 Welcome to CNLives, continuing coverage of Julian Assange's extradition hearing at the Old Valley in London. I'm Joe Lauria, Editor-in-Chief of Sodium News. Day 14, a major development today. A few days back, the defense asked Judge Vanessa Barraza for four weeks for them to prepare their final arguments or final submissions. She was taken aback by that and argued that the case had gone on for far too long. Of course, there was the interruption because of the pandemic from February that there were numerous witnesses and there was another week of testimony to go. And at one point, she seemed to indicate that she would only give them the weekend to prepare after the final arguments and the final, sorry, the final submissions and witnesses and testimony are heard. Then she spoke about a week. She went away for a few days to think about that. Before today's testimony began, she asked Edward Fitzgerald QC, the defense attorney, to talk about this issue. And she, startlingly, raised the American election on November 4. She said, she asked Fitzgerald how a new administration or the election in general or a new administration would affect or impact the hearing. She said, quote, that's one of the factors going into my decision. He responded, it seems unlikely for you to make a judgment before November 4 election day and you would have to bear in mind that the future is uncertain. Much of what we say about Trump is because this proceeding was initiated by Trump. Some elements of the case would be worse if Trump were there, meaning reelected. She responded, I agree that one way or the other, my decision will come after an election in the United States. And for that reason, I find no reason, for that reason, I find no reason not to give you the four weeks. I think even the defense may have been surprised by that, so she's been extremely lenient with them. She's going to give them four weeks to put together the final arguments in this case. That starts at the end of next week. Today was the end of the third week. There'll be another week of testimony at the end of the fourth week. We'll begin the four week preparation by the defense. Of course, also the prosecution gets those four weeks to marshal together their final argument and that date will be November 16. That's the date of the final arguments. She said she could not set a judgment day yet, but that it would most likely seem to come after the new year. So she also said that she considered a Sanchez condition in prison all this time, but that since the defense wanted the four weeks, she's going to give them the full month to prepare those arguments. So after next week will be the last week of testimony and then November 16 rolls around and then we have the final arguments and sometime probably in January you would imagine with the holidays interrupting things that in the new year with after the election probably before the inauguration of a new president, which comes in January, we will know whether she has decided to send Julian Sange to the United States or not. There was another moment where Fitzgerald argued that the defense should be able to put forward two new witnesses that were not on the list. And that was because Gordon Cumber, the assistant US attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, whose 36 page affidavit has really been the playbook for the prosecution, that he had stated many things in his affidavit, including saying point blank that there is no solitary confinement at the Alexandria detention center where Sange would be held in free trial and during the trial. And also that I'm not sure what he said about Colorado, but the point Fitzgerald was making was that he wanted he was unable to cross examine Cromberg, because Cromberg is refusing to make himself available and this evidence is put every day into court by Lewis, James Lewis QC, the prosecutor. He refers constantly to Cromberg's affidavit and yet anything that is said from Cromberg's affidavit can't be challenged by the defense. Because of that, the defense wanted two new witnesses. One was a former chief psychiatrist of the US Bureau of Prisons and another is a forensic psychiatrist who had spent many, many much time inside the ADX Florence Colorado facility where it seems to be agreed that Sange would go if he's convicted and if he's extradited, of course, first. He wanted Fitzgerald to bring these two witnesses on. At one point he said that Cromberg and the prosecution should not have a divine right to have the last word. It was a very strong statement there, a divine right. They don't have a divine right and that they should be challenged and since they won't appear on the stand, he wanted Cromberg won up here on the stand. He wanted these two witnesses to come and challenge the assertions made by Cromberg about conditions in US prisons particularly ADC and Alexandria and the Colorado facility. She denied that. She denied that, I guess, having already given four weeks to them. She felt she was leaning enough. I don't know her thinking, of course. But again, she's very much running a tight ship, this court, the rates is, and she was moving a case along as many, many judges do. They like to move the case forward. They don't want to waste any time. And she has complained about a lot of wasting of time so far and things have happened like this coronavirus scare that shut down the court for a day and a half, for example. So she denied these two witnesses, which is a blow to the defense because Cromberg's words do hang out there and he does have the final word and they can't be challenged by these two new witnesses who know about the American facilities that Cromberg's talking about and a former US official, chief psychiatrist of the Bureau of Prisons who presumably would say that the conditions there are horrible and that there is a solitary confinement ADX. We don't know