8:00 am EDT: Baraitser has refused two defense witness statements that Fitzgerald proposed as providing "the other side of the coin" to Kromberg's affidavit regarding the condition of U.S. prisons, specifically the Alexandria Detention Center, where Assange would be held pre-trial and during the trial, and ADX Florence in Colorado where he would go if convicted. Kromberg, who maintains there's no solitary confinement at the ADX, has refused to make himself available for cross examination.
"We have no right to cross examine Kromberg, who can say whatever he wants and we have no right to challenge him," Fitzgerald told Baraitser. "They have no divine right to have the last word." Fitzgerald had proposed as his witnesses a former chief psychiatrist at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and a forensic psychiatrist who has made many visits to ADX.
Baraitser ruled against in the interests of time, she said. She said enough countervailing testimony from defense psychiatrists about U.S. prions had been heard.
Dispute Over Attempt to Crack a Password
10:28 am EDT: Testimony with Patrick Eller was highly complex and inaccessible to the less than computer literate. The essence of the debate between the sides appeared to be whether Chelsea Manning needed a password to access classified material and to download music videos.
Eller testified that from the Manning court-martial that she did not need a password to gain access to classified data. But using a local computer she would need a password to download music videos and computer games.
Eller said Manning wouldn't have had to use a password to remove classified files from a government computer to her own and send them to WikiLeaks because she used a Linux CD to boot her computer, permitting her to bypass Windows security features.
Lewis on cross examination tried to demonstrate that Assange could help Manning crack the password because of a vulnerability that Microsoft discovered. Lewis was leaving the impression, contrary to what Eller had testified, that the password had to be cracked to obtain the classified documents. But the indictment against Assange stated clearly that Manning had legal access to all classified matter up to Secret.
Eller came back at Lewis explaining that on the same day Microsoft released a patch that fixed the vulnerability and made it "infeasible" to hack a password. Stunned, Lewis said that Assange has "boasted" that he was an expert hacker and could crack the password despite the patch. Eller said it was possible, but withdrew that statement on re-direct.
At one point Lewis asked Eller how he knew for sure, having not seen the government's evidence, that Assange had not helped Manning crack the hash passcode.
"I understand you said in examination that as a fact the password had not been cracked. How do you know that?" Lewis said.
"Based on the conversation [on jabber between Assange and Manning] I found no evidence," Eller said.
But the indictment against Assange itself says the Manning and Assange failed to crack the password.
The U.S. extradition request also makes clear that "prior to the formation of the password-cracking agreement, Manning had already provided WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of documents classified up to the SECRET level that she downloaded from departments and agencies of the United States, including the Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports and Iraq war-related significant activity reports."
It's not clear how much of the dense, technical detail Baraitser was able to understand, especially as Summers failed to lay out in laymen's terms what he was trying to establish.
During the first week of the hearing in February, the defense clearly stated that Assange was trying to help Manning crack a password so that she could hide her identity when downloading unauthorized music and video games, a point that Summers did not clearly make on Friday.
10:21 am EDT: Court has recessed early for the day. The hearing resumes on Monday.
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