Julian Assange spent his youth in Australia during the 1980s in chaotic and constant circumstances. He moved more than two dozen times, bounced from school to school and was driven, for a time, to what he called a New Age cult, before settling in Melbourne.
There, at the age of 16, he received his calling: hacking. Ultimately, they will be on the edge of global disruption in an era of counterattacks against national security and political institutions.
Mr. Assange, the 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder, boarded a private jet this week from London for the long flight to a US courtroom in Saipan, where he pleaded guilty on Wednesday to one count of illegal acquisition and endangering national security. information.
The brief proceedings at the remote outpost cap a long legal saga.
For a case that attracted attention for more than ten years, the last throes played out quickly and in relative obscurity.
Mr Assange, dressed in a black suit, made his plea in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific. He refused to appear in court on the US mainland and requested that the trial be held at the court’s remote outpost, which is close to Australia.
He responded cautiously to questions from U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona and defended his actions, describing himself as a journalist seeking information from sources, a job he said he considers constitutionally protected.
“I believe the First Amendment and the Espionage Act conflict with each other,” he said, “but I accept that it would be difficult to win a case like this because of all the circumstances.”
Shortly after his plea, Judge Manglona sentenced him to time served in Belmarsh Prison in England.
Mr Assange will return to Australia.
Mr Assange is expected to be released immediately, after the US Department of Justice agreed to accept the five years he has served in Britain. He will then return to Australia, his wife said.
There is at least one more debt: $520,000 to the Australian government for a home charter flight, an amount expected to be raised through crowdsourcing.
It is unclear what will happen to Mr Assange, who has suffered from depression and a minor stroke during his imprisonment.
But he would be free to move again, ending a period of confinement that lasted about twelve years, first in self-isolation at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, then in prison after he was indicted in the United States and detained. by British authorities.
He is a daring teenage hacker.
If the past is any guide, Mr. Assange may not be unemployed for long.
In his late teens, Mr. Assange, by his own account, was Australia’s most successful hacker, claiming to have breached thousands of systems, from the local telecommunications commission to servers at the Pentagon, using the alter ego Mendax, among other aliases. . (As a young man, he adopted the credo of “good mendax,” Latin for “unrighteous.”)
Mr Assange said his aim had always been to share important information hidden by big government and big business, without compromising the hacked systems. And in the early 1990s, Mr. Assange and a group of hackers began to systematically target systems operated by the so-called “US military industrial complex.”
In 1994, he had his first serious brush with the law, facing a 31-count indictment for hacking into servers owned by Telecom Australia. Mr Assange, who faces 290 years in prison, fell into a deep depression, wandering the desert near Melbourne and sleeping outdoors.
In the end, he entered a guilty plea and received no jail time. But the experience was a sobering ordeal and strengthened political resolve to attack institutions believed to infringe on individual liberties, including the US National Security Agency.
WikiLeaks established itself as a beacon of transparency.
Mr. Assange and a group of like-minded activists, hackers, programmers and academics founded WikiLeaks in 2006, with a stated mission to destroy the secrecy that protects the powerful cabal in private and public life. He defined his role as a digital Robin Hood, freeing “tortured documents” from captivity in secret computer networks.
In its early years, WikiLeaks worked with major news organizations, uncovering details of extrajudicial killings in Kenya, China’s crackdown on dissidents, and possible financial corruption in the US and Peru, among others.
The success of the group made its founder famous. Mr. Assange is tireless, brazen and on the move, traveling from country to country to recruit volunteers, court would-be leaks and proclaim the virtues of extreme institutional transparency.
As the 2010s dawned, Mr. Assange increasingly set his sights on the United States, where he would gain worldwide acclaim as a free-speech fighter and, ultimately, half a decade behind British bars.
WikiLeaks will publish many secrets about American military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as secret cables shared with diplomats. During the 2016 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, leading to revelations that embarrassed Hillary Clinton’s party and campaign.
He ran away again and again.
By then, Mr. Assange had fled, to London after Swedish authorities charged him with sexual assault. (He denied the charges, saying they were trying to extradite him to the United States. The case was dropped in late 2019.)
In 2012, Mr. 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 Mr. Assange on 18 charges related to WikiLeaks’ disclosure of various national security documents. It includes many materials sent to the organization by Chelsea Manning, a former US Army intelligence analyst who provided information on military planning and operations nearly a decade earlier.
By this time, Mr. Assange had worn out his welcome. He was arrested by British police and transferred to Belmarsh, where he was held in a cell for 23 hours a day. According to an account published in The Nation this year, he eats food from his own tray, is surrounded by 232 books and is only allowed one day to exercise in the prison yard.
Secret hearings pave the way for acquittal.
In the end, the described multinational dance that led to his release took place behind closed doors, at a secret bail hearing in London last Thursday, British officials said.
Although many of Mr. Assange’s supporters are clamoring for his admission of any guilt, he appears to be relieved to be free, if pictures posted by his wife and friends on social media are any guide.
He is, at least, back in motion.
Damien Cave contribute reports.