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Partie entretien

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Pour la deuxième partie de votre épreuve d'expression orale l'examinateur vous posera des questions en lien avec la notion que vous avez choisie.

It is impossible to know exactly what questions you could be asked but you can think about the sort of questions that could be asked and prepare your answers beforehand. If you are more at ease with a notion, try to mention it in your conclusion!

Here are just a few ideas :

Myths and Heroes

Who do you consider to be your hero? Why?

Is it a sportsperson, an actor, an artist, a pop star, a member of your family, an ordinary hero such as a fireman? Why is this person considered a role model?

What are his/her qualities?

Why are myths and heroes important to our society?

Do you think that myths and heroes can teach us a lesson?

Can you think of an anti-hero? Can you talk about their behaviour?

What myth does your document remind you of?

Places and Forms of Power

How do people exercise their power? What tools can they use?

What in your opinion is the most dangerous form of power?

Can you give an example of a power struggle?

What are the limits to power? How is power abused?

Why do people need to exercise their power on others?

How do people exercise their power on others? (revolution, riots, demonstrations, disobedience)

Idea of progress

In what way has progress made life better? Can you give examples?

Do you think that progress is always positive? Can there be a negative side to progress?

What do you think are the most important inventions of the past 50 years?

How has internet changed today's world?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of progress? Illustrate your ideas/give examples.

Would you like to be able to travel in time? Would you prefer to move forward to the future or travel back in time?

Spaces and Exchanges

Would you like to travel abroad? Which country would you like to live in? Why?

Have you ever travelled abroad? Which countries have you visited?

What did you learn from your trips abroad?

What kind of exchanges are there in today's world? (trade, financial, sport, social networking, education.....)

What impact does globalisation have on exchanges?

How are these exchanges influenced by modern technologies? Do the new technologies make exchanges easier?

What do we gain from these exchanges? What do people to immigrate to another country bring to the new country? (examples)

Who benefits the most from these exchanges?

What is the American Dream? Is it still true today?

Vous trouverez quelques fiches de conseils pour l'épreuve sur ce site: http://lemaire.english.free.fr/lepreuvedexpress/index.html

Catégories : Expression orale, Les 4 notions

Tags: questions anglais oral bac, Questions expression orale anglais bac

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Les questions à l’épreuve d’expression orale

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Pour la deuxième partie de votre épreuve d'expression orale l'examinateur vous posera des questions en lien avec la notion que vous avez choisie. It is impossible to know exactly what questions you could be asked but you can think about the sort of questions that could be asked and prepare your answers beforehand.

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internet_form of power_list of documents

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2. Act normal

If you are a high-risk source, avoid saying anything or doing anything after submitting which might promote suspicion. In particular, you should try to stick to your normal routine and behaviour.

3. Remove traces of your submission

If you are a high-risk source and the computer you prepared your submission on, or uploaded it from, could subsequently be audited in an investigation, we recommend that you format and dispose of the computer hard drive and any other storage media you used.

In particular, hard drives retain data after formatting which may be visible to a digital forensics team and flash media (USB sticks, memory cards and SSD drives) retain data even after a secure erasure. If you used flash media to store sensitive data, it is important to destroy the media.

If you do this and are a high-risk source you should make sure there are no traces of the clean-up, since such traces themselves may draw suspicion.

4. If you face legal action

If a legal action is brought against you as a result of your submission, there are organisations that may help you. The Courage Foundation is an international organisation dedicated to the protection of journalistic sources. You can find more details at https://www.couragefound.org.

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2. Act normal If you are a high-risk source, avoid saying anything or doing anything after submitting which might promote suspicion. In particular, you should try to stick to your normal routine and behaviour. 3.

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Julian Paul Assange ( ə-SAHNZH ; Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to wide international attention in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning: footage of an airstrike in Baghdad, military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and US diplomatic cables.

Assange was raised in several towns in Australia until his family settled in Melbourne in his mid-teens. He became involved in the hacker community and was convicted for hacking in 1996. Following the establishment of WikiLeaks, Assange was its editor when it published the Bank Julius Baer documents, footage of the 2008 Tibetan unrest, and a report on political killings in Kenya with The Sunday Times.

In November 2010, Sweden issued a European arrest warrant for Assange, for questioning in a Swedish investigation. After losing his appeal against the warrant, he breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States. He stood for the Australian Senate in 2013 and launched the WikiLeaks Party but failed to win a seat. Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation in 2019.

On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy and he was arrested. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. The U.S. government unsealed an indictment charging Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion related to the leaks provided by Manning. In May 2019 and June 2020, the U.S. government unsealed new indictments against Assange, charging him with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and alleging he had conspired with hackers.

Assange has been confined in HM Prison Belmarsh in London since April 2019, as the United States government's extradition effort is contested in the British courts.

Assange was born Julian Paul Hawkins on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple separated before their son was born. When Julian was a year old, his mother married Brett Assange, an actor with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Julian Assange regards as his father (choosing Assange as his surname). Christine and Brett Assange divorced around 1979. Christine then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, whom Julian Assange later described as "a member of an Australian cult" called The Family. Meynell and Christine Assange separated in 1982.

Julian Assange had a nomadic childhood, living in more than 30 Australian towns and cities. He attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979-1983) and Townsville State High School in Queensland as well as being schooled at home. In his mid-teens, he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne. Assange was involved in the Melbourne rave scene, assisting in installing an internet kiosk at Ollie Olsen's club night Psychic Harmony where he was nicknamed "Prof".

By 1987, aged 16, Assange had become a skilled hacker under the name Mendax, taken from Horace's splendide mendax (from Latin, "nobly untruthful") Around this time, the police raided his mother's home and confiscated his equipment. According to Assange, "it involved some dodgy character who was alleging that we had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from Citibank". He wasn't charged and had his equipment returned, but "decided that it might be wise to be a bit more discreet".

Assange had a self-imposed set of ethics: he did not damage or crash systems or data he hacked, and he shared information. The Sydney Morning Herald later opined that he had become one of Australia's "most notorious hackers", and The Guardian said that by 1991 he was "probably Australia's most accomplished hacker". Assange's official biography on WikiLeaks called him Australia's "most famous ethical computer hacker", and the earliest version said he "hacked thousands of systems, including the Pentagon" when he was younger.

He and two others, known as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect", formed a hacking group they called "the International Subversives". According to NPR, David Leigh, and Luke Harding, Assange may have been involved in the WANK hack at NASA in 1989, but this has never been proven. Assange called it "the origin of hacktivism", and the Swedish television documentary WikiRebels, which was made with Assange's cooperation, also hinted he was involved. The WANK worm was also discussed in the opening chapter of Underground, a book for which Assange was the researcher.

In mid-1991, the three hackers began targeting MILNET, a secret data network used by the US military, where Assange found reports he said showed the US military was hacking other parts of itself. Assange found a backdoor and later said they "had control over it for two years." In 2012, Ken Day, the former head of the Australian Federal Police computer crime team, said that there had been no evidence the International Subversives had hacked MILNET. In response to Assange's statements about accessing MILNET, Day said that "Assange may still be liable to prosecution for that act - if it can be proved."

Assange wrote a program called Sycophant that allowed the International Subversives to conduct "massive attacks on the US military". The International Subversives regularly hacked into systems belonging to a "who's who of the U.S. military-industrial complex" and the network of Australia National University.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) set up an investigation called Operation Weather targeting The International Subversives. In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. Another member of the International Subversives turned himself and the others in, and the AFP tapped Assange's phone line (he was using a modem) and raided his home at the end of October.

The earliest detailed reports about Assange are 1990s Australian press reports on him and his trial. He was charged in 1994 with 31 counts of crimes related to hacking, including defrauding Telecom Australia, fraudulent use of a telecommunications network, obtaining access to information, erasing data, and altering data. The prosecution argued that a magazine written by the International Subversives would encourage others to hack, calling it a "hacker's manual" and alleging that Assange and the other hackers posted information online about how to hack into computers they had accessed. His trial date was set in May 1995 and his case was presented to the Supreme Court of Victoria, but the court did not take the case, sending it back to the County Court.

In December 1996, facing a theoretical sentence of 290 years in prison, he struck a plea deal and pleaded guilty to 24 hacking charges including breaches of the Crimes Act, and fraudulent use of a telecommunications network. The judge called the charges "quite serious" and initially thought a jail term would be necessary but ultimately sentenced Assange to a fine of A$2,100 and released him on a A$5,000 good behaviour bond because of his disrupted childhood and the absence of malicious or mercenary intent. After his sentencing, Assange told the judge that he had "been misled by the prosecution in terms of the charges" and "a great misjustice has been done". The judge told Assange "you have pleaded guilty, the proceedings are over" and advised him to be quiet. Assange has described the trial as a formative period and according to The New Republic, "the experience set him on the intellectual path" leading him to found WikiLeaks.

Assange, about 2006

In 1993, Assange provided technical advice and support to help the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit to prosecute individuals responsible for publishing and distributing child pornography. His lawyers said he was pleased to assist, emphasising that he received no benefit for this and was not an informer. His role in helping the police was discussed during his 1996 sentencing on computer hacking charges.

In the same year, he took over running one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network, when its original owner, Mark Dorset, moved to Sydney. He joined the cypherpunk mailing list in late 1993 or early 1994. According to Robert Manne, Assange's main political focus at this time seems to have been the information-sharing possibilities created by the internet and its threats. He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring network and encryption programs, such as the Rubberhose deniable encryption system.

During this period of time he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, ran Best of Security which was a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996, and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers including the International Subversives. According to Assange, he "deliberately minimized" his role in Underground so it could "pull in the whole community". In 1998, he co-founded the " network intrusion detection technologies" company Earthmen Technology which developed linux kernel hacking.

According to Assange, in the 1990s, he and Suburbia Public Access Network facilitated leaks for groups like activists and lawyers. Assange told Suelette Dreyfus that he had "acted as a conduit for leaked documents" when fighting local corruption. While awaiting trial and trying to get custody of his son, Assange and his mother formed the activist organisation Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection. An article in the Canadian magazine later referred to it as "a low-tech rehearsal for WikiLeaks". The group used the Australian Freedom of Information Act and secretly recorded meetings with Health and Community Services to get information. The group also used flyers to encourage insiders to anonymously come forward, and according to Assange they "had moles who were inside dissidents." An insider leaked a key internal departmental manual about the rules for custody disputes to the group.

In November 1996, Assange sent an email to lists he had created and mentioned a "LEAKS" project. Assange stated that he registered the domain "leaks.org" in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it". He publicised a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology saying "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."

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in the leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive 'secrecy tax') and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaptation.

Assange and a group of other dissidents, mathematicians and activists established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange became a member of its advisory board. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America.

Assange found key supporters at the Chaos Computer Club conference in Berlin in December 2007, including Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Jacob Appelbaum and the Swedish hosting company PRQ.

During this time, the organisation published internet censorship lists, leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. The publications include revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and the "Petrogate" oil scandal in Peru. From its inception, the website had a significant impact on political news in a large number of countries and across a wide range of issues.

During this period WikiLeaks had only four permanent staff: Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and two others using pseudonyms. It had a far larger group of volunteers. Assange was the most powerful individual, as the editor-chief, but he relied upon networks of others with expertise.

From its inception, WikiLeaks sought to engage with the established professional media. It had good relations with parts of the German and British press. A collaboration with the Sunday Times journalist Jon Swain on a report on political killings in Kenya led to increased public recognition of the WikiLeaks publication, and this collaboration won Assange the 2009 Amnesty International New Media Award.

WikiLeaks' international profile increased in 2008 when a Swiss bank, Bank Julius Baer, tried via a Californian court injunction to prevent the site's publication of bank records. Assange commented that financial institutions ordinarily "operate outside the rule of law", and he received extensive legal support from free-speech and civil rights groups. Bank Julius Baer's attempt to prevent the publication via injunction backfired. As a result of the Streisand effect, the publicity drew global attention to WikiLeaks and the bank documents.

By 2009 WikiLeaks had succeeded in Assange's intentions to expose the powerful, publish material beyond the control of states, and attracted media support for its advocacy of freedom of speech. It had not, however, had the impact that Assange hoped for. Assange's idea of crowd-sourcing analysis of the documents to the army of visitors was unsuccessful, and few of the leaks attracted mainstream media attention.

In July 2009 Assange released through Wikileaks the full report of a commission of inquiry, set up by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, into corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands. The report had been due for publication earlier in the year but an injunction obtained by some of those named had prevented its publication. According to Assange "the Commission released on its website what it called its Redacted Final Report...Yet only hours later, the 266 page report was removed. WikiLeaks has obtained the full report - and restored the redacted text." The report found that foreign property developers had given millions of US dollars in payments and secret loans to senior politicians in the islands, including the TCI's former premier, Michael Misick.

In April 2010, WikiLeaks released video footage of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike, which Reuters had previously requested under the US Freedom of Information Act but had been denied. Assange and others worked for a week to break the U.S. military's encryption of the video, which they titled Collateral Murder and which Assange first presented at the U.S. National Press Club. It shows United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq, including Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh.

Gun camera footage of the airstrike of 12 July 2007 in Baghdad, showing the deaths of journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh by a US helicopter

In October 2010, WikiLeaks published the Iraq War logs, a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports from the Iraq War covering from 2004 to 2009. Assange said that he hoped the publication would "correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued after the war".

Regarding his own role within WikiLeaks, he said, "We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit".

In November 2010, WikiLeaks published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, known as the "Cablegate" files. WikiLeaks initially worked with established Western media organisations, and later with smaller regional media organisations while also publishing the cables upon which their reporting was based. The files show United States espionage against the United Nations and other world leaders, revealed tensions between the U.S. and its allies, and exposed corruption in countries throughout the world as documented by U.S. diplomats, helping to spark the Arab Spring. The Cablegate as well as Iraq and Afghan War releases impacted diplomacy and public opinion globally, with responses varying by region. In March 2010, a member of WikiLeaks using the handle "Ox", widely believed to be Julian Assange, talked to Chelsea Manning by text chat while she was submitting leaks to WikiLeaks. The US referred to these chat logs in the 2018 indictment of Julian Assange and filed an affidavit which said they were able to identify Assange as the person chatting with Manning using hints he made during the chats and that Manning identified him as Assange to Adrian Lamo.

