[trhway]

> Maybe law enforcement/Pentagon/intelligence data is not under threat at the moment

the payments data would tell a lot about intelligence networks for example or about various Pentagon contractors.

Remember Assange? He did a decade under house arrest for a leak paling in comparison to what happens today. How times have changed.

[dragonwriter]

> He did a decade under house arrest

No, he did a most of a decade hiding out in an diplomatic enclave to avoid legal process, and three years in jail fighting extradition; he spent no time under house arrest.

[ben_w]

That's not why Assange spent a decade hiding in an embassy, which also wasn't house arrest. Before he got kicked out, he could have left any time he wanted — it was the police outside who weren't allowed in.

He spent a decade hiding in an embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden for unrelated crimes, ostensably for fear of what ended up happening in the UK where he was apparently happy to stay while insisting Sweden wasn't safe.

[trhway]

>wasn't house arrest. Before he got kicked out, he could have left any time he wanted — it was the police outside

and the people in prison can leave anytime they want - it is just prison guards outside who would shoot them.

> to Sweden for unrelated crimes

And what happened to those crimes in Sweden once he resolved his US issues?

[ben_w]

> and the people in prison can leave anytime they want - it is just prison guards outside who would shoot them.

By that standard, given what the guards would do, you would need to also claim that "prison is a death sentence".

He wasn't under house arrest — he went there against the desires of the police force outside who stationed officers there to perform an arrest for skipping bail.

Calling this "house arrest" is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine "drowning" or working in the antarctic "hypothermia": he chose to go there, and to keep staying there. More than that, he chose to commit a new and easy to prove crime by going there.

His argument against going to Sweden, *after having been arrested for the Swedish extradition hearing in the UK*, was a fear of a thing the UK ended up doing, and which it should have been obvious the UK would do willingly whenever the US asked for it. The US has no need to make things more complicated by asking for Swedish involvement given how friendly the UK government is.

The UK is infamous for doing whatever the US tells it to, so if you're afraid of US prosecutorial/extradition overreach, the UK is one of many countries where you don't want to be. Sweden, not so much.

If the US wanted him back in 2010, they could have had him directly from the UK with full support of the UK government, without any of the convoluted extra steps in this conspiracy theory that makes the Swedish judicial system into patsies.

> And what happened to those crimes in Sweden once he resolved his US issues?

The statute of limitations happened. Bits were already timing out even before he overstayed his welcome by Ecuador.

Nevertheless the prosecutors did try to reopen that prosecution and to get the UK to extradite to Sweden first over the US, only to be told no by the judge because the evidence was too old to secure a conviction.

That pre-existing cancellation was why the British didn't feel the need to bother telling Sweden when his asylum was cancelled and he was arrested, much to the annoyance of the Swedish prosecutors: https://www.courthousenews.com/%EF%BB%BFsweden-tells-uk-it-t...

And only after all that had already happened, did the US issues get fully resolved.

[trhway]

>he went there against the desires of the police force outside

>is akin to calling voluntarily serving on a submarine

> he chose to go there, and to keep staying there.

it isn't called "voluntary"/"choosing" if the alternative to the "voluntarily"/"choosing" is a police force desire of putting you into Gitmo (or SuperMax if you're lucky) for life or even capital punishment to politically prosecute you. (Assange's actions weren't criminal at the jurisdiction where he performed his actions. US prosecution of him was pure political and a pure projection of US force beyond US jurisdiction. Crowds of people in US collect classified info from other countries, and US doesn't extradite those people into those other countries. Because jurisdiction matters for determining whether actions constitute a crime. I for example say a a lot of things which are crime in Russia - like calling the Ukraine war a war - which aren't crime in US. Should i be extradited to Russia and face the "legal process" there? And if i caught in a Russia friendly country and hide from extradition in a UK or US embassy it wouldn't be a voluntary choosing to visit the embassy, it would be a "voluntary choice" to stay in the embassy instead of getting treason conviction and 20 years in GULAG - such "voluntarily chosen" stay at the embassy is a de-facto house arrest.)

>The statute of limitations happened.

No. You're again inventing things. Like with your invented definition of the "voluntary choosing" above.