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In December 2006, Somali opposition leader Avis intended a coup d'état.
Information on the preparation of assassinations to overthrow the Somali government was leaked.
In 2007, documents embezzling £1 billion in state assets during the reign of former Kenyan President Moi leaked out.
In 2010, 92,000 top-secret copies of U.S. forces in the Afghan war were released.
In 2016, Hillary Mailgate during the U.S. election.
How many untold secrets are there in the world?
A website called WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Paul Assange,
Maybe I can tell you the answer.
In 2006, Assange created the WikiLeaks website.
In 2010, Interpol issued a Red Notice against Assange.
Assange then spent seven years in hiding at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
In 2019, the regime in Ecuador changed, and the new regime reached an agreement with the United Kingdom.
The Metropolitan Police was allowed to enter the embassy and arrested Assange.
Now Assange faces the fate of being extradited to the United States.
Some say he's a whistle-blowing hero, some say he's a leaky spy.
What exactly did Assange do to make many governments hate him to the bone? Today we're going to talk about the story behind that.
Julian Assange was born in 1971 in Townsville, Townsville, off the northeast coast of Australia.
Birth mother Kristen Ann Hawkins and biological father John Shipton met during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
But before Assange was born, the two parted ways.
When Assange was 1 year old, his mother remarried with his stepfather, Brett Assange.
Julian Assange was also able to get the surname Assange from his stepfather.
Later, the parents jointly ran a touring theater.
Stepfather Bright said that Assange "has a personal opinion on right and wrong black and white" and "always supports the weak,
People who resent the alliance to bully others."
Bright was very kind to Assange, and because of this, Assange had a happy childhood.
Unfortunately, in 1979, when Assange was 8 years old, the marriage of his mother Christine Christine and his stepfather Bright broke down again.
Soon after, the mother married a musician, Leif Meynell,
He also gave birth to Julian Assange's younger brother.
But Assange's second stepfather was a fanatic of an emerging religion in Australia, and he would often do some crazy behavior.
He even wanted to dedicate Assange to his own master.
In 1982, Christine Christine divorced again, leaving with the young Assange and his brother.
And in order to escape the entanglement of Leif Meynell Lef Menell, he began a life of 5 years of hiding in Tibet.
In just 5 years, Assange moved with his mother more than 30 times.
Such an unstable life left Assange receiving an intermittent education, often self-taught at home.
Mother Christine Christine's ideas on Assange's education are also very offbeat.
She believes that formal education will only imprison children's thinking.
Instilled in them a pernicious sense of reverence for authority and weakened his thirst for knowledge.
The precarious upbringing of his youth prevented Assange from easily building trust in the world.
He wrapped himself in a thick shell, sensitive and paranoid.
When he was fourteen years old, Assange saw something called a computer in the window of an electrical appliance store.
In this way, an unexpected encounter completely changed Assange's life.
Teen Hacker
Ever since he had his first computer, Assange has become obsessed with programming.
The binary codes of 0 and 1 became the only sustenance for him to display his talents.
At the age of sixteen, her mother, Christine, bought Assange a modem.
Since then, Assange has knocked on the door of the Internet.
By 1987, the website did not exist, but the web and telecommunications system was beginning to take shape.
Assange named himself Mendax and became a hacker.
Mendax is taken from the famous phrase "splendide mendax" by the ancient Roman poet Horace, which means "noble hypocrisy".
Assange wants to use his own technology to pierce all the darkness of the world.
He later formed a hacking group called "Subversion of All Nations" with two other hackers.
Have fun snooping on secrets hidden on the web.
From Motorola and Bell Labs to Lockheed Martin and stanford Research Institute,
Then to the U.S. Department of Defense Pentagon, Assange has left backdoors in these network systems.
In his book Underground, co-authored with writer Selette Dreyfus,
Assange described his hacking beliefs: First, don't damage the computer system you're hacking into;
Second, do not change the information in those systems; Third, share the information obtained.
In 1989, at the age of 18, Assange married his 16-year-old girlfriend and gave birth to a son, Daniel.
At this point, hacking activities had become Assange's routine. In the "Subversion of All Nations" hacking group,
Assange's level of technology is the highest. But often walk by the river where there are not wet shoes,
In September 1991, 20-year-old Assange hacked into the main terminal of the Canadian telecommunications company Northern Telecom in Melbourne.
And sent the system administrator this provocative message:
"I had a great time in your system. We didn't do anything to damage the system.
On the contrary, some improvements have been made in some places. Please do not notify the Australian Federal Police. ”
Prior to this, the Australian government had long noticed the hacking organization "Subversion of All Nations".
