Julian Assange

Julian Assange
Assange in 2010
Born	(1971-07-03) 3 July 1971 Townsville, Queensland, Australia
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	University of Melbourne
Occupation(s)	Editor-in-chief and spokesperson for WikiLeaks
Awards	Economist Freedom of Expression Award (2008) Amnesty International UK Media Award (2009) Sam Adams Award (2010)

Julian Paul Assange (/əˈsɑːnʒ/ ə-SAHNZH; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian publisher, journalist, software developer and Internet activist. He is the founder, spokesperson, and editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide news leaks, with the stated purpose of creating open governments. Assange has worked as a computer programmer and was a hacker during his youth. He has lived in several countries, and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.

Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. In 2010, he published classified details about American involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five international print media partners (Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and El Pais) began publishing secret US diplomatic cables. The White House has called Assange's release of the diplomatic cables "reckless and dangerous" while sources in the Kremlin linked to President Dmitry Medvedev suggested that he "could be awarded a Nobel prize."

For his work with WikiLeaks Assange has received glowing praise and accolades, along with public condemnation and calls for his execution. He received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya and Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.

Assange is currently wanted for questioning in Sweden regarding alleged sexual offences, and was arrested in London, England on 7 December 2010. He is currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an extradition hearing on February 7 and 8. Assange has denied the allegations and claimed that they are politically motivated.

Early life

Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, and spent much of his youth living on Magnetic Island.

When he was one year old, his mother Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname. Brett and Christine Assange ran a touring theatre company. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". "He always stood up for the underdog... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people."

In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician whom Julian Assange believed belonged to a New Age group called Santiniketan Park Association that was led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The couple had a son, but broke up in 1982 and engaged in a custody struggle for Assange's half-brother.His divorced mother fled her boyfriend for years across Australia taking both children into hiding for the next five years. Assange moved 30 times before he turned 14, attending many schools, sometimes being home-schooled.

Hacking

In 1987, after turning 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of Horace: "splendide mendax", or "nobly untruthful"). He and two other hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. Assange wrote down the early rules of the subculture: "Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information".

In response to the hacking, the Australian Federal Police raided his Melbourne home in 1991. He was reported to have accessed computers belonging to an Australian university, the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, the USAF 7th Command Group in the Pentagon and other organisations, via modem. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and was released on bond for good conduct after being fined AU$2100. The prosecutor said "there is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what's the expression—surf through these various computers". The judge warned that if Assange had not had such a disrupted childhood he would have gone to jail for up to 10 years.

Assange later commented, "It's a bit annoying, actually. Because I co-wrote a book about [being a hacker], there are documentaries about that, people talk about that a lot. They can cut and paste. But that was 20 years ago. It's very annoying to see modern day articles calling me a computer hacker. I'm not ashamed of it, I'm quite proud of it. But I understand the reason they suggest I'm a computer hacker now. There's a very specific reason."

Child custody issues

In 1989, Assange started living with his girlfriend and they had a son, Daniel. After they split up, they engaged in a lengthy custody struggle, and did not agree on a custody arrangement until 1999. The entire process prompted Assange and his mother to form Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection, an activist group centered on creating a "central databank" for otherwise inaccessible legal records related to child custody issues in Australia.

Computer programming and university studies

In 1993, Assange was involved in starting one of the first public internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. Starting in 1994, he lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software. In 1995, he wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. He contributed several patches to the PostgreSQL project in 1996. He helped to write the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), which credits him as a researcher and reports his history with International Subversives. Starting around 1997, he co-invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption system, a cryptographic concept made into a software package for Linux designed to provide plausible deniability against rubber-hose cryptanalysis; he originally intended the system to be used "as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field." Other free software that he has authored or co-authored includes the Usenet caching software NNTPCache and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines. In 1999, he registered the domain leaks.org; "But", he says, "then I didn't do anything with it."

From 2003 to 2006, Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He has also studied philosophy and neuroscience. He never graduated and received the minimum passing grades in most of his math courses.He allegedly dropped out because his fellow students were doing research for Pentagon's DARPA. On his personal web page, he described having represented his university at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005.

WikiLeaks

Main article: WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006. That year, Assange wrote two essays setting out the philosophy behind WikiLeaks: "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not." In his blog he wrote, "the more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie.... Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."

Assange sits on Wikileaks's nine-member advisory board, and is a prominent media spokesman on its behalf. While newspapers have described him as a "director" or "founder" of Wikileaks, Assange has said, "I don't call myself a founder"; he does describe himself as the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, and has stated that he has the final decision in the process of vetting documents submitted to the site. Assange says that Wikileaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined: "That's not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are – rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It's disgraceful." He advocates a "transparent" and "scientific" approach to journalism, saying that "you can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism." In 2006, CounterPunch called him "Australia's most infamous former computer hacker." The Age has called him "one of the most intriguing people in the world" and "internet's freedom fighter." Assange has called himself "extremely cynical". The Personal Democracy Forum said that as a teenager he was "Australia's most famous ethical computer hacker." He has been described as being largely self-taught and widely read on science and mathematics, and as thriving on intellectual battle.

WikiLeaks has been involved in the publication of material documenting extrajudicial killings in Kenya, a report of toxic waste dumping on the coast of Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike video, and material involving large banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer among other documents.

In late 2010, Assange was in the process of completing his memoirs for publication in 2011.

Public appearances

Assange in Copenhagen, 2009

In addition to exercising great authority and editorial control within WikiLeaks, Assange acts as its public face. He has appeared at media conferences such as New Media Days '09 in Copenhagen, the 2010 Logan Symposium in Investigative Reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and at hacker conferences, notably the 25th and 26th Chaos Communication Congress. In the first half of 2010, he appeared on Al Jazeera English, MSNBC, Democracy Now!, RT, and The Colbert Report to discuss the release of the Baghdad airstrike video by Wikileaks. On 3 June he appeared via videoconferencing at the Personal Democracy Forum conference with Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg told MSNBC "the explanation he [Assange] used" for not appearing in person in the USA was that "it was not safe for him to come to this country." On 11 June he was to appear on a Showcase Panel at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas, but there are reports that he cancelled several days prior.

On 10 June 2010, it was reported that Pentagon officials were trying to determine his whereabouts. Based on this, there were reports that U.S. officials wanted to apprehend Assange. Ellsberg said that the arrest of Bradley Manning and subsequent speculation by US officials about what Assange may be about to publish "puts his well-being, his physical life, in some danger now." In The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder called Ellsberg's concerns "ridiculous", and said that "Assange's tendency to believe that he is one step away from being thrown into a black hole hinders, and to some extent discredits, his work." In Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald questioned "screeching media reports" that there was a "manhunt" on Assange underway, arguing that they were only based on comments by "anonymous government officials" and might even serve a campaign by the U.S. government, by intimidating possible whistleblowers.

On 21 June 2010, he took part at a hearing in Brussels, Belgium, appearing in public for the first time in nearly a month. He was a member on a panel that discussed Internet censorship and expressed his worries over the recent filtering in countries such as Australia. He also talked about secret gag orders preventing newspapers from publishing information about specific subjects and even divulging the fact that they are being gagged. Using an example involving The Guardian, he also explained how newspapers are altering their online archives sometimes by removing entire articles. He told The Guardian that he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert and will avoid travel to America, saying "[U.S.] public statements have all been reasonable. But some statements made in private are a bit more questionable." He said "politically it would be a great error for them to act. I feel perfectly safe but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the U.S. during this period."

On 17 July, Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York City, replacing Assange due to the presence of federal agents at the conference. He announced that the WikiLeaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended. Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that WikiLeaks was now accepting submissions again. On 26 July, after the release of the Afghan War Diary, he appeared at the Frontline Club for a press conference.

Release of US diplomatic cables

Main article: United States diplomatic cables leak

On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing some of the 251,000 American diplomatic cables in their possession, of which over 53 percent are listed as unclassified, 40 percent are "Confidential" and just over six percent are classified "Secret". The following day, the Attorney-General of Australia, Robert McClelland, told the press that Australia would inquire into Assange's activities and WikiLeaks. He said that "from Australia's point of view, we think there are potentially a number of criminal laws that could have been breached by the release of this information. The Australian Federal Police are looking at that". McClelland would not rule out the possibility that Australian authorities will cancel Assange's passport, and warned him that he might face charges should he return to Australia. As of 11 December 2010 only 1295 cables have been released, or 0.5 percent of the total.

