I think the merit of the case is not about what particular thing Assangge did which warrants extradition, but the fact that extraditions are near impossible to thwart in court as such, in many common law countries, because if you are innocent, your only remedy is to go to the country demanding extradition, and trying proving that.
This is so broken, and add extraditions to a long list of habeas corpus negating tools governments in the West now amass.
That's not truly what's broken. If it were a truly fair system, no one would fear showing up to say they were innocent.
The problem is that the courts regularly ignore due process because there isn't any incentive for them to uphold the letter of the law. The side with the more expensive team of lawyers regularly wins.
If you could bet on court decisions, you would see the odds heavily in favor of the more moneyed party.
There should be a monetary incentive that encourages people who can read the law to evaluate past court decisions, and that punishes legal bodies (maybe even in a criminal court) that ignore due process.
The issue is the long-standing gentleman’s agreement not to enforce the laws regarding classified information against journalists. The computer intrusion charge is prosecutors’ strategy to get him behind bars while preserving that tradition. Give the facts here, he probably would be acquitted. But then the government might decide to use the classified information laws, under which it has a slam-dunk case. Prosecutorial policy convention is not due process. Those charges are what he really has to fear if he’s extradited.
I still don't understand how the Eastern District of Virginia can claim that "Nathaniel Frank" was in fact Julian Assange. The reasoning presented in their affidavit looks clearly fallacious to me (starting at p13):
Your not missing anything. this isn't a criminal trial it's an extradition hearing. They're not required to prove their case on the merits, just show they have sufficient facts to make a pro forma case at the criminal trial.
The argument is based on NF referring in the first person to doing things that JA did (debate in Iceland, conference in Norway), that other members of Wikileaks didn't do.
As far as I can tell they only state that for the conference in Norway: "[...] Assange was identified as a 'lecturer.' A review of the other names on the list revealed no other persons known to be associated with WikiLeaks"
To me the fact that they wrote "other persons known" indicates that they are not sure if there were other members present.
Almost all of this is about a 2013 trial and not this present proceeding at all. And the claim (from that trial) is that Manning provided Assange with bytes from an encrypted SAM or that it's only part of the password hash.
It's actually pretty aggravating reading trial documents when nobody present knows what they're talking about, it might as well be a Star Trek script, this is why it's so nice when the trial judge or at least some of the lawyers know what they're talking about (e.g. the Horizon scandal in the UK) but we can't have nice things most of the time.
Here's what the transcript says Manning provided:
80c11049faebf441d524fb3c4cd5351c
That's 16 bytes = 128 bits = one Windows password hash.
So straight away it's completely reasonable that this is in fact a Windows password hash, and in the absence of evidence of how Manning obtained that value it's only speculation that this is actually encrypted somehow (e.g. because it is from an encrypted offline SAM). And yet Assange's defence apparently has hours of such speculation on tap, for whatever they suppose that's worth.
What Assange talks about doing is using Rainbow tables. This would be applicable regardless of which type of Windows hash it is (or Assange thought it was) but crucially if the password is strong then you only get a result if this 128-bit value is an LM Hash. The risible LM Hash turns the first seven characters into one 64-bit value using DES, the next seven into another 64-bit value (DES again). It doesn't work on long passwords, if you have a long password then you can't have an LM hash. This of course is one reason somehow who tried to obtain both hashes would only get one...
The NT Hash is MD4(password). If the password is "qwerty" or "manning" that's not difficult to find, and Rainbow Tables that will be fairly reliable for simple passwords with NT Hash are readily available and would have been years ago too.
But if the password is sixteen random characters then MD4(password) might as well be Argon2id(password) for all the good that'll do you. It's just too many combinations.
So, for all we may ever know that 128-bit value is in fact a legitimate NT Hash of a good password.
Some background that helped me understand why any of the is is important -
The government want a way to charge assange with something, that they don’t then have to also charge all the national newspapers with who helped him - because that would then be a much more blatant attack on press freedom.
They want to charge him as some form of hacker instead of what it’s really about - that they don’t like what he did as a journalist.
This reminds me of Particularism[0]. Instead of applying consistent moral principles to this case to determine right or wrong, they have already decided that this particular case is wrong and are figuring out what moral principles they can come up with to make it wrong.
> ASSANGE Agrees to Help Manning Crack a Password [1]
Is this what Assange is accused of doing?