because we're not going to hear their testimony. But that was an important moment. Now, Kristyn Krafens and the interim chief of WikiLeaks reacted to Bereitsa's decision to give the four weeks and particularly her citing the US election as the reason for this. And his quote is, district judge Vanessa Bereitsa has acknowledged what has been clear since even before the first indictment against Julian Assange was unsealed that this is a politically motivated prosecution. So the fact that she was asking Fitzgerald whether a new administration would change anything was quite significant today. She's clearly understands the political dimensions of this case. Now, whether she thinks that rises to annulling the tradition requests by the United States because the treaty between the US and the UK clearly states that no one can be extradited in a political case. And of course, the defense has been trying to argue from day one of this hearing that this is a blatantly political case. Politics certainly surrounded even Bereitsa has acknowledged that today. We then moved on to a witness, Patrick Eller. Patrick Eller describes himself on his LinkedIn page as a digital forensic examiner, as an expert witness, as a principal consultant, an adjunct professor, a disabled veteran, and a retired special agent. He then said when he was sworn in that he had been an MP, a military police. He was in the military and in law enforcement. He took the stand to talk about some highly complex technical issues surrounding a Java chat between someone named Nathaniel Frank and someone who was later identified at the Chelsea Manning Court Marshal as Chelsea Manning. And in this chat, they're discussing whether they can crack a password. Now, this issue is, as I say, highly complex. I think people who are less than completely computer literate might not have followed all of it or were able to piece together the argument. My view is summers didn't do a tremendous job in putting this in layman terms for the judge to understand, of course, and also for the public, the press reporting on this. So because of that, I'm going to ask our journalist, Cathy Vogan, who's also the executive producer of CN Live, and she's also been doing a hell of a job live tweeting this case, to come in now and to explain and report on what this charged testimony and cross-examination by Patrick Eller regarding the technical aspects of whether or not Assange tried to crack a computer and what exactly that meant. So now I'm going to bring in Cathy Vogan, and she will present the report on that. Cathy. The best place to start is probably what Assange has actually accused of in the indictment. Assange agreed, first of all, these are accusations. Assange agreed to assist Manning in cracking a password hash stored on the United States Department of Defense computers connected to the secret internet protocol network, SIPRANET is the acronym, a United States government network used for classified documents and communications. The next part is this enabled Manning to log on to computers under a username. These are the allegations that did not belong to her, and that such measures would have made it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the disclosures. So Eller was asked to look at the chat logs, right? Looking at the chat logs, Lewis said, what did you see there between Nathaniel Frank and nobody? So these were the two users. Nobody is chatting with Nathaniel Frank in the chat logs. That's allegedly Manning and Assange. But in fact, this conversation, which doesn't have much context, in fact, it offers no context about what the password was for, what computer it was going to be used on, if at all, and also whether the computer that it was going to be used on was in fact a government computer. According to Eller, there's nothing there in the chat logs that states that this was the intended purpose of this hash code. The other thing that comes out, and this is in reexamination, and I'm taking things out of context to try and paint a more coherent picture, because this was gradually drawn out throughout the day, especially with a very, very long showing off type of demonstration by Mr. Lewis, the prosecutor of what he knew about encryption, and that was all a waste of time as he found out. But this is a very important point that was made. So it seems to have been established that nobody was, in fact, Chelsea Manning. However, it was never proved during the Manning trial or since that Nathaniel Frank was Julian Assange. And so Eller was asked if he had been asked to investigate who Nathaniel Frank actually was. And Eller said, no, I wasn't even asked. And he said, did you see any evidence that it was Julian Assange on the other end? And he said, no, I saw no evidence at all that it was Julian Assange on the other end of the chat. There is no forensic evidence or evidence in the actual chat itself that could indicate that this was Assange. And so it was asked by Mark Summers, who was the defense lawyer. Well, why did you use Assange's name interchangeably in your report with Nathaniel Frank? And suddenly there was this gotcha moment with Eller. And he said, well, it was just assumed that it was him. Excuse me. Yes, I really shouldn't have assumed that. So that's a big question mark there. It makes this whole, the actual identities of the two people. First of all, it's not clear what they're talking about, what it's for. And then it's not clear who's actually speaking on the other end with Manning. It might have been Ziggy. I don't know. I really don't know. But there is no proof that this Nathaniel Frank was Julian Assange on the other end. This is the what's great about the digital fingerprint on your computers. I guess that is forensic evidence that can link you to what you do on your computer, especially with regards to passwords and all kinds of installing