Julian Assange

Julian Assange
Assange in 2014
Born	Julian Paul Hawkins (1971-07-03) 3 July 1971 Townsville, Queensland, Australia
Alma mater	Central Queensland University University of Melbourne University of Canberra
Occupations	Editor programmer politician
Years active	1987–present
Known for	Founding WikiLeaks
Title	Director and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks
Political party	Independent (2015–present) WikiLeaks (2012–2015)
Criminal status	Convicted of failure to surrender to the court Under arrest by the Metropolitan Police Service in London.
Spouse	Teresa Doe ​ ​ (m. 1989; div. 1999)​
Partner(s)	Sarah Harrison (esp. 2009; sep. 2012)
Children	4
Awards	Full list
Signature

Julian Paul Assange (/əˈsɑːnʒ/; born Julian Paul Hawkins; 3 July 1971) is an Australian journalist, computer programmer, and the founder and director of WikiLeaks. Assange describes himself as an advocate of information transparency and market libertarianism. Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006, an international publishing organisation known for revealing war crimes, human rights abuses, and corruption. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and CableGate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and asked allied nations for assistance.

In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange, after questioning him months earlier about allegations of sexual assault and rape. Assange denied the allegations, and said that they were just a pretext for him to be extradited from Sweden to the United States because of his role in publishing secret American documents. Swedish prosecutors later suspended their investigation and applied to revoke the European arrest warrant in May 2017. Assange surrendered to UK police on 7 December 2010 but was released on bail within 10 days. Having been unsuccessful in his challenge to the extradition proceedings, he breached his bail in June 2012 to seek asylum from Ecuador. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 and remained in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for almost seven years. In 2017, the London Metropolitan Police indicated that an arrest warrant was in force for Assange's failure to surrender himself to his bail, even though the original Swedish allegations had been dropped.

During the 2016 U.S. Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted emails sent or received by candidate Hillary Clinton from her private email server when she was Secretary of State. The U.S. Intelligence Community, as well as a Special Counsel investigation, concluded that the Russian government carried out a hacking campaign as part of broader efforts of interference in the 2016 United States elections. In 2018, twelve Russian intelligence officers, mostly affiliated with the GRU, were indicted on criminal charges by Special Counsel Robert Mueller; the indictment charges the Russians with carrying out the computer hacking and working with WikiLeaks and other organisations to spread the stolen documents. Assange consistently denied any connection to or co-operation with Russia in relation to the leaks.

On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy, and he was arrested. He faces up to a year in jail for breaching bail in 2012, and his alleged rape victim's lawyer is attempting to have Sweden reopen its investigation.

Early life, family, and education

Julian Paul Hawkins was born on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple separated before their son was born.

When Julian Hawkins was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Assange regards as his father (choosing Assange as his surname). The surname Assange is a Westernization of the Chinese name Au Sang, from a Taiwanese man who married a Torres Strait Islander woman on Thursday Island. His mother had a house in Nelly Bay on Magnetic Island, where they lived from time to time until it was destroyed by fire.

Christine and Brett Assange divorced about 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982. Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty Australian towns and cities by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne.

He attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979–1983) and Townsville State High School, as well as being schooled at home. He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006), but did not complete a degree.

While in his teens, Assange married a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer. The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child. Assange was Daniel's primary caregiver for much of his childhood. Assange has other children; in an open letter to then-French President François Hollande, he stated that his youngest child lives in France with his mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.

Hacking

In 1987, aged 16, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax (Latin for "liar"). He and two others—known as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect"—formed a hacking group they called the International Subversives. He is thought to have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but he does not acknowledge this.

In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange's phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October, and eventually charged him in 1994 with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges (the other six were dropped), and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. The perceived absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood were cited to justify his lenient penalty.

Programming

Assange, c. 2006

In 1993, Assange gave technical advice to the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit and assisted with prosecutions. In the same year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the TCP port scanner Strobe (1995), patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996), the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996), the Rubberhose deniable encryption system (1997), (which reflected his growing interest in cryptography) and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000). During this period, he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, ran Best of Security, a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996, and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives. In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.

Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it". He did, however, publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency 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." Systematic abuse of technology by governments against fundamental freedoms of world citizens remained an abiding concern—more than a decade later, in the introduction to Cypherpunks (2012), Assange summarised: "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen".

WikiLeaks

Main articles: WikiLeaks and List of material published by WikiLeaks

Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg at the 26C3 in Berlin, December 2009

After his period of study at the University of Melbourne, Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange is a member of the organisation's advisory board and describes himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.

WikiLeaks published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources, including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, the extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, the 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, the "Petrogate" oil scandal in Peru, the leaked emails from the Turkish government published at the height of Erdoğan’s post-coup purges in Turkey in December 2016, or collection of more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, government ministries and companies. Assange said of the Syria Files that "it helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it."

