Julian Assange

Julian Assange
Assange in 2010
Born	(1971-07-03) 3 July 1971 Townsville, Queensland, Australia
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	University of Melbourne
Occupation(s)	Editor-in-chief and spokesperson for WikiLeaks
Known for	WikiLeaks
Children	Son
Awards	Economist Freedom of Expression Award (2008) Amnesty International UK Media Award (2009) Sam Adams Award (2010)

Julian Paul Assange (/əˈsɑːnʒ/ ə-SAHNZH; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian journalist, publisher, and Internet activist. He is the spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for news leaks. He has worked as a computer programmer and was a hacker during his youth. He has lived in several countries, and has made occasional public appearances to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.

Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Africa, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. In 2010, he published classified details about US involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media partners began publishing secret US diplomatic cables. The White House has called Assange's release of the diplomatic cables "reckless and dangerous".

For his work with WikiLeaks, Assange received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya and Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.

Assange is currently wanted for questioning in Sweden regarding alleged sexual offences, and was arrested in London, England on 7 December 2010. He is currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an extradition hearing. He has denied the allegations and claimed they are politically motivated. As a result of Assange's bail appeal the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales issued a ruling allowing the use of live electronic reporting during court sessions.

Early life

Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, and spent much of his youth living on Magnetic Island.

When he was one year old, his mother Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname. Brett and Christine Assange ran a touring theatre company. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". "He always stood up for the underdog,... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people."

In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician who belonged to a New Age group led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The couple had a son, but broke up in 1982 and engaged in a custody struggle for Assange's half-brother. His mother then took both children into hiding for the next five years. Assange moved several dozen times during his childhood, attending many schools, sometimes being home schooled.

Hacking

In 1987, after turning 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of Horace: "splendide mendax", or "nobly untruthful"). He and two other hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. Assange wrote down the early rules of the subculture: "Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information".

In response to the hacking, the Australian Federal Police raided his Melbourne home in 1991. He was reported to have accessed computers belonging to an Australian university, the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, and other organisations, via modem. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and was released on bond for good conduct after being fined AU$2100. The prosecutor said "there is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what's the expression—surf through these various computers".

Assange later commented, "It's a bit annoying, actually. Because I co-wrote a book about [being a hacker], there are documentaries about that, people talk about that a lot. They can cut and paste. But that was 20 years ago. It's very annoying to see modern day articles calling me a computer hacker. I'm not ashamed of it, I'm quite proud of it. But I understand the reason they suggest I'm a computer hacker now. There's a very specific reason."

Child custody issues

In 1989, Assange started living with his girlfriend and they had a son, Daniel. After they split up, they engaged in a lengthy custody struggle, and did not agree on a custody arrangement until 1999. The entire process prompted Assange and his mother to form Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection, an activist group centered on creating a "central databank" for otherwise inaccessible legal records related to child custody issues in Australia.

Computer programming and university studies

In 1993, Assange was involved in starting one of the first public internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. Starting in 1994, Assange lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software. In 1995, Assange wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. He contributed several patches to the PostgreSQL project in 1996. He helped to write the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), which credits him as a researcher and reports his history with International Subversives. Starting around 1997, he co-invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption system, a cryptographic concept made into a software package for Linux designed to provide plausible deniability against rubber-hose cryptanalysis; he originally intended the system to be used "as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field." Other free software that he has authored or co-authored includes the Usenet caching software NNTPCache and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines. In 1999, Assange registered the domain leaks.org; "But", he says, "then I didn't do anything with it."

Assange has reportedly attended six universities at various times. From 2003 to 2006, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He has also studied philosophy and neuroscience. He never graduated and received the minimum passing grades in most of his math courses. On his personal web page, he described having represented his university at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005.

WikiLeaks

Main article: WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006. That year, Assange wrote two essays setting out the philosophy behind WikiLeaks: "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not." In his blog he wrote, "the more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. ... Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."

