JULIAN ASSANGE & WIKILEAKS: UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

Julian Assange

Today, The Grandma is reading the latest news about Julian Assange, the Australian journalist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and requested asylum in London's Ecuadorian Embassy on a day like today in 2012.

There are lots of shadows and lights around the figure of Julian Assange and we don't know for whom is he really working but we must accept the importance of WikiLeaks revelations about corruption, interests and dark policies established in lots of countries that affect our lives directly and the interest of hidden powers to punish him with the highest condemns.

Julian Paul Assange (3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher and investigative journalist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and CableGate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and asked allied nations for assistance.

In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange, after questioning him months earlier about allegations of sexual assault. Assange denied the allegations, and said that they were just a pretext for him to be extradited from Sweden to the United States because of his role in publishing secret American documents.

Assange surrendered to UK police on 7 December 2010 but was released on bail within 10 days. Having been unsuccessful in his challenge to the extradition proceedings, he breached his £340,000 bail in June 2012 to seek asylum from Ecuador.

In August 2012, Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador due to fears of political persecution and possible extradition to the United States. He remained in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for almost seven years. Swedish prosecutors later suspended their investigation and applied to revoke the European arrest warrant in May 2017.

Julian Assange

During the 2016 U.S. Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted emails sent or received by candidate Hillary Clinton from her private email server when she was Secretary of State.

The U.S. Intelligence Community, as well as a Special Counsel investigation, concluded that the Russian government carried out a hacking campaign as part of broader efforts of interference in the 2016 United States elections.

In 2018, twelve Russian intelligence officers, mostly affiliated with the GRU, were indicted on criminal charges by Special Counsel Robert Mueller; the indictment charges the Russians with carrying out the computer hacking and working with WikiLeaks and other organisations to spread the stolen documents. Assange consistently denied any connection to or co-operation with Russia in relation to the leaks, and accused the Clinton campaign of stoking a neo-McCarthy hysteria.

More information: @wikileaks

On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy, and he was arrested. Later that day he was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and on 1 May 2019 he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison in the United Kingdom.

On the same day, the United States government unsealed an indictment against Assange for alleged computer intrusion, related to the leaks provided by Chelsea Manning.

On 23 May 2019, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Executive editors from top newspapers including The Washington Post and The New York Times criticized the government's decision to charge Assange under the Espionage Act. As a result of the revocation of his asylum, and at the request of his alleged rape victim's lawyer, Swedish prosecutors reopened their investigation in May 2019. Assange is incarcerated in HM Prison Belmarsh.

Julian Assange

Assange was born Julian Paul Hawkins on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951),a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple separated before their son was born.

In 1987, aged 16, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax, Latin for liar. He and two others -known as Trax and Prime Suspect- formed a hacking group they called the International Subversives. He is thought to have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but he does not acknowledge this.

Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but didn't do anything with it. He did, however, publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.

More information: Wikileaks

Systematic abuse of technology by governments against fundamental freedoms of world citizens remained an abiding concern -more than a decade later, in the introduction to Cypherpunks (2012), Assange summarised: the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.

After his period of study at the University of Melbourne, Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange is a member of the organisation's advisory board and describes himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.

WikiLeaks published internet censorship lists, leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources, including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, the Petrogate oil scandal in Peru.

Several parties have claimed a strong pro-Russian bias in Assange's public comments and stated that the materials released by WikiLeaks never seems able to leak anything damaging to the interests of the Russians. 

Free Assange

Assange's claim that the Guccifer 2.0 emails were not provided to WikiLeaks by the GRU has led to further accusations that he is working in line with Russian propaganda.

In April 2017, then CIA Director Mike Pompeo, in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. Pompeo's accusation followed a series of damaging leaks of confidential documents, codenamed Vault 7, that included details on the CIA's hacking capabilities. 

Assange accused the CIA of trying to subvert his First Amendment rights, saying that History shows the danger of allowing the CIA or any intelligence agency, whose very modus operandi includes misdirection and lying, to be the sole arbiter of what is true or what is prudent. Otherwise every day might see a repeat of the many foolish CIA actions which have led to death, displacement, dictatorship and terrorism.

More information: BBC

After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally with a view to prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917. 

In November 2010 US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was an active, ongoing criminal investigation into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.

On 19 June 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that his government was considering the request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Finally, Ecuador gave asylum to Assange.

On 28 March 2018, Ecuador cut Assange's Internet connection at its London embassy in order to prevent any potential harm. Officials said that Assange's recent social media posts denouncing the arrest of a Catalonian separatist leader put at risk Ecuador's relations with European nations. Assange then went silent on social media.

Reactions to Assange detention

On 16 October 2018, congressmen from the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote an open letter to President Moreno which described Assange as a dangerous criminal and stated that progress between the US and Ecuador in the areas of economic co-operation, counternarcotics assistance and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on Assange being handed over to the proper authorities.

On 19 October 2018, BBC News reported that Assange was starting legal action against the government of Ecuador, accusing it of violating his fundamental rights and freedoms. Later that month, an Ecuadorian judge ruled against him, saying that a requirement for Assange to pay for his Internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.

In February 2019, the parliament of Geneva passed a motion demanding that the Swiss government extend asylum to Assange. The move was proposed by the Swiss People's Party and supported by the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland. In the same month, it was revealed that Assange was issued with a new Australian passport in September 2018. His previous passport had expired several years ago.

More information: BBC

In April, Ecuador's president Lenin Moreno stated that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, after photos surfaced on the internet linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. WikiLeaks denied that it had acquired any of the published material, and stated that it merely reported on a corruption investigation against Moreno by Ecuador's legislature.

WikiLeaks subsequently wrote on Twitter that according to a source within the Ecuadorian government, an agreement had been reached to expel Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy and place him in the custody of UK police. The source stated that the expulsion from the embassy would occur in retaliation against WikiLeaks' tweet noting corruption charges against Moreno. Ecuador's Foreign Ministry denied the existence of any planned expulsion.

On 10 April 2019, WikiLeaks said it had uncovered an extensive surveillance operation against Assange from within the Ecuadorian embassy, asserting that videotapes of Assange taken at the embassy constituted an invasion of privacy. 

Wikileaks & Julian Assange, The Numbers

WikiLeaks said that material including video, audio, copies of private legal documents and a medical report had surfaced in Spain and that unnamed individuals in Madrid had made an extortion attempt.

On 11 April 2019, the Metropolitan Police were invited into the Ecuadorian embassy and arrested Assange in connection with his failure to surrender to the court in June 2012 for extradition to Sweden. Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno stated that Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum after he repeatedly violated international conventions regarding domestic interference. Moreno referred to Assange as a spoiled brat and miserable hacker.

More information: DW

British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt thanked the Ecuadorean president, Lenin Moreno, for co-operation and the British prime minister, Theresa May, said that no one is above the law.The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said that Assange is not going to be given special treatment... It has got nothing to do with" Australia, it is a matter for the US.

On the afternoon of the day of his arrest Assange was charged with breaching the Bail Act 1976 and was found guilty after a short hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court.

Judge Michael Snow said Assange was a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest and he had not come close to establishing reasonable excuse.

Assange was remanded to HM Prison Belmarsh, and on 1 May 2019 he was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court to 50 weeks imprisonment.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a statement through the website of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights that the verdict contravened principles of necessity and proportionality for what it considered a minor violation.

More information: ECCHR

In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed 

that the material being put out is not authentic.

Julian Assange