Australian TV presenter and online journalist Julian Assange (photo) is a vivid example of an individual who is not indifferent to the fate of mankind. He was one of the first daredevils to make information about top-secret materials available to the people, to tell in detail about espionage scandals and war crimes of the great powers of the world, and to publicize numerous cases of corruption in the upper echelons of power. For this he was persecuted, put on the international wanted list, repeatedly charged, 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 are his goals? Who does Assange Julian work for? Where is he now? Read about this and much more in the article.
One such
Despite all the persecution and threats from the special services and other secret structures of the world, Julian Assange continues to realize what most likely, except him, no one else can do. This man is an example of inexhaustible courage and confidence. Only a person with a heightened sense of justice and lack of fear is capable of what Julian Assange did. The biography of this journalist indicates that a sense of duty to humanity has always been above all for him.
Childhood and teens
Assange Julian, whose biography is full of the struggle for truth, was born in northeast Australia in the city of Townsville on July 3 in 1971. Julian's parents - John Shipton and Christine Hawkins - met at a popular demonstration against hostilities in Vietnam. The boy’s childhood passed without a father, since he and his mother broke up even before he was born. Julian's first acquaintance with dad happened when he was already twenty-five.
In 1972, when her son was barely a year old, Kristin Hawkins married Richard Assange, who worked as director of a wandering theater. Since then they have lived in constant moving. In 1979, Julian's mother broke up with 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 her leader Enne Hamilton-Bern. Fearing that her son would be taken away from her, her mother ran on the run. So another five years of young Julian passed in wandering around the world.
Dangerous hobby
When Julian was 16, he became acquainted with programming. Together with like-minded friends, he created a hacker organization called the “Worms Against Nuclear Killers”. Members of the organization were guided by the code: to share information without damaging the system.
In 1991, Juliana, along with associates, was arrested for breaking into the central data archive of Canadian telecommunications company Nortel Networks. Assange did not deny the deed and paid the company a small fine - the damage was insignificant.
When a young hacker entered a university in Melbourne to pursue higher education, he discovered that all the processes in the educational institution were controlled by the military, and therefore did not continue his studies.
After some time, Julian Assange was accused of stealing five hundred thousand dollars from the Citibank account, but the suspicions were not confirmed during the audit.
Wikileaks
In 2006, Julian Assange became the creator of the so-called “truth factory” - a site called WikiLeaks. Sweden, the most loyal country to journalists, was chosen as the place where the main resource server will be based. The first material that appeared on Wikileaks dealt with the decision of the Somali Islamic Court regarding the execution of government officials.
Later, other secret information began to appear on the Assange resource: about military operations in Iran and Afghanistan, as well as secret documents of the Pentagon. In addition to documentary materials, videos were published of the shooting of civilians, which entailed an international scandal.
In October 2010, more than four hundred documents related to military operations in Iraq were uploaded to the site.
In 2012, Wikileaks published materials testifying to the real situation in Syria. The U.S. government accuses Bradley Manning of leaking information. There is speculation that while Manning was working as an analyst in Iraq, he brought a music disc to the office and recorded an archive of high-security documents on it, including video footage of the shelling of journalists. He subsequently transferred this disc to Assange for publication on Wikileaks. It is not known for certain whether this was actually so, because the resource team never reveals informants, worrying about their safety. It is practically impossible to track the source, since the information is duplicated at the same time on all servers of the resource before getting to the page in Wikileaks.
Assange Julian. Biography. Persecution
The administration of US President Barack Obama has severely criticized the owners of Wikileaks for publishing Syrian classified materials. For their own safety, the Assange team published on the website links to secret documents with a total of four hundred gigabytes, protecting them with a password. WikiLeaks announced that they will remove the protection, and the information will become known to the whole world if any of the key figures of the organization suffer.
With the growing popularity of the Wikileaks resource, interest in the identity of its founder on the part of special services also grew. In August 2010, Assange was accused of sexual harassment in Sweden, but the day after the publication of the “Afghan dossier” on Wikileaks, the charges were dropped.
In September of that year, the Swedish authorities again accused Assange of abortive rape. In November, a court ruled to arrest Julian, 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.