A task force called Climate Action has also been set up to investigate them and gather evidence.
Assange's message became the trigger for their arrest.
In October 1991, the police finally came to the door. Assange was subsequently charged with 31 hacking-related counts.
Because his wife could no longer bear the fearful life, she left him with her young son, and the family became a mess.
Later, Assange pleaded guilty to 25 charges and 6 other charges were dropped.
But because the laws on hackers at that time were not perfect,
The actions of Assange and his party also did not cause actual damage to the injured organization,
The judge believed they were just trying to satisfy curiosity and gain pleasure in surfing on a computer.
As a result, Assange was ultimately sentenced to a fine of ONLY $2100 and 18 months of keeping orders as a punishment.
Even more painful than the criminal case is the lawsuit he and his ex-wife fought over custody of his son during the same period.
After more than 30 hearings and appeals, in 1999, Assange finally reached an agreement with his bare ex-wife.
Took back custody of his son. On the day of the sentencing, Assange had a white head overnight, and his once brown hair had turned gray.
In order to be able to support his son, Assange worked several part-time jobs at the same time during that time, and life was very hard.
In 2003, at the age of 32, Assange was busy again and entered the University of Melbourne to study mathematics and physics.
Trying to find the truth of the world. He has good grades and has represented the University of Melbourne in national physics competitions.
But after a few years of study, before he could graduate, he dropped out of school hastily.
The reason is that once Assange attended a conference organized by the Australian Physical Society.
More than 900 professional physicists were present that day.
At the meeting, various authorities took turns to speak, expressing their own views, talking about the world, physics, and life.
But the wheel of the machine came down with a war of words, but It disappointed Assange.
He did not see scholars who dared to pursue the truth, but he saw a group of timid rats, conformist,
Terrible so-called experts. Shortly after the conference, Assange dropped out of the University of Melbourne.
After that, Assange often fell into anxiety and confusion, and also felt the smallness and incompetence of the individual in the face of power. Assange once thought that the Internet was a place of freedom and equality, but the truth is that information technology has become a tool for authorities to brainwash people. The truth is concealed and the media is controlled.
One day in 2006, Assange wrote on his blog: I'm going to throw the world into acid and melt it, leaving only the skeleton.
In October of the same year, under Assange's leadership, a website called WikiLeaks was born.
The word wiki is an abbreviation from the English word "What I Know Is" meaning: What I know is.
The WikiLeaks logo is also particularly eye-catching: a melting Earth hourglass.
Black holes that devour secrets are everywhere.
Assange is determined to be the black hole hunter, providing the public with the truth without any whitewash.
WikiLeaks
Assange set three goals for WikiLeaks: freedom of information, uncovering the truth, and creating and preserving real history.
In December 2006, WikiLeaks released its first document pointing directly to somali opposition leader Avis's intentions in a coup.
WikiLeaks' first shot shocked the world.
At first, people thought that WikiLeaks was a website that used the slogan of "freedom" and "human rights" to create momentum.
I didn't expect them to be able to pull out such classified heavy information. Everyone wonders what the site is trying to do.
In 2007, WikiLeaks struck again, publishing documents of corruption by former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi.
and then-President Mwai Kibaki's weakness and compromise with the Moi family.
According to the documents, Moy embezzled £1 billion in state assets during his 24-year reign and colluded with drug lords to print counterfeit money.
This news once again made the world look at WikiLeaks, and even the subsequent Kenyan election was affected.
Zebeki's popularity plummeted, and he was finally elected by a narrow margin of only 2%, and he almost fell.
Since then, WikiLeaks' gunfire has become even more unmanageable.
In 2008, WikiLeaks published "Kenya: Crying and Blood: Killings and Disappearances in Judicial Trials"
（Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances）一文，
The indiscriminate killing of innocents by the Kenyan police was exposed.
Not long after, "WikiLeaks" broke the news again,
The internal confidential documents of Kaupthing, Iceland's largest bank, were made public,
Uncovered the bank's debt problems and illegal lending problems.
At the end of 2009, WikiLeaks teamed up with Russian hackers.
More than 1,000 emails from the Climate Institute of the University of East Anglia in England were made public.
The contents of the email show that several scientists have manipulated data and falsified scientific processes to support their claims about climate change.
To prove that global warming is mainly caused by human activities.
This revelation directly triggered the later "ClimateGate" incident, which made many people think that
Global warming is nothing more than a cover for developed countries to suppress developing countries.
For an analysis of the paradox of climate change, you can look back at my previous video.
In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks as number one of the "sites that revolutionized the press."
