The International Court of Justice has made it difficult for the public to view the Assange extradition hearing  Boing Boing

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The International Court of Justice has made it difficult for the public to view the Assange extradition hearing - Boing Boing

If a British court permits the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to face criminal charges in the United States, the Biden administration has pledged that it will not hold him under the most austere conditions reserved for high-security prisoners and that, if he is convicted, it will let him serve his sentence in his native Australia.

Those assurances were disclosed on Wednesday as part of a British High Court ruling in London. The court accepted the United States governments appeal of a ruling that had denied its extradition request for Mr. Assange who was indicted during the Trump administration on the grounds that American prison conditions for the highest-security inmates were inhumane.

The new ruling was not made public in its entirety. But in an email, the Crown Prosecution Service press office provided a summary showing that the High Court had accepted three of five grounds for appeal submitted by the United States and disclosing the promises the Biden administration had made.

A lower-court judge, Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates Court, had held in January that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States given American prison conditions. The summary of the decision to accept the appeal said that the United States had provided the United Kingdom with a package of assurances which are responsive to the district judges specific findings in this case.

Specifically, it said, Mr. Assange would not be subjected to measures that curtail a prisoners contact with the outside world and can amount to solitary confinement, and would not be imprisoned at the supermax prison in Florence, Colo., unless he later did something that meets the test for imposing such harsh steps.

The United States has also provided an assurance that the United States will consent to Mr. Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any custodial sentence imposed on him, the summary said.

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U.S. Promises Not to Imprison Julian Assange Under Harsh Conditions ...

However, Koeltl said accessing the contents of their phones if that occurred invaded the visitors privacy rights under the U.S. Constitution.

The misconduct alleged is a violation of the plaintiffs reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their electronic devices under the Fourth Amendment, the judge wrote.

Koeltl, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, threw out part of the lawsuit that sought money damages against former CIA Director Mike Pompeo. But the judge said the plaintiffs could continue to seek a ruling requiring the spy agency to destroy any records it may have gleaned from the Assange visitors phones.

Spokespeople for the CIA and for the U.S. Attorneys Office in Manhattan, which is representing the federal government in the case, declined to comment.

The judges ruling could prompt officials to try to invoke the state-secrets privilege a legal doctrine that can be used to shut down civil suits that implicate classified information.

The suit was filed in August 2022 on behalf of two attorneys who visited Assange in 2017, Margaret Ratner Kunstler and Deborah Hrbek, along with two journalists: John Goetz with German broadcaster NDR and Charles Glass, a freelance reporter formerly with ABC News.

We are thrilled that the Court rejected the CIAs efforts to silence the Plaintiffs, who merely seek to expose the CIAs attempt to carry out Pompeos vendetta against WikiLeaks, the lawyer for the visitors, Richard Roth, said in an email to POLITICO.

The suit tracks allegations in reports by the Spanish newspaper El Pais that a security firm at the Ecuadorian embassy gave the CIA information about Assanges visitors. The data was gleaned from hidden cameras and microphones and from opening their phones while they were meeting with the WikiLeaks founder.

The suit accuses Pompeo of spearheading the effort, citing his record of public animosity towards WikiLeaks, the controversial group which anonymously obtains secrets from governments, militaries, banks and political figures and publishes them onlineoften in raw form.

Critics have accused the group of being a pawn of Russia, but supporters say the organizations practice of radical transparency has been groundbreaking.

As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump praised the leaks of hacked emails from advisers to his opponent at the time, Hillary Clinton.

Pompeo also welcomed those disclosures at the time, but after being confirmed as CIA chief the following year, he declared WikiLeaks to be a hostile intelligence service and spurred government-wide efforts to target the organization and Assange.

Assange, an Australian citizen, entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 and was granted asylum while he was on bail pending efforts by the Swedish government to extradite him to face a rape charge.

That investigation was dropped in 2017, but the U.S. brought criminal charges against him the next year for allegedly conspiring to hack U.S. government computers and to disclose national security secrets.

Ecuador effectively turned Assange over to U.K. officials in 2019, who have been detaining him for the past four years as he fights extradition to the U.S.

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Judge: Assange visitors can proceed with spying suit against CIA

FILE PHOTO: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at the Westminster Magistrates Court, after he was arrested in London, Britain April 11, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights

(Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will seek to be released from prison on bail on Wednesday after a British judge refused to extradite to him to the United States, where he is wanted to face criminal charges.

Following are some key events and details in Assange's life:

July 1971 - Assange is born in Townsville, Australia, to parents involved in theatre. As a teenager, he gains a reputation as a computer programmer, and in 1995 is fined for computer hacking but avoids prison on condition he does not offend again.