In the chat logs, Manning asks Assange if he was "any good at LM hash cracking", which would decrypt passwords. Assange said he was, and told Manning about rainbow tables that WikiLeaks used to crack hashes and find passwords associated with them. The exchange was cited as evidence against Assange for the 2018 charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and as evidence that WikiLeaks was more like an intelligence agency than a publisher.

Assange also told Manning that WikiLeaks had four months of telephone calls from the Icelandic Parliament, saying the " Nixon tapes got nothing on us." When Manning told Assange she had nothing else to submit to WikiLeaks, he replied that "curious eyes never run dry in my experience." During her court martial, Manning said she downloaded the detainee assessment briefs (DABs) for Guantanamo Bay after speaking to a member of Wikileaks via a secure online chat log. While discussing files on Guantanamo Bay, Manning asked Assange about detainee assessment briefs. She said that "although he did not believe that they were of political significance, he did believe that they could be used to merge into the general historical account of what occurred at Guantanamo." She added that "after this discussion, I decided to download the data."

Release of unredacted cables

In 2011 a series of events compromised the security of a WikiLeaks file containing the leaked US diplomatic cables. In August 2010, Assange gave journalist David Leigh an encryption key and a URL where he could locate the full file. In February 2011 David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian published the encryption key in their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. Leigh said he believed the key was a temporary one that would expire within days. Wikileaks supporters disseminated the encrypted files to mirror sites in December 2010 after Wikileaks experienced cyber-attacks. When Wikileaks learned what had happened it notified the US State Department. On 25 August 2011, the German magazine Der Freitag published an article giving details which would enable people to piece the information together. On 1 September 2011 Wikileaks announced they would make the unredacted cables public and searchable.

The Guardian wrote that the decision to publish the cables was made by Assange alone, a decision that it and its four previous media partners condemned. Glenn Greenwald wrote that "WikiLeaks decided--quite reasonably--that the best and safest course was to release all the cables in full, so that not only the world's intelligence agencies but everyone had them, so that steps could be taken to protect the sources and so that the information in them was equally available".

The U.S. established an Information Review Task Force (IRTF) to investigate the impact of WikiLeaks' publications. In 2013, Brigadier general Robert Carr, who headed the IRTF, testified at Chelsea Manning's sentencing hearing that the task force had found no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals due WikiLeaks' publication of material provided by Manning. Ed Pilkington wrote in The Guardian that Carr's testimony significantly undermined the argument that WikiLeaks' publications put lives at risk.

The US cited the release in the opening of its request for extradition of Assange, saying his actions put lives at risk. John Young, the owner and operator of the website Cryptome testified at Assange's extradition hearing that the unredacted cables were published by Cryptome on 1 September, the day before Wikileaks, and they remain on the Cryptome site. Young testified that "no US law enforcement authority has notified me that this publication of the cables is illegal, consists or contributes to a crime in any way, nor have they asked for them to be removed". Lawyers for Assange gave evidence it said would show that Assange was careful to protect lives.

According to Andrew O'Hagan, during the 2011 Egyptian revolution after Mubarak closed the mobile phone networks, Assange and others at WikiLeaks hacked into Nortel to reverse it.

Over the next several years, WikiLeaks published the Guantanamo Bay files leak, the Syria Files, the Kissinger cables, and the Saudi cables. As of July 2015, Assange said WikiLeaks had published more than ten million documents and associated analyses; he described it as "a giant library of the world's most persecuted documents".

After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange to prosecute them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that WikiLeaks was being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia and the administration urged allies to open criminal investigations of Assange.

In 2010, the FBI told a lawyer for Assange that he wasn't the subject of an investigation. That year the NSA added Assange to its Manhunting Timeline, an annual account of efforts to capture or kill alleged terrorists and others. In 2011, the NSA discussed categorising WikiLeaks as a "malicious foreign actor" for surveillance purposes. In August 2011, WikiLeaks volunteer Sigurdur Thordarson, working in his native Iceland, contacted the FBI and after presenting a copy of Assange's passport at the American embassy, became the first informant to work for the FBI from inside WikiLeaks. He gave the FBI several hard drives he had copied from Assange and core WikiLeaks members.

In December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and someone they claimed was Assange. Assange said that WikiLeaks has no way of knowing the identity of its sources and that chats with sources, including user-names, were anonymous. In January 2011, Assange described the allegation that WikiLeaks had conspired with Manning[clarification needed ] as "absolute nonsense". The logs were presented as evidence during Manning's court-martial in June-July 2013. The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password. During her trial, Manning said she acted on her own to send documents to WikiLeaks, and no one associated with WikiLeaks pressured her into giving more information.

In 2012, diplomatic cables between Australia and the United States were released that showed the US government was investigating Assange and that "a broad range of possible charges are under consideration, including espionage and conspiracy". The diplomats dismissed claims the investigation was politically motivated, and highlighted prosecutors' claims that Manning was "guided by WikiLeaks' list of 'most wanted' leaks".

In 2013, US officials said it was unlikely that the Justice Department would indict Assange for publishing classified documents because it would also have to prosecute the news organisations and writers who published classified material. In June 2013, The New York Times said that court and other documents suggested that Assange was being examined by a grand jury and "several government agencies", including by the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that WikiLeaks was under "active and ongoing" investigation at that time. In July 2015, Assange called himself a "wanted journalist" in an open letter to the French president published in Le Monde.

Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice did not indict Assange because it could not find evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist. During the Trump Administration, CIA director Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped up pursuit of Assange. Law enforcement officials wanted to learn about Assange's knowledge of WikiLeaks's interactions with Russian intelligence and other actions. They had considered offering Assange some form of immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony and had reached out to Assange's lawyers. The negotiations were ended by the Vault 7 disclosures.

In April 2017, US officials were preparing to file formal charges against Assange. Assange's indictment was unsealed in 2019 and expanded on later that year and in 2020. The legal scholar Steve Vladeck said that prosecutors likely accelerated the case in 2019 due to the impending statute of limitations on Assange's largest leaks.

In early 2019, the Mueller report wrote the Special Counsel's office considered charging WikiLeaks or Assange "as conspirators in the computer-intrusion conspiracy" and that there were "factual uncertainties" about the role that Assange may have played in the hacks or their distribution that were "the subject of ongoing investigations" by the US Attorney's Office.

Assange visited Sweden in August 2010. On 20 August, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women who volunteered with WikiLeaks. On 30 August, Assange was questioned by the Stockholm police regarding the allegations, which he denied. European WikiLeaks members were privately concerned that Assange was spreading allegations of dirty tricks. The preliminary investigation was later discontinued, but on 1 September 2010, Public Prosecutor Marianne Ny decided to resume the preliminary investigation concerning all of the original allegations. Assange left Sweden on 27 September 2010, and an international warrant for his "arrest-in-absence" was issued the same day.

On 18 November 2010, the Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant. Later that day, Assange told journalist Raffi Khatchadourian that Sweden had a "very, very poor judicial system" that he said was driven by a "crazed radical feminist ideology". He also said that the case was a matter of international politics, and referred to Sweden as a "US satrapy". In a later interview, he fed criticism of his accusers and said he considered himself a victim of radicalism. On 30 November 2010, Interpol posted a Red Notice and put Assange on its most-wanted listed. On 8 December 2010, Assange gave himself up to British police and attended his first extradition hearing, where he was remanded in custody. On 16 December 2010, at the second hearing, he was granted bail by the High Court of Justice and released after his supporters paid £240,000 in cash and sureties. A further hearing on 24 February 2011 ruled that Assange should be extradited to Sweden. The High Court upheld this decision on 2 November and by the Supreme Court on 30 May the next year.

Assange said he would go to Sweden if provided with a diplomatic guarantee that he would not be turned over to the United States, to which the Swedish foreign ministry stated that Sweden's legislation does not allow any judicial decision like extradition to be predetermined.

Assange's lawyers say they invited the Swedish prosecutor four times to come and question him at the embassy, but the offer was refused. The prosecutor, Marianne Ny, said that she could not question a suspect by video link or in the Swedish embassy. In 2013 Ny wrote to the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), informing them that she intended to lift the detention order and withdraw the European arrest warrant as the actions were not proportionate to the costs and seriousness of the crime. In response, the CPS tried to dissuade Ny from doing so, and arguing that the costs were not a factor. In March 2015, Ny changed her mind about interrogating Assange, who had breached bail and taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The UK agreed to the interview in May and reached a deal with Ecuador that included several interview restrictions. These interviews, which began on 14 November 2016, involved the British police, Swedish prosecutors and Ecuadorian officials, and were eventually published online. By that time, the statute of limitations had expired on all three of the less serious allegations. Since the Swedish prosecutor had not interviewed Assange by 18 August 2015, the questioning pertained only to the open investigation of "lesser degree rape".

Following Assange's arrest on 11 April 2019, the case was reopened in May 2019 under prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson. On 19 November, she announced that she had discontinued her investigation, saying that although she was confident in the complainant, "the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed".

On 19 June 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that the Ecuadorian government was considering his request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The embassy staff installed a shower for Assange and removed the toilet in the women's bathroom at his request so he could sleep in the quiet room. He was limited to a few hundred square feet of real estate and ate a combination of take-out food and food prepared by the embassy staff.

Soon after entering the embassy, Assange asked to use the embassy's surveillance equipment to find out who had been harassing him from the street. After he was given permission, a security guard found him using the equipment and tried to stop him. El Pais reported that "they argued and struggled."

Assange breached his bail conditions by taking up residence in the embassy rather than appearing in court and faced arrest if he left. Assange's supporters, including journalist Jemima Goldsmith, journalist John Pilger, and filmmaker Ken Loach, forfeited £200,000 in bail and £40,000 as promised sureties. Goldsmith said she was surprised at his asylum bid and she wanted and expected him to face the Swedish allegations but that he had "a real fear of being extradited to the US".

The UK government wrote to Patiño, saying that the police were entitled to enter the embassy and arrest Assange under UK law. Patiño said it was an implied threat, stating that "such actions would be a blatant disregard of the Vienna Convention". Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service were stationed outside the embassy from June 2012 to October 2015 to arrest Assange if he left the embassy and compel him to attend the extradition appeal hearing. The police officers were withdrawn on grounds of cost in October 2015, but the police said they would still deploy "several overt and covert tactics to arrest him". The Metropolitan Police Service said the cost of the policing for the period was £12.6million.

The Australian attorney-general, Nicola Roxon, wrote to Assange's lawyer saying that Australia would not seek to involve itself in any international exchanges about Assange's future. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the Australian government had no evidence the US intended to charge and extradite Assange at that time, and Roxon suggested that if Assange was imprisoned in the US, he could apply for an international prisoner transfer to Australia. Assange's lawyers described the letter as a "declaration of abandonment". WikiLeaks insiders stated that Assange decided to seek asylum because he felt abandoned by the Australian government.

On 16 August 2012, Patiño announced that Ecuador was granting Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States secret investigation against him. In its formal statement, Ecuador said that "as a consequence of Assange's determined defense to freedom of expression and freedom of press... in any given moment, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger". Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa confirmed on 18 August that Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely. An office converted into a studio apartment, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer, shower, treadmill, and kitchenette, became his home until 11 April 2019.

Assange stood for the Australian Senate in Victoria in the 2013 Australian federal election and launched the WikiLeaks Party after announcing his candidacy but failed to win a seat. Assange said that Prime Minister Julia Gillard's attacks on WikiLeaks contributed to his decision to run for the Senate, and that if he won the seat the US would end the grand jury investigation against him and the British government would follow suit because "the political costs of the current standoff will be higher still". Assange's statement was interpreted to indicate that had been one of Assange's major aims in launching his Senate campaign. Assange said he could be described as a libertarian, and that he would use parliamentary privilege to overcome court-imposed gag orders. He also said it was important to protect people and small businesses from large corporations and government, and that there were "strong arguments on all sides" of issues like euthanasia and same-sex marriage.

The party experienced internal dissent over its governance and electoral tactics, including a controversial 2013 preference deal. According to leaked emails, Assange was behind the preference deal, and attempted to give himself veto rights and to turn the party's internal National Council into a rubber stamp for decisions taken by individual candidates. He also suggested that he was entitled to make himself the president of the party because he had founded it, although there is no leader or president under the WikiLeaks Party constitution.

After the 2013 election, Assange said he thought he would try again for a Senate seat in three or six years, and that the WikiLeaks Party would continue. Assange said he would stand for the 2014 special election in Western Australia, but the Australian Electoral Commission ruled Assange was ineligible. The party was deregistered due to low membership numbers in 2015.

In 2013, Assange and others in WikiLeaks helped whistleblower Edward Snowden flee from US law enforcement. After the United States cancelled Snowden's passport, stranding him in Russia, they considered transporting him to Latin America on the presidential jet of a sympathetic Latin American leader. In order to throw the US off the scent, they spoke about the jet of the Bolivian president Evo Morales, instead of the jet they were considering. In July 2013, Morales's jet was forced to land in Austria after the US pressured Italy, France, and Spain to deny the jet access to their airspace over false rumours Snowden was on board. Assange said the grounding "reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States" as "a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity". Assange advised Snowden that he would be safest in Russia which was better able to protect its borders than Venezuela, Brazil or Ecuador. In 2015, Maria Luisa Ramos, the Bolivian ambassador to Russia, accused Assange of putting Morales' life at risk. Assange stated that he regretted what happened but that "[w]e can't predict that other countries engage in some... unprecedented criminal operation".

Documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that in 2012 and 2013 the New Zealand government worked to establish a secret mass surveillance programme which it called "Operation Speargun". On 15 September 2014 while campaigning for Kim Dotcom, Assange appeared via remote video link on his Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland, which discussed the programme. Assange said the Snowden documents showed that he had been a target of the programme and that "Operation Speargun" represented "an extreme, bizarre, Orwellian future that is being constructed secretly in New Zealand".

John Pilger, Richard Gizbert, and Assange-'The WikiLeaks Files' Book Launch-Foyles, London, 29 September 2015

In 2014, the company hired to monitor Assange warned Ecuador's government that he was "intercepting and gathering information from the embassy and the people who worked there" and that he had compromised the embassy's communications system, which WikiLeaks denied. According to El Pais, a November 2014 UC Global report said that a briefcase with a listening device was found in a room occupied by Assange. The UC Global report said that proved "the suspicion that he is listening in on diplomatic personnel, in this case against the ambassador and the people around him, in an effort to obtain privileged information that could be used to maintain his status in the embassy." According to ambassador Falconí, Assange was evasive when asked about the briefcase.

On 3 July 2015, Paris newspaper published an open letter from Assange to French President François Hollande in which Assange urged the French government to grant him refugee status. In response to this letter, Hollande said: "France cannot act on his request. The situation of Mr Assange does not present an immediate danger."

In September 2016 and again on 12 January 2017, WikiLeaks tweeted that if President Obama granted Chelsea Manning clemency, Assange would agree to US extradition. After commuting Manning's sentence on 17 January 2017, Obama stated that Assange's offer had not been a consideration and WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange was "still happy" to agree to extradition if his rights were respected despite Obama's statement. Assange said the decision to grant Manning clemency was an attempt to "make life hard" for Assange and make him look like a liar. One of WikiLeaks' lawyers, Melinda Taylor, said Assange would stand by the offer, and WikiLeaks tweets suggested he was ready for extradition. Assange faced pressure to agree to extradition, but retreated from the offer. WikiLeaks lawyers Melinda Taylor and Barry Pollack said that the clemency didn't meet Assange's conditions and Manning should have been released immediately.

On 19 May 2017, Assange emerged on the embassy's balcony and told a crowd that, despite no longer facing a Swedish sex investigation, he would remain inside the embassy to avoid extradition to the United States.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Assange was critical of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In February 2016, Assange wrote: "Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ...she certainly should not become president of the United States". Before the election, WikiLeaks was approached by Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix about releasing missing Clinton emails. Assange rejected the request and the Daily Beast reported that he replied he preferred to do the work on his own. In an Election Day statement, Assange said that "The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers".

On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), in which the DNC seemingly presented ways of undercutting Clinton's competitor Bernie Sanders and showed apparent favouritism towards Clinton. The release led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC. The New York Times wrote that Assange had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention because he believed Clinton had pushed for his indictment and he regarded her as a "liberal war hawk".

On 7 October WikiLeaks began publishing emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. On 15 October, The Ecuadorian government severed Assange's Internet connection from 15 October until December because of election interference. According to surveillance reports of Assange provided by UC Global, on 19 October, associates of Assange removed boxes covered with blankets and about 100 hard drives from the embassy.

In November 2017, WikiLeaks asked Donald Trump Jr. to share a WikiLeaks tweet with the quote "Can't we just drone this guy?" which the website True Pundit claimed that Hillary Clinton had made about Assange. After the election, WikiLeaks also requested that the president-elect push Australia to appoint Assange as ambassador to the US.

Cybersecurity experts attributed the attack on the DNC server to the Russian government. and 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents were later indicted for the attack. According to the Mueller report, this group shared these mails using the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks and other entities. The investigation also unearthed communications between Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks in which they talked about the release of the material. When asked about Guccifer 2.0's leaks, Assange said "These look very much like they're from the Russians. But in some ways, they look very amateur, and almost look too much like the Russians." The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that "WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort."

In interviews, Assange repeatedly said that the Russian government was not the source of the DNC and Podesta emails, and accused the Clinton campaign of "a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria" about Russian involvement. On the eve of the election, Assange addressed the criticism he had received for publishing Clinton material, saying that WikiLeaks publishes "material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere," that it had never received any original information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson's campaign.

In a July 2016 interview on Dutch television, Assange hinted that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the DNC emails and that Rich had been killed as a result. Seeking clarification, the interviewer asked Assange whether Rich's killing was "simply a murder," to which Assange answered, "No. There's no finding. So, I'm suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that." WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about his murder and wrote: "We treat threats toward any suspected source of WikiLeaks with extreme gravity. This should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source to WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications."

Assange's comments set off a spike in attention to the murder. Assange's statements lent credibility and visibility to what had at that point been a conspiracy theory in the fringe parts of the Internet. According to the Mueller investigation, Assange "implied falsely" that Rich was the source ostensibly to obscure the fact that Russian military intelligence was the source, and Assange received the emails when Rich was already dead and continued to confer with the Russian hackers to coordinate the release of the material.

In March 2017, WikiLeaks began releasing the largest leak of CIA documents in history, codenamed Vault 7. The documents included details of the CIA's hacking capabilities and software tools used to break into smartphones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. In April, CIA director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia". Assange responded "For the head of the CIA to pronounce what the boundaries are, of reporting or not reporting - is a very disturbing precedent. The head of the CIA determining who is a publisher, who's not a publisher, who's a journalist, who's not a journalist, is totally out of line". According to former intelligence officials, in the wake of the Vault7 leaks, the CIA talked about kidnapping Assange from Ecuador's London embassy, and some senior officials discussed his potential assassination. Yahoo! News found "no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved." Some of its sources said that they had alerted House and Senate intelligence committees to the plans that Pompeo and others was suggesting. In October 2021, Assange's lawyers introduced the alleged plot during a hearing of the High Court of Justice in London as it considered the U.S. appeal of a lower court's ruling that Assange could not be extradited to face charges in the U.S. In 2022 the Spanish courts summoned Pompeo as a witness to testify on the alleged plans.

On 6 June 2017, Assange supported NSA leaker Reality Winner, who had been arrested three days earlier, by tweeting "Acts of non-elite sources communicating knowledge should be strongly encouraged".

On 16 August 2017, US Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange and told him that Trump would pardon him on condition that he would agree to say that Russia was not involved in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leaks. At his extradition hearings in 2020, Assange's defence team alleged in court that this offer was made "on instructions from the president". Trump and Rohrabacher subsequently said they had never spoken about the offer and Rohrabacher said he had made the offer on his own initiative. In August 2017, in the midst of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, Dubai-based said Assange had refrained from publishing two cables about Qatar after negotiations between WikiLeaks and Qatar. Assange said Al Arabiya had been publishing "increasingly absurd fabrications" during the dispute.

In late August 2017, Assange became involved in the Catalonia independence movement. Assange was seen as the independence movement's chief international spokesman and according to an independent analysis confirmed by Fairfax Media, he was responsible for more than 25% of all Twitter traffic under the hashtag #Catalonia before the 2017 Catalan independence referendum. Assange disseminated thousands of messages and disinformation supporting the movement and he was forced to delete several fake or misleading images he had shared on Twitter. Some of his statements in tweets and radio interviews on Catalonia confused people with each other or fictional characters, and others made distorted or exaggerated claims. In September, Assange offered a reward for information on the use of Spanish security forces during the referendum. In November 2017, Assange met with two key supporters of the independence movement, Oriol Soler and Arnau Grinyó, which caused backlash from the Spanish government. The Spanish government said that Assange was spreading information that was "at odds with reality" and the Ecuadorian government warned Assange against commenting on other countries' policies. In December 2017, Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis said Assange was "trying to interfere and manipulate" in Catalonia. Assange stated that, while he did not have a position on the outcome of the Catalan independence referendum, he believed that Catalans had the right to self-determination. He assisted Catalans in the lead up to the referendum by providing instructions on how to communicate and organise through secure channels and by providing historical background on the Catalan independence movement. When the Spanish Government disabled voting apps, Assange tweeted instructions on how Catalans could use other apps to find out information about voting. Assange's actions upset the Spanish government, leading to concerns in Ecuador, which soon after cut off Assange's internet and stopped his access to visitors. In January 2020, the Catalan Dignity Commission awarded Assange its 2019 Dignity Prize to "[recognise] his efforts to correct misreporting of events and to provide live video updates to the world of the peaceful Catalan protesters and the brutal crackdown on them by Spanish police".

Ecuador granted Assange citizenship in December 2017, and on the 19th approved a "special designation in favor of Mr. Julian Assange so that he can carry out functions at the Ecuadorean Embassy in Russia." On the 21st, Britain's Foreign Office wrote that it did not recognise Assange as a diplomat, and that he did not have "any type of privileges and immunities under the Vienna Convention." The citizenship was later revoked over unpaid fees and problems in the naturalisation papers, which allegedly had multiple inconsistencies, different signatures, and the possible alteration of documents. Assange's lawyer said the decision had been made without due process, but Ecuador's Foreign Ministry said the Pichincha Court for Contentious Administrative Matters had "acted independently and followed due process in a case that took place during the previous government and that was raised by the same previous government."

In January 2018, Sean Hannity's Twitter account was temporarily deleted and Assange sent an account impersonating the Fox News host messages offering "news" on Mark Warner, a senior Democrat senator investigating Trump-Russia links. Assange asked the fake Hannity to contact him about it on "other channels".

In March 2018, Assange used social media to criticise Germany's arrest of Catalonian separatist leader Carles Puigdemont. He also tweeted that Britain was about to conduct a propaganda war against Russia relating to the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. On 28 March 2018, Ecuador responded by cutting Assange's internet connection. Ecuador said he had broken a commitment "not to issue messages that might interfere with other states" and Assange said he was "exercising his right to free speech". In May 2018, The Guardian reported that over five years Ecuador had spent at least $5million (£3.7m) to protect Assange, employing a security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and the British police. Ecuador reportedly devised plans to help Assange escape should British police forcibly enter the embassy to seize him. The Guardian reported that by 2014 Assange had compromised the embassy's communications system. WikiLeaks described the allegation as "an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange". In July 2018, President Moreno said that he was talking to the British government about how to end Assange's asylum and guarantee his life would be safe.

On 11 October 2018, Ecuador partially restored his communications. On 16 October 2018, members of Congress from the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote an open letter to President Moreno, which described Assange as a dangerous criminal. It stated that progress between the US and Ecuador in economic cooperation, counter-narcotics assistance, and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on Assange being handed over to the authorities.

In November 2018, Pamela Anderson, a close friend and regular visitor of Assange, gave an interview in which she asked the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, to defend Assange. Morrison rejected the request with a response Anderson considered "smutty". Anderson responded that "[r]ather than making lewd suggestions about me, perhaps you should instead think about what you are going to say to millions of Australians when one of their own is marched in an orange jumpsuit to Guantanamo Bay - for publishing the truth. You can prevent this."

On 21 December 2018, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention urged the UK to let Assange leave the embassy freely. In February 2019, the parliament of Geneva passed a motion demanding that the Swiss government extend asylum to Assange. In March 2019, Assange submitted a complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking the Ecuadorian government to "ease the conditions that it had imposed on his residence" at the embassy and to protect him from extradition to the US. It also requested US prosecutors unseal criminal charges that had been filed against him. Assange said the Ecuadorian embassy was trying to end his asylum by spying on him and restricting his visitors. The commission rejected his complaint.

On 10 April 2019, WikiLeaks said it had uncovered an extensive surveillance operation against Assange from within the embassy. WikiLeaks said that "material including video, audio, copies of private legal documents and a medical report" had surfaced in Spain and that unnamed individuals in Madrid had made an extortion attempt.

On 26 September 2019, the Spanish newspaper reported that the Spanish defence and security company Undercover Global S.L. ( UC Global) had spied on Assange for the CIA during his time in the embassy. UC Global had been contracted to protect the embassy during this time. According to the report UC Global's owner David Morales had provided the CIA with audio and video of meetings Assange held with his lawyers and colleagues. Morales also arranged for the US to have direct access to the stream from video cameras installed in the embassy at the beginning of December 2017. The evidence was part of a secret investigation by Spain's High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, into Morales and his relationship with US intelligence. The investigation was precipitated by a complaint by Assange that accused UC Global of violating his privacy and client-attorney privileges as well as committing misappropriation, bribery and money laundering. Morales was arrested in September on charges involving violations of privacy and client-attorney privileges, as well as misappropriation, bribery, money laundering and criminal possession of weapons. He was released on bail.

On 25 September Spanish Judge José de la Mata sent British authorities a European Investigation Order (EIO) asking for permission to question Assange by videoconference as a witness in the case against Morales. The United Kingdom Central Authority (UKCA), which is in charge of processing and responding to EIOs in the UK, provisionally denied De la Mata's request to question Assange, raised a number of objections to the request, and asked for more details. De la Mata responded to UKCA's objections on 14 October by stating that Assange was the victim who had filed the complaint and that unlawful disclosure of secrets and bribery are also crimes in the UK. He said that the crimes were partially committed on Spanish territory because the microphones used to spy on Assange were bought in Spain, and the information obtained was sent and uploaded to servers at UC Global S. L.'s headquarters in Spain.

Spanish judicial bodies were upset at having their EIO request denied by UKCA and believed the British justice system was concerned by the effect the Spanish case may have on the process to extradite Assange to the US.

In a November 2019 article, Stefania Maurizi said she had access to some of the videos, audios and photos showing a medical examination of Assange, a meeting between Ecuadorian ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz and his staff, a meeting between Assange, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda and lunch between Assange and British rapper M.I.A. According to Maurizi, microphones had been placed in the women's toilets to capture meetings between Assange and his lawyers and phones belonging to some of the embassy's visitors were compromised. Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez, who is part of Assange's legal team, said videos were taken of meetings between Assange and his legal defence team. Maurizi wrote that, based on statements from former employees of UC Global, internal UC Global emails and the type of information collected, she believed the surveillance was conducted on behalf of the US government and could be used in support of the extradition case.

Britain agreed to allow Judge De la Mata to interview Assange via video link on 20 December. According to his lawyer, Assange testified that he was unaware that cameras installed by Undercover Global were also capturing audio and suggested the surveillance likely targeted his legal team. In August 2022, four of Assange's American lawyers and journalists filed a lawsuit against the CIA, Mike Pompeo, UC Global, and Morales over the surveillance.

On 2 April 2019, Ecuador's president Moreno said that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, after photos surfaced on the internet linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. WikiLeaks said it merely reported on a corruption investigation against Moreno by Ecuador's legislature. WikiLeaks reported a source within the Ecuadorian government saying that, due to the controversy, an agreement had been reached to expel Assange from the embassy and place him in the custody of UK police. According to Assange's father, Ecuador revoked Assange's asylum as part of a deal with the U.S. to receive a loan from the International Monetary Fund.

On 11 April 2019 the Ecuadorian government invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy, and they arrested Assange on charges that he skipped bail in the UK in 2012 and on the basis of a US extradition warrant. Foreign Minister José Valencia said an audio recording captured Assange threatening Ambassador Jaime Merchan with a panic button that he said would bring devastating consequences for the Embassy in the event of his arrest. Ecuador's authorities shared the threat with British authorities and when arresting Assange they were careful to not let him trigger any possible emergency plans.

Moreno accused Assange of installing electronic distortion equipment in the embassy, blocking security cameras, mistreating guards and accessing security files without permission and stated that Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum after he interfered in Ecuador's domestic affairs. Moreno added that "the patience of Ecuador has reached its limit on the behaviour of Mr. Assange" and Foreign minister José Valencia listed nine reasons why Assange's asylum was withdrawn, and said Ecuador had no choice after Assange's "innumerable acts of interference in the politics of other states".

