Views on Julian Assange have been given by a number of public figures, including journalists, well-known whistleblowers, activists and world leaders. They range from laudatory statements to calls for his execution. Various journalists and free speech advocates have praised Assange for his work and dedication to free speech. [1] [2] [3] Some former colleagues have criticised his work habits, editorial decisions and personality[ cleanup needed ]. [4] [5] [6] [7] After the 2016 US Presidential election, there was debate about his motives and his ties to Russia. [8] [9] After Assange's arrest in 2019, journalists and commenters debated whether Assange was a journalist. [10] [11] [12] [13] Assange has won multiple awards for journalism and publishing.
In 1997, Assange created the deniable encryption program Rubberhose as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field. [14] Science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling was impressed with the program and wrote that he thought Assange knew he would attract the attention of the authorities and had "figured out that the cops would beat his password out of him, and he needed some code-based way to finesse his own human frailty". [15]
In 2010 Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange was a kindred spirit who disclosed information "on a scale that might really make a difference" [1] and "has shown much better judgment with respect to what he has revealed than the people who kept those items secret inside the government." [17] [18]
During an argument in an internal chat, Domscheit-Berg told Assange he was failing as a leader. [19] [20] [21] After Assange told him he should quit, former WikiLeaks member Herbert Snorrason questioned his judgment. [1] Other departing members who challenged his leadership style included Birgitta Jonsdottir, who acknowledged his importance to the organisation. [1]
In November 2010, an individual from the office of the President of Russia suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. [22] [23] In December 2010 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who was then the President of Brazil, said "They have arrested him and I don't hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression". Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, asked at a press conference "Why is Mr. Assange in prison? Is this democracy?" [24] [21] In the same month Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, described his activities as "illegal" [25] but the Australian Federal Police said he had not broken Australian law. [26] Joe Biden, the vice-president of the United States, was asked whether he saw Assange as closer to a high-tech terrorist than to whistleblower Ellsberg. Biden responded that he "would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers". [27]
American politicians Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin each either referred to Assange as "a high-tech terrorist" or suggested that through publishing US diplomatic traffic he was engaged in terrorism. [28] [29] [30] Other American and Canadian politicians and media personalities including Tom Flanagan, [31] [32] and Mike Huckabee called for his assassination or execution. [33]
Journalists at The Guardian , The Daily Beast , and Salon wrote that Assange is not a journalist, [34] [35] [36] while other journalists at Salon wrote that he is. [37] [38] Italian Rolling Stone magazine called Assange "the person who best embodied a rock'n'roll behaviour" during 2010, describing him a cross between a James Bond villain, a Marvel superhero and a character from The Matrix films. It hailed him as "the exterminator of secrets held by the world's great powers". [39]
In his 2011 memoir Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website, Domscheit-Berg criticised Assange's character, his attitude towards women, and his handling of the "Collateral Murder" video clip. He wrote that Assange had lied to The New Yorker about decrypting the video clip, and had refused to reimburse WikiLeaks' staffers who worked on the project. [4] Domscheit-Berg described Assange as "freethinking", "energetic" and "brilliant" as well as "paranoid", "power-obsessed" and "monomaniacal". [5] [40] In March 2011, Australian author Robert Manne wrote that Assange was "one of the best-known and most-respected human beings on earth". [41] In September 2011, the Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde made a joint statement that they condemned and deplored the decision by Julian Assange to publish the unredacted state department cables and WikiLeaks insiders including Birgitta Jonsdottir criticised Assange's handling of the moral issue of the Afghan War Diary and "dictatorial tendencies" inside WikiLeaks. [41] [6] The New York Times reporters "came to think of Assange as smart and well-educated, extremely adept technologically, but arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous." [42]
Writing in the MIT Technology Review , Jason Pontin predicted in early 2011 that "Assange has declared himself the state’s enemy and he will, in all likelihood, be comprehensively destroyed. Wikileaks will vanish. There will be collateral damage to the press and our civil liberties. But the technology of Wikileaks, once imagined, cannot be forgotten and is easily imitated". [15]
