Julian Assange spent his youth in Australia during the 1980s in a state of perpetual, chaotic motion. He moved more than two dozen times, jumped from school to school and was thrust, for a time, into what he called a New Age cult, before settling in Melbourne.
It was there, at age 16, that he adopted a calling: hacking. It would eventually place him on the brink of global disruption in an era of backlash against national security and the political establishment.
Assange, the 52-year-old founder of WikiLeaks, boarded a private plane from London this week for a long flight to a U.S. court in Saipan, where he pleaded guilty Wednesday to a single count of illegally obtaining and disseminating national security information. information.
A brief procedure at a remote location put an end to a long legal saga.
For a case that attracted attention for more than a decade, its final agony unfolded quickly and in relative obscurity.
Assange, dressed in a black suit, pleaded guilty in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the US commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific. He had refused to appear in court in the continental United States and asked that the hearing be held at the remote court outpost, which is near his native Australia.
He carefully answered questions from U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona and defended his actions, describing himself as a journalist seeking information from sources, a task he said he considered constitutionally protected.
“I think the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction to each other,” he said, “but I accept that it would be difficult to win such a case given all the circumstances.”
Shortly after his statement, Judge Manglona sentenced him to a sentence he had already served in Belmarsh Prison in Britain.
Assange will return to Australia.
Assange is expected to be freed immediately, after the US Justice Department accepted the five years he has already served in Britain. He will then fly back to Australia, according to his wife.
There is at least one more debt to pay: $520,000 to the Australian government for the chartered flight home, an amount he hopes to raise through crowdfunding.
It is unclear what Assange, who suffered bouts of depression and a minor stroke during his imprisonment, will do next.
But he will be free to move around again, ending a period of confinement that lasted nearly a dozen years, first in self-exile in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, then in prison after being charged in the United States and taken into custody by British authorities.
He was a bold teenage hacker.
If the past is any guide, Assange may not remain inactive for long.
By his late teens, Assange was, by his own account, Australia’s most accomplished hacker, claiming to have breached thousands of systems, from a local telecommunications commission to Pentagon servers, using the alter ego Mendax, among other aliases. . (As a teenager, he adopted the creed “splendide mendax,” which is Latin for “brilliantly deceitful.”)
Assange has said his goal has always been to publicly share important information hidden by big governments and big companies, without damaging the systems it infiltrated. And in the early 1990s, Assange and a group of hackers began systematically attacking systems run by what he called “the US military-industrial complex.”
In 1994, he had his first serious brush with the law, facing a 31-count charge for hacking into servers owned by Telecom Australia. Assange, facing 290 years in prison, fell into a deep depression, wandering in the desert near Melbourne and sleeping outdoors.
He eventually pleaded guilty and was not sentenced to prison, but the experience was a harrowing one and strengthened his political resolve to attack institutions he believed violated individual liberties, including the National Security Agency.
WikiLeaks presents itself as a beacon of transparency.
Assange and a group of like-minded activists, hackers, programmers and academics founded WikiLeaks in 2006, with the stated mission of breaking through the veil of secrecy that shields powerful cliques in public and private life. He defined his role as a digital Robin Hood, freeing “wanted documents” from captivity in secret computer networks.
In its early years, WikiLeaks worked closely with major news organizations, uncovering details of extrajudicial killings in Kenya, China’s crackdown on dissidents, and possible financial corruption in the United States and Peru, among many others.
The success of the group made its founder famous. Assange was tireless, brash and itinerant, traveling from country to country to recruit volunteers, court potential leakers and trumpet the virtues of extreme institutional transparency.
As the 2010s dawned, Assange increasingly set his sights on the United States, simultaneously earning him global recognition as a free speech warrior and ultimately a half-decade behind English bars.
WikiLeaks would go on to publish reams of secrets about US military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as confidential cables shared between diplomats. During the 2016 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks published thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, leading to revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
He was fleeing repeatedly.
At the time, Assange was already on the run and heading to London after Swedish authorities accused him of sexual assault. (He has denied the charges, saying they were a covert attempt to extradite him to the United States. The case was dropped in late 2019.)
In 2012, Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador and moved into a 300-square-foot space in the country’s embassy in London.
In 2019, a federal grand jury indicted Assange on 18 counts related to WikiLeaks’ dissemination of a wide range of national security documents. They included a trove of materials sent to the organization by Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who provided information on military planning and operations nearly a decade earlier.
By then, Assange had exhausted his stay. British police arrested him and transferred him to Belmarsh, where he was confined to a cell for 23 hours a day. According to an account published in The Nation this year, he ate alone from a tray, surrounded by 232 books, and was given just one hour a day to exercise in the prison yard.
A secret hearing paved the way for his release.
In the end, the choreographed multinational dance that led to his release took place behind closed doors, at a secret bail hearing in London last Thursday, British officials said.
While many of Assange’s supporters lamented the requirement that he plead guilty to any crime, he seemed relieved to be free, if images posted by his wife and friends on social media are any guide.
At least he’s back on the move.
Damian Cave contributed with reports.