On the day of his arrest, Assange was charged with breaching the Bail Act 1976 and was found guilty after a short hearing. Assange's defence said chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who had dealt with his case, was biased against him as her husband was directly affected by WikiLeaks' allegations. According to an article by Mark Curtis and Matt Kennard in the Daily Maverick, Emma Arbuthnot's husband, James Arbuthnot, "has financial links to the British military establishment, including institutions and individuals exposed by WikiLeaks". The Intercept reported that Emma Arbuthnot's husband and son had "links to people cited for criminal activities in documents published by WikiLeaks" and that her family had "additional connections to the intelligence services and defense industries". Judge Michael Snow said it was "unacceptable" to air the claim in front of a "packed press gallery" and that Assange's "assertion that he has not had a fair hearing is laughable. And his behaviour is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests." Judge Snow also said "He has chosen not to give evidence, he has chosen to make assertions about a senior judge not having the courage to place himself before the court for the purpose of cross-examination. Those assertions made through counsel are not evidence as a matter of law. I find they are not capable of amounting to a reasonable excuse."

Assange was remanded to Belmarsh Prison, and on 1 May 2019 was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment. The judge said he would be released after serving half of his sentence, subject to other proceedings and conditional upon committing no further offences. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that the verdict contravened "principles of necessity and proportionality" for what it considered a "minor violation". Assange appealed against his sentence, but dropped his appeal in July.

Manning in 2017

In 2012 and 2013, US officials indicated that Assange was not named in a sealed indictment. On 6 March 2018, a federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a sealed indictment against Assange. In November 2018, US prosecutors accidentally revealed the indictment.

In February 2019, Chelsea Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Virginia in the case. When Manning condemned the secrecy of the hearings and refused to testify, she was jailed for contempt of court on 8 March 2019. On 11 April 2019, the day of Assange's arrest in London, the indictment against him was unsealed. He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion (i.e., hacking into a government computer), which carries a maximum five-year sentence. The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents and avoid detection. This allegation had been known since 2011 and was a factor in Manning's trial; the indictment did not reveal any new information about Assange.

On 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 new charges relating to the Espionage Act of 1917 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The charges carried a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison:

Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information;

Conspiracy to commit computer intrusions;

Obtaining national defence information (seven counts); and

In June 2019, The US Department of Justice revealed a new indictment they said "broaden[s] the scope of... alleged computer intrusions", alleging that Assange recruited and conspired with hackers, encouraging them to hack to get information for WikiLeaks. Assange allegedly told the Hacking At Random conference that WikiLeaks got private documents from the Congressional Research Service by exploiting "a small vulnerability" inside the United States Congress, and then told them "[t]his is what any one of you would find if you were actually looking." The indictment also alleged he "communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec [,]... provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack".

In a call with reporters, U.S. Attorney Terwilliger said that "Assange is charged for his alleged complicity in illegal acts to obtain or receive voluminous databases of classified information and for agreeing and attempting to obtain classified information through computer hacking. The United States has not charged Assange for passively obtaining or receiving classified information."

Most cases brought under the Espionage Act have been against government employees who accessed sensitive information and leaked it to journalists and others. Prosecuting people for acts related to receiving and publishing information has not previously been tested in court. Gabe Rottman from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said there were a few occasions when the U.S. government had almost charged a journalist under the Espionage Act, but had decided not to proceed. He mentioned the case of Seymour Hersh, whom the Justice Department decided after consideration not to charge for reporting on US surveillance of the Soviet Union. Buzzfeed News wrote that lawyers to whom it had spoken said there was only one previous case in which third parties were prosecuted for sharing leaked information. In that case, two lobbyists for a pro-Israel group were charged in 2005 with receiving and sharing classified information about American policy toward Iran. The charges, however, did not relate to the publication of the documents and the case was dropped in 2009.

The Obama administration had debated charging Assange under the Espionage Act, but decided against it out of fear that it would have a negative effect on investigative journalism and could be unconstitutional. The New York Times commented that it and other news organisations obtained the same documents as WikiLeaks also without government authorisation. It said it was not clear how WikiLeaks' publications were legally different from other publications of classified information.

The Associated Press reported that the indictment raised concerns about media freedom, as Assange's solicitation and publication of classified information is a routine job journalists perform. Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, stated that what Assange is accused of doing is factually different from but legally similar to what professional journalists do. Suzanne Nossel of PEN America said it was immaterial to the charges whether Assange was a journalist or publisher as the indictment describes activities which "media outlets routinely undertake as part of their role to hold government to account".

While some American journalism institutions and politicians supported Assange's arrest and indictment, several non-government organisations for press freedom condemned it. Mark Warner, vice-chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Assange was "a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security". After Assange's arrest and first indictment, the New York Times' Editorial Board wrote that "The case of Mr. Assange, who got his start as a computer hacker, illuminates the conflict of freedom and harm in the new technologies, and could help draw a sharp line between legitimate journalism and dangerous cybercrime." The editorial board also warned that "The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime. But there is always a risk with this administration - one that labels the free press as "the enemy of the people" - that the prosecution of Mr. Assange could become an assault on the First Amendment and whistle-blowers." The Washington Post's Editorial Board wrote that Assange was "not a free-press hero" or a journalist, and that he was "long overdue for personal accountability." The Economist published an editorial arguing that Assange should be extradited.

Several jurists, politicians, associations, academics and campaigners viewed the arrest of Assange as an attack on freedom of the press and international law. Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest would "set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future". Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is "a major threat to global media freedom". United Nations human rights expert Agnes Callamard said the indictment exposed him to the risk of serious human rights violations. Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union said that prosecuting Assange "for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest".

Since his arrest on 11 April 2019, Assange has been incarcerated in HM Prison Belmarsh in London.

After visiting Assange in prison on 9 May 2019, Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, concluded that "in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma." The British government said it disagreed with some of his observations.

On 13 September 2019, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released on 22 September when his prison term ended because he was a flight risk and his lawyer had not applied for bail. She said when his sentence came to an end, his status would change from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.

On 1 November 2019, Melzer said that Assange's health had continued to deteriorate and his life was now at risk. He said that the UK government had not acted on the issue. On 30 December 2019, Melzer accused the UK government of torturing Assange. He said Assange's "continued exposure to severe mental and emotional suffering... clearly amounts to psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

On 17 February 2020, Australian MPs Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen visited Assange and pressed the UK and Australian governments to intervene and stop him from being extradited. Between November 2019 and February 2020, concerns about Assange's health and the conditions of his detention were raised by members of the medical profession who signed petitions on his behalf.

In September 2020, an open letter in support of Assange was sent to Boris Johnson with the signatures of the Presidents of Argentina and Venezuela and approximately 160 other politicians. The following month, U.S. Representatives Tulsi Gabbard and Thomas Massie introduced a bipartisan resolution opposing the extradition of Assange. In December 2020, German human rights commissioner Bärbel Kofler cautioned the UK about the need to consider Assange's physical and mental health before deciding whether to extradite him, and the UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer appealed to British authorities to immediately release Assange after 10 years of arbitrary detention.

On 2 May 2019, the first hearing was held in London into the U.S. request for Assange's extradition. When asked by Judge Snow whether he consented to extradition, Assange replied, "I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many people". On 13 June, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid said he had signed the extradition order.

Towards the end of 2019, Judge Emma Arbuthnot, who had presided at several of the extradition hearings, stepped aside because of "judicial guidance that advises on avoiding the perception of bias" when her family's connections to the intelligence services and defence industries became public.[unreliable source? ] Vanessa Baraitser was appointed as the presiding judge.[unreliable source? ]

On 21 October 2019, Assange appeared for a case management hearing at the court. When Judge Baraitser asked about his understanding of the proceedings, Assange replied:

I don't understand how this is equitable. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can't access my writings. It's very difficult where I am to do anything but these people have unlimited resources. They are saying journalists and whistleblowers are enemies of the people. They have unfair advantages dealing with documents. They [know] the interior of my life with my psychologist. They steal my children's DNA. This is not equitable what is happening here.

In February 2020, the court heard legal arguments. Assange's lawyers contended that he had been charged with political offences and therefore could not be extradited. The hearings were delayed for months due to requests for extra time from the prosecution and the defence and due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, IBAHRI, condemned the mistreatment of Assange in the extradition trial.

Some witnesses who testified in September, such as Daniel Ellsberg, did so remotely via video link due to COVID-19 restrictions. Technical problems caused extensive delays. Torture victim Khaled el-Masri, who was originally requested as a defence witness, had his testimony reduced to a written statement. Other witnesses testified that the conditions of imprisonment, which would be likely to worsen upon extradition to the U.S., placed Assange at a high risk of depression and suicide which was exacerbated by his Asperger syndrome. During the court proceedings the defence drew attention to a prison service report stating that a hidden razor blade had been found by a prison officer during a search of Assange's cell. During the proceedings it was also revealed that Assange had contacted the Samaritans phone service on numerous occasions.

Patrick Eller, a former forensics examiner with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, testified that Assange did not crack and could not have cracked the password mentioned in the U.S. indictment, as Chelsea Manning had intentionally sent only a portion of the password's hash. Moreover, Eller stated that password cracking was a common topic of discussion among other soldiers stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, suggesting that Manning's message was unrelated to the classified documents which were already in her possession. Testimony on 30 September revealed new allegations surrounding the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy by UC Global. A former UC Global employee, who spoke anonymously, fearing reprisals, stated that the firm undertook "an increasingly sophisticated operation" after it was put into contact with the Trump administration by Sheldon Adelson. According to the employee, intelligence agents discussed plans to break into the embassy to kidnap or poison Assange and attempted to obtain the DNA of a baby who was believed to be Assange's child.

Hearings, including a statement in support of the defence by Noam Chomsky, concluded on 1 October 2020.

On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk, pending an appeal by the United States. The US prosecutors appealed against the denial of extradition on 15 January.

Following the decision by Judge Baraitser that it would be "oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States," in July 2021 the Biden administration assured the Crown Prosecution Services that "Mr Assange will not be subject to SAMs or imprisoned at ADX (unless he were to do something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX)". The United States also assured that it "will consent to Mr Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any custodial sentence imposed on him." An Amnesty International expert on national security and human rights in Europe said, "Those are not assurances at all. It's not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise".

In June 2021 Icelandic newspaper published details of an interview with Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, the witness identified as "Teenager" in the U.S. Justice Department's case against Assange. In the interview Thordarson, who had received a promise of immunity from prosecution in return for co-operating with the FBI, stated he had fabricated allegations used in the U.S. indictment. The Washington Post said Thordarson's testimony was not used as the basis for charges but for information on Assange's contact with Chelsea Manning. A year previously The Washington Post said the superseding indictment broadened the case against Assange to that he was a hacker not a publisher and said evidence for that involved Thordarson.

Ecuador revoked Assange's citizenship in July 2021.

In August 2021 in the High Court, Lord Justice Holroyde ruled that Judge Baraitser may have given too much weight to what Holroyde called "a misleading report" by an expert witness for the defence, psychiatrist Prof Michael Kopelman, and granted permission for the contested risk of suicide to be raised on the appeal.

In October 2021, the High Court held a two-day appeal hearing presided over by Ian Burnett, Baron Burnett of Maldon, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and Lord Justice Holroyde. In opening the U.S. as appellant argued that Assange's health issues were less severe than claimed during the initial extradition hearing and that his depression was moderate rather than severe. They also drew attention to binding assurances given by the U.S. concerning his proposed treatment in custody and pointed to the lower rate of suicides in prisons in the U.S. compared to the U.K.. The lawyer also made four binding assurances concerning his proposed treatment in U.S. custody, including an agreement to send Assange to his home country of Australia to serve the prison sentence and not to incarcerate him in super-maximum security prison or solitary confinement. In response, Edward Fitzgerald QC drew attention to a Yahoo! News report that the CIA had plotted to poison, abduct or assassinate Assange. Fitzgerald argued that "there are great grounds for fearing what will be done to him" if extradited to the U.S. He urged the court "not to trust [the] assurances" of the "same government" alleged to have plotted Assange's killing. According to his partner Stella Moris, Assange had a mini-stroke on 27 October while sitting through the court hearing and was subsequently given anti-stroke medication.

On 10 December 2021, the High Court ruled in favour of the United States. The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Justice Holroyde ruled that "if the assurances had been before the judge, she would have answered the relevant question differently" and allowed his extradition. The case was remitted to Westminster Magistrates' Court with the direction that it be sent to the Home Secretary Priti Patel for the final decision on whether to extradite Assange. On 24 January 2022 Assange was granted permission to petition the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom for an appeal hearing, but in March the court refused to allow the appeal, saying that Assange had not raised an arguable point of law.

In an auction of non-fungible tokens on 9 February 2022 organised by Pak collaborating with Assange, an NFT artwork called "Clock" by him was bought by a decentralised autonomous organisation ("DAO") of over 10,000 supporters called AssangeDAO and raised 16,593 of the cryptocurrency ether, worth about $52.8m at the time, for Assange's legal defence. "Clock" updates each day to show how long Assange has been imprisoned.

On 1 July 2022, Assange lodged an appeal against the extradition in the High Court. On 22 August 2022, Assange's legal team lodged a Perfected Grounds of Appeal before the High Court challenging District Judge Vanessa Baraitser's decision of 4 January 2021 with new evidence. Assange also made a further appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, but on 13 December 2022, this appeal was declared inadmissible.

In April 2023, European unions and associations of journalists from Portugal, Armenia, Great Britain and Greece granted Julian Assange honorary membership. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and its affiliates joined the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) to appeal to US and UK authorities to release Julian Assange and drop all charges. The EFJ was concerned about the impact of Assange's continued detention on media freedom and the rights of all journalists globally and urged European governments to work to secure Assange's release. In May 2023 Assange wrote a letter to King Charles III saying he was a political prisoner and requesting the King visit him in prison.

In May 2023, Assange's lawyers said they were open to a plea deal but that "no crime has been committed and the facts involved in the case don't support a crime". In June 2023, reported that the FBI was seeking to gather new evidence in the case, based on a request from the FBI to interview Andrew O'Hagan. O'Hagan refused the request and said to he "would not give a witness statement against a fellow journalist".

