On April 20, 2022, the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, England, issued an extradition order approving the extradition of legendary Julian Assange to the United States!
As soon as this news came out, it immediately shocked the world and global public opinion was in an uproar. The Americans finally caught Assange, and it is not difficult to guess that he will face endless trials and tortures from the Americans for the rest of his life.
Back in 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice filed as many as 17 charges against Assange, and based on these charges, Assange will receive up to 175 years in prison.
Assange himself is a legend, and the secrets he reveals are even more revealing the ugly face of the United States, the hegemon of power. However, the process of the United States' pursuit of Assange for many years has also confirmed the authenticity of the secrets he revealed, and the Americans have always been unscrupulous to achieve their goals.
Assange's experience not only made us aware of many amazing secrets, but also showed the double standards of the United States and other Western powers in their treatment of themselves and other countries.
Assange is Australian, but his homeland is reluctant to provide him with any protection, even though what he does is defend the idea of "freedom" that the West has long advocated.
In the eyes of the Rulers of the United States, there are two people who hate the most, one is Assange, and the other is Snowden, the protagonist of the "Prism Gate".
Still, Snowden now lives in seclusion in Russia, living a leisurely and safe life; but the rest of Assange seems destined to spend the rest of his life in prison. It is conceivable that even in prison, he would not have a moment of silence to enjoy.
Why are the same people who reveal the secret, but the endings of the two are very different?
Born in Australia in 1971, Julian Assange has lived with his mother since childhood. Because his mother was a itinerant actor, he grew up accustomed to a mobile life and attended dozens of schools. He received far more education in his family than in school.
However, Assange was talented and very studious, reading a lot of books at home and teaching himself computer knowledge, becoming a top hacker.
Living a turbulent life since childhood and indulging in group books has made Assange's personality somewhat withdrawn and arrogant, he is not a social person, and he has some naïve ideas about the world.
The young Assange is tall, handsome and has a proven hacking technique, and he often hacks into other people's computers to check other people's secrets. This gave him an indescribable sense of pleasure and accomplishment, and as the technology continued to improve, he later became a top hacker and even had easy access to many state secret databases.
As a teenager, he hacked into classified computer systems in Europe and North America with two hackers and viewed many classified files. Of course, this is only a trace found later, and only they know how many countries' secret databases they have cracked.
Although Assange's hacking techniques were clever, they were not so clever as to leave no trace, so their actions attracted the attention of the Australian authorities.
Assange, who married a girl two years younger than him at the age of 18 and soon had children of his own, has little experience in life and is unclear about how to handle his future work and family relationships.
At the age of 20, he was charged with trespassing into the state secrets system, but in the end the Australian courts did not impose a heavy sentence on him, but simply fined him. This incident made Assange feel that there are huge loopholes to be drilled, whether it is the system or the law.
So, instead of abandoning hacking adventures, he targeted higher-level state secrets. However, it was also because he was legally charged that his wife left him with the child, and the couple fought a marathon lawsuit over the custody of the child until 1999, when the two reached an agreement.
Of course, the child was not with him, he did not have the ability to raise the child alone, and in short, his personal life was not smooth.
During these more than a decade, he continued his hacking activities while working. With Assange's technology at that time, he could rely on his superb hacking skills to make himself a billionaire and live a luxurious life.
But Assange was indifferent to the infinite wealth of the online world, initially out of curiosity. But as he came into contact with more and more secrets, deeper and deeper, a sense of anger and responsibility rose up deep within him.
Through hacking techniques, Assange saw the untold dark side of the world, where many countries, many leaders, on the surface, sounded grand and glamorous, but behind the scenes, they did unseemly things.
Assange spontaneously believed that these secrets should be known to everyone, so that the people of the world would know the truth, so that there would be true freedom and true fairness.
Perhaps because of reading since childhood, in Assange's mind, the greatest meaning of this world is "freedom". And the Internet is the biggest free platform, if someone restricts freedom everywhere, or even uses this free platform to seek illegal benefits, then this kind of behavior is wrong, he should oppose.
However, he also understood that he was just a computer technician, and even if he was highly skilled, there were more masters and institutions in the world than he was. With his own strength, no matter what, it is impossible to reverse the situation.
So he found a simpler and more direct way to "reveal the secret." By revealing the secrets that are not known to the world and letting people know the world as it is, those in power can let go of more restrictions and achieve more freedom.
From an objective point of view, Assange is a person who is somewhat withdrawn in personality and extremely stubborn, and once he is determined, even if it is difficult and dangerous, he must persist to the end.
It is undeniable that there are always one or two exceptions in the world that don't seem to fit the law, and Assange is one of them. He does not seek money, does not seek fame and fortune, and decrypts in order to reveal the secret. To this end, he will not hesitate to offend the most powerful regime in the world, even if he puts himself in danger and his life is in danger.
