Which system did he hack?

Before you answer, consider that his crime is the rough equivalent of you walking past a "secure government facility" with one of those number-pad locks on the door, trying a few combinations, and then giving up.

Also, before talking about "attempted crimes are still crimes" or whatever, please do a rough Fermi estimate of how many teenage children do that much or worse on a daily basis, attempting to hack US systems from either abroad or on US soil.

Should the government of the United States spend tens of millions of dollars prosecuting every such incident? Extradite every script kiddie and drag them in front a grand jury? Are you saying that there's "rules" here that are being meticulously followed by all parties?

To most normal people, this looks like abuse of power. Assange made powerful people look bad and they retaliated with all of the tools at their disposal.

That anyone here can justify this kind of behaviour is a sign that you want an emperor, not a president. A king, not an elected official. You want monarchy, with those in power able to execute a peasant for any infraction against their betters.

> China trying to extradite someone for criticizing them isn't the same as the US trying to extradite a Russian hacker who is behind a ransomware attack or a South American drug kingpin.

Why?

To them it's the same severity of "crime".

You don't get to define who takes what crimes seriously. If you open the door the US prosecution of overseas non-citizens for non-crimes they didn't commit on US soil, then you open the door for everyone else to apply the same logic to you.

Assange basically did nothing. He didn't break into any systems, he didn't access any IT systems, etc...

> trying to pretend like that is on the same level as criticizing the CCP or some warlord is absurd.

Tell that to these people, executed for criticizing a dead person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo

To you this might be an absurd reason to go execute someone, but to other people it was a "serious crime" requiring capital punishment.

Reading posts like this make just wonder: how can one be so off? I mean in the “missing forest for the trees” sense of off.

What exactly was this guy doing? Was he accessing secrets to sell them to north korea or was he exposing crimes against humanity, conspiracies against the public interest, and violations of international law?

I wonder something. Let’s say the mafia spent on Hollywood and mainstream news enough to develop mainstream culture to the point where the mafia is legitimized in the eyes of enough of the public. You would defend mob punishment of someone who steals documents from them wouldn’t you?

I wonder what is it that makes you ready to side with authority and blame the (potential) victim? Do you always side with authority because it’s more comfortable to pretend they are noble than to admit to yourself that you ignore the tyranny of an evil, abusive authority? Do you blame the Gazans for Israel dropping bombs on their apartment buildings or burning their children alive in the refugee tent camps (that Israel declared as safe) because nearly two decades ago Hamas won the election in Gaza? Do you blame the millions Vietnamese for getting agent orange dropped on them because they dared to tolerate deviations from what the Americans desired in terms of Vietnamese economic/civic management?

It’s an interesting thing to see people jump to defend an authority when they lash out from a position which is so clearly not the moral high ground. Why is that? The American Government destroyed this mans life because he exposed their crimes. You can’t ignore the Governments crimes — which stretch far back —- while being fixated on his violations of some social contract that has been long trampled upon by the government itself.