On 6 June 2023, the High Court in London dismissed Assange's appeal. Justice Jonathan Swift ruled that "none of the four grounds of appeal raises any properly arguable point". In a second ruling, Justice Swift denied Assange permission to challenge a January 2021 ruling by Judge Baraitser.

The incoming Australian Labor government of Anthony Albanese indicated that it would oppose the continued prosecution of Assange but would pursue quiet diplomacy to achieve this aim. In July 2023, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected the Australian government's position, saying that Assange faced serious charges. On 14 August 2023, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy had "flagged" a plea deal for Assange.

Writings, talk show, and opinions

In 2012 Assange hosted World Tomorrow show, broadcast by Russian network RT. He has written a few short pieces, including " State and terrorist conspiracies" (2006), "Conspiracy as governance" (2006), "The hidden curse of Thomas Paine" (2008), "What's new about WikiLeaks?" (2011), and the foreword to Cypherpunks (2012). Cypherpunks is primarily a transcript of World Tomorrow episode eight, a two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. In the foreword, Assange said, "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen". He also contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), and received a co-writer credit for the Calle 13 song "Multi Viral" (2013). In 2010, Assange said he was a libertarian and that "WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical".

In 2010, Assange received a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3million. In 2011, Canongate Books published Julian Assange, The Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange immediately disavowed it, stating, "I am not 'the writer' of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript, which was written by Andrew O'Hagan." Assange accused Canongate of breaching their contract by publishing, against his wishes, a draft that Assange considered "a work in progress" and "entirely uncorrected or fact-checked by me." In 2014, O'Hagan wrote about his experience as Assange's ghostwriter. "The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses," O'Hagan recalled. "He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning." Colin Robinson, co-publisher of Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks, criticised O'Hagan for largely ignoring the bigger issues about which Assange had been warning and noted that O'Hagan's piece "is no part of an organised dirty tricks campaign. But by focusing as it does on Assange's character defects, it ends up serving much the same purpose."

Assange's book When Google Met WikiLeaks was published by OR Books in 2014. It recounts when Google CEO Eric Schmidt requested a meeting with Assange, while he was on bail in rural Norfolk, UK. Schmidt was accompanied by Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas; Lisa Shields, vice-president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Scott Malcomson, the communications director for the International Crisis Group. Excerpts were published on the website, while Assange participated in a Q&A event that was facilitated by the Reddit website and agreed to an interview with magazine.

In 2011, an article in Private Eye by its editor, Ian Hislop, recounted a rambling phone call he had received from Assange, who was especially angry about Private Eye's report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Assange suggested, Hislop wrote, "that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization." Assange subsequently responded that Hislop had "distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase." He added, "We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world."

While still a teenager, Assange married a woman, also in her teens, named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son named Daniel. The couple separated and disputed custody of Daniel until 1999. According to Assange's mother, his brown hair turned white during the time of the custody dispute.

In 2006, Assange created a dating profile on the website OkCupid with the username Harry Harrison, who had been a science fiction writer. Assange described himself as a "passionate, and often pig headed activist intellectual" who was "directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated" and looking for a "siren for [a] love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy". The profile was verified by OkCupid CEO Sam Yagan and last accessed in December 2006.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg said in his 2011 memoir Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website that Assange said he had fathered several children. In an email in January 2007, Assange mentioned having a daughter. In 2015, in an open letter to French President Hollande, Assange revealed he had another child. He said that this, his youngest child, was French, as was the child's mother. He also said his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.

In 2015, Assange began a relationship with Stella Moris, his South African-born lawyer. They were engaged in 2017 and have two sons, born in 2017 and 2019. Moris revealed their relationship in 2020 because she feared for Assange's life. On 7 November 2021, the couple said they were preparing legal action against Deputy UK Prime Minister Dominic Raab and Jenny Louis, governor of Belmarsh Prison. Assange and Moris accused Raab and Louis of denying them and their two children's human rights by blocking and delaying their marriage. On 11 November, the prison service said it had granted permission for the couple to marry in Belmarsh Prison, and on 23 March 2022 the couple married.

The travelling art installation Anything to Say? by Davide Dormino featuring bronze sculptures of Assange, Snowden, and Manning standing on chairs in Berlin on May Day 2015[565]

Views on Assange have been given by a number of public figures, including journalists, well-known whistleblowers, activists and world leaders. They range from laudatory statements to calls for his execution.

In 2010, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange was a kindred spirit who disclosed information "on a scale that might really make a difference" and "has shown much better judgment with respect to what he has revealed than the people who kept those items secret inside the government." During an argument in an internal chat, Domscheit-Berg told Assange he was failing as a leader. After Assange told him he should quit, former WikiLeaks member Herbert Snorrason questioned his judgment. Other departing members who challenged his leadership style included Birgitta Jonsdottir, who acknowledged his importance to the organisation. In November 2010, an individual from the office of the President of Russia, suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In December 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who was then the President of Brazil, said "They have arrested him and I don't hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression". Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, asked at a press conference "Why is Mr. Assange in prison? Is this democracy?" In the same month Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, described his activities as "illegal" but the Australian Federal Police said he had not broken Australian law. Joe Biden, the vice-president of the United States, was asked whether he saw Assange as closer to a high-tech terrorist than to whistleblower Ellsberg. Biden responded that he "would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers".

American politicians Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin each either referred to Assange as "a high-tech terrorist" or suggested that through publishing US diplomatic traffic he was engaged in terrorism. Other American and Canadian politicians and media personalities including Tom Flanagan, and Mike Huckabee called for his assassination or execution.

Journalists at The Guardian, The Daily Beast, and wrote that Assange is not a journalist, and other journalists at Salon wrote that he is. Italian Rolling Stone magazine called Assange "the person who best embodied a rock'n'roll behaviour" during 2010, describing him a cross between a James Bond villain, a Marvel superhero and a character from The Matrix films. It hailed him as "the exterminator of secrets held by the world's great powers".

In his 2011 memoir Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website, Domscheit-Berg criticised Assange's character, his attitude towards women, and his handling of the "Collateral Murder" video clip. He wrote that Assange had lied to The New Yorker about decrypting the video clip, and had refused to reimburse WikiLeaks' staffers who worked on the project. Domscheit-Berg described Assange as "freethinking", "energetic" and "brilliant" as well as "paranoid", "power-obsessed" and "monomaniacal". In March 2011, Australian author Robert Manne wrote that Assange was "one of the best-known and most-respected human beings on earth". In September 2011, the Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde made a joint statement that they condemned and deplored the decision by Julian Assange to publish the unredacted state department cables and WikiLeaks insiders including Birgita criticised Assange's handling of the moral issue of the Afghan War Diary and "dictatorial tendencies" inside WikiLeaks.

In November 2011 Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, said he supported Assange "in terms of the manner in which he is delivering us an opportunity to talk about really important stuff. I think it's important that we are encouraged to discuss secrecy in our society. It's good for us". In July 2012, Smith offered his residence in Norfolk for Assange to continue WikiLeaks' operations whilst in the UK. Smith told the press it was not about whether Assange was right or wrong for what he had done with WikiLeaks, it was about "standing up to the bully" and "whether our country, in these historic times, really was the tolerant, independent, and open place I had been brought up to believe it was and feel that it needs to be".

In diplomatic cables from 2011 and 2012, Australian diplomats dismissed claims that the US investigation of Assange was politically motivated. The cables also revealed that the embassy saw complaints about threats to Assange as part of a media campaign "to set the scene for a possible political exception to extradition".

In April 2012, interviewed on Assange's television show World Tomorrow, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa praised WikiLeaks and told his host "Cheer up! Cheer up! Welcome to the club of the persecuted!" That October, Andy Greenberg said The Architect "sees Assange as driven by his ego and there were points when he felt like Assange was not as focused about the release of significant information as he was on breaking records, releasing leaks that were bigger than the last one."

In 2012, Bob Beckel called for Assange's assassination, and in 2013, Michael Grunwald echoed the call, though Grunwald later apologised for this, saying, "It was a dumb tweet. I'm sorry. I deserve the backlash". In April 2013, filmmaker Oliver Stone stated that "Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept." In 2013, Jemima Khan wrote that when dealing with Assange, "pundits on both the left and the right have become more interested in tribalism than truth. The attacks on him by his many critics in the press have been virulent and highly personal." Vivienne Westwood criticised Khan for ending her support for Assange. Khan wrote:

"As editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Assange had created a transparency mechanism to hold governments and corporations to account. I abhor lies and WikiLeaks exposed the most dangerous lies of all - those told to us by our elected governments. WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes, torture and cover-ups. ... If Assange is prosecuted in the US for espionage, I suspect even his most disenchanted former supporters will take to the barricades in his defence. The list of alienated and disaffected allies is long: some say they fell out over redactions, some over broken deals, some over money, some over ownership and control. The roll-call includes Assange's earliest WikiLeaks collaborators, Daniel Domscheit-Berg and "The Architect", the anonymous technical whizz behind much of the WikiLeaks platform. It also features the journalists with whom he worked on the leaked cables.

In early 2014 Andrew O'Hagan, the ghost writer of Assange's autobiography, said that Assange was passionate, funny, lazy, courageous, vain, paranoid, moral, and manipulative. In November 2014, Spanish Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias also gave his support to Assange, calling him an activist and a journalist and criticising his persecution.

In July 2015, British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn opposed Assange's extradition to the US, and as Labour Party leader in April 2019 said the British government should oppose Assange's extradition to the US "for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan".

In October 2016, James Ball who had previously worked with Assange, wrote that he had a score to settle with Hillary Clinton and wanted to reassert himself on the world stage, but that he wouldn't knowingly have been a tool of the Russian state. That month Pussy Riot member and Courage Foundation advisory board member Nadya Tolokonnikova criticised Assange for his connections to the Russian government.

In 2017, Barrett Brown said that Assange had acted "as a covert political operative" in the 2016 US election, thus betraying WikiLeaks' focus on exposing "corporate and government wrongdoing". He considered the latter to be "an appropriate thing to do", but that "working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting". That May, Laura Poitras said he was admirable, brilliant and flawed. In late May 2017, President Moreno said that Assange was a "hacker", but that he respected his human rights and Assange's asylum in the embassy would continue.

2019-present

After Assange's arrest in 2019, journalists and commenters debated about if Assange was a journalist. Journalists at the Associated Press, CNN, The Sydney Morning Herald, The LA Times, National Review, The Economist, and The Washington Post argued he was not a journalist. Other journalists at The Independent, The Intercept, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and The Washington Post wrote that he was a journalist or that his actions were still protected. The Washington Post's editorial board wrote that he was "not a free-press hero" or journalist and that he was "overdue for personal accountability."

In December 2019, Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis said that in 2006 she "became fascinated at this young, idealistic Australian, very tech-savvy, who developed a way for whistleblowers to upload data anonymously". In January 2021, Australian journalist John Pilger stated that, were Assange to be extradited, "no journalist who challenges power will be safe". In November 2022, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País published an open letter that said "the US government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets". The letter did not urge the government to drop the case related to the hacking-related charge, though it said that "some of us are concerned" about it, too.

In 2023, former Trump administration CIA Director Mike Pompeo described Assange in his memoir as "a useful idiot for Russia to exploit." The next month, Louis Menand of New Yorker wrote that "Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him."

2009, Amnesty International UK New Media Award for Kenya: The Cry of Blood-Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances

2010, "Rockstar of the year" by the Italian edition of Rolling Stone

2011, Free Dacia Award

2011, Voltaire Award for Free Speech

2013, Global Exchange Human Rights Award, People's Choice

2013, New York Festivals World's Best TV & Films Silver World Medal

2013 The Brazilian Press Association Human Rights Award

2014, Union of Journalists in Kazakhstan Top Prize

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Julian Paul Assange ( ə-SAHNZH ; Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to wide international attention in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning: footage of an airstrike in Baghdad, military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and US diplomatic cables.

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WikiLeaks () is an international non-profit organisation that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organisation Sunshine Press, stated in 2015 that it had released online 10 million documents in its first 10 years. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder and director. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief.

WikiLeaks has variously described itself as an organization of journalists, political activists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists, an intermediary between sources and journalists, an advocacy group for sources, and a public intelligence agency.

The group has released a number of prominent document caches that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties to the US and international public. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war, a report about a corruption investigation in Kenya, and an operating procedures manual for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi Reuters journalists were among several civilians killed. Other releases in 2010 included the Afghan War Diary and the " Iraq War Logs". The latter release allowed the mapping of 109,032 deaths in "significant" attacks by insurgents in Iraq that had been reported to Multi-National Force - Iraq, including about 15,000 that had not been previously published. In 2010, WikiLeaks also released classified diplomatic cables that had been sent to the US State Department. In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. In 2012, WikiLeaks released the "Syria Files," over two million emails sent by Syrian politicians, corporations and government ministries. In 2015, WikiLeaks published Saudi Arabian diplomatic cables, documents detailing spying by the U.S. National Security Agency on successive French presidents, and the intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial international trade agreement which had been negotiated in secret.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks released emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, showing that the party's national committee favoured Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries, leading to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC. These releases caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign, and have been cited as a potential contributing factor to her loss in the general election against Donald Trump. The U.S. intelligence community expressed "high confidence" that the leaked emails had been hacked by Russia and supplied to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks said that the source of the documents was not Russia or any other state. During the campaign, WikiLeaks promoted conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

In 2016, WikiLeaks released nearly 300,000 emails it described as coming from Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, later found to be taken from public mailing archives, and rereleased over 50,000 emails from the Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources. In 2017, WikiLeaks published internal CIA documents describing tools used by the agency to hack devices including mobile phones and routers. In 2019, WikiLeaks published over 30,000 files as part of the Fishrot Files, exposing corruption at Samherji, a multinational fishing company based in Iceland.

In October 2021, WikiLeaks' secure chat stopped working and in February 2022 their submission system and email server went offline. According to the Daily Dot, in July 2022 WikiLeaks launched a version of the submissions portal that told sources to use expired PGP keys and did not function properly, and the submission site went offline without explanation later the same month.

Staff, name and founding

The inspiration for WikiLeaks was Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Assange built WikiLeaks to shorten the time between a leak and its coverage by the media. WikiLeaks was established in Australia but its servers were soon moved to Sweden and other countries that provided more legal protection for the media.

