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What did Julian Assange do to deserve this?

2021-01-03T18:55:41.720Z


British justice dictates this Monday whether to extradite the founder of Wikileaks to the United States


Julian Assange was chosen by the readers of the weekly

Time

as person of the year now a decade ago.

The

Australian

editor,

hacker

and activist, founder of Wikileaks, was the man of the moment after turning hundreds of thousands of state secrets upside down with several leaks, among which the more than 250,000 cables of US diplomacy stood out.

Today, a British judge decides whether Assange, 49, imprisoned in London, is extradited to the United States, where he is accused of 18 crimes of espionage and computer intrusion.

It was at the end of August of that year 2010, in which Wikileaks was shaking over and over again the public opinion of half the world, when Assange sent this journalist a brief message: "Having time now is simply impossible."

The Australian was working, who would know, together with his partner in the project, the German Daniel Domscheit-Berg in a massive leak of diplomatic cables, messages received or sent to North American legations that uncovered the secrets of Washington's foreign policy.

His approach to the press was timid and distrustful - Domscheit-Berg was always closer.

But he knew he needed her to get into the world.

Those revelations by Wikileaks, known as

Cablegate

, were published on November 28, 2010 by five newspapers: The Guardian,

The New York Times

, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and EL PAÍS.

It was the straw that would fill the patience of the United States, which already had the Australian in its sights, a tremendously creative entrepreneur, experienced

hacker

, information transparency activist, who in a few months had become a mass idol.

At least for a while.

Wikileaks tries to mediate between people with relevant information and the rest of the world.

And it does so with a convoluted system that protects the identity of the sources.

The Australian has stated that even he does not know who is leaking information.

The fame of WikiLeaks had simmered up to

Cablegate

.

The movie

The Fifth Power

, released in 2013, portrays Assange's inevitable rise and metamorphosis as the tyrant of his project.

In one of the sequences, Assange works alongside Domscheit-Berg and Icelandic activist and politician Birgitta Jónsdóttir on Collateral Murder, the publication of a secret video recorded in July 2007 by American soldiers, authors of a bombing in Baghdad that took their lives. a dozen civilians.

The film is based in part on the book

My Time with Julian Assange on the World's Most Dangerous Web

.

It was written by Domscheit-Berg after breaking with Assange for his dictatorial outbursts, as he himself has expressed.

Assange had, in effect, reached an agreement with those five newspapers that published the

Cablegate

: the cables would be published - filtered by the former American analyst Chelsea Manning, as it became known in the end - provided they were edited to protect the identities of those who there they appeared.

In September 2011, he unilaterally skipped the agreement and published all the raw material.

It was a turning point in his rare relationship with the press - even Reporters Without Borders, which supported the Wikileaks project, criticized the move.

But Assange and his website had already uncovered some of the abusive practices of the US in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan;

the secret archives of Guantánamo;

extrajudicial executions by the Kenyan police;

the fraudulent practices of the Kaupthing bank, tip of the iceberg of the political crisis in Iceland ...

By then also, in August 2010, two women had reported sexual offenses allegedly committed by the Australian publisher to the Swedish police.

When the judge ordered his arrest in November of that year, Assange was residing in the United Kingdom.

The Swedish justice proceeded to request the extradition - it subsequently shelved the case in November 2019 - and it was granted, but the Australian found a nook not to be sent to Stockholm - he feared that from there he would be put on a plane bound for Washington: applied for and obtained asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The permit was in effect from June 2012 to April 12, 2019, the date on which Assange was arrested by Scotland Yard agents.

Since then, the Australian has been imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison, in south-east London.

Justice has required it to avoid a possible escape from the extradition request made by the US justice and evaluated last year in the Old Bailey court in London.

Washington accuses him of 17 crimes of espionage and one of computer intrusion, with penalties of up to 175 years in prison.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-01-03

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