This gray-haired man is definitely one of the people that America hates and wants to get rid of the most.
He exposed a large number of scandals in the United States, exposed countless crimes of the US military, and overthrew Hillary Clinton.
He is Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and a super-hacker known as the "modern-day Robin Hood".
So, what did he do to make the United States chase and intercept for more than ten years?
[a]
Every legend has had a relatively extraordinary childhood, and Assange is no exception.
Assange's mother is an Australian motorcycle girl who dropped out of school since she was a child, and her private life is quite chaotic, and she was not married when she gave birth to Assange, and Assange naturally did not know who his biological father was.
When he was a child, Assange's mother remarried twice, and when she married for the second time, she was very unlucky to meet a cultist, who wanted to capture Assange and go to the sacrifice, but in desperation, his mother had to take Assange to hide.
moved more than 30 times before he escaped the pursuit of his stepfather.
The wandering and helplessness of his youth allowed Assange to develop a liberal and unruly character, which laid the groundwork for his subsequent entrepreneurial journey.
In 1985, at the age of 14, Assange was introduced to programming in a computer store across the street from his home, and he became interested in it, and after some hard work, gradually mastered the basic techniques of becoming a hacker, and took the online name "Mendax".
In Assange's mind, all people are equal, and although he comes from a humble background, he has the same human rights as the dignitaries, and the pampering of the dignitaries is full of hypocrisy in his opinion.
Since then, Assange has begun to use his hacking skills to hack into the network systems that other governments have guarded strictly, and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, and the Naval Operations Center have all been attacked by him one after another. This quickly attracted the attention of the Five Eyes Alliance.
Soon after, the police found out that the hacking was the work of Assange, who was in Australia, and held him for some time.
But Assange's actions were only to prove his hacking skills and satisfy his intellectual curiosity, and he did not tamper with the backend data or sell the data for his own profit. So after being fined a few thousand dollars, he was released on bail.
After being acquitted, Assange endured months in prison for no apparent reason, confiscated his money and his wife left him, a series of encounters that made him realize how easily law enforcers could drain themselves of their money and even their freedom.
He's going to rebel!
He wants to reveal the dark side behind the abuse of power!
[two]
In 2006, Assange rallied a group of like-minded friends to announce the creation of the WikiLeaks website, which "featured" leaks and was dedicated to revealing the truth about suppressed politics.
On the day of its establishment, Assange gave an impassioned speech, saying that the asymmetry of information is the crux of people's exploitation and oppression, and that only by letting more people know the truth and making the work of the power institutions more transparent can we have a more equal and just society, and that information technology is the only way to realize this vision.
However, although the slogan was shouted, it did not receive much attention.
Because the world's hacking technology was not developed at that time, there were many technology companies such as "WikiLeaks", and many of them were listed to defraud the subsidy company, so WikiLeaks seemed very ordinary in the industry and was not worth mentioning.
But it didn't take long for Assange to show the world how powerful he was.
In December of that year, WikiLeaks released news that a Somali opposition leader was seeking a coup d'état, causing an uproar around the world.
Just when people are struggling with what kind of forces are controlled by behind "WikiLeaks" to be able to obtain such top-secret and critical intelligence, WikiLeaks has made another dose of shocking information at the right time.
At the beginning of the following year, WikiLeaks officially broke the news that Moi, the former president of the African country of Kenya, had colluded with the current president to embezzle $1 billion in national assets and print counterfeit money during his 24-year reign.
Both revelations caused political turmoil in the countries where they were exposed, and their influence can be seen.
The U.S.-led Five Eyes Alliance is very happy to see this situation.
In the colonial perception of Western countries since ancient times, the more chaotic the small country they are trying to control, the easier it is to control. Not to mention the fact that the civil strife in these regions was created by "WikiLeaks", and they did not need to pay anything, so that they were even happier.
Therefore, these Western countries have praised WikiLeaks' behavior, praising it for making an indelible contribution to the world's "democracy and justice", which is a just act.
But they are clearly too consequentialist to understand why WikiLeaks was founded in the first place.
Only Assange knows in his heart that WikiLeaks is by no means a puppet and a weapon of European and American countries, and what he does is to expose the despicable lies that exist in the world, even in the face of many powerful countries in the world, he will not give them the slightest face.
It wasn't long before Assange set out to take aim at the boss of the Western bloc, the United States.