2006 - Founds WikiLeaks, creating an internet-based "dead letter drop" for leakers of classified or sensitive information.

April 5, 2010 - WikiLeaks releases leaked video from a U.S. helicopter showing an air strike that killed civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff.

July 25, 2010 - WikiLeaks releases over 91,000 documents, mostly secret U.S. military reports about the Afghanistan war.

October, 2010 - WikiLeaks releases 400,000 classified military files chronicling the Iraq war. The next month, it releases thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, including candid views of foreign leaders and blunt assessments of security threats.

Nov. 18, 2010 - A Swedish court orders Assange's arrest over rape allegations, which he denies. He is arrested in Britain the next month on a European Arrest Warrant but freed on bail.

February 2011 - London's Westminster Magistrates Court orders Assange's extradition to Sweden. He appeals.

June 14, 2012 - The British Supreme Court rejects Assange's final appeal and five days later he takes refuge in Ecuador's embassy in London and seeks political asylum, which Ecuador grants in August 2012.

April 13, 2017 - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, then CIA chief, describes WikiLeaks as "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia".

May 19, 2017 - Swedish prosecutors discontinue their investigation, saying it is impossible to proceed while Assange is in the Ecuadorean embassy.

April 11, 2019 - Assange is carried out of the embassy and arrested after Ecuador revokes his political asylum. He is sentenced on May 1 to 50 weeks in prison by a British court for skipping bail. He completes the sentence early but remains jailed pending extradition hearings.

May 13, 2019 - Swedish prosecutors reopen their investigation and say they will seek Assange's extradition to Sweden.

June 11, 2019 - The U.S. Justice Department formally asks Britain to extradite Assange to the United States to face charges that he conspired to hack U.S. government computers and violated an espionage law.

Nov. 19, 2019 - Swedish prosecutors drop their rape investigation, saying the evidence is not strong enough to bring charges, in part because of the passage of time.

Feb. 21, 2020 - A London court begins the first part of extradition hearings which are adjourned after a week. The hearings are supposed to resume in May but are delayed until September because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jan. 4, 2021 - Judge Vanessa Baraitser concludes it would be "oppressive" to extradite him to the United States because of his frail mental health, saying there was a real risk he would take his own life.

Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Catherine Evans

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Timeline: Who is Julian Assange? | Reuters

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange supporters hold placards as they gather outside Westminster Magistrates court in London on Wednesday. Alastair Grant/AP hide caption

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange supporters hold placards as they gather outside Westminster Magistrates court in London on Wednesday.

LONDON A British judge on Wednesday formally approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States to face spying charges. The case will now go to Britain's interior minister for a decision, though the WikiLeaks founder still has legal avenues of appeal.

The order, which brings and end to the years'-long extradition battle closer, comes after the U.K. Supreme Court last month refused Assange permission to appeal against a lower court's ruling that he could be extradited.

District Judge Paul Goldspring issued the order in a brief hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court, as Assange watched by video link from Belmarsh Prison and his supporters rallied outside the courthouse, demanding he be freed.

Home Secretary Priti Patel will now decide whether to grant the extradition.

The move doesn't exhaust the legal options for Assange, who has sought for years to avoid a trial in the U.S. on charges related to WikiLeaks' publication of a huge trove of classified documents more than a decade ago.

His lawyers have four weeks to make submissions to Patel, and can also seek to appeal to the High Court.

Assange lawyer Mark Summers told the court that the legal team had "serious submissions" to make.

The U.S. has asked British authorities to extradite Assange so he can stand trial on 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse. American prosecutors say Assange unlawfully helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published, putting lives at risk.

Supporters and lawyers for Assange, 50, argue that he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment protections of freedom of speech for publishing documents that exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. They argue that his case is politically motivated.

A British district court judge had initially rejected a U.S. extradition request on the grounds that Assange was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. U.S. authorities later provided assurances that the WikiLeaks founder wouldn't face the severe treatment that his lawyers said would put his physical and mental health at risk.

In December, the High Court overturned the lower court's decision, saying that the U.S. promises were enough to guarantee that Assange would be treated humanely. The Supreme Court in March rejected Assange's attempt to challenge that ruling.

Assange's lawyers say he could face up to 175 years in jail if he is convicted in the U.S., though American authorities have said the sentence was likely to be much lower than that.

Assange has been held at Britain's high-security Belmarsh Prison in London since 2019, when he was arrested for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that, he spent seven years inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed.

Last month, Assange and his partner Stella Moris married in a prison ceremony.

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Julian Assange is one major step closer to extradition to the U.S.

