A little more than 5 months ago, precisely on July 3rd, the founder of Wikileaks completed 50 years-old. This post is a tribute to him. Unfortunately this week we had a bad news about him, he can be extradite to U.S. I am his fan since 2010. Like me, he did an activism for transparency for governments and privacy for individuals. In May 2011, I put in this blog an interview he gave to a Brazilian magazine, you can read it here https://thepeopleteacher.blogspot.com/2011/10/jump-to-democracy.html. We all have to fight against his prison. His crime was to publish at Wikileaks serious violations of human rights, and corruption evidences, something that we all should do. Instead of prison, he deserves a compensation for his unfair incarceration. This post is a summary of the article published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded Wikileaks in 2006. Wikileaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike collateral murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), etc. After the 2010 leaks, the U.S. government launched a criminal investigation into Wikileaks. In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct. Assange said the allegationswere a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the U.S. over his role in the publication of secret American documents. He took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigations in 2019. During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, Wikileaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries. In April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. The U.S. government unsealed an indictment against Assange, related to the leaks provided by Manning. Editors from newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as press freedom organisations, criticised the government's decision, characterising it as an attack on the freedom of the press. On December 2021 Britain's court of Appeal ruled that Assange can be extradited to the U.S. to face the charges. Assange has been confined in Belmarsh prison in London since April 2019. Julian Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins and John Shipton, a builder. The couple separated before he was born. When he was a year old, his mother married Brett Assange, an actor with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Julian regards as his father. By the time he reached his mid-teens, he with his mother and a half-brother settled in Melbourne. In 1987, aged 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax". In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne terminal of Nortel, a Canadian telecommunications corporation. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges and he was ordered to pay reparations and was released on a good behaviour bond. Assange studied programming, mathematics and physics at University of Melbourne, but did not complete a degree. In 1993, Assange used his computing skills to help the Victoria Police to prosecute individuals responsible for publishing and distributing child pornography. In 1996, he moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers. In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology. Assange registered the domain Leaks.org in 1999, but didn't do anything with it. He published a patent granted to the N.S.A. in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: "This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency." he said. Assange and others established Wikileaks in 2006. From 2007 to 2010 Wikileaks published internet censorship lists, classified media from anonymous sources. These including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and the Petrogate oil scandal in Peru. The material Wikileaks published between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of international attention, but after it began publishing documents supplied by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks became a household name. Also Wikileaks published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, known as the "Cablegate" files, in November 2010. The files showed U.S. espionage against U.N. and other world leaders, and exposed corruption in countries throughout the world as documented by U.S. diplomats. Since his arrest in April 2019 in London, after examining Assange, Nils Melzer, from U.N. concluded that "in addition to physical ailments, Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma. In a later interview, Melzer criticised the termination by Ecuador Assange's asylum status and citizenship without any form of due process and he said that the U.S. and U.K. were trying to make an example of Assange. He also accused some journalists of "spreading abusive and distorted narratives." In September 2020, an open letter in support of Assange was sent to Boris Johnson with the signatures of two current heads of state and approximately 160 other politicians. The following month, U.S. Representatives Tulsi Gabbard and Thomas Massie, introduced a resolution opposing the extradition of Assange. In December 2020, German human rights commissioner Barbel Kofler cautioned the U.K. about the need to consider Assange's psysical and mental health before deciding to extradite him. In July 2016, artist and activist Ai Weiwei, musicians Patti smith, Brian Eno, and PJ Harley, scholars Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis and filmmaker Ken Loach were amongst those attending an event in support of Assange. In January 2021, Australian journalist John Pilger stated that were Assange to be extradited "no journalist who challenge power will be safe."
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