By 2015, WikiLeaks had published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as "a giant library of the world's most persecuted documents". The published material between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of publicity, but it was only after it began publishing documents supplied by Chelsea Manning, that WikiLeaks became a household name. The Manning material included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010) which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 people from a helicopter in Iraq, including journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. This material also included the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).

Opinions of Assange at this time were divided. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard described his activities as "illegal," but the police said that he had not broken Australian law. United States Vice-President Joe Biden and others called him a "terrorist". Some called for his assassination or execution. Support for him came from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President of Ecuador Rafael Correa, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Britain's Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (then a backbench MP), Spain's Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, Argentina's ambassador to the UK Alicia Castro, and activists and celebrities including Tariq Ali, John Perry Barlow, Daniel Ellsberg, Mary Kostakidis, John Pilger, Ai Weiwei, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Vaughan Smith, and Oliver Stone.

Gun camera footage of the airstrike of 12 July 2007 in Baghdad, showing the deaths of journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh by a US helicopter

Several parties have claimed a strong pro-Russian bias in Assange's public comments and stated that the materials released by WikiLeaks "never seems able to leak anything damaging to the interests of the Russian". Assange's claim that the Guccifer 2.0 emails were not provided to WikiLeaks by the GRU has led to further accusations that he is working in line with Russian propaganda.

The year 2010 culminated with the Sam Adams Award, which Assange accepted in October, and a string of distinctions in December—the Le Monde readers' choice award for person of the year, the Time readers' choice award for person of the year (he was also a runner-up in Time's overall person of the year award), a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3 million, and selection by the Italian edition of Rolling Stone as "rockstar of the year".

Assange announced that he would run for the Australian Senate in March 2012 under the new WikiLeaks Party, and Cypherpunks was published in November. In 2012, Assange hosted a television show on RT (formerly known as Russia Today), a network funded by the Russian government. In the same year, he analysed the Kissinger cables held at the US National Archives and released them in searchable form. On 15 September 2014, he appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom's Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland.

The following February, he won the Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal for Peace with Justice, previously awarded to only three people—Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhist spiritual leader Daisaku Ikeda. Two weeks later, he filed for the trademark "Julian Assange" in Europe, which was to be used for "Public speaking services; news reporter services; journalism; publication of texts other than publicity texts; education services; entertainment services." For several years a member of the Australian journalists' union and still an honorary member, he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in June, having earlier won the Amnesty International UK Media Award (New Media) in 2009.

In April 2017, then CIA Director Mike Pompeo, in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia." Pompeo's accusation followed a series of "damaging leaks" of confidential documents, codenamed Vault 7, that included details on the CIA's hacking capabilities. Assange accused the CIA of trying to "subvert" his First Amendment rights, saying that "History shows the danger of allowing the CIA or any intelligence agency, whose very modus operandi includes misdirection and lying, to be the sole arbiter of what is true or what is prudent. Otherwise every day might see a repeat of the many foolish CIA actions which have led to death, displacement, dictatorship and terrorism."

In August 2017, in the midst of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, Saudi-owned newspaper Al Arabiya based in Dubai claimed that Assange "has seven cables about Qatar and only five were published" after Qatar negotiated with WikiLeaks. Assange responded that "The Al Arabiya network (HQ in UAE) has been publishing increasingly absurd fabrications as the UAE v Qatar dispute continues. One from today."

A 2017 article in Foreign Policy asserted that in the summer of 2016 WikiLeaks turned down leaks on Russian Government during the U.S. Presidential Campaign, stating "the leak organization ignored damaging information on the Kremlin to focus on Hillary Clinton and election-related hacks." This was disputed by Wikileaks who said that as far as it could recall the material was "already public." The cache was reported by the BBC and other news outlets to reveal details about Russian military and intelligence involvement in Ukraine. The article also described Assange's shifting position on Russia. Assange's relationship with Russia "started out as adversarial" as in he had in October 2010 "teased a massive dump of documents that would expose wrongdoing in the Kremlin, teaming up with a Russian news site for the rollout." However Assange by 2012 "had his own show on the Kremlin-funded news network RT" and in 2016 Assange publicly criticized Novaya Gazeta's coverage of the Panama Papers, suggesting that "reporters had “cherry-picked” the documents to publish for optimal “Putin bashing, North Korea bashing, sanctions bashing, etc.” while giving Western figures a pass." Russian investigative reporter Roman Shleynov said in an interview with the New York Times that it was a surprise for him to hear that "Mr. Assange was repeating the same excuse that our officials, even back in Soviet days, used to say — that it’s all some conspiracy from abroad.”

In September 2017, Assange released "Spy Files Russia," revealing "how a St. Petersburg-based technology company called Peter-Service helped Russian state entities gather detailed data on Russian cellphone users, part of a national system of online surveillance called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM)." According to Moscow based journalist Fred Weir, "experts say it casts a timely spotlight on the vast surveillance operations mounted by Russian security services."

United States criminal investigation and indictment

U.S. investigations

Assange speaks on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral in London, 16 October 2011

After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally with a view to prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010 US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.

