Julian Assange

Social and political activist

• Born: July 3, 1971
• Place of Birth: Townsville, Queensland

Introduction

Australian computer programmer, journalist, publisher, and activist Julian Assange's career has been shaped by his beliefs in transparency and the freedom of information. He achieved widespread recognition in 2006 as the founder and public spokesperson for the website WikiLeaks, which entered leaked or hacked secret and classified information into the public domain. The site sparked enormous public debate over internet ethics and censorship after it released approximately ninety thousand classified documents related to the US military records regarding the war in Afghanistan, known collectively as the Afghan War Diary, in 2010. Pursued as a criminal by the US government, Assange was effectively confined to Ecuador's embassy in London, England, beginning in 2012. From there, he and WikiLeaks continued to play a central role in many hacking scandals, including leaks that impacted the 2016 US presidential election. He was arrested and removed from the embassy in April 2019 to face extradition hearings in the UK regarding US espionage charges. In June 2024, Assange was released from a UK prison after striking a deal with the US to plead guilty to a single charge of espionage in exchange for time served, thus freeing him from years of incarceration and legal proceedings.

Early Life

Julian Paul Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, on July 3, 1971. Assange himself once claimed to come from a blended background that included Scottish, Irish, Taiwanese, and French ancestry. He credits Australian architect John Shipton as his biological father. Shipton had no contact with Assange until the latter was twenty-five years old. His stepfather was Australian theater director Richard Brett Assange, whom his mother, Christine Ann Hawkins, married when he was only one year old. Assange's mother raised him. She had numerous marriages and moved more than thirty times during Assange's childhood. He attended Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales from 1979 to 1983 among shorter stints at numerous other schools and periods of home schooling. Assange later attended the University of Melbourne and the University of Canberra from 2002 to 2005, studying for a bachelor of science degree before dropping out. His main fields of study were mathematics and physics. His departure was reportedly partly in protest over his belief that student research was being used for military purposes.

In 1987, when he was a teenager, Assange began operating as a computer hacker by the name of Mendax. He chose the name based on the Latin phrase splendide mendax, which means "nobly untruthful." He and his mother were living outside Melbourne, Australia, at the time. He joined other hackers to form the International Subversives. The group operated under a computer hacking code of ethics, including such policies as not damaging hacked computer systems, not changing system information unnecessarily, and sharing any information gathered.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) began investigating the group, and Assange was caught hacking into the master terminal of the Canadian telecommunications corporation Nortel in 1991. He was charged for this and numerous other computer hacking crimes, facing thirty-one counts in the Australian court system. Six charges were eventually dropped, and Assange pleaded guilty to the remaining charges in 1995. A lack of evidence of malicious intent induced the judge to sentence Assange to pay only a small amount in damages.

Life's Work

Assange began his legal career in the computer and information technology field in the 1990s, first turning his attention to the rapidly growing internet field. He played a role in the 1993 founding of the Suburbia Public Access Network in Australia, one of the country's first public internet service providers. During this period, he also developed free computer software and programming, including Strobe, Surfraw, the Linux Rubberhose deniable encryption system, and the Usenet-caching software NNTPCache.

Assange's most famous career milestone was the 2006 founding of the website WikiLeaks to support his belief in the importance of the free exchange of information. He believed that freedom of information through leaking sensitive information into the public domain would bring an end to illegitimate government and organizational practices. WikiLeaks followed in the footsteps of the earlier intelligence leak website Cryptome, run by New York architect John Young. Assange designed WikiLeaks to advance his mission of achieving transparency in journalism.

Although WikiLeaks relies mostly on sources to provide information, Assange admitted that the site's workers, including him, also used computer hacking to obtain information. Assange called himself the website's editor in chief, with final approval over all posted documents. He often used WikiLeaks' success, in terms of the amount of information posted, as a rebuke of more traditional sources of journalism for their failure to publish suppressed information. Assange and many WikiLeaks workers have said that such leaks weaken secretive governments and organizations, paving the way for their ouster and replacement by more open governments and organizations.

WikiLeaks' first published document, a Somali Islamic Courts Union decision of questionable authenticity advocating the execution of government officials, carried a disclaimer warning of its potential basis in a US intelligence community trick. The site also exposed extrajudicial killings in Kenya through its publication of a 2008 report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights titled The Cry of Blood: Extra-Judicial Killings and Disappearances. The 2010 release of a 2007 incident in which a US helicopter attack killed a number of civilians and several journalists in Baghdad, Iraq, achieved widespread renown as the Collateral Murder video. Assange had been involved in the online posting while staying temporarily in a safe house in Iceland nicknamed the Bunker.

One of WikiLeaks' most noted achievements was the publication of approximately ninety thousand classified US military documents from 2006 to 2010 regarding the war in Afghanistan. WikiLeaks published these documents, known collectively as the Afghan War Diary, in 2010. Many detailed the role of the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) in aiding al-Qaeda and the Taliban and fueling the Taliban insurgency against US troops in Afghanistan. Criticisms of the Afghan War Diary and WikiLeaks in general included the unfiltered and unqualified nature of the leaked data and the potential of providing false data in hopes of a monetary or other form of reward or a hidden agenda.

Assange served house arrest in Norfolk, England, from December 2010 to June 2012 under a European arrest warrant. He had served more than a week in prison before being freed on bail. The warrant was related to charges of sex crimes involving the alleged rape and assault of two women in separate incidents in Sweden. Assange claimed the encounters were consensual and appealed his extradition to Sweden, fearing that the US government was behind the measure to gain time to build a case against him in that country for his WikiLeaks activity.

Assange soon found both himself and WikiLeaks in financial difficulty. In 2010, he sold the publishing rights to his proposed autobiography to the publishing firm Canongate, receiving more than £1 million. The book, ghostwritten by Andrew O'Hagan, was nonetheless published without his consent in 2011. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks endured censorship, filtering, and suppression of its submission system in various countries and has been unavailable at times. Such censorship has inspired protests among WikiLeaks supporters. In 2010, computer hacker collectives known as Anonymous and LulzSec launched a cyberattack on Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal sites to protest their actions against WikiLeaks. The use of hacking as a form of political protest has become widely known as hacktivism or the "global cyber insurgency."

The controversy surrounding WikiLeaks has also prompted discussions as to whether or not Assange is a journalist. Assange filed to trademark his name in Europe for the purposes of public speaking, reporting, journalism, publishing, education, and entertainment in 2011. He worked with WikiLeaks to produce a politically based weekly talk show entitled The World Tomorrow while serving his house arrest. WikiLeaks announced the show in 2012, and the first episode was broadcast online later that year. The first guest was Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the militant Islamic organization Hezbollah. Assange also sought—and, in August 2012, was granted—political asylum in Ecuador through that country's London embassy, to which he fled to avoid extradition to Sweden.

Despite his exile, Assange continued to spearhead more WikiLeaks work from within the embassy. In April 2013, the site released a database allowing users to search through a collection of 1.7 million diplomatic records spanning from 1973 to 1976, referred to as the "Kissinger Cables." Speculation then surfaced in the summer of 2014 that Assange would be leaving the embassy shortly after he had hinted at this development in a press conference. His lawyers attempted to have the Swedish order to detain him withdrawn. However, in November 2014, a Swedish court announced that the detainment order would be upheld. The following day, Ecuador reaffirmed its commitment to protect him and his rights for as long as necessary. In February 2016, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for Assange's release from effective exile, but the decision was contested by the governments of Great Britain and Sweden.

Assange continued making headlines in 2016 regarding his role in leaks that appeared to have a direct impact on the 2016 US presidential election. In February of that year, Assange posted statements on WikiLeaks staunchly opposing the candidacy of Hillary Clinton due to her foreign policy views. That summer, WikiLeaks began to host information from Clinton's former private email account during her time as US secretary of state, before then posting documents hacked from the Democratic National Convention (DNC). The latter trove of information was interpreted as revealing the DNC's suppression of Senator Bernie Sanders's Democratic primary campaign in favor of Clinton, resulting in a scandal that saw DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resign her position.

