From Dynomight, March 2024:
(espissange? asspionage?)
Who is this Julian Assange guy? Is he good or bad? Did he do espionage? Why is the US so obsessed with getting its hands on him?
At dynomight.net we don’t like to answer questions. Instead, we prefer to replace them with more abstract questions that we also don’t answer.
Pop quiz
First up though—in which of the following scenarios would you be doing espionage?
You work for the CIA. You’re a sweaty/greedy type and decide you want a Bugatti so you sell a list of CIA spies to Russia.
You work for the CIA. You decide the US is an evil empire so you give a list of CIA spies to Russia for free.
You work for the CIA. At a cafe, a barista is mean to you and in your grief you forget a list of CIA spies on a table. Russian agents later pick it up.
You work for the CIA. You find some documents that prove the CIA is doing illegal stuff and give them to the New York Times.
You work for the New York Times. You give a friend at the CIA some tips on how to steal some documents that prove the CIA is doing illegal stuff. The documents also contain a list of CIA spies, but whatever, you publish them anyway.
You work for the New York Time. Unprompted by you, a friend at the CIA gives you some documents that prove the CIA is doing illegal stuff. There’s also a list of CIA spies, but whatever, you publish them anyway.
You work for the New York Times. Unprompted by you, a friend at the CIA gives you documents that prove the CIA is doing illegal stuff. You redact any sensitive information and publish them.
You have a blog. One day, you’re messing around with some publicly available datasets and realize that they prove the CIA is doing illegal stuff. You publish your findings.
You have a blog. You don’t live in the US. You’re not political. One day, you get interested in, like, how much US natural gas production depends on machine tools imported from China, so you do some research and publish a post on that.
What is espionage?
You can take three legal views about Assange.
He was a journalist and did nothing illegal.
He did hacking or conspiracy or something, but not espionage.
He did espionage.
Which is right? When I started looking into this, I expected the answer to be found in an examination of what Assange did. And, sure, that matters. But I quickly learned that I had no idea how the law actually works, and the reality is really weird. So let’s start there.
In US law, conspiracy is defined very broadly.
Say you and I decide to murder Alice. We agree that you’ll fill up your car with petrol and then we’ll go murder her. But when you get back, we remember that we love Alice and we take her out for dinner instead.Well, good news! We’re both still guilty of conspiracy. Even though we didn’t do anything else illegal, conspiracy itself is still a crime. We conspired (“hey let’s murder Alice; OK cool”) and you took some action (getting petrol) and that’s all that’s required. Sound strange? Usually murder would be a state crime, and each state defines conspiracy slightly differently. But here’s the federal conspiracy statute (emphasis mine):
If two or more persons conspire […] to commit any offense against the United States […] and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be […] imprisoned not more than five years
A lot of people seem to struggle to understand this, simply because it’s so strange. But that’s really how the law works—you “conspire” and then one person does some “overt act” and then you’re guilty. Prosecutors understand this very well and love charging people with conspiracy because it allows them to convict people even when they can’t prove anyone actually did any (other) crime.
(Incidentally, if you just ask me nicely to commit a crime, that would be solicitation rather than conspiracy. For reasons I don’t understand, no one ever talks about the possibility that Assange could be guilty of solicitation.)
In US law, espionage is defined very extremely very broadly.
When I hear “espionage”, I picture black turtlenecks and nuclear codes and exploding cigars. Is that what the law says?Well, if you try to read the Espionage Act, it feels like it was deliberately written to be unreadable and unquotable. It’s insanely repetitive and annoying. So let me paraphrase:
Whoever does basically anything to obtain or communicate basically any information that could be harmful to the national defense of the United States shall be imprisoned for not more than 10 years.
I know this sounds crazy. If you have any doubt, please read for yourself. Note that classified information is never mentioned, as the act predates the classification system by decades. Also note that there is no mention of “spying” or “journalists” or “whistleblowers”. In fact, there’s no mention of “espionage”—it should have been called the Imprisoning People for Obtaining or Communicating Information Related to National Defense Act.
How the Espionage Act was used has varied throughout time....
....MUCH MORE
Also at Dynomight:
Using axis lines for good or evil
Say you want to plot some data. You could just plot it by itself:
