The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Benjamin Cole]

11 hours ago, Paul Bacon said:

You must've been a very charming trick for her.

She married me!

[Kirk Gallaway]

Bob: Assange could have just soldiered up and done what most journalists do and said "See ya in court!"

Exactly, Something Assange's supporters never think of. What did Obama do with Assange's most publicized source. Chelsea Manning?   He pardoned him!

I can't speak to the case against Assange. But the guys been running in fear for years now. Remember he finally overextended his welcome at the Ecuador embassy?  It seems like all of his supporters are projecting the grimmest scenario in jail. People do respect people who fight. For all, we know, If he just fought it directly, he may have not have even served time and I'd say he would  have been a free man easily  by now.

Edited December 14, 2021 by Kirk Gallaway

[Bob Ness]

4 hours ago, Chris Barnard said:

By the nature of journalism, I struggle to see how someone being passed information and then publishing it is a crime, particularly if it has been done in a country that is not the prosecuting one.

To illustrate the point:

If I were the administrator of this site, I could potentially publish financial data from you that would be available online that you freely gave to this site without reading the terms of agreement (who does?). I could host it and route it through 10 different countries with no treaties, cooperation agreements or capability to enforce regulations and your lawyer or a Federal Attorney (not certain who covers that - SS, DoJ ???) would be stopped at the first uncooperative country. After that, if the country agreed to help, they'd have to convince the next one to share their information. And on and on until they get to the country where I reside that has legal authority over me. But no laws have been broken domestically that I can be charged with and there you go.

That's an over simplification but is essentially how many of these extra legal organizations function without any corresponding oversight. Now your debit card is online and when the complaints finally make it to my doorstep, I claim I'm a journalist and many of the charges revealed in your account corroborate the claim my other source (I'm keeping that secret) gave me that you're planning an assassination! Perfect!

One of the ways to keep from running aground is to do investigations on your plot under the aegis of an actual media banner established for investigating such things. They can and have been sued for substantial sums when they've got it wrong. To one degree or the other they're also obligated professionally to act in accordance with the best public interest. Wikileaks has done a number of remarkable expose's but has also offered itself as a dump site for information from people with grudges.

In some ways they should be held to a much higher legal standard than Fox or the NYT simply because their business model seems to depend on the dissemination of wholesale "leaked" material with no consideration of the punitive effect on innocent people (there are plenty).

[Bob Ness]

36 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

She married me!

Why'd she do that? Better off before hahaha!

[Matt Allison]

1/6 committee isn't messing around. These texts... holy f**k

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/585659-meadows-texts-show-hannity-don-jr-wanted-trump-to-stop-jan-6-riot

[Ron Bulman]

1 hour ago, Benjamin Cole said:

She married me!

So you paid your wife for sex before you married her and ask who's the whore?  Maybe a little insightful regarding some of your posts.  Though I don't meant to be judgmental of your situation and not trying to insult your wife.   

[Benjamin Cole]

5 minutes ago, Ron Bulman said:

So you paid your wife for sex before you married her and ask who's the whore?  Maybe a little insightful regarding some of your posts.  Though I don't meant to be judgmental of your situation and not trying to insult your wife.   

Best deal of my life. I didn't have to pay her anymore. 

[Benjamin Cole]

47 minutes ago, Bob Ness said:

Why'd she do that? Better off before hahaha!

Shhhh. I am getting my rewards for free. 

[Jeff Carter]

53 minutes ago, Bob Ness said:

To illustrate the point:

If I were the administrator of this site, I could potentially publish financial data from you that would be available online that you freely gave to this site without reading the terms of agreement (who does?). I could host it and route it through 10 different countries with no treaties, cooperation agreements or capability to enforce regulations and your lawyer or a Federal Attorney (not certain who covers that - SS, DoJ ???) would be stopped at the first uncooperative country. After that, if the country agreed to help, they'd have to convince the next one to share their information. And on and on until they get to the country where I reside that has legal authority over me. But no laws have been broken domestically that I can be charged with and there you go.