Trash? Know this about the man I love and perfect day Ill treasure forever  Daily Telegraph

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Trash? Know this about the man I love and perfect day Ill treasure forever - Daily Telegraph

From WikiLeaks To China: Censored Texts Endure In Bitcoin And Ethereum  Forbes

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From WikiLeaks To China: Censored Texts Endure In Bitcoin And Ethereum - Forbes

Julian Assange has written a letter to King Charles ahead of his coronation inviting him to visit the UK prison where the WikiLeaks founder has been captive for more than four years on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign.

The letter is the first document the Australian journalist and WikiLeaks founder has written and published since his time in Belmarsh prison in London and accounts the horrors of his life there.

On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: his majestys prison Belmarsh, Assange writes.

One can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.

It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdoms record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe.

Assange, an Australian citizen, remains at Belmarsh as he fights a US attempt to extradite him to face charges in connection with the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as well as diplomatic cables.

He goes on to point sarcastically to the UK governments commitment to roll out the biggest expansion of prison places in more than a century, and the culinary delights of eating on a budget of two pounds per day.

As a political prisoner, held at your majestys pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution, Assange writes.

Beyond the gustatory pleasures you will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaros Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets.

Assange goes on to invite the King to the most isolated place within [the] walls of Belmarsh Healthcare, or Hellcare and the Belmarsh End of Life Suite.

Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners cries of Brother, Im going to die in here, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison, Assange writes.

I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majestys Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king.

As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.

On Friday, the Australian opposition leader, Peter Dutton, agreed with the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, that the detention of Assange needed to come to an end.

For the first time in more than a decade, the leaders of Australias major political parties both publicly back a diplomatic intervention in the case, with Albanese saying enough is enough and Dutton agreeing it has gone on too long.

Albanese told journalists in the UK, where he is attending King Charles coronation, that the matter needed to be brought to a conclusion and he was continuing to raise it through diplomatic channels.

There is nothing to be served by his ongoing incarceration, Albanese said. And I am concerned about Mr Assanges mental health. There was a court decision here in the United Kingdom that was overturned on appeal that went to Mr Assanges health as well and I am concerned for him.

On Friday morning, the opposition leader told ABC radio RN Breakfast it had gone on for too long at the fault of many people.

A cross-section of Australian politicians have been raising the matter internally with their colleagues and international counterparts for the last few years, rallying for Assanges freedom. Nearly 50 federal parliamentarians have called on the US to drop its extradition bid.

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Julian Assange writes letter to King Charles and urges him to visit ...

Assanges supporters say he is an anti-establishment hero who has been victimised because he exposed the US wrongdoings.

Australian lawmakers have met United States Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, urging her to help drop the pending extradition case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and allow him to return to Australia.

The Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group said on Tuesday it informed Kennedy of the widespread concern in Australia about the continued detention of Assange, an Australian citizen.

The meeting comes before US President Joe Bidens scheduled visit to Australia this month for the Quad leaders summit.

There are a range of views about Assange in the Australian community and the members of the Parliamentary Group reflect that diversity of views. But what is not in dispute in the Group is that Mr Assange is being treated unjustly, the legislators said in a statement after meeting Kennedy in the capital, Canberra.

Assange is battling extradition from the United Kingdom to the US where he is wanted on criminal charges over the release of confidential military records and diplomatic cables in 2010. Washington says the release of the documents had put lives in danger.

Assanges supporters say he is an anti-establishment hero who has been victimised because he exposed US wrongdoings, including in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US embassy in Australia confirmed the meeting in a tweet but did not share further details.

Assanges brother, Gabriel Shipton, said he felt the meeting was an important acknowledgement by the US government that Julians freedom is important to millions of Australians.

After [Prime Minister Anthony Albanese] expressed frustration with the Biden administration, this is now a test for Ambassador Kennedy to see if she can move Washington on this issue, said Shipton.

Albanese, who has been advocating for the release of Assange, last week aired his frustration for not yet finding a diplomatic fix over the issue.

Support for Assange among US policymakers remains low. Only a few members of Congress have come forward in support of the demand to drop charges against him.

If extradited, Assange faces a sentence of up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison.

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Australian lawmakers press US envoy for Julian Assange release

Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Massachusetts air national guard member who was charged on Friday with leaking classified Pentagon documents, has joined a long list of individuals who have been prosecuted for allegedly disclosing sensitive US national security intelligence.

Previous leaks have ranged from information about US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan to details of Russian interference in American elections. Despite the diversity of the subject matter, the treatment of the leakers has shared a common relentlessness on the part of the US government in pursuing those it accuses of breaching its trust.

