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3) "Swedish prosecutors being willing to interview Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy shows they could have done that in the UK at any time" - Ecuador has no extradition treaty with Sweden, so once he was granted asylum the normal process was no longer available. I agree that judicial systems should be more flexible! But Assange wasn't being treated unusually here - Sweden's approach changed only when the approaches available to them changed

4) "The women didn't want him to be charged" - after the initial investigation was dropped. the women's legal representative petitioned the authorities for the case to be reexamined. It was only as a result of this that it was reopened.

5) "This was an obvious pretext so he could be extradited to the US" - under Swedish law, if a non-EU country asks that someone who was extradited to Sweden be extradited from Sweden, this can only occur if the country the person was extradited from agrees - ie, if Assange were extradited to Sweden from the UK, and if the US then requested he be extradited, the UK would need to agree. Given the US just requested he be extradited from the UK anyway, there's no obvious reason to complicate it.

6) "He was being prosecuted for journalism" - the charge he plead guilty to was not merely that he received leaked material, but that he had encouraged others to obtain material illegally in the first place with the goal of then publishing it. This is quite a long way beyond what's normally considered journalism. Could this case have set uncomfortable precedent in terms of where the line of acceptability is? Yes, and I'm glad it hasn't.

@mcc https://www.aklagare.se/en/media/press-service/the-assange-matter/facts-about-extradition-and-surrender/ is from the Swedish prosecution authority website

@mjg59 Thanks for the link!

@ciaranmak If someone illegally obtains material about war crimes and gives them to you, your use of that material is protected under the 1st amendment and is considered journalism. If you *ask* someone to illegally obtain material, you're now conspiring with them to commit an illegal act.

@ciaranmak Taking it into the real-world realm - if someone breaks into a house, finds some information of public evidence, and gives you a copy - journalism. If you ask someone to break into a house to find you that information - crime.

@mjg59 In the real world, Assange isn't from the United States, protected by the 1st ammendment? What.

Journalists openly ask folks to provide them with evidence and leaks all the times. You seem very willing to not only sidestep, but accept the much greater crime that was committed here.

@ciaranmak Asking someone to commit a crime on your behalf is kind of the exact definition of conspiring to commit a crime. You don't get to launder responsibility by having someone else do it for you, same as paying someone to murder someone doesn't mean you're legally in the clear.

@ciaranmak So, you get to make a choice. If you believe there's material of public interest available, you can either hope that someone just hands it to you or you can ask people to look for it for you. The latter may well be the morally correct thing to do. But it's still a crime, and our legal system isn't constructed such that acting morally correctly means you can't be found guilty.

@ciaranmak Conspiring to commit the crime of illegal access to computers in order to expose the crime of mass murder of civilians. Justifiable? Personally I'd say yes! Still a crime.

@theothersimo @ciaranmak I'm drawing a distinction that's well established in precedent. The idea that journalists should be able to commit arbitrary crimes in order to obtain material they believe to be in the public interest has obvious bad outcomes.

@mjg59 @ciaranmak the espionage act forbids sharing lost or misfiled classified information the same way it forbids stealing information. There is no legal or logical distinction between a journalist asking to be illegally provided with information in the leaker’s possession versus asking to be illegally provided with information not yet in the leaker’s possession.

@theothersimo @ciaranmak So, for example, Reality Winner mailing classified material to The Intercept meant the journalists weren't at risk under the espionage act.

@mjg59 @ciaranmak what about Woodward and Bernstein meeting Mark Felt in a parking garage? Any question they asked him about classified information is technically a solicitation to commit a felony.

@theothersimo @mjg59 They don't qualify as journalists now

@mjg59 @theothersimo Back to my original point, even when illegal, it's still journalism (and especially so when directed at the state that is guilty of the war crimes he was part of exposing and publishing).

The idea of holding a powerful state to account for their crimes, is textbook 4th/5th estate journalism, the notion that the same state has legal repurcussions for doing so, is beside the point. He was prosecuted for doing journalism and operating out of public interest.

@mjg59 @theothersimo This isn't a misconception, it's reality.

@mjg59 @theothersimo Well the alternative is letting murderous heavily armed bastards do whatever crimes they want on foreign soils, unanswered and oblivious to the public, isn't it.