The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was established and published its first document in December 2006. Before his arrest, WikiLeaks was usually represented in public by Julian Assange, who has been described as "the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest". Assange formed an advisory board in the early days of WikiLeaks, filling it with journalists, political activists and computer specialists. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrell are other notable associates of Assange who have been involved in the project. Harrison is also a member of Sunshine Press Productions along with Assange and Ingi Ragnar Ingason. Gavin MacFadyen was acknowledged by Assange as a ″beloved director of WikiLeaks″ shortly after his death in 2016.

WikiLeaks originally used a " wiki" communal publication method, which ended by May 2010. Its founders and early volunteers were once described as a mixture of Asian dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. As of June 2009, the website had more than 1,200 registered volunteers.

Despite some public confusion, related to the fact both sites use the "wiki" name and website design template, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia are not affiliated. Wikia, a for-profit corporation affiliated loosely with the Wikimedia Foundation, purchased several WikiLeaks-related domain names as a "protective brand measure" in 2007.

On 26 September 2018, it was announced that Julian Assange had appointed Kristinn Hrafnsson as editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks with Assange continuing as its publisher. His access to the internet was cut off by Ecuador in March 2018 after he tweeted that Britain was about to conduct a propaganda war against Russia relating to the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Ecuador said he had broken a commitment "not to issue messages that might interfere with other states" and Assange said he was "exercising his right to free speech".

In a 2013 resolution, the International Federation of Journalists, a trade union of journalists, called WikiLeaks a "new breed of media organisation" that "offers important opportunities for media organisations". Harvard professor Yochai Benkler praised WikiLeaks as a new form of journalistic enterprise, testifying at the court-martial of Chelsea Manning that "WikiLeaks did serve a particular journalistic function," and that the "range of the journalist's privilege" is "a hard line to draw".

Others do not consider WikiLeaks to be journalistic in nature. Media ethicist Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies wrote in 2011: "WikiLeaks might grow into a journalist endeavor. But it's not there yet." Bill Keller of The New York Times considers WikiLeaks to be a "complicated source" rather than a journalistic partner. Prominent First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams writes that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic group, but instead "an organization of political activists; ... a source for journalists; and ... a conduit of leaked information to the press and the public". In support of his opinion, referring to Assange's statements that WikiLeaks reads only a small fraction of information before deciding to publish it, Abrams wrote: "No journalistic entity I have ever heard of-none-simply releases to the world an elephantine amount of material it has not read."

Administration

According to a January 2010 interview, the WikiLeaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800 people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated. WikiLeaks does not have any official headquarters.

WikiLeaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking". In 2010, the website was available on multiple servers, different domain names and had an official dark web version (available on the Tor Network) as a result of a number of denial-of-service attacks and its elimination from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers.

Until August 2010, WikiLeaks was hosted by PRQ, a company based in Sweden providing "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". PRQ was reported by The Register website to have "almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs". Later, WikiLeaks was hosted mainly by the Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof in the Pionen facility, a former nuclear bunker in Sweden. Other servers are spread around the world with the main server located in Sweden. Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden and the other countries "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He talks about the Swedish constitution, which gives the information-providers total legal protection. It is forbidden, according to Swedish law, for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper. These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult for any authority to eliminate WikiLeaks; they place a burden of proof upon any complainant whose suit would circumscribe WikiLeaks' liberty. Furthermore, "WikiLeaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called " bulletproof hosting".

After the site became the target of a denial-of-service attack on its old servers, WikiLeaks moved its website to Amazon's servers. Amazon later removed the website from its servers. In a public statement, Amazon said that WikiLeaks was not following its terms of service. The company stated: "There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content ... that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content." WikiLeaks was then moved to servers at OVH, a private web-hosting service in France. After criticism from the French government, a judge ruled that there was no need for OVH to cease hosting WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks used EveryDNS, but was dropped by the company after distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS) attacks against WikiLeaks hurt the quality of service for its other customers. Supporters of WikiLeaks waged verbal and DDoS attacks on EveryDNS. Because of a typographical error in blogs mistaking EveryDNS for competitor , the sizeable Internet backlash hit EasyDNS. Despite that, EasyDNS began providing WikiLeaks with DNS service on "two 'battle hardened' servers" to protect the quality of service for its other customers.

In 2010 Assange said WikiLeaks received some submissions through the postal mail. During the 2010 reorganisation, the site's submission system went offline. While it was offline, WikiLeaks announced they were building a state-of-the-art secure submission system. The launch of the new system was delayed by security concerns in 2011. The new submission system did not launch until four and a half years later, in May 2015. According to The Washington Post, Andy Müller-Maguhn and a colleague administered the submission server in 2016, though Müller-Maguhn denies this. By October 2021, WikiLeaks' secure chat stopped working and by February 2022, WikiLeaks' submission system and email server were offline. In July 2022, a broken version of the submission system briefly relaunched with expired PGP keys and went offline after it was reported on by The Daily Dot.

Legal status

The legal status of WikiLeaks is complex. In 2010, WikiLeaks set up a private limited company in Iceland for administrative purposes, according to a long-time spokesman and later editor-in-chief. The organisation was also creating legal entities in France and Sweden, and operated in Australia.

Criminal investigations

The US Justice Department began a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange soon after the leak of diplomatic cables in 2010 began. The Washington Post reported that the department was considering charges under the Espionage Act of 1917, an action which former prosecutors characterised as "difficult" because of First Amendment protections for the press. Several Supreme Court cases (e.g. Bartnicki v. Vopper) have established previously that the American Constitution protects the re-publication of illegally gained information provided the publishers did not themselves violate any laws in acquiring it.

Regarding legal threats against WikiLeaks and Assange, legal expert Ben Saul said that Assange is the target of a global smear campaign to demonise him as a criminal or as a terrorist, without any legal basis. The US Center for Constitutional Rights issued a statement expressing alarm at the "multiple examples of legal overreach and irregularities" in his arrest.

In 2011, Google was served with search warrants for the contents of two WikiLeaks volunteers' email accounts.

In 2015, it was revealed that Google had been served with search warrants for the contents of three WikiLeaks staff members' email accounts as part of a criminal investigation with alleged offenses including espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, the theft or conversion of property belonging to the United States government, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and criminal conspiracy.

In April 2017, CIA director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia". The official designation of Wikileaks and Julian Assange as a non-state hostile intelligence service was discussed in mid-2017 during preparation of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018. It was eventually incorporated into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 that became law in December 2019. The Act says "It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States." In the opinion of some sources, the effect of the designation was to allow the CIA to launch and plan operations that did not require presidential approval or congressional notice.

Use of leaked documents in court

In April 2011, the US Department of Justice warned military lawyers acting for Guantanamo Bay detainees against clicking of links on sites such as The New York Times that might lead to classified files published by WikiLeaks. In June 2011, the US Department of Justice ruled that attorneys acting for Guantanamo Bay detainees could cite documents published by WikiLeaks. The use of the documents was subject to restrictions.

On 8 February 2018, the UK Supreme Court unanimously allowed a document that had been leaked through WikiLeaks to be admitted as evidence. The cable had been excluded from use in an earlier part of the case before the Administrative Court based on the fact that it was a diplomatic communication, which enjoy "inviolable" protections that prevent them from being used in court outside of exceptional circumstances. The Supreme Court ruled that since the document had already been widely disseminated, it had lost any protections it might have had. The hearing was considered an important test of the Vienna Convention in relation to WikiLeaks documents.

Lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee

On 20 April 2018, the Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in federal district court in Manhattan against Russia, the Trump campaign, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, alleging a conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 United States presidential election in Trump's favour. The suit was dismissed with prejudice on 30 July 2019. In his judgement, Judge John Koeltl said that WikiLeaks "did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place" and therefore was within the law in publishing the information. The federal judge also wrote "The DNC's interest in keeping 'donor lists' and 'fundraising strategies' secret is dwarfed by the newsworthiness of the documents as a whole...If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC's political financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them 'secret' and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet".

WikiLeaks is a self-described not-for-profit organisation, funded largely by volunteers, and is dependent on public donations. Its main financing methods include conventional bank transfers and online payment systems. According to Assange, WikiLeaks' lawyers often work pro bono. Assange has said that in some cases legal aid has been donated by media organisations such as the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Assange said in 2010 that WikiLeaks' only revenue consists of donations, but it has considered other options including auctioning early access to documents. During September 2011, WikiLeaks began auctioning items on eBay to raise funds.

The Wau Holland Foundation helps to process donations to WikiLeaks. An article in TechEye wrote that "as a charity accountable under German law, donations for Wikileaks can be made to the foundation. Funds are held in escrow and are given to Wikileaks after the whistleblower website files an application containing a statement with proof of payment."

In January 2010, WikiLeaks temporarily shut down its website while management appealed for donations. Previously published material was no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirror websites. WikiLeaks stated that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were paid. WikiLeaks saw this as a kind of work stoppage "to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue". While the organisation initially planned for funds to be secured by 6 January 2010, it was not until 3 February 2010 that WikiLeaks announced that its minimum fundraising goal had been achieved.

By October 2017, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the group had made a 50,000% return on Bitcoin. By that December, they had raised at least $25 million in Bitcoin. The total value later reached $46 million.

Financial blockade of WikiLeaks

On 22 January 2010, the Internet payment intermediary PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' donation account and froze its assets. WikiLeaks said that this had happened before, and was done for "no obvious reason". In December 2010, PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' account, thereby stopping donations through PayPal. PayPal said it had taken action after the US State Department sent a letter to Wikileaks stating that Wikileaks' activities were illegal in the US. Hendrik Fulda, vice-president of the Wau Holland Foundation, said that the Foundation had been receiving twice as many donations through PayPal as through normal banks before PayPal's decision to suspend WikiLeaks' account. Mastercard and Visa Europe also decided to stop accepting payments to WikiLeaks. Bank of America, Amazon and Swiss bank PostFinance had previously stopped dealing with WikiLeaks. Datacell, the IT company that enabled WikiLeaks to accept credit and debit card donations, threatened Mastercard and Visa with legal action to enforce the resumption of payments to WikiLeaks. Datacell said Visa's action was the result of political pressure.

Assange noted that the financial blockade by Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union, had cost WikiLeaks ninety-five percent of its revenue. In July 2011, WikiLeaks filed a complaint against Visa and MasterCard with the European Commission. In 2012, an Icelandic district court ruled that Valitor, the Icelandic partner of Visa and MasterCard, was violating the law when it stopped accepting credit card donations to WikiLeaks. The court ruled that donations to WikiLeaks must resume within 14 days or Valitor would be fined US$6,000 a day.

Publications

WikiLeaks posted its first document in December 2006, a decision to assassinate Somali government officials signed by rebel leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys. Assange and WikiLeaks were uncertain of its authenticity, and the document's authenticity was never determined.

In August 2007, the UK newspaper The Guardian published a story about corruption by the family of the former Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi based on information provided via WikiLeaks.

In November 2007, a March 2003 copy of Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta detailing the protocol of the US Army at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was released. The document revealed that some prisoners were off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross, something that the US military had in the past denied repeatedly. The Guantánamo Bay Manual included procedures for transferring prisoners and methods of evading protocols of the Geneva convention.

In February 2008, WikiLeaks released allegations of illegal activities at the Cayman Islands branch of the Swiss Bank Julius Baer, which resulted in the bank suing WikiLeaks and obtaining an injunction which temporarily suspended the operation of wikileaks.org. The California judge had the service provider of WikiLeaks block the site's domain (wikileaks.org) on 18 February 2008, although the bank only wanted the documents to be removed but WikiLeaks had failed to name a contact. The website was instantly mirrored by supporters, and later that month the judge overturned his previous decision citing First Amendment concerns and questions about legal jurisdiction.

In March 2008, WikiLeaks published what they referred to as "the collected secret 'bibles' of Scientology", and three days later received letters threatening to sue them for breach of copyright.

In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaigns, the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked by 4chan user David Kernell.

In November 2008, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks, after appearing briefly on a weblog. A year later, in October 2009, another list of BNP members was leaked, said by the BNP's leader, Nick Griffin, to be a 'malicious forgery'.

In January 2009, WikiLeaks released 86 telephone intercept recordings of Peruvian politicians and businessmen involved in the 2008 Peru oil scandal.

In February, WikiLeaks cracked the encryption to and published NATO's Master Narrative for Afghanistan and three other classified or restricted NATO documents on the Pentagon Central Command (CENTCOM) site.

During February, WikiLeaks released 6,780 Congressional Research Service reports followed in March by a list of contributors to the Norm Coleman senatorial campaign and a set of documents belonging to Barclays Bank that had been ordered removed from the website of The Guardian.

In July, it released a report relating to a serious nuclear accident that had occurred at the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2009. Later media reports suggested that the accident was related to the Stuxnet computer worm.

In September, internal documents from Kaupthing Bank were leaked, from shortly before the collapse of Iceland's banking sector, which had caused the 2008-2012 Icelandic financial crisis. The document showed that suspiciously large sums of money were loaned to various owners of the bank, and large debts written off.

In October, Joint Services Protocol 440, a British document advising the security services on how to avoid documents being leaked, was published by WikiLeaks. Later that month, it announced that a super-injunction was being used by the commodities company Trafigura to stop The Guardian (London) from reporting on a leaked internal document regarding a toxic dumping incident in Côte d'Ivoire.

In November, it hosted copies of e-mail correspondence between climate scientists, although they were not leaked originally to WikiLeaks. It also released 570,000 intercepts of pager messages sent on the day of the 11 September attacks. These included messages sent from the Pentagon, the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the NYPD, in response to the disaster.

During 2008 and 2009, WikiLeaks published lists of forbidden or illegal web addresses for Australia, Denmark and Thailand. These were originally created to prevent access to child pornography and terrorism, but the leaks revealed that other sites featuring unrelated subjects were also listed.

In mid-February 2010, WikiLeaks received a leaked diplomatic cable from the United States Embassy in Reykjavik relating to the Icesave scandal, which they published on 18 February. The cable, known as Reykjavik 13, was the first of the classified documents WikiLeaks published among those allegedly provided to them by United States Army Private Chelsea Manning. In March 2010, WikiLeaks released a secret 32-page US Department of Defense Counterintelligence Analysis Report written in March 2008 discussing the leaking of material by WikiLeaks and how it could be deterred.

In April, a classified video of the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike was released, showing two Reuters employees being fired at, after the pilots mistakenly thought the men were carrying weapons, which were in fact cameras. After the men were killed, the video shows US forces firing on a family van that stopped to pick up the bodies. Press reports of the number killed in the attacks vary from 12 to "over 18". Among the dead were two journalists and two children were also wounded.

