Is it legal for a journalist to assist another person in invading someone's home, for the purpose of obtaining information that could be published?
It is not. It's very illegal, for good reason.
It's also illegal to do the same thing with a computer system.
People need to start thinking about information systems as property, in the same way that your house is your property, and your car is your property. In this case, the information system is government property, which for some reason many people believe gives us special license to take whatever we want from it. But the same principle applies to the property of private individuals, including you.
So do you really want to live in a world where the governing maxim is that information wants to be free, and that justifies any and all means of getting to it, including breaking into secure information systems?
What specific "principle" are you referring to where you conflate private property with public property? That they are both just types of "property" and therefore the invasion of either is an identical ethical misdemeanour? This seems a rather crummy "principle" to me. There is a world of difference between the two types of property, and it's fundamental to the very definition of a nation - especially the US. Government property is publicly/collectively owned by the citizens of the nation, while private property, while coming with certain collectively agreed responsibilities (tax, licenses, codes etc), is controlled entirely privately by individuals. Invasion of private property as you say is unambiguously morally wrong, but I don't think the same can be said about collectively owned public property. I'm not saying everyone should have a "license" to ransack public property, but if there is an invasion then the morality of the act has to be gauged on case by case basis - if the public property of a non-corrupt state is breached for private gain then of course that's wrong. But what if property of an evil/corrupt regime is breached for the public good - surely the same can't said?
>US. Government property is publicly/collectively owned by the citizens of the nation, while private property, while coming with certain collectively agreed responsibilities (tax, licenses, codes etc), is controlled entirely privately by individuals. Invasion of private property as you say is unambiguously morally wrong, but I don't think the same can be said about collectively owned public property
Even if this ridiculous argument is true, Assange was never a US citizen or taxpayer.
Just the principle that the laws that dictate what is and isn't government property and who is and isn't entitled to access it are decided by legislators that were chosen by the people of the United States in an election, and not by Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or any other single individual
I don't know what planet you live on, but there is plenty of publicly owned property that I have no access to. If you think otherwise, just try randomly walking onto a military base that does not allow visitation. You may argue what you feel is morally right, but any actual adult has realized that morally right does not equate to the law.
>US. Government property is publicly/collectively owned by the citizens of the nation
How dare you speak for or decide for the public then. Have you requested access from us or our representatives? Or you think, "fuck it, owned by everyone, I have a license to do whatever I want".
Avoid spreading FUD please. No-one has claimed that Assange provided Manning with any assistance compromising any computer systems. The only revelation from the leaked indictment is that Manning apparently sent him a password hash once and Assange said, "can't break it."
The Manning-Lamo chat logs leaked to Wired also clearly show that Manning sought out Assange. If you have any evidence to the contrary on these two points, please post as your claims are running against what is publicly known.
It's fascinating to me how you can accuse someone of "spreading FUD" without having read the (short) indictment.
In my opinion this is complicated stuff. I think people have not only a right but a moral obligation to leak in order to expose crimes. But it isn't clear that this was Assange's goal. Instead, Assange does a lot of moral posturing and seems mostly driven by ego: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/andrew-ohagan/ghosting.
I would be much more sympathetic had Assange or wikileaks provided leaks in a different manner. But they didn't. They released everything, unredacted, without commentary or contextualization which is why the previous poster's restatement of Assange's infantile position is basically accurate:
> So do you really want to live in a world where the governing maxim is that information wants to be free, and that justifies any and all means of getting to it, including breaking into secure information systems?
Merely attempting to assist the break-in is a crime. He attempted.
Same metaphor applies. I try to help someone pick the lock as they try to break-in to a house. This is illegal. It's also illegal for a computer intrusion.
Julian Assange took concrete steps in furtherance of a conspiracy. Whether or not he succeeded is besides the point.
Exactly, if he is to be classed as a journalist, has his past actions conformed with journalist ethics and standards expected within the USA?
I do disagree with him being classified as a journalist as from my understanding he published writings from others. That, if we are to classify him, would place him more within the realms of a publisher, not a journalist.
Hence this is not a threat to journalists, but publishers - who are less protected and the legal buck for journalists actions. That's their job. They are there to make sure journalists adhere to standards as much as write articles wanted. But journalist or publisher, etc - your not above the law and the journalist card is not a get out of free jail card. Never has been and some would argue, more the opposite.
>People need to start thinking about information systems as property
Except they don't ? "You" can, of course, but it doesn't mean "people" need to. There is no scarcity of digital files in the world. You can create and destroy them at will. With real property, you can't. That's also the basic argument against DRM systems. The file isn't scarce. That you transferred the scarcity of resources to make the file to the file itself is something you brought upon yourself. Nobody asked you to. If it does not suit you, you are free to do everything with pen and paper, and put the papers in your wardrobe. You can't have the benefits and convenience (i.e., lack of scarcity) of digital files, and still pretend that they are scarce. Pick one.
So because I put information in a digital format, I cannot own it? Even if I only put it on my hardware and encrypt it etc? If you hack into my stuff and get my information, it isn't criminal because We All Own the Bits??
Yes, this is a crucial mistake. People love to understand things by analogy, but analogies are limited.
I might explain a filesystem and folder structure to someone by using an analogy that uses paper folders etc. But crucial understanding is lost when I do this. There are significant differences between the systems that make certain rules that apply to one system not apply to the other.
Another reason this is not a useful analogy is if we see information as government property, I am using government property each time I identify myself using my ID card or even my name and date of birth. Surely we should now pay tax each time we do this (or the government should license it to us).
Furthermore, in the specific case of the government, which works in service of the people it governs, government owned information is at odds with its purpose. The government got this information from, and uses it in service of, its citizens. As much of it as possible should be public. For instance, land-surveying information should be public, as well as free (with respect to rights).
The property analogy is too limited. We need to understand information as something different.
With all the things released by assange, the crime you want to talk about is hacking? Come on man.
Numerous innocent people were mowed down gleefully. Political powers were sabatoging nations. Evil amok. And the only thing you want to talk about is that hacking allegedly occurred and after 7 years imprisonment assange deserves more?
I won't even get into how different it is to break into someone's home as compared to a govt office...
Apply some more of that sane and rational thinking to this question: what real evidence do any of us have that Assange attempted to 'break into someones house'? Is conjecture enough to be able to establish a moral position in this particular case?
And then, think of it like this: you see a dark house at the end of the street, a dark den of scum and villainy, and you know that crimes have been committed from this house because you've seen the corpses scattered in its yard. Are you not justified in investigating - or at least, reporting to relevant authorities, that something is going wrong?
Because America today is that house, and the only relevant authorities who can do anything about it, are the American people themselves. (The local law enforcement already know about the house - they sell their crack and bury their corpses there too.. such is the state of the American military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex today, the real, tangible crimes of which are and always have been in Wikileaks sights...)
Well, when one whistle blower tells another whistle blower how to collect the evidence needed for... blowing said whistle about illegal activity, the methods themselves often seem a bit off-book. eg gaining authorised access to materials, transmitting them to third parties for public reveal, etc.
The thing with whistle blowing though, is (some) countries have protections for whistle blowers specifically because off-book methods are commonly needed.
So, even if Assange did assist Manning as stated... the "illegality" here isn't really the point (except to people trying to suppress whistle blowing).
The point is whether whistle blower protections turn out to be fit for purpose. ;)
>Is it legal for a journalist to assist another person in invading someone's home, for the purpose of obtaining information that could be published?
You clearly don't understand the concept of whistleblowing. And you did not read the article you're commenting on:
“Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log onto the computers using a username that did not belong to her,” the indictment says. “Such a measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of disclosures of classified information.” So the goal was to protect Manning’s identity, and Assange offered to assist.
Misfeasance is the real issue here. Wikileaks exposed it. I don't care if Assange broke the cited law, if the US govt is up to no damn good as a US Citizen I have a right to know. If the govt is using the law to retaliate against journalists who expose misfeasance I expect 18 U.S. Code § 214to apply.
> If the govt is using the law to retaliate against journalists
Assange is not a journalist. He conspired to hack a computer system. That is a crime.
