Julian Assange arrested

[TiroFijo]

What gives us the right to spy on our enemies yet not allow our enemies to spy on us? Isn't that awfully hypocritical? Shouldn't we allow an equal number of spies per nation in order to be fair? Maybe supplement the poorer nations that can't afford their own spies by just giving them the info they request so there's no "might makes right" aspect? Or, do we recognize that an aspect of being a nation is looking out for your national interests and that "fair" isn't really relevant to that?

Spot on.

Just don't be a hypocrite and claim the "high moral ground" while doing whatever it takes to support your national (...whatever that means) interests.

[Stephanie B]

"Not too many people seem to have been upset by the Israelis capturing, trying and hanging Eichmann, for example."

I'm not shedding any tears for Eichmann. I'm curious, though, how would you feel about the Vietnamese snatching William Calley and and hanging him?

I'd be pretty careful about defining things down. Genocide is one thing; unauthorized access of a computer is another. We don't want France snatching Zuckerberg because Facebook violated some European privacy law ... oh wait :-)

In reverse order:

If France wants to try Zuckerberg and he sets foot on French territory or goes to a nation which has an extradition treaty with France, well, it would suck to be him.

Does Vietnam have a right to try Calley and, after a trial, execute him for war crimes committed on Vietnamese soil? Absolutely. The soldiers of Tiger Force should be similarly concerned.

How would I feel about Vietnam sending a snatch team to grab Calley or James Hawkins? As an American citizen, I'd be outraged at the violation of U.S. sovereignty.

But, as the Vietnamese would eagerly point out, our nation's hands are not clean on this issue. The snatching of Humberto Álvarez Machaín from Mexico has already been addressed. Assuming that Vietnam either did it themselves or hired a snatch team to do it, our Supreme Court has decided that does not preclude their trying him. The U.S. also has a pretty substantial record of taking people from one country and delivering them to another country to be tortured, whether by the other country or by our own torturers in "black" prisons. So I submit that if the Vietnamese did snatch one of those guys, the reaction from the rest of the world would be a loud "ho-hum".

[whomever]

"Or, do we recognize that an aspect of being a nation is looking out for your national interests and that "fair" isn't really relevant to that? "

I'm going to partially agree, and partially disagree :-)

Let's think about our response to 9/11. We asked Afghanistan to extradite Osama. They said 'No can do, Pashtun ethics about guests, etc'. If we were Lichtenstein, we'd have been SOL, but we're not; we invaded. Later we violated Pakistani sovereignty to gt him, because of a likely correct suspicion that (at least parts of) the Pakistani government were harboring him. That's a classic example of looking out for our national interests. And I think that most of the world doesn't have much of a problem with that; any nation that has the capability will go after anyone who kills thousands of their citizens.

Espionage is a dirty business, but is generally accepted. The Secretary of State in 1929 famously disagreed with codebreaking, saying 'Gentlemen don't read other people's mail', but that sentiment didn't catch on. But people expect a certain symmetry in their relations. We try to break adversary's codes, and expect them to break ours. I'm not sure that applies equally well to allies - my sense was that the Germans. Brazilians, et al were ticked when they found out a couple of years ago that the NSA was eavesdropping on their presidents/premiers/chancellors. If we found out that Ireland had put a bug in the Oval Office, I doubt our reaction would be 'they are looking out for their national interests, that's the way the world works'.

Erratasec has an article describing exactly what we're charging Assange with: https://blog.erratasec.com/2019/04/a...-password.html
(with the caveat there may be further charges, but that's what we have now).

So imagine the following conversation that's analogous to the Manning/Assange conversation that underlies the charges:

Russian clerk: "I have some dirt on Putin's polonium murders, and could get more if I could find a coworker's password"
NYTimes reporter, at his desk in NYC: "Have you tried '1234', 'admin', and your coworker's cat's name?"
Russian clerk: "Those didn't work"

The Russians now charge the NYTimes reporter for conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer.

So we have the Holocaust/Eichmann, 9/11 and Osama, and the NYT Times reporter. I'm not sure that arguments justifying extraordinary things for the first two necessarily justify similar things for the third.

