What's Really Going On With Wikileaks' Julian Assange

 

Where did WikiLeaks come from?

 How did its founder go uncaught for so long?

 Find out as we look at What’s Really Going On With Julian Assange.

 #10 Australian Roots

 Though much of the last decade for Julian Assange has been spent in Europe, the 47-year-old founder of WikiLeaks is an Australian native.

 Assange grew up under the care of his mother for the most part, with his father, a peace activist, separating from her before the hacker was born.

 He would take the name of his mother’s husband Richard Assange, but they divorced after 7 years.

 For three years during his childhood, his mother dated a member of the Australian cult “The Family” before moving on.

 This nomadic lifestyle continued for years, taking Assange to more than 30 towns across Australia by his mid-teens.

 #9 Hacker Origin

 At the age of sixteen, Assange entered the world of hacking under the name of Mendax, the latin word for liar.

 With the help of two friends using the codenames of Trax and Prime Suspect, he formed the hacking group named the International Subversives.

 The trio would put out a magazine, offering tips like how to break into telephone systems illegally to make free calls, though it never saw widespread distribution.

 Together the team would target networks like Australia’s National University, the US military’s MILNET, accessing secret defence data, and the Melbourne master terminal for Nortel, a telecommunications company based out of Canada.

 This final target attracted the attention of Australian Federal Police and they would go on to tap Assange’s phone line.

 He experienced many potential scares with authorities before, having chosen to drop everything and run more than once in his early adulthood.

 But it wasn’t until 1994 that he was actually charged...with 31 counts of hacking!

 He plead guilty to 25 of them, having the rest dropped, and was just instructed to pay a fine, having his lack of malicious intent and rough childhood cited for the lax sentencing.

 #8 Legitimate Programmer Not all of Assange’s exploits have come at the cost of breaking laws and infiltrating governments and organizations.

 In fact, for a short stint, Assange operated in conjunction with authorities.

 Back in 1993, the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit received technical assistance from the Australian national, going so far as to help with prosecutions as well.

 The same year, he began Australia’s first public internet service provider called the Suburbia Public Access Network.

 From 1994 onward, Assange contributed to the growing computer age by programming a number of systems, scanners, softwares, and search engines.

 At the same time, he would moderate a cryptography forum, run a computer security website, and contribute to a book about Australian hackers, and in 1998 he even co-founded a legitimate company called Earthmen Technology.

 But by 1999, the rebellious bud within him started to sprout and he soon found himself publicly speaking out against the U.S. National Security Agency and their patent on voice-data harvesting.

 He would spend a number of years studying at the University of Melbourne before his next great creation, though he never would complete his degree.

 #7 Wikileaks

 Assange established the creation of WikiLeaks in 2006 with a group of other like-minded individuals.

 He acts as a member of the organization’s advisory board and is the self-described editor-in-chief of the newsleak publication.

 For the next three years, Assange traveled the globe, hopping from Asia and Africa to Europe and North America, all in the name of WikiLeaks business.

 The organization acted as an international watchdog, publishing classified information and media it obtained from anonymous sources.

 Some of the controversial uncoverings revealed by WikiLeaks include details on the 2008 riots and protests in Tibet, the 2008 Peru oil scandal, Turkish emails during post-coup purges, corruption in the Middle East, US drone strikes on Yemen, and extrajudicial executions in Kenya.

 WikiLeaks has published information about nations all over the world, and as such Assange has created many enemies for himself and the organization.

 Despite the apparent resentment he had evoked from foreign officials, Assange’s work with WikiLeaks earned him awards such as the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, the Amnesty International UK Media Award, and the Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal for Peace with Justice.

 The latter award was so prestigious, its prior winners only include the likes of Buddhist spiritual leader Daisaku Ikeda, the Dalai Lama, and Nelson Mandela.

 #6 Hacker Loneliness

 Living a life on the run can be an exhausting pursuit, and doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for a healthy romance.

 But at the very beginning of WikiLeaks launch in 2006, Assange was apparently ready to find a special someone.

 Crafting profile under the name Harry Harrison, the infamous web infiltrator used the site OKCupid to find a potential match.

 He was 36 years old at the time and some of his supposedly beneficial attributes included being "variously professionally involved in international journalism/books, documentaries, cryptography, intelligence activities, civil rights, political activism, white collar crime and the internet".

 He described himself as a “pig-headed activist intellectual” in search of a “siren for love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy”, going so far as to alert potential suitors with the statement “WARNING: Want a regular, down to earth guy?

 Keep moving ... I am DANGER, ACHTUNG!"

 While his profile is no longer up on the dating site, it’s representative of his sense of humor towards himself, as well as the esteem with which he views his work.

 It’s unknown if Assange has found romantic success as his life is still mired in international chaos.

