Julian Assange arrested

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Was he always a twat or did he descend into twathood? If it was a descent, where you you mark the line?

[Faust]

The timing of this and Chelsey Mannings re-arrest are too close. They want both of them at the same time but what for?
I dont like the man though I think wikileaks did some genuine good at highlighting some of the war crimes going on.
I am hoping they keep to their word and now release the dead-man-switch on the rest of the docs they were holding in case of this.

If he is extradited to Sweden then the people talking about the sex crimes are justified. If he is extradited to the US then it shows he was imprisoned in the embassy unfairly.

[Cain]

I think he was probably always a twat, but he had people around him who prevented him from descending too far into twathood and personal grievances.

For me, the red line was when Wikileaks basically put up a bunch of Turkish voters personal information with no vetting whatsoever (which also included attachments of some nasty viruses).  That was when it was clear that, in the words of Snowden, Assange was becoming hostile to "even modest curation".

[Telarus]

I just re-read a story about them doxxing a majority of Turkish voters (& claiming emails scraped from social/political google groups were "Edrogan administration emails"). I'm 100% with Cain here.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

The timing of this and Chelsey Mannings re-arrest are too close. They want both of them at the same time but what for?

They wanted Manning to testify against him so they can nail him with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. He's alleged to have attempted to assist Manning in hacking an account password in order to obtain the files that were published by Wikileaks. Their evidence is chat logs, apparently.

Manning refused to cooperate, and was jailed for contempt, I think.

They obviously want Assange bad enough that they'll settle for getting him on a charge that only has a maximum of five years. Probably once they get him in a U.S. prison, they'll put him through something like MKULTRA, if that's even still a thing. He's on the shit-list, obviously, but fortunately we're forced to follow our own rules in order to get to him first. Not from lack of trying, the DOJ had certainly considered charging him with national security espionage shit, which would just fuck everything up for a semblance of free press across the globe. Anyone could extradite anyone from a cooperating country just for sharing information that was otherwise legally obtained.

The problem here is that if the allegations are legit, Assange dropped the ball on his "journalism" high-ground. He wouldn't be "just a publisher" and our constitution wouldn't protect him from being seen as an enemy agent. It's painfully obvious that he has an anti-establishment bias towards the West (and seems more than cozy with Russia), and that would be fine if he made efforts to avoid being an active participant in data theft/whisleblowing/etc.

In other words, he dun goofed. And they backtraced it. To the cyberpolice.

And the consequences will never be the same.