Blog 1:Julian Assange

Julian Assange

Class Discussion

I'm ashamed to say that before the conversation we had in class I had no idea who Julian Assange was. I don't know if this was because of a lacking on my part or just that the media sources I have been visiting haven't been covering the situation well, but after the class conversation, I took it upon myself to learn more and better educate myself on a situation that is heavily integrated into the career I wish to one day be apart of.

Who Is Julian Assange

For starters who is Assange, and what did he do exactly that has caused him to flee to another country? 

Reuters put together a very nice timeline of Assange's life, giving a brief summary of major events that happened along with the year they occurred, but I wish to dive a little deeper.

According to an Article on Britannica, Assange was born on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. Since he was young he had an “uncanny aptitude” with computers and possessed hacking skills that allowed him to hack into a plethora of highly secured systems, for example NASA and the Pentagon, as a teenager. 

However, according to an article on Biography.com, it was when he hacked into the master terminal for Nortel, a telecommunications company, in 1991 that he got into real trouble for the first time. Assange was charged with 31 counts of cybercrime in 1991 and he pleaded guilty to most of them, however, because a judge ruled that his actions were “the result of youthful inquisitiveness”  he only received a small fine as punishment.

Assange would go on to pursue a mathematics degree at the University of Melbourne, but would ultimately drop out and leave the university before completing his study for “moral reasons” - those being his displeasure with other students working on computer projects for the military according to the Biography.com article.

In 2006, Assange began working on WikiLeaks, a site with the purpose of creating a platform where individuals could leak/expose sensitive information that the public wasn’t supposed to know. Some of these leaks included, documents from inside the Scientology movement, intimate details about the U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, and emails from the 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Beyond this, due to another legal case surrounding sexual assault claims against Assange in Sweeden causing there to be a Warrant out for his arrest. According to the Guardian, Assange feared that if he were extradited to Sweden the next step might be him being extradited to the United States, so he could be persecuted for WikiLeaks’ publication of the secret US government files. After many extradition hearings, the courts decided that Assange would be extradited to Sweden, which caused him to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.

He would stay there seven years after entering the embassy in 2012, only leaving it after the country ended his asylum. He would be sentenced to 50 weeks in prison because of him skipping bail and failing to appear in court, according to Reuters. Pending his extradition hearings for both Sweeden and the United States, who on June 11, 2019, officially asked the British government to extradite Assange to their country because of his violation of the espionage law as well as conspiring to hack government computers. Currently, Assange is being held in the HM Prison Belmarsh in London.

The Verdict, at least in my opinion.

The question is, should Assange be extradited back to the United States. There is much debate circling around if what Assange did. Some say it was in fact an act of transparency, informing American’s on what was happening behind the scenes in their government and supplying them with the knowledge their country was trying to keep from them. Others argue that it was an act of treason with the sole purpose of undermining the government and fostering distrust between officials and the average citizen, as well as spilling sensitive country secrets that could be detrimental to the security of the USA.

Personally, I think what he did was, while dangerous, something that needed to be done. People should know what their government is doing, and what Assange exposed was some startling actions and knowledge that needed to be brought to light. Did he go through a very illegal route to acquire this knowledge, yes? Should he be punished for the process he took together this information - possibly. But being punished for exposing the things he did that I do not think is right.

One video I watched that really helped me feel informed about the whole scenario was the 60 Minutes interview from 2011.