He emerged on the information security scene in the 1990s as a “famous teenage hacker” after what he called a “traveling minstrel childhood” that began in Townsville, Australia.
But the story of Julian Assange, the eccentric founder of the secret-sharing website WikiLeaks, was never less strange — or less polarizing — after he shook the United States and its allies by revealing secrets about how the United States conducted its wars.
Today he has achieved a plea deal with the USwhich could set him free, according to experts.
Since Assange attracted global attention in 2010 for his work with prominent media outlets to publish war logs and diplomatic cables detailing US military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other issues, he has sparked fervor among his admirers and hatred among his detractors without there being many people in the middle. This has sparked tense debates about state secrecy and press freedom.
The beginnings of the hacker
Assange, 52, attended “37 schools” before he turned 14, he wrote on his now-deleted blog. The details it contains are not independently verifiable and some of his biographical details differ between accounts and interviews.
An autobiography published against his will in 2011, after he fell out with his ghostwriter, described him as the son of traveling puppeteers, and he told The New Yorker in 2010 that his mother’s itinerant lifestyle prevented him from a consistent or complete education.
At the age of 16, in 1987, he had his first modem, which he explained to the magazine. Assange would become an accomplished hacker who, along with his friends, broke into networks in North America and Europe.
In 1991, at age 20, Assange hacked into a Melbourne terminal of a Canadian telecommunications company, leading to his arrest by the Australian Federal Police and 31 criminal charges. Although he pleaded guilty to some charges, he avoided prison time.
After the presiding judge attributed his crimes simply to “intelligent curiosity, and the pleasure of—what’s the expression?—browsing through these different computers.”
Wikileaks arrives
In 2006, when he founded WikiLeaks, Assange’s pleasure in hacking into locked computer systems turned into a belief that, as he wrote on his blog, “only injustice revealed can be answered. For man to do anything intelligent, he must know what is really going on.”
In 2010, it released half a million documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, WikiLeaks was registered in Sweden and its legal entity in Iceland. Assange “lived in airports,” she told The New Yorker, and claimed that her media company, with no paid staff, had hundreds of volunteers.
The controversial publication of files
Assange defended his work by calling it a kind of “scientific journalism.” Among the most powerful in the repository of files published by WikiLeaks was the video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by US forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people. , including two Reuters journalists.
Assange was not against the war, he wrote in The Australian.
“US prosecutors later reported that documents released by Assange included the names of Afghans and Iraqis who provided information to US and coalition forces, while diplomatic cables he released exposed journalists, religious leaders, rights activists humans and dissidents in repressive countries.
Assange said in a 2010 interview that it was “regrettable” that sources revealed by WikiLeaks could be harmed, prosecutors said.
Later, after a State Department legal adviser informed him of the risk to “countless innocent people” compromised by the leaks, Assange said he would work with major news organizations to black out people’s names. WikiLeaks did redact some names, but a year later it published 250,000 cables without hiding the identities of the people named in them.
Warrant
In 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman’s accusation of rape and another’s allegation of sexual harassment.
Assange has always denied the allegations and has fought efforts from Britain to extradite him to Sweden for questioning.
When his appeal against extradition to Sweden failed, he breached his bail conditions imposed in Britain and reported to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he requested asylum on the grounds of political persecution. There he spent seven years of self-exile inside the embassy.
He also continued the WikiLeaks operation and organized an unsuccessful campaign for the Australian Senate in 2013 with the newly founded WikiLeaks party. Before the constant British police presence outside the embassy was removed in 2015, he cost Britain’s taxpayers millions of dollars.
Relations with his host country deteriorated and Ecuador’s embassy cut off its internet access due to posts Assange made on social media. In 2019, his host revoked his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him.
The president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, announced that he decided to evict Assange from the embassy after what he described as repeated violations of international conventions and protocols of daily life.
Assange was arrested and jailed, accused of violating his bail conditions, and spent the next five years in prison, from where he continued his fight against extradition to the United States.
US accusation
In 2019, the US government unsealed an indictment against Assange and added more charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret documents.
Prosecutors said he conspired with Chelsea Manning, a U.S. military intelligence analyst, to hack a Pentagon computer and release secret diplomatic cables and military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning had served seven years of a 35-year military sentence before receiving a commutation from then-President Barack Obama.
The same year, Swedish prosecutors dropped the rape charge against Assange because too much time had passed since the accusation was made nine years earlier.
Assange married his partner, Stella Moris, in prison in 2022, after a relationship that began during his years in the Ecuadorian embassy. Today they have two children, born in 2017 and 2019.
[Con información de The Associated Press]
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