He has run for elected office, posted hundreds of thousands of leaked government documents online, and once lobbied to save his local swimming pool. One of the most polarizing and influential figures of the information age, Julian Assange He is now free after spending five years in a British jail and seven years in self-imposed exile in the British embassy. Ecuador in London.
It is unclear what the future holds for the WikiLeaks founder. Assange, 52, landed in his Australian homeland this week after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that ends an attempt to extradite him to the United States. That could have led to a lengthy prison sentence had he been convicted.
“Julian plans to swim in the ocean every day. He plans to sleep in a real bed. He plans to enjoy real food, and he plans to enjoy his freedom,” his wife, Stella Assange, told reporters Thursday at a news conference that Assange did not attend.
Her husband and father of her two children would continue “defending human rights and raising our voices against injustice,”he added. “He can choose how he does that because he is a free man.”
Assange himself has given no clues as to what he will do.
Will it “disconnect”?
All of Assange’s friends and acquaintances interviewed by The Associated Press this week stressed that they were unaware of his future plans, and highlighted the impact of his ordeal: he spent 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in prison after years of self-imposed exile in Ecuador’s diplomatic headquarters.
“I just want him to survive this ordeal and be happy. I don’t care what Julian does now,” said Andrew Wilkie, an Australian independent lawmaker who knew Assange before the hacker launched WikiLeaks and was one of the first politicians to lobby for Australia to intervene in his case.
But some found it hard to imagine that Assange would not eventually return to the concerns that have long captured his attention.
“However, I suspect he won’t go offline, and it’s hard to see him just disappear forever into a beach hut,” Wilkie added.
Assange does not “could ignore injustice,” said Suelette Dreyfus, a professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne who has known Assange since he was a teenager, when he would hack into secure networks just for fun. Dreyfus, who once lobbied alongside Assange to save a Melbourne swimming pool, said her friend’s health had deteriorated during his years in a British jail.
“But I suspect he won’t be sitting on a beach for the rest of his life,” he pointed.
What’s next for WikiLeaks?
It is unclear what will become of WikiLeaks, the website Assange founded in 2006 as a place to publish classified documents exposing corruption and revealing secret government mechanisms behind wars and spying. That work earned him praise from supporters as a champion of transparency but also condemnation from national security hardliners who insisted his conduct put lives at risk and went far beyond the bounds of traditional journalism.
The website remains online, although Assange told The Nation in 2023 that he had stopped publishing because he was jailed, and because state surveillance and the fact that WikiLeaks’ funds had been frozen had discouraged whistleblowers. Assange’s plea deal with Washington included a deal to destroy any US documents he had not previously published.
“Will he return to WikiLeaks, and if he does, will he do it differently? I don’t know,” said Wilkie, the lawmaker.
Could he be pardoned?
One issue on which Assange’s views are known is his hope that a sitting or future US president will pardon him for the charge to which he pleaded guilty as part of his plea deal.
Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, said President Joe Biden is not considering issuing one.
Media analysts are concerned that the conviction threatens to have a chilling effect on public interest journalism. Assange has always insisted he is a journalist, and the case could lead to other reporters being prosecuted, said Peter Greste, a University of Queensland professor and former foreign correspondent who was jailed in Egypt for his reporting.
Could you run for elected office?
Assange has previously sought elected office. In 2013, he made an unsuccessful bid to join the Australian Senate on behalf of his WikiLeaks party, although he has not hinted at whether he will run again.
“When you turn on a bright light, cockroaches scurry away. That’s what we need to do to Canberra.”he told the news program “60 Minutes” that same year, when he was asked why he wanted to enter politics.
But while the government at the time had scorned Assange — a feeling that was mutual, he said — on Wednesday he received a hero’s welcome in his homeland, including from some politicians and a public who had previously not supported him.
It reflected a slow sea change in Australian views about the WikiLeaks founder, but it also masked a strange tension. In a recent high-profile case, an Australian judge sentenced a former army lawyer to nearly six years in jail for leaking classified information exposing allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan. Assange’s legal team mentioned the case on Thursday.
Analysts said that case and others, along with the renewed focus on Assange, have drawn attention to a fraught national culture of information secrecy that has been backed even by some of the politicians who celebrated the Australian hacker’s release.
“We have some of the most restrictive laws in the world on access to public information, and we have no constitutional protection for freedom of the press or freedom of expression,” said Greste. “I hope Julian will also get involved in campaigns to support press freedom, transparency and accountability in reporting in Australia.”
Even when Assange did address the idea of what he might do next — in a 2018 interview for the World Ethical Digital Forum, considered his last public appearance before he was jailed — he was characteristically enigmatic.
“Don’t know”said. “No, I mean, yes I know. But I don’t know what I should answer in response to that question.”
It may interest you
- Who is Julian Assange, the polarizing founder of the WikiLeaks website?
- Julian Assange pleads guilty as part of US plea deal
- US Justice wants to prosecute Julian Assange for 18 crimes and sentence him to up to 175 years
Source: Gestion
Ricardo is a renowned author and journalist, known for his exceptional writing on top-news stories. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he is known for his ability to deliver breaking news and insightful analysis on the most pressing issues of the day.
