Sure, but the Barton Gellman, from the Washington Post, coordinated with Ed Snowden to publish his leaks, too. Breaking the law in such a way is just not sufficient to explain why he ends up in prison.
Snowden had already exfiltrated the documents by the time he coordinated with journalists to publish them. Assange allegedly instructed Manning on how to exfiltrate the documents and directed Manning’s exfiltration process. Publishing is protected by the first amendment, stealing classified documents is not and ergo conspiracy to steal documents is not.
That's not how the entire fabric of international law works though.
Citizenship and postal address are irrelevant. If you break the law in another country and there is an extradition treaty then you will face the consequences.
So if I buy something from a Saudi Arabian e-commerce site am I at risk for extradition from Ireland to Saudi Arabia for the capital offense of being gay?
Clearly I was gay while doing stuff online on a Saudi Arabian server.
Extradition is covered by a patchwork of treaties and laws most of which involve some kind of human judgement as well.
One core concept of extradition is the crime has to be, at least in broad strokes, illegal in both jurisdictions.
The crime in question also has to have some reasonable argument of jurisdiction for the requesting state. You might have been gay while buying things from an SA company, but you weren't doing anything in an interaction with SA that had anything to do with being gay. (The first dual criminality concept protects you way before having to think about this). It is also often the case that countries are reluctant or outright refuse to extradite their own citizens and choose to try them in court locally.
Assange wouldn't be protected by either of these. Conspiring to take classified military secrets with a member of the military in question would be illegal everywhere. As would participating in the taking and the following distribution.
The legal questions for Assange are "did he do those things, guiding, requesting, and helping Manning acquire and send the classified information?" "Do the first amendment protections of free speech and free press cover WikiLeaks model?" and "Would Assange receive a fair trial and just punishment if extradited?"
If the Irish government has an extradition treaty with SA covering that crime and the Irish government has decided to extradite you, then yes. However, no such treaty exists and the Irish government would never do it.
The key with extradition is that it has more to do with diplomacy, geopolitics, and sovereignty than anything else.
> So if I buy something from a Saudi Arabian e-commerce site am I at risk for extradition from Ireland to Saudi Arabia for the capital offense of being gay?
Probably not, because that's not within the scope of what Ireland would be willing to extradite for.
But that's a question of Saudi Arabia’s practical ability to bring you to trial, not one of whether or not any law they have would apply to you on principle.
> Assange broke US laws that he was never subject to, as an Australian living in Europe.
That's not how laws work. Laws are limited in territorial applicability only to the extent that the sovereign adopting them so limit them, and basically no government would fail to hold foreign coconspirators in a crime occuring within their domestic jurisdiction immune to prosecution (some might not have the practical means to bring such an actor to justice, and some might not choose to apply them in most cases as a matter of policy priorities, but that's a different issue.)
Manning knew how to extract the documents already, Assange attempted to help her do it more anonymously. Trying to protect your source is the duty of the press.
The allegations against him (and there is evidence to support this) is that he didn’t just coordinate to publish, but provided instructions and technical training to Manning on how to steal them.
This is not true. The allegations are that he attempted to crack a password on a different Windows account so that the documents would not he tied to Manning. And most of the charges against him are related to publishing.
Manning leaked the info proving US war crimes and lying, including the "collateral damage" video. She got these leaks using her own access, and sent them to wikileaks.
There were additional files she was interested in leaking that she did not have access to.
She then obtained the password hash of an account that did have access and tried to crack the password, but was unsuccessful. She then sent the hash to wikileaks, not something wikileaks asked for, along with a request for help. There was no response.
Later she was in a chat with someone using a known wikileaks chat account. The identity of this person has not been established. She asked if they had been able to crack the password hash and that person said no they had not cracked it. They did not say they tried to crack it or they approved of cracking it. They answered the question factually, no, they had not cracked it.
Manning never hacked the system, but did try to. There's no evidence Assange attempted to hack the system. There's pretty solid evidence someone at wikileaks told Manning that they had not cracked the hash she had sent them, but none that they had attempted to do so. As far as the leaks that were published, none of these involved hacking, they were obtained using Manning's granted access. They were however unauthorized exfiltration of state secrets documenting war crimes.
This is the case alleging he actively assisted a leaker in hacking crimes.
>There were additional files she was interested in leaking that she did not have access to. She then obtained the password hash of an account that did have access
This is where this breaks down. The account in question was a generic local Windows admin account, and she already had the same level of access as the desired account. It was only attempted to hide her identity.
This is clearly laid out as what happened in Assange's indictment.
This makes no difference, legally speaking. Assange was still helping her to gain unauthorized access to a computer system.
This is like giving bank robbers ski masks in full knowledge that they're going to use the ski masks to hide their identities during a robbery. You're still an accessory. It's no defense to say "Oh, I wasn't helping them to gain access to the vault, I was just helping them to hide their identities".