Regardless of what you believe to be right, you must acknowledge that sometimes good people have to face consequences for their actions, regardless of the morality of said actions.
>People need to start thinking about information systems as property, in the same way that your house is your property, and your car is your property. In this case, the information system is government property, which for some reason many people believe gives us special license to take whatever we want from it.
You've skipped over a chunk of logic there which I feel bears closer scrutiny.
The house and the car are owned by people, who feel emotional distress when their privacy is invaded. Governments do not feel emotional distress ever.
It's also hard to argue that governments are harmed by invasions of privacy the same way an individual might be, because governments wield much power in the form of monopolization of force and have more control over how information they dislike is used. See the British parliaments ban on using parliamentary footage for comedy purposes.
The point is, while I'm not saying government information systems should be a free-for-all, I am personally of the opinion that the larger an organization gets, the less right it has to privacy. I don't agree with your logical leap of "people deserve privacy -> governments are basically people -> governments deserve privacy". Governments don't have a right to privacy the way people do.
This is a red herring because of the context. Wikileaks regularly dumped sensitive information like names of local informants in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan without redacting it, getting them killed in some cases.
Justice Black had something to say about the role of journalism when he ruled on the New York Times publishing material from the Top Secret Pentagon Papers, showing how our leaders had misled the public about the Vietnam war:
>In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
Concurring in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).
The Obama administration had the same information that the Trump administration used to make it's "hacking" claim and came to a very different conclusion.
>“The problem the department has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists,” said former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “And if you are not going to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, which the department is not, then there is no way to prosecute Assange.”
Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a “New York Times problem.” If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
It's important to look at the actual indictment [1] rather than all the commentary about it, because everyone involved seems to have an axe to grind thanks to Assange's colorful character.
The indictment charges Assange with conspiring with Manning to unlawfully gain new access to a protected government computer system. Specifically:
* Assange gave Manning a CD to boot from on the target computer, containing tools to copy the protected password data.
* Assange received a copy of the password hashes from Manning, and attempted to crack them.
Regardless of what reasons the Obama administration had to proceed or not proceed with the indictment at the time (which we are not privy to), these are very clearly defined criminal offenses in the USA, with much precedent behind them. Had Assange not provided the hacking tools, and had he not attempted to crack the passwords, this indictment would never have happened.
Press freedom and protecting your sources is not the issue here; it's about conspiring to hack a government computer.
>Had Assange not provided the hacking tools, and had he not attempted to crack the passwords, this indictment would never have happened.
He has not been under trial yet, so how do you know with such certainty he actually did that?
>Press freedom and protecting your sources is not the issue here;
A lot of very prominent people who deal with politics, activism and journalism disagree with this assessment. On top of that list would be: Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and Noam Chomsky. Their reasoning seems pretty solid. And unlike some media people, they didn't suddenly flip-flop in their positions on such issues.
Allegedly then. It doesn't change the nature of the charges.
And who cares what prominent people think ? They aren't the ones who will be judging whether Assange committed a crime or not. Lots of prominent people have defended guilty people before.
> Assange tried to find the pre-image of a hash. There's nothing criminal about that either.
That's also conspiracy. You can't take these two acts out of context. They were done with the intent of stealing and disseminating classified information which is illegal.
Is your question “what’s wrong with a non-citizen supplying the means for a member of the military to access and share sensitive data”? I should have thought it obvious what is wrong with that.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with briskly thrusting a knife back and forth. But if there’s a person stood in front of you and you intend to kill them, the moral and legal context changes. Context and intent matter.
So it appears that the author of this piece and the authors of the nearly identical Intercept piece [0] are skeptical of the "conspiracy to hack" charges brought against Assange. From what I understand, the action conspired towards was gaining access to an account on a government network that neither Assange nor Manning had access to ordinarily, with the goal of better covering Mannong's tracks (the other account had just as much file access rights as Manning).
I understand the claim that this was an effort by Assange to protect his information source, but should it really not be considered Bad to login to someone else's account on a government network and spoof your actions with their name attached? Is it so unreasonable to believe that that's somehow too far?