The United States Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation related to the leak. US prosecutors are reportedly considering charges against Assange under several laws, but any prosecution would be difficult. In relation to its ongoing investigations of WikiLeaks, on the 14 December 2010 the US DoJ issued a subpoena ordering Twitter to release information relating to Assange's account, amongst others.

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange "is serving our [American] democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country." On the issue of national security considerations for the US, Ellsberg added that "He's obviously a very competent guy in many ways. I think his instincts are that most of this material deserves to be out. We are arguing over a very small fragment that doesn’t. He has not yet put out anything that hurt anybody's national security". Assange told London reporters that the leaked cables showed US ambassadors around the world were ordered "to engage in espionage behavior" which he said seemed to be "representative of a gradual shift to a lack of rule of law in US institutions that needs to be exposed and that we have been exposing."

Role as a publisher

Assange received the 2009 Media award from Amnesty International, which are intended to "recognise excellence in human rights journalism" and he has been recognized as a journalist by the Centre for Investigative Journalism. In December 2010, US State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley objected to the description of Assange as a journalist, and also stated that the US State Department does not regard WikiLeaks as a media organization. In response to a question from the press, Crowley said; "I think he’s an anarchist, but he’s not a journalist." Alex Massie wrote an article in The Spectator called "Yes, Julian Assange is a journalist", but acknowledged that "newsman" might be a better description of Assange. Assange has said that he has been publishing factual material since age 25, and that it is not necessary to debate whether or not he is a journalist. He has stated that his role is "primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists".

Financial sanctions

On 6 December, the Swiss bank, PostFinance, announced that it had frozen assets of Assange's totalling 31,000 euros, because he had "provided false information regarding his place of residence" when opening the account. MasterCard, Visa Inc., and Bank of America also halted dealings with Wikileaks. Assange described these actions as "business McCarthyism". The English-language Swedish newspaper web-site "Local" quoted Assange on 27 Dec 2010 as saying that legal costs for the whistleblowing website and his own defence had reached £500,000. The decisions to halt donations to WikiLeaks by Visa, MasterCard and PayPal had cost it £425,000, the same amount it costs the website to publish for six months. Assange claimed WikiLeaks had been receiving as much as £85,000 a day at its peak.

Autobiography

In December 2010 Assange sold the publishing rights to his autobiography for over £1million. He told the Sunday Times that he was forced to enter the deals for an autobiography due to the financial difficulties he and the site encountered, he told them "I don't want to write this book, but I have to. I have already spent £200,000 for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat".

Internal dispute

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the German spokesman and effective number 2 at Wikileaks, resigned on 25 September, 2010 during an interview with Der Spiegel. Domscheit-Berg left because he felt the organization was too centered around the figure of Assange whom Domscheit-Berg accused of having an authoritarian style contrary to the transparency-focused mission of the organization, and that Assange wasn't ready to step back from public view, jeopardizing the project. Assange accused Domscheit-Berg of leaking information to Newsweek claiming the Wikileaks team was unhappy with Assange's leadership and handling of the Afghan war document releases. Domscheit-Berg left with a small group to start OpenLeaks. Herbert Snorrason, also a 25-year old Icelandic university student, resigned after he challenged Assange on his decision to suspend Domscheit-Berg and was bluntly rebuked. Iceland MP Birgitta Jonsdottir also left Wikileaks citing lack of transparency, lack of structure, and poor communication flow in the organisation.

Criticism

In July 2010, after WikiLeaks released classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, said in an interview with Democracy now, "Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we’ve been given, but don’t put those who willingly go into harm’s way even further in harm’s way just to satisfy your need to make a point. Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family." Assange responded, "There is, as far as we can tell, no incident of that. So it is a speculative charge. Of course, we are treating any possible revelation of the names of innocents seriously. That is why we held back 15,000 of these documents, to review that. ...it’s really quite fantastic that Robert Gates and Mullen...being the former head of the CIA during Iran-Contra and the overseer of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mullen being the military commander for Iraq and Afghanistan—I’m not sure what his further background is, who have ordered assassinations every day, are trying to bring people on board to look at a speculative understanding of whether we might have blood on our hands. These two men arguably are wading in the blood from those wars."

