Whatever trick he tries will not permit him to avoid a US prison.
Did he do anything wrong? He is a non-US citizen who got his hand on some data exposing wrong doings. He was not a state department employee who violated trust. How about the things he exposed, does anyone gets held accountable?
How does this match up with sending virus to destroy another nation's assets and infrastructure. When they do the same to us, would we then call it "terrorism" and an act of war?
He was not a reporter. He took documents clearly classified as secret from a troubled sexually dysfunctional man and published them while bragging about it.
This is not the old laws of the pentagon papers. These are post 911 laws covered by the patriot act with wide scope and coverage enough to have him hogtied in a dungeon forever.
These laws were not repealed completely by Obama. Presidents seldom give back power given them. Congress has to repeal them. Meanwhile, Assange is toast and I think he deserve it.
Does not matter, nations use prostitutes and other such people to gain access to secret information.
Storm, so what about all the cyber warfare being conducted by the US, where does this fit in international law? Remember, the US law is not necessarily international law, this is why Mark Rich was always a free man, except for the USA.
That being said, Assange should have been more careful of data containing names.
International law is what any nation at anytime is willing to agree to given its national interest. It is not within the US's national interest to avoid entertaining the idea of cyber war. It is just an added dimension to conventional warfare. The us hid cameras in Xerox machines to get data from the Russian Embassy in the 60's and 70's.
I bet the KGB did as well. One remember the US embassy in Moscow was declared unsecured because of the magnitude of bugs the builders placed in it. Now we simply make sure our chips do not target our vehicles, our chips call home or software do the same (software and hardware are interchangeable in their function here)
Note, even our ordinary printers and scanners have steganographic identities so why would one think that our relations in cyber space will differ. Intelligence gathering is no longer cloak and dagger. It is hunt and peck from a keyboard. Not to doi it would be criminally negligent. Everyone else is doing it and the worse are the Chinese. They steal any and everything to aid their hive mentality like the Star Trek 'Borgs.
Storm, when you have the power, you can justify anything you do and get people to fall in-line. It does not change the facts.
Now go give your justification to the 10s of thousands of Iraqis who died because their nation had WMDs with the capability to hit the region in 45 mins. This is also "justifiable".
The Chinese will do what the Chinese need to do to advance their nation's cause. You can say they steal, but who cares. The US space program got off the ground of "captured" Nazi scientists.
As they say, tief tief from tief mek god laff.