In December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an alleged WikiLeaks interlocutor they claimed to be Assange; he denied this, dismissing the alleged connection as "absolute nonsense". The logs were presented as evidence during Manning's court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password, but evidence that the interlocutor was Assange was circumstantial, and Manning insisted she acted alone.

Assange was being examined separately by "several government agencies" in addition to the grand jury, most notably the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was still under "active and ongoing" investigation at that time.

Moreover, some Snowden documents published in 2014 show that the United States government put Assange on the "2010 Manhunting Timeline", and in the same period they urged their allies to open criminal investigations into the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. In the same documents there was a proposal by the National Security Agency (NSA) to designate WikiLeaks as a "malicious foreign actor", thus increasing the surveillance against it.

In January 2015, WikiLeaks issued a statement saying that three members of the organisation had received notice from Google that Google had complied with a federal warrant by a U.S. District Court to turn over their emails and metadata on 5 April 2012. In a December 2015 court submission, the U.S. government confirmed its "sensitive, ongoing law enforcement proceeding into the Wikileaks matter."

In April 2017, U.S. officials told CNN that they were preparing to file formal charges against Assange.

In early 2019, individuals began to come forward with news of being questioned about Assange by prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia. Legal scholar Stephen Vladeck stated that the prosecutors, after refusing to unseal the indictment, accelerated the case in 2019 due to the impending statute of limitations on Assange's largest leaks. Witnesses named in the investigation included Jacob Appelbaum, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, David House, Jason Katz and Chelsea Manning, all of whom condemned it as a form of government over-reach.

Indictment in the United States

Main article: Indictment and arrest of Julian Assange

In 2012 and 2013, U.S. officials indicated that Assange was not named in a sealed indictment. On 6 March 2018, a federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a sealed indictment against Assange.

In November 2018, U.S. prosecutors accidentally revealed that Assange had been indicted under seal in U.S. federal court; the revelation came as a result of a error in a different court filing, unrelated to Assange.

On 11 April 2019, the day of Assange's arrest in London, the indictment against Assange was unsealed. Judge Michael Snow said Assange was "a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest" and he had "not come close to establishing reasonable excuse". He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion (i.e. hacking into a government computer), a relatively minor crime that carries a maximum 5-year sentence if found guilty. The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents, in order to avoid detection. This information has been known since 2011, and was a component of Manning's trial; the indictment did not reveal any new information about Assange.

United Nations special rapporteur Agnes Callamard, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa condemned Assange's arrest. Snowden tweeted that "Assange's critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom." Bolivian President Evo Morales and Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also condemned it. British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt thanked the Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno for co-operation and British Prime Minister Theresa May said that "no one is above the law." Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that Assange is "not going to be given special treatment ... It has got nothing to do with" Australia, "it is a matter for the US". British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said that Assange had revealed "evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan" and his extradition to the United States "should be opposed by the British government".

Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) speculated that if authorities were to prosecute Assange "for violating U.S. secrecy laws [it] would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest." The Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest could "set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future." Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is "a major threat to global media freedom."

Mark Warner, Vice-Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, welcomed the arrest of Assange, saying that Julian Assange is "a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security." The President of the Center for American Progress and former Obama aide Neera Tanden also welcomed the arrest and condemned Assange's leftist supporters, tweeting that "the Assange cultists are the worst. Assange was the agent of a proto-fascist state, Russia, to undermine democracy. That is fascist behaviour. Anyone on the left should abhor what he did."

Swedish sexual assault allegations

Main article: Assange v Swedish Prosecution Authority

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

Assange visited Sweden in August 2010. During his visit, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women. He was questioned, the case was initially closed, and he was told he could leave the country. In November 2010, however, the case was re-opened by a special prosecutor who said that she wanted to question Assange over two counts of sexual molestation, one count of unlawful coercion and one count of "lesser-degree rape" (mindre grov våldtäkt). Assange denied the allegations and said he was happy to face questions in Britain.

In 2010, the prosecutor said Swedish law prevented her from questioning anyone by video link or in the London embassy. In March 2015, after public criticism from other Swedish law practitioners, she changed her mind and agreed to interrogate Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, with interviews finally beginning on 14 November 2016. These interviews involved police, Swedish prosecutors and Ecuadorian officials and were eventually published online. By this time, the statute of limitations had expired on all three of the less serious allegations. Since the Swedish prosecutor had not interviewed Assange by 18 August 2015, the questioning pertained only to the open investigation of "lesser degree rape", whose statute of limitations is due to expire in 2020.

On 19 May 2017, the Swedish authorities suspended their investigation against Assange, claiming they could not expect the Ecuadorian Embassy to communicate reliably with Assange with respect to the case. Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny officially revoked his arrest warrant, but said the investigation could still be resumed if Assange visited Sweden before August 2020. "We are not making any pronouncement about guilt", she said. After Assange's arrest in April 2019, news media reported that Swedish authorities were considering reopening the investigation.

