General Politics Discussion (VI) [ARCHIVED] • Page 394

do you understand why it would be bad if the US started attempting to litigate the morals and motives of whistleblowers and leakers. it doesn't matter

 

seriously do you people remember why Chelsea Manning is in jail? It's completely incongruent to want her released and also want Assange jailed in the US

 

I don't neccesarily want him jailed in the US, never said a word about that. I'm just not going to defend him. He has a pretty clear agenda now and I lost all good will I had for him after the PRISM leaks and such.

 

yeah sure that's what it was mate

 

Lousy hippies!

 

ok cool then shut up lol??? who cares. its bad when whistleblowers and leakers are punished for whistleblowing or leaking, full stop. none of their motives are ever pure. it's irrelevant

 

bad! no! stop!!!!!

 

hey dave what do you think of this, are you quite excited for the thing you don't care about to be used as precedent in cases you might care about???

 

I think Assange is a scumbag who tried to use a foreign entity to influence our election to one side and therefore fuck him?

Again, no where am I saying he should be prosecuted for leaking documents of public interest like secret govt programs. If he were to be prosecuted in the US for, say, helping a foreign country to sway the election in the way they wanted it to sway...And no, I am not in on the "Well America does it to other countries too!" train. I know they do, I still think someone doing it here should be punished.

 

thats also not what hes being prosecuted for

 

Yeah, and? That's why I'm not defending him, not why I think he's being prosecuted.

 

jailing people for whistleblowing war crimes to own the cons

 

Cool.

Working Families Tax Relief Act Says ‘Fuck You’ to Poor Children

 

youd be a good twitter troll

 

Also, since I was now annoyed enough to actually read the charges...he’s not even being charged for leaking in the US.

 

there’s a difference between defending assamge as a person and realizing what’s happening to him has awful implications for our justice system but go off king!

 

he's being charged for hacking to get the information he leaked, its the same thing, except designed to get people to say things like this and obfuscate that fact

 

No, that is not the same thing, because hacking US Govt. computers is not what, say, a reporter for the NYT or WaPo is doing when they report leaked info from a source inside DoD or DoJ or etc..

 

The CFAA is absolutely awful. It is a terrible law that essentially gives federal prosecutors free range to charge someone with a crime whenever they want to ensnare someone.

Literally just about every one of us has probably committed a crime under the broadest reading of the CFAA because it was written in the fucking 80s and computers have, believe it or not, changed a good deal since then.

Make no mistake that the CFAA charges against Assange are pretextual. The indictment is legit laughable. And CFAA needs to be heavily amended.

EDIT: Just to give you some context, prosecutors have gone after people for violating a social media websites terms of service under the CFAA. A woman was literally prosecuted for creating an alt facebook account. The story is tragic and the woman was objectively awful, but the only "crime" she committed was the act of creating an alt-facebook account in violation of facebook's terms of service.

EDIT 2: It may have been myspace now that I think of it. Regardless, the point still stands.

 

"hacking" is so broadly defined in US law that "illegal access" can constitute it, so while the reporters would not be charged with that, the source could, and the source is the one whistleblowing, not the reporter....Greenwald isn't being charged

 

Well, yeah, but that's why a lot of reporters usually protect their source's identities. You won't get an argument from me on how our whistleblower protections need to not be so bad.

 

scum

 

Lmao