No journalist would help their sources hack their employer for more documents. Journalists can take documents their source already has; but helping their source illegally access more documents is against the law.
Imagine if these were physical documents in a safe. A journalist helping the source crack that safe would be very illegal.
I thought Manning already had access to the documents in question. The goal of getting into another account was to cover their tracks, not to gain unauthorized access.
A journalist giving someone else a document that explain how a particular brand of safe can be cracked is not illegal. Handing someone knowledge is not illegal.
Actually cracking the safe is illegal. We've been over this for decades. Once it was about simply encrypting. Others about documents on bomb making. Or safe cracking. Or lock picking.
The information is legal. Putting it in practice to gain unauthorized access is illegal.
>A journalist giving someone else a document that explain how a particular brand of safe can be cracked is not illegal. Handing someone knowledge is not illegal.
Terrible analogy. Assange obtained the actual NTLM hash from Manning of the user they were trying to crack the password of and attempted to crack it with the full knowledge that it was a top secret US military login. He wasn't sending her generic knowledge on how to crack NTLM passwords.
>Actually cracking the safe is illegal.
Attempting to crack a safe that you don't have authorization to, with the intent of stealing things from it is also illegal even if you failed to crack it.
Just like going around the neighborhood trying the doors of homes or pulling handles of cars is illegal.
Assange is in my opinion a slimeball, and not a neutral player, but I don't think he committed a crime - at least not anymore than Daniel Ellsberg did when they published the Pentagon Papers, or for that matter Bob Woodward did when publishing the Watergate Leaks from the FBI - but, like I said, not a Neutral Player - he has his own agenda, which while from time to time may align with the interests of the greater good, is neither benign or uniformly positive. I dont consider the charges against Assange to be any more of a risk to journalism than the charges leveled against Ellsberg in the wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers - and will likely not survive a trial. The assertion that he helped Manning beyond acting as a publisher/dissemination method is absurd and more or less baseless.
There is an important difference between Assange and Ellsberg so your comparison of the two isn’t a good one:
Assange did not steal and leak the materials, he was the outside party publishing them.
On the other hand Ellsberg was the person working for the government who copied and leaked all the materials and knew he might face charges for that reason.
In this comparison Manning would be compared to Ellsberg. And Assange would be the reporter at The NY Times or WaPo (I’m brain farting here) who published them.
The government's position isn't that he "helped" Manning, it is that Manning acted, in part on the direction of Assange. If I remember correctly, their correspondence between each other occurred before Manning did anything. Assange basically said he would publish it if it were given to him.
So imagine if a journalist did that, and told someone "if you break into this person's house, I will publish your findings. Since neither of us like this person."
Would that be illegal? It would definitely be illegal.
It's more than that, it's that Assange actively assisted in the crime.
A better analogy would be that as he was casing the joint, he called up someone, told them he was going to break in, and asked for instructions on how to pick locks. At that point, rendering such assistance makes you an accomplice.
"Publishing" documents is not what Assange is being indicted for, and his defenders refuse to accept that point. It is cited as an aggravating circumstance, which is indeed arguably an overreach.
I have to say, this makes me sad. I visit HN daily, mostly look at the headlines and rarely engage in the discussion, but seeing what are supposed to be smart, thinking people commenting in here just saddens me. Same goes for the other 1k+ comments on the previous thread.
It seems you people think it's ok to have someone end up like this guy for helping a source get us information we all benefited from. You can say trying to protect this source's identity is conspiracy to commit computer hacking, but your head needs to be buried very deep into the sand to pretend this is anything but the excuse used to get him.
The actual crime here is holding governments accountable. Trying, at least.
I understand most of you didn't love him for exposing problems inside a political party otherwise set to win the election. I really do. I understand he didn't do much to be loved by the public. I understand 10 years of propaganda could make most people change their mind about a saint. But here, too?
I listened to his most recent interview today and I really enjoyed his views. I half expect people to point out this is Russian state media, and yes, the reds are out to get you but can listen to it in the background, that way the watermark can't bother you.
