As a reminder, this is why the US wants to punish Assange:

> Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians > https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-a...

Likewise, if you think leaking the pentagon papers is the same as leaking all diplomatic cables and operational communications from a period of time is the same thing, not sure I can say much to change your opinion.

If you think it wasn't about that you clearly didn't follow the lawsuit.

What something is ostensibly about -- like for instance, what's spelled out in a lawsuit -- is not necessarily what it's actually about.

It would be very difficult, because you believe that journalists enabling the distribution of secret government documents means they're not journalists, they're activists. That equally condemns the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. You agree with their opinion, which is why you can't say much to change it.

edit:

Daniel Ellsberg: “Whatever Julian Assange is guilty of, I’m guilty of.”

https://www.exberliner.com/features/julian-assange-trial-202...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/indictment...

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wikileaks-releases-classifie...

The overarching question is at what point does a private citizen/activist become culpable. Developing technologies and social networks (old school kind, not facebook) which are explicitly designed to enable the stealing/leaking of state secrets would seem to be skirting pretty close to the line of "I'm just a private citizen/journalist." This is doubly true if said leaks end up putting military personnel and government assets in harms way.

We don't need to consider that possibility. It has been over a decade since this information was released. If anyone about whom USA government cares had ever suffered any harm (even if they actually deserved it) as a result, the USA war media would have crowed about it until we had all memorized all details. Not even a rumor exists of anything like that, so we know it didn't happen.

Scoping to a reasonable level, publishers' primary job is to review and filter information for quality, safety, and fitness for mass consumption. Assange and WikiLeaks explicitly do not do that. At best, they are a distributor.

The law generally views the publisher as responsible for unlawful (defamatory, copyright infringing, etc.) content without evidence of specific knowledge, whereas distributors are generally liable only when they have specific knowledge of the facts that make the content unlawful. This, in effect, makes publishers responsible for reviewing/filtering content, because if they fail to do so, they will be held responsible.

That's the whole source of significanxe of, e.g., the section 230 protection against hosts or other users of online services meeting certain descriptions being treated as the publisher of other-user submitted content.

WikiLeaks helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong. A WikiLeaks editor also accompanied Snowden to Russia, staying with him during his 39-day enforced stay at a Moscow airport and living with him for three months after Russia granted Snowden asylum.

As a reminder, the post you show isn't when the aggression against Wikileaks escalated. You reminder is not true.

His disclosures have shown a consistent bias to damage the Democrats, support the Republicans, Trump, and the Putin regime. He also endangered the lives of multiple assets by revealing their names and locations.

It's a lot more nuanced than you portray it.

Redefining journalist can let you imprison any and every journalist.

Inconvenient journalists financed from abroad. And "foreign agents" are not imprisoned, they just obligated by the law to remind their readers about this fact.

Your point is pretty clear. You designated exposing war crimes a criminal conspiracy no different from any other.

This view isn't compatible with a belief in human rights and democracy.

To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."

You cannot look at just one small part of what was leaked and ignore the rest. If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.

I see no substantial difference.

>To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."

I really don't understand what you being in Afghanistan is supposed to prove. If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.

Is that not the case?

>If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.

Oh, we absolutely would. The case was built specifically around the leak of collateral murder.

American espionage law criminalizes leaking evidence of war crimes. Snowden has offered to come home if its scope was tightened to only include actual espionage. Congress demurred.

This is what you were fighting for in Afghanistan like it or not - for a group of elites who would toss you in prison for exposing their war crimes without a second's thought.

> If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.

You realize you were the invader right?

However, I am glad you are able to with criticize and judge a person with 20/20 hindsight, while simultaneously offering nothing of value to the conversation.

Thank you for taking the time to offer your opinion and I wish you nothing but the best.

Yet your comment history on this subject ("activist" vs "journalist") indicates that's how you see the world. My contribution is to expose the cognitive dissonance surrounding your comments.

I've yet to see anything that makes your time in Afghanistan relevant to this conversation. In fact another person already posted a source debunking the claims that anyone's life was in danger due to the Wikileaks releases.

Aside from that, I did not ask about, nor do I care, what you think of my time in Afghanistan. I am more than capable of evaluating my own life choices through a critical and charitable lens.

Thank you for taking the time to contribute to the discussion and wish you the best.

> Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/bradley-mannin...