Political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy

Asylum granted by Rafael Correa

Assange on balcony of Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012

On 19 June 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that his government was considering the request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Wikileaks insiders stated that Assange made the decision to seek asylum because he felt abandoned by the Australian government. The Australian attorney-general at the time, Nicola Roxon, had written a letter to Assange's legal representative, Jennifer Robinson, in which she wrote that Australia would not seek to involve itself in any international exchanges about Assange's future. She also wrote that "should Mr. Assange be convicted of any offence in the United States and a sentence of imprisonment imposed, he may apply for an international prisoner transfer to Australia". Assange's lawyers described the letter as a "declaration of abandonment".

Assange and his supporters state he is concerned not about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but believe that his deportation to Sweden could lead to politically motivated deportation to the United States, where he could face severe penalties, up to the death sentence, for his activities related to WikiLeaks.

Ecuadoran foreign minister Ricardo Patiño met with Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy on 16 June 2013

On 16 August 2012, Patiño announced that Ecuador was granting Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States secret investigation against him. In its formal statement, Ecuador reasoned that "as a consequence of [Assange's] determined defense to freedom of expression and freedom of press… in any given moment, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger". Latin American states expressed support for Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa confirmed on 18 August that Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely, and the following day Assange gave his first speech from the balcony. Assange's supporters forfeited £293,500 in bail and sureties. An office converted into a studio apartment, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer, shower, treadmill, and kitchenette, became his home from then until 11 April 2019.

Just before Assange was granted asylum, the UK government wrote to Patiño stating that the police were entitled to enter the embassy and arrest Assange under UK law. Patiño criticised what he said was an implied threat, stating that "such actions would be a blatant disregard of the Vienna Convention". Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service were stationed outside the building from June 2012 to October 2015 in order to arrest Assange for extradition and for breach of bail, should he leave the embassy. The police guard was withdrawn on grounds of cost in October 2015, but the police said they would still deploy "a number of overt and covert tactics to arrest him". The cost of the policing for the period was reported to have been £12.6 million.

In April 2015, during a video conference to promote the documentary Terminal F about Edward Snowden, Bolivia's ambassador to Russia, María Luisa Ramos Urzagaste, accused Assange of putting the life of Bolivian president Evo Morales at risk by intentionally providing the United States with false rumours that Snowden was on the president's plane when it was forced to land in Vienna in July 2013 after France, Spain and Italy denied access to their airspace. "It is possible that in this wide-ranging game that you began my president did not play a crucial role, but what you did was not important to my president, but it was to me and the citizens of our country. And I have faith that when you planned this game you took into consideration the consequences", the ambassador told Assange. Assange stated that the plan "was not completely honest, but we did consider that the final result would have justified our actions. We weren't expecting this outcome. The result was caused by the United States' intervention. We can only regret what happened."

In an interview the following month with Democracy Now!, Assange explained the story of the grounding of Morales' plane, saying that after the United States cancelled Snowden's passport, WikiLeaks thought about other strategies to take him to Latin America, and they considered private presidential jets of those countries which offered support. The appointed jet was that of Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, but Assange stated that "our code language that we used deliberately swapped the presidential jet that we were considering for the Bolivian jet ... and in some of our communications, we deliberately spoke about that on open lines to lawyers in the United States. And we didn't think much more of it. ... We didn't think this was anything more than just distracting." Eventually, the plan was not pursued and, under Assange's advice, Snowden sought asylum in Russia.

Demonstration outside the Ecuadorian embassy to free Assange, 16 June 2013

Paris newspaper Le Monde, in its edition of 3 July 2015, published an open letter from Assange to French President François Hollande in which Assange urged the French government to grant him refugee status. Assange wrote that "only France now has the ability to offer me the necessary protection against, and exclusively against, the political persecution that I am currently the object of." In the letter Assange wrote, "By welcoming me, France would fulfill a humanitarian but also probably symbolic gesture, sending an encouragement to all journalists and whistleblowers ... Only France is now able to offer me the necessary protection ... France can, if it wishes, act."

In a statement issued by the Élysée Palace on 3 July 2015 in response to this letter, the French President said: "France cannot act on his request. The situation of Mr Assange does not present an immediate danger."

On 4 July 2015, in response to the denial of asylum by France, a spokesman for Assange denied that Assange had actually "filed" a request for asylum in France. Speaking on behalf of Assange, Baltasar Garzón, head of his legal team, said that Assange had sent the open letter to French president François Hollande; but Assange had only expressed his willingness "to be hosted in France if and only if an initiative was taken by the competent authorities".

On 16 August 2016, Assange's lawyer in the UK, John Jones, was found dead, according to the first reports after an apparent suicide. An inquest into his death found that the lawyer was accepted since March to a private psychiatric hospital with several issues of mental health, including bipolar disorder, and closed-circuit television cameras showed no-one was near him when he jumped before the train. Coupled with the death of WikiLeaks lawyer Michael Ratner from cancer in May, the death of both lawyers in such a short time span sparked conspiracy theories, and a tweet by WikiLeaks on 21 August said that an inquest ruled it was not suicide. Some Twitter users took this to imply assassination, but the linked article explained that the inquest found culpability on the part of the hospital for letting Jones outside since suicide requires mental competence. The next day, 22 August, a man scaled the embassy's walls, but was caught by the embassy's security.