and downloading. And sometimes that kind of thing. So what was actually said was that a hash was provided. That is an encrypted password to try and keep this non-technical. James Lewis did go into the whole process of how it's done. But what was actually said was that a hash was provided by Manning. And Nathaniel Frank, which I'm going to use from now on, said that they had rainbow tables to crack this password and to have to crack the hash. What's normally done is a password is encrypted into a hash format. What allegedly was the purpose of these rainbow tables, and there is another way, was to reverse engineer that process of encryption from a hash. And it was only a part of a hash back into a plain text password. And the purpose was allegedly so that Manning could log into a computer under another identity and so that it would be harder to detect who had done this. Now Eller came through with compelling evidence that, in fact, first of all, and there was another user account that was identified called, not sure it was just called FTP or FTP user, but that was identified by Megan Brown, FBI agent, as allegedly the user that Manning logged into in order to download these files anonymously. But Eller pointed out that Manning had to be logged into her computer under her own identity in order to get access to the defence information, the information that was on Cypranet, that if she were logged into a computer as FTP user, there would be no access. The other thing that was incredibly important was that anything that happens on those computers, all of the information being stored on what was called the T drive, so that would be the online server and Manning's on a local machine. So every access that was made to that information on the T drive was actually tracked and the IP address of the individual computer that was used to access it. That means regardless of what the login was, it was the actual physical address of the computer that was in the logs. And Eller was asked if Manning knew this and he said, yes, I believe she did. She knew that this would be tracked. Another really significant detail is that all of the Reykjavik 13, the Guantanamo files, the Afghan war logs and the Iraq war logs were all downloaded already before this chat between nobody, Manning and Nathaniel Frank, question mark, took place. And so the only documents that were obtained after the chat log were the cables. The other thing is that under her own identity logged in as Bradley dot Manning at the time, that was how she could only way that she could access these documents. And Manning had legal access. Manning had a top secret clearance, which it was argued by her lawyers in the trial that after she became emotionally distraught over personal issues, that perhaps this top secret clearance should have been revoked before she was sent off to Iraq. However, Manning did not access any top secret or deliver any top secret information whatsoever to Julian Assange, or if it were Julian Assange on that chat. It was wicked. It's really, I think that's the idea that the prosecution wants to bring Julian Assange out of WikiLeaks as a single defendant in this case, as a single person who is culpable for all this. When in fact, we know that there were other team members and various tasks that people looked after. It's still the case today. So I think I've covered most of it. Did she need a password to get classified? Absolutely not. Did she need the password to get the videos and not to get the classified information? Well, there's mixed reports because it seems that a technical officer was actually assisting the soldiers in installing these video games on their computers. We don't really know. It may have been Manning. But I think the important thing to remember, apart from the video games thing, which was suggested in the first week of extradition hearings, that that was the purpose of this hash code was to download films, video games, and music videos because these were not allowed to be installed on religious computers. So I'm not quite sure. It wasn't that clear to me. But what was very, very clear was Ellen saying that there was no advantage to gaining anonymity because there was no way that Manning could have accessed the documents anonymously. If the password had been cracked and this other user was logged into, that user would have access to the T drive. Exactly. That's where all of the classified material was stored. And on the computer, whichever user it was, everything was tracked to the IP address and it was easy to work out which soldier was on shift at the time and which one was actually likely to have done it. Although, and this was something that came out at Manning's trial, that there were a number of people who had access to Manning's computer. If memory serves up to five different people. But she did confess at the trial. Yes, Manning confessed. What about the role of CD, the Linux CD? That was another reason why the password wouldn't have needed to be cracked because Manning had a CD with a Linux operating system on it and the computer could have been voted up from the CD and that would have bypassed the security, the username security. So Cromberg described four stages of getting the material off the T drive and then preparing it and then exfiltrating it as the word was used and then delivering it to WikiLeaks. So this is really the third stage of exfiltration and third and fourth stage. Steps one and two, getting the information could not have been done anonymously ever. And three and four, there was no need to be anonymous because Manning had this CD that would enable the whole security system to be bypassed. So the bottom line is Julian Assange, first of all, the indictment says that they did not succeed in cracking this password. However, Lewis said to Eller, understand, how do you know that they didn't succeed? You