The Guardian has been very hostile toward Assange. I helped compile a list of its coverage a while ago:

https://theguardian.fivefilters.org/assange/

As for its coverage of the case, the most important aspect, which Jonathan Cook refers to, is that two of its journalists (David Leigh and Luke Harding) are implicated in releasing the password that led to everyone being able to access the unredacted cables that Assange is being blamed for publishing.

Cook writes:

> The two authors used the book not only to vent their personal animosity towards Assange – in part because he refused to let them write his official biography – but also to divulge a complex password entrusted to Leigh by Assange that provided access to an online cache of encrypted documents. That egregious mistake by the Guardian opened the door for every security service in the world to break into the file, as well as other files once they could crack Assange’s sophisticated formula for devising passwords.

> Much of the furore about Assange's supposed failure to protect names in the leaked documents published by Assange – now at the heart of the extradition case – stems from Leigh's much-obscured role in sabotaging Wikileaks' work.

I'm sure you'll agree that's a hugely significate aspect of the case. Can you find anything in the Guardian accepting responsibility for this? The Guardian journalists responsible have stayed silent and have not appeared in court. Yet the prosecution quotes from their book repeatedly.

The kind of "journalist" Luke Harding is was brutally exposed by Aaron Mate by simply repeatedly asking him for evidence for his claims when Harding was flogging a conspiracy theory book. Nothing more than that reduced him to powder.

It's an amazing thing to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ikf1uZli4g

I have no idea how this guy Harding is employed by the guardian, or indeed anyone or ever was. Obviously not a competent journalist, what he is... I'd never heard of Mate before seeing this, Mate just gives him rope and let's him do it to himself. That's the guy the Guardian had doing hatchet jobs on Assange when he was getting more death threats every day than every guardian journalist ever put together has received. [1]

[1] I have no evidence of this. But it seems a lot more plausible than the Guardian's hatchet jobs. Where is Alan Rusbridger nowadays? He was editor back then. Ah, wikipedia says principal of an Oxford college. When not appearing in cameo perfomances of movie versions of Luke Harding's hatchet jobs on Snowden. Must be where he thinks he's best speaking truth to power nowadays. He may be right.

It's a 58-character password. Every password strength checker I try certifies it as extremely strong. Remember, it wasn't cracked, it was published in a book by a Guardian journalist.

And what Assange wrote to the journalist was only a part of the password. Assange never wrote the second part. Apparently the journalist had to combine both the said and the written parts to use it but published the whole combination in a book.

There's an old fashioned concept that a thing known by only you is a secret. A thing you've told somebody else, is just on a countdown to being public information.

The journalists obviously fucked Assange by being idiots, but he is 100% culpable for putting the information somewhere it could be leaked in the first place. I simply don't think it has any bearing on the case at all.

> A thing you've told somebody else, is just on a countdown to being public information.

This wasn't just "somebody else", this was the senior Guardian investigative journalist David Leigh, who was working with Assange to redact and publish the information in the Guardian. Assange was reluctant to give him the password, but was badgered into it by Leigh.

> he is 100% culpable for putting the information somewhere it could be leaked in the first place

The information was only available in encrypted form, and not made public. All the testimony from people involved in the redaction process show that Assange was very careful, while the Guardian's David Leigh was impatient and careless, and ultimately published the password in his book. I don't see why you think that has no bearing on the case.

Here's testimony from computer science professor Christian Grothoff:

> [Prosecutor] Smith: So in summer 2010 David Leigh was given a password and the cache was put up on a public website?

> Grothoff: No, it was put on a website but not public. It was in a hidden directory.

> Smith: So how did it end up on mirror sites if not public?

> Grothoff: It depends how the specific mirror is created. On the Wikileaks site the encrypted cache was not an available field. Different mirroring techniques might sweep up archive files.

> Smith: Wikileaks had asked for the creation of mirrors?

> Grothoff: Yes.

> Smith: The strength of a password is irrelevant if you cannot control the people who have it.

> Grothoff: That is true. The human is always the weakest link in the system. It is difficult to guard against a bad faith actor, like David Leigh.

> Smith: How many people did Wikileaks give the key in the summer of 2010?

> Grothoff: It appears from his book only to David Leigh. He then gave it to the hundreds of thousands who had access to his book.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...

At some other point it's pointed out that those following the mirroring instructions provided by Wikileaks would not have received the encrypted file. Suggesting the intention wasn't to have that particular file mirrored.

I read that if you keep the password only in 1 head then you just painted a giant target on that head, where if you have it shared to a few trusted people if one of them is "suicided" then you can release the secrets so you have a way to prevent the assassinations attempts.

I'm pretty sure that's not what David Leigh was doing. Publishing the password was total gross unprofessional incompetent foolishness. Or possibly at that point the Guardian "investigative" unit was already trying to poison the whole story.

Or he was just a damn idiot.

Yeah, I was suggesting that is not a good idea to keep the password only in 1 person head/home , it is an invitation to get assassinated. You could be right but I fail to see any relation with my comment(maybe is my fault and expressed my idea badly= I know that he did not reveal the password to protect Assanges life).

The Guardian is actually involved in the case: the "Guardian’s 2011 WikiLeaks book" contained the full password of the encrypted file containing the unredacted documents and that encrypted file was already (it is argued, not per the instructions of Wikileaks) mirrored to different locations.

The Guardian of course denies its own responsibility, because if they wouldn't, it would mean that it was the Guardian who de facto "published" the files by publishing the password to the file, and not Assange, and it would be them fighting the extradition now.

There's no way that the prosecution in this case would go after the Guardian at this point in time.

Remember, the whole playbook here is to target the weakest possible link, i.e. an individual not associated to a traditional publisher, who is being attacked personally (i.e., casting doubts on his mental health after ensuring that he was forced for years to live under circumstances that would erode anybody's mental health).

They are doing this against a chosen target because they hope to establish precedent which can then later on be used against more difficult targets.

Why did Assange given them a password to any documents he didn't share with them?

The encryption key was to the archive that Assange shared with the Guardian journalist working on the story, David Leigh.

The encrypted archive was apparently mirrored on several sites, meaning that when Leigh published the key, anyone could access the full archive of unredacted cables. I guess Assange could be faulted for working with traditional journalists who aren't so competent with technology. That would be an ironic reversal of the usual complaints about WikiLeaks. But at the very least, Leigh should have known to at least ask Assange before publishing the encryption key.

The Guardian turned around and blamed WikiLeaks, throwing it under the bus for the Guardian's own screw-up.

yes, but that doesn't have Craig Murray's conspiracy theories.

What "conspiracy theory" are you suggesting is being served here?