Even before Thursday’s arrest by British authorities, Julian Assange was not a sympathetic character. The WikiLeaks founder had spent the last seven years in Ecuador’s embassy in London, initially taking refuge there to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations. (He denies any wrongdoing.) He published internal Democratic documents stolen by Russian hackers during the 2016 election. (He denies knowing the Russian government had stolen them.) And he helped amplify the conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered for political reasons. (Washington, D.C. police attributed Rich’s death to an armed robbery.)

But you don’t have to like Assange to be troubled by the Justice Department’s case against him—at least so far. In the indictment unsealed on Thursday, federal prosecutors laid out a somewhat threadbare case against the Australian anti-secrecy activist for his work with Chelsea Manning in 2010. Assange burst onto the international stage that year when WikiLeaks, in collaboration with news outlets around the world, published troves of classified U.S. diplomatic and military documents obtained by Manning. The federal government began building a case against Assange soon thereafter.

Press freedom advocates have long feared that Assange would face charges under the Espionage Act. Manning served seven years in prison after her court-martial under the act. Federal prosecutors also filed charges against Edward Snowden, who leaked an even larger trove on U.S. government surveillance operations in 2013. No such charges appear on Assange’s indictment, though they could be added later on. An Espionage Act conviction could result in a decades-long prison sentence for Assange instead of the maximum of five years that he currently faces.

Instead, Assange is charged with a single count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The indictment alleges that he helped Manning, an Army intelligence analyst at the time, crack a password on one of the Department of Defense’s classified computer networks in the spring of 2010. Around that time, Manning downloaded tens of thousands of files about U.S. military activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a vast archive of State Department diplomatic cables. Federal prosecutors focused on the period between when Manning allegedly provided the Defense Department files to Assange and when she obtained the cables a few weeks later.

As paired down as they are, there are still some issues with the allegations. Right off the bat, the indictment defines the alleged conspiracy between Assange and Manning in uncomfortably broad strokes. It asserts that it was “part of the conspiracy” for Assange to “encourage Manning to provide information and records,” for them to “[take] measures to conceal Manning as the source of the disclosure of classified records,” for them to use a secret online chat service to “collaborate on the acquisition and dissemination of the classified records,” and for them to “[use] a special folder on a cloud drop box of WikiLeaks to transmit classified information.”