Re: Schenck lives! UK high court skeptical that Assange's rights would be protected in US trial

BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

Julian Assange is an enemy of the state, same as Schenck. He's been
indicted under the Espionage Act. (I've never read that he's indicted
under other acts.)

While there can be much argued that the leaks he's responsible for had
legitimate national security implications, a great deal of it was
overclassification to avoid embarassment to the military and State
Department and, in a few instances, cover up actual wrongdoing.

Typically with classified documents, we don't actually know what our
enemies already know but we absolutely want to keep Americans from
finding out even if our enemies are known to have the information.

When I had the responsibility of preparing the morning intel brief for
the Director every day, I would get to work at 4:30AM and start
scrolling through the classified CIA and NSA cables that had come in
from around the world in the last 24 hours to pull anything relevant to
our protectees' safety for the Director to read.

It used to drive me nuts to find some CIA station had copy/pasted an
article from the New York Times into a cable and sent it back to Langley
for his/her boss to read and the cable was marked TOP SECRET/NOFORN
//5I//SCI-XXXX. It was only the newspaper article-- no commentary or
analysis added-- an article which had been published to the public
openly around the world but the CIA classified it at the highest level
just because.

Somebody is playing games by overwhelming you with shit, hoping you'll
miss the information critical to your missing that they refused to
highlight out of bureaucratic rivalry.

I'm sure somebody in some intelligence agency somewhere routinely
classified works of history and fiction too.

And when it came to the disclosures by Snowden and Assange, even though
the contents of what they leaked where splashed all over every newspaper
and broadcast on every news channel, if you were a government employee,
you could get in trouble for buying a copy of the New York Times
containing the classified info and dropping it in the trash can after
reading it. (Improper handling/disposal of classified information) Or
for just possessing the newspaper if you weren't cleared for the
information the Times printed. It's no defense that the whole world can
see it and it's no longer secret. You can still get a security violation
for mishandling classified info.

Dear ghod

Assange wants to argue freedom of the press as a defense.

He was scheduled to be extradicted to the US later today but the UK
highest court finally gave him the right to a hearing to challenge his
extradition on the basis that he won't be treated fairly in US court
because he's an Australian and not a US citizen, and courts won't grant
him his 1st Amendment rights.

How does a foreign national not within U.S. territory get indicted as a
spy in the first place? Is it the position of the U.S. government that
all 7 billion people in the world have a duty to protect the national
security of the United States?

Well, some of what he's charged with is unauthorized access to a
computer network, so that's within our sovereign jurisdiction. The rest
of it, receiving stolen property maybe?

The main thing he did was embarass bureaucrats in the Obama
administration. Obama was truly vindictive with whistleblowers. I have
no idea why.

Why didn't Trump issue a blanket pardon? That's very curious, as that
would have been a moral stand against the deep state.

If so, wouldn't everyone who works in,
for example, Mossad or MI6 or PLAGF or the GRU then be guilty of
violating the Espionage Act?

I'm sure they are but no one made a deal for their extradition.

I'm sure you've read that would-be whistleblowers, wanting to reveal
wrongdoing, are told by investigators on the appropriate Congressional
committee to take their evidence to the Inspector General because
revealing it to anybody else can get them charged with felony theft of
government property for starters. And don't even think about providing
evidence to a reporter.