Julian Assange

So this is how Lucius Malfoy looks these days.

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“”Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.

—

Julian Assange (1971–) is an Australian transparency activist who has gained worldwide recognition as editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. He founded the site in 2006, and has since been the focus of a never-seen-before international controversy. His involvement with WikiLeaks has earned him praise from civil liberties organizations and criticism from others. From 2012 to 2019, he was forced to reside in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid an arrest warrant, fearing that he would be extradited to the U.S. where he is wanted for leaking classified information. In 2019, the Ecuadorian government removed his diplomatic protection after he was accused by President Lenín Moreno of trying to use the embassy as a "centre for spying" and of aggressively campaigning against Ecuador and of going so far as threatening to sue those who were helping him.

As one of the founders of WikiLeaks, his contribution to whistle-blowing and online journalism can only be described as revolutionary. Some of the awards Assange received include Amnesty International UK Media Awards, the Sam Adams Award, the Sydney Peace Prize, and the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. However, his seeming tendency to target only very specific angles with his leaks, and continually making promises he has failed to uphold, has led major news outlets (and some of his most ardent supporters) to accuse him of having a political bias which disincentivizes leakers with opposite viewpoints.

Political views

“”I was asked this question: Did I prefer Clinton or Trump? And, I mean, the answer is: Well, you’re asking do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea.

—Julian Assange, Democracy Now!

While his politics has been described by some as techno-anarchic, his actual views are much more intricate than that. His admiration and support for Ron Paul and Rand Paul along with comments about a "Jewish conspiracy" against him may make one believe he is on the far-right. This is further supported by the fact that his leaks were helpful to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

However, Assange has gained support and high praise from prominent figures, such as academic Noam Chomsky and journalist John Pilger. Assange also supported the Green Party's 2016 U.S. presidential nominee Jill Stein, appearing via video stream to the Green Party 2016 convention in Texas.

WikiLeaks has gained support from the likes of Yanis Varoufakis, ex-finance minister for the libertarian-socialist Syriza party.

Assange formed his free speech ideals running a free speech ISP, suburbia.net (still extant) in the 1990s. He published a document in 2002, State and Terrorist Conspiracies, setting out his aims in detail: to increase the friction in the mechanisms by which authoritarian governments conspire against their citizens, thus changing the lay of the land and forcing them to more open communication mechanisms. It's the inchoate hacker free speech ideal of the 1980s developed into a coherent philosophy.

WikiLeaks

Assange is still the Editor In Chief of WikiLeaks; the only other acknowledged staff member is Kristinn Hrafnsson.

Assange is remarkably disliked by many governments and some newspaper journalists. Sarah Palin has called for him to be "hunted down" and Canadian Tom Flanagan has called for him to be executed. Mike Huckabee has called for the execution of the individual who leaked the 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

Sex crime allegations

Two women accused Assange of rape in Sweden. As a result of those accusations, Sweden attempted to get Assange extradited from the United Kingdom so he could be put on trial. There were concerns that if Assange were extradited to Sweden, he could be removed from there to the United States and speculation that he might face the death penalty in the USA.

British courts agreed to extradite Assange to Sweden, but in June 2012 he fled to the London embassy of Ecuador, which later granted him asylum. Sweden gave assurances that Assange would not be extradited to the US if he faced the death penalty, which supporters of Assange feared. The Swedes refused to rule out extradition entirely, though. Amnesty International was one of many organisations wanting such an assurance, which in any case would be hard to enforce.

After being granted asylum by Ecuador, a standoff ensued. Assange could not leave the embassy to take up asylum in Ecuador without being arrested. However, UK law enforcers could not enter the embassy without serious diplomatic repercussions. The UK showed it had the legal option of entering the embassy by force and arresting Assange, but chose not to do so. In the third week of August 2012, an intimidating police presence appeared outside the embassy, including one police officer outside a toilet window and there were complaints about excessive police presence. It was reported that the cost of keeping police outside the embassy, awaiting the opportunity to arrest Assange, was £2.9 million ($4.4 million) by January 2013 and had risen to £6.4m by August 2014.

At the same time, response to the UK government's posturing by President Correa of Ecuador may have helped get him reelected in 2013. Renard Sexton suspects that could possibly have been Correa's motive in granting asylum.

By April 2013, Assange had settled into a work routine in a confined space in the Ecuadorian embassy. Oliver Stone wrote:

He lives in a tiny room with great modesty and discipline. (…) Strong mind, no sun, friends who visit, work to be done (…) I don't think most people in the US realise how important WikiLeaks is and why Julian's case needs support. (…) Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept.

