Who is Wikileaks' Julian Assange and what did he do?
Reuters
Julian Assange has arrived in Australia after walking free from an American court following a deal with US authorities.
He pleaded guilty to one criminal charge under the deal after fighting against extradition to the US, where he was accused of disclosing military secrets.
What did Julian Assange do?
Mr Assange ran Wikileaks, a website that published many confidential or restricted official reports related to war, spying and corruption.
In , it released a video from a US military helicopter which showed civilians being killed in the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
It also published thousands of confidential documents supplied by former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These suggested that the US military had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents during the war in Afghanistan.
The revelations became a huge story, prompting reaction from all corners of the globe, and led to intense scrutiny of American involvement in foreign conflicts.
The US said the leaks had endangered the lives of American personnel.
Mr Assange was accused of conspiring to break into its military databases to acquire sensitive information, and was charged with 18 offences.
Efforts were made to bring him to the US for prosecution - which he fought for 14 years in some of the world's highest courts.
Mr Assange has always argued that he exposed serious abuses by US armed forces, and that the case against him was politically motivated.
Wikileaks
Who is Julian Assange?
Born in Australia, Mr Assange is described by those who have worked with him as intense, driven and highly intelligent, with an exceptional ability to crack computer codes.
He gained a reputation for computer programming as a teenager. In , he was fined for hacking offences.
He also co-wrote a bestselling book on the emerging, subversive side of the internet, before studying physics and maths.
What were
Who is Julian Assange and what did he do? A brief history of Australian who will plead guilty for violating US laws
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been granted bail by a UK Court after he agreed to sign a plea deal with US. Assange will plead guilty to a single count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defence documents. Though the deal has not yet been formally finalised.
Who is Julian Assange?
Julian Assange was born in Townsville, Australia, in July As a teenager, he became known as a skilled computer programmer. In , he pleaded guilty to hacking and was fined. Later, he studied mathematics and physics at Melbourne University.
What is WikiLeaks and what did it do?
In , Assange started WikiLeaks, a website designed to allow whistleblowers leak secret information anonymously. Termed as the ‘dead letter drop’ it gave access to classified documents of governments across the world. It was operated by a transnational collective using servers in countries including Iceland and Sweden.
In US, an army intelligence analyst known as Chelsea Manning downloaded large batches of documents from a classified computer network and uploaded them to WikiLeaks. Eventually she was arrested and identified as the source of the wave of secret American documents. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
“WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people's right to know,” the website posted on X after his release.
Major WikiLeaks Releases
April WikiLeaks published a classified video showing a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad in , which killed several people, including two Reuters journalists
The site released over 90, classified U.S. military documents about the war in Afghanistan and about , secret files on the Iraq war. These were some of the la
Julian assange: what did he do
Julian Assange
Australian editor and founder of WikiLeaks (born )
Julian Paul Assange (ə-SAHNZH;néHawkins; born 3 July ) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in He came to international attention in after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a United States Army intelligence analyst:footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, U.S. military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange has won multiple awards for publishing and journalism.
Assange was raised in various places around Australia until his family settled in Melbourne in his middle teens. He became involved in the hacker community and was convicted for hacking in Following the establishment of WikiLeaks, Assange was its editor when it published the Bank Julius Baer documents, footage of the Tibetan unrest, and a report on political killings in Kenya with The Sunday Times. Publication of the leaks from Manning started in February
In November Sweden wished to question Assange in an unrelated police investigation and sought to extradite him from the UK. In June , Assange breached his bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States. In , he launched the WikiLeaks Party and unsuccessfully stood for the Australian Senate. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in
On 11 April , Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy and he was arrested. He was found guilty of breaching the United Kingdom Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. The U.S. government unsealed an
Julian Assange
Julian Paul Assange (born 3 July ) is an Australian computer programmer, publisher and journalist.
In June , he was released from the British justice system; He was put on an airplane. He went to the island of Saipan (in the Pacific Ocean). He stood in front of a judge in the District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, and was released. He came (back) to Australia in June.
He is a spokesman and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, which is a website that posts news leaks. He started the website in He was born in Townsville, Queensland. He also made a program called Rubberhose (file system) to hide secret information in a specific way that protects against torture.
Assange was the Readers' Choice for Time Person of the Year in after getting the most Internet votes.
Time in Britain (–)
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In , facing extradition to Sweden, he took refuge at the Embassy of Ecuador in London and was granted political asylum by Ecuador.
On 11 January , it was announced that Assange had held Ecuadorian citizenship since 12 December
Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno said on 27 July that he had begun talks with British authorities to withdraw the asylum for Assange. On 11 April , Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum and he was arrested by the Metropolitan Police shortly afterwards. His lawyers said they will fight extradition to the United States.
In November , it was reported that Assange is in bad health, has depression and "could die in prison" if not hospitalised.
As of 's second quarter, Assange's extradition case [was still] under appeal, in the British justice system. Earlier (4 February ), the extradition to the United States hearing (a pre-trial discussion in a court) for Assange began in London. On 26 March , London’s High Court gave "the U.S. government three weeks