I agree with your sentiment of disappointment in the general response on HN to this. And I also have the same disappointment in the general media's response. I thought Tulsi Gabbard's defense of Assange to Tapper on CNN was spot on, and can't believe it's up to a few politicians to defend journalism on a news network instead of the news network itself.
The previous Obama administration went very hard against whistle blowers, but even they ultimately decided that prosecuting Assange for this would be a step too far.
What's happening seems to be people don't like him for various reasons (fair enough), are blind to the larger issues and chilling effects caused by this prosecution, and so with motivated reasoning decide this is not about politics and is about hacking, he's a bad hacker who tried to crack a Government password, and they're just standing up for some principal of not trying to hack Govt passwords or some such.
Does anyone have the specifics of what was the exact nature of Julian Assange’s help in cracking the password? Specifically,
1. Did Assange send Manning the name of utility that would crack the password?
Or
2. Did Assange send Manning a link to the utility in order to download it?
Or
3. Did Assange send Manning a page of Google search results, and/or a Wikipedia page, a technical article or blog post with the computer science fundamentals behind password-cracking?
Or
4. Did Assange send Manning a technical article or blog post with step by step instructions to crack the password?
Or
5. Did Assange crack the password himself?
I apologize if this information has been released somewhere and I haven’t seen it. In addition, apologize if the questions that I asked sound painfully fundamental or demeaning towards Assange or Manning.
What I am trying to get at is how easy it seems to get in trouble with the law in this case. Suppose someone comes up to me and says they want to know how to hotwire a car (or whatever the term is) in order to steal it, I happen to blurt out that this someone can “just Google that”, and then this person goes out and does just that without me being totally sure about their intent to do so. Am I now an accomplice to the crime?
The saddest part in this Twitter thread is the comment about Manning being a sociopath, and how people who disagree are "entitled whites". Not sure what the connection is even, but there's a certain irony given that Manning exposed killings of indigenous non-whites in what many on the left consider to be, in essence, a white colonial adventure.
To be pedantic, he's awaiting sentencing for skipping bail and then an extradition request (or two, depending on how the Sweden situation pans out). He may or may not face trial for the alleged crimes.
> Isn't his "crime" releasing documents that Manning stole?
No, releasing documents is not conduct that he is charged with.
> Manning, by the way, who had their sentence commuted by president Obama...
Commutation is not a pardon; it is merely a limitation on punishment. Now, a pardon still wouldn't invalidate the Assange charges, but the idea that the fact that a coconspirator got less punishment than their original sentence negates the validity of charges against someone else in the conspiracy is laughable.
The article goes to great length to show that the supposed crimes (except for the one password, maybe) are things that journalists do. It's even more shady because his co-conspirator, and the one who was charged with and convicted of the crimes that are unambiguously illegal, has been pardoned.
edit: I don't really care about the difference between pardon an commuted sentence because they both are a get out of jail free card.
If he did attempt to break the password hash, he conspired to hack military systems. I don't see why someone who attempted to break a password hash for access to classified documents shouldn't be prosecuted, journalist or not.
> The article goes to great length to show that the supposed crimes (except for the one password, maybe) are things that journalists do.
He's only charged with one crime, not multiple, and the “one password” is an integral part of the one crime he is charged with. What “supposed crimes” beside that are you referring to?
Readit News
It is not. It's very illegal, for good reason.
It's also illegal to do the same thing with a computer system.
People need to start thinking about information systems as property, in the same way that your house is your property, and your car is your property. In this case, the information system is government property, which for some reason many people believe gives us special license to take whatever we want from it. But the same principle applies to the property of private individuals, including you.
So do you really want to live in a world where the governing maxim is that information wants to be free, and that justifies any and all means of getting to it, including breaking into secure information systems?
That sword cuts both ways.
Even if this ridiculous argument is true, Assange was never a US citizen or taxpayer.
How dare you speak for or decide for the public then. Have you requested access from us or our representatives? Or you think, "fuck it, owned by everyone, I have a license to do whatever I want".
Deleted Comment
The Manning-Lamo chat logs leaked to Wired also clearly show that Manning sought out Assange. If you have any evidence to the contrary on these two points, please post as your claims are running against what is publicly known.