1. Receiving a password hash from Manning
2. Telling Manning he'll try to crack it
3. Following up asking for more info about it (related usernames or something)
4. Never actually cracking it and no further action
Does anyone have any more specifics on what Assange actually did here to break the law? The indictment is pretty vague on this and it seems to be the central issue.
Assange and Manning agreed to try to gain unauthorized access to some U.S. government computer system.
Unauthorized computer access is a federal crime, see 18 U.S.C. section 1030.
The federal conspiracy charged (18 U.S.C section 371 in this case) also requires that one of the conspirators take an 'overt act' to further conspiracy. This is to stop idle talk about crimes being prosecuted as conspiracies.
In this case, Manning actually provided Assange with the hashed password. That's the overt act.
But, fundamentally, the conspiracy is the agreement to commit a crime.
The salient point in this case is that one of those persons was a journalist.
Conspiring with sources to obtain secret information is what investigative journalists do. Doing so illegally is sometimes clearly bad (like the UK Daily Mail hacking celebrity phones), and sometimes clearly good (Manning and Snowden).
Journalists are never normally prosecuted for breaking the Official Secrets Act (and equivalents in other countries). This case is the first time that's happened. It sets a precedent for other cases against journalists in the future as the US and UK governments get more authoritarian and less open.
The initial indictment against Assange was an attempt to draw some kind of line between him and "proper" journalists. The new indictment (which had to be created because, as the prosecution admitted, the first one would have failed) makes no such distinction.
This is bad for society. Assange is a bit of a twat, but this needs to stop because the ramifications are enormous.
It's not clear that the person who agreed to decoded the password hash was, in fact, Assange. This is another US allegation but it is by no means proven.
Is it clear Assange knew the password was to a U.S. government computer system?
Let's say Manning had the files at some point and encrypted them on his own machine with some password which would NOT give access to any U.S. government computer system? Then it wouldn't be a conspiracy to gain access to a U.S. government computer system, would it?
This isn't a trial.. It's an extradition hearing. They don't need to prove their case. They just need to make a showing of sufficient evidence that they could prove their case at trial.
> Manning never provided the two files necessary to “reconstruct the decryption key” for the password hash, Eller testified. “At the time, it would not have been possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained.”
Except ... factual impossibility is not a defense to a charge of conspiracy, or indeed most charges of inchoate offenses.
If you have a gun, and we agree that I will shoot someone with it, but it turns out (unbeknownst to either of us) that the gun has in fact been permanently deactivated ... that's still conspiracy to commit murder.
The problem with the analogy is that committing a murder is a crime for everyone everywhere. For a US citizen who has been given classified information it may be illegal and treasonous to leak classified US information to some one who doesn't have the clearance to get access to it.
But a journalist, should have the right to ask people to come forward if they have information with a public interest, even if it is classified. If someone comes forward, they may break the law, but not the journalist.
Further more, Assange is not a US citizen, and is there for under no obligation to be loyal to or protect US interests or secrets. He cant by definition be treasonous again any country besides his own.
If he on the other hand, provides material support to someone committing a crime, (like helping to crack a password), then he can be tried as an accomplice. This evidence seems to imply he did not.
>For a US citizen who has been given classified information it may be illegal and treasonous to leak classified US information to some one who doesn't have the clearance to get access to it.
Actually, here in the US, we don't have licensed journalists. As such anyone may act as one. Government employees (including members of the military) and contractors can be and have been charged and convicted with misuse/dissemination of classified information. What's more, private citizens working in the employ of a foreign government have also been charged and convicted for providing classified information to that foreign government.
However, no US journalist (and remember, anyone can be a journalist) has ever been convicted under the Espionage Act. Ever.
As such, it seems incredibly unlikely that Assange would be convicted under that Espionage Act. I guess we'll just have to see.
I take issue with the title of this posting, as (at least in the UK[0]), an Extradition Hearing is not a trial, nor is it intended to be one.
The Adrian Lamo chat logs (published by Wired) show Assange was contacted by Manning with express intent to leak. So there was no conspiracy.
Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, just pointing this out because there is no reason to retreat to the common sense position you advocate. The fact that you have to make such a sensible point is a reflection of the deep deceit and dishonesty of the prosecutors who clearly know this and are omitting it in order to try and paint a portrait of conspiracy that is factually wrong and they know it.
If his defense against treason is that he's a foreign agent attacking the US, then he'll rightly end up in a POW prison. So he needs a better defense than that
Agree. Nonetheless feds are making him pay through the legal expense and stress of deflecting these charges.
