>How do you establish that a given act of hacking is or is not a public service?

If you hack and then publish embarrassing material to the whole world it's a public service.

If you hack non-embarrassing operationally sensitive material and then leak it selectively to foreign governments then it's espionage.

There's some fuzziness but it's not a bright line to cross and Julian Assange is very, very far away from it.

The fact that the murders that were uncovered are still going unprosecuted adds considerable weight to the idea that it was a public service. If Assange had done the exact same thing to Russia the idea that it was espionage would be justifiably mocked. It's not mocked because nationalism is a potent drug, essentially (here, it's not like Russians aren't looking at this and shaking their heads).

> If you hack and then publish embarrassing material to the whole world it's a public service.

By that definition, hacking a celebrity's iCloud account and leaking their nudes is a public service. I think that's a bit of a stretch.

Well it depends on how straight our heads on are for what we consider embarrassing. That "a human has a naked body" is embarrassing while "detaining suspects indefinitely without a trial and torturing them while using an utter bullshit pretext of a loophole which wouldn't survive an unbias court" isn't says a lot of things about us and none of them good.

Only with a very disingenuous reading of the parent comment out of context can you imagine the definition was intended to imply in a case of hacking someone’s private life.

"on the government".

Regardless, hacking a celebrity's icloud account and releasing the images is still more journalism than it espionage.

> It seems like going to court & having a jury decide that is not obviously the wrong solution.

If the court process was reasonably expected to be impartial and fair, then you'd have a point.

That's very much not the case in this instance. :(