorable states of Russia, China, and Iran?
The whole saga is an interesting lesson in how a noble cause can end up helping anti-democratic forces.
Assange gave the public invaluable information that would not have been know otherwise, but he ended up playing right into the hands of the people who wanted to discredit Clinton.
Yes, and politics is not about supporting only one side either. If transparency makes for more informed decisions, who’s to judge the better outcome? Meritocracies die in darkness and evidence of corruption scares lots of voters away. Especially the unaffiliated/independent ones that decide elections.
Also interesting that they didn't Wikileak these messages, some mainstream journalist had to do it for them. Probably they just hadn't gotten around to it
I don't believe Assange ever believed in a noble cause. He did what he did for personal vanity and any good he did in the world is purely by coincidence. When he blamed the DNC hack on Seth Rich he had an opportunity to do the right thing and instead he impugned a victim of a heinous crime. Rich's successfully sued Fox for defamation over exactly the same thing Assange said.
A rich demagogue getting elected over a rich career politician technocrat who was smeared by right-wing money for decades sounds like "democracy" working well as it's ever worked.
It's easy to blame one entity or another for these sorts of upset events, but national elections are media circuses largely run by private spending on the terms of private parties and blaming any one party seems like missing the forest for the trees.
Again, election "interference" is not unfamiliar ground for democracies or republics, liberal or classic, so it confuses me why people blame the electorate rather than the flaws in our implementation of democratic ideals (eg the citizens united ruling) that allowed private capital to run rampant over our election mechanics.
To illustrate how inevitable this is, the roman republic had statute stipulating the width of the halls leading up to the ballots to physically restrict voters from being harassed or intimidated. Otherwise the richer candidate would simply pay a mob to physically bully you into voting a certain way regardless of your original intentions—or perhaps they might outright buy your vote out if they knew which way your ballot cast. It was completely understood by all involved that voting (& armies) could be bought with sufficient money and ingenuity by even single people.
Why we are discussing anything other than restricting the ability of money to interfere with our modern processes when it comes to "democratic health" is beyond me.
This entire case was a catastrophic show of hand in how the justice systems across the west have been weaponized and used against the values it proclaims to protect.
Good, this was getting majorly embarrassing for all countries still involved with this legal mess. The man dying in prison stuck in legal limbo without any conviction whatsoever (innocent until proven guilty and all that) would have been a PR disaster for the UK. And of course there's also the issue that the UK is very likely to get a new government that would have likely been leaning to just letting the man go in any case. At least the current Labour leader strikes me as a decent man with some actual principles and backbone and this would fundamentally be a decent thing to do.
This would have been embarrassing for the US. One country doing something decent and calling another out on the whole indecency of the whole case. Not a good look after a decade plus of legal limbo with no end in sight. And of course the man actually being extradited (as unlikely as that would have been at this point) would just refocus the attention on all the embarrassing things that Wikileaks actually leaked that have caused this whole vindictive attitude towards Assange. All that stuff being rehashed in court rooms and the media for months on end was not going to end well. So, the US grudgingly finally doing the right thing via a plea deal seems like a good face saving compromise that just ends this now.
If you care about this news and you are able to do this financially, consider supporting Julian's fee for having have had to take a private plane for this entire process:
> Julian Assange has embarked on flight VJ199 to Saipan. If all goes well it will bring him to freedom in Australia. But his travel to freedom comes at a massive cost: he will owe USD 520,000 which he is obligated to pay back to the Australian government for the charter flight. He was not permitted to fly commercial airlines or routes to Saipan and onward to Australia.
Congratulations! I share in the popular jubilation and sense of epoch-making reconciliation, that aligns with the stars, even tho I think Assange acted like an egotistical fool who squandered the great lens of transparency and accountability he had created through misjudged self-importance and vulnerability to manipulation by his sources for their own ends.
Hopefully his Second Act brings good fruits without the thorns and rot of the previous ages. Good luck to him!
In an ideal world we would get to do a reverse investigation to understand which government officials were complicit in his very obviously politically motivated detention, action would be taken upon those individuals to ensure accountability, and the system itself would be updated so powerful interests can't abuse the law like this. How far are we from this world?