The US government has claimed exactly this in its indictment of Assange:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/press-release/file/1153481...
It's fascinating to me how you can accuse someone of "spreading FUD" without having read the (short) indictment.
In my opinion this is complicated stuff. I think people have not only a right but a moral obligation to leak in order to expose crimes. But it isn't clear that this was Assange's goal. Instead, Assange does a lot of moral posturing and seems mostly driven by ego: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/andrew-ohagan/ghosting.
I would be much more sympathetic had Assange or wikileaks provided leaks in a different manner. But they didn't. They released everything, unredacted, without commentary or contextualization which is why the previous poster's restatement of Assange's infantile position is basically accurate:
> So do you really want to live in a world where the governing maxim is that information wants to be free, and that justifies any and all means of getting to it, including breaking into secure information systems?
Same metaphor applies. I try to help someone pick the lock as they try to break-in to a house. This is illegal. It's also illegal for a computer intrusion.
Julian Assange took concrete steps in furtherance of a conspiracy. Whether or not he succeeded is besides the point.
Sorry, it's the law.
Deleted Comment
I do disagree with him being classified as a journalist as from my understanding he published writings from others. That, if we are to classify him, would place him more within the realms of a publisher, not a journalist.
Hence this is not a threat to journalists, but publishers - who are less protected and the legal buck for journalists actions. That's their job. They are there to make sure journalists adhere to standards as much as write articles wanted. But journalist or publisher, etc - your not above the law and the journalist card is not a get out of free jail card. Never has been and some would argue, more the opposite.
Except they don't ? "You" can, of course, but it doesn't mean "people" need to. There is no scarcity of digital files in the world. You can create and destroy them at will. With real property, you can't. That's also the basic argument against DRM systems. The file isn't scarce. That you transferred the scarcity of resources to make the file to the file itself is something you brought upon yourself. Nobody asked you to. If it does not suit you, you are free to do everything with pen and paper, and put the papers in your wardrobe. You can't have the benefits and convenience (i.e., lack of scarcity) of digital files, and still pretend that they are scarce. Pick one.
I might explain a filesystem and folder structure to someone by using an analogy that uses paper folders etc. But crucial understanding is lost when I do this. There are significant differences between the systems that make certain rules that apply to one system not apply to the other.
Another reason this is not a useful analogy is if we see information as government property, I am using government property each time I identify myself using my ID card or even my name and date of birth. Surely we should now pay tax each time we do this (or the government should license it to us).
Furthermore, in the specific case of the government, which works in service of the people it governs, government owned information is at odds with its purpose. The government got this information from, and uses it in service of, its citizens. As much of it as possible should be public. For instance, land-surveying information should be public, as well as free (with respect to rights).
The property analogy is too limited. We need to understand information as something different.
Numerous innocent people were mowed down gleefully. Political powers were sabatoging nations. Evil amok. And the only thing you want to talk about is that hacking allegedly occurred and after 7 years imprisonment assange deserves more?
I won't even get into how different it is to break into someone's home as compared to a govt office...
And then, think of it like this: you see a dark house at the end of the street, a dark den of scum and villainy, and you know that crimes have been committed from this house because you've seen the corpses scattered in its yard. Are you not justified in investigating - or at least, reporting to relevant authorities, that something is going wrong?
Because America today is that house, and the only relevant authorities who can do anything about it, are the American people themselves. (The local law enforcement already know about the house - they sell their crack and bury their corpses there too.. such is the state of the American military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex today, the real, tangible crimes of which are and always have been in Wikileaks sights...)
The thing with whistle blowing though, is (some) countries have protections for whistle blowers specifically because off-book methods are commonly needed.
So, even if Assange did assist Manning as stated... the "illegality" here isn't really the point (except to people trying to suppress whistle blowing).
The point is whether whistle blower protections turn out to be fit for purpose. ;)
You clearly don't understand the concept of whistleblowing. And you did not read the article you're commenting on:
“Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log onto the computers using a username that did not belong to her,” the indictment says. “Such a measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of disclosures of classified information.” So the goal was to protect Manning’s identity, and Assange offered to assist.