Assange sits on Wikileaks's nine-member advisory board, and is a prominent media spokesman on its behalf. While newspapers have described him as a "director" or "founder" of Wikileaks, Assange has said, "I don't call myself a founder"; he does describe himself as the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, and has stated that he has the final decision in the process of vetting documents submitted to the site. Like all others working for the site, Assange is an unpaid volunteer. Assange says that Wikileaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined: "That's not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are – rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It's disgraceful." Assange advocates a "transparent" and "scientific" approach to journalism, saying that "you can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism." In 2006, CounterPunch called him "Australia's most infamous former computer hacker." The Age has called him "one of the most intriguing people in the world" and "internet's freedom fighter." Assange has called himself "extremely cynical". The Personal Democracy Forum said that as a teenager he was "Australia's most famous ethical computer hacker." He has been described as being largely self-taught and widely read on science and mathematics, and as thriving on intellectual battle.

WikiLeaks has been involved in the publication of material documenting extrajudicial killings in Kenya, a report of toxic waste dumping on the African coast, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike video, and material involving large banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer among other documents.

When asked about the ideology and intended purpose of Wikileaks at the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum, Assange stated:

Our goal is to have a just civilization. That is sort of a personal motivating goal. And the message is transparency. It is important not to confuse the message with the goal. Nonetheless we believe that it is an excellent message. Gaining justice with transparency. It is a good way of doing that, it is also a good way of not making too many mistakes. We have a trans-political ideology, it is not right it is not left it is about understanding. Before you can give any advice, any program about how to deal with the world, how to put the civil into civilization. How to gain influence on people. Before you can have that program, first you have to understand what is actually going on.... And therefore any program or recommendation, any political ideology that comes out of that misunderstanding will itself be a misunderstanding. So, we say, to some degree all political ideologies are currently bankrupt. Because they do not have the raw ingredient they need to address the world. The raw ingredient to understand what is actually happening.

Public appearances

Assange in Copenhagen, 2009

In addition to exercising great authority and editorial control within WikiLeaks, Assange acts as its public face. He has appeared at media conferences such as New Media Days '09 in Copenhagen, the 2010 Logan Symposium in Investigative Reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and at hacker conferences, notably the 25th and 26th Chaos Communication Congress. In the first half of 2010, he appeared on Al Jazeera English, MSNBC, Democracy Now!, RT, and The Colbert Report to discuss the release of the Baghdad airstrike video by Wikileaks. On 3 June he appeared via videoconferencing at the Personal Democracy Forum conference with Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg told MSNBC "the explanation he [Assange] used" for not appearing in person in the USA was that "it was not safe for him to come to this country." On 11 June he was to appear on a Showcase Panel at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas, but there are reports that he cancelled several days prior. On 10 June 2010, it was reported that Pentagon officials are trying to determine his whereabouts. Based on this, there have been reports that U.S. officials want to apprehend Assange. Ellsberg said that the arrest of Bradley Manning and subsequent speculation by US officials about what Assange may be about to publish "puts his well-being, his physical life, in some danger now." In The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder called Ellsberg's concerns "ridiculous", and said that "Assange's tendency to believe that he is one step away from being thrown into a black hole hinders, and to some extent discredits, his work." In Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald questioned "screeching media reports" that there was a "manhunt" on Assange underway, arguing that they were only based on comments by "anonymous government officials" and might even serve a campaign by the U.S. government, by intimidating possible whistleblowers.

On 21 June 2010, Assange took part at a hearing in Brussels, Belgium, appearing in public for the first time in nearly a month. He was a member on a panel that discussed Internet censorship and expressed his worries over the recent filtering in countries such as Australia. He also talked about secret gag orders preventing newspapers from publishing information about specific subjects and even divulging the fact that they are being gagged. Using an example involving The Guardian, he also explained how newspapers are altering their online archives sometimes by removing entire articles. He told The Guardian that he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert and will avoid travel to America, saying "[U.S.] public statements have all been reasonable. But some statements made in private are a bit more questionable." He said "politically it would be a great error for them to act. I feel perfectly safe but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the U.S. during this period."

On 17 July, Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York City, replacing Assange due to the presence of federal agents at the conference. He announced that the WikiLeaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended. Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that WikiLeaks was now accepting submissions again. On 26 July, after the release of the Afghan War Diary, Assange appeared at the Frontline Club for a press conference.

