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Notes -
The guardian on Assange and Biden considering to drop the charges.
To my surprise, this is actually a take echoed by Glenn Greenwood:
The facts go like this:
The Guardian/Greenwood narrative would have to go like this:
My narrative would go something like this:
One question I have is whether Assange’s conviction would even be guaranteed if he was tried in the US.
Here’s the indictment. Almost all the charges are ‘espionage’, and a lot of it seems to rely on proving that Assange knew he was damaging the US and essentially acted as Manning’s handler rather than just using Manning as a source.
That seems like a pretty difficult thing to prove, unlike Snowden Assange didn’t flee to an enemy state, and while he is an asshole it doesn’t seem likely he’s working for the Russians or Chinese. Assange can cite a history of years of working as a journalist/editor of wikileaks in the public interest before he was arrested. Is it not possible that Biden is worried about the risk of Assange being acquitted?
I thought there are chat logs of him instructing Manning on what commands he should run to hack the US and exfiltrate secrets? That doesn't strike me as run-of-the-mill journalism at that point.
What does that even mean? I don't think Manning hacked anything, let alone "the US".
I have also heard the part where Assange helped Manning with the commands to run to exfiltrate the data, but I wouldn't be so confident that to ban this would define a test that normal journalists would generally pass. Have none of them provided their sources with some kind of technical support, like "here's how you use this camera you asked us to lend you"? What about interviewers that help their interviewees tweak the formulation of a statement that winds up becoming the linchpin of the latter's violation of some confidentiality law, like "S: So what I'm saying is the US r... rev... - J: reverse engineered? - S: ... reverse engineered alien technology, right."?
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The indictment argues that Assange believed the evidence would be used to harm the United States and at least implies he had that motive.
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