In November 2011 Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, said he supported Assange "in terms of the manner in which he is delivering us an opportunity to talk about really important stuff. I think it's important that we are encouraged to discuss secrecy in our society. It's good for us". [43] In July 2012, Smith offered his residence in Norfolk for Assange to continue WikiLeaks' operations while in the UK. Smith told the press it was not about whether Assange was right or wrong for what he had done with WikiLeaks, it was about "standing up to the bully" and "whether our country, in these historic times, really was the tolerant, independent, and open place I had been brought up to believe it was and feel that it needs to be". [43] [44]
In diplomatic cables from 2011 and 2012, Australian diplomats dismissed claims that the US investigation of Assange was politically motivated. The cables also revealed that the embassy saw complaints about threats to Assange as part of a media campaign "to set the scene for a possible political exception to extradition". [45]
In April 2012, interviewed on Assange's television show World Tomorrow , Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa praised WikiLeaks and told his host "Cheer up! Cheer up! Welcome to the club of the persecuted!" [46] That October, Andy Greenberg said The Architect "sees Assange as driven by his ego and there were points when he felt like Assange was not as focused about the release of significant information as he was on breaking records, releasing leaks that were bigger than the last one." [47]
In 2012 Bob Beckel called for Assange's assassination, [48] and in 2013, Michael Grunwald echoed the call, though Grunwald later apologised for this, saying, "It was a dumb tweet. I'm sorry. I deserve the backlash". [49] [50] In April 2013, filmmaker Oliver Stone stated that "Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept." [51] In 2013, Jemima Khan wrote that when dealing with Assange, "pundits on both the left and the right have become more interested in tribalism than truth. The attacks on him by his many critics in the press have been virulent and highly personal." [7] Vivienne Westwood criticised Khan for ending her support for Assange. [52] [7] [53] Khan wrote:
"As editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Assange had created a transparency mechanism to hold governments and corporations to account. I abhor lies and WikiLeaks exposed the most dangerous lies of all – those told to us by our elected governments. WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes, torture and cover-ups. ... If Assange is prosecuted in the US for espionage, I suspect even his most disenchanted former supporters will take to the barricades in his defence. The list of alienated and disaffected allies is long: some say they fell out over redactions, some over broken deals, some over money, some over ownership and control. The roll-call includes Assange's earliest WikiLeaks collaborators, Daniel Domscheit-Berg and "The Architect", the anonymous technical whizz behind much of the WikiLeaks platform. It also features the journalists with whom he worked on the leaked cables. [7]
In early 2014 Andrew O'Hagan, the ghost writer of Assange's autobiography, said that Assange was passionate, funny, lazy, courageous, vain, paranoid, moral, and manipulative. [54] [55] [56] In November 2014, Spanish Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias also gave his support to Assange, calling him an activist and a journalist and criticising his persecution. [57]
In July 2015 British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn opposed Assange's extradition to the US, [58] and as Labour Party leader in April 2019 said the British government should oppose Assange's extradition to the US "for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan". [59]
In October 2016 James Ball who had previously worked with Assange, wrote that he had a score to settle with Hillary Clinton and wanted to reassert himself on the world stage, but that he wouldn't knowingly have been a tool of the Russian state. [60] That month Pussy Riot member and Courage Foundation advisory board member [61] Nadya Tolokonnikova criticised Assange for his connections to the Russian government. [62]
In 2017 Barrett Brown said that Assange had acted "as a covert political operative" in the 2016 US election, thus betraying WikiLeaks' focus on exposing "corporate and government wrongdoing". He considered the latter to be "an appropriate thing to do", but that "working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting". [63] That May, Laura Poitras said he was admirable, brilliant and flawed. [64] In late May 2017, President Moreno said that Assange was a "hacker", but that he respected his human rights and Assange's asylum in the embassy would continue. [65] [66]
Days before Assange was arrested, the Guardian's editorial board wrote that "it would be wrong to extradite him" and that "He believes in publishing things that should not always be published – this has long been a difficult divide between the Guardian and him. But he has also shone a light on things that should never have been hidden. When he first entered the Ecuadorian embassy he was trying to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape and molestation. That was wrong. But those cases have now been closed. He still faces the English courts for skipping bail. If he leaves the embassy, and is arrested, he should answer for that, perhaps in ways that might result in deportation to his own country, Australia." [67] [68] [69]
After Assange's arrest in 2019, journalists and commenters debated whether Assange was a journalist. [10] [11] [12] [13] Journalists at the Associated Press, [70] CNN, [71] The Sydney Morning Herald, [72] The LA Times, [73] National Review, [74] The Economist, [75] and The Washington Post [76] argued he was not a journalist. Other journalists at The Independent, [77] The Intercept, [78] the Committee to Protect Journalists, [79] and The Washington Post [80] wrote that he was a journalist or that his actions were still protected. The Washington Post's editorial board wrote that he was "not a free-press hero" or journalist and that he was "overdue for personal accountability." [81]