Further leaks of Clinton-related material followed into the fall of 2016, including hacked emails from Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta, which further focused public attention on the highly publicized scandal regarding the legality and ethics of Clinton's email use. The ongoing hacks and leaks led many US Democratic Party leaders, including Clinton, to suggest that Assange may have been working with Russian hackers—perhaps government-sponsored ones—to undermine the US presidential election. Ecuador cut Assange's internet access in their London embassy in October due to concerns that he was interfering in the election, but WikiLeaks continued to publish emails. After Clinton lost the election in the electoral college to Donald Trump, many experts believed the email scandal significantly contributed to Clinton's perceived lack of trustworthiness, which was noted as a key weakness of her candidacy. In March 2017, WikiLeaks released a large trove of files and computer code detailing the top-secret hacking strategies of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In November 2016, Assange met with Swedish investigators regarding the rape charges against him. Later that month, the United Nations rejected the appeal of Great Britain to the earlier ruling that he was being held arbitrarily. In May 2017, Swedish prosecutors announced that they had suspended their investigation of rape allegations against Assange, but he was expected to remain at the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he has been living since 2012. US Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in April 2017 that Assange's arrest remained a priority for the United States, and Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA, criticized WikiLeaks for operating like a "hostile intelligence service" against the United States while working with authoritarian and anti-democratic governments such as Russia.

In early 2019, Assange and his lawyers began a new legal battle against the Trump administration, seeking to further delay extradition and reveal any potential secret charges from the US government. However, on April 11, after his citizenship was suspended and he had lost the protection of the embassy, he was arrested based, in part, on a US charge that he had conspired to hack into US Department of Defense computers in 2010. By May 1 he had been sentenced by a British court to spend fifty weeks in jail for having jumped bail in 2012. Later that same month, he was charged in the United States with seventeen additional counts of violating the Espionage Act. Though Swedish prosecutors had also reopened the rape case in May, it was announced in November that the investigation was being discontinued. Still, as the outgoing UK home secretary signed the US extradition request in June, Assange continued to face legal battles. While some supporters of Assange and freedom of the press argued for his release, others, including a group of international doctors, expressed concern regarding his mental and physical health. At a court hearing in October, his request to delay the extradition case against him was denied, however, when both sides of the case asked for more time to prepare in January 2020, the judge rescheduled the hearing for February.

In February 2020, Assange's barrister told the court that, in August 2017, former congressman Dana Rohrabacher had offered Assange a pardon on behalf of President Trump if Assange were to testify that Russia was not responsible for the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leaks. While both the White House and Rohrabacher made statements that Trump had no involvement in the offer, the judge ruled the evidence admissible in Assange's legal attempt to block extradition.

In January 2021, a judge denied the United States' ongoing request to extradite Assange on the basis that transferal to a US prison risked a deterioration of Assange's mental health as well as put him at risk of suicide. In December 2021, following an appeal by the US, the High Court of Justice in London judged in favor of the US and ruled that the decision to extradite Assange was now at the discretion of Home Secretary Priti Patel. Then, in January 2022, a judge determined Assange eligible to appeal his case to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, but the Supreme Court denied his appeal and the UK government ordered his extradition to the US in June 2022. Over the next two years or so, Assange's legal team sought to prevent his extradition and was still in the process of doing so when, in June 2024, they struck a plea deal with the US Department of Justice. According to the terms of the deal, Assange filed to plead guilty to one charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information in exchange for time served and his freedom. Assange was released from prison in the UK to appear before a US federal judge in the Mariana Islands. Pending the judge's ruling, Assange was expected to return to Australia.

Assange has described himself as a cynic who loves intellectual fights. He is the author of several essays, articles, and books outlining his overall philosophy in using the Internet to promote transparency and freedom of information for the public good. He is listed as a researcher for the 1997 book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, which details the work of his early computer hacking organization, the International Subversives. Supporters have referred to him as "the Robin Hood of hacking."

Assange's numerous awards have included the Amnesty International UK Media Award (2009), the Sam Adams Award (2010), the Sydney Peace Foundation of the University of Sydney Gold Medal (2011), and the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (2011). He was selected as Time magazine's Readers' Choice Man of the Year for 2010 and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. His work has been recognized for its use of computer and internet technology to pursue governmental and journalistic transparency, freedom of information, and human rights. However, it has also been criticized for advancing Assange's own agenda, posing a potential danger to active soldiers and intelligence officers, representing a potential invasion of privacy, meddling in politics, working with authoritarian governments and dictatorships, and generally treading a fine line between whistleblowing and illegal activity.

Personal Life

Assange was married in either 1988 or 1989. The couple had one son, resulting in a lengthy and bitter custody battle when the couple divorced. The experience drove Assange's formation of Parent Inquiry into Child Protection, an activist organization dedicated to the facilitation of access to custody-related legal records. Assange had a daughter through a subsequent relationship. By 2024, he was married to human rights lawyer Stella Assange, with whom he had two sons.