That is, unless there were somebody they could point to who was dead as a result. Then they would describe what happened.

Or stay silent - if there were no examples.

Hopefully that's not what you mean to convey.

Some clarification would go a long way.

What was indiscriminate about it? Wikileaks reached out to other journalists to sort through and publish the information. The full release of the diplomatic cables happened only after some of those journalists (David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian) failed to keep that content secure.

"Espionage" like publishing warcrimes.

"I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy"

Transparency is a government duty. It is a shame but totally justified that private citizens have to enforce it. As for "criminal", sounds like yet another victimless crime. If anything they are exposing crimes.

"being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did"

Thank you for disclosing that. How many people did you kill (directly or indirectly) and why didn't you try to expose warcrimes?

"Assange is an activist, not a journalist. He should not be treated as such"

Activists, journalists, and regular citizens should all be treated the same.

"is directly related to his own actions (e.g., fleeing to an Embassy)."

Yet given how the events turned out it seems that he was right. He was hiding in the embassy in fear that they would try to send him to the US.

If only we could all flee when faced with consequences for breaking laws that we disagree with.

"Transparency is a government duty. It is a shame but totally justified that private citizens have to 3nforce it. As for "criminal", sounds like yet another victimless crime. If anything they are exposing crimes."

There are absolutely reasons for state secrecy and the breadth of information crossed a line between what was necessary for informing the public, versus damaging to the diplomatic relations and ability to conduct diplomacy with much of the rest of the world.

"Thank you for disclosing that. How many people did you kill (directly or indirectly) and why didn't you try to expose warcrimes?"

Oh, goodness. Thanks for adding to taking the time to provide your perspective and add to the discussion.

Tell that to Snowden.

> There are absolutely reasons for state secrecy and

Sorry, I have to: that's just, like, your opinion man. Have you ever thought that you might be wrong on this? How about the state stops doing the things they need to keep secret? You may call it naive, but some will call it being just, you know?

At one point, society deemed it acceptable to amputate various parts of a body as a form of punishment. Imagine you have a time machine and get to go watch a public torture and execution ca. 1200AD. Would you consider literally frying someone slowly into charcoal something you can "make a case" for? Why not? The social contract of there and then says it's fine?

There are places today where the social contract is still pretty much the same it was throughout human history: "we'll murder our way to any resources we need, and if you try to stop us you're dead (and if not, we might even share a bit)". Would you say this contract is good and just? Would you support it? And if not, why should we support yours, if it's precisely how your own "social contract" looks like to anyone that is not you?

Which part of the Afghan society voted you and your friends in? Why is your social contract important and just, yet theirs doesn't mean anything to you? Moreover, you went there specifically to break their contract: there's no way a full-scale invasion doesn't break at least the guarantee of single jurisdiction. So, your social contract - good; their - bad. Because terrorists?

On a related note: "society does and it has deemed" sounds to me like "and God said it was good". It's not an argument, it's an observation at best, but most often utterly empty. If you want to tell us that killing civilians with an attack helicopter should be kept under wraps, you should really give us the reasons why you personally think so. You really cannot speak for the "society", now can you? Or are you Borg?

How many members of Western society do you think would agree that war crimes should be routinely covered up? I'd guess very, very few.

These who can flee the overreach of foregin countries trying to enforce their unjust laws on them, do so.

"versus damaging to the diplomatic relations and ability to conduct diplomacy with much of the rest of the world."

Yeah, if a country commits horrible warcrimes then most of the world will not want to deal with them. It was not assange who was responsible for this but the US itself. One would not accuse a rape victim of ruining the reputation of their abuser.

"Oh, goodness. Thanks for adding to taking the time to provide your perspective and add to the discussion."

Pray tell. If it is zero then you can just say so, and if you did try to expose warcrimes I will take it back.

I am not sure why you think that this is the case given that the person that I am replying to literally worked for an organisation made for killing people and with a known record of torture and warcrimes. Would you welcome a proud ISIS fighter? I would not.

If they killed nobody then they just can say so. I just do not wish to talk to people who murdered people in illegal invasions.

> I consider setting up a website purely designed to encourage leaking of potentially classified information and assisting with the ability to do so as being no different than any other criminal conspiracy.

He exposed crimes committed by war criminals. "Criminal conspiracy" is disingenuous. Furthermore the "classified" label is defined by the organization that committed those crimes. Do you think murdering innocent civilians indiscriminately should be classified?

