An Australian journalist and free speech activist, best known as the founder of the controversial website Wikileaks, a repository of leaked corporate and government documents. Assange was a hero of the American left when he published documents which discredited the Bush administration and aided the election of Barack Obama, but became a villain after the murder of Seth Rich. Assange published documents about the Obama administration’s lies in the Benghazi massacre and exposed the Hillary Clinton email scandal. The American left then called him a tool of Russia. Assange was previously investigated for rape, but the charges were ultimately dropped. However, there is an international warrant for Assange, as he is wanted for questioning in Sweden in relation to a rape investigation.
On June 19, 2012, while Assange was in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Ricardo Patiño, the Ecuadorian foreign minister announced that Assange had applied for political asylum and eventually (August 16) announced that the Ecuadorian government was granting Assange political asylum.On April 11, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed. The Mueller report was dependent on fake news allegations of Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes.The Mueller report claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange on-the-record statements.
The predicate for Robert Mueller’s investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is John Brennan’s early January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA); and the ICA claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor.The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim. The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Peter Strzok also have a vested self-interest in maintaining the Russia hacking narrative. Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he has evidence it was not from a hack.Born in Australia in 1971, Assange had established a reputation as a sophisticated computer programmer who could break into even the most well-protected networks by the time he was a teenager. Around 1987, he joined with two fellow hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and the trio broke into computer systems from Europe to North America — including, most notably, networks belonging to the U.S. Defense Department and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book to which he contributed – Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier – Assange tried to create an aura of morality around this activity, defining what he called the Golden Rules of the hacker subculture: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”
A major witness in the United States’ Department of Justice case against Julian Assange admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. The witness, who has a documented history with sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution.
Hacking remained an obsession for Assange throughout his late teens. Pursued by authorities, he developed a nomadic lifestyle, moving from place to place, maintaining no real home, for fear that international governmental agencies — particularly those in the U.S. — may have targeted him for reprisal for the data leaks he had orchestrated.
In September 1991, Assange hacked into the master terminal that the Canadian telecom company Nortel maintained in Melbourne, Australia. Soon thereafter, he was caught by federal investigators and was charged with 31 counts of hacking and related offenses. Facing a potential sentence of a decade behind bars, Assange pled guilty to 25 charges, 6 of which were dropped. At his final sentencing, the judge was lenient with him and he escaped with the lightest of penalties — the payment of a small fine.
After the hacking trial, Assange lived below the radar in Melbourne for a number of years, working variously as a computer programmer and software developer, among other pursuits. He also studied physics and math at the University of Melbourne. Then, in 2006, he began the process of creating WikiLeaks, a website that would publish confidential government documents and images. His inspiration for WikiLeaks was the infamous Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 — the year of Assange’s birth — had published the Pentagon Papers. Assange has described WikiLeaks as “an activist organization” whose “method is transparency,” and whose “goal is justice.”
Shortly after getting WikiLeaks off the ground, Assange flew to Kenya to attend the World Social Forum — a yearly symposium dedicated to the redistribution of wealth and the eradication of capitalism — where he delivered a presentation about his new enterprise.
Contending that the primary objective of WikiLeaks was to expose injustice wherever it might reside, Assange told potential collaborators in 2006: “Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and corporations.” Assange further suggested that a “social movement” to expose incriminating classified information had the potential to “bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality—including the U.S. administration.” Indeed, it has been the U.S. — rather than Russia and China — that WikiLeaks has targeted most intensively.
At a London ceremony in June 2009, Amnesty International honored Assange with its Media Award, in recognition of his expose of hundreds of recent extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks became an international sensation when it publicized a classified video that showed civilians, who were mistaken for insurgents, being attacked by the U.S. military during the Iraq War. Over the rest of that year, Assange and his website sparked additional massive controversy on three separate occasions: In July, Assange released 77,000 secret files pertaining to the Afghan War. In October, he released nearly 400,000 pages of classified documents on the Iraq War. And in November, he released hundreds of thousands of classified State Department communications, many of which contained sensitive information on major U.S. diplomatic relations.
Also in 2010, Assange published the results of an Army test which had found that certain electromagnetic devices designed to prevent IED explosives from detonating, also tended to compromise the performance of communication systems used by American soldiers. When asked if he would consider not releasing this information, given its potential for being exploited by terrorists intent on killing U.S. troops, Assange replied that in spite of his “harm-minimization policy,” his uncompromising commitment to transparency might ultimately cause him and his fellow WikiLeaks insiders to get “blood on our hands.”
In December 2010, after the November “data dump” of U.S. diplomatic cables had touched off an international furor, Assange — who was in hiding — was placed on INTERPOL’s “wanted” list for his alleged involvement in “sex crimes” against two women he had met in Sweden that summer. Assange denied the allegations, but he surrendered to London police on December 7, 2010. A WikiLeaks spokesman said that Assange‘s arrest would not prevent the organization from releasing additional secret documents.
In the aftermath of the arrest, Assange sympathizers launched an all-out hacking attack (dubbed “Operation Payback“) against the computer systems of companies considered hostile to WikiLeaks. Among these were Mastercard, Visa, Amazon.com, PayPal Inc., and EveryDNS. These companies had cut ties to WikiLeaks in recent days amid intense pressure from the U.S. government.
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