After years holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London time is up for Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and superstar whistle-blower and computer-hacker. Assange was arrested on Thursday morning after President Lenin Moreno withdrew the asylum granted to Assange in 2012 by his predecessor, Raffael Correa. This U-turn has enabled his arrest – for skipping bail after fleeing to the embassy to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault. These charges have since been dropped but the main reason for Assange’s actions was the risk of extradition to the US on charges of espionage.
Thanks to Wikileaks
These charges of espionage go back to 2010 when WikiLeaks first hit the world’s headlines by making thousands of classified documents and videos available on its website. This organization, founded by Assange, has been at the epicentre of changes in how journalists, and media organizations work, now dependent on internet-based tools and networks. The release of video-footage of US military killing not only civilians but also Reuters correspondents from a helicopter in 2010, the classified files that Chelsea – formerly Bradley – Manning (released in 2017 after serving seven of a thirty-five year prison sentence in the US) passed on to Wikileaks exposing military misconduct in Afghanistan and Iraq, Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on bulk online surveillance by the US and its Five Eyes Alliance partners in 2013, the 2016 Panama Papers’ revelations of financial skulduggery, and the much-lauded web-based investigative journalism of Bellingcat.com. All these would be unthinkable without Wikileaks.
As the UK Centre of Investigative Journalism notes, WikiLeaks pioneered new approaches to accessing and publishing “classified media ... from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere … [becoming] a unique, invaluable resource for investigative journalists and scholars… Its innovations – from cross-border, collaborative reporting to systems for secure, anonymous leaks – have been borrowed by almost every major news outlet in the world” (CIJ 11 April 2019).