You seem to be arguing semantics more than establishing any sort of moral or ethical argument against what he did.

I feel that an Australian citizen should not expect to be extradited to the USA for publishing information the USA would rather not be published. Still true even if he is an activist, would still be true even for someone genuinely trying to systematically destroy America and American values, if it’s just publication. Free speech etc.

For encouraging Americans to break American laws, which I think is the non-legalese summary of the accusation? I don’t know how I feel. The internet (telecoms in general) breaks borders and jurisdiction in ways that are not yet settled even in my own head.

Fleeing to an embassy definitely looked dumb to me at the time, and still does now. If someone is told to eat oranges, refuses because they are afraid oranges might be poisoned, volunteers to eat apples instead, runs away when someone tries to force them to eat an orange, then gets given a poisoned apple… I still don’t understand why people say this vindicates the original no-oranges stance.

Were Gandhi/MLK/Rosa Parks wrong when they made a point of breaking unjust laws and encouraging others to follow along?

Many liberals at the time thought yes - "the law being the law" and all that. It does sound like you're making the same argument they were?

The difference between their civil disobedience and Assange's actions is that they took their punishment.

Your question of right/"wrong" is a matter of morality, not legality. Stealing bread to feed a starving person might be morally good, but legally wrong, and nobody should expect to avoid legal consequences because of it.

In the case of civil disobedience, those involved do NOT attempt to flee from justice. Being arrested and facing the legal system is an integral part.

Assange may just get his chance to emulate Ghandi by spending years in prison...

You think Oskar Schindler was wrong not to hand himself in?

Remind me about how Rosa Parks ran and hid?

I do know that rule of law doesn’t function if everyone gets to decide for themselves what is and isn’t an unjust law, even though I can say with the benefit of hindsight that Rosa Parks deserved her Congressional Gold Medal, and that I hope I would’ve recognised the law as unjust at the time.

The reference that comes to mind is the four boxes of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and cartridge, which should be used in this order. Breaking unjust laws counts as #3, normal journalism is #1, Assange didn’t have the option of #2 with regard to the USA.

I'd have hoped so too, but from what you've written it sounds like you would have slotted in with the liberal whites who declared support-for-ending-segregation-in-theory but would also say that "this isn't the right way" or "this isn't the right time".

They made rather similar arguments to yours about the primacy of the rule of law as a principle.

Four boxes is a reason to take things slow, not a reason to say “no not like that” when the first steps have failed. And when the law bites someone for breaking it, if you think the law is wrong you should support the victim of the law; but that’s not the same as saying the law should not bite at all. A court case is by itself a powerful bite for most people, even without conviction.

I can also see that someone who is constantly being ground down and dehumanised by the law isn’t going to care about an end to the rule of law. I can’t expect someone in that situation to care if rule of law is damaged, because it never protected them in the first place. I suspect the feeling the law is a bludgeon rather than a shield is the cause of the current “ACAB” and “defund the police” slogans.

But is Assange even in that category? I don’t think so, so I do not feel confident predicting how I would vote if I was hypothetically on a jury. I do think the Guardian newspaper in the UK was in the “law is wrong” category, and that it was wrong for the UK government to destroy their copy of what Snowden gave them.

Like I said, complicated.

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. MLK had a specific, rather famous riposte to this attitude because of how common it was:

"I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

Emphasis mine.

But let me turn this around to demonstrate why such an ordering is desirable: lynchings in the USA disproportionately targeted African Americans. Those mobs were full of people who often claimed to be enforcing justice, but they were reaching straight for the 4th box.

And again, this is only even a consideration for people who care about rule of law. I can easily believe that many rights activists — women’s equality, race equality, Stonewall, independence movements in then-European colonies — had no possible reason to care about rule of law, because the law was never on their side. Anyone in that situation, I’d expect to reach for #4 first because it’s the only tool even available.

Why does the intent/purpose of the publisher matter here in any way from a legal prospective? I fear that your opinion of his purpose is forming your opinion of its legality.

2. I don't think Assange is accused specifically of furthering the goals of a foreign adversary. If there was evidence of that then he would presumably have been charged with it somewhere.