To realize this "ideal," Assange set up a website in 2006, known as WikiLeaks. It's a non-profit site, and it's said that assange is usually maintained by assange alone.
Assange collates the information he has stolen through hacking techniques and publishes it on his website. Most importantly, WikiLeaks is also a platform through which informants around the world can publish their secret information.
Assange also designed a set of strict confidentiality procedures for the website, and even Assange himself could not obtain the real information of the uploader of the confidential information, all to protect the safety of the demystifier.
Of course, not all uploaded information can be published, and this information must be personally selected and screened by Assange.
Assange excludes secret information with little influence, then verifies some of the information that meets the requirements in person, and once the information is confirmed to be true, it is published on the WikiLeaks website.
In 2006, as soon as the website went live, Assange published details of the internal political struggles at the top of the Somali hierarchy, which were very detailed and comprehensive. As soon as the incident came out, the WikiLeaks website received attention, and Assange became famous.
Since then, Assange has received classified information from volunteers from all over the world, many of which are little-known top secrets. Later, these secrets were revealed, and WikiLeaks became more and more famous, and even caused important influences.
In 2009, the WikiLeaks website exposed records of communications between senior Peruvian government officials and oil majors, exposing serious corruption in its domestic oil industry. As the events continued to ferment, they caused a political crisis in Peru.
Soon after, Assange exposed the internal secrets of the Icelandic banking giant, which was learned that the bank had serious illegal transactions and funding loopholes, which later triggered the Icelandic financial crisis.
WikiLeaks, which had previously revealed the secrets of small countries in Africa, South America, or northern Europe, grew with its career and influence. Assange set his sights on the world hegemon, the United States.
In fact, Assange has long been in possession of many important secrets from the United States, and he also knows that once these secrets are released, the United States will never let him go. Therefore, he was hesitant to expose the secrets of the United States.
Perhaps discovering too many secrets about the United States, or perhaps being too angry at what Americans are doing, Assange finally decided to take the risk of exposing the secrets of the United States that the world did not want to let the world know.
In 2010, when Assange arrived in Washington, D.C., during a regular press conference, he suddenly released a video that shocked everyone present.
The video was streamed from the U.S. military command, and people could clearly hear the conversations and exchanges of the U.S. military commanders. U.S. soldiers were flying Black Hawk helicopters hovering over Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.
They found a group of Iraqis in a corner talking to a journalist-like person, and one could see that the Iraqis were not armed, just a group of civilians.
But when the U.S. commander found out, he immediately ordered shooting at them, and then a dense machine gun bullet hit several people, some of whom were wounded and then cried on the ground.
A minute or two later, several vans were driven, and the people on the vans tried to rescue the wounded lying on the ground, but at this time the helicopter opened fire again, killing the rescuers in the van.
According to the recordings in the video, the U.S. military killed a total of 12 Iraqi civilians in the surprise attack, and after determining that the target was indeed killed, the U.S. military fled.
As soon as this video was broadcast, it immediately shocked the whole of Washington, and the media all over the world were spreading the video on the same day, and it was too late for the US government to block it.
The Pentagon went to great lengths to deny that the video was real, desperately referring to it as a human-edited clip, an attempt by people with ulterior motives to smear the U.S. military. But no matter how the U.S. government justifies it, the video has made things clear, with governments and civil society organizations accusing U.S. troops of indiscriminate shooting civilians.
The incident disgraced the U.S. government and the U.S. military, who became angry and vowed to investigate the matter thoroughly and to punish this Assange.
Soon after, the U.S. military found that it was the American soldier Manning who leaked the secrets, and then arrested him and launched a military prosecution, and Manning was charged with leaking secrets and espionage.
But the U.S. government is helpless against Assange. First, Assange is Australian, and if he is to be arrested or charged, sufficient evidence and compliance with international law is needed.
Second, in essence, Assange simply published the video provided by others, and according to U.S. law, the indirect communicator did not break the law, which means that Assange did not violate U.S. law. There is no legitimate reason for the United States to arrest people.
Finally, at that time, Assange was in the spotlight of the world's media in the United States, and if the Americans rushed to act, it would be equivalent to not admitting that Assange had angered them, and the only thing that could really make them angry was the truth.
So Assange left the United States safely and returned to Australia. In Assange's view, he is Australian, and his own government should provide protection for himself.
But he did not expect that the Australian government, under pressure from the United States, began to closely monitor and investigate Assange. This made Assange feel that it was no longer safe to stay in Australia, so he left his homeland and began to wander the world.
And the cooperation between the United States and Australia to monitor Assange also angered the stubborn man, who decided to start fighting back in his own way.
