| > The one (?) remaining charge in Sweden will quickly fall apart no doubt. There is a lot politics to decide this depending on american, UK and Swedish diplomacy. Everything which should not exist in a legal system. > Aiding in defeating security measures to obtain it is quite another story. Conspiring to assist in defeating a security measure. There are plenty of precedent of cases where a person has been charged with attempting to break a password, for both in UK and US, and the expected punishment for a person with no priors is a fine. > Assange lost all credibility as a journalist over the Wikileaks handling of the 2016 election and related hackings (eg the DCC emails). People can change when they receive death threats, talk about drone strikes by people in power, death penalty and secretly being throw into Guantanamo. > Playing an active part in illegally obtaining emails and other materials The current accusation of offering to help to break a password does not cover that. Getting leaked email sent to them is no different then getting leaked the audio log of someone being recorded without their knowledge. > Even Snowden filtered his classified material through reputable media outlets. "reputable media outlets" do not carry the same moral meaning as they once did. The Guardian journalist Claas Relotius is a prime example of reputable media doing less than reputable behavior, and the majority of news papers in the US is own by a handful individuals which endorsement has significant effect on the polls. A lot of media research acknowledge and sorts news paper by political bias. For source see https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud |