{"id":82968,"date":"2024-06-28T02:24:07","date_gmt":"2024-06-28T02:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/28\/from-hacker-to-hunted-figure-the-polarizing-legacy-of-julian-assange\/"},"modified":"2024-06-28T02:24:07","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T02:24:07","slug":"from-hacker-to-hunted-figure-the-polarizing-legacy-of-julian-assange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/28\/from-hacker-to-hunted-figure-the-polarizing-legacy-of-julian-assange\/","title":{"rendered":"From Hacker to Hunted Figure, the Polarizing Legacy of Julian Assange"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1050\" height=\"549\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/06\/27\/multimedia\/27assange-saga-1-wvqc\/27assange-saga-1-wvqc-facebookJumbo.jpg?fit=1050,549&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"From Hacker to Hunted Figure, the Polarizing Legacy of Julian Assange\" title=\"From Hacker to Hunted Figure, the Polarizing Legacy of Julian Assange\" \/><\/div><p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In his two-decade odyssey from Australian hacker to new-age media celebrity, hunted figure, perennial prisoner and finally, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/06\/24\/us\/politics\/julian-assange-plea-deal.html\" title=\"\">a free man<\/a>, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/06\/25\/us\/politics\/julian-assange-wikileaks-plea-deal.html\" title=\"\">Julian Assange<\/a> has always been easier to caricature than characterize.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The lack of an agreed-upon label for Mr. Assange \u2014 is he a heroic crusader for truth or a reckless leaker who endangered lives? \u2014 makes any assessment of his legacy ambiguous at best.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Whatever history\u2019s judgment of Mr. Assange, his appearance Wednesday in a courtroom on a remote Pacific island, where he pleaded guilty to a single count of violating the U.S. Espionage Act, was an appropriate coda to a story that has always seemed stranger than fiction.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">From the time he established WikiLeaks in 2006, Mr. Assange, 52, was a polarizing figure, using the internet to <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/06\/25\/us\/politics\/assange-plea-deal-press-freedom.html\" title=\"\">solicit and publish<\/a> government secrets. His disclosures, from confidential diplomatic cables to civilian deaths in the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, made him courageous to those who believed in his gospel of radical transparency. To others who feared the information he revealed could get people killed, he was destructive, even if there was never proof that lives were lost.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After his sensational leaks incurred the wrath of the White House, Mr. Assange spent 12 years in London fighting extradition, first to Sweden and then to the United States. Holed up in a South American embassy and later languishing in a British prison, he resurfaced in the headlines whenever a court ruled on his latest appeal. He became less a cutting-edge insurgent than a ghostly throwback to another time.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cJulian Assange has for so many years sacrificed for the freedom of speech, freedom of the press,\u201d said Barry Pollack, a lawyer who represented Mr. Assange in his plea negotiations with the American authorities, on Wednesday in Canberra, Australia. \u201cHe\u2019s sacrificed his own freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">At its best, WikiLeaks shone a light into dark corners, often working with traditional media organizations to expose abuses like extrajudicial killings in Kenya. Documents posted by WikiLeaks about the excesses of Tunisia\u2019s ruling family presaged the upheaval that swept the region.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Alan Rusbridger, a former editor in chief of The Guardian who worked extensively with Mr. Assange, said WikiLeaks deserved credit for accelerating the political changes of the Arab Spring.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">While Mr. Assange indisputably changed history, it is not clear he did so in the way that he and his apostles may have hoped when they first came to global prominence in 2010 by posting video on WikiLeaks of a U.S. helicopter strike in Baghdad that had resulted in the death of a Reuters photographer.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThink about Julian Assange\u2019s motivation regarding Iraq and Afghanistan,\u201d said P.J. Crowley, who was the State Department\u2019s spokesman when WikiLeaks published 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables in 2010, a project in which the site initially collaborated with The New York Times and others.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cWe left Iraq, went back, and are still there,\u201d Mr. Crowley said. \u201cWe stayed in Afghanistan for a decade after WikiLeaks. His legacy is collaborating with Russian intelligence, whether wittingly or unwittingly, to help Russia elect Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Crowley\u2019s experience with Mr. Assange is acutely personal: He was forced to resign his post after he criticized the Pentagon\u2019s treatment of Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence analyst who downloaded thousands of documents, including those cables, from a classified government network and uploaded them to WikiLeaks.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Views of Mr. Assange soured after WikiLeaks, in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, published Democratic emails that had been hacked by a Russian intelligence agency. Allies of Hillary Clinton cited it as one of multiple factors that contributed to her defeat by Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton had to apologize to foreign leaders for embarrassing details in cables sent by American diplomats to the State Department. In one case, the foreign minister of a Persian Gulf nation refused to allow note takers into a meeting with her, for fear that his comments would be leaked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cSome of this damage to American foreign policy was irreparable,\u201d said Vali R. Nasr, a senior State Department official at the time, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University. \u201cYou can apologize for it, but you can\u2019t undo it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">But Mr. Nasr said the furor caused by WikiLeaks also revealed something that the United States was later able to use to its advantage: the public relations value of intelligence. Before Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, American and British intelligence agencies selectively declassified material about Russia\u2019s activities to warn President Vladimir V. Putin and mobilize Western support.