don't have the evidence, the government's evidence. But the indictment itself and the extradition request both state that they did not succeed. But had they succeeded, it would not have helped Chelsea Manning who had already delivered to WikiLeaks in Iraq and the Afghan files would not have helped to get more classified information. And the indictment only alleges that it was done to help hide their identity so that investigators could not find out who it was, which is a normal tactic of investigative journalism, which is to hide your source. It's nothing different from that than any when any reporter does, especially in national security reporting, to hide the identity of your source. So that's all he explained. That's all they were alleging he was doing in the indictment. And yet we've gone through this entire day of testimony on this highly technical and complex matter. And I'm not quite sure what Vanessa Barate understood out of this or not, and what the point of it really was, what the defense was trying to say, and what the government was trying to say. Well, I think the case is globally very weak. We had this long discussion about how that pass because how that password might have been cracked. Ella said that at the time it would not have been possible to use brute force. That means taking a dictionary and going through every word, you know, you just bomb I think there wasn't the computing power back then. Lewis pointed to vulnerabilities back then with Microsoft software. But and he went into a long explanation of how these vulnerabilities could have been exploited. Ella was looking like he wanted to say something for a long time. And I feel that Julian might have been at the time because after all that Ella said, but there was a patch in 1999 that that removed this vulnerability. So all you know, basically everything that Lewis said was irrelevant. I think what is really relevant is that they have just about nothing to hang around this actual chat between two people. We don't know what the password was for. We don't know if it was going to be used within the context of which kind of computer or whether it was government computer or not, they are alleging that it was. And also, I think Ella demonstrated very clearly that cracking this password would be of no use whatsoever to maintaining anonymity or yeah at all or getting the classified information that she had access to. But anonymity was not possible because she was on a system where the IP address, which is a unique address of your computer was being recorded for every activity. So no matter the user. So I think that's really important. And I think that you cannot assume that Nathaniel Frank was Julian Assange. I think the government have really pulled the wool over everyone's eyes on that. Even Patrick Ella, because he went, he apologized and said, yes, I was assuming that. And you were saying, I think everyone thinks it was Julian, but actually, there is no proof. It's irrelevant though, because he didn't commit a crime. That's what they're saying, that he committed a crime trying to help her to crack the password. And for what I understand, she doesn't need a password to get the classified information that she's legally access to. End of story. And she could have leaked top secret information, but she chose not to. And in fact, one of the things in the chat log, the chat between these two people, Manning says these files have been sanitized. Now, what does that mean? That means that's really damaging information, dangerous information had been removed already excluded by Manning. And so it is also the, what we've seen from the people like John Goetz, for example, who talks about the rigorous reduction process. And we've also heard this outside of the court from Mark Davis, that it was an extremely rigorous, long reduction, meticulous reduction process engaged upon with all of the media partners together in a very professional manner. And that accounts for until the next year when the password got leaked out. And we won't go into that. But that is given as an explanation of why their rigor in redacting, that was why nobody got hurt. Thank you very much, Cathy, for trying to explain what is an unbelievably complex day. The really major news again was that Vanessa Barrett decided the U.S. election, which Kristen Hathanson said shows is the political nature of this case. She cited that election to give four weeks to the defense to, in fact, prepare their final arguments. So we all need a long weekend here. And fortunately, it is a Friday. And we won't be back in court until Monday morning. That means that's when we'll be back on CN Live to bring you today's testimony, the last week of testimony, then four weeks will ensue after that, the preparation of final arguments. And it won't be until January, most likely that we will learn whether Barrett has decided to send Assange to the United States or not. If she does, there'll be an appeal without any question by the defense. That could take many, many more months for the High Court in Britain. We could ultimately go to the Supreme Court. This won't be resolved. But we heard some really heart-wrenching testimony about Assange's physical and mental condition. And he's continuously kept in this prison, Belmarsh, at one point today, Fitzgerald actually said to her, well, you know, all these, this issue of Assange, because she raised the idea that Assange will be still in jail throughout this whole period, in wanting to argue why it should be sped up. And he said, well, you could have granted her bail. And she did not. So Mr. Assange, please come back on Monday, she said, as if he has a choice. Well, we will be back on Monday. And that's our choice. Thank you for watching this edition of CNLives reporting on Julian Assange's extradition hearing. Until Monday, this is Joe Laurier of CNLives. Goodbye.