That's an over simplification but is essentially how many of these extra legal organizations function without any corresponding oversight. Now your debit card is online and when the complaints finally make it to my doorstep, I claim I'm a journalist and many of the charges revealed in your account corroborate the claim my other source (I'm keeping that secret) gave me that you're planning an assassination! Perfect!

One of the ways to keep from running aground is to do investigations on your plot under the aegis of an actual media banner established for investigating such things. They can and have been sued for substantial sums when they've got it wrong. To one degree or the other they're also obligated professionally to act in accordance with the best public interest. Wikileaks has done a number of remarkable expose's but has also offered itself as a dump site for information from people with grudges.

In some ways they should be held to a much higher legal standard than Fox or the NYT simply because their business model seems to depend on the dissemination of wholesale "leaked" material with no consideration of the punitive effect on innocent people (there are plenty).

Bob  - your illustration has nothing at all to do with Wikileaks’ practices. It may be that other organizations have been careless and irresponsible, but Wikileaks always maintained careful vetting of materials submitted. This all was covered during the original extradition hearing, which I would wager you are entirely unfamiliar with despite holding a strong opinion about it.

For example, here is a summary of Day Seven of the Hearing:

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/09/16/assange-hearing-day-seven-ellsberg-and-goetz-refute-informants-were-harmed-and-that-assange-was-first-to-release-their-names/

The featured witnesses were Daniel Ellsberg and German journalist John Goetz. Consortium News summarizes three important points from these witnesses:

1. It’s not against the law to reveal the names of informants.

2. Assange did not reveal informants names first.

3. Not a single informant is known to have been harmed by the revelation of their names.

Ellsberg’s comments in particular are entirely relevant to your arguments, and in fact refute your arguments.

 

Niederhut - all the answers you seek were contained in my post Saturday afternoon at 4:31 PM. I am not going to respond to you if you can’t or won’t read or comprehend the material you are supposing to respond to. I read the silly Frum piece previously, so make half an effort yourself.

[Benjamin Cole]

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674652507

In light of recent serious discussions on this page regarding who is a journalist, see the above, an interesting publication on pamphlets during the Revolution days. 

Our Founding Fathers passed in the First Amendment in 1791, which was and is a great idea (despite modern-day Donk Party reservations). 

And think about it: Back then, a journalist or commentator was anybody who printed pamphlets, or paid to have pamphlets printed (such as Thomas Paine).  

Today, we have the internet, and the equivalent idea is that anybody voicing an opinion or presenting journalism is thus a journalist, only in pixels, and not print.

And yet we have emerging the loathsome idea that a real journalist must be attached to a successful commercial media organization, which leads to ridiculous standards such as Chris Cuomo is a real journalist, but Glenn Greenwald presently is not. 

I advocate the US government stop prosecuting Julian Assange.  I guess the Donk Party wants him prosecuted. Many establishment 'Phants too. 

[Ron Bulman]

16 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

1/6 committee isn't messing around. These texts... holy f**k

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/585659-meadows-texts-show-hannity-don-jr-wanted-trump-to-stop-jan-6-riot

Hanity and Ingram, DJ.  His base doesn't know this dooky.  The Truth will ultimately shatter them.  

For the self perceived don of nyc, who claimed he could get away with murder on 5th avenue.

 

[Bob Ness]

38 minutes ago, Jeff Carter said:

Bob  - your illustration has nothing at all to do with Wikileaks’ practices. It may be that other organizations have been careless and irresponsible, but Wikileaks always maintained careful vetting of materials submitted.

 

This is the problem Jeff. Quote from para two:

WikiLeaks planned to take a year to slowly roll out the unpublished parts of its archive of leaks in order to redact as much as possible.  But Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding published the password to that archive in their book published in February 2011. 

A German newspaper, Der Freitag, learned about the password and published it even though Assange tried hard to convince them not to because of the risk of revealing informants’ names. After Freitag published it Cryptome dumped the entire un-redacted archive on its website on Sept. 2, 2011.