If Assange hadn't taken aim at the United States,
Maybe he and WikiLeaks could win the Nobel Peace Prize.
November 2007 was WikiLeaks' first firing of artillery against the United States.
They published a U.S. Department of Defense Instruction Manual for the Administration of Prisons at Guantanamo, issued to soldiers.
This is ironclad evidence of human rights violations in the prison.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks exposed a video of a U.S. military helicopter shooting Iraqi civilians.
This is the "Baghdad video" that shocked the world.
The video was filmed on July 12, 2007, when two U.S. Army helicopters opened fire in a residential area in Baghdad, the iraqi capital.
Caused more than a dozen deaths. Among them were 2 British Reuters reporters and 2 children were injured.
When firing, American soldiers laughed and fired, as if they were playing a computer game.
The "Baghdad Video" made Assange and WikiLeaks famous and made them a thorn in the side of the U.S. government.
It is worth mentioning that after the video was exposed, officials still insisted that the reporters and the civilians who were shot were "rebels".
Instead, he stripped out the cocoon and pulled out the provider of this video, American intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning,
Manning was also sentenced to 35 years in prison for illegally downloading 250,000 confidential U.S. government documents.
In July 2010, WikiLeaks released another 92,000 top-secret copies of U.S. military information on the War in Afghanistan.
In October of the same year, 392,000 documents related to the Iraq War were exposed.
The document details the six-year period from 2004 to 2009.
A total of 109,000 Iraqis lost their lives in the war, 66,000 ordinary people.
The most exciting thing is that in November of the same year, WikiLeaks passed through several mainstream media in Europe and the United States.
More than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables were made public.
The cable showed that U.S. diplomats ridiculed Putin, then Prime Minister of Russia, as a "transparent man."
Alluding to him is the "Shadow Emperor" behind President Dmitry Medvedev.
He also funnedly compared the two to Batman and Robin in DC Comics, putin is Batman,
Medvedev is Robin, and Robin will always be Batman's assistant and follower.
In an interview, Putin, who is angry with these contents, used three words to pay tribute to those behind the scenes.
Calling them "arrogant," "rude," and "immoral."
However, Putin is not the most miserable person to be hacked.
In diplomatic telegrams, then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was likened to Hitler in the Middle East.
Zimbabwean President Mugabe was called a "crazy old man."
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was hit in almost every part of his lower body.
U.S. diplomats described him as "conceited and incompetent, physically and politically weak."
The diplomats reveled in telegrams like spitting conventions, going crazy and biting even allies and themselves.
French President Sarkozy was described as a thin-skinned dictator, like a king without clothes.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is "afraid of risks, not creative", "there is nothing in the brain".
His own president, Barack Obama, is also not a good bird, "has no feelings for Europe, prefers the East to the West."
These 250,000 diplomatic telegrams were like artillery battles falling into the pits, blowing up the world's dignitaries.
Importantly, the telegram not only contained offensive and ridiculous remarks by U.S. diplomats about the heads of state, but even showed that
Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state in the United States, had asked American diplomats to secretly collect detailed biological information of senior United Nations officials.
Includes DNA, fingerprints, and the iris of the eyeball. As soon as the "telegraph gate" came out, it triggered a serious diplomatic crisis in the United States.
The leak has also been dubbed "9/11 in U.S. diplomacy."
At this time, although the U.S. government hated Assange to the teeth, it also had nothing to do with him and WikiLeaks.
With the experience of the arrest when he was young, Assange made every preparation this time.
Structurally, WikiLeaks has 9 board members, but only Assange has made his identity public.
There are also five regular staff members, all of whom are volunteers.
They don't want to make money by breaking the news, they just want to build an encryption platform.
Anyone can upload material through WikiLeaks.
Technically, the information of each data uploader will be encrypted layer by layer, and no one knows their true identity.
Even Assange himself is unclear. After the information was uploaded to the WikiLeaks platform,
The staff will review the authenticity of the information, confirm that the information has a certain degree of credibility and then make it public.
Legally, WikiLeaks does not have any obligation of confidentiality and does not carry out direct hacking.
No lawsuit can be filed.
And once the lawsuit is filed, governments are equivalent to indirectly acknowledging the authenticity of the documents published by WikiLeaks.
However, the open gun is easy to block, and the dark arrow is difficult to defend.
In December 2010, Internet giant Amazon and U.S. domain name system management company EverydNS came under repeated pressure from the government.
Announced that it will terminate its services to WikiLeaks. Subsequently, the funding account that WikiLeaks used to accept donations was frozen.
Worst of all, at the end of 2010, Interpol was asked by the Swedish police.
