Australian TV presenter and Internet journalist Julian Assange (photo) is a vivid example of an individual who cares about the fate of humanity. He was one of the first daredevils who made information about top-secret materials available to the people, spoke in detail about spy scandals and war crimes of the great powers of the world, and publicized numerous cases of corruption in the highest strata of power. For this, he was persecuted, put on the international wanted list, repeatedly accused, arrested and tried.
Who is he - Julian Assange? How did a simple journalist from Australia become the most influential person in the international media? What goals does he pursue? Who does Assange Julian work for? Where is he now? Read about this and much more in the article.
One of these
Despite all the persecution and threats from the secret services and other secret structures of the world, Julian Assange continues to implement what, most likely, no one else can do except him. This man is an example of inexhaustible courage and confidence. Only a person with a heightened sense of justice and no fearcapable of what Julian Assange did. The biography of this journalist shows that the sense of duty to humanity has always been above all for him.
Childhood and adolescence
Assange Julian, whose biography is full of struggle for the truth, was born in the north-east of Australia in Townsville on July 3, 1971. Julian's parents - John Shipton and Christine Hawkins - met at a popular demonstration against the war in Vietnam. The boy's childhood passed without a father, as he and his mother broke up before he was born. Julian first met his dad when he was already twenty-five.
In 1972, when her son was barely a year old, Christine Hawkins married Richard Assange, who worked as a traveling theater director. Since then, they have lived in constant movement. In 1979, Julian's mother separated from Assange and began a relationship with musician Hamilton Leif. Soon Julian had a brother. As it turned out later, her chosen one is a member of the Family sect, where it is customary to give newborn children to its leader Anne Hamilton-Burn. Fearing that her son would be taken away from her, the mother ran away. So another five years of young Julian were wandering around the world.
Dangerous hobby
When Julian was 16, he was introduced to programming. Together with like-minded friends, he created an organization of hackers, which he called "Worms Against Nuclear Killers". Members of the organization were guided by a code: to share information without damaging systems.
In 1991, Julian and his associates were arrested for hacking into the central data archive of the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel Networks. Assange did not deny what he had done and paid the company a small fine - the damage was insignificant.
When a young hacker entered the university in Melbourne for higher education, he found that all processes in the educational institution were controlled by the military, and therefore did not continue his studies.
Some time later, Julian Assange was accused of stealing $500,000 from a Citibank account, but during the investigation, the suspicions were not confirmed.
WikiLeaks
Julian Assange in 2006 became the creator of the so-called "truth factory" - a site called WikiLeaks. Sweden, the most loyal country in relation to journalists, was chosen as the place where the main server of the resource will be based. The first story to appear on Wikileaks was about the decision of the Somali Islamic Court regarding the execution of government officials.
Later, other secret information began to appear on Assange's resource: about military operations in Iran and Afghanistan, as well as secret Pentagon documents. In addition to documentary materials, videos of the execution of civilians were published, which led to an international scandal.
In October 2010, more than four hundred documents relating to military operations in Iraq were posted on the site.
In 2012, Wikileaks published materials that testify to the realstate of affairs in Syria. The US government blames Army Private Bradley Manning for the leak. There is speculation that while Manning was working as an analyst in Iraq, he brought a disc of music to the office and recorded on it an archive of top-secret documents, including footage of journalists being shot at. He subsequently gave this disc to Assange for publication on WikiLeaks. It is not known for certain whether this was actually the case, because the resource team never reveals informants, worrying about their safety. It is almost impossible to trace the source, since the information is duplicated simultaneously on all the resource's servers before it gets to the Wikileaks page.
Assange Julian. Biography. Persecution
The administration of US President Barack Obama severely criticized the owners of WikiLeaks for publishing classified Syrian material. For their own security, Assange's team posted on the site links to secret documents totaling four hundred gigabytes, password-protected. WikiLeaks announced that they would remove the protection, and the information would be known to the whole world if any of the key figures of the organization were harmed.
As the popularity of the Wikileaks resource grew, so did the interest in the identity of its founder from the side of the security services. In August 2010, Assange was accused of sexual harassment in Sweden, but the charges were dropped the day after the "Afghan dossier" was published on WikiLeaks.
In September of the same year, the Swedish authorities againaccused Assange of a failed rape. In November, the court ordered Julian's arrest, but his lawyer appealed the decision. The defendant moved to London, and in December, Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest, and Assange was put on the international wanted list.
December 7, Julian himself appeared at the station and was arrested. The basis for his arrest was a warrant issued by the Swedish prosecutor's office. Assange's lawyer explained the extradition request for his client as political.