Release of US diplomatic cables

Main article: United States diplomatic cables leak

On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing some of the 251,000 American diplomatic cables in their possession, of which over 53 percent are listed as unclassified, 40 percent are "Confidential" and just over six percent are classified "Secret". The following day, the Attorney-General of Australia, Robert McClelland, told the press that Australia would inquire into Assange's activities and WikiLeaks. He said that "from Australia's point of view, we think there are potentially a number of criminal laws that could have been breached by the release of this information. The Australian Federal Police are looking at that". McClelland would not rule out the possibility that Australian authorities will cancel Assange's passport, and warned him that he might face charges should he return to Australia. As of 11 December 2010 only 1295 cables have been released, or 1/2 of 1 percent of the total.

The United States Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation related to the leak. US prosecutors are reportedly considering charges against Assange under several laws, but any prosecution would be difficult.

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange "is serving our [American] democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country." On the issue of national security considerations for the US, Ellsberg added that "He's obviously a very competent guy in many ways. I think his instincts are that most of this material deserves to be out. We are arguing over a very small fragment that doesn’t. He has not yet put out anything that hurt anybody's national security". Assange told London reporters that the leaked cables showed US ambassadors around the world were ordered "to engage in espionage behavior" which he said seemed to be "representative of a gradual shift to a lack of rule of law in US institutions that needs to be exposed and that we have been exposing."

Role as a publisher

Assange received the 2009 Media award from Amnesty International, which are intended to "recognise excellence in human rights journalism" and he has been recognized as a journalist by the Centre for investigative journalism. In December 2010, US State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley objected to the description of Assange as a journalist, and also stated that the US State Department does not regard WikiLeaks as a media organization. In response to a question from the press, Crowley said; "I think he’s an anarchist, but he’s not a journalist." Alex Massie wrote an article in The Spectator called "Yes, Julian Assange is a journalist", but acknowledged that "newsman" might be a better description of Assange. Assange has said that he has been publishing factual material since age 25, and that it is not necessary to debate whether or not he is a journalist. He has stated that his role is "primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists".

Investigations

Espionage investigation in the United States

Published reports suggest that a joint Justice Department-Pentagon team of investigators is exploring the possibility of charging Assange under the Espionage Act. "This is not saber-rattling," said Attorney General Eric Holder, commenting on the possibility that Assange will be prosecuted by the US government.

U.S. Vice President Joseph "Joe" Biden told the press that the U.S. is looking into ways to stop future releases of leaked material. On the issue of whether or not Assange violated any laws, he said, "If he conspired to get these classified documents with a member of the US military that is fundamentally different than if someone drops on your lap … you are a press person, here is classified material."

A number of commentators, including current and former US government officials, have accused Assange of terrorism. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has called Assange "a high-tech terrorist". Former US House speaker Newt Gingrich, has been quoted as saying, "Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant." Within the media, an editorial in the Washington Times by Jeffrey T. Kuhner said Assange should be treated "the same way as other high-value terrorist targets"; Fox News' National Security Analyst and host "K.T." McFarland has called Assange a terrorist, WikiLeaks "a terrorist organization" and has called for Bradley Manning's execution if he is found guilty of making the leaks; and former Nixon aide and talk radio host G. Gordon Liddy has reportedly suggested that Assange's name be added to the "kill list" of terrorists who can be assassinated without a trial.

Tom Flanagan, former campaign manager for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, commented in November 2010 that he thought Julian Assange should be assassinated. A complaint has been filed against Flanagan, which states that Flanagan "counselled and/or incited the assassination of Julian Assange contrary to the Criminal Code of Canada," in his remarks on the CBC programme Power & Politics. Flanagan has since apologised for the remarks made during the programme and claimed his intentions were never "to advocate or propose the assassination of Mr. Assange".

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, said that "Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family." Assange denies this has happened, and responded by saying, "...it’s really quite fantastic that [Robert] Gates and Mullen...who have ordered assassinations every day, are trying to bring people on board to look at a speculative understanding of whether we might have blood on our hands. These two men arguably are wading in the blood from those wars."

Swedish sex allegations

On 20 August 2010, Swedish police opened an investigation against Assange in connection with sexual encounters with two women, aged 26 and 31, one in Enköping and the other in Stockholm. Assange and some media accounts say that a dispute arose from incidents of consensual but unprotected sex and that the accusations against him are a "set-up" arranged by the enemies of WikiLeaks. Within hours, Stockholm's chief prosecutor Eva Finné reviewed the case and dropped the rape investigation, saying there was insufficient evidence to suggest rape but kept open the molestation investigation, and on 30 August Stockholm police interrogated Assange about that. Assange denied the allegations, said he had consensual sexual encounters with the two women, and said along with his supporters that they were an attempt at character assassination and smear campaign.