Assange is not a journalist. He conspired to hack a computer system. That is a crime.
Regardless of what you believe to be right, you must acknowledge that sometimes good people have to face consequences for their actions, regardless of the morality of said actions.
You've skipped over a chunk of logic there which I feel bears closer scrutiny.
The house and the car are owned by people, who feel emotional distress when their privacy is invaded. Governments do not feel emotional distress ever.
It's also hard to argue that governments are harmed by invasions of privacy the same way an individual might be, because governments wield much power in the form of monopolization of force and have more control over how information they dislike is used. See the British parliaments ban on using parliamentary footage for comedy purposes.
The point is, while I'm not saying government information systems should be a free-for-all, I am personally of the opinion that the larger an organization gets, the less right it has to privacy. I don't agree with your logical leap of "people deserve privacy -> governments are basically people -> governments deserve privacy". Governments don't have a right to privacy the way people do.
>In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
Concurring in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).
The Obama administration had the same information that the Trump administration used to make it's "hacking" claim and came to a very different conclusion.
>“The problem the department has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists,” said former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “And if you are not going to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, which the department is not, then there is no way to prosecute Assange.”
Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a “New York Times problem.” If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/julia...
The indictment charges Assange with conspiring with Manning to unlawfully gain new access to a protected government computer system. Specifically:
* Assange gave Manning a CD to boot from on the target computer, containing tools to copy the protected password data.
* Assange received a copy of the password hashes from Manning, and attempted to crack them.
Regardless of what reasons the Obama administration had to proceed or not proceed with the indictment at the time (which we are not privy to), these are very clearly defined criminal offenses in the USA, with much precedent behind them. Had Assange not provided the hacking tools, and had he not attempted to crack the passwords, this indictment would never have happened.
Press freedom and protecting your sources is not the issue here; it's about conspiring to hack a government computer.
[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/document-julian-assange-indictme...
He has not been under trial yet, so how do you know with such certainty he actually did that?
>Press freedom and protecting your sources is not the issue here;
A lot of very prominent people who deal with politics, activism and journalism disagree with this assessment. On top of that list would be: Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and Noam Chomsky. Their reasoning seems pretty solid. And unlike some media people, they didn't suddenly flip-flop in their positions on such issues.
And who cares what prominent people think ? They aren't the ones who will be judging whether Assange committed a crime or not. Lots of prominent people have defended guilty people before.
what's wrong with this?
> * Assange received a copy of the password hashes from Manning, and attempted to crack them.
Assange tried to find the pre-image of a hash. There's nothing criminal about that either.
It's conspiracy.
> Assange tried to find the pre-image of a hash. There's nothing criminal about that either.
That's also conspiracy. You can't take these two acts out of context. They were done with the intent of stealing and disseminating classified information which is illegal.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with briskly thrusting a knife back and forth. But if there’s a person stood in front of you and you intend to kill them, the moral and legal context changes. Context and intent matter.
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I understand the claim that this was an effort by Assange to protect his information source, but should it really not be considered Bad to login to someone else's account on a government network and spoof your actions with their name attached? Is it so unreasonable to believe that that's somehow too far?
[0] https://theintercept.com/2019/04/11/the-u-s-governments-indi...
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Imagine if these were physical documents in a safe. A journalist helping the source crack that safe would be very illegal.
Actually cracking the safe is illegal. We've been over this for decades. Once it was about simply encrypting. Others about documents on bomb making. Or safe cracking. Or lock picking.
The information is legal. Putting it in practice to gain unauthorized access is illegal.
Terrible analogy. Assange obtained the actual NTLM hash from Manning of the user they were trying to crack the password of and attempted to crack it with the full knowledge that it was a top secret US military login. He wasn't sending her generic knowledge on how to crack NTLM passwords.
>Actually cracking the safe is illegal.
Attempting to crack a safe that you don't have authorization to, with the intent of stealing things from it is also illegal even if you failed to crack it.
Just like going around the neighborhood trying the doors of homes or pulling handles of cars is illegal.
Assange did not steal and leak the materials, he was the outside party publishing them.
On the other hand Ellsberg was the person working for the government who copied and leaked all the materials and knew he might face charges for that reason.
