Julian Assange came to international attention as the founder of the whistle-blowing Web site, Wikileaks.Assange continued to pursue a career as a computer programmer and software developer. An intelligent mind, he studied mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He dropped out without finishing his degree, later claiming that he left the university for moral reasons; Assange objected to other students working on computer projects for the military.
In 2006, Assange began work on Wikileaks, a Web site intended to collect and share confidential information on an international scale. The site officially launched in 2007 and it was run out of Sweden at the time because of the country’s strong laws protecting a person’s anonymity. Later that year, Wikileaks released a U.S. military manual that provided detailed information on the Guantanamo detention center. Wikileaks also shared emails from then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin that it received from an anonymous source in September 2008.
After a series of extradition hearings in early 2011 to appeal the warrant, Assange learned on November 2, 2011, that the High Court dismissed his appeal. Still on conditional bail, Assange made plans to appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court, in regard to the case.
According to a New York Times article, Assange came to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in June 2012, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden. Nearly two months later, in August 2012, Assange was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorean government, which, according to the Times, “protects Mr. Assange from British arrest, but only on Ecuadorean territory, leaving him vulnerable if he tries to leave the embassy to head to an airport or train station.” The article went on to say that the decision “cited the possibility that Mr. Assange could face ‘political persecution’ or be sent to the United States to face the death penalty,” putting further strain on the relationship between Ecuador and Britain, and instigating a rebuttal from the Swedish government.
OJulian Assange founded Wikileaks in 2006, and its activities including the release of 500,000 secret military files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 250,000 diplomatic cables have infuriated the United States.
The main source of the leaks, US Army soldier Chelsea Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for breaches of the Espionage Act.
Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in west London since 2012 in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden over rape allegations, charges he has denied.
Ecuador has granted him asylum, but he faces immediate arrest if he steps onto British soil and for years police have been posted around the clock outside its doors at a cost of millions of pounds.
Separately, the Australian fears he could eventually face extradition to the United States to be put on a trial over the leak of hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents by his anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
In September 2014, Assange filed a complaint against Sweden and Britain to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention claiming his confinement in the embassy amounts to illegal detention.
“The only protection he has… is to stay in the confines of the embassy; the only way for Mr Assange to enjoy his right to asylum is to be in detention,” the submission said.
“This is not a legally acceptable choice,” it added, according to a file posted on the website justice4assange.com.
Any decision by the UN group would not be legally binding, but Justice for Assange claims its rulings influenced the release from detention of prominent figures including Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi and Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, who was held by Iran for 18 months.
A divisive figure, Assange has likened his confinement in the embassy, where he lives in a small room divided into an office and a living area, to living in a space station.Previously he lived in the more impressive surroundings of an English country mansion owned by one of his supporters.
Assange is 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).
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 under house arrest in rural Norfolk, UK.
@Based on various sources.