A week later, on December 14, Assange was released from custody after posting a bail of 240,000 pounds. Before the trial, which was to take place on February 6, 2011, Julian Assange was in London on bail.
Court decision
In the end, the London court decided to extradite Julian to Sweden, despite the fact that Assange's lawyers tried several times to appeal this decision, because no official charges were brought against him. The Swedish authorities claim that Julian Assange just want to interrogate and find out all the circumstances of the case. But the founder of WikiLeaks himself fears that the Swedish authorities will extradite him to the United States.
In December 2010, it became known that all bank accounts and accounts in Assange's international payment systems were frozen, and the accounts of all WikiLeaks employees on the Facebook and Twitter social networks were blocked. In September 2012, the United States declared Julian Assange an enemy of the country.
Asylum in Ecuador
Ministry of Foreign AffairsEcuador in 2010 offered Assange to grant him political asylum. In August 2012, he took advantage of their offer and took refuge in the country's embassy in London. The police considered this a violation of the agreements and said that Assange would be arrested as soon as he left the embassy.
For a year and a half, Julian Assange has been on the grounds of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There he lives in a small room that has a bed, bookshelves, a makeshift shower, a round table, a computer, a UV lamp, and a treadmill. Assange compares his residence in the embassy to being on a space station. Julian makes up for the lack of sunlight with an ultraviolet lamp and vitamin D supplementation. Food is brought to him by embassy staff and friends.
Julian Assange feels good today, works seventeen hours a day, works out on a treadmill, speaks to his like-minded people, receives guests. But the British government has already cost a pretty penny 20 months of careful surveillance of Assange - his stay in the Ecuadorian embassy has already cost the taxpayers eight million dollars. It can be assumed that Assange will not come to Sweden voluntarily. And if he stays in the embassy until the statute of limitations expires (2022), it could cost the UK more than sixty million dollars.
Public reaction to the arrest of Julian Assange
Community MembersAnonymous, calling themselves "Enemies of the enemies of Wikileaks", announced on Twitter that they take responsibility for the cyberattacks of everyone who in one way or another contributed to the arrest of Julian Assange. Among the Internet resources that were subjected to cyberattacks were: the Interpol website, the website of the government of Sweden, the United States, Australia and France, the Amazon.com platform, on whose servers Wikileaks worked for some time, and was subsequently evicted, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa payment systems, the website of the Swedish prosecutor's office and other resources and accounts of all those involved or contributed to the arrest of Assange.
The autobiography of Julian Assange
According to the author, writing the book was a necessary measure due to the financial difficulties of his team. It was necessary to reimburse the huge costs of lawyers in the fight for justice. He expected such a literary work to be expensive, and he was right. He managed to sell the rights to publish the book for a million pounds.
Autobiography, to the surprise of Julian himself, turned out to be very dramatic. When Julian Assange read a draft of the book, he decided to cancel its publication - too much of it was personal. The author went against the rules and said that he wanted to terminate the contract with the publishing house, despite the fact that he had already been paid a rather large advance, which he also managed to spend. The book was already expected to be released in 38 countries around the world. Therefore, the management of the publishing house took a desperate step - to repay in the same coin. Julian Assange's autobiography was published without his consent.
Film "The Fifth Estate"
Recently, a film about the creator of Wikileaks, which was created by Entertainment Weekly, was released. Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, after reading the script for the film, called it an outright big-budget lie. According to them, such films are made by order of corrupt structures for a specific purpose and contain incorrect, distorted and dangerous information. In The Fifth Estate, Assange saw anti-Iranian propaganda. The film begins with a scene indicating that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The action then shifts to Cairo, where an Iranian nuclear scientist informs a CIA agent that the bomb will be tested in six months. But US intelligence agencies have long confirmed the absence of nuclear weapons in Iran, as Julian Assange noted.
Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the film. In addition to him, such actors as Anthony Mackie, Daniel Brühl, Alicia Vikander, Laura Linney participate in the film. The film was based on the investigative journalism of Luke Harding and David Lee and the autobiographical story of WikiLeaks hacker Daniel Domstein-Berg. The film was directed by the famous Bill Condon.
Private life
The infamous hacker Julian Assange married Teresa at the age of 16, who gave birth to his son Daniel in 1989. For fourteen years, Julian raised the child himself. He rarely sees his son now, buthe does not take offense at his father, but supports him in everything. Shortly before his arrest, Julian officially divorced Teresa.