In December 2019 Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis said that in 2006 she "became fascinated at this young, idealistic Australian, very tech-savvy, who developed a way for whistleblowers to upload data anonymously". [2] In January 2021, Australian journalist John Pilger stated that, were Assange to be extradited, "no journalist who challenges power will be safe". [82] In November 2022, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País published an open letter that said "the US government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets". The letter did not urge the government to drop the case related to the hacking-related charge, though it said that "some of us are concerned" about it, too. [83] [84] [13]
The journal Ethics and Information Technology published a paper by Patrick D. Anderson in 2020, in which he wrote that Assange’s cypherpunk ethics need to be considered when assessing the work of WikiLeaks. Anderson wrote that "By combining cypherpunk ethics with antiwar values and Enlightenment ideals, Assange developed a truly global conception of cypherpunk philosophy. Within this worldview, crypto defends privacy for the weak, thereby upholding the right to communicate, and promotes transparency for the powerful, thereby limiting the harm caused by bad governance". [85]
In his 2022 book The Trial of Julian Assange: a Story of Persecution, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Nils Melzer, wrote that Assange's treatment by the United States, Great Britain, Sweden, and Ecuador "exposes a fundamental systemic failure that severely undermines the integrity of our democratic, rule-of-law institutions.". [86]
In 2023 former Trump administration CIA Director Mike Pompeo described Assange in his memoir as "a useful idiot for Russia to exploit." [8] The next month, Louis Menand of New Yorker wrote that "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him." [9]
Prior to Assange's final appeal against extradition to the United States, Alice Jill Edwards, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, urged the UK to stop his extradition because of concerns he would be subject to torture if extradited. [87]
Assange has been awarded multiple awards for journalism and publishing including the Amnesty International UK Media Award, Economist Award, Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, and more.
Andy Müller-Maguhn is a member of the German hacker association Chaos Computer Club (CCC). Having been a member since 1986, he was appointed as a spokesman for the club in 1990, and later served on its board until 2012. He runs a company that develops cryptophones.
Cryptome is an online library and 501(c)(3) private foundation created in 1996 by John Young and Deborah Natsios and closed in 2023. The site collected information about freedom of expression, privacy, cryptography, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and government secrecy.
Israel Shamir, also known by the names Robert David, Vassili Krasevsky, Jöran Jermas and Adam Ermash, is a Swedish writer and journalist, known for his ties to WikiLeaks and for promoting antisemitism and Holocaust denial. His son Johannes Wahlström is a spokesperson for WikiLeaks in Sweden.
WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organisation and publisher of leaked documents. It is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website states that it has released more than ten million documents and associated analyses. WikiLeaks' most recent publication of original documents was in 2019 and its most recent publication was in 2021. From November 2022, numerous documents on the organisation's website became inaccessible. In 2023, Assange said that WikiLeaks is no longer able to publish due to his imprisonment and the effect that US government surveillance and WikiLeaks' funding restrictions were having on potential whistleblowers.
Bank Julius Baer & Co. v. WikiLeaks, 535 F. Supp. 2d 980, was a lawsuit filed by Bank Julius Baer against the website WikiLeaks.
The Granai airstrike, sometimes called the Granai massacre, refers to the killing of approximately 86 to 147 Afghan civilians by an airstrike by a US Air Force B-1 Bomber on May 4, 2009, in the village of Granai in Farah Province, south of Herat, Afghanistan.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a former United States Army intelligence analyst: footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, U.S. military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange has won multiple awards for publishing and journalism.
The Afghan War documents leak, also called the Afghan War Diary, is a collection of internal U.S. military logs of the War in Afghanistan, which was published by WikiLeaks on 25 July 2010. The logs consist of over 91,000 Afghan War documents, covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009. Most of the documents are classified secret. As of 28 July 2010, only 75,000 of the documents have been released to the public, a move which WikiLeaks says is "part of a harm minimization process demanded by [the] source". Prior to releasing the initial 75,000 documents, WikiLeaks made the logs available to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel in its German and English online edition, which published reports in line with an agreement made earlier the same day, 25 July 2010.
