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Now that the controversy surrounding Julian Assange has died down, and he is back in Australia after pleading guilty to breaching the U.S. Espionage Act, it may be useful to look more closely at the man who has spent the last 12 years trying to avoid the legal systems of Sweden, Britain and the United States.

Assange acquired international celebrity status when, as publisher of WikiLeaks, in 2010 he published hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. government documents that he had received from a disgruntled low-level U.S. Army clerk, Bradley Manning, about the U.S. prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and intelligence files dealing with Washington’s relations with its allies.

Assange’s supporters, particularly human-rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson, who helped secure the agreement for his release and return to Australia, have argued that Assange is simply a journalist, doing what all journalists do. It follows that charging him with a crime is stifling journalism from exposing secrets that ought to be out in the open.

However, Assange was not charged over his journalism. He was accused of receiving stolen goods (in this case, government documents), and hacking into government servers in order to steal files.

Illegal

Regardless of whether Assange is a journalist or not, both of these actions are illegal in almost all countries, including Australia, Britain and the United States.

In Australia, for example, the Australian Institute of Criminology says that it is an offence to access “data that is subject to an access control restriction (Commonwealth, ACT, NSW, Victoria).”

More serious offences include selling stolen information and inserting computer viruses, ransomware or spyware into networks.

Interestingly, Assange was involved in computer hacking long before the WikiLeaks saga. According to his biography on Wikipedia, in the late 1980s, he had become a skilled hacker, getting the password to access the server of the Overseas Telecommunications Commission, which was ultimately privatised and became Optus.

The Sydney Morning Herald described him later (2015) as “one of Australia’s most notorious hackers”.

At about the same time, Assange formed a group called the International Subversives. This group targeted MILNET, a data network used by the U.S. military. He later claimed the group “had control of it for two years”.

Following an Australian Federal Police investigation, he was charged in 1994 with 31 counts of crimes related to hacking, including defrauding Telecom Australia, fraudulent use of a telecommunications network, obtaining access to information, erasing data, and altering data.

In December 1996, he pled guilty to 24 hacking charges including breaches of the Crimes Act, and fraudulent use of a telecommunications network. A judge fined him $2,100, and put him on a $5,000 good-behaviour bond, because of his disturbed childhood and lack of malicious or mercenary intent.

After bringing together people involved in publishing leaked information, he was one of the founders of WikiLeaks in 2006, which had good access to the media, and became a clearing house for people who wanted to get global coverage for leaked and hacked information.

American Accomplice

Bradley Manning supplied huge quantities of U.S. military and diplomatic documents to Assange that were subsequently published on WikiLeaks, causing immense embarrassment to successive U.S. administrations.

Manning was later cashiered from the U.S. Army, dishonourably discharged, and sentenced to a lengthy term of imprisonment.

In one of his last actions before leaving office in 2017, U.S. President Barack Obama gave Manning a presidential pardon, meaning that he was freed from prison immediately. Why President Obama did this has never been satisfactorily explained.

In the meantime, Assange had sought diplomatic immunity in the London Embassy of Ecuador. Ecuador was then led by a left-wing politician whose hatred for America was visceral. Assange lived in the Embassy until 2019, when Ecuador grew tired of his delinquent behaviour and revoked his asylum.

He was subsequently arrested by British police and carried from the Embassy to a British prison where he fought U.S. attempts to extradite him to face charges of conspiracy to commit computer crimes and breaching the Espionage Act, through his collaboration with Manning.

In light of the fact that Manning had been given a presidential pardon, it was not surprising that his collaborator, Julian Assange, was offered a plea bargain by the U.S. Justice Department, with the clear support of both the Biden Administration and the Australian Government.

He pled guilty to 24 breaches of the Espionage Act, and was sentenced to 62 months in prison, which coincides exactly with the time he had been in detention in Britain, after his expulsion from the Embassy.

Subsequent attempts by his supporters to paint him as a victim of a vast American conspiracy have fallen on deaf ears.

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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.