The Remarkable Case of Julian Assange

When is a hacker not a hacker?

If the earth continues for another thousand years and if some unfortunate individual has to write the story of the 21^st century, I do not think the leading figure in this story is going to be a president, a king, a pope, a scientist, an astronaut, a politician, an engineer, or a researcher. It won’t be a writer or a musician and certainly not an actor. I think it will be Julian Assange. He may be the most consequential person to live in my entire lifetime.

A native-born Australian, Julian Assange is languishing in a British prison right now and there is a chance the United States will extradite him in order to give him the death penalty. Despite these serious charges, the issue in the Assange case is whether or not what Julian Assange was criminal or just good journalism. He stands literally at the nexus of journalism and terrorism. No wonder so many establishment figures do not like him.

Julian Assange could be depicted as the middle ground of a Venn diagram between arch-villain and super-hero. Is he the man who speaks truth to power? Or the spy who revealed precious secrets to our enemies? Is he a terrorist or a journalist? And, what’s the difference between those two occupations?

With his charm, wit, intelligence, striking good looks, and signature thick silver hair, Assange first rose to prominence or infamy as the computer hacker known as Mendax. (We mere mortals will not know Julian’s erudite reference, and that is part of the Assange charm; he knows vastly more than we do. Mendax comes from the classical author Horace and it is a truncation of his phrase “splendide mendax” or noble mendacity.) By age 16, Australian police were already raiding the Assange home to confiscate young Julian’s computer; there were suggestions he had stolen some funds from Citibank. No charges were ever filed but high school student Assange learned a valuable lesson. In his own words, “It might be wise to be a bit more discreet.”

By age 17, Assange had worked out his ethical code. Renowned as a world-class hacker, he never damaged or crashed systems and he often shared information he found. One biographer called Assange an “ethical computer hacker.” That same year, he had successfully hacked the Overseas Telecommunications Commission’s mainframe computers in Australia. He was a hacker autodidact who later teamed up with other hackers.

By age 21, Assange and some compatriots had gained “backdoor” access to some U.S. military computers and maintained this access undetected for two years. The list of Assange’s adventures are too long to be listed here, but he once commented, “I’ve been reading generals’ emails since I was 17.”

Australia realized this hacker-kid could be of service, and at times, he was. When asked by authorities in Australia to help reduce the publication and distribution of child pornography, Assange complied and did extensive work for no pay to take down nefarious networks. (Assange was never an informer, but he would hack.) In another case, it is reported that Assange worked with authorities to remove a how-to book on the internet about making bombs.

In 2006, Assange founded the “document archive” site called Wikileaks. It is run by Sunshine Press, a nonprofit media organization, and it is most famous for publishing leaked documents that embarrass governments around the world. In fact, it is his work with Wikileaks that got him in the mess he’s in now.

Wikileaks has been in operation for about 17 years now. You can visit Wikileaks by clicking here. Bear in mind that with Wikileaks, you are reading raw information. Hillary’s emails are there (at least some of them) and a lot of them are boring and not particularly relevant. So becoming a denizen of Wikileaks is a bit of an acquired taste. It has thousands upon thousands of pages.

The big question with Wikileaks is whether a media organization has the right to publish secret government materials. Newspapers do it all of the time. Our government leaks like a sieve (remember, even the Supreme Court leaked the Dobbs decision on abortion). But what happens if someone else does it? Is Julian Assange fighting for truth in a corrupt world, or is he a spy trying to harm America by telling people secret stuff? 

The most important legal issue is this: if Julian Assange is arrested and sentenced as a spy, how is The New York Times or The Washington Post or any media outlet any different?

The next character in this strange story is Army Private Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning. (Manning joined the Army as a man and later transitioned, so Bradley and Chelsea Manning are the same person.) The story begins when Oklahoma-born Manning was a lonely young private in the Army with mad computer skills stationed in Afghanistan and later Iraq. These wars confused Manning’s moral compass.

In 2007, Private Manning got hold a horrifying video showing a U.S. military crew in a helicopter shooting and killing Iraqi civilians and a journalist from Reuters. These soldiers also fired on a bus trying to rescue the injured; there were children on the bus. That’s not all Manning found, but it’s the most famous. Manning tried to interest the mainstream media in this video of a war crime, but The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian would not even return his calls. Then he called Wikileaks and wound up talking to a man who would later reveal himself as Julian Assange.

Assange not only was willing to discuss the matter with Manning, in 2010, he published the video and many other leaks from Manning. Some of Manning’s finds hat are called the Afghan War Logs on Wikileaks.

Manning wound up getting arrested and sentenced to 35 years (Obama commuted the sentence after about seven years). Another arrest followed in 2019 on contempt charges for refusing to testify against Wikileaks before a Grand Jury, but Manning was released in 2020.

Around this time, Julian Assange started to live like the Raymond Reddington character of The Blacklist. He maintained no permanent address, traveled under assumed names, used only encrypted telephones, and sometimes slept in public places like subways. He was not being paranoid. His life became schizophrenic; he was a rockstar hacker and a wanted criminal. A celebrity and a wanted man.

