Julian Assange’s extradition from UK to US approved by home secretary
'Julian Assange refused bail despite judge ruling against extradition to US "Julian Assange stripped of citizenship by Ecuador "Pentagon Papers leaker comes to the defense of Assange"""
Appeal likely after Priti Patel gives green light to extradition of WikiLeaks co-founder
VIDEO - ‘We’re going to fight’: Julian Assange’s wife addresses US extradition
Jamie Grierson and Ben Quinn Sat 18 Jun 2022 04.32 AEST First published on Fri 17 Jun 2022 19.21 AEST
Priti Patel has approved the extradition of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to the US, a decision the organisation immediately said it would appeal against in the high court.
The case passed to the British home secretary last month after the UK supreme court ruled that there were no legal questions over assurances given by US authorities on Assange’s likely treatment.
While Patel has given the green light, WikiLeaks immediately released a statement to say it would appeal against the decision. “Today is not the end of the fight,” it said. “It is only the beginning of a new legal battle. We will appeal through the legal system; the next appeal will be before the high court.”
Timeline Julian Assange extradition battle Show [..inside..]
The statement said anyone who cared about freedom of expression should be “deeply ashamed” that the home secretary had approved Assange’s extradition.
“Julian did nothing wrong. He has committed no crime and is not a criminal. He is a journalist and a publisher and he is being punished for doing his job,” it said. “It was in Priti Patel’s power to do the right thing. Instead she will for ever be remembered as an accomplice of the United States in its agenda to turn investigative journalism into a criminal enterprise.”
Any appeal is likely to focus on grounds such as the right to freedom of expression [..see article below..] and whether the extradition request is politically motivated. Patel had been considering whether the US extradition request met remaining legal tests, including a promise not to execute him.
Assange is being held at Belmarsh prison in London after a lengthy battle to avoid extradition. At a press conference in London, his wife, Stella Assange, said: “We are not at the end of the road here. We are going to fight this. We are going to use every available avenue. I’m going to use every waking hour fighting for Julian until he is free, until justice is served.”
The saga was triggered in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks provided by the then US army soldier Chelsea Manning .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/12/chelsea-manning-interview-leaked-documents , as well as a dump of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables, some of which were published in the Guardian and elsewhere, containing classified diplomatic analysis from world leaders. The US government launched a criminal investigation into the leaks.
Also in 2010, an arrest warrant for Assange was issued for two separate sexual assault allegations in Sweden. The UK ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden. This prompted him to enter the Ecuadorian embassy in London in August 2012, claiming political asylum. He feared that if he was extradited to Sweden he would in turn be extradited to the US.
Assange finally left the embassy in 2019. He was arrested in the UK for skipping bail and ultimately jailed, then extradition proceedings to the US were started against him.
“It will likely be a few days before the [14-day appeal] deadline and the appeal will include new information … on how Julian’s lawyers were spied on, and how there were plots to kidnap and kill Julian from within the CIA,” Gabriel Shipton told Reuters in an interview.
Patel’s decision was met with immediate criticism from campaigners, journalists and MPs. Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP for Brighton Pavilion, said: “Absolutely shameful that Priti Patel has approved Julian Assange’s extradition to US – this sets a dangerous precedent for press freedom and democracy. US authorities are determined to silence him because they don’t like what he revealed.”
The former cabinet minister David Davis said: “Sadly, I do not believe Mr Assange will get a fair trial. This extradition treaty needs to be rewritten to give British and American citizens identical rights, unlike now.”
The veteran BBC broadcaster John Simpson said: “Journalists in Britain and elsewhere will be very worried by the decision to extradite Julian Assange to the US – both for his own wellbeing and for the precedent it creates for journalism worldwide [..again. see article below..].”
John Pilger, a journalist and longtime supporter of Assange and a fellow Australian, said: “A new appeal will challenge the political rottenness of British ‘justice’.”
The new Australian government said it believed Assange’s case had “dragged on for too long and that it should be brought to a close”. “We will continue to express this view to the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States,” the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, and the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said in a statement responding to Patel’s decision.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, had said last year, when he was the opposition leader, that he did “not see what purpose is served by the ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange” and that “enough is enough”.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “On 17 June, following consideration by both the magistrates court and high court, the extradition of Mr Julian Assange to the US was ordered. Mr Assange retains the normal 14-day right to appeal.
“In this case, the UK courts have not found that it would be oppressive, unjust or an abuse of process to extradite Mr Assange.
“Nor have they found that extradition would be incompatible with his human rights, including his right to a fair trial and to freedom of expression, and that whilst in the US he will be treated appropriately, including in relation to his health.”
Breaking Down the Hacking Case Against Julian Assange
IMAGE - Julian Assange gestures to the media from a police vehicle on his arrival at Westminster Magistrates Court on April 11, 2019, in London.Jack Taylor/Getty Images
For the first time since 2012, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange no longer has the legal protections of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. He now faces the criminal charges he's always suspected and feared—although it's now clear that he's accused of criminal behavior not as a journalist, or even a spy, but a hacker.
