Q Anon: Assange to Testify in Russia Probe-Q.PUB Down [Dark 2 Light] 8.8.18 - Video

The Patriot Hour

Published on Aug 8, 2018

From Wikipedia:

Julian Paul Assange (/əˈsɑːnʒ/;^[1] born Hawkins; 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer and the editor of WikiLeaks.^[2]Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006, but came to international attention in 2010, when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks provided by Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010),^[3][4] the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and CableGate (November 2010). Following the 2010 leaks, the federal government of the United Stateslaunched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and asked allied nations for assistance.^[5]

In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange.^[6] He had been questioned there months earlier over allegations of sexual assault and rape.^[7] Assange continued to deny the allegations, and expressed concern that he would be extradited from Sweden to the United States because of his perceived role in publishing secret American documents.^[8][9] Assange surrendered himself to UK police on 7 December 2010, and was held for ten days before being released on bail. Having been unsuccessful in his challenge to the extradition proceedings, he breached his bail and absconded. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 and has remained in the Embassy of Ecuador in London since then. Assange has held Ecuadorian citizenship since 12 December 2017.^[10]

During the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted emails sent or received by candidate Hillary Clinton from her private email server when she was Secretary of State.^[11] According to two political scientists, WikiLeaks strategically released the e-mails whenever Clinton’s lead expanded in the polls.^[12] After the Democratic Party, along with cybersecurity experts, claimed that Russian intelligence had hacked Clinton campaign-related e-mails and leaked them to WikiLeaks, Assange said Clinton was causing “hysteria about Russia.”^[13][14] He consistently denied any connection to or cooperation with Russia in relation to the leaks.^[15][16][17]

On 19 May 2017, the Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation into the rape accusation against Assange and applied to revoke the European arrest warrant.^[18] Although he is free to leave the Embassy, it is likely that he would then be arrested for the criminal offence of breaching his bail conditions.^[19] The London Metropolitan Police have indicated that an arrest warrant is still in force for Assange’s failure to surrender himself to his bail.^[20] On 27 July 2018, Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno revealed that he had begun talks with British authorities to withdraw the asylum for Assange.^[21]

Personal life

Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland,^[22][23] to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951),^[24] a visual artist,^[25] and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder.^[26] The couple had separated before Assange was born.^[26]

When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange,^[27][28][29] an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company.^[30]They divorced around 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982.^[22][31][32] Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty^[33][34] Australian towns by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, Victoria.^[27][35]

He attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979–1983)^[30] and Townsville State High School,^[36] as well as being schooled at home.^[28]He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at Central Queensland University (1994)^[37] and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006),^[27][38] but did not complete a degree.^[39]

While in his teens, Assange married a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer.^[27][39][40] The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child.^[28] Assange was Daniel’s primary caregiver for much of his childhood.^[41] Assange has other children; in an open letter to French President François Hollande, he stated that his youngest child lives in France with his mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.^[42]

Hacking

In 1987, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax.^[28][43] He and two others—known as “Trax” and “Prime Suspect”—formed a hacking group they called the International Subversives.^[28] During this time, he hacked into the Pentagon and other U.S. Department of Defense facilities, MILNET, the U.S. Navy, NASA, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission; Citibank, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Panasonic, and Xerox; and the Australian National University, La Trobe University, and Stanford University‘s SRI International.^[44] He is thought to have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but he does not acknowledge this.^[45][46]

In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation.^[28] The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange’s phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October,^[47] and eventually charged him in 1994 with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes.^[28] In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges (the other six were dropped), was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond,^[45][48] avoiding a heavier penalty resulting from the perceived absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood.^{[48][49][50][51][52][excessive citations]}

Programming

Assange, c. 2006

In 1993, Assange gave technical advice to the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit and assisted with prosecutions.^[53] In the same year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network.^[27][54] He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the Transmission Control Protocol port scanner strobe.c (1995);^[55][56] patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996);^[57][58] the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996);^[59] the Rubberhose deniable encryptionsystem (1997),^[60][61] which reflected his growing interest in cryptography;^[62] and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000).^[63] During this period, he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum;^[62] ran Best of Security, a website “giving advice on computer security” that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996;^[64] and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus‘s Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives.^[43][65] In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.^[51]

Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but “didn’t do anything with it.”^[51] He did, however, publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: “This patent should worry people. Everyone’s overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.”^[62] Systematic abuse of technology by governments against fundamental freedoms of world citizens remained an abiding concern — more than a decade later, in the introduction to Cypherpunks (2012), Assange summarised: “the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen”.^[66]

WikiLeaks

Main article: WikiLeaks

Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg at the 26C3 in Berlin, December 2009

After his period of study at the University of Melbourne, Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange is a member of the organisation’s advisory board^[67] and describes himself as the editor-in-chief.^[68] From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.^{[28][34][69][70][71]}

WikiLeaks published secret information, news leaks,^[72] and classified media from anonymous sources.^[73] By 2015, WikiLeaks had published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as “a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents”.^[74] The published material between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of publicity,^[75] but it was only after it began publishing documents supplied by Chelsea Manning, that WikiLeaks became a household name.^[76] The Manning material included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010)^[3] which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 people from a helicopter in Iraq,^[4] the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).

