A British judge has ordered the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States, where he faces a 175-year sentence. The final decision on Assange’s extradition will now be made by U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel. Amnesty International’s Simon Crowther spoke outside the courthouse prior to today’s ruling.
Simon Crowther: “Julian Assange is being prosecuted for espionage for publishing sensitive material that was classified. And if he is extradited to the U.S. for this, all journalists around the world are going to have to look over their shoulder, because within their own jurisdiction, if they publish something that the U.S. considers to be classified, they will face the risk of being extradited.”
Most “journalists” are at zero risk because they just parrot what their governments say.
Reading through the indictment, I think a lot of the fury is because Assange didn’t redact vulnerable sources, and when confronted had a very callous attitude about threats to the life or liberty of people who were mentioned. A responsible journalist would redact information like that to protect them from reprisals. Like, there are plenty of journalists that criticize the government in the West and receive leaks, but they’re not having the US government chasing them across the Atlantic.
speaking of the Atlantic, read this article:
you’ve been mislead in thinking WikiLeaks releases harmed anyone. the US army harmed the people of Afghanistan, and that’s what this story is about.
fucking tragic, really hope this doesn’t go through
dear brits, i trust in your protest potential, if extradition is “officially” completely approved, pls don’t be silent, this is a
oncefirst in a lifetime precedent that’s going to establish this terrible practice
I’m scratching my head over most of the charges. There is one charge where he was attempting to help Chelsea Manning break a password hash (unsuccessfully). Based on their conversation, that seems like a slam dunk case of intrusion that crosses the line from journalist to hacker.
But when I was reading through the expanded indictment with 18 counts, I was… unimpressed. I got a massive cringe out of this:
The portion of the password hash Manning gave to ASSANGE to crack was stored as a “hash value” in a computer file that was accessible only by users with adminstrative-level privileges. Manning did not have administrative-level privileges, and used special software, namely a Linux operating system, to access the computer file and obtain the portion of the password provided to ASSANGE.
Linux is special software? That’s… news.
The are a couple of things I will say in favor of this indictment. The first is that it managed to not misgender Chelsea Manning. It should be a minimum standard of acceptable human behavior, but I’ve seen plenty of people not manage that. The second is that they make a pretty good case that Assange was careless in handling extremely sensitive material. Whereas a responsible journalist would have redacted things like the names of local sources in dangerous or repressive regions, Assange did not, painting a target on their back. Translation: he got people killed or hurt. He acknowledged this and basically said he didn’t care.
The expanded indictment is troublesome because of its potential to affect press freedom, which is why the Obama administration originally only included the hacking charges. Still, the deeper I dig the harder I find it to defend Assange and his callous disregard for human life.
