[ben_w]

I’m not against use of hacking to reveal higher crimes.

I am against hacking in general.

I see no good reason for him to have targeted a newspaper.

I do see good reason to target secretive government agencies.

I see good reason for those agencies to have a problem with this and go after anyone who does it.

I am against government agencies having bad enough security that they can be so targeted.

Assange isn’t in prison right now for any of this, he’s in prison because he skipped bail to avoid extradition for a completely different charge to a completely different country to face his accusers for a potential maximum penalty less than the time he spent in the embassy he got kicked out of for breaking their rules, and which he fled to because for some reason that never made sense to me he claimed that going from the UK to Sweden put him in danger of the thing which actually happened in the UK.

[dependenttypes]

> he got kicked out of for breaking their rules

This was not really the reason.

> and which he fled to because for some reason that never made sense to me he claimed that going from the UK to Sweden put him in danger of the thing which actually happened in the UK.

He feared that either the UK or Sweden would send him to the US.

[ben_w]

> This was not really the reason.

While I am not naïve enough to ignore the possibility of dishonesty, the official statement was:

“We cannot allow our house, the house that opened its doors, to become a center for spying, … This activity violates asylum conditions. Our decision is not arbitrary but is based on international law.”

and also accusations of blocking security cameras at the embassy.

> He feared that either the UK or Sweden would send him to the US.

And yet, he initially submitted to the UK authorities while trying to deny access to the Swedish ones. That never looked sensible to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I paid attention when the UN accused the UK of torturing him, and the fact that the UK told the US about arresting him at the embassy before it told Sweden even though the latter had an outstanding warrant stinks — but thinking poorly of how governments treat a (very unusual) investigator who showed the world a whole bunch of the skeletons in their closets does not mean I have to think the investigator was doing anything other than fleeing justice in 2011.