In Sweden, Arrange was detained by police, at first on charges of rape, which was later downgraded to sexual molestation. He was told on September 27, 2010 that he could leave Sweden if he wanted while charges were pending; he flew to the United Kingdom and Sweden arrested him later that day. In Sweden, it is legal to arrest a person who is not there. It is called “arresting in absence.” This whole stunt—and it gets complicated—never resulted in any real charges (it was completely dropped in 2015) but it accomplished what it was designed to do. It made Assange a wanted man. Interpol issues a “red warrant” for him which made him a wanted man in every country on earth. Nobody wanted Assange for rape, they wanted to curtail his movements and keep him in hiding. This began the decade-long persecution of Julian Assange.

And it worked. By 2011, the United States got in on the fun and made Assange a “malicious foreign actor.” However, the legal case got stymied because it was hard to differentiate what Assange did from what journalists did. In other words, if it was illegal to publish official documents… then wouldn’t the United States have to shut down The New York Times, too? While Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to prosecute Julian Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917, then-President Obama hesitated. Although Obama never pardoned Assange, he recognized early on that the legal case against Assange lacked merit.

Then comes the famous Democratic National Convention (DNC) hacks in 2016. According to Hillary and DNC spokesperson Donna Brazile, the Russians hacked the DNC computers and gave the information to Wikileaks, which published them. Hillary did her best to pin “the hack” on the Russians, arguing that the Russians did it to hurt her campaign and help Trump ascend to the White House.

Julian Assange said that the Russians were not the source of the DNC hacks but stopped short of naming the real source.

The DNC leaker may have been a disillusioned young man named Seth Rich working for the Democrat Party; Rich had access to the files and could have downloaded them and given them to Wikileaks. An intern at the DNC, Seth Rich was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter. Even from his lowly intern-level perch at the DNC, Rich could see that Bernie was being railroaded and forced out in order to advance Hillary’s nomination. In other words, Seth Rich had motive and opportunity. We may never know if Seth Rich downloaded the DNC files or not, because he was murdered on a D.C. street late at night in what was called a “botched robbery” on July 10, 2016. It was seriously botched because Rich was shot, no one saw the robber, but the shooter did not bother to take his wallet or his expensive watch. Seth Rich died in the hospital of his injuries that same day.

Wikileaks published the DNC emails. Was Seth Rich the leaker? Assange never said he was or wasn’t, but did remark that people who leak things take risks, which he found very concerning. Assange also offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer, which was never claimed.

Now go back to 2012. With a little help from his friends, Assange asked the nation of Ecuador for asylum and they set him up in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. The reason Ecuador granted asylum was that the government of Ecuador believed there was a “secret investigation” going on against Assange in the United States that put his life at risk. Although promised indefinite residency in the Embassy and permanent asylum, these agreements was later revoked in 2019 when the Ecuadoran government changed hands. Remember, Assange had never left England so when Ecuador gave him the boot, he was kicked out to a London street and the British arrested him toute-de-suite. He barely got a breath of British air before he was whisked off to prison, where he has been ever since. The United States has cooked up 17 espionage charges against Assange. Some of these charges could carry the death penalty.

And that’s where we are right now. Assange is still in British prison and the United States wants to bring him here. The matter is stalled in the court system since the High Court in London wants more detailed information before they can decide if they are willing to ship Julian to the States. A decision could come down any day now. In fact, it’s already a couple of days late.

Julian Assange has an interesting array of supporters and detractors. Among those who want him arrested, imprisoned, if not worse, are Hillary Clinton, Jeff Sessions, Joe Biden, and Mitch McConnell. When he was President, Obama pursued the case against Assange but backed off when he determined what Assange did could rightly be described as nothing more than really aggressive journalism. Trump has been more ambivalent about Assange but has recently stated that when he was President, he considered—but ultimately did not grant—a pardon to Assange. (Tulsi Gabbard said she pushed then-President Trump to pardon Assange.) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has made a campaign promise that, if elected, he would pardon both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden (a whistleblower on U.S. national security now living in Russia).

Some have waffled over the years. Sarah Palin was originally in favor of prosecuting Assange as a spy, but now has admitted that was a mistake and favors a full pardon.

Of course, Joe Biden is currently using all the tools he can find to extradite Assange for full prosecution, although some in his inner circle argue this is a mistake. Biden may even be hoping for the death penalty (and if the United States says it will seek the death penalty against Assange, that may quash the extradition since Britain will not extradite people if they are in jeopardy of being executed). One good argument in favor of pardoning Assange is the fact that Biden does not want to do it, and he’s wrong about everything.

Just to see how Julian Assange may be the most remarkable figure in politics right now—he has brought together bipartisan teams of supporters such as Representatives Jim McGovern (Dem, MA) and Thomas Massie (Rep, KY), who are trying to get others in Congress to formally urge Biden to back off the case. And in one amazing bit of unity, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined sides with Marjorie Taylor Green to fight Assange’s extradition. AOC and MTG … could anyone else have done this besides Assange?

As a matter of editorial policy, we hate to agree with Roger Waters on anything, but Ricochet Cafe favors a complete pardon for Assange, too. Assange’s many leaks have revealed evidence of real war crimes. None of the people who committed actual crimes have ever faced arrest, much less prosecution. It’s apparently acceptable to commit war crimes, just not to expose them.