John Pilger, Richard Gizbert, and Julian Assange – 'The WikiLeaks Files' Book Launch – Foyles, London, 29 September 2015

In September 2016, Assange said he would agree to US prison in exchange for President Obama granting Chelsea Manning clemency. Obama commuted Manning's sentence on 17 January 2017. The next day, at his final presidential news conference, Obama stated, "I don't pay a lot of attention to Mr. Assange's tweets, so that wasn't a consideration in this instance." The same day, Assange's US-based attorney Barry Pollack asserted (without saying when or where) that Assange "had called for Chelsea Manning to receive clemency and be released immediately". Accordingly, Pollack maintained, the commutation—which specified Manning would be freed four months thence—did not meet Assange's conditions. On 17 May 2017, Manning was released from prison. Two days later, Assange emerged on the embassy's balcony and told a crowd that, despite no longer facing a Swedish sex investigation, he would remain inside the embassy in order to avoid extradition to the United States.

On 17 October 2016, WikiLeaks announced that a "state party" had severed Assange's Internet connection at the Ecuadorian embassy. The Ecuadorian government stated that it had "temporarily" severed Assange's Internet connection because of WikiLeaks' release of documents "impacting on the U.S. election campaign". In an interview published on 29 December, Assange said, "The Internet has been returned."

Presidency of Lenín Moreno

On 6 June 2017, Assange tweeted his support for NSA leaker Reality Winner, offering a $10,000 reward for information about a reporter for The Intercept who had allegedly helped the US government to identify Winner as the leaker. Assange posted on Twitter: "Reality Leight [sic] Winner is no Clapper or Petraeus with 'elite immunity'. She's a young woman against the wall for talking to the press."

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team had been investigating a meeting between former Donald Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort and President Lenín Moreno in Quito in 2017. Moreno talked with Manafort about removing Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and his extradition to the United States.

On 28 March 2018, Ecuador cut Assange's Internet connection at its London embassy "in order to prevent any potential harm". Officials said that Assange's recent social media posts denouncing the arrest of a Catalonian separatist leader "put at risk" Ecuador's relations with European nations. Assange is now silent on social media.

In May 2018, a team of Guardian journalists, including Luke Harding, reported that over a five-year span, Ecuador spent at least $5 million (£3.7m) through a secret intelligence budget to protect Assange at its London embassy, "employing an international security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and even the British police". Visitors included "individuals linked to the Kremlin". Ecuadorian officials had reportedly also devised plans to help Assange escape should British authorities use force to enter the embassy and seize him. The Guardian also reported that documents and "a source who wished to remain anonymous" had indicated that by 2014, Assange had "compromised" the embassy's communications system and arranged his own satellite Internet hookup. "By penetrating the embassy's firewall", Assange was allegedly able to "access and intercept the official and personal communications of staff". According to The Guardian, this claim was denied by WikiLeaks as an "anonymous libel aligned with the current UK–US government onslaught against Mr Assange".

On 21 July 2018, Glenn Greenwald reported that the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry was finalising an agreement to release Assange into the custody of the British government. In a press conference the following week, President Lenín Moreno confirmed that he wanted Assange out of the embassy but also "for his life not to be in danger". This prompted wide speculation that Moreno aimed to strengthen Ecuador's relations with the United States and assist their extradition efforts.

In September 2018, Reuters reported that Ecuador had, in December 2017, granted Assange a "special designation" diplomatic post in Russia – and the cover to leave the embassy and England – but the British Foreign Office did not recognise diplomatic immunity for Assange, and the effort was dropped.

On 14 October 2018, ITV News reports that Assange's communications have been partially restored following a meeting between two senior UN officials and Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno.

On 16 October 2018, congressmen from the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote an open letter to Lenín Moreno which described Assange as a dangerous criminal and stated that progress between the US and Ecuador in the areas of economic co-operation, counternarcotics assistance and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on Assange being "handed over to the proper authorities".

On 19 October 2018, BBC News reported that Assange was starting legal action against the government of Ecuador, accusing it of violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms". Later that month, an Ecuadorian judge ruled against him, saying that a requirement for Assange to pay for his Internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.

Pamela Anderson, a close friend and regular visitor of Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy, gave an interview with 60 Minutes Australia in November 2018 in which she asked the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to "defend your friend, and get Julian his passport back, and take him back to Australia and be proud of him". Morrison rejected the request but his response was described as "smutty" and "lewd" by Anderson who wrote in an open letter to Morrison that "[y]ou trivialised and laughed about the suffering of an Australian and his family. You followed it with smutty, unnecessary comments about a woman voicing her political opinion". She further advised Morrison that "[r]ather than making lewd suggestions about me, perhaps you should instead think about what you are going to say to millions of Australians when one of their own is marched in an orange jumpsuit to Guantanamo Bay – for publishing the truth. You can prevent this".