Assange lived a nomadic existence after beginning WikiLeaks in 2006. He stayed in Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, France, Germany, and Iceland before his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London beginning in 2012. Over that time, he appeared at various conferences and symposiums on computers, hacking, communication, freedom of information, and investigative journalism in Germany, Austria, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Australia, Belgium, and the United States. He has not revealed much personal information, including any confirmation of his birth date, age, or any permanent address.

Bibliography

Assange, Julian. Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography. Canongate Books, 2011.

Becker, Jo, et al. "How Russia Often Benefits When Julian Assange Reveals the West's Secrets." The New York Times, 31 Aug. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/world/europe/wikileaks-julian-assange-russia.html. Accessed 2 Dec. 2016.

Bennett, Brian. "CIA Chief Calls WikiLeaks 'Non-State Hostile Intelligence Service.'" Los Angeles Times, 13 Apr. 2017, www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-pompeo-are-you-sure-trump-1492114120-htmlstory.html. Accessed 23 May 2017.

Bowcott, Owen. "Julian Assange Launches Legal Challenges Against Trump Administration." The Guardian, 23 Jan. 2019, www.theguardian.com/media/2019/jan/23/julian-assange-launches-legal-challenge-against-trump-administration-extradition. Accessed 5 Mar. 2019.

Chao-Fong, Léonie, et al. "Julian Assange En Route to US Pacific Island after Accepting US Plea Deal – Live." The Guardian, 25 June 2024, www.theguardian.com/media/live/2024/jun/25/julian-assange-prison-release-live-updates-plea-deal-return-australia-wikileaks-leaves-uk. Accessed 25 June 2024.

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website. With Tina Klopp, translated by Jefferson Chase, Crown Publishers, 2011.

Douglas, Jason. "Julian Assange Can Seek Appeal in U.K. Supreme Court against Extradition to U.S." The Wall Street Journal, 24 Jan. 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/julian-assange-can-seek-appeal-in-u-k-supreme-court-against-extradition-to-u-s. Accessed 7 Mar. 2022.

Dreyfus, Suelette, and Julian Assange. Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness, and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. 1997. Canongate Books, 2011.

Editorial Board. "A New Twist in the Assange Drama." The New York Times, 22 May 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/opinion/julian-assange-wikileaks.html. Accessed 23 May 2017.

Ellison, Sarah. "The Man Who Came to Dinner." Vanity Fair, Oct. 2013, www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2013/10/julian-assange-hideout-ecuador. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.

Greenberg, Andy. This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information. Dutton, 2012.

Groll, Elias. "US in 'Cat and Mouse Game' with Julian Assange." Foreign Policy, 19 May 2017, foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/19/u-s-in-cat-and-mouse-game-with-julian-assange. Accessed 23 May 2017.

Hui, Sylvia. "Timeline of the Julian Assange Legal Saga over Extradition to the US on Espionage Charges." Associated Press, 25 June 2024, apnews.com/article/julian-assange-wikileaks-extradition-timeline-77a759d7408ebeb24d026a7c2c00feb3. Accessed 25 June 2024.

"Julian Assange Freed from UK Prison under Plea Deal with US Justice Department." ABC News, 25 June 2024, www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-25/julian-assange-released-from-prison/104017664. Accessed 25 June 2024.

"Julian Assange: Judge Refuses to Delay Extradition Hearing." BBC News, 21 Oct. 2019, www.bbc.com/news/uk-50132599. Accessed 3 Dec. 2019.

Leigh, David, and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. With Ed Pilkington et al., PublicAffairs, 2011.

Shane, Scott, et al. "WikiLeaks Releases Trove of Alleged CIA Hacking Documents." The New York Times, 7 Mar 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/world/europe/wikileaks-cia-hacking.html. Accessed 23 May 2017.

Sifry, Micah L. WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. OR Books, 2011.

Smith, David. "Arresting Julian Assange Is a Priority, Says US Attorney General Jeff Sessions." The Guardian, 20 Apr. 2017, www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/21/arresting-julian-assange-is-a-priority-says-us-attorney-general-jeff-sessions. Accessed 23 May 2017.