In March 1971, Ellsberg, a military analyst, leaked a top-secret study to the New York Times. The document, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, spanned US involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and exposed covert efforts by successive US presidents to escalate the conflict while hiding deep doubts about the chances of victory.

Ellsberg was prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act a law designed to catch first world war spies and faced a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison. All charges were dropped after the FBIs illegal wiretapping of Ellsberg was revealed.

Early last month, the 92-year-old Ellsberg, who has become revered as the doyen of whistleblowers, revealed that he has terminal cancer and has months to live.

Sterling, a former CIA operations officer, served more than two years of a 42-month sentence after he was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking information about a botched covert US operation with Iran to the then New York Times journalist James Risen. In 2003, Risen published details of the operation in a book, State of War.

It was not until 2011, under Barack Obamas administration, that Sterling was arrested. Federal prosecutors accused him of leaking details of the Iran engagement out of anger and resentment a reference to an earlier claim from Sterling, who is Black, that he suffered discrimination while at the CIA.

Sterling has denied ever talking to Risen about Iran.

A former senior official with the National Security Agency (NSA), Drake was charged in 2010 with leaking classified information to the Baltimore Sun. He faced 10 counts with a possible 35-year sentence, though the charges were whittled down to a single misdemeanor for which he was given a year of probation.

Drake has always insisted that he had no intention of harming national security, presenting himself as a whistleblower who had been trying to sound the alarm on technical flaws in NSA programs that were wasting billions of dollars.

As a former intelligence analyst posted outside Baghdad during the Iraq war, Manning had access to classified information that shone a light on the vagaries of war there and in Afghanistan. She leaked hundreds of thousands of military records and diplomatic cables via the open information site WikiLeaks in 2010 in one of the largest disclosures of military secrets in US history.

Three years later, she was convicted under the Espionage Act. She was given a 35-year sentence, of which she served seven. In a memoir published last year, README.txt, she wrote: What I did during my enlistment was an act of rebellion, of resistance, and of civic disobedience.

Kiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer, was sentenced to two years in prison in 2012 for leaking the identity of a covert operative to a journalist. He was the first CIA officer to be imprisoned for doing so.

Prosecutors insisted that they went after Kiriakou to protect the safety of undercover government agents. He countered that he was a whistleblower attempting to expose the use of torture in the so-called war on terror.

Kiriakou was the first former government official to talk in public about waterboarding, the form of controlled drowning used against terrorism suspects in the aftermath of 9/11.

In 2013 Snowden disclosed inside intelligence about the US governments dragnet surveillance of the digital communications of millions of Americans through the Guardian and Washington Post. Working at the time as an NSA contractor, he fled to Hong Kong and from there to Russia, where he was granted asylum.

After he outed himself through the Guardian, a raft of Republican politicians demanded that Snowden be extradited back to the US to face trial as a traitor. Donald Trump called for his execution three years before he was elected US president.

In his support, a number of prominent public figures, including Ellsberg, have lauded Snowden as a pro-democracy hero who should be allowed to come home with a pardon.

The former NSA intelligence contractor and air force linguist was sentenced to more than five years under the Espionage Act in 2018 for leaking a top-secret document on Russian interference in the US presidential election. She pleaded guilty to having handed a copy of a classified report about Russian hacking of voting software suppliers in the 2016 race.

She was released after three years. Having regained her freedom she told CBS: I am not a traitor, I am not a spy. I am somebody who only acted out of love for what this country stands for.

The WikiLeaks founder was initially charged in 2019 with conspiring to hack into a military computer an accusation arising out of the massive leak by Manning to WikiLeaks nine years earlier. The seriousness of prosecutors case against him was dramatically expanded later that year to include 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act.

Assange has been held for the past four years in Belmarsh prison in London as extradition proceedings work their way through British courts. The Joe Biden White House has come under mounting pressure to drop the charges, including from leading news outlets, on grounds that the prosecution is putting a chill on press freedom.

The air national guardsman now finds his name added to the list. He was charged in a Boston federal court on Friday with two counts under the Espionage Act, each carrying a possible 10-year sentence.

Prosecutors allege that they have evidence to prove that Teixeira unlawfully retained and transmitted hundreds of classified defence documents. The FBI has indicated that he enjoyed security clearance for sensitive intelligence marked top secret/sensitive compartmented information.

The leak of the Pentagon documents is believed to have started on the social media platform Discord. Teixeira reportedly visited the platform over several years posting about guns, online games and racist memes, though any motive for the alleged leak remains obscure.

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From Ellsberg to Assange: Jack Teixeira joins list of alleged ...