Ah law... don't know too much about that.
What I do know is that those communications need to be secret for the whole diplomatic system to work.
Now you might not think it serious to fuck a couple of girls lying to them about using protection the Swedes do.
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Cerebus Sticky! Sticky! Stick! Stick!, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 10:14,
Reply)
Oh, I completely agree that, if there's reasonable suspicion that he broke Swedish law, he should go there to face trial...
... unless he can actually produce reasonably convincing evidence that that will lead to massive infringements of his human rights (being the whole point of seeking asylum).
However, it seems to me that he wouldn't be being pursued anywhere near so vigorously if he wasn't the figurehead of WikiLeaks. If this was some random guy no-one had heard of, I very much doubt the government would be thinking of infringing on ambassadorial privilege to nick him. And that just isn't on in my book, because WikiLeaks isn't criminal.
And I'm not convinced that it's immoral, either. The bureaucrats etc who handle the stuff and decide to leak it, they're the ones being (arguably) naughty. The people who receive the leaks and publish them... well, it was never their job to keep the information secret in the first place, so I don't see the problem.
Sure, it'd be Good if they were a bit more selective about which leaks they published, but I'd consider their indiscriminate approach Neutral, not Evil. In the absence of WikiLeaks, people could still indiscriminately bung stuff on bittorrent and file lockers and pastebins.
(, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 10:32, Reply)
Well someone else pointed out that it's Sweden not Sudan
And what about the rights of the two women accusing him?
If he hadn't been the head of wikileaks and gotten lots of support and money from media darlings he would have been given a simple trial here and put on a plane to StockHolm.
Because of who he is he's managed to take it the full length of the legal system here and now that it's not gone the way he want's he's trying to run away.
It wasn't the bureaucrats that leaked it. It was Bradley after being chatted up by Assange and promptly left in the gutter by him.
As for being selective, they're choosing what to leak.
The whole file is leaked but it's encrypted.
Sure it's probably been decrypted by most nations with a basic cyber division like China, N Korea, Iran etc but you and me the proles have to wait and be drip fed it to sell newspapers.
I would hate to be an informant named in any of those papers right now.
Not knowing when your doors going to get kicked in.
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Cerebus Sticky! Sticky! Stick! Stick!, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 10:43,
Reply)
Regardless of anything else, now he's in the embassy, it's the government of Ecuador's job to consider his case for asylum, and our government is obligated to respect that.
Those duties are, in my mind, vastly more important than what happens to any one individual. If Hitler had been found hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy, I'd still stick to that. If the government breaks the rules when it feels like it, what's the point of having rules?
All the rest is kinda beside the point, IMO, but I guess it'd be rude of me to not address your points...
Your first bit, we seem to be in vigorous agreement: "I completely agree that, if there's reasonable suspicion that he broke Swedish law, he should go there to face trial". As you say, it's Sweden not Sudan, so the odds of him producing "reasonably convincing evidence that that will lead to massive infringements of his human rights" are slim to none.
I don't think any of us are in a position to say one-way-or-the-other whether he'd have managed to flee to an embassy to seek asylum if he was just a randomer. There's too many factors at work.
re: bureaucrats, I said "bureaucrats etc". Manning is in the "etc". And it's not like everything ever leaked to WikiLeaks came from Manning, so some may well have come from bureaucrats. I'll grant that it may have been a poor choice of words on my part, but that's incidental.
and re: encryption... well, I don't know how it's encrypted, but there is freely-available open-source encryption out there that, with long enough keys, would require a computer made up of every atom in the universe more time than the universe's expected lifespan to crack. So it might be genuinely unbreakable without the key.
(, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 11:22, Reply)
I suspect that if the Ecuadorian government wouldn't have even given him the time of day were it not for who he was.
And the rules seem to allow for in extreme circumstances for an embassy to be entered into and an individual taken, but all sources seem to play down this actually happening.
What seems to have happened is the U.K Government made them aware of this in case the diplomatics got all their knowledge of international diplomacy from "Lethal Weapon 2" and Ecuador promptly released this message.
The whole "Computer taking years" to break an encryption is based on brute forcing a code.
You work smarter than that and you can guarantee every world nation is working hard to break it
and a lot probably already have and shared it with others.
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Cerebus Sticky! Sticky! Stick! Stick!, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 11:53,
Reply)
Even if we're technically allowed to go in there for him, it'd only make this whole clusterfuck even more diplomatically messy than it is already.
And I maintain: as long as he stays in the embassy, I don't see how he's anyone's problem but Ecuador's. So why piss off the international community just to make him our problem again?
And the "computer taking years to break modern encryption" thing is based on the fact that modern cryptographic algorithms have been very thoroughly studied, by many academics and hackers and security professionals and so on and so on, and we can base time estimates off the most efficient cracking algorithm all these experts have found in all their years of study.
Sure, as far as I know, it's effectively impossible to prove that more efficient cracking algorithms don't exist, but the odds of someone having found one (that no-one else has found and published), and successfully kept it a secret, are vanishingly small.