What I wonder more about is our own guys: how does manning and Snowden walk out the door with this info anyway? Our search procedures apparently suck.
For the record my assessment of our involvement in Iraq is not kind: we should have escalated to armed intrusion to vet wmds base by base instead of invading wholesale on the reason Iraqi's were evasive. Second torture is unamerican, not reliable, and wholly wrong. Not proud at all of what we did here. Our response before after 9/11 was incompetent.
They show FBI radicalizes people and creates "terrorists", not catches terrorists. They act like criminals and intimidate people into compliance and then arrest them.
But for some reason if you tried pretending to be a terrorist, you'd still be a criminal
>If you have a gun, and we agree that I will shoot someone with it, but it turns out (unbeknownst to either of us) that the gun has in fact been permanently deactivated ... that's still conspiracy to commit murder.
IIUC, at least in the US, a charge of conspiracy requires an overt act by at least one of the conspirators[0]:
"If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If, however, the offense, the commission of which is the object of the conspiracy, is a misdemeanor only, the punishment for such conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for such misdemeanor."
As such, in the scenario you present, unless those who discuss murder actually do something in furtherance of that discussed goal, it's not conspiracy.
Well in the example they are procuring and preparing to use a gun. That’s doing an act. Incompetently perhaps because unbeknownst to the its not a functioning firearm, but they’re still acting on their intentions.
It makes sense, for charges about an attempt. Presumably if you attempt to kill someone in a way that doesn't work, you may try again in a way that does later. Also, a case can probably be made that while attempted murder may not be harmful to the intended victim (in some cases), it's still harmful to society.
This gun and murder analogy strikes me as being in bad taste, in this instance. Julian Assange is not being accused of murder by the US government, the particular charges in this case revolves around a hash of a password and alleged attempts to compare that hash to a table of similar hashes and, possibly, finding the matching clear text password for that specific hash value.
This is a far cry from conspiracy to commit murder, with our without a functional gun.
Actually, that particular issue (the alleged attempt to crack a password hash) isn't covered under the Espionage Act[0].
Rather, it's a separate charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act[1]. And that matters because the penalties are enormously more severe for the the former than the latter.
>This is a far cry from conspiracy to commit murder, with our without a functional gun.
Conspiracy is defined[2] as:
"If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If, however, the offense, the commission of which is the object of the conspiracy, is a misdemeanor only, the punishment for such conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for such misdemeanor."
As such, the example was just that, an example. Would you be less butthurt if the example was conspiracy to steal office supplies from a US Post Office, and the overt act was to bring a hand-cart to the post office in order to cart away said office supplies?
Let's say that you've been given a key for a locker at Grand Central Station and told there's a gun inside. We agree that I'll use the gun to shoot someone. You give me the key and I go to collect the gun. In fact, the locker is empty.
The gun doesn't even exist and yet there's still a conspiracy to commit murder.
If Manning and Assange think that a recipe for fruit salad is a hash of a root password for some U.S. Government computer and then attempt to identify a collision for it, with the goal of allowing Manning unauthorized access: that's still conspiracy.
"If I'm God, and we agree that I will kill everyone with my God powers, but it turns out (unbeknownst to either of us) that I'm not God, that's still conspiracy to commit murder."
The defendants were at a bar. A drunken woman collapsed. The defendants put her in their car, took her home, and had sex with her while they believed she was unconscious.
In fact, the woman had died at the bar, and they had been having sex with a corpse. They could not be convicted of rape, but they could be convicted of attempted rape because they believed the woman was alive at the time.
Being factually mistaken about the possibility of a crime is not a defense to a charge of attempt, conspiracy etc.
Given that someone has actually been convicted of attempted murder by voodoo doll (ridiculous as that is), that reddit discussion sounds a bit like wishful thinking.
Readit News
This is so broken, and add extraditions to a long list of habeas corpus negating tools governments in the West now amass.
The problem is that the courts regularly ignore due process because there isn't any incentive for them to uphold the letter of the law. The side with the more expensive team of lawyers regularly wins.
If you could bet on court decisions, you would see the odds heavily in favor of the more moneyed party.
There should be a monetary incentive that encourages people who can read the law to evaluate past court decisions, and that punishes legal bodies (maybe even in a criminal court) that ignore due process.
https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2019/04/2017-12-21_Vir...