@ciaranmak @theothersimo I mean that ends up being an argument that it should be legal for a fascist journalist to murder you if in doing so he thinks he'll obtain some material that's in the public interest to publish.

@mjg59 @theothersimo Your troops being scumbag murderers and you arguing it's illegal to hold their crimes to account is fascism buddy.

@ciaranmak @theothersimo If you agree that legitimate journalism might involve someone murdering you then I admire your consistency here and I think we both understand each other's positions

@mjg59 @ciaranmak @theothersimo For comparison, computer programming is still computer programming even when the thing you’re programming is illegal and/or immoral. Journalism is an activity like programming, not defined by its moral or legal status.

I’m not opining on whether Assange was conducting legitimate journalism, or whether what he did was moral (or legal), but I don’t think “it was illegal therefore it wasn’t journalism” holds up.

@mjg59 @ciaranmak @theothersimo I didn’t see people saying that ‘phone hacking to obtain news items “wasn’t journalism”—just that it was illegal, immoral, and icky. I’m sure someone will have exaggerated that into “not journalism” but I’ve also seen people call writing really bad code “not programming”.

@johnaldis @ciaranmak @theothersimo In that scenario, what is the definition of journalism? Publishing anything that's of interest to at least one person, no matter how you obtained that information?

@mjg59 @ciaranmak @theothersimo Publishing current information, I suppose—journalism comes from journal meaning (daily) newspaper so if what you’re producing is “news” (current information of general interest or importance) then that’s journalism. I think my feeling is it’s more “journalisty” the more research you’re doing—the more you value the truth, and the more what you’re publishing is information over misinformation or disinformation.

@mjg59 @ciaranmak @theothersimo I’m thinking of the joke where someone gets a ‘phone call and the caller says “Hello, I’m a journalist with The Sun”—to which the response is “Make up your mind, you can’t be both.” Even that is a joke along the lines of “bad journalism isn’t journalism”.

@efialto @ciaranmak Ellsberg? No, he wasn't a journalist at all. He gave the material to journalists, and those journalists weren't prosecuted.

@mjg59 @ciaranmak Sure, the journalist was Sheehan, who without Ellsberg consent copied the full documents. And was prosecuted by the US government, but it was quickly stopped by the Supreme Court.

So, it's basically the same story. Substitute Sheehan by Assange, and Ellsberg by Manning.

Changed the times, the scale and the context, but the thing is quite similar.

@efialto @ciaranmak Except for the bit where Sheehan didn't ask Ellsberg to break into a government computer to steal the documents in the first place

@mjg59 @ciaranmak Ellsberg told Sheehan not to copy the whole document but just little bits and he disregarded it. Much more lack of explicit consent.
I can ask you to rob a bank, but it's up to you to do the thing or not. Start prosecuting people for what they say and not for what they do kind of stinks to bad regimes.

@efialto @ciaranmak If I ask you to rob a bank because I stand to benefit from you robbing a bank then settled law basically everywhere is that I'm guilty of a crime.

@mjg59 @ciaranmak But what if the bank owner is a felon and I don't see a dime, and only want to expose its felony to the public? That's much closer to what Assange did, as any journalist would do.

He only signed this out of years of captivity and prosecution. Pretty much as any bad regime forces people to sign self-blaming documents after torture or captivity.

The root issue here is confusing legality with morality. All bad regimes have a legal system I would not morally comply.

@efialto @ciaranmak Then you're still guilty of conspiracy but there's an argument that that conspiracy was justified

@mjg59 @ciaranmak On that we agree. Guilty of a conspiracy crime which apparently applies to Assange but not to a government that systematically lied to their citizens and the world about Iraq war.

@efialto @ciaranmak Well yeah the social bargain we've largely accepted is that the state has freedoms the individual does not

@efialto @ciaranmak I think there's an entirely reasonable conversation to have about whether Assange's behaviour *should* be legal, but that's separate from just asserting that it was journalism and therefore protected - I don't think that's the common understanding of anything that happened here

@mjg59 @efialto I agree with that but you originally said "He was prosecuted for Journalism" was a misconception, it isn't.

@ciaranmak @efialto Was the output of the phone hacking scandal journalism?

@mjg59 @efialto Yes. In so far as plenty of journalists got confirmation of facts that allowed them to publish stories.