On December 7, Julian himself appeared at the station and was arrested. The reason for his arrest was a warrant issued by the Swedish prosecutor. Assange's lawyer explained the request for the extradition of his client for political reasons.
A week later, on December 14, Assange was released from custody after making a bail of 240 thousand pounds. Prior to the trial, which was to be held on February 6, 2011, Julian Assange was in London under a written undertaking not to leave the country.
The court's decision
In the end, a London court decided to extradite Julian to Sweden, despite the fact that Assange’s lawyers tried several times to appeal this decision, because he was never formally charged. The Swedish authorities say that Julian Assange just wants to interrogate and find out all the circumstances of the case. But the founder of Wikileaks 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, the accounts of all Wikilix employees on Facebook and Twitter were blocked. In September 2012, the United States declared Julian Assange an enemy of the country.
Political Asylum in Ecuador
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador in 2010 invited Assange to provide him with political asylum. In August 2012, he took advantage of their offer and took refuge in the embassy of this country in London. The police considered this a violation of the agreements and said that they would arrest Assange as soon as he left the embassy.
For a year and a half, Julian Assange has been at the Embassy of Ecuador in London. There he lives in a small room with a bed, bookshelves, a home-made shower, a round table, a computer, a UV lamp and a treadmill. Assange compares his habitation at the embassy with his stay at the space station. Julian compensates for the shortage of sunlight with an ultraviolet lamp and Vitamin D. Embassy staff and friends bring him food.
Julian Assange feels well today, works seventeen hours a day, practices on a treadmill, speaks to her like-minded people, and receives guests. But the British government has already flown a penny of 20 months of careful surveillance of Assange - taxpayers, his stay in the Embassy of Ecuador has already cost eight million dollars. It can be assumed that Assange will not come to Sweden voluntarily. And if he remains in the embassy until the statute of limitations of the claim (2022) expires, for the UK this could cost more than sixty million dollars.
Public reaction to the arrest of Julian Assange
Members of the Anonymous community, calling themselves “Enemies of the Wikileaks Enemies, ” reported on Twitter that they were taking responsibility for the cyber attacks of all who contributed in some way to the arrest of Julian Assange. Among the Internet resources that were subjected to cyber attacks were: Interpol website, the website of the government of Sweden, the USA, Australia and France, the Amazon.com platform, on whose servers Wikileaks worked for some time, and subsequently was evicted, payment systems PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, the website of the Swedish prosecutor's office and other resources and accounting records si all who participated or contributed to the arrest of Assange.
Autobiography of Julian Assange
According to the author, writing a book was a necessary measure in connection with the financial difficulties of his team. It was necessary to reimburse the huge expenses for the services of lawyers in the fight for justice. He expected that such a literary work would be expensive, and he was right. He managed to sell the rights to publish a book for a million pounds.
The autobiography, to the surprise of Julian himself, turned out to be very dramatic. When Julian Assange read the draft version of the book, he decided to cancel its publication - there was too much personal in it. The author went against the rules and said that he wanted to terminate the contract with the publisher, despite the fact that he had already been paid a rather big advance, which he also managed to spend. The book was already expected to be released in 38 countries. Therefore, the publisher’s leadership took a desperate step - to repay with the same coin. An autobiography of Julian Assange was published without his consent.
The film "Fifth Power"
Recently, a movie about the creator of Wikileaks, which was created by Entertainment Weekly, was released. Julian Assange and Daniel Domsheit-Berg, after familiarizing themselves with the script of the film, called her a frank, high-budget lie. According to them, such pictures are shot at the request of corrupt structures for a specific purpose and contain incorrect, distorted and dangerous information. In Fifth Power, Assange saw anti-Iranian propaganda. The film begins with a scene testifying to the development of nuclear weapons in Iran. Then the action is transferred to Cairo, where an Iranian nuclear scientist informs the 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 plays a major role in the film. In addition to him, such actors as Anthony Mackie, Daniel Bruhl, 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 a WikiLeaks hacker, Daniel Domstein-Berg. The director of the picture was the famous Bill Condon.