In 2010, WikiLeaks released a prison management manual issued by the U.S. Department of Defense, which revealed some of the abuses of prisoners by the U.S. police, and conversely, if the detainees behaved well, they received a "special reward" with a roll of toilet paper.
Immediately afterward, WikiLeaks released emails exchanged between Alaska Governor Perrin and the Canadian Independence Party, causing a rift in US-Canadian relations. As a result, Palin's political future was in jeopardy, and he indignantly portrayed Assange as a dangerous enemy.
For a time, Assange almost became a "global public enemy".
The U.S. government has ordered Interpol to arrest Assange. Because WikiLeaks only exposes information and never falsifies it illegally, Interpol can only arrest Assange on a rape charge.
Ironically, the so-called "freedom of speech" that Western countries have always advocated has been slapped in the face, because the arrest of Assange is, in a sense, a violation of "freedom of speech".
Assange was able to live in peace while creating a video website during his exile and uploading a video of U.S. troops killing Afghan civilians during the war in Afghanistan.
After the video was uploaded, the total number of views quickly exceeded one million, attracting a crusade from the people of the world against the atrocities of the US military.
It is worth mentioning that this video was not obtained by Assange using hacking techniques, but was voluntarily submitted by a soldier of the US military who could not bear the condemnation of conscience.
After the video was exposed, Assange used hacking technology to obtain more than 90,000 files of the US military in the war in Afghanistan, and made 144 cases of torture and killing of civilians public, and the international image of the United States completely fell to the bottom.
Annoyed and angry, the United States sent a large number of agents to find an opportunity to assassinate Assange, but fortunately, Assange was lucky to avoid several assassinations.
It was in 2012 that the Ecuadorian government granted political asylum to Assange, and Assange was freed from life-threatening conditions.
During his time in Ecuador, Assange can be said to have devoted himself to the work of acting as a "messenger of world justice", and NATO countries led by the United States have basically tasted the pain of being successfully leaked by WikiLeaks, and the United States is naturally the first to bear the brunt.
Among the many confrontations with the United States, the most classic is the "Hillary election" in 2016.
At that time, it was the US election season, and Assange exposed a series of scandals of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, including malicious control of public opinion, cracking down on political opponents, and funding the "Islamic State".
This operation caused Hillary's approval rating to plummet, and the Republican candidate Trump caught up and became the new president of the United States.
Assange's actions can be described as a "divine assist" for Trump, and afterwards, Trump did not forget to express his gratitude to Assange for his "help", saying that he also likes to watch WikiLeaks very much.
But in 2019, Ecuador's leadership changed dramatically, and the new president, pursuing a pro-American policy, revoked Assange's political asylum, and Assange was arrested and imprisoned by the British police shortly after.
In 2020, Biden, a Democrat in the United States, won the election, and Biden became the new president of the United States.
Under pressure from the "big brother", the UK could only approve the decision to extradite Assange back to the United States in 2022.
However, the opposition from the outside world has been repeated, and this decision has never been implemented. Then-Mexican President Andrés Manuel López López said: "If Assange is extradited back to the United States and sentenced to death, then we must demolish the Statue of Liberty." ”
At the end of March this year, British prosecutors held a hearing on "whether to immediately extradite Assange to the United States".
As a result, demonstrations against Assange's extradition broke out in London, the capital of the United Kingdom, on the same day, and the British government reluctantly compromised, agreeing to give Assange the opportunity to continue his appeal and hold the next hearing in May.
This means that to this day, Assange has still not been extradited back to the United States, and there is still a possibility of regaining his freedom.
Assange's saga may still be unfinished.
[The author said]
In the author's view, what the United States has always been proud of is its "separation of powers" political system, which they have labeled as more "liberal and democratic" and "more respectful of human rights," and has established the prestige of world hegemony in the world.
However, the so-called "freedom" and "human rights" advocated by the United States are limited and extremely hypocritical, and the premise is that it must fully guarantee that it can continue to plunder its interests, which is the American-style bandit logic.
Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has become a thorn in the side of the U.S. government because of his outstanding professional skills and extraordinary courage to tear off the fig leaf of the United States on this issue. Whether or not Assange can be extradited back to the United States determines whether "freedom of speech" should yield to hegemonism, and this issue is indeed a dilemma for Britain today.