Claes Borgström, a Swedish lawyer and SAP spokesperson for gender equality, who represents the two women, appealed against the decision to drop the rape investigation, upon which Swedish Director of Public Prosecution Marianne Ny reopened the rape investigation and expanded the molestation investigation on 1 September. Swedish investigators reinterviewed the two women, wanting to clarify their allegations before talking to Assange but he left Sweden on 27 September, according to statements in UK court, and refused to return to Stockholm for questioning in October, according to Claes Borgström.

According to a statement issued by Assange's London-based lawyer Mark Stephens, Assange made repeated attempts to contact the prosecution, spending over a month in Stockholm, Assange subsequently obtained permission to leave the country, and the Swedish prosecution stated that an interview would not be required.

On 18 November, Marianne Ny ordered Assange detained and obtained an order from a Swedish court for his arrest. On 20 November, Sweden's Criminal Police issued an European Arrest Warrant (EAW) and on 30 November 2010, Interpol issued a red notice against Assange. A lawyer for Assange said "It is highly irregular and unusual for the Swedish authorities to issue a red notice in the teeth of the undisputed fact that Mr. Assange has agreed to meet voluntarily to answer the prosecutor's questions" outside Sweden and also said Assange would fight extradition attempts due to the possibility that it could lead to the Swedish handing him over to the United States. When the EAW was received in the UK, an error in the paperwork was found, and Sweden issued a second EAW on 3 December 2010.

On 6 December 2010, Assange's UK lawyers were informed by Scotland Yard that a valid EAW had been received by SOCA and validated by the UK authorities. Assange presented himself to the Metropolitan Police the next morning and was taken into custody. He is wanted for interrogation in connection with the following offenses under the Swedish Penal Code: Rape of a lesser degree (Ch 6:1-3), Sexual molestation of a person in a way that is likely to cause discomfort or to violate that person's sexual integrity (Ch 6:10-2) and Unlawful coercion (Ch 4:4-1), where the provisions of Chapter 6 deal with Sexual Crimes and Chapter 6 with Crimes against Liberty and Peace. Later that day, Assange was refused bail and held in custody on remand. On 14 December Assange was granted bail with conditions including a £240,000 guarantee and surrender of his passport, but remained in custody due to appeal of the bail decision by the U.K's Crown Prosecution Service. On 16 December the appeal was dismissed, Assange was granted bail and placed under house arrest at Ellingham Hall, Norfolk. On release Assange said to a crowd of photographers, "It's great to smell fresh air of London again" and "I hope to continue my work and continue to protest my innocence in this matter." Assange told the BBC, "This has been a very successful smear campaign and a very wrong one."

Assange's legal advisers include Mark Stephens, who has compared the legal proceedings to a show trial, Geoffrey Robertson, Helena Kennedy and Jennifer Robinson, all in the UK, and Bjorn Hurtig in Sweden. Stephens told CBS News that he believes the charges against Assange were clandestinely pre-arranged, and that he believes reports that discussions are ongoing between Sweden and the U.S. over Assange's extradition to the U.S. Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny said in a public statement on 14 December that, under the provisions of the Swedish European Arrest Warrant Act, Britain would have to agree to allow Sweden to send Assange to the U.S. if he ends up in Swedish custody.

The full extradition hearing is set for 11 January 2011.

Support and praise

Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, expressed his "solidarity" with Assange following Assange's 2010 arrest in the United Kingdom. He further criticised the arrest of Assange as "an attack on freedom of expression". Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin condemned Assange’s' detention as "undemocratic."

A source within the office of Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, said that "Public and non-governmental organisations should think of how to help him."

In December 2010, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Frank LaRue, said Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal accountability for any information they disseminated, noting that "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is of, exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases."

On 11 December 2010, more than one hundred people demonstrated at the British Embassy in Madrid to protest the arrest of Assange.