So I have a couple of thoughts on this. For context, I'm a big fan of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Julian Assange is... more interesting.
Imagine you're a journalist and someone hands you a shoebox full of SD cards with classified materials including video evidence of war crimes. Most of us would agree it is the ethical thing to do to publish that and you're definitely a journalist.
Now imagine you had a contact in the military with acccess to classified data. What if instead of simply receiving that information, you tell that person what you're interested in. Are you still a journalist?
What if you procure tools for that person to bypass security procedures? What if you instruct them on methods they can smuggle out that information from a secure facility? Are you still a journalist?
What if you run someone off the road so they have a car accident and they miss their shift and that person is in charge of facility security, making it easier for your contact to smuggle out classified materials? Are you still a journalist?
This can go on and at some point you're no longer a journalist.
My point is that Assange was allegedly more of an active participant in acquiring these materials so there's an argument to be made that he wasn't a journalist, legally speaking.
But here's where I think Assange really hurt himself: by playing politics in selectively releasing the Podesta and DNC emails to try and sway the 2016 election. This demonstrated that Wikileaks is not, as it portrays itself, a vessel for unfiltered publication. This mattered in the court of public opinion because that's what would ultimately have to come to Assange's aid.
Now make no mistake: the US government did what it set out to do, which was to create a chilling effect on journalism that exposed US government secrets. Assange has essentially spent 12 yaers in confinement between the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh awaiting extradition.
My view of him changed when I saw a recording of him in a documentary saying that murdered Iraqi translators who worked with the US military got what they deserved for working with the enemy.
This is almost bringing me to tears today. I am happy he's finally going to be free but I am still in deep sadness because this is not the world we are supposed to living in. With all of our knowledge and technology we are still doing horrible things as a civilization and we have lost control of our leadership. This scares me a lot because it is a growing problem and every day it seems like humanity is losing more and more of itself to evil and greedy powers that be. Assange did a great thing by exposing corrupt and criminal behavior at the highest levels and got such a inhumane treatment from the most powerful organizations on earth. He should not have been punished, he should have been protected and praised and his case should be a matter of study on every school on earth.
This is beautifully articulated. I myself thought for a long time that if the day ever came that Assange walks free, I'd cry, but instead I feel a strange emptiness inside. The world isn't the one I'd imagined for this day.
Read some Steven Pinker. Your observations about our present state are not wrong, but seriously consider every other point in human history and realize we are not worse off in any measurable way. In fact, much better.
The entire point was to embarrass the US, not to take some high minded stance. Wikileaks has shown some extreme bias, after refusing to expose dirty secrets of the Kremlin. They are hardly some do-gooder organization. If it came out in 15 years that wikileaks was Russian funded, I would not be surprised. Spreading false rumors and misinformation, failure/refusal to fact check sources, anti-semitism, possibly editing or doctoring videos.
The list goes on, they are not the BBC or Al-Jazeera. The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.
Just such a bizarre take completely divorced of reality.
I share the general disappointment but to steelman a positive outlook: People in power have always done horrible things and orgs like wikileaks and some from the media counterbalance this. While this was a tragedy, if not for such a strong light being shined on Assange, he surely would've disappeared. At least he is getting freedom now, at least he exposed many important things with his organization and at least he inspired many people to do similar things.
It's true I've never really felt worse about the future. Maybe because I was blissfully ignorant, or maybe because things are actually worse. I try (and struggle) to stay positive because it is so easy to be cynical and detractive and I think that ultimately makes things worse for the world AND my own mental health.
How do plea deals work for precedent? As despite the constant claim that he was only being charged for assisting in hacking US computers, the plea deal is over violations of the Espionage Act specifically about receiving and publishing classified documents. Or basically his acts as a journalist.
Can this be used to indict other journalists who receive and publish classified information? As if so, this feels like a huge loss, though I can hardly blame Assange for not continuing the fight.
Journalists generally avoid asking for classified information. The belief is that (in the US) a journalist that passively receives classified information & publishes it isn't committing a crime due to the First Amendment. The actual crime itself was committed by the person leaking the information.