A Red International Wanted Notice was issued against Assange for sexual assault.
Pink trap
In August 2010, Assange was invited to Stockholm, Sweden, for a lecture.
On August 14, Assange had a relationship with Anna, a college teaching assistant.
In the process of turning the clouds and rain, the condom broke.
Two days later, Assange had another relationship with a fan who admired him and also had a condom problem.
Then, a few days later, on August 20, the two women reported that Assange had forced them to have sex.
A large number of media outlets have heard about it and made overwhelming reports.
On November 18, 2010, the Stockholm District Court issued a warrant for Assange's arrest.
But that didn't make Assange restrain a bit.
Ten days later, on November 28, Assange launched the shocking "9.11 diplomatic leak."
Let the dignitaries of various countries be disgraced.
On December 1, Interpol, based in Lyon, decided to assist Sweden,
Issued a global "Red Notice" to 188 member states vowing to bring Assange to justice.
It's true that Assange can't control his lower body, but things seem ridiculous too.
Many netizens questioned that this is too much like a trap, and Interpol has mobilized the public for a condom.
But Assange did not choose to become a fugitive, and on December 7, 2010, he surrendered himself to British police in London.
Assange was then imprisoned in Wandsworth Prison in the United Kingdom.
A reporter in the Washington Times published an article claiming
"Assange is not a journalist, he is a spy, and he deserves to go to jail."
Assange was not surprised, knowing that many journalists were nothing more than stenographers of the powerful.
While in Wandsworth Prison, Assange also received many letters from supporters.
Someone else sent him a copy of Time Magazine, and Assange was on the cover of the magazine.
On the cover, Assange's mouth is sealed by an American flag. It's clear that the U.S. wants Assange to shut up.
On December 16, 2010, Assange's supporters collected bail for him, and Assange walked out of prison.
However, in May 2012, the Uk's Supreme Court ruled that Assange would be extradited to Sweden for trial.
So, on bail, Assange disguised himself as a courier and hid in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Britain to seek asylum.
That's seven years.
One might wonder why Ecuador is willing to fight against many countries for assange?
This is because, on the one hand, Ecuador already has diplomatic contradictions with the United States.
Ecuadorian President Correa, on the other hand, had his own considerations.
He believes supporting Assange will increase his support in Ecuador.
Many Ecuadorians have a negative impression of European countries, especially the United Kingdom.
Sheltering Assange would help Correa build an image of a civilian fighter who represents developing countries in the fight against imperialism.
In addition, Correa shut down 14 media outlets in Ecuador in 2012, which has made him widely criticized.
By supporting Assange, it can also be shown that he is a staunch supporter of free speech,
The domestic initiative is only to combat corrupt media. All of this could pave the way for the 2013 presidential election.
In this way, Assange in a 18-square-meter room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Britain,
Embarked on a 7-year-long journey of grounding, in this room he also continued to challenge power.
Embassy survive
In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee, sent two top-secret documents
It was handed over to the British Guardian and the Washington Post of the United States, respectively.
On June 5, the British "Guardian" first threw the first public opinion bomb,
Calling the NSA a secret program code-named Prism,
Its content is to require telecom giant Verizon to hand over the call logs of millions of users every day.
On June 6, the Washington Post threw a second public opinion bomb, revealing that in the past six years,
The NSA and the FBI have access to the servers of nine internet giants such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
Monitor U.S. citizens' emails, chat history, videos, photos, and other private profiles.
American public opinion then went into an uproar. This is known as the "Prism Gate" incident.
After the incident broke out, Snowden turned to WikiLeaks for help.
WikiLeaks used its global network of people to help Snowden successfully flee to Russia to seek political asylum.
In 2015, WikiLeaks repeatedly exposed the information of the United States for a long time spying on senior leaders of other countries.
Then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Brazilian President Rousseff,
There are also three presidents of France (Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande)
As many as 35 other leaders appeared on the NSA's surveillance list.
By 2016, during the U.S. election, Trump's rivalry with Hillary Clinton was in full swing.
From the party's candidacy in February 2016 to the time of the general election vote,
Hillary Clinton's approval rating is higher than Trump's for the vast majority of the time.
Especially in the final three television debates from September to October, most U.S. media outlets preferred Hillary Clinton's performance.
But the situation reversed on the day of the election, except for a few sessions of short-term overtaking, Trump led all the way,
And finally beat Hillary Clinton in a ratio of 306:232.
It also set the Best Republican election performance since 1988.
Trump's election as PRESIDENT of the United States can be said to be the greatest credit for Assange and WikiLeaks.
