Hero to zero

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Hero to zero

Saturday, 13 April 2019 | Pioneer

Hero to zero

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange revealed US secrets for the world to see. After the arrest, what’s next for him?

In 2010, Wikileaks dumped a huge amount of United States (US) diplomatic cables, some dating back decades, onto its website. These documents were leaked to the site by a US soldier now called Chelsea Manning. Many of the leaked diplomatic cables were mundane, others revealed American duplicity and yet more, some pertaining to India, revealed how citizens were revealing their national secrets to the US. In short, they offered an intriguing insight into the world of diplomacy and espionage. Thereafter, the charismatic founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, who had crowd-funded his website, used the proceeds to try and find more secret documents that rich and powerful individuals and big governments did not want the public at large to find out. To many, he was a hero and in 2010 he claimed the global spotlight.

The leak obviously had a negative impact on American diplomacy and Assange was right to believe that the US would want ‘revenge.’ Meanwhile, Manning was court-martialled and imprisoned by the US and while the narrative has been made that he was a confused young man, who was taken advantage of by Assange, he did face some punishment. Assange, on the other hand, managed to avoid extradition to Sweden, not for the diplomatic cable dump but to face sexual assault charges. He claims he did so to avoid the Swedes potentially extraditing him to the US but his refusal to face those charges lost him much goodwill, as did the revelation that Wikileaks was in touch with Donald Trump’s campaign, specifically his son, during the US presidential election of 2016. This was possibly in the hope that Assange could win a pardon for Trump if he was elected, but that did not happen. While Sweden dropped the charges after the Wikileaks founder ran away and hid in the Ecuadorian embassy, one of the alleged victims has apparently asked for him to be charged again. The Americans are booking him with a fairly light charge of computer hacking to gain access to protected information that will possibly lead to a maximum five-year sentence. Assange might still be a hero to some but US law is clear about computer hacking and he might pay the price for his information warfare. More importantly, one hopes that his alleged victims in Sweden get a chance to prove or disprove their cases against him, because on that front Assange is nothing but a fugitive from the law.

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