“The UK High Court will deliver its decision on Monday morning [January 24] about whether to permit Julian Assange to appeal the US extradition decision to UK Supreme Court,” WikiLeaks tweeted on Friday.
The December court ruling to accept the US appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange enraged his supporters, who claimed it was a “travesty of justice.”
But who is Assange, and why is he in such trouble?
Political prisoner or enemy of the state?
For some, Julian Assange, the 50-year old founder of WikiLeaks, is the world’s most famous political prisoner. A fearless truth-telling journalist who has been persecuted for many years for revealing US war crimes and showing the public what went on behind the curtain. For the authorities in the US and other allied Western countries, however, he is an enemy of the state who needs to be held accountable for publishing classified information that, it is argued, has put lives at risk and endangered national security.
Computer geek
Assange was born in Townsville, Australia on July 3, 1971. His family background could hardly be described as settled. His biological parents had already separated before he was born, and by the time he was 10, his mother and the man he regarded as his father had split, too. Young Julian moved around from town to town in Australia and attended 37 different schools. That ‘never settling down too long in one place’ lifestyle remained with him as an adult.
You could say his life changed forever when his mother bought him his first PC at the age of 16. Always something of a rebel, he carried out his first computer hack as a member of a hacking group at the age of 16, and his first charges for hacking and cybercrime – 31 of them in total – came seven years later. He got off with just a fine for damages. He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at the University of Melbourne, but failed to graduate.
In 1993, when he was in his early 20s, Assange used his computer skills to help the Victoria state police investigate a child pornography ring. “My client assisted in relation to two investigations. His role was limited to providing technical advice and support, to assist in the prosecution of persons suspected of publishing and distributing child pornography on the internet,” said his lawyer Grace Morgan. “Mr. Assange received no personal benefit from his contribution, and was pleased to be in a position to assist.”
Underdog defender
Assange’s interest in cryptography intensified in the 1990s and early 2000s, becoming an obsession. His stepfather, Brett, described him as having been a “sharp kid who always fought for the underdog.” Assange started to think he might be able to use his computer skills to do just that on a global basis.
In 2006, he founded WikiLeaks as a non-profit media organization with the intention that it would be an online clearing house via which confidential information pertaining to governments around the world would be published. Assange, whose politics could be described as ‘anti-war libertarian,’ and which transcended old divisions of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ believed citizens had every right to know what their administration was up to, particularly if it involved war crimes. WikiLeaks’ stated goal was “to bring important news and information to the public.” But the founding of WikiLeaks was later to have severe personal consequences for Assange.
War crime whistleblower
In April 2010, WikiLeaks published a shocking video filmed from a US helicopter showing the killing of civilians in Baghdad, Iraq – an air assault in which two Reuters journalists were killed. And it revealed not only individual war crimes but the scale of civilian deaths in US-led conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, too. In October of that year, it released almost 400,000 classified US documents about the Iraq War.