On Thursday, London's metropolitan police physically dragged Assange out of his residence at the embassy and into a police van. Hours later, a grand jury unsealed an indictment against the WikiLeaks founder for one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. The UK government has already made clear that it carried out Assange's arrest on behalf of the US government, implying that it intends to comply with his extradition to the US to face those hacking charges.
The indictment—which you can read in full below—centers on an incident nine years ago ago, when Assange allegedly told his source, then Army private Chelsea Manning, that he would help crack a password that would have given her deeper access to the military computers from which she was leaking classified material to WikiLeaks.
"On or about March 8, 2010, Assange agreed to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on United States Department of Defense Computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a United States government network used for classified documents and communications," the indictment reads, referring to the Pentagon's SIPRNet network of computers that store classified information.
That brief alleged offer of active assistance from Assange may be all the US government needs to charge him not as a journalist recipient of Manning's leaks, but as a coconspirator with Manning in the theft of Pentagon data.
"It can be as simple as that," says Bradley Moss, an attorney for the Washington, DC, law firm Mark Zaid P.C. who focuses on issues in national security and intelligence community personnel.
-- "It seems thin to me." Tor Ekeland, Lawyer --
The password cracking incident has long loomed in the background of Assange's legal case. As WIRED first reported in 2011 .. https://www.wired.com/2011/12/army-manning-hearing/ , prosecutors in Chelsea Manning's case asserted at the time that Assange had offered to help Manning crack a password "hash," a form of scrambling designed to protect stored passwords from abuse. Hashing irreversibly converts a password into another string of characters .. https://www.wired.com/2016/06/hacker-lexicon-password-hashing/ .. but hackers often use lists of pre-computed hashes from millions of passwords, known as rainbow tables, to search for a matching hash, revealing the hidden password.
In a pretrial hearing in Manning's case, prosecutors presented evidence that Manning had asked Assange—who was instant messaging with Manning under the name Nathaniel Frank—if he had experience cracking hashes.Assange allegedly responded that he possessed rainbow tables for that, and Manning sent him a hashed password string. According to Thursday's unsealed indictment, Assange followed up two days later asking for more information about the password, and writing that he'd had "no luck so far." The indictment further alleges that Assange actively encouraged Manning to gather even more information, after Manning said she had given all she had.
It's not clear if Assange ever successfully cracked the password. According to the indictment, that password would have given Manning administrative privileges on SIPRNet, allowing her to pull more files from it while concealing the traces of her leaks from investigators.
Is one failed attempt to crack a password really enough to embroil Assange in a felony hacking case?"For the CFAA, unfortunately yes," says Jeffrey Vagle, a former University of Pennsylvania law professor and current affiliate scholar at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He points to a long history of using the overly expansive wording of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to hit hackers accused of even trivial acts with serious charges. "The fact that his involvement is de minimus isn't enough to stop an indictment, because the CFAA is just so broad."
-- "I think the press freedom issues are moot now." Susan Hennessey, Brookings Institute --
That doesn't make the charges against Assange an open-and-shut case, argues Tor Ekeland, a well-known hacker defense attorney. The indictment only charges Assange with one count, with a maximum of five years in prison. And due to the complicating factor of his extradition from the UK, prosecutors won’t be able to pile on more charges with a so-called “superseding indictment,” since they have to justify any charges they make now to British authorities. Ekeland also says there could still be venue issues with the charges; prosecutors would have to prove that the case affected residents of the Eastern District of Virginia, the relatively conservative district where the case would be tried. "It seems thin to me," Ekeland says.
Ekeland also points out that to expand the statute of limitations for the CFAA from the normal five years to the necessary eight in this case, given the indictment's date of March 2018, the Justice Department is charging Assange under a statute that labels his alleged hacking an "act of terrorism." He sees that as another suspect element of the case, if not one that would necessarily hinder prosecution. "To get the benefit of the eight years, they’re trying to call this a terrorist act," Ekeland says. "That seems a little weird."
But prosecutors have at least skirted a potentially bigger source of controversy: the First Amendment. Assange's defenders have long argued .. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/us-charging-julian-assange-put-press-freedom-trial/ .. that prosecuting him would set a dangerous new precedent, breaking with a long history in the US that has spared journalists from prosecution when they report on leaks of classified secrets. By focusing its indictment solely on Assange's alleged role in Manning's computer intrusion, the Justice Department has essentially separated Assange from the journalistic pack.
"I think the press freedom issues are moot now," argues Susan Hennessey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former legal counsel for the NSA. "There are ways the government could have brought these charges that would have still posed concerns; for example, conspiracy to steal government records. But they didn’t do that. These are charges for ordinary computer hacking. The conduct the government alleges here is behavior that is well outside any reasonable definition of journalism."
The charges against Assange represent, in fact, the second time in his life he's been charged with computer hacking. As a teenage hacker in Australia going by the name "Mendax," he was turned in by a fellow member of his three-person hacking group called the International Subversives, and he spent the next five years awaiting sentencing, a bleak period he’s described as a formative period. “Such prosecution in youth is a defining peak experience,” he wrote in a 2006 blog entry. “To know the state for what it really is!”
Eventually, a judge noted that Assange's intrusions had been mostly harmless explorations, rather than profit-focused or malicious. He was given a $2,000 fine. This time, he may not be so lucky.
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