Back at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this morning attempting to monitor a call over hearing in the case of @wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. This is the last such hearing scheduled before the extradition decision will be given on 4 January.

Thread. 1/

The goal posts for access constantly shift at this court, in a completely arbitrary manner. We are currently being told by a court official that no journalists will be allowed in (told they can access the Cloud Video Platform) and only two people can access the public gallery. 2/
At times, even under Covid measures, four journalists have been allowed into the well of this same courtroom, and five people into the public gallery. Two in total today is completely arbitrary. We’re told the access restrictions are the judge’s decision. 3/
We’re hearing that two seats in court are being held for @AusHouseLondon, so we circle back to the same issue as the “VIP” seats held in the September proceedings at the Old Bailey, when these “VIP” diplomats never took their seats, but they were held back from the public. 4/
Again, the only way for professional NGO observers to access these hearings (and do our job) is in person, as the court will not give us remote access. This is not only a barrier to open justice, but the court is creating unnecessary Covid risks as London heads towards Tier 3. 5/
Six of us were finally allowed in (journalists + observers) only as defence counsel Fitzgerald intervened with the judge (District Judge Goldspring today). 6/
After all that, proecedings lasted under 2 minutes. Judge Baraitser had granted Assange leave not to appear, and he did not. He was remanded back into custody until the 4 January hearing at the Old Bailey. 7/
I am furious about these continued access issues, which are clearly intentional. At every step of the way, we face unprecedented barriers to observing any aspect of proceedings in Julian Assange’s case. This is not open justice. 8/
I am also furious about the conditions Assange is being held in. He’s been locked in his cell for over 3 weeks with Covid infections dangerously on the rise in his prison block. Unsafe for everyone, but he has respiratory issues - and shouldn’t be detained in the first place. 9/
The #FreeAssange protesters are out as always: “US, UK, hands off Assange”. No arrests this time as protests are once again allowed in London under Tier 2. 10/
We’re hearing there will be no overflow courtroom on 4 Jan, meaning no journalists will be able to attend in person, and only Assange’s family is likely to be granted public gallery access. A historic extradition decision will be given with hardly anyone able to bear witness. 11/
Headed home, still furious about all of it. It shouldn’t be this way. Will share some more thoughts later. In the meantime, thank you as always to the community of activists who continue to support our never-ending battle for access - especially @greekemmy & @deepa_driver 🙏 /12

More from Crime

My students @maxzks and Tushar Jois spent most of the summer going through every piece of public documentation, forensics report, and legal document we could find to figure out how police were “breaking phone encryption”. 1/


This was prompted by a claim from someone knowledgeable, who claimed that forensics companies no longer had the ability to break the Apple Secure Enclave Processor, which would make it very hard to crack the password of a locked, recent iPhone. 2/

We wrote an enormous report about what we found, which we’ll release after the holidays. The TL;DR is kind of depressing:

Authorities don’t need to break phone encryption in most cases, because modern phone encryption sort of sucks. 3/

I’ll focus on Apple here but Android is very similar. The top-level is that, to break encryption on an Apple phone you need to get the encryption keys. Since these are derived from the user’s passcode, you either need to guess that — or you need the user to have entered it. 4/

Guessing the password is hard on recent iPhones because there’s (at most) a 10-guess limit enforced by the Secure Enclave Processor (SEP). There’s good evidence that at one point in 2018 a company called GrayKey had a SEP exploit that did this for the X. See photo. 5/

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)