The United States diplomatic cables leak, widely known as Cablegate, began on Sunday, 28 November 2010 when WikiLeaks began releasing classified cables that had been sent to the U.S. State Department by 274 of its consulates, embassies, and diplomatic missions around the world. Dated between December 1966 and February 2010, the cables contain diplomatic analysis from world leaders, and the diplomats' assessment of host countries and their officials.
WikiLeaks began publishing the United States diplomatic cables leak on 28 November 2010. The documents included classified cables that had been sent to the U.S. State Department by its consulates, embassies, and diplomatic missions around the world. The cables were dated between December 1966 and February 2010, and contained assessments of host countries and their officials. The publication of the cables produced varying responses around the world.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, previously known under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, is a German technology activist. He is best known as the former spokesperson for WikiLeaks and the author of Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (2011).
WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy is a 2011 book by British journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. It is an account of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the leak by Chelsea Manning of classified material to the website in 2010. It was published by Guardian Books in February 2011.
WikiLeaks, a whistleblowing website founded by Julian Assange, has received praise as well as criticism from the public, hacktivists, journalist organisations and government officials. The organisation has revealed human rights abuses and was the target of an alleged "cyber war". Allegations have been made that Wikileaks worked with or was exploited by the Russian government and acted in a partisan manner during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Assange v Swedish Prosecution Authority were the set of legal proceedings in the United Kingdom concerning the requested extradition of Julian Assange to Sweden for a "preliminary investigation" into accusations of sexual offences allegedly made in August 2010. Assange left Sweden for the UK in 27 September 2010 and was arrested in his absence the same day. He was suspected of rape of a lesser degree, unlawful coercion and multiple cases of sexual molestation. In June 2012, Assange breached bail and sought refuge at Ecuador's Embassy in London and was granted asylum.
The Fifth Estate is a 2013 biographical thriller film directed by Bill Condon about the news-leaking website WikiLeaks. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as its editor-in-chief and founder Julian Assange and Daniel Brühl as its former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Anthony Mackie, David Thewlis, Alicia Vikander, Stanley Tucci, and Laura Linney are featured in supporting roles. The film's screenplay was written by Josh Singer based in-part on Domscheit-Berg's book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (2011), as well as WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (2011) by British journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. The film's name is a reference to people who operate in the manner of journalists outside the normal constraints imposed on the mainstream media.
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks is a 2013 American independent documentary film about the organization established by Julian Assange, and people involved in the collection and distribution of secret information and media by whistleblowers. Directed by Alex Gibney, it covers a period of several decades, and includes background material. Gibney received his fifth nomination for Best Documentary Screenplay from the Writers Guild of America Awards for this film.
Sarah Harrison is a British former WikiLeaks section editor. She worked with the WikiLeaks' legal defence and has been described as Julian Assange's closest adviser. Harrison accompanied National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden on a high-profile flight from Hong Kong to Moscow while he was sought by the United States government.
Global surveillance and journalism is a subject covering journalism or reporting of governmental espionage, which gained worldwide attention after the Global surveillance disclosures of 2013 that resulted from Edward Snowden's leaks. Since 2013, many leaks have emerged from different government departments in the US, which confirm that the National Security Agency (NSA) spied on US citizens and foreign enemies alike. Journalists were attacked for publishing the leaks and were regarded in the same light as the whistleblowers who gave them the information. Subsequently, the US government made arrests, raising concerns about the freedom of the press.
In 2012, while on bail, Julian Assange was granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he sought to avoid extradition to Sweden, and what his supporters said was the possibility of subsequent extradition to the US. On 11 April 2019, Ecuador revoked his asylum, he was arrested for failing to appear in court, and carried out of the Embassy by members of the London Metropolitan Police. Following his arrest, he was charged and convicted, on 1 May 2019, of violating the Bail Act, and sentenced to fifty weeks in prison. While in prison the US revealed a previously sealed 2018 US indictment in which Assange was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion related to his involvement with Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks.
The 65-year-old is one of only a handful of Australians to have seen Assange since his imprisonment; she has travelled, at her own expense, on her own time, to see him; and recently she committed herself to giving '100 per cent of my attention and resources' to his defence. She's been a supporter since 2006, long before he was famous.