Meanwhile, a Swedish woman believed to be one of Assange’s accusers claimed she was the victim of wild guesses and speculation over her motives for the accusations. Harassment made it extremely hard for her to work.

In August 2014, Assange said he might soon leave the embassy for unspecified reasons; he confirmed his health suffered while he was confined in the embassy. In October 2015, Assange was in chronic pain and a heart condition was suspected, requiring hospital diagnosis. In early 2016, Assange was still in the embassy and Swedish authorities agreed to question him there. A United Nations panel decided Assange was being detained illegally, but the ruling was not binding; Sweden and the UK rejected the finding. It was unclear how much had changed.

In October 2016, it was reported that Assange was under investigation by the Bahamas police regarding sexually propositioning an 8-year-old online. The story was later retracted due to fabricated evidence. The Royal Bahama Police Force said in a statement that it did receive an anonymous phone call but was not investigating due to a lack of evidence. Soon after, his internet connection was cut by Ecuador over fears he was using it to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The charges against Assange in Sweden were dropped in May 2017 but he remained inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

In April 2019 Assange was removed from the embassy and faces possible extradition to the United States.

Guccifer 2.0

“”The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

—Hmm.

“”GOD BLESS WIKILEAKS - Julian Assange is a hero -> America owes this man one thing -> FREEDOM!!! Thank you, sir - THANK YOU!

—David Duke

During the Bill Clinton presidency, Julian Assange was living in the US, working on a Ph.D. According to Assange, the US government cut his funding without providing an explanation. Assange also blames Hillary for indicting him after the initial State Department cable dump, and has also accused her of pushing to indict him for publishing the Chelsea Manning leaks. He believes that if Obama and Clinton had their way, he would live in a metal box for the rest of his life. This belief may not actually be unfounded. (Assange has said he prefers Trump's chaos to Hillary, whom he dislikes.) On the other hand, Trump has stated a desire to punish Edward Snowden and has also made comments that appear to show a desire to restrict free speech.

The timing of WikiLeaks' DNC E-mail dump (aka the "Guccifer 2.0" hack) were released only after Clinton had all but secured her party's nomination, and not during the primaries, or before Bernie Sanders dropped out. This timing appears to be intended to hurt Clinton's chances against Trump in the general election. The DNC took the unusual step of preemptively and publicly announcing the hack and implicating Russia as the source just over a month before the release of the emails and internal communications.

The e-mails were never intended to be released to the public and thus aren't especially PC. The Sanders campaign was using the DNC and the committee chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as a punching bag, knowing that their hands were tied publicly. It's not really surprising that a politician would blow off some steam in private (privately call a critic an "ass", or acknowledging the apparent primary winner without waiting for a concession). Guccifer took private conversations and put them in a different context against the will of the people involved. Once removed from that context and placed in a completely different one, it became "evidence" of voter fraud. The email dump reignited a lot of Sanders supporters' belief that the primary was rigged, that the DNC is in bed with the media, and that Hillary didn't really earn her spot on the ticket. The dump also included plain text Social Security and credit card numbers. Per Gizmodo, Assange is the kind of "dickhead" who happily publishes that kind of stuff without question to maintain his eCeleb status.

Unfortunately, Wikileaks always over-promises and under-delivers. Much of the information came out as recently as May, and there was way too much going on (post-RNC discussion, Trump's daily news creation, the VP announcement and then the convention the following week) for Democrats to care about Inside Baseball crap at the DNC, or which delegates are mad at which people in the media. If these e-mails had come out during the primaries, it would have mattered to Sanders (and we might all be better off today).

However, the GE might have gone the other way without those email leaks. It was covered for months, and even Assange stated that the way they were releasing them was in order to maximize coverage. And he was promising other email bombshells ("just around the corner") that never materialized, but were widely talked about. Overall, it was all about creating a narrative of massive corruption: World Tomorrow has never tweeted anything bad about Trump, yet they have posted hundreds of anti-Clinton tweets since April 2016: World Tomorrow used the hashtags #TrumpTrain and #Trump2016, retweeted Breitbart articles, as well as obligatory #NeverHillary tweets.

Sergei Lavrov, the current Foreign Minister of Russia, brazenly admitted they were behind the DNC leaks. Julian Assange alluded that Seth Rich, a DC staffer who was murdered in 2016, gave him the E-mails. On 16 May 2017, new evidence surfaced on WikiLeaks that the Democratic National Committee was behind his killing. The evidence, of course, is the word of a PI who freely admits to not having seen the laptop, nor any E-mails between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks, or even spoken with a source who confirms they have. The family denies hiring a private investigator; he is in fact a paid Fox contributor. The "crime analyst" who broke this story is the same one who went on Bill O'Reilly's show in 2007 to warn us of roving lesbian gangs. They flooded social media with this to deflect from the "Twittergate" story, in which Trump undermined his legal defense (and those of some of his closest aides) with ill-considered and ill-timed tweets.

The Julian Assange Show

In 2012, Assange started producing and hosting a talk show, World Tomorrow. In theory, World Tomorrow is independently produced and can be syndicated by any TV company that wants it. In practice, the only channel that saw fit to broadcast World Tomorrow is RT, who never miss a chance to provide a platform to any critic of the US. The list of guests in the first few episodes is… interesting.

Assange got his show after he threatened to publish embarrassing documents on Russia’s political elite in 2010, but relented after an FSB official hinted at reprisal against Wikileaks. These documents were never published.

When Assange was first exiled, he requested the FSB, of all things, to handle his security detail. There's also the fact that RT scooped Assange on some of his leaks, since they reported on them before they were dumped.

The largest sponsor of WikiLeaks today is the Russian government. They keep their sources of funding secret (which is… somewhat ironic), but it's funny how no major leaks from Russia have appeared on the site since 2010. Case in point: when a whistleblower leaked the Panama Papers to German journalist Bastian Obermayer from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, exposing widespread corruption among Russia’s political and business elite, Assange immediately went to Twitter to denounce these documents:

#PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID and George Soros

US govt funded #PanamaPapers attack story on Putin via USAID. Some good journalists but no model for integrity

WikiLeaks declined to publish those, as well. Their whole angle of the leaks is that it's a US false flag to discredit President Putin. Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which released the Panama Papers, is indeed funded by USAID and George Soros, but several major American companies were also named in the leaks.

High on his own supply

“”Our primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia."

—Assange in 2006

“”[Russia is a] bit player on the world stage… Every man and his dog is criticizing Russia. It's a bit boring, isn't it?

—Assange in 2016

“”WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is neither whistleblower nor journalist. He is an Australian citizen charged by the Justice Department with conspiring to hack into a U.S. government computer.

—Allison Stanger, author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump

Assange has a habit of releasing documents that had actual legitimate reasons for being concealed — and, in doing so, endangered groups of already-vulnerable people in the name of "transparency":

• For some unknowable reason, he decided to release a document containing highly sensitive information on the last Jews living in Baghdad, where they are living in perpetual fear for their lives.^{[citation needed]}
• After a Turkish writer called them out for dumping private conversations of Turkish citizens, WL called her a "Erdoğan apologist" and said that she was fabricating her story.
• Assange has proposed using WikiLeaks to track down and "verify" the home address, family members, and banking information of Twitter users — to authenticate them. What better way to hand power to the people than by doxing your enemies?

WikiLeaks accused Snowden of trying to curry favors from Clinton when Snowden criticized them for not sanitizing their leaks. During an interview on Real Time, Assange's response was, "Edward Snowden hasn’t published anything in three years. He did one thing. It was a very important thing, and it was in fact so important that I and this organization saved his ass by rescuing him from Hong Kong...I think he should remember that." So he needs to be your submissive lackey? (Assange also accused Bill Maher of donating a million dollars to HRC's campaign on live television, and had to walk it back because he made it up on the spot.)

On January 18, 2017, Assange tweeted: "If Obama grants Manning clemency Assange will agree to US extradition despite clear unconstitutionality of DoJ case." Obama granted Manning clemency; most of her lengthy sentence was commuted and she went free on May 17, 2017. Oh, what's that? Assange went and changed the terms of the offer after the original terms were satisfied? It's clear the offer wasn't serious.

See also

• Forum:Assange and Ecuador
• Christopher Hitchens — Years of leftist engagement led him to perfect the art of denunciation. In his later years, he used his talent for evil.

External links

• World Tomorrow The show's page at RT's website with all the episodes so far
• Profile: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange
• Deleting a tweet? Not very transparent.
• Assange: Chelsea Manning clemency is going to make life hard for me — You're so vain, you probably think this pardon's about you 🎶