In this comparison Manning would be compared to Ellsberg. And Assange would be the reporter at The NY Times or WaPo (I’m brain farting here) who published them.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/document-julian-assange-indictme...
So imagine if a journalist did that, and told someone "if you break into this person's house, I will publish your findings. Since neither of us like this person."
Would that be illegal? It would definitely be illegal.
A better analogy would be that as he was casing the joint, he called up someone, told them he was going to break in, and asked for instructions on how to pick locks. At that point, rendering such assistance makes you an accomplice.
"Publishing" documents is not what Assange is being indicted for, and his defenders refuse to accept that point. It is cited as an aggravating circumstance, which is indeed arguably an overreach.
It seems you people think it's ok to have someone end up like this guy for helping a source get us information we all benefited from. You can say trying to protect this source's identity is conspiracy to commit computer hacking, but your head needs to be buried very deep into the sand to pretend this is anything but the excuse used to get him.
The actual crime here is holding governments accountable. Trying, at least.
I understand most of you didn't love him for exposing problems inside a political party otherwise set to win the election. I really do. I understand he didn't do much to be loved by the public. I understand 10 years of propaganda could make most people change their mind about a saint. But here, too?
I listened to his most recent interview today and I really enjoyed his views. I half expect people to point out this is Russian state media, and yes, the reds are out to get you but can listen to it in the background, that way the watermark can't bother you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J98ed6oML2A
I lost one fifth of my karma yesterday defending the guy, let's see if this comment goes the same way.
Edit: funny enough my comment went to -3 in no time before slowing crawling its way back to +1. Almost like if... Nah.
The previous Obama administration went very hard against whistle blowers, but even they ultimately decided that prosecuting Assange for this would be a step too far.
What's happening seems to be people don't like him for various reasons (fair enough), are blind to the larger issues and chilling effects caused by this prosecution, and so with motivated reasoning decide this is not about politics and is about hacking, he's a bad hacker who tried to crack a Government password, and they're just standing up for some principal of not trying to hack Govt passwords or some such.
I could have sworn that you used to be able to still read [flagged] comments here. When did that change, or am I misremembering?
1. Did Assange send Manning the name of utility that would crack the password?
Or
2. Did Assange send Manning a link to the utility in order to download it?
Or
3. Did Assange send Manning a page of Google search results, and/or a Wikipedia page, a technical article or blog post with the computer science fundamentals behind password-cracking?
Or
4. Did Assange send Manning a technical article or blog post with step by step instructions to crack the password?
Or
5. Did Assange crack the password himself?
I apologize if this information has been released somewhere and I haven’t seen it. In addition, apologize if the questions that I asked sound painfully fundamental or demeaning towards Assange or Manning.
What I am trying to get at is how easy it seems to get in trouble with the law in this case. Suppose someone comes up to me and says they want to know how to hotwire a car (or whatever the term is) in order to steal it, I happen to blurt out that this someone can “just Google that”, and then this person goes out and does just that without me being totally sure about their intent to do so. Am I now an accomplice to the crime?
https://twitter.com/kpoulsen/status/1116341065416462336
A grand jury has already decided that: that's what an indictment means.
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US doesn’t exactly have a strong track record of successfully extraditing people from the UK for hacking the military.
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Manning, by the way, who had their sentence commuted by president Obama...
No, releasing documents is not conduct that he is charged with.
> Manning, by the way, who had their sentence commuted by president Obama...
Commutation is not a pardon; it is merely a limitation on punishment. Now, a pardon still wouldn't invalidate the Assange charges, but the idea that the fact that a coconspirator got less punishment than their original sentence negates the validity of charges against someone else in the conspiracy is laughable.
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edit: I don't really care about the difference between pardon an commuted sentence because they both are a get out of jail free card.
If he did attempt to break the password hash, he conspired to hack military systems. I don't see why someone who attempted to break a password hash for access to classified documents shouldn't be prosecuted, journalist or not.
He's only charged with one crime, not multiple, and the “one password” is an integral part of the one crime he is charged with. What “supposed crimes” beside that are you referring to?