In June 2010, Manning was arrested after alleged chat logs were given to United States authorities by former hacker Adrian Lamo, in whom she had confided. Manning reportedly told Lamo she had leaked the "Collateral Murder" video, in addition to a video of the Granai airstrike and about 260,000 diplomatic cables, to WikiLeaks.

In July, WikiLeaks released 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009 to the publications The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. The documents detail individual incidents including " friendly fire" and civilian casualties. WikiLeaks asked the Pentagon and human-rights groups to help remove names from the documents to reduce the potential harm caused by their release, but did not receive assistance.

After the Love Parade stampede in Duisburg, Germany, on 24 July 2010, a local resident published internal documents of the city administration regarding the planning of Love Parade. The city government reacted by securing a court order on 16 August forcing the removal of the documents from the website on which it was hosted. On 20 August 2010, WikiLeaks released a publication entitled Loveparade 2010 Duisburg planning documents, 2007-2010, which consisted of 43 internal documents regarding the Love Parade 2010.

After the leak of information concerning the Afghan War, in October 2010, around 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq War were released. The BBC quoted the US Department of Defense referring to the Iraq War Logs as "the largest leak of classified documents in its history". Media coverage of the leaked documents emphasised claims that the US government had ignored reports of torture by the Iraqi authorities during the period after the 2003 war.

On 29 July 2010 WikiLeaks added an "Insurance file" to the Afghan War Diary page. The file is AES encrypted. There has been speculation that it was intended to serve as insurance in case the WikiLeaks website or its spokesman Julian Assange are incapacitated, upon which the passphrase could be published. After the first few days' release of the US diplomatic cables starting 28 November 2010, the US television broadcasting company CBS predicted that "If anything happens to Assange or the website, a key will go out to unlock the files. There would then be no way to stop the information from spreading like wildfire because so many people already have copies." CBS correspondent Declan McCullagh stated, "What most folks are speculating is that the insurance file contains unreleased information that would be especially embarrassing to the US government if it were released."

Diplomatic cables release

On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and five major newspapers from Spain (), France (), Germany (Der Spiegel), the United Kingdom (The Guardian), and the United States ( The New York Times) started simultaneously to publish the first 220 of 251,287 leaked documents labelled confidential - but not top-secret - and dated from 28 December 1966 to 28 February 2010.

Assange wrote "What makes the revelations of secret communications potent is that we were not supposed to read them. Diplomatic cables are not produced in order to manipulate the public, but are aimed at elements of the rest of the US state apparatus, and are therefore relatively free from the distorting influence of public relations".

The contents of the diplomatic cables include numerous unguarded comments and revelations regarding: US diplomats gathering personal information about Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and other top UN officials; critiques and praises about the host countries of various United States embassies; political manoeuvring regarding climate change; discussion and resolutions towards ending ongoing tension in the Middle East; efforts and resistance towards nuclear disarmament; actions in the War on Terror; assessments of other threats around the world; dealings between various countries; United States intelligence and counterintelligence efforts; and other diplomatic actions. Reactions to the United States diplomatic cables leak varied. On 14 December 2010 the United States Department of Justice issued a subpoena directing Twitter to provide information for accounts registered to or associated with WikiLeaks. Twitter decided to notify its users. The overthrow of the presidency in Tunisia of 2011 has been attributed partly to reaction against the corruption revealed by leaked cables.

On 1 September 2011, it became public that an encrypted version of WikiLeaks' huge archive of un-redacted US State Department cables had been available via BitTorrent for months and that the decryption key (similar to a password) was available to those who knew where to find it. Guardian newspaper editor David Leigh and journalist Luke Harding published the decryption key in their book, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, so the files were now publicly available to anyone including intelligence services. WikiLeaks decided to publish the entire, unredacted archive in searchable form on its website on 2 September. According to Assange, Wikileaks did this so that possible targets could be informed and better defend themseles, and also to provide a reliable source for the leaks. The website Cryptome published the unredacted cables on 1 September, a day before Wikileaks, and they remain on the Cryptome site. According to the website owner and operator they have never been asked by US authorities to remove them.

In late April 2011, files related to the Guantanamo prison were released. In December 2011, WikiLeaks started to release the Spy Files. On 27 February 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. On 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files (emails from Syrian political figures 2006-2012). On 25 October 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Detainee Policies, files covering the rules and procedures for detainees in US military custody. In April 2013 WikiLeaks published more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s, including the Kissinger cables.

In 2013, the organisation assisted Edward Snowden (who is responsible for the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures) in leaving Hong Kong. Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks activist, accompanied Snowden on the flight. Scott Shane of The New York Times stated that the WikiLeaks involvement "shows that despite its shoestring staff, limited fund-raising from a boycott by major financial firms, and defections prompted by Mr. Assange's personal troubles and abrasive style, it remains a force to be reckoned with on the global stage."

In September 2013, WikiLeaks published " Spy Files 3", 250 documents from more than 90 surveillance companies. On 13 November 2013, a draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership's Intellectual Property Rights chapter was published by WikiLeaks. On 10 June 2015, WikiLeaks published the draft on the Trans-Pacific Partnership's Transparency for Healthcare Annex, along with each country's negotiating position. On 19 June 2015 WikiLeaks began publishing The Saudi Cables: more than half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that contain secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world.

On 23 June 2015, WikiLeaks published documents under the name of "Espionnage Élysée", which showed that NSA spied on the French government, including but not limited to then President Francois Hollande and his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac. On 29 June 2015, WikiLeaks published more NSA top secrets intercepts regarding France, detailing an economic espionage against French companies and associations. In July 2015, WikiLeaks published documents which showed that the NSA had tapped the telephones of many German federal ministries, including that of the Chancellor Angela Merkel, for years since the 1990s. On 4 July 2015, WikiLeaks published documents which showed that 29 Brazilian government numbers were selected for secret espionage by the NSA. Among the targets were then-President Dilma Rousseff, many assistants and advisors, her presidential jet and other key figures in the Brazilian government.

On 29 July 2015, WikiLeaks published a top secret letter from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) Ministerial Meeting in December 2013 which illustrated the position of negotiating countries on " state-owned enterprises" (SOEs). On 31 July 2015, WikiLeaks published secret intercepts and the related target list showing that the NSA spied on the Japanese government, including the Cabinet and Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui. The documents revealed that United States espionage against Japan concerned broad sections of communications about the US-Japan diplomatic relationship and Japan's position on climate change issues, other than an extensive monitoring of the Japanese economy. On 21 October 2015 WikiLeaks published some of John O. Brennan's emails, including a draft security clearance application which contained personal information.

During the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted emails sent or received by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton from her personal mail server while she was Secretary of State. The emails had been released by the US State Department under a Freedom of information request in February 2016. WikiLeaks also created a search engine to allow the public to search through Clinton's emails. The emails were selected in terms of their relevance to the Iraq War and were apparently timed to precede the release of the UK government's Iraq Inquiry report. The emails were a major point of discussion during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, requiring an FBI investigation which decided that Clinton had been "extremely careless" but recommended that no charges be filed against her.

On 19 July 2016, in response to the Turkish government's purges that followed the coup attempt, WikiLeaks released 294,548 emails from Turkey's ruling Justice and Development party (AKP). According to WikiLeaks, the material, which they claim to be the first batch from the "AKP Emails", was obtained a week before the attempted coup in the country and "is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state". After WikiLeaks announced that they would release the emails, the organisation was for over 24 hours under a "sustained attack". Following the leak, the Turkish government ordered the site to be blocked nationwide.

Fisher asked WikiLeaks not to publish the AKP emails as she was still access files on the AKP network. After WikiLeaks published the emails, the AKP shut down its internal network and Fisher lost access. Most experts and commentators agree that Phineas Fisher was behind the leak. Fisher said WikiLeaks had told her that the emails were "all spam and crap."

WikiLeaks had also tweeted a link to a database which contained sensitive information, such as the Turkish Identification Number, of approximately 50 million Turkish citizens, including nearly every female voter in Turkey. The information first appeared online in April of the same year and was not in the files uploaded by WikiLeaks, but in files described by WikiLeaks as "the full data for the Turkey AKP emails and more" which was archived by Emma Best, who then removed it when the personal data was discovered.

On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released approximately 20,000 emails and 8,000 files sent from or received by Democratic National Committee (DNC) personnel. Some of the emails contained personal information of donors, including home addresses and Social Security numbers. Other emails appeared to criticise Bernie Sanders or showed favouritism towards Clinton during the primaries. Emails showed that the DNC shared debate questions with Clinton in advance. In July 2016, Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) because the emails released by WikiLeaks showed that the DNC was "effectively an arm of Mrs. Clinton's campaign" and had conspired to sabotage Bernie Sanders's campaign.

On 7 October 2016, WikiLeaks started releasing series of emails and documents sent from or received by Hillary Clinton campaign manager, John Podesta, including Hillary Clinton's paid speeches to banks, including Goldman Sachs. The BBC reported that the release "is unlikely to allay fears among liberal Democrats that she is too cosy with Wall Street". According to a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, "By dribbling these out every day WikiLeaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing Vladimir Putin's dirty work to help elect Donald Trump." The New York Times reported that when asked, President Vladimir Putin replied that Russia was being falsely accused. "The hysteria is merely caused by the fact that somebody needs to divert the attention of the American people from the essence of what was exposed by the hackers."

On 17 October 2016, WikiLeaks announced that a "state party" had severed the Internet connection of Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. WikiLeaks blamed United States Secretary of State John Kerry of pressuring the Ecuadorian government in severing Assange's Internet, an accusation which the United States State Department denied. The Ecuadorian government stated that it had "temporarily" severed Assange's Internet connection because of WikiLeaks' release of documents "impacting on the U.S. election campaign," although it also stated that this was not meant to prevent WikiLeaks from operating.

On 25 November 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and internal documents that provided details on the US military operations in Yemen from 2009 to March 2015. In a statement accompanying the release of the "Yemen Files", Assange said about the US involvement in the Yemen war: "The war in Yemen has produced 3.15 million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war itself reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare".

In December 2016, WikiLeaks published over 57,000 emails from Erdogan's son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, who was Turkey's Minister of Energy and Natural Resources. The emails show the inner workings of the Turkish government. According to WikiLeaks, the emails had been first released by Redhack.

On 16 February 2017, WikiLeaks released a purported report on CIA espionage orders (marked as NOFORN) for the 2012 French presidential election. The order called for details of party funding, internal rivalries and future attitudes toward the United States. The Associated Press noted that "the orders seemed to represent standard intelligence-gathering."

On 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks started publishing content code-named " Vault 7", describing it as containing CIA internal documentation of their "massive arsenal" of hacking tools including malware, viruses, weaponised " zero day" exploits and remote control systems. Leaked documents, dated from 2013 to 2016, detail the capabilities of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs, web browsers (including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera Software ASA), and the operating systems of most smartphones (including Apple's iOS and Google's Android), as well as other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux. In September 2021, Yahoo! News reported that in 2017 in the wake of the Vault 7 leaks, the CIA planned to spy on associates of WikiLeaks, sow discord among its members, and steal their electronic devices. "[T]op intelligence officials lobbied the White House" to designate Wikileaks as an "information broker" to allow for more investigative tools against it, "potentially paving the way" for its prosecution. Laura Poitras described attempts to classify herself and Assange as "information brokers" rather than journalists as "bone-chilling and a threat to journalists worldwide". Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo stated that the US officials who had spoken to Yahoo should be prosecuted for exposing CIA activities.

On 5 May 2017, WikiLeaks posted links to e-mails purported to be from Emmanuel Macron's campaign in the French 2017 presidential election. The documents were first relayed on the 4chan forum and by pro-Trump Twitter accounts, and then by WikiLeaks, who indicated they did not author the leaks. Some experts have said that the WikiLeaks Twitter account played a key role in publicising the leaks through the hashtag #MacronLeaks just some three-and-a-half hours after the first tweet with the hashtag appeared. The campaign stated that false documents were mixed in with real ones, and that "the ambition of the authors of this leak is obviously to harm the movement En Marche! in the final hours before the second round of the French presidential election." France's Electoral Commission described the action as a "massive and coordinated piracy action." France's Electoral Commission urged journalists not to report on the contents of the leaks, but to heed "the sense of responsibility they must demonstrate, as at stake are the free expression of voters and the sincerity of the election." Cybersecurity experts initially believed that groups linked to Russia were involved in this attack. The Kremlin denied any involvement. The head of the French cyber-security agency, ANSSI, later said that they did not have evidence connecting the hack with Russia, saying that the attack was so simple, that "we can imagine that it was a person who did this alone. They could be in any country."

In September 2017, WikiLeaks released "Spy Files Russia," revealing "how a St. Petersburg-based technology company called Peter-Service helped state entities gather detailed data on Russian cellphone users, part of a national system of online surveillance called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM)." Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov said that "there is some data here that's worth publishing. Anything that gets people talking about Russia's capabilities and actions in this area should be seen as a positive development."

In November 2019, WikiLeaks released an email from an unnamed investigator from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) team investigating the 2018 chemical attack in Douma (Syria). The investigator accused the OPCW of covering up discrepancies. Robert Fisk said that documents released by WikiLeaks indicated that the OPCW "suppressed or failed to publish, or simply preferred to ignore, the conclusions of up to 20 other members of its staff who became so upset at what they regarded as the misleading conclusions of the final report that they officially sought to have it changed in order to represent the truth". The head of OPCW, Fernando Arias, described the leak as containing "subjective views" and stood by the original conclusions.

On 12 November 2019, WikiLeaks began publishing what it called the Fishrot Files ( Icelandic: Samherjaskjölin), a collection of thousands of documents and email communication by employees of one of Iceland's largest fish industry companies, Samherji, that indicated that the company had paid hundreds of millions Icelandic króna to high ranking politicians and officials in Namibia with the objective of acquiring the country's coveted fishing quota.

In 2021, WikiLeaks released a database of 17,000 documents, which it called The Intolerance Network, from the ultra-conservative Spanish Catholic organisation Hazte Oir and its international arm, CitizenGo. The documents reveal the internal workings of the organisations, their network of donors and their relationship with the Vatican. The release also includes documents from the secret Catholic organisation El Yunque. The editor of WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson, said "As ultra right-wing political groups have gained strength in recent years, with increasing attacks on women's and LGBT rights, it is valuable to have access to documents from those who have lobbied for those changes on a global basis". According to WikiLeaks, the documents were first released in 2017.