If someone wanted to encrypt something in a way that was unbreakable in this universe, I assure you that it is possible.
[edit] I almost forgot: One-time pads are completely unbreakable, even if you had infinite computing power -- there is inherently no possibility of a cracking algorithm. You just need a key of high-quality entropy, with as many bits as the data you want to encrypt. I'm sure WikiLeaks could manage that.
(, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 12:15, Reply)
They said the same thing for the encryption used on the PS3 and they were right.
Until someone found out a number in the process that was supposed to be random churned out "4" every time.
Ok, the wikileaks "insurance file" containing all the uncensored documents including names of informants in hostile countries was sent all around the internet a few years ago.
Have a look it'll be on the torrents. there's now thousands of copies.
It's encrypted with a 256bit AES key.
That's a string of 256 characters and strong encryption indeed.
Now, this one file holds the mother of all intelligence gathering.
A nation that can access this will be very happy indeed.
You can guarantee everyone's working on accessing it.
Problem is human error can defeat the strongest encryption.
The key he distributed to key followers will be written down, talked about, saved on a computer in a folder marked "super secret passwords" whatever.
Assange bet the life of a lot of people on that simple bit of encryption.
You can talk about one time pads but he didn't use them he used a very public way to insure he's not bumped off. In fact I can well imagine many foreign powers happily killing him so his followers release the code.
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Cerebus Sticky! Sticky! Stick! Stick!, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 12:52,
Reply)
Okay, I wasn't aware that the encryption method was publicly known at this time.
As you say, that's strong encryption indeed, modulo non-technical weaknesses such as human error. We can but wait and see whether WikiLeaks screwed up in such a way.
And we can but wait and see whether they were bluffing about the contents. If not, then, as you say, they have indeed "bet the life of a lot of people" on it, and letting the key get out (deliberately or though error) would be pretty damn irresponsible however you slice it.
(, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 13:06, Reply)
If he weren't head of Wikileaks, there'd certainly be a lot less fuss.
That's true enough. But there wouldn't need to be: he'd have been extradited quickly and efficiently, stood trial, been found innocent or guilty, and be well on the way to having served his sentence by now.
I don't know about Wikileaks' legal status; but its moral status isn't so obvious as you see to imagine. For sure, the people who do the actual leaking may well have committed a crime in their own right - but that doesn't exonerate Wikileaks. By analogy, if you steal a car, and I know it to be stolen when I sell it on your behalf, then it's no defence for me to insist that selling a car is perfectly legal.
And as for their approach being neutral... well, maybe. But there's a difference between responsible and rash neutrality. WL seems to me often to be rash, and founded on the dubious premise not only that there's never any need for information to be regulated, but that it should never be regulated. That's insane.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 10:51,
Reply)
I'm no fan of WikiLeaks, I assure you, I'm pretty ambivalent about them. They are indeed rash and irresponsible at times. And Assange is an attention-seeking nutter.
I can't say one way or the other what would have happened if he wasn't a celebrity - maybe he'd have been dealt with very efficiently, as you say... but he may still have managed to sneak off to the Ecuadorian embassy, and if he had, we wouldn't be considering pissing off Ecuador by burning the rulebook to get him out.
I would've expected a response more along the lines of "okay, Ecuador can deal with him; we'll stick a van of bobbies outside to knick him if he leaves, but aside from that, he's not our problem".
Your car analogy... well, I'm never comfortable with analogies between material theft and information "theft". If I may answer it with another analogy: if the cables had been leaked straight to the papers, would you have taken issue to them publishing (at least some of) them? It's my understanding that that's what the press is expected to do with leaks it receives, and I don't think there's a clear distinction between "the press" and "some guy with a website" any more.
(, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 11:09, Reply)
My understanding is that publishing is technically illegal,
but there's a public interest defence. Note that it's a defence, not an exception, and the publisher would therefore have to be able to show such an interest. Maybe there's such a defence for some of the stuff WL publishes; but that alone won't justify their approach across the board.
Note, too, that my analaogy was to the moral claim, rather than the legal one.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 11:20,
Reply)
Fair enough.
To clarify my position:
I'm ambivalent about WikiLeaks, insufficiently informed to pass judgement on them, and too apathetic to rectify that.
I think Assange is a tit, and I suspect his recent Sweden-dodging antics are a sign of either narcissism or paranoia; but I'm not going to say any more than "I suspect" on that, as I have no way of knowing for sure.
I don't care to defend WikiLeaks or Assange, really.
All I want to defend here is that diplomatic immunity is vastly more important than anyone involved in this pantomime of bullshit. The government should stay the fuck out of other countries' embassies, period.
As long as he stays on Ecuadorian turf, he's Ecuador's problem, not ours. If he leaves the building (or they kick him out), by all means, nick him then. If he does so in a diplomatic vehicle, follow it 'til he gets out (and then nick him) or it leaves the country (and then he's not our problem any more).
That's how embassies and asylum-seeking are meant to work.
(, Thu 16 Aug 2012, 11:44, Reply)