So, I admire Oleg Penkovsky, and I loathe Aldrich Ames, but I see a lot of grey with Assange. I think we should think carefully about the long term effects of treating the world differently than we expect the world to treat us. Specifically, I think it is *in our national interest* to be viewed as a country with a tendency to occupy the moral high ground, and not throw our weight around just because we can.

[JHC]

Re: the bolded part, IIRC his mistress was a USAR LTC in Military Intelligence. You can't be an MI officer without a TS clearance. That doesn't excuse what he did.

Sorry, my bad. Her's wasn't suspended until after this blew up. The stink was because she had no military purpose for having access to the info he provided.
Thanks for fixing that.

[Wondering Beard]

Ecuadorian Embassy Vows Never To List Room On Airbnb Again

[David C.]

Not that much I don't think. Get past the FoxNews hype and there was relatively little classified material involved in Clinton's case and it was shared between people with clearance to see it. The China angle remains speculation right? In contrast to vastly more Petraeus smuggled out and shared with someone without any clearance. In the Pentagon Papers case, as I recall it was not surveillance sources and methods, much less the names of indig agents helping us; it was about exposing political and military decisions about the conduct of the war.


Assange's reveal was ginormous.

You have no way to know who saw the classified material on an unsecured server.

Denial is a powerful drug.

[JHC]

You have no way to know who saw the classified material on an unsecured server.

Denial is a powerful drug.

Exactly my point on speculation.

[TGS]

"In other words, nothing gives us the "right" except the other country agreeing...

...

The entire premise you have about this extradition business, that nobody else can do what we can, is a false understanding. Extradition is rooted in reciprocity."

I don't think that's an accurate statement of the U.S. position. See, for example, U.S. v. Alvarez-Machain, in which the U.S. snatched a guy from Mexico without attempting to extradite him under the U.S.-Mexico extradition agreement. From the wiki page:

"On April 2,[1] 1990, Álvarez was abducted from Mexico by Trent Tompkins of Claysville, PA, a private citizen hired by DEA agents, and brought to trial in the United States over the protest of Mexican officials. ... Despite vigorous protests from the Mexican government, Álvarez was tried in United States District Court in Los Angeles; the trial, in which his defense focused intensely on the legality of the arrest, resulted in an acquittal. The trial judge (whose earlier decision dismissing the indictment had been overruled by the Supreme Court) ruled at the close of the government's case in chief that the government had not presented a prima facie case, and therefore granted an acquittal without presenting the matter to the jury for verdict."

Now, Alvarez may be a despicable person despite the acquittal - he was accused of abetting the torture of a DEA agent - but people have done despicable things to foreigners in the U.S.

Abner Louima, for example, was an innocent Haitian who was arrested in NYC, beaten and sodomized with a broom handle. That's a pretty despicable act in anyone's book. What would the U.S. position be if instead of letting the prosecution happen in U.S. courts, the Haitian government had sent someone to snatch the accused officers off the street in Brooklyn and taken them to Haiti for trial?

The U.S. is a wonderful country - the best country that has ever been. I get misty eyed when I see Old Glory flapping in the breeze. But from FATCA to extraordinary rendition to drone strikes, we do things to the world that we would object to the world doing to us, and we get away with it because we're the big kid on the block. That's not the moral high ground.

(Imagine the U.K. government doing a drone strike to take out Gerry Adams in Boston, because terrorism is bad, and we wouldn't arrest him ... we wouldn't like that)

Bringing extraordinary rendition into the conversation is a strawman.

This thread is about extradition.

[JohnO]

Worth watching.

[BehindBlueI's]

If we found out that Ireland had put a bug in the Oval Office, I doubt our reaction would be 'they are looking out for their national interests, that's the way the world works'.

That *is* the way the world works. I'm nobody who knows anything and I know that. I don't recall the source of the quote, but it's summarized as nations don't have friends, they have interests. So the issue isn't "we're buddies, we shouldn't spy on each other" but rather the capability to protect one's own national interests. If the reaction is a muted "we caught you, don't do that" or a largely public announcement and subsequent stoking of emotional response of the masses will also be a calculated play based on national interest. It's no secret Israel spies on the US, but there's little to no stoking of the emotional fires because it suits us to have Israel as "friendly". If the Palestinians were a better strategic partner, I've no doubt the official playbook would be quite different.