Claims of upcoming leaks

In January 2011, Rudolf Elmer, a former Swiss banker, passed data containing account details of 2,000 prominent people to Assange, who stated that the information would be vetted before being made publicly available at a later date. In May 2010, WikiLeaks said it had video footage of a massacre of civilians in Afghanistan by the US military which they were preparing to release. In an interview with Chris Anderson on 19 July 2010, Assange showed a document WikiLeaks had on an Albanian oil-well blowout, and said they also had material from inside British Petroleum, and that they were "getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high calibre" but added that they had not been able to verify and release the material because they did not have enough volunteer journalists. In December 2010, Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC Television that WikiLeaks had information it considered to be a "thermo-nuclear device" which it would release if the organisation needs to defend itself against the authorities.

In a 2009 interview with Computerworld magazine, Assange claimed to be in possession of "5GB from Bank of America". In 2010, he told magazine that WikiLeaks was planning another "megaleak" early in 2011, from the private sector, involving "a big U.S. bank" and revealing an "ecosystem of corruption". Bank of America's stock price decreased by 3%, apparently as a result of this announcement. Assange commented on the possible effect of the release that "it could take down a bank or two". In August 2011, Reuters reported that Daniel Domscheit-Berg had destroyed around 3,000 submissions related to Bank of America (most of them "random junk"), out of concern over WikiLeaks' inadequate protection of sources. The WikiLeaks Twitter account (believed to be controlled by Assange) stated "five gigabytes from the Bank of America" had been deleted, but Domscheit-Berg stated that he had only destroyed material received after Assange's Computerworld interview, and raised the possibility that Assange had lost access to the material because of technical deficiencies in WikiLeaks' submission system.

In October 2010, Assange told a major Moscow newspaper that "The Kremlin had better brace itself for a coming wave of WikiLeaks disclosures about Russia". Assange later clarified: "[W]e have material on many businesses and governments, including in Russia. It's not right to say there's going to be a particular focus on Russia".

Authenticity

According to Wired in 2009, a "whistleblower" submitted fabricated documents to WikiLeaks. The documents were published and flagged as potential fakes. WikiLeaks stated in 2010 that it has never released a misattributed document and that documents are assessed before release. In response to concerns about the possibility of misleading or fraudulent leaks, WikiLeaks has stated that misleading leaks "are already well-placed in the mainstream media. WikiLeaks is of no additional assistance." The FAQ states that: "The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinise and discuss leaked documents." According to statements by Assange in 2010, submitted documents were vetted by five reviewers with expertise in different topics such as language or programming, who also investigated the leaker's identity if known. Assange had the final say in document assessment.

Columnist Eric Zorn wrote in 2016 "So far, it's possible, even likely, that every stolen email WikiLeaks has posted has been authentic," but cautioned against assuming that future releases would be equally authentic. Writer Glenn Greenwald stated in 2016 that WikiLeaks has a "perfect, long-standing record of only publishing authentic documents." Cybersecurity experts have said that it would be easy for a person to fabricate an email or alter it, as by changing headers and metadata.

In July 2016, the Aspen Institute's Homeland Security Group, a bipartisan counterterrorism organisation, warned that hackers who stole authentic data might "salt the files they release with plausible forgeries." According to Douglas Perry, Russian intelligence agencies have frequently used disinformation tactics. He wrote in 2016 that "carefully faked emails might be included in the WikiLeaks dumps. After all, the best way to make false information believable is to mix it in with true information."

Campaigns to discredit WikiLeaks

In 2010 the Bank of America employed the services of a collection of information security firms, known as Team Themis, when the bank became concerned about information that WikiLeaks held about it and was planning to release. Team Themis included private intelligence and security firms HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies. In 2011 hacktivist group Anonymous released emails it had obtained from HBGary Federal. Among other things, the emails revealed that Team Themis had planned to sabotage and discredit WikiLeaks. One plan was to attack WikiLeaks servers and obtain information about document submitters to "kill the project". Another was to submit fake documents to WikiLeaks and then call out the error. A further plan involved pressuring supporters of WikiLeaks such as journalist Glenn Greenwald. The plans were not implemented and, after the emails were published, Palantir CEO Alex Karp issued a public apology for his company's role.

Promotion of conspiracy theories

Murder of Seth Rich

WikiLeaks promoted conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich. Unfounded conspiracy theories, spread by some right-wing figures and media outlets, hold that Rich was the source of leaked emails and was killed for working with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks fuelled such theories when it offered a $20,000 reward for information on Rich's killer and when Assange implied that Rich was the source of the DNC leaks, although no evidence supports that claim. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russian interference in the 2016 election said that Assange "implied falsely" that Rich was the source in order to obscure that Russia was the actual source.

Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton

WikiLeaks popularised conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, such as tweeting articles which suggested Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta engaged in satanic rituals, implying that the Democratic Party had Seth Rich killed, claiming that Hillary Clinton wanted to drone strike Assange, suggesting that Clinton wore earpieces to debates and interviews, promoting conspiracy theories about Clinton's health, and promoting a conspiracy theory from a Donald Trump-related Internet community tying the Clinton campaign to child kidnapper Laura Silsby.

Promotion of false flag theories

On the day the Vault 7 documents were first released, WikiLeaks described UMBRAGE as "a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation," and tweeted, "CIA steals other groups virus and malware facilitating false flag attacks." A conspiracy theory soon emerged alleging that the CIA framed the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 U.S. elections. Conservative commentators such as Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter speculated about this possibility on Twitter, and Rush Limbaugh discussed it on his radio show. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that Vault 7 showed that "the CIA could get access to such 'fingerprints' and then use them."

In April 2017, the WikiLeaks Twitter account suggested that the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, which international human rights organisations and governments of the United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, France, and Israel attributed to the Syrian government, was a false flag attack. WikiLeaks stated that "while western establishment media beat the drum for more war in Syria the matter is far from clear", and shared a video by a Syrian activist who claimed that Islamist extremists were probably behind the chemical attack, not the Syrian government.

Awards and support

WikiLeaks won a number of awards in its early years, including The Economist's New Media Award in 2008 at the Index on Censorship Awards and Amnesty International's UK Media Award in 2009. In 2010, the New York listed WikiLeaks first among websites "that could totally change the news". Julian Assange received the 2010 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence for releasing secret U.S. military reports on the Iraq and Afghan wars and was named the Readers' Choice for TIME's Person of the Year in 2010. The UK Information Commissioner has stated that "WikiLeaks is part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen". In 2010, an Internet petition in support of WikiLeaks attracted more than six hundred thousand signatures.

On 16 April 2019, Mairead Maguire accepted the 2019 GUE/NGL Award for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information on Julian Assange's behalf.

Improving government and corporate transparency

During the early years of WikiLeaks, various members of the media and academia commended it for exposing state and corporate secrets, increasing transparency, assisting freedom of the press, and enhancing democratic discourse while challenging powerful institutions. In 2010, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed concern over the "cyber war" being led at the time against WikiLeaks, and in a joint statement with the Organization of American States the UN Special Rapporteur called on states and other people to keep international legal principles in mind.

Allegations of anti-Clinton and pro-Trump bias

Assange wrote on WikiLeaks in February 2016: "I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgement and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ... she certainly should not become president of the United States." In a 2017 interview by Amy Goodman, Julian Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhea. "Personally, I would prefer neither." WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison stated that the site was not choosing which damaging publications to release, rather releasing information available to them. In conversations that were leaked in February 2018, Assange expressed a preference for a Republican victory in the 2016 election, saying that "Dems+Media+liberals would [sic] then form a block to reign [sic] in their worst qualities. With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities, dems+media+neoliberals will be mute." In further leaked correspondence with the Trump campaign on election day (8 November 2016), WikiLeaks encouraged the Trump campaign to contest the election results as being "rigged" should they lose.

Having released information that exposed the inner workings of a broad range of organisations and politicians, WikiLeaks started by 2016 to focus almost exclusively on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, WikiLeaks only exposed material damaging to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton. WikiLeaks even rejected the opportunity to publish unrelated leaks, because it dedicated all its resources to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. According to The New York Times, WikiLeaks timed one of its large leaks so that it would happen on the eve of the Democratic Convention. The Washington Post noted that the leaks came at an important sensitive moment in the Clinton campaign, as she was preparing to announce her vice-presidential pick and unite the party behind her. The Sunlight Foundation, an organisation that advocates for open government, said that such actions meant that WikiLeaks was no longer striving to be transparent but rather sought to achieve political goals.

WikiLeaks explained its actions in a 2017 statement to Foreign Policy: "WikiLeaks schedules publications to maximize readership and reader engagement. During distracting media events such as the Olympics or a high profile election, unrelated publications are sometimes delayed until the distraction passes but never are rejected for this reason." On 7 October 2016, an hour after the media had begun to dedicate wall-to-wall coverage of the revelation that Trump had bragged on video about sexually harassing women, WikiLeaks began to release emails hacked from the personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Podesta suggested that the emails were timed to deflect attention from the Trump tapes.

Correspondence between WikiLeaks and Donald Trump Jr.

In November 2017, it was revealed that the WikiLeaks Twitter account corresponded with Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 presidential election. The correspondence shows how WikiLeaks actively solicited the co-operation of Trump Jr., a campaign surrogate and advisor in the campaign of his father. WikiLeaks urged the Trump campaign to reject the results of the 2016 presidential election at a time when it looked as if the Trump campaign would lose. WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr. to share a WikiLeaks tweet with the quote "Can't we just drone this guy?" which True Pundit alleged Hillary Clinton made about Assange. WikiLeaks also shared a link to a site that would help people to search through WikiLeaks documents. Trump Jr. shared both. After the election, WikiLeaks also requested that the president-elect push Australia to appoint Assange as ambassador to the US. Trump Jr. provided this correspondence to congressional investigators looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Allegations of association with Russian government

According to the Associated Press, leaked documents from WikiLeaks include an unsigned letter from Julian Assange authorising Israel Shamir to seek a Russian visa on his behalf in 2010. WikiLeaks said Assange never applied for the visa or wrote the letter.

In 2012, as WikiLeaks was under a financial blockade, Assange began to host World Tomorrow, a television show that was distributed by Journeyman Pictures and aired on RT.

In 2013, the Russian national newspaper reported that Russian intelligence officers had coordinated with WikiLeaks to get Edward Snowden to Russia.

In April 2016, WikiLeaks tweeted criticism of the Panama Papers, which had among other things revealed Russian businesses and individuals linked with offshore ties. Assange said that journalists had "cherry-picked" documents to maximise "Putin bashing, North Korea bashing, sanctions bashing, etc." while avoiding mention of Western figures. The WikiLeaks Twitter account tweeted, "#PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID and [George] Soros". Putin later dismissed the Panama Papers by citing WikiLeaks: "WikiLeaks has showed us that official people and official organs of the U.S. are behind this." According to The New York Times "there is no evidence suggesting that the United States government had a role in releasing the Panama Papers".

In August 2016, after WikiLeaks published thousands of DNC emails, DNC officials and a number of cybersecurity experts and cybersecurity firms claimed that Russian intelligence had hacked the e-mails and leaked them to WikiLeaks. Assange said that Russia was not the source of the documents and that the Clinton campaign was stoking "a neo-McCarthy hysteria". In October 2016, the US intelligence community said that it was "confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations". The US intelligence agencies said that the hacks were consistent with the methods of Russian-directed efforts, and that people high up within the Kremlin were likely involved. On 14 October 2016, CNN stated that "there is mounting evidence that the Russian government is supplying WikiLeaks with hacked emails pertaining to the U.S. presidential election."

WikiLeaks said it had no connection with Russia. When asked about Guccifer 2.0's leaks, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said "These look very much like they're from the Russians. But in some ways, they look very amateur, and almost look too much like the Russians." President Putin stated that there was no Russian involvement in the election. In August 2016, a New York Times story asked whether WikiLeaks had "become a laundering machine for compromising material gathered by Russian spies". It wrote that US officials believed it was unlikely there were direct ties between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence agencies. A report by the Central Intelligence Agency shared with senators in 2016 concluded that Russia intelligence operatives provided materials to WikiLeaks in an effort to help Donald Trump's election bid.

In March 2017, The Moscow Times wrote that a former WikiLeaks collaborator said that "in recent years, WikiLeaks and the Russian state have effectively joined forces." The article reported that, since submissions to the Wikileaks portal are anonymous and encrypted, it was very difficult for Wikileaks to trace their source. Mark Galeotti, a researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague and an expert on the Russian security services, said he had suspicions "that things are sometimes fed in, and [WikiLeaks does] know where they came from." Galeotti said Assange would have to be "extraordinarily stupid and naive" not to conclude the DNC leaks came from Russia. According to the Mueller indictment, WikiLeaks knew the source was the Russian Guccifer 2.0 persona.

In August 2017, Foreign Policy wrote that WikiLeaks had in the summer of 2016 turned down a large cache of documents containing information damaging to the Russian government. WikiLeaks stated that, "As far as we recall these are already public ... WikiLeaks rejects all information that it cannot verify. WikiLeaks rejects submissions that have already been published elsewhere". News outlets had reported on contents of the leaks in 2014, amounting to less than half of the data that was allegedly made available to WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016.

In September 2018, The Guardian reported that Russian diplomats had secret talks with people close to Julian Assange in 2017 with plans to help him flee the U.K. Several possible destinations were suggested, including Russia. The Russian embassy denied the report. It was also reported that Ecuador attempted to give Assange a diplomatic posting in Russia, but Britain refused to give him diplomatic immunity to leave the embassy.

Allegations of anti-semitism

WikiLeaks has been accused of anti-semitism both in its Twitter activity and hiring decisions. According to Ian Hislop, Assange claimed that a "Jewish conspiracy" was attempting to discredit the organisation. Assange denied making this remark, stating "'Jewish conspiracy' is completely false, in spirit and in word. It is serious and upsetting."

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January 2015, the WikiLeaks Twitter account wrote that "the Jewish pro-censorship lobby legitimized attacks", referring to the trial of Maurice Sinet. In July 2016, the same account suggested that triple parentheses, or (((echoes))) - a tool used by neo-Nazis to identify Jews on Twitter, appropriated by several Jews online out of solidarity - had been used as a way for "establishment climbers" to identify one another. In leaked internal conversations, the WikiLeaks Twitter account, thought[by whom? ] to be controlled by Assange at the time, commented on Associated Press reporter Raphael Satter who had