There are two assumptions they use to infer the identity of NF:
1- The belief of two persons that the person who they were talking with was probably Assange.
2- That only one single person was using that jabber account.
The only thing I can personally infer from the information they presented is that NF was (very likely) a member of Wikileaks at that time.
What am I missing?
To me the fact that they wrote "other persons known" indicates that they are not sure if there were other members present.
Deleted Comment
"Take a word for it" has been taken to a whole new level in the 21st century...
It's actually pretty aggravating reading trial documents when nobody present knows what they're talking about, it might as well be a Star Trek script, this is why it's so nice when the trial judge or at least some of the lawyers know what they're talking about (e.g. the Horizon scandal in the UK) but we can't have nice things most of the time.
Here's what the transcript says Manning provided:
80c11049faebf441d524fb3c4cd5351c
That's 16 bytes = 128 bits = one Windows password hash.
So straight away it's completely reasonable that this is in fact a Windows password hash, and in the absence of evidence of how Manning obtained that value it's only speculation that this is actually encrypted somehow (e.g. because it is from an encrypted offline SAM). And yet Assange's defence apparently has hours of such speculation on tap, for whatever they suppose that's worth.
What Assange talks about doing is using Rainbow tables. This would be applicable regardless of which type of Windows hash it is (or Assange thought it was) but crucially if the password is strong then you only get a result if this 128-bit value is an LM Hash. The risible LM Hash turns the first seven characters into one 64-bit value using DES, the next seven into another 64-bit value (DES again). It doesn't work on long passwords, if you have a long password then you can't have an LM hash. This of course is one reason somehow who tried to obtain both hashes would only get one...
The NT Hash is MD4(password). If the password is "qwerty" or "manning" that's not difficult to find, and Rainbow Tables that will be fairly reliable for simple passwords with NT Hash are readily available and would have been years ago too.
But if the password is sixteen random characters then MD4(password) might as well be Argon2id(password) for all the good that'll do you. It's just too many combinations.
So, for all we may ever know that 128-bit value is in fact a legitimate NT Hash of a good password.
The government want a way to charge assange with something, that they don’t then have to also charge all the national newspapers with who helped him - because that would then be a much more blatant attack on press freedom.
They want to charge him as some form of hacker instead of what it’s really about - that they don’t like what he did as a journalist.
0: https://iep.utm.edu/morlpat/
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Is this what Assange is accused of doing?
1. Receiving a password hash from Manning
2. Telling Manning he'll try to crack it
3. Following up asking for more info about it (related usernames or something)
4. Never actually cracking it and no further action
Does anyone have any more specifics on what Assange actually did here to break the law? The indictment is pretty vague on this and it seems to be the central issue.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1289641/downl... (page 9)
Assange and Manning agreed to try to gain unauthorized access to some U.S. government computer system.
Unauthorized computer access is a federal crime, see 18 U.S.C. section 1030.
The federal conspiracy charged (18 U.S.C section 371 in this case) also requires that one of the conspirators take an 'overt act' to further conspiracy. This is to stop idle talk about crimes being prosecuted as conspiracies.
In this case, Manning actually provided Assange with the hashed password. That's the overt act.
But, fundamentally, the conspiracy is the agreement to commit a crime.
Conspiring with sources to obtain secret information is what investigative journalists do. Doing so illegally is sometimes clearly bad (like the UK Daily Mail hacking celebrity phones), and sometimes clearly good (Manning and Snowden).
Journalists are never normally prosecuted for breaking the Official Secrets Act (and equivalents in other countries). This case is the first time that's happened. It sets a precedent for other cases against journalists in the future as the US and UK governments get more authoritarian and less open.
The initial indictment against Assange was an attempt to draw some kind of line between him and "proper" journalists. The new indictment (which had to be created because, as the prosecution admitted, the first one would have failed) makes no such distinction.
This is bad for society. Assange is a bit of a twat, but this needs to stop because the ramifications are enormous.
Dead Comment
Let's say Manning had the files at some point and encrypted them on his own machine with some password which would NOT give access to any U.S. government computer system? Then it wouldn't be a conspiracy to gain access to a U.S. government computer system, would it?
Cracking a hashed password isn't obviously part of a crime. Using it may be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Manning never provided the two files necessary to “reconstruct the decryption key” for the password hash, Eller testified. “At the time, it would not have been possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained.”