On 29 November 2010, in the aftermath of WikiLeaks release of more classified American documents Sarah Palin wrote of Assange on her Facebook page, "He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?" she added, "Assange is not a 'journalist', any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine Inspire is a 'journalist'."

A number of political and media commentators, as well as current and former US government officials, have accused Assange of terrorism. US Vice President Joe Biden argued that Assange was "closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers." In May 2010 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had used the phrase, calling Assange "a high-tech terrorist", and saying "he has done enormous damage to our country. I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law".

Also in May 2010, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said: "Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant."

Support

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil, expressed his "solidarity" with Assange following his 2010 arrest in the United Kingdom. He further criticised the arrest of Assange as "an attack on freedom of expression".

Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin condemned Assange’s detention as "undemocratic". A source within the office of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev suggested that Assange be nominated for a Nobel Prize, and said that "Public and non-governmental organisations should think of how to help him."

In December 2010, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Frank LaRue, said Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal accountability for any information they disseminated, noting that "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is of, exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases."

Daniel Ellsberg, who was working in the U.S. Department of Defense when he leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, was a signatory to a statement by an international group of former intelligence officers and ex-government officials in support of Assange’s work, which was released in late December 2010. Other signatories included David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, and five recipients of annual Sam Adams Award: Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson. Ellsberg has said, "If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me ... I would be called not only a traitor — which I was [called] then, which was false and slanderous — but I would be called a terrorist... Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am."

Demonstration in support of Assange in front of Sydney Town Hall, 10 December 2010.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has come under widespread condemnation and a backlash within her own party for failing to support Assange after calling the leaks "an illegal act" and suggesting that his Australian passport should be cancelled. Hundreds of lawyers, academics and journalists came forward in his support with Attorney-General Robert McClelland, unable to explain how Assange had broken Australian law. Opposition Legal Affairs spokesman, Senator George Brandis, a Queen's Counsel, accused Gillard of being "clumsy" with her language, stating, "As far as I can see, he (Assange) hasn't broken any Australian law, nor does it appear he has broken any American laws." Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who supports Assange, stated that any decision to cancel the passport would be his, not Gillard's. Queen's Counsel Peter Faris, who acted for Assange in a hacking case 15 years ago, said that the motives of Swedish authorities in seeking Assange's extradition for alleged sex offences are suspect: "You have to say: why are they [Sweden] pursuing it? It's pretty obvious that if it was Bill Bloggs, they wouldn't be going to the trouble." Following the Swedish Embassy issuing of a "prepared and unconvincing reply" in response to letters of protest, Gillard was called on to send a message to Sweden "querying the way charges were laid, investigated and dropped, only to be picked up again by a different prosecutor."

On 10 December 2010 over five hundred people rallied outside Sydney Town Hall and about three hundred and fifty people gathered in Brisbane where Assange's lawyer, Rob Stary, criticised Julia Gillard's position, telling the rally that the Australian government was a "sycophant" of the US. A petition circulated by GetUp!, who have placed full page ads in support of Assange in The New York Times and The Washington Times, received more than 50,000 signatures.

Awards

Assange won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award. He won the 2009 Amnesty International UK Media Award (New Media), for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya by distributing and publicizing the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR)'s investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances. Accepting the award, Assange said, "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented."

In 2010 Assange was awarded the Sam Adams Award, Readers' Choice in Time magazine's Person of the Year poll, and runner-up for Person of the Year., and an informal poll of editors at Postmedia Network named him the top newsmaker for the year after six out of 10 felt Assange had "affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered".

Le Monde named him person of the year with fifty six percent of the votes in their online poll. Le Monde is one of the five publications to cooperate with Wikileaks' publication of the recent document leaking.

Allegations of sexual assault

On 20 August 2010, Swedish police opened an investigation against Assange in connection with sexual encounters with two women, aged 26 and 31, one in Enköping and the other in Stockholm. Within hours, Stockholm's chief prosecutor Eva Finne reviewed the case and dropped the rape investigation, saying there was insufficient evidence to suggest rape but kept open the molestation investigation, and on 30 August Stockholm police questioned Assange. He denied the allegations, saying he had consensual sexual encounters with the two women.