Australia

Demonstration in support of Assange in front of Sydney Town Hall, 10 December 2010.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has come under widespread condemnation and a backlash within her own party for failing to support Assange after calling the leaks "an illegal act" and suggesting his Australian passport may be cancelled. Hundreds of lawyers, academics and journalists came forward in his support with Attorney-General Robert McClelland unable to explain how Assange had broken Australian law. Opposition Legal Affairs spokesman, Senator George Brandis a Queen's Counsel, accused Gillard of being "clumsy" with her language stating, "As far as I can see, he (Assange) hasn't broken any Australian law, nor does it appear he has broken any American laws." Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who supports Assange, stated that any decision to cancel the passport was his not Gillards. Queen's Counsel Peter Faris, who acted for Assange in a hacking case 15 years ago, said the motives of Swedish authorities in seeking Assange's extradition for alleged sex offences were suspect, "You have to say: why are they (Sweden) pursuing it? It's pretty obvious that if it was Bill Bloggs, they wouldn't be going to the trouble." Following the Swedish Embassy issuing of a "prepared and unconvincing reply" in response to letters of protest, Gillard was called on to send a message to Sweden "querying the way charges were laid, investigated and dropped, only to be picked up again by a different prosecutor."

On 10 December 2010 over five hundred people rallied outside Sydney Town Hall and about three hundred fifty people gathered in Brisbane where Assange's lawyer, Rob Stary critisized Jilia Gillards' position, telling the rally that the Australian government was a "sycophant" of the US. A petition circulated by GetUp!, who have placed full page ads in support of Assange in The New York Times and The Washington Times, recieved more than 50,000 signatures.

Awards

Assange was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award (New Media), awarded for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya with the investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances. In accepting the award, he said: "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented. Through the tremendous work of organisations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR, Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world." He also won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award.

Assange was awarded the 2010 Sam Adams Award by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. In September 2010, Assange was voted as number 23 among the "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010" by the British magazine New Statesman. In their November/December issue, Utne Reader magazine named Assange as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World". In December 2010, Julian Assange was named the Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year, as well as runner-up for 2010 Person of the Year.

Residency

Though an Australian citizen, Assange has been profiled as not having a permanent address. Assange has said he is constantly on the move. He has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and began renting a house in Iceland on 30 March 2010, from which he and other activists, including Birgitta Jónsdóttir, worked on the 'Collateral Murder' video.

For much of 2010, he was visiting the United Kingdom, Iceland, Sweden and other European countries. On 4 November 2010, Assange told Swiss public television TSR that he was seriously considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and moving the operation of the WikiLeaks foundation there. In December 2010 it was reported that US Ambassador to Switzerland Donald S Beyer had warned the Swiss government against offering asylum to Assange.

In late November 2010, Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas of Ecuador appeared to be offering Assange residency with "no conditions... so he can freely present the information he possesses and all the documentation, not just over the Internet but in a variety of public forums". Lucas believed that Ecuador may benefit from initiating a dialogue with Assange. Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino stated on 30 November that the residency application would "have to be studied from the legal and diplomatic perspective". A few hours later, President Rafael Correa stated that WikiLeaks "committed an error by breaking the laws of the United States and leaking this type of information... no official offer was [ever] made." Correa noted that Lucas was speaking "on his own behalf"; additionally, he will launch an investigation into possible ramifications Ecuador would suffer from the release of the cables.

In a hearing at the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court on 7 December 2010, Assange identified a post office box as his address. When told by the judge that this information was not acceptable, Assange submitted "Parkville, Victoria, Australia" on a sheet of paper. His lack of permanent address and nomadic lifestyle were cited by the judge as factors in denying bail. He was ultimately released on bail, in part because journalist Vaughan Smith offered to provide Assange with an address for bail during the extradition proceedings, Smith's Norfolk mansion, Ellingham Hall. Smith said the large estate would afford Assange some privacy because "it's quite hard to get too close without trespassing."

External links

• Full coverage at Aljazeera
• Profile: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at BBC News
• Full coverage at The Guardian
• Special report at Reuters
• Video profile on SBS Dateline
• Julian Assange: Hero or Villain? – slideshow by Life magazine
• "Meet the Aussie behind Wikileaks". Fairfax New Zealand. 8 July 2008.
• "WikiLeaks editor on Apache combat video: No excuse for US killing civilians". RussiaToday. April 2010.
• Archived versions of the home page on Julian Assange's web site iq.org (at the Internet Archive)
• Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks video at ted.com