WikiLeaks then took the decision to also publish the entire archive the next day to help alert informants so they could get to safety. Nevertheless, the government is trying to portray Assange as recklessly endangering individuals. 

Seriously? You're claiming they didn't act irresponsibly but "somehow" the credentials for the archive became public knowledge? WTF? How hard is it to make the archive unavailable or restrict access on a server? It isn't! Any fifth grader could! Wikileaks was responsible for the dump because it was in THEIR archive and in THEIR source's best interest to protect them. FCS they apparently knew about it for 7 months!

In fact I'm sure they're lying about it because the effort to maintain the security of the archive is trivial (especially for tech people) to the point it appears intentionally mishandled. It was his/their responsibility to care for the material NOT the people they spilled it to.

Put another way: The intention party X has in giving classified information to party Y, who then makes it public, is not relevant to to the culpability of both parties in making those materials public. They are both part of the conspiracy equally.

These facts are why the links you post to UNATTRIBUTED authors at Consortium News are worse than useless because people actually believe the thrust of the article. They get difficult to read.

Edited December 14, 2021 by Bob Ness

[Benjamin Cole]

I guess the long knives are out to censor Joe Rogan too. 

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/7/22821823/joe-rogan-media-matters-hot-pod-spotify-moderation#comments

If this how the left-wing thinks today? 

I hope the readers of this space, who should be aware of media manipulation in the wake of the JFKA, and of the national security state and its grip on media...have more enlightened points of view regarding press freedoms...

[Chris Barnard]

1 hour ago, Bob Ness said:

To illustrate the point:

If I were the administrator of this site, I could potentially publish financial data from you that would be available online that you freely gave to this site without reading the terms of agreement (who does?). I could host it and route it through 10 different countries with no treaties, cooperation agreements or capability to enforce regulations and your lawyer or a Federal Attorney (not certain who covers that - SS, DoJ ???) would be stopped at the first uncooperative country. After that, if the country agreed to help, they'd have to convince the next one to share their information. And on and on until they get to the country where I reside that has legal authority over me. But no laws have been broken domestically that I can be charged with and there you go.

That's an over simplification but is essentially how many of these extra legal organizations function without any corresponding oversight. Now your debit card is online and when the complaints finally make it to my doorstep, I claim I'm a journalist and many of the charges revealed in your account corroborate the claim my other source (I'm keeping that secret) gave me that you're planning an assassination! Perfect!

One of the ways to keep from running aground is to do investigations on your plot under the aegis of an actual media banner established for investigating such things. They can and have been sued for substantial sums when they've got it wrong. To one degree or the other they're also obligated professionally to act in accordance with the best public interest. Wikileaks has done a number of remarkable expose's but has also offered itself as a dump site for information from people with grudges.

In some ways they should be held to a much higher legal standard than Fox or the NYT simply because their business model seems to depend on the dissemination of wholesale "leaked" material with no consideration of the punitive effect on innocent people (there are plenty).

Thank you, Bob. I like the logic in this reply and it does illustrate some of the complexities involved. 
 

Do we hold our personal data (legally or ethically) as non crime committing individuals on a par with state institutions classified information? Or, is one more important than the other? Or, is it determined on a case by case basis? 
 

If state crimes or, international crimes were uncovered in those data leaks. Are both parties prosecutable? Or, just Assange? Is this a factor in the Assange case? Or, was he just exposing questionable behaviour, not criminality? 
 

it’s very difficult to understand the crux of the matter in the British media. 

[Bob Ness]

3 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

I guess the long knives are out to censor Joe Rogan too. 

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/7/22821823/joe-rogan-media-matters-hot-pod-spotify-moderation#comments

If this how the left-wing thinks today? 

I hope the readers of this space, who should be aware of media manipulation in the wake of the JFKA, and of the national security state and its grip on media...have more enlightened points of view regarding press freedoms...

They haven't figured out what the Republicans have - you can just outright lie and enough of your supporters are stupid enough they will believe you and it doesn't matter how outlandish the claim is. A significant amount of them think Trump won still.