Julian Assange actively solicited leaks of information. That's where the espionage claim comes from.
There's not much precedent on this though and making a plea deal avoids establishing one. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Generally, precedent is established when someone appeals their conviction, and a higher court determines that the conviction is lawful. Higher court decisions bind lower courts, so e.g. if a circuit appeals court says the law is "X", every district court within it has to agree.
Since generally, you wouldn't appeal a plea deal, there probably won't be legal precedent from this.
That being said, I wonder if the USA will informally say "we got Assange; we can get you" the next time a similar situation comes up.
They don't. Generally: lower court decisions don't create binding precedent.
Further: Assange wasn't simply charged with "receiving and publishing classified information"; he was charged with being instrumental in that information being exfiltrated in the first place.
The plea deal is for “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information”. Having documents dropped in your lap and then publishing them is different than conspiring with someone to illegally obtain them in the first place.
If Australia truly loved Assange they would've done the thing Russia does where they start their own bogus competing extradition proceeding in order to repatriate the person. Not to mention that they stuck him with a $500k bill!
[+] [-] esnard|1 year ago|reply
Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible.
After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.
WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles,and for the people's right to know.
As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.
Julian's freedom is our freedom.
[More details to follow]
[+] [-] consumer451|1 year ago|reply
> A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/18/julian...
[+] [-] whoitwas|1 year ago|reply
Here's when their key expired in 2007: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks_talk:PGP_Keys
From another below:
vikingerik
A canary goes something like "This website has not received or acted on any government orders to disclose or modify or remove material." When they ever do, then they remove that notice. The government enforcement usually includes a gag order prohibiting the target from saying that they're under orders, so the intent is that you can infer government gag pressure by the canary having been removed. Wikileaks used to have such a notice and no longer does, so we assume government enforcement is why.
[+] [-] frereubu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DaoVeles|1 year ago|reply
And then I just saw this... wow! I am so glad to be wrong, to see my pessimistic side be completely wrong. Julian is free!
[+] [-] nikkwong|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AdamJacobMuller|1 year ago|reply
I definitely don't think that is always a positive thing but I struggle to think of anything which Assange leaked which I really disagree with. Probably some parts of cablegate should not have come out as they were very "inside baseball" talk between diplomats and were too easily construed negatively in the media, though, I think for the most part our allies realized that they said the same things about us in their private communications and there was really no major fallout from it.
Now, all that said, Assange did break the law and I don't think there should be no consequences for that but the way the US went about this (across 3 different presidencies) is just terrible. Nudging and cajoling and perhaps berating our Swedish allies to jin up a "rape" case against him so he could be extradited from the UK to Sweden and then obviously to the US, and, denying that we were doing that was just dirty on our part. I'm sure if there is a cablegate 2.0 we'd find we did some fairly terrible stuff to persuade our Swedish allies to prosecute this.
Ultimately the simple reason I think there is near positive reaction to this news is that everyone understands that even given what he did, it does not merit almost 15 years of prison in some really terrible conditions. Should he have walked away free? Maybe, maybe not but he should have had a fair trial with fair charges and faced a fair jury and he never got any of that, he was effectively extrajudicially jailed.
[+] [-] ben_w|1 year ago|reply
Not really, though I am frustrated as it does feel like he's only popular because he's an underdog sticking it to The Man.
Even in isolation and ignoring the preceding case — for which he fled to the embassy in order to not risk the very outcome he's now facing (c.f. going to the USA, "Assange would appear in court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S.-controlled territory north of Guam", even though that wasn't even on the cards at the time he fled) — many other journalists manage to publish damning evidence that seriously upsets their governments without having to solicit for it (AFAICT, no journalists have gotten into trouble for publishing Snowden's leaks, just Snowden himself), while some other journalists who broke the law to get their scoops also faced court for breaking the law to get their scoops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_arrested_in_the...
[+] [-] wizzwizz4|1 year ago|reply
Julian Assange was an irresponsible arsehole. Doesn't mean his treatment was anything resembling just. While he probably put a lot of people at risk, I've not heard of anyone actually getting hurt as a result of his actions. Given that, and given his treatment in prison, he's more than served his time.