In December 2018, President Moreno reached an agreement to have Assange leave the embassy in what he called "near liberty". According to a radio interview by Moreno, British sources told him that Assange would be free to live in the United Kingdom without extradition after serving a prison sentence of at most six months. The formal offer was less explicit, simply stating that he would not be extradited to a country with the death penalty. Assange's lawyers declined citing a need for further protection.

In February 2019, the parliament of Geneva passed a motion demanding that the Swiss government extend asylum to Assange. The move was proposed by the Swiss People's Party and supported by the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland. In the same month, it was revealed that Assange was issued with a new Australian passport in September 2018. His previous passport had expired several years ago.

In April, Ecuador's president Lenin Moreno stated that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, after photos surfaced on the internet linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. WikiLeaks denied that it had acquired any of the published material, and stated that it merely reported on a corruption investigation against Moreno by Ecuador's legislature. WikiLeaks subsequently wrote on Twitter that according to a source within the Ecuadorian government, an agreement had been reached to expel Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy and place him in the custody of UK police. The source stated that the expulsion from the embassy would occur in retaliation against WikiLeaks' tweet noting corruption charges against Moreno. Ecuador's Foreign Ministry denied the existence of any planned expulsion.

On 11 April 2019, Assange was arrested by the Metropolitan Police Service inside the Ecuadorian embassy after the police were invited in by the Ambassador of Ecuador to the United Kingdom. The same day, Moreno referred to Assange as a "spoiled brat" and "miserable hacker".

Hours after Assange's arrest, programmer Ola Bini was arrested (but not charged) in Ecuador and interrogated about an alleged plot by unnamed Russian hackers to release compromising information about Moreno in retaliation. The coder had previously met with Assange at the embassy, posted a link to a news article about the plot to Twitter, describing it as a "witch hunt", before leaving on a trip to Japan.

Opinions from supranational organisations

The Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa requested an advisory opinion from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the issue of "the Institution of Asylum and its Recognition as a Human Right in the Inter-American System," and the court issued its advisory opinion in May 2018, upholding the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits signatories of the American Convention on Human Rights from deporting foreign individuals when such a deportation would likely lead to their persecution. According to Doughty Street, the ruling was made shortly after U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence raised the issue of Ecuador's grant of asylum to Assange while on a visit to Ecuador.

On 5 February 2016, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish Governments since 7 December 2010, including his time in prison, on conditional bail and in the Ecuadorian embassy. According to the group, Assange should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation. The UK and Swedish governments rejected the claim. UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Philip Hammond, said the claim was "ridiculous" and that the group was "made up of lay people", and called Assange a "fugitive from justice" who "can come out any time he chooses". UK and Swedish prosecutors called the group's claims irrelevant. The UK said it would arrest Assange should he leave the Ecuadorian embassy. Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, stated that the finding is "not binding on British law". Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has said that the finding is based on binding international law.

The Working Group again urged the UK to let Assange leave the Ecuador embassy in London freely. In a statement on 21 December 2018, the organisation asserted that the "Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr. Assange's continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offense that cannot post facto justify the more than 6 years confinement that he has been subjected to".

In 2019, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights rejected a complaint submitted by Assange, requesting that the Ecuadorian government "ease the conditions it has imposed on his residence" at the Ecuadorian embassy in London by monitoring him and restricting his visitors, and not allow him to be extradited to the United States.

Withdrawal of asylum and arrest

On 11 April 2019, the Metropolitan Police—whom Ecuadorian authorities had invited into the embassy—arrested Assange in connection with his failure to surrender to the court in June 2012 for extradition to Sweden. Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno stated that Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum after he repeatedly violated international conventions regarding domestic interference. He was found guilty of breaching his bail conditions later that afternoon. Assange was carrying Gore Vidal's History of the National Security State during his arrest.

2016 U.S. presidential election

Criticism of Clinton and Trump

Assange wrote on WikiLeaks in February 2016: "I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ... she certainly should not become president of the United States." On 25 July, following the Republican National Convention (RNC), during an interview by Amy Goodman, Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhea. "Personally, I would prefer neither." WikiLeaks editor, Sarah Harrison, has stated that the site is not choosing which damaging publications to release, rather releasing information that is available to them. In an Election Day statement, Assange criticised both Clinton and Trump, saying that "The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers."

It was revealed in October 2017 that during the 2016 presidential election, Cambridge Analytica funder and substantial Republican donor Rebekah Mercer had proposed creating a searchable database for Hillary Clinton emails in the public domain and then forwarded this suggestion to several people, including Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, who personally emailed a request to Assange for Clinton's emails. Assange responded to the report by saying he denied Nix's request.

Seth Rich conspiracy theory

Main article: Murder of Seth Rich

In July 2016, in an interview with Megyn Kelly, Assange stated no confirmation or refutation that Seth Rich, a DNC staffer who was murdered that month, was the source behind the DNC emails that WikiLeaks published by saying "We're not saying that Seth Rich's death necessarily is connected to our publications – that's something that needs to be established. But if there is any question about a source of WikiLeaks being threatened, then people can be assured that this organization will go after anyone who may have been involved in some kind of attempt to coerce or possibly, in this kill a potential source." WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about Rich's murder. Assange spoke about sources bringing information to WikiLeaks in the context of Seth Rich, in an interview with Nieuwsuur, and stated that whistleblowers are at risk. When the interviewer suggested that Rich died as a result of "just a robbery", Assange said "No. There's no finding."

Assange's claims were highlighted by Fox News, The Washington Times and conspiracy website InfoWars. According to a study by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Assange's claims set off a spike in attention to the Seth Rich murder. According to the scholars, Assange's claims lent credibility and visibility to what had at that point been a conspiracy theory in the fringe parts of the Internet. The July 2018 indictment of 12 Russian officers by Special Counsel Robert Mueller which laid out how the DNC emails were hacked by Russian intelligence and disseminated to WikiLeaks, in the words of the Associated Press, undermined the "conspiracy theory, carefully nurtured by Assange and his supporters, that slain DNC staffer Seth Rich was at the origin of the leaks."

Democratic National Committee leaks

Main article: 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak

Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as DNC chairwoman following WikiLeaks releases suggesting bias against Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign.

On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) seemingly presenting ways to undercut Bernie Sanders and showing apparent favouritism towards Clinton, leading to the resignation of party chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The New York Times reported that "Assange accused Mrs. Clinton of having been among those pushing to indict him..." and that he had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention. In an interview with Robert Peston of ITV News Assange suggested that he saw Hillary Clinton as a personal foe.

Cybersecurity experts and firms attributed the cyberattack to the Russian government, and the Central Intelligence Agency subsequently determined that Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC servers, as well as the email account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and leaked the stolen information to WikiLeaks in order to bolster Trump's chances of winning the presidency. In interviews, Assange repeatedly denied that the Russian government was the source of the DNC and Podesta emails, and accused the Clinton campaign of "a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria." This statement was repeated in the Russian media outlet RT.

On 4 October 2016, in a WikiLeaks anniversary meeting in Berlin with Assange teleconferencing from his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, reporters spoke of a supposed promise to reveal further information against Clinton which would bring her candidacy down, calling this information "The October Surprise". On 7 October, Assange posted a press release on WikiLeaks exposing over 2,000 emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The emails, ranging from 2007 to 2016, revealed excerpts of Clinton's paid Goldman Sachs speech in 2013. In the emails, she explained her relationship to Wall Street and how she had previously represented the community: "even though I represented [people in finance] and did all I could to make sure they continued to prosper, I called for closing the carried interest loophole and addressing skyrocketing CEO pay. So when I raised early warnings about subprime mortgages and called for regulating derivatives and over complex financial products, I didn't get some big arguments, because people sort of said, no, that makes sense."

According to Harvard political scientist Matthew Baum and College of the Canyons political scientist Phil Gussin, WikiLeaks strategically released emails related to the Clinton campaign whenever Clinton's lead expanded in the polls. On the eve of the general presidential election, Assange wrote a press release addressing the criticism around publishing Clinton material on WikiLeaks, saying that WikiLeaks publishes "material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere," that it had never received any information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson's campaign, and that therefore could not publish what it did not have.

DNC lawsuit

See also: Democratic National Committee v. Russian Federation

Assange was named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee in April 2018. The lawsuit alleges that WikiLeaks and Russian agents together engaged in a "brazen attack on American democracy" with regard to the hacking and publication of its emails in 2016. WikiLeaks sought to dismiss the suit, with its editor in chief Kristinn Hrafnsson calling the case "a litmus test for press freedoms. The suit claims that the scandalous emails of powerful political operatives are 'trade secrets' and cannot be published."

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that the lawsuit "raises a number of important press freedom questions" including the determination of what activities should "implicate a journalist in a source's illegal behavior." The organisation cited several First Amendment experts who opined that the lawsuit, if successful, might undermine the Supreme Court's precedents that publishers of information "are not responsible for the illegal acts of their sources," such as Bartnicki v. Vopper.

2018 Guardian article

On 27 November 2018, The Guardian's Dan Collyns and Luke Harding stated that Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2013, 2015 and 2016. In The Guardian article, the journalists reported that the last visit in March 2016 could be related to WikiLeaks' publication later in 2016 of DNC documents. They also stated that in June 2016 WikiLeaks emailed the GRU via an intermediary seeking the DNC material and that the GRU sent the documents to WikiLeaks in mid-July 2016 as an encrypted attachment. Manafort and Assange both said they had never met, with the latter threatening legal action against The Guardian. Manafort described the story as "totally false and deliberately libelous" and said that he has never met Assange or anyone connected to him. Glenn Greenwald said that if Manafort had entered the Ecuadorian consulate there would be "mountains of evidence" from the surrounding cameras. Ecuador's London consul Fidel Narváez, who had worked at Ecuador's embassy in London from 2010 to July 2018, said that Manafort's alleged visits did not happen.

Writings

Assange describes himself as an advocate of information transparency and market libertarianism. He has written a few short pieces, including "State and terrorist conspiracies" (2006), "Conspiracy as governance" (2006), "The hidden curse of Thomas Paine" (2008), "What's new about WikiLeaks?" (2011), and the foreword to Cypherpunks (2012). He also contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), and received a co-writer credit for the Calle 13 song "Multi_Viral" (2013).

Cypherpunks is primarily a transcript of the World Tomorrow episode eight two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann.

Assange's book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, was published by OR Books on 18 September 2014. The book recounts when Google CEO Eric Schmidt requested a meeting with Assange, while he was on bail in rural Norfolk, UK. Schmidt was accompanied by Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas; Lisa Shields, vice-president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Scott Malcomson, the communications director for the International Crisis Group. Excerpts were published on the Newsweek website, while Assange participated in a Q&A event that was facilitated by the Reddit website and agreed to an interview with Vogue magazine.

Some of Assange's writings have been criticised for alleging conspiracies involving other journalists. In her 2017 documentary on Assange, Laura Poitras included a scene of him calling the Swedish sexual assault allegations a "radical feminist conspiracy"—a comment which she says led them to part ways. In 2011, Assange criticised a Private Eye article for portraying WikiLeaks contributor Israel Shamir as anti-Semitic. According to editor Ian Hislop, Assange called the article "an obvious attempt to deprive [WikiLeaks] of Jewish support and donations" and went on to point out that several journalists involved were Jewish. On 1 March 2011, Assange released a statement in which he said, "Hislop has distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase. In particular, 'Jewish conspiracy' is completely false, in spirit and in word. It is serious and upsetting. We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world."

Honours and awards

• 2008, The Economist New Media Award
• 2009, Amnesty International UK Media Awards
• 2010, Time Person of the Year, Reader's Choice
• 2010, Sam Adams Award
• 2010, Le Monde Readers' Choice Award for Person of the Year
• 2011, Free Dacia Award
• 2011, Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal
• 2011, Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism
• 2011, Voltaire Award for Free Speech
• 2012, Big Brother Award Italy 2012 "Hero of Privacy"
• 2013, Global Exchange Human Rights Award, People's Choice
• 2013, Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts
• 2013, New York Festivals World's Best TV & Films Silver World Medal
• 2014, Union of Journalists in Kazakhstan Top Prize

Works

Bibliography

• Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997)
• Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (2012) OR Books
• When Google Met WikiLeaks (2014) OR Books
• The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to The US Empire (2015) Verso Books

Filmography

Producer

Title	Year
Collateral Murder	2010
The World Tomorrow	2012 (host)
Mediastan	2013
The Engineer	2013

As himself

• The War You Don't See (2010)
• The Simpsons (2012) (cameo; episode "At Long Last Leave")
• Citizenfour (2014)
• The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014)
• Terminal F/Chasing Edward Snowden (2015)
• Asylum (2016)
• Risk (2016)
• Architects of Denial (2017)
• The New Radical (2017)

See also

• Courage Foundation
• List of people who took refuge in a diplomatic mission
• Timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
• Timeline of investigations into Trump and Russia (2019)

Further reading

Books

• Nick Cohen, You Can't Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2012).
• Suelette Dreyfus, Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), with research by Julian Assange.
• Andrew Fowler, The Most Dangerous Man in the World: The Explosive True Story of Julian Assange and the Lies, Cover-ups and Conspiracies He Exposed (2011).
• David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (2011).
• Andrew O'Hagan, Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography (2011)

Essays

• Raffi Khatchadourian, "No secrets: Julian Assange's mission for total transparency," The New Yorker, 7 June 2010.
• Robert Manne, "The cypherpunk revolutionary: Julian Assange," The Monthly, March 2011. Reprinted in Robert Manne, Making Trouble: Essays Against the New Australian Complacency (Melbourne: Black Inc. Publishing, 2011).
• Andrew O'Hagan, "Ghosting: Julian Assange," London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 5 (6 March 2014).

Films

• Underground: The Julian Assange Story (2012), Australian TV drama that premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.
• Julian (2012), Australian short film about nine-year-old Julian Assange. The film won several awards and prizes.
• The Fifth Estate (2013), a thriller that Assange claimed was a 'serious propaganda attack' on WikiLeaks and its staff.
• Mediastan (2013), documentary produced by Assange; to challenge that of The Fifth Estate.
• We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013), American documentary.
• Risk (2016), American documentary.
• Hacking Justice (2017), documentary.

External links

• Works by Julian Assange at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Julian Assange at Internet Archive
• Julian Assange at TED
• Why Judge Baltasar Garzon has taken on the defense of Julian Assange