Opinions of Assange at this time were divided. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard described his activities as “illegal,”^[77] but the police said that he had broken no Australian law.^[78] United States Vice President Joe Biden and others called him a “terrorist”.^{[79][80][81][82][83]} Some called for his assassination or execution.^{[84][85][86][87]} Support came from people including Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,^[88][89] President of Ecuador Rafael Correa,^[90] Russian President Dmitry Medvedev,^[91][92] Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (then a backbench MP),^[93] Spain’s Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias,^[94] UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay,^[95] Argentina‘s ambassador to the UK Alicia Castro,^[96] and activists and celebrities including Tariq Ali,^[97] John Perry Barlow,^[98] Daniel Ellsberg,^[99][100] Mary Kostakidis,^[101] John Pilger,^[102][103] Ai Weiwei,^[104] Michael Moore,^[105] Noam Chomsky,^[104] Vaughan Smith,^[106][107] and Oliver Stone.^[108]

Gun camera footage of the airstrike of 12 July 2007 in Baghdad, showing the death of Namir Noor-Eldeen by a U.S. helicopter.

The year 2010 culminated with the Sam Adams Award, which Assange accepted in October,^[109] and a string of distinctions in December—the Le Monde readers’ choice award for person of the year,^[110][111] the Time readers’ choice award for person of the year (he was also a runner-up in Time’s overall person of the year award),^[112][113] a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3 million,^{[114][115][116]} and selection by the Italian edition of Rolling Stone as “rockstar of the year”.^[117]

Assange announced that he would run for the Australian Senate in March 2012 under the new WikiLeaks Party,^[118][119] and Cypherpunks^[66]was published in November. In 2012, Assange hosted a television show on RT (formerly known as Russia Today), a network funded by the Russian government.^[120] In the same year, he analysed the Kissinger cables held at the U.S. National Archives and released them in searchable form.^[121] On 15 September 2014, he appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom‘s Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland.^[122]

The following February, he won the Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal for Peace with Justice, previously awarded to only three people—Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhist spiritual leader Daisaku Ikeda.^[123] Two weeks later, he filed for the trademark “Julian Assange” in Europe, which was to be used for “Public speaking services; news reporter services; journalism; publication of texts other than publicity texts; education services; entertainment services.”^{[124][125][126]} For several years a member of the Australian journalists’ union and still an honorary member,^{[127][128][129]} he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in June,^[130][131] and the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism in November,^[132][133] having earlier won the Amnesty International UK Media Award (New Media) in 2009.^[134]

United States criminal investigation

Assange speaks on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, 16 October 2011

After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally with a view to prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917.^[135] In November 2010 US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks.^[5] It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.^[136][137] An email from an employee of intelligence consultancy Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor) leaked in 2012 said, “We have a sealed indictment on Assange.”^[138] The US government denies the existence of such an indictment.^[139][140]

In December 2011 prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an alleged WikiLeaks interlocutor they claimed to be Assange;^[141][142] he denied this,^[143][144] dismissing the alleged connection as “absolute nonsense”.^[145] The logs were presented as evidence during Manning’s court-martial in June–July 2013.^[146] The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password, but evidence that the interlocutor was Assange was circumstantial, and Manning insisted she acted alone.^[147]

Assange was being examined separately by “several government agencies” in addition to the grand jury, most notably the FBI.^[148] Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was still under “active and ongoing” investigation at that time.^[149]

Moreover, some Snowden documents published in 2014 show that the United States government put Assange on the “2010 Manhunting Timeline”,^[150] and in the same period they urged their allies to open criminal investigations into the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.^[151] In the same documents there was a proposal by the National Security Agency (NSA) to designate WikiLeaks as a “malicious foreign actor”, thus increasing the surveillance against it.

On 26 January 2015, WikiLeaks reported that three members of the organisation had received notice from Google that Google had complied with a federal warrant by a U.S. District Court to turn over their emails and metadata on 5 April 2012.^[152] At the time, Google had been prohibited by the court’s order from disclosing the existence of the warrant, but a subsequent order by the court gave Google permission to notify WikiLeaks regarding the warrant’s existence and that Google had complied with the order. The warrants cited 18 USC 371, 641, 793(d), 793(g), and 1030, which include espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, theft or conversion of property belonging to the United States government, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and general conspiracy. According to the statement by WikiLeaks, the alleged offenses could add up to a total of 45 years of imprisonment each for Assange and other WikiLeaks staff.

In a 15 December 2015 court submission, the United States confirmed its “sensitive, ongoing law enforcement proceeding into the Wikileaks matter.”^[153]

On 20 April 2017, U.S. officials told CNN that they were preparing to file formal charges against Assange.^[154]