If you have a gun, and we agree that I will shoot someone with it, but it turns out (unbeknownst to either of us) that the gun has in fact been permanently deactivated ... that's still conspiracy to commit murder.
But a journalist, should have the right to ask people to come forward if they have information with a public interest, even if it is classified. If someone comes forward, they may break the law, but not the journalist.
Further more, Assange is not a US citizen, and is there for under no obligation to be loyal to or protect US interests or secrets. He cant by definition be treasonous again any country besides his own.
If he on the other hand, provides material support to someone committing a crime, (like helping to crack a password), then he can be tried as an accomplice. This evidence seems to imply he did not.
Actually, here in the US, we don't have licensed journalists. As such anyone may act as one. Government employees (including members of the military) and contractors can be and have been charged and convicted with misuse/dissemination of classified information. What's more, private citizens working in the employ of a foreign government have also been charged and convicted for providing classified information to that foreign government.
However, no US journalist (and remember, anyone can be a journalist) has ever been convicted under the Espionage Act. Ever.
As such, it seems incredibly unlikely that Assange would be convicted under that Espionage Act. I guess we'll just have to see.
I take issue with the title of this posting, as (at least in the UK[0]), an Extradition Hearing is not a trial, nor is it intended to be one.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/extradition-processes-and-review
Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, just pointing this out because there is no reason to retreat to the common sense position you advocate. The fact that you have to make such a sensible point is a reflection of the deep deceit and dishonesty of the prosecutors who clearly know this and are omitting it in order to try and paint a portrait of conspiracy that is factually wrong and they know it.
Dead Comment
> Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
What I wonder more about is our own guys: how does manning and Snowden walk out the door with this info anyway? Our search procedures apparently suck.
For the record my assessment of our involvement in Iraq is not kind: we should have escalated to armed intrusion to vet wmds base by base instead of invading wholesale on the reason Iraqi's were evasive. Second torture is unamerican, not reliable, and wholly wrong. Not proud at all of what we did here. Our response before after 9/11 was incompetent.
But for some reason if you tried pretending to be a terrorist, you'd still be a criminal
IIUC, at least in the US, a charge of conspiracy requires an overt act by at least one of the conspirators[0]: "If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If, however, the offense, the commission of which is the object of the conspiracy, is a misdemeanor only, the punishment for such conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for such misdemeanor."
As such, in the scenario you present, unless those who discuss murder actually do something in furtherance of that discussed goal, it's not conspiracy.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/371
N.B.: IANAL
This is a far cry from conspiracy to commit murder, with our without a functional gun.
Rather, it's a separate charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act[1]. And that matters because the penalties are enormously more severe for the the former than the latter.
>This is a far cry from conspiracy to commit murder, with our without a functional gun.
Conspiracy is defined[2] as: "If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If, however, the offense, the commission of which is the object of the conspiracy, is a misdemeanor only, the punishment for such conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for such misdemeanor."
As such, the example was just that, an example. Would you be less butthurt if the example was conspiracy to steal office supplies from a US Post Office, and the overt act was to bring a hand-cart to the post office in order to cart away said office supplies?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/371
Edit: Fixed grammatical error
Let's say that you've been given a key for a locker at Grand Central Station and told there's a gun inside. We agree that I'll use the gun to shoot someone. You give me the key and I go to collect the gun. In fact, the locker is empty.
The gun doesn't even exist and yet there's still a conspiracy to commit murder.
Dead Comment
If Manning and Assange think that a recipe for fruit salad is a hash of a root password for some U.S. Government computer and then attempt to identify a collision for it, with the goal of allowing Manning unauthorized access: that's still conspiracy.
"If I'm God, and we agree that I will kill everyone with my God powers, but it turns out (unbeknownst to either of us) that I'm not God, that's still conspiracy to commit murder."
Promising impossibility is not a conspiracy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladviceofftopic/comments/6le3hy...
Refer to, e.g. United States vs. Thomas: https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-u... ... which is an actual appeal court decision.
The defendants were at a bar. A drunken woman collapsed. The defendants put her in their car, took her home, and had sex with her while they believed she was unconscious.
In fact, the woman had died at the bar, and they had been having sex with a corpse. They could not be convicted of rape, but they could be convicted of attempted rape because they believed the woman was alive at the time.
Being factually mistaken about the possibility of a crime is not a defense to a charge of attempt, conspiracy etc.
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2004/dec/09/attempted-vo...