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)