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">American officials justified their prosecution of Mr. Assange on espionage charges by saying it would deter other would-be whistle-blowers from leaking classified material. But it also reflected a collective sense of shock that the nation\u2019s most tightly held secrets could be so easily compromised.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cSome of this going after Assange,\u201d Mr. Nasr said, \u201chad to do with compensating for your weakness by shooting the messenger.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The messenger proved elusive. Mr. Assange\u2019s prolonged exile in Britain, during which he spent seven years in the Ecuadorean embassy and five years in London\u2019s Belmarsh prison, turned him from a swashbuckling media impresario into a haunted, if hardheaded, resistance figure.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Supporters camped outside the embassy, where he had been granted asylum, holding placards and chanting, \u201cFree Assange!\u201d Detractors saw him as an erratic publicity seeker. Claiming to be a victim of political persecution, he violated his bail terms after losing his appeal of a Swedish arrest warrant on charges of sexual assault \u2014 charges he described as a \u201csmear campaign\u201d ginned up by the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">From his cramped living quarters in a converted embassy office, Mr. Assange gave defiant press interviews. Activists and celebrities came and went: the actress Pamela Anderson became something of a regular.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Assange began a secret relationship with Stella Moris, a lawyer who represented him and later became his wife. They had two children while he was hiding out in the embassy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">For British authorities, caught in the middle, it was a costly and time-consuming distraction. They had to station police in front of the embassy, while the courts dealt with extradition requests.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Sweden later dropped its case against Mr. Assange, but the United States, under President Donald J. Trump, charged him with espionage. After a change in government in Ecuador, he became an unwelcome guest and was evicted from the embassy in April 2019. As police dragged out a bedraggled, bearded Mr. Assange, he shouted, \u201cU.K. resist \u2014 resist this attempt by the Trump administration.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">By that point, Mr. Assange\u2019s saga had become little more than a sideshow. \u201cJournalists didn\u2019t pay enough attention to Assange\u2019s plight,\u201d Mr. Rusbridger said. \u201cPeople either think he\u2019s the messiah or the devil, and there\u2019s no in between.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Sentenced to 50 weeks for violating his bail, Mr. Assange would spend five years in Belmarsh, a high-security prison that once housed the convicted terrorist, Abu Hamza al-Masri, and is known as \u201cHellmarsh\u201d because of its harsh conditions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">As Mr. Assange challenged his removal from Britain, his legal case sometimes felt interminable, lumbering from one court to the next as his lawyers filed appeals to unfavorable rulings.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cOur procedural rules don\u2019t really lend themselves to speedy resolution,\u201d said Nick Vamos, a partner at the British law firm, Peters &amp; Peters, and a former head of extradition for Britain\u2019s Crown Prosecution Service. \u201cIf you want to take every point \u2014 as was entirely his right to do \u2014 then you can buy yourself a lot of time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Assange had his share of victories. Last month, he won a bid to have a full appeal of the extradition order heard after a judge decided that American assurances did not go far enough in addressing concerns about the protection of his rights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">While a plea agreement with the United States may have begun to take shape earlier, Mr. Vamos believes it was this decision \u201cthat really brought people to the to the table to discuss a concrete deal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">As the legal maneuvering came to a head, a few people were able to see Mr. Assange in jail. Among them was Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns for Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom group that has campaigned for Mr. Assange\u2019s release since 2019. She visited him six times between August 2023 and last month, and said she was often concerned about his health.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cIt\u2019s not an easy situation to be in. And of course, we had concerns for his mental health too,\u201d Ms. Vincent said. \u201cBut he was still Julian; he was still fighting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Based on her discussions with Mr. Assange and his family, Ms. Vincent said she expected his priority now will be spending time with them. His two sons have only known their father through prison visits. She sees his release as a win but said it should have ended with all charges dropped.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Champions of press freedom agree that even with Mr. Assange\u2019s release, the plea deal set a troubling precedent.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that while the agreement averted the \u201cworst-case scenario for press freedom,\u201d it also means that Mr. Assange \u201cwill have served five years in prison for activities that journalists engage in every day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Speaking in Canberra, where an emotional Mr. Assange kissed his wife after arriving home, Mr. Pollack, his lawyer, said, \u201cHopefully, this is the end, not just of the case against Julian Assange, but the end of the case against journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/06\/27\/world\/europe\/julian-assange-wikileaks-legacy.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his two-decade odyssey from Australian hacker to new-age media celebrity, hunted figure, perennial prisoner and finally, a free man, Julian Assange has always been easier to caricature than characterize. The lack of an agreed-upon label for Mr. Assange \u2014 is he a heroic crusader for truth or a reckless leaker who endangered lives? \u2014 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/06\/27\/multimedia\/27assange-saga-1-wvqc\/27assange-saga-1-wvqc-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14855,27268,73293,47229,14854,2013,51461],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82968"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82970,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82968\/revisions\/82970"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}