Julian Assange: Daring Revealer

GABRIEL SHIPTON, who—along with father John and sister-in-law Stella—had campaigned tirelessly against the American effort to put his brother Julian Assange on trial on US soil, has called the WikiLeaks founder-publisher’s return to native Australia an “incredible moment that felt surreal and overwhelming”.

It has been a long saga and a determined campaign involving countries and
committed volunteers, including celebrities and even crypto millionaires. It came a long 12 years after Assange took shelter at the Ecuador embassy in London to dodge arrest warrants, and five years after he was kidnapped from the embassy and lodged in the high-security Belmarsh prison in the UK. The kidnapping and jailing went in tandem with American plans to have Assange extradited to face trial in the US. The 52-year-old has finally walked out a free man following a deal.

Assange has been a highly polarising figure. The much-publicised trial, which has now come to a close with him being freed after pleading guilty in a court on the US territory of Saipan to one count of violating US espionage law, was widely seen as an attempt to criminalise investigative journalism. In his 2022 book The Trial of Julian Assange, author Nils Melzer, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, said, “The motive behind the aggressive persecution of Assange is always the same: fear. Fear of the WikiLeaks methodology and its proliferation; fear of transparency, truth and new revelations; fear of democratic control and accountability; and above all, fear of losing power.”

Assange, who was born in Australia, has won a raft of journalism awards over the past two decades. He shot to the limelight in 2006 after he founded WikiLeaks, a media platform that encouraged potential whistleblowers to share classified documents for publication.

As a young man, Assange, who had studied physics and worked as a computer security consultant, had been a hacker who—using his nickname Mendax—infiltrated the security systems of the Pentagon and NASA. He had also been charged with cybercrime. He later co-wrote a bestselling book with Dr Suelette Dreyfus titled Underground on the lives of young hackers of the 1980s and the 1990s.

Under his leadership, WikiLeaks went on to publish classified documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US diplomatic cables, Guantanamo Bay documents, and other explosive leaks that belied American public posturing on those issues. While he was at the Ecuador embassy, WikiLeaks published documents according to which the CIA planned to kill or kidnap Assange. The most damning of them all was the “Collateral Murder” video. It showed the events of July 12, 2007, in a residential area of Baghdad, Iraq, where indiscriminate firing from a US combat helicopter killed many people, including a Reuters staff member and those who came to rescue him. The video was published in 2010.

The trial of Assange had divided nations and people over his journalistic practice. Nonetheless, he changed journalism. Dr Suelette Dreyfus, his collaborator, argues that one proof of his immense contribution to journalism is “in how so many traditional media outlets have now copied him”. She adds, “They run anonymous digital drop boxes. They have employed data science journalists to find the hidden stories in large datasets. They have started to embrace secure communication technologies to improve confidentiality with sources. Imitation is the highest form of compliment.”

Stefania Maurizi, the only international journalist to have partnered with WikiLeaks in all of its major projects since 2009, told Open that governments that accused Assange of putting lives at risk haven’t found a single person who was killed, injured or jailed because of WikiLeaks. “So, this is a campaign. There was the rape allegation in which there were no charges against him. Then there was the Russia campaign. Numerous disinformation campaigns followed to undermine WikiLeaks,” she notes, adding that during the trial of US military whistleblower Chelsea Manning who had passed on many classified documents to Assange, the head of the taskforce assigned to study the impact of Manning’s leak, Brigadier General Robert Carr, had testified that he was unable to find that anyone was hurt from her disclosure.

Assange had earlier been convicted by a grand jury in the US for 175 years in prison over publishing disclosures obtained from Manning. Meanwhile, Assange, who has two children with Stella, is also the recipient of the Sydney Peace Foundation’s gold medal, an honour that previously had gone to the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, for his “exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights”.

fugitiveJulian AssangeMendaxNils MelzerStefania MauriziwhistleblowerWikiLeaks