Thread by @jamesdoleman

Back at the Old Bailey for day 7 of evidence in the London extradition case of Julian #Assange
You can catch up with yesterday's proceedings here
assangecourt.report

Court rises as presiding judge, Vanessa Baraitser enters and proceedings begin
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First witness today, Professor John Sloboda, who co-founded the Iraq Body Count website.
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This site, tracked civilian and military deaths in Iraq from 2003 ad was relied on by the official UK enquiry into the conflict, the Chilcot report.
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The witness says the monitoring of civilian deaths is important, it gives dignity for those who are killed and gives information that may reveal patterns and trends.
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Sloboda says that his website had relied on media reports to count deaths, WikiLeaks publication of the US military "war logs," revealed 15,000 further civilian deaths they had been unaware of, and added details on ones they had already had counted.

Slobodo says he worked with WikiLeaks to analyse the logs and cross-check them with their own database.
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Witness says that there were 40,000 documents to be analysed in the war logs, says there was "very stringent redaction," of these before publication to ensure no information that could lead to harm anyone.
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Witness says this would be impossible to do manually, "it would have taken an army of people," so a automated process was designed.
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The process was to use a dictionary of ordinary English words and redact anything that was not in there, it also removed job titles such as "translator," or "driver."

Sloboda says that this process was sometimes resented by some of the media, but Assange was insistent, he adds that in the end the documents were probably "over-redacted."

Witness says the release of the documents led to a huge increase in worldwide awareness of the scale of civilian deaths in Iraq.
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Defence ends, Joel Smith for the US government rises to cross examine.
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Witness agrees he has no experience in the handling of classified information.

Prosecution asks the professor what vetting procedure Wikileaks did on him before he was given access to the documents,
"I don't know," he replies.
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Prosecutor is asking how many people had direct access to the raw Iraqi war data, he replies he simply doesn't know.
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Prosecution says "for whatever reason there was a rise in terrorist violence in Iraq."
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Prosecutor now asking about the software redacting non-English words and suggests that Iraqi names that had been Anglicised and were also proper words would still appear.
"I don't think so," the witness replies.
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Witness says there was a "complete meetings of minds," between himself and Wikileaks over the need to protect people who might have been at risk if their names were disclosed.
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Prosecutor suggests "Mr Assange took a cavalier attitude to the publication of these names."

Sloboda replies, "No."

Prosecution ends, court takes a short break.