So shortly after he left Australia, he published on his website more than two hundred confidential emails sent by U.S. embassies and consulates abroad. Most of the contents of these top-secret emails are intelligence from other countries secretly collected by US agencies abroad, and these are all top secrets.
As soon as this incident came out, it caused solemn protests against the United States in various countries, and the United States insisted that this was a rumor, but most of the content involved in these telegrams did exist and was not known to the outside world. The United States cannot make a reasonable explanation for this, but it is getting darker and darker.
Not only that, Assange also published the private emails of some American politicians, the more famous of which is the Hillary Mail Gate incident.
According to Assange's disclosure, Hillary Clinton has long used a private mailbox for official business, which is one of the reasons why Assange has easy access to information.
Disclosures reveal that Hillary Clinton, during her tenure as U.S. secretary of state, issued instructions to U.S. diplomats via private mail, ordering them to do whatever it took to gather foreign intelligence.
Moreover, the email also exposed some of Hillary's uncivilized words and work mistakes. This information greatly affected Hillary's image among the people. It happened to be a pivotal moment for Hillary and Trump to compete for the presidency, and Assange's revelations inadvertently helped Trump gain an advantage in the election.
Assange also exposed the nicknames and private comments that U.S. government officials have given to world leaders, such as calling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "mustache (Hitler)," saying Merkel was too conservative, saying that the Zimbabwean president was a lunatic, and so on.
In fact, these things that cannot be put on the table are not secrets among countries, everyone tacitly agrees, you scold me, I also scold you. But suddenly one day it was put on the table, then other countries were unwilling, and it was another condemnation and protest against the United States.
The U.S. presidential palace was overwhelmed by a little Assange, so the U.S. side decided to get rid of this assange.
Assange had been prepared for this, and when he left Australia, he knew that American agents would catch up sooner or later, so he began to wander around the world.
Although the United States secretly wanted him for a long time, it was difficult to find his whereabouts, and for a time he was sneaking between African countries and playing hide-and-seek with American agents.
At the same time, the U.S. government also tried its best to block the WikiLeaks website and try to prevent Assange from leaking U.S. secrets to the outside world. Of course, they also understand that if They don't catch Assange himself, sooner or later he will continue to shake out the secret in his hand.
Soon after, Assange fled to Sweden, and the United States at this time thought that if assange was killed directly, it would leave a handle on public opinion, and it would be too cheap.
So they hired two female agents to seduce Assange back and forth, and finally the two sang and accused Assange of rape. The Swedish government, unwilling to cause this trouble, opened the case after Assange left Sweden and issued an international arrest warrant for him.
Issuing an international Red Notice for a spurious crime of rape is also a strange thing.
So Assange traveled around countries with an international wanted warrant for rape and applied for political asylum. However, most countries were reluctant to take over the hot potato, and finally Assange was politically sheltered in Ecuador in britain, so he disguised himself as a courier and ran into the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain.
Even Assange himself did not expect that he would live in the basement here for seven years.
Assange and Snowden are different in that they can get asylum in Russia, but Assange is rejected by Russia.
Because Snowden is only demystifying the United States, and Russia is the sworn enemy of the United States, it will naturally protect Snowden. The better Snowden's situation, the more anti-Americans will turn to Russia in the future.
But Assange is a strange personality, he not only exposes the secrets of the United States, he also exposes the secrets of Russia, it can be said that the secrets of any country are the objects of his disclosure, he is to reveal the secrets for the sake of revealing secrets, and he does not have his own political tendencies.
So, this Assange seems to have offended most governments.
Moreover, Assange's relationship with Ecuador was not very good, and during his hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy, he even exposed the shortcomings of others. Perhaps for this reason, he later had a strained relationship with the embassy staff and was said to have clashed with security guards.
In 2019, after the change of government in Ecuador, it said it was not prepared to continue to provide political asylum to Assange. Soon after, Assange was taken out of the Ecuadorian embassy by the London police and imprisoned in Britain's highest prison.
After years of investigation and trial, the British court finally decided to extradite him to the United States.
The decision of the British courts caused an uproar around the world because it was a political bargain and there was no fairness to speak of. There are many well-known journalists and MPs in the United Kingdom who have expressed their incredulity because under British law, Assange should not be extradited abroad.
That's why he was tried for so long, but in the end Britain made concessions to the United States.
Some people jokingly said that if Assange was a Chinese, he would be rescued with all his might like Meng Wanzhou, but the timid Morrison did nothing; if he only exposed Russia or China, then he could become a freedom fighter in the United States and even win the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, he exposed the United States, and the same nature of things is placed on the United States, and he will be imprisoned for a lifetime!
I am the Phantom of Shi Hai, and I am following me to praise history.