Later in the election, WikiLeaks released top-secret emails from more than 19,000 Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party in one fell swoop.
The emails involved seven democratic heavyweights over a period from January 2015 to May 2016.
The contents of the email show that Hillary Clinton has long used her private mailbox to handle public affairs.
It even contains government classified information. Not only that, she also deliberately forged black material to attack party rival Bernie Sanders,
and Republican presidential candidate Trump.
These emails shook off the Democrats' manipulation of public opinion, crackdowns on political opponents, and even collusion with terrorists.
This eventually led to the instant collapse of the Hillary design. Indirectly allowing Trump to become the president of the United States as he wished.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump said several times: "WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks." ”
However, a few years after taking office, perhaps under the pressure of his position, Trump changed his mouth and said: I don't know anything about WikiLeaks.
It's not my business, and I'm sure the well-done Attorney General will handle it and he'll make the decision.
I really didn't know anything about Assange. ”
In 2012, after Assange had just taken refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,
Then-Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said he was welcome to stay at the embassy for "centuries."
However, as time went on, economic difficulties forced Ecuador to become more and more eager to rebuild its relations with the West.
It is also aware of the damage caused by Assange's long stay to the country's diplomatic relations.
In 2017, Ecuador's new president, Lenin Moreno, took office.
His attitude towards Assange was not as friendly as his last president.
In 2018, the Ecuadorian embassy began restricting Assange's access to the Internet and issued a series of so-called "house rules".
He was required to keep his room clean and hygienic at all times, and he was forbidden to receive visitors other than the team of lawyers.
Subsequently, Assange accused the Ecuadorian government of installing surveillance equipment in his room to monitor his daily life,
Caused him to have to play white noise while he was working,
Or use household appliances such as blenders to suppress the listening devices in the room.
In October 2018, Assange sued the Ecuadorian government for "violating his basic human rights."
Subsequently, President Moreno of Ecuador said that Assange's actions violated the conditions of asylum.
The asylum granted to him will be revoked in the hope that he will leave the embassy.
In April 2019, British police were allowed to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, dragged Assange out and put him in a police car.
In May of the same year, Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison and taken to Belmarsh Prison in London.
The U.S. followed up with 18 charges against Assange under espionage laws.
If all these charges are convicted, Assange could face up to 175 years in prison.
In his current physical condition, this is equivalent to a death sentence.
In June 2019, the United States applied for Assange's extradition.
From the upheaval to the struggle for democracy, from the attention of thousands of people to the prisoner of the order,
Julian Assange's life went through ups and downs.
Whether he was a brave whistleblower who exposed the darkness or a leaking spy for crazy demons has always been controversial.
Daniel Benjamin, a U.S. diplomat and former State Department counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that
He is more inclined to believe that Assange is a spy because all the information he publishes is from improper sources.
But Kristen Ravensen, an Icelandic investigative journalist and former WikiLeaks spokeswoman, has a different view.
He argues that Assange's actions are a kind of news activity, no matter where the information comes from.
As long as it's in the public interest, as a journalist you have a responsibility to publish it.
The US "Time" magazine believes that the information disclosed by Assange is in fact not a "top secret" document.
At least hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel or government officials have access to these secrets.
The Assange phenomenon is a social phenomenon that will inevitably arise in the era of network informatization.
The essential problem of this phenomenon is freedom of speech and information.
In January 2021, the London District Court ruled on Assange's extradition case.
Believing that extradition to a U.S. prison could have made Assange, who already suffered from depression and The Asperger's sign,
His physical and mental condition further deteriorated, increasing the risk of suicide and he therefore refused the extradition request.
Subsequently, the United States pledged not to hold Assange in solitary confinement or send Assange to a heavily guarded prison.
So in December 2021, the Uk High Court overturned the District Court's decision.
On 17 June 2022, Uk Home Secretary Pritty Patel issued a statement,
Confirm that she has approved the Request of the United States Government for the extradition of Julian Assange.
Although the mighty power was fierce and destroyed, Assange still left himself a backhand.
In July 2010, perhaps with a premonition that his doom was coming,
Assange published a 1.4GB encrypted file on the WikiLeaks website.
He calls it an "insurance file," and its contents will not only affect the United States, but even determine the pattern of the world.
This document has been downloaded and saved by countless netizens.
Assange set it up an extremely complex encryption system that no one has been able to crack so far.
In the event of an accident on assange or a WikiLeaks website, someone will expose the key.
Assange says it's his "dead hand system" against power.
This means that the story about Assange has not come to an end.
In the future, he may continue to stage wars with world powers.