Скачать или смотреть How Julian Assange Changed The World

CyberSec Weekly
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Sources
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wiki...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ric...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_...)

Script

I want to dive deep into Wikileaks and discover its true identity…

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers he had to wait 2 years for it to finally be published in the New York Times. The papers were instrumental in uncovering the hidden secrets of the US army in the Vietnam war. The releasing of the papers led to Ellsberg being charged with conspiracy and also an unlawful attempt to discredit them by the us government at the time. A similar thing would also happen to the founder of Wikileaks.

fast forward to 2006 Julian Assange was inspired by this, he thought 2 years was too much time to wait and that whistleblowing could become more efficient. To do this he set up WikiLeaks, and hosting wikileaks.org on servers in Sweden due to robust press protection laws.

8th December 2006
Boundary disputes between Somalia and Ethiopia had been going on for many years over the Ogaden region which had been granted to Ethiopia in 1948. So it’s safe to say that the tension between the two countries is high. This all lead to a 30000 strong army invading somalia. So what does this have to do with Wikileaks?

Well, at the time they were able to collect information on the communications surrounding the war leading to alleged conversations where the US had encouraged the invasion of Somalia.

While this become widely shared news Wikileaks didn’t become widely known until later…

The organisation built a purpose leading to an ever increasing number of supporters of volunteers, but as much as some love assange and wikileaks, others hated just as much. One such group of people was the US military after wikileaks shared a government document outlining plans to destroy the trustworthiness of Wikileaks, furthermore they wanted to attack and uncover the sources to discourage others from sharing the information that made Wikileaks so notorious.

Their first big break came from one video. The video was part of a larger collection called the Iraq War Logs, and this is what put wikileaks on the map. The Iraq War Logs included 100s of 1000s of US military documents, one of which became particularly famous which was entitled “Collateral Murder”. This footage contained an apache helicopter circling and shooting at what is assumed to be insurgents, among these were several journalists who after a minivan tried to pick up the wounded they were shot to death as well. Despite the disturbing actions the US army concluded the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and their rules of engagement.

One criticism of this video is that it fails to show armed men who were seen before the attack took place. This has been combated by the talk between the pilots, which included the pilots laughing about a child being brought to the battle scene. An unacceptable act.

They have dealt with many other controversial scenarios, such as the 2016 elections where Wikileaks was accused of being biased and sharing news articles that helped promote the democratic campaign. This was after assange wrote on Wikileaks “I have had years of experience in dealing with Hilary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hilary lacks judgement and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism… she certainly should not become president of the United States.”

But this isn’t the only accusation of wrong-doing Julian has had. Since 2012 he has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. And what on earth could have caused him to do this?

Well shortly before he had been accused of rape from 2 different women and rather than be extradited back to Sweden he has sought political asylum in the embassy.

And since 2017 Sweden has dropped its investigation into alleged sexual offences. The stay at the embassy after 7 years came to end once the president of Ecuador decided Assange was no longer welcome subsequently calling him a “spoiled brat”. This lead to him being placed in HMP Belmarsh, one of the UK’s toughest detention centres. Furthermore, with all the 18 charges that Jullian has been accused of, he is facing up to 175 years in prison.

And finally on 20 april 2022 a judge formally issued assange’s extradition order which has been approved and means that assange could be shortly extradited to the US.

So Does This Mark the End of Wikileaks?
WikiLeaks has been less active since Julian's arrest, due to there being a lack of a leader. Despite this there still has been notable leaks such as in 2021 when a database of 17000 publicly available documents named The Intolerance Network was released, this suggests that wikileaks is here to stay.