What benefits or harms a country is orthogonal to what is factual. Any law that claims a moral high ground in protecting facts from being publicized, is used as a club to suppress speech. That is the moral issue, not some misguided idea that you are beholden to where and when you were born over reality to make statements. When you chase people after the fact (information is already published), you're doubling the moral insult. This isn't he ruin of the US, so it's transparently a petty vendetta.

There are practical problems (like state secrets in larger war games, ie Game Theory), which countries have historically forgone any nuance for the club, in the interest of expediency and simplicity. This isn't so complicated. Everyone understands. This is not a justification for totalitarian behavior, regardless of how dressed up the process is.

Motive is incredibly important from a legal perspective. It's the difference between self-defense and murder. I believe you have the burden of proof suggesting why motive shouldn't be considered from a legal perspective, and I believe you'll have an uphill battle doing so.

As far as I'm aware his activities regarding the whole guccifer, Seth rich, etc. affair make me think a mere journalist he is not.

> Assange is an activist, not a journalist.

Assange has broken two of the biggest stories of our era and literally hundreds of stories each of which would be a reputation-maker for a lesser individual.

Just because you don't like the truths that Assange reveals, doesn't mean he isn't a journalist.

> any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done.

Wikileaks tried to get cooperation from the US government to redact the sensitive parts. They refused to cooperate.

Your way would have meant nothing at all.

Can you explain what harm you believe these leaks caused, compared to their value in knowing that the US engages in war crimes and covers them up?

The US invasion of Afghanistan was a complete failure and one that allowed the actual guilty party, Osama Bin Laden, to escape.

The Taliban offered twice to give up Bin Laden but Bush refused even to discuss it with them. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...

Both the CIA and the FBI concluded that no one in the Taliban had any idea of 9/11 before it happened, which is very logical, because you aren't successful at conspiracies by telling everyone.

And yet Bush invaded Afghanistan, because he needed to invade somewhere and couldn't invade the actual culprits, Saudi Arabia - Al Qaeda being founded, funded, manned and managed by Saudis.

---

Participating in a great war crime that killed hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people and completely failed militarily, economically, diplomatically, and strategically should not be a matter of pride.

> However, I do not agree that a “journalist” should be able to enable espionage

Then you don't really believe that 99% of journalists are journalists, because they would disagree with you. I'm thankful that I don't live in the completely bowdlerized history that would have been the result if more journalists agreed with you.

Indiscriminate publishing. So you think the vetting done in partnership with the Washington Post and the New York Times was not journalism and the employees of the NYT and WaPo who are now not journalists should be prosecuted along side him? That's pretty radical.

Many of the larger newspapers lean toward the former kind of "he's not one of us" and clearly hate him on a personal level, for many reasons one of which is that he de-values their prestige currency of the scoop by having achieved many orders of magnitude more important scoops than they reasonably ever dreamed of without having to have the crap beaten out of him as a young person joining a newsroom like they did. "My editor would never allow me to publish that even though it's completely true and backed with documents proving it." He doesn't have that problem.

There's no doubt that the litany of CIA, NSA & FBI openly employed as analysts are pushing a false narrative about it which is repeated often. We saw evidence of that kind of ting pretty clearly with the evidence free suppression of Hunter Biden's laptop contents as "Russian disinformation." Now we know it's real. The contents are minor league attempted sleaze but true. The suppression of it and the constant refrain of "Russians" is vastly more significant and pretty worrying.

People have be led to think of Wikileaks and Assange as "Anti-American." Pretty obvious that the Military would want to frame it that way. And it's reasonable not to like anti-american stuff. It's not so very far to go from there to thinking CIA lies are actually anti-american and reporting the truth about massive corruption and illegality in government is what has made the American experiment with democracy work and so is pro-american.

I don't know the extent to which the CIA and NSA etc actually use social media comments to push a narrative, I'd really, really hope it was none. Was there anything about that in Edward Snowden's revalations?

The modern corporate press is bad enough as it is. But do you really want to live in a country where legit journalists are jailed for publishing things the government does not want you to know about.

Just this week, state prosecutor blanked out almost all the names on Epstein flight logs. Fairly obvious its in the public interest to know which powerful people went there. But powerful people will try to protect other powerful people.

It's funny to me that you were marauding around Afghanistan a couple of years ago and would use the word indiscriminate to describe Assange.

Shouldn't you be pushing for the prosecution of the Guardian journalist that published the encryption keys then? Not Assange who actively worked to get both press and government help to ensure safe disclosure.