[+] [-] gklitz|1 year ago|reply
Yes, war crimes committed by USA and its allies are best kept secret and those committed by others are best exposed, right?
He’s not American and America are not “the good guys”. For any given secret, consider if you feel that USA should honor a request by Russia to keep it secret for the best of Russian interacts, if you don’t feel the same then its best exposed.
It’s redicules that so many Americans feel that war crimes committed by it and its allies should be kept secret because “we’re the good guys” then turn around and argue that the reason “we’re the good guys” is because we don’t commit war crimes, or when we do we at least have the decency to try to keep it secret because we know it’s bad, unlike the evil enemy who commit war crimes and try to cover it up!
[+] [-] skilled|1 year ago|reply
Instead of making people guess what you mean by nuanced, you simply should go ahead and provide that nuanced perspective and see if anyone wants to engage it.
[+] [-] enlightenedfool|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BurnGpuBurn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] account42|1 year ago|reply
a) This applies to nuclear launch codes, not to the kind of things that Assange leaked even if leaking this is inconvenient or embarrassing for the nation.
b) Many of us aren't Americans and don't really care that much about US "national interests".
[+] [-] epanchin|1 year ago|reply
Assange’s imprisonment was widely considered to be caused not by democratically formed laws, but by the whims of politics.
[+] [-] tboyd47|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] grumple|1 year ago|reply
This soft-handed approach towards anti-American behavior is the culmination of multiple movements in the post-Soviet era where the remnants of Soviet-sponsored communists and other home-grown agitators align themselves with anti-western groups around the world (Russia, Iran, China, various terrorist groups, etc). These groups have a lot of influence in the left in general, and in the current US administration, so it's not surprising that now is the time that Assange gets a friendly deal. Between this and Manning's sentence being commuted, I think a lot of damage has been done to our security apparatuses. What's the dissuade the next kid with delusions of toppling the corrupt American empire from exposing state secrets in a noble act on behalf of our comrades in the benign and honorable states of Russia, China, and Iran?
[+] [-] qsdf38100|1 year ago|reply
JULIAN!! The guy that embarrassed evil powers all over the world!
What evil powers? Well, the US, the US, and... the US.
I got down-voted by just mentioning he didn't release anything significant on Russia for some reason.
I wouldn't be surprise if some of the massive support we're seeing here in this thread is not completely legit.
[+] [-] light_triad|1 year ago|reply
Assange gave the public invaluable information that would not have been know otherwise, but he ended up playing right into the hands of the people who wanted to discredit Clinton.
Politics is complicated.
[+] [-] gklitz|1 year ago|reply
And no, letting USA or any other nation for that matter commit war crimes quietly does not support democracy.
[+] [-] webninja|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hsod|1 year ago|reply
Also interesting that they didn't Wikileak these messages, some mainstream journalist had to do it for them. Probably they just hadn't gotten around to it
[+] [-] badgersnake|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 12907835202|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] darby_nine|1 year ago|reply
It's easy to blame one entity or another for these sorts of upset events, but national elections are media circuses largely run by private spending on the terms of private parties and blaming any one party seems like missing the forest for the trees.
Again, election "interference" is not unfamiliar ground for democracies or republics, liberal or classic, so it confuses me why people blame the electorate rather than the flaws in our implementation of democratic ideals (eg the citizens united ruling) that allowed private capital to run rampant over our election mechanics.
To illustrate how inevitable this is, the roman republic had statute stipulating the width of the halls leading up to the ballots to physically restrict voters from being harassed or intimidated. Otherwise the richer candidate would simply pay a mob to physically bully you into voting a certain way regardless of your original intentions—or perhaps they might outright buy your vote out if they knew which way your ballot cast. It was completely understood by all involved that voting (& armies) could be bought with sufficient money and ingenuity by even single people.
Why we are discussing anything other than restricting the ability of money to interfere with our modern processes when it comes to "democratic health" is beyond me.
[+] [-] gosub100|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DaoVeles|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] udev4096|1 year ago|reply
0. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansar...
1. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/10/politics/biden-assange-au...
[+] [-] bjornsing|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hi-v-rocknroll|1 year ago|reply
Today was a good day.
[+] [-] pharos92|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|1 year ago|reply
This would have been embarrassing for the US. One country doing something decent and calling another out on the whole indecency of the whole case. Not a good look after a decade plus of legal limbo with no end in sight. And of course the man actually being extradited (as unlikely as that would have been at this point) would just refocus the attention on all the embarrassing things that Wikileaks actually leaked that have caused this whole vindictive attitude towards Assange. All that stuff being rehashed in court rooms and the media for months on end was not going to end well. So, the US grudgingly finally doing the right thing via a plea deal seems like a good face saving compromise that just ends this now.
[+] [-] skilled|1 year ago|reply
> Julian Assange has embarked on flight VJ199 to Saipan. If all goes well it will bring him to freedom in Australia. But his travel to freedom comes at a massive cost: he will owe USD 520,000 which he is obligated to pay back to the Australian government for the charter flight. He was not permitted to fly commercial airlines or routes to Saipan and onward to Australia.
Links:
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/free-julian-assange
https://x.com/Stella_Assange/status/1805573781303308326
[+] [-] keepamovin|1 year ago|reply
Hopefully his Second Act brings good fruits without the thorns and rot of the previous ages. Good luck to him!
[+] [-] sackfield|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|1 year ago|reply
Imagine you're a journalist and someone hands you a shoebox full of SD cards with classified materials including video evidence of war crimes. Most of us would agree it is the ethical thing to do to publish that and you're definitely a journalist.
Now imagine you had a contact in the military with acccess to classified data. What if instead of simply receiving that information, you tell that person what you're interested in. Are you still a journalist?
What if you procure tools for that person to bypass security procedures? What if you instruct them on methods they can smuggle out that information from a secure facility? Are you still a journalist?
What if you run someone off the road so they have a car accident and they miss their shift and that person is in charge of facility security, making it easier for your contact to smuggle out classified materials? Are you still a journalist?
This can go on and at some point you're no longer a journalist.
My point is that Assange was allegedly more of an active participant in acquiring these materials so there's an argument to be made that he wasn't a journalist, legally speaking.
But here's where I think Assange really hurt himself: by playing politics in selectively releasing the Podesta and DNC emails to try and sway the 2016 election. This demonstrated that Wikileaks is not, as it portrays itself, a vessel for unfiltered publication. This mattered in the court of public opinion because that's what would ultimately have to come to Assange's aid.
Now make no mistake: the US government did what it set out to do, which was to create a chilling effect on journalism that exposed US government secrets. Assange has essentially spent 12 yaers in confinement between the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh awaiting extradition.
[+] [-] pipes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] drojas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jfax|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jorblumesea|1 year ago|reply
The list goes on, they are not the BBC or Al-Jazeera. The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.
Just such a bizarre take completely divorced of reality.
[+] [-] wand3r|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|1 year ago|reply
In what locale and at which time did humans have control of their leadership?
[+] [-] meroes|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|1 year ago|reply
Can this be used to indict other journalists who receive and publish classified information? As if so, this feels like a huge loss, though I can hardly blame Assange for not continuing the fight.
[+] [-] jjmarr|1 year ago|reply
Julian Assange actively solicited leaks of information. That's where the espionage claim comes from.
There's not much precedent on this though and making a plea deal avoids establishing one. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Generally, precedent is established when someone appeals their conviction, and a higher court determines that the conviction is lawful. Higher court decisions bind lower courts, so e.g. if a circuit appeals court says the law is "X", every district court within it has to agree.
Since generally, you wouldn't appeal a plea deal, there probably won't be legal precedent from this.
That being said, I wonder if the USA will informally say "we got Assange; we can get you" the next time a similar situation comes up.
[+] [-] tptacek|1 year ago|reply
Further: Assange wasn't simply charged with "receiving and publishing classified information"; he was charged with being instrumental in that information being exfiltrated in the first place.
[+] [-] tssva|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] which|1 year ago|reply