Claes Borgström, who represents the two women, appealed against the decision to drop the rape investigation. The Swedish Director of Public Prosecution then reopened and expanded the investigation on 1 September. Swedish investigators reinterviewed the two women, wanting to clarify their allegations before talking to Assange but he left Sweden on 27 September, according to statements in UK court, and refused to return to Stockholm for questioning in October, according to Borgström. According to Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, Assange made repeated attempts to contact the prosecution, spending over a month in Stockholm before obtaining permission to leave the country, with the Swedish prosecution stating an interview would not be required.

On 18 November 2010 the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny asked the local district court for a warrant for Assange in order for him to be heard by the prosecutor. The court ordered detention as a suspect with probable cause for rape, sexual assault, and coercion. An appeal from the legal representatives of Assange was turned down by the Svea Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Sweden declined to hear the case. On 6 December 2010, Scotland Yard notified Assange that a valid European arrest warrant had been received. He presented himself to the Metropolitan Police the next morning and was remanded to London's Wandsworth Prison. On 16 December he was granted bail and placed under house arrest at Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, the High Court Judge rejected the prosecution's argument that he was a flight risk. Bail was set at £240,000 surety with £200,000 ($312,700) required to be actually deposited in the courts account.

On release Assange said "I hope to continue my work and continue to protest my innocence in this matter," and told the BBC, "This has been a very successful smear campaign and a very wrong one." Assange claimed that the extradition proceedings to Sweden were "actually an attempt to get me into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite me to the US." Swedish prosecutors have denied the case has anything to do with WikiLeaks.

The extradition hearing is set for 7–8 February 2011 at Belmarsh Magistrates' court, Thamesmead, south east London. His defence team outlined seven strands of their argument, including a challenge for abuse of process as well as the potential risks to Assange's person were he "rendered" to the US.

Residency

Though an Australian citizen, Assange has not had a permanent address for several years. Assange has described himself as constantly on the move. He has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and began renting a house in Iceland on 30 March 2010, from which he and other activists, including Birgitta Jónsdóttir, worked on the 'Collateral Murder' video.

For much of 2010, he was visiting the United Kingdom, Iceland, Sweden and other European countries. On 4 November 2010, Assange told Swiss public television TSR that he was seriously considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and moving the operation of the WikiLeaks foundation there. In December 2010 it was reported that US Ambassador to Switzerland Donald S. Beyer had warned the Swiss government against offering asylum to Assange.

In late November 2010, Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas of Ecuador spoke about giving Assange residency with "no conditions... so he can freely present the information he possesses and all the documentation, not just over the Internet but in a variety of public forums". Lucas believed that Ecuador may benefit from initiating a dialogue with Assange. Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino stated on 30 November that the residency application would "have to be studied from the legal and diplomatic perspective". A few hours later, President Rafael Correa stated that WikiLeaks "committed an error by breaking the laws of the United States and leaking this type of information... no official offer was [ever] made." Correa noted that Lucas was speaking "on his own behalf"; additionally, he will launch an investigation into possible ramifications Ecuador would suffer from the release of the cables.

In a hearing at the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court on 7 December 2010, Assange identified a post office box as his address. When told by the judge that this information was not acceptable, he submitted "Parkville, Victoria, Australia" on a sheet of paper. His lack of permanent address and nomadic lifestyle were cited by the judge as factors in denying bail. He was ultimately released, in part because journalist Vaughan Smith offered to provide Assange with an address for bail during the extradition proceedings, Smith's Norfolk mansion, Ellingham Hall.

External links

• Full coverage at Aljazeera
• Profile: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at BBC News
• Julian Assange: Hero or Villain? – slideshow by Life magazine
• Archived versions of the home page on Julian Assange's web site iq.org (at the Internet Archive)
• WikiLeaks editor on Apache combat video: No excuse for US killing civilians - April 2010. Russia Today via You tube
• Interview with Julian Assange on release of Afghan war files - 1 August 2010 Russia Today via YouTube
• Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks - July 2010 video at ted.com
• Frost Over the World - Julian Assange - December 2010. Al Jazeera English via You tube
• Julian Assange interviewed by John Pilger on New Statesman January 2011