Who is Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks?

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — He emerged on the information security scene in the 1990s as a “famous teenage hacker” after what he called a “travelling 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. .

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 many people in the middle: He is seen either as a hero in favor of an open and transparent government, or as a villain who put American lives at risk by helping his enemies and provoking tense debates over the secret of State and freedom of the press.

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 biographical aspects of Assange differ between the accounts and the 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 education or complete. But at the age of 16, in 1987, he had his first modem, he exposed it 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. After pleading guilty to some charges, he avoided jail 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.”

He then studied mathematics and physics at university, but did not complete the degree. 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 revealed injustice can be answered. For man to do anything intelligent, he must know what is really going on.”

In 2010, the year of WikiLeaks’ explosive publication of half a million documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the nonprofit organization’s website 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.

Assange called his work a kind of “scientific journalism” in a 2010 opinion piece he wrote for The Australian newspaper, as readers could compare media reports with the original documents that had led to a report. Among the most powerful in the repository of files released by WikiLeaks was 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.

“But there is nothing more unfair than a government that lies to its people about those wars, and then asks those same citizens to risk their lives and taxes for those lies,” he said. “If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.”

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 published exposed journalists, religious leaders, human rights defenders 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 advisor 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 purge some names, but a year later it published 250,000 cables without hiding the identities of the people named in them.

Weeks after the release of the largest file of documents in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman’s rape allegation and another’s sexual harassment allegation.

Assange has always denied the allegations and, from Britain, fought efforts to extradite him to Sweden for questioning. He condemned the allegations as a smear campaign and an attempt to move him to a jurisdiction from where he could be extradited to the United States.

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 followed seven years of self-exile inside the embassy and one of the most unusual chapters in an already strange story.

He refused to leave because British police were waiting for him 24 hours a day, but Assange made occasional forays to the embassy balcony to address his supporters.

A sunlamp and a treadmill helped him maintain his health, he told The Associated Press and other reporters in 2013, and he remained in the news due to a flood of celebrity visitors, including Lady Gaga and designer Vivienne Westwood. Even her cat became famous.

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.

But 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. Some time later he attacked him during a speech in Quito, and said of the Australian native that he was spoiled and treated his hosts without respect.

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.

In 2019, the US government unsealed an indictment against Assange and added more charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret documents. Prosecutors said she 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.

At the time, Scott Morrison, then prime minister of Australia, said he had no plans to intervene in Assange’s case and called it a US matter. 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.

While the case over his extradition played out in British courts over the next few years, Assange remained in Belmarsh prison, where, his wife told the BBC on Tuesday, he was in a “terrible state” of health.

Assange married his partner, Stella Moris, in prison in 2022, after a relationship that began during Assange’s years in the Ecuadorian embassy. Assange and the South African-born lawyer have two children, born in 2017 and 2019.