 #5 Undermining Elections The Australian whistleblower was anything but subtle in declaring his distaste for both major candidates during the US presidential election of 2016.

 In a public statement on Wikileaks, he claimed to have had years of examining thousands of confidential messages from Hillary Clinton, and believed she would push the United States towards endless military campaigns.

 He compared the choice of Clinton and Trump to that of having to pick between cholera or gonorrhea!

 Four months after making these statements, WikiLeaks released the Democratic National Committee’s emails to demonstrate the party’s blatant favoritism for Clinton rather than challenger Bernie Sanders.

 This reveal caused party chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign.

 Experts in the cybersecurity field traced the leaks back to Russian intelligence agencies, but Assange denied this, instead claiming them to have come from a DNC staffer that had passed after being shot just a couple weeks prior.

 But these claims have since been dashed by further investigations.

 Another major leak came in October when over 2000 emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were revealed by WikiLeaks.

 Political experts have since found Wikileaks releases to have coincided with each time Clinton would expand her lead in the polls.

 #4 US Interference & Indictment Before Assange and WikiLeaks supposedly dipped their wicks into the American Presidential race of 2016, the information leaker had already drawn the ire of the United States.

 Back in 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder disclosed to the public that there was an “active, ongoing criminal investigation” in regards to WikiLeaks.

 The main target of the Federal government’s was alleged the alleged source of WikiLeaks’ classified information, US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

 While prosecuting her in 2011, attorneys revealed evidence they claimed would tie Assange into her actions directly, implicating him in what would later be claimed as conspiracy.

 Continued leaks, including from information obtained by former CIA employee and contractor Edward Snowden, provoking investigations into Assange from a variety of government agencies.

 There was debate for years on whether or not the United States would, or should, indict the hacker-turned-journalist, but as the statute of limitations was reaching its limit in regards to the various incidents they looked to cite as criminal, the US made its move.

 It was accidentally revealed in the fall of 2018 that Assange had been indicted by the federal court, under seal, when an error in another, completely unrelated court filing spilled the beans!

 #3 Hide & Seek

 Following a visit to Sweden in 2010, Assange found himself to be the subject of two intimate violation allegations from two separate women.

 Initially, the case was closed after questioning and Assange was free to leave the country at his leisure that August.

 But in November, a special prosecutor reopened the case, looking to question the rebel journalist in regards to multiple charges.

 While he denied the allegations, Assange told authorities he would be willing to answer any questions they might have...from the safety of Britain.

 The prosecutor in the case claimed they couldn’t complete a questioning via article link or within the London embassy via Swedish law, so Assange went virtually unpursued in the case...until 5 years later.

 By then, Assange had sought asylum with the Ecuadorian government, having felt abandoned by his homeland of Australia.

 The notorious hacktivist was living within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London when they went through with the questioning.

 Peer-criticism led the Swedish prosecutor to reverse their decision and interrogate Assange with the assistance of British police, Swedish prosecutors, and Ecuadorian officials.

 Though, this development didn’t come until the statute of limitations had already expired for all but one allegation, ceasing their investigation in 2017.

 #2 Campaign Connection The various leaks during the 2016 US Presidential election proved to be a serious issue long after Trump took his seat in office.

 Pursuing the foreign interference in American political affairs, the DNC named Assange as a defendant in a lawsuit they filed against the Russian Federation in 2018.

 In the lawsuit, the Committee alleges that WikiLeaks colluded with Russian agents to hack and publicize the private emails with the intent of attacking American democracy.

 This opened a can of worms in regards to the freedoms of the press, as such a lawsuit challenges the precedent that media publishers “are not responsible for the illegal acts of their sources”, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

 The charges grew more complex later that year when The Guardian reported that Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, visited Assange while he was staying at the Ecuadorian Embassy.

 This claim was refuted by Manafort and Assange, as well as Ecuador’s London consul who, in theory, would have plenty of evidence to confirm the visits had they taken place.

 Still, the accusations aren’t entirely without motive, as Assange has suggested that he views Clinton as a personal foe, having believed her to be among those putting pressure on authorities to indict him.

 #1 Eventual Arrest

 Upon being evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange was arrested by British officers on April 11, 2019.

 He was brought in by the Metropolitan Police in regards to failure to show to a 2012 court proceeding regarding his extradition to Sweden.

 Looming federal charges from the US Government, though, have many thinking he’ll be extradited their instead.

 Sweden had since dropped the charges against Assange, but the United States still seek to try him in court.

 Avoiding tricky First Amendment loopholes, the United States looks to prosecute the hacktivist for conspiring with Chelsea Manning to download classified files.

 Assange faces a potential 12-month sentence in London, but should he head to America, that jail time could be much longer.

 What do you think will happen with Assange and WikiLeaks?

 Let us know in the comments below!