Why is WikiLeaks founder and hacker Julian Assange facing possible extradition to the United States?

This article was originally published in English

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces a crucial two-day trial in the United Kingdom that will decide whether he should be extradited to the United States on espionage charges.

London’s High Court is expected to decide before Wednesday whether to block the 52-year-old journalist’s extradition to the United States, where 18 faced espionage charges For publishing hundreds of thousands of confidential documents related to the conduct of the US military during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2010.

The Australian journalist has been kept in Belmarsh Prison (United Kingdom) since April 2019. In light of this important legal milestone, ‘Euronews Next’ takes a look at who Assange is, what exactly he faces and What can happen next if you lose your last attempt? Desperate to live in the UK.

Who is Julian Assange?

What name was Assange known? skilled hacker Australian by the name of Mendax, long before the founding of WikiLeaks. An incident when he was 16 led the police to break into his mother’s house and confiscate all of her equipment.

Assange has been linked to several major hacks such as Member of the International Subversives GroupIncluding WANK’s 1989 NASA hack and the online takeover of MILNET, an online server used by the US military.

Assange in 1991 was behind bars Australian police learned for the first time that he had hacked the master terminal of Nortel, a Melbourne-based Canadian telecommunications company.

Assange was charged with 31 computer hacking crimes, but was ultimately acquitted.reach a plea agreementAdmitted to 24 charges and paid a fine of 2,100 Australian dollars (about 5,000 dollars, or 3,000 euros today).

Shortly after, Assange He founded the activist organization along with his mother. Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection is a group fighting local corruption by using the Australian Freedom of Information Act to secretly record government meetings. Maclean’s, a Canadian magazine, later referred to it as a “low-tech” rehearsal for the final WikiLeaks.

What was WikiLeaks?

In 2006, Assange and a group of other dissidents created WikiLeaks. And, in December of the same year, the website published its first leak: a decision to assassinate government officials specifically signed by a Somali political figure.

At the same time, Assange published an essay titled “Conspiracy as Governance”, detailing his reasons for doing what he called ethical hacking. Assange wrote, “The more secretive or inappropriate an organization is, the more leaks create fear and paranoia in the leadership and planning group.”

He added, “If we’ve learned anything, it’s that systems of governance don’t want to change. We must think beyond those who came before us and look for the technological changes that will free us from those ways of doing things.” “Encourage what our ancestors could not.” Over the next four years, WikiLeaks Internet censorship lists, leaks and classified material published from anonymous sources,

Some of these cases attracted attention. In 2007, documents about the Guantanamo Bay operation posted on the site revealed that the US military kept prisoners in isolation for more than two weeks to make them more compliant.

In 2009, he collected over 500,000 pieces of classified information from the Pentagon, FBI, and New York Police Department (NYPD).about 9/11 To show how authorities responded to the attacks. But the big bombshell that landed Assange back in prison, and now before the British courts, was yet to come.

so called cablegate

In 2010, the site published A video shows a US military helicopter killing civilians, including two journalists, in the Iraqi capitalIn Baghdad, 2007. A voice on the broadcast, speaking to the pilot, says, “Burn them all”, prompting the pilot to shoot the civilians with the gunship’s gun.

At the time, WikiLeaks told the media that the video showed that “the US military’s rules of engagement were flawed.” WikiLeaks later published Hundreds of thousands of documents and diplomatic cables leakedChelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst, has similar reports on civilian casualties in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

It was revealed from the documents 66,000 civilians were killed by the US military During the Iraq War, much more than the US government had previously reported.

In their lawsuit against Assange, US officials alleged that the publication of this information “put specific people in Afghanistan and Iraq at risk of serious harm, torture, or even death.” Assange after this He was charged with 18 crimes of entering military bases to obtain sensitive information.

In 2010 he was further accused of: Violation by the Swedish government against one of its citizens, With two arrest warrants against him, Assange fled in 2012. He was living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London after losing an appeal in the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to be extradited to Sweden to face rape charges.

British police eventually detained Assange outside the Ecuadorian embassy in 2019 after the Latin American government ousted Assange in response to Sweden’s withdrawal of charges. He was initially detained for 50 weeks for bail to be revoked, before the Americans began working on his extradition case.

What is to be done now?

In 2021, a British court concluded that there was a real risk that Assange would take his own life if extradited to the United States due to his mental health. Judge Vanessa Baraitser said at the time, “I consider that Mr. Assange’s mental condition is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States.”

However, the Americans continue to press for his extradition, which would mean Assange could face up to 175 years in prison if convicted. The real danger, according to his wife Stella Assange, is that he will unwittingly face death penalty In the United States.

He declared, “His life is in danger every day he spends in prison, and if he were extradited, he would die.” Despite Assange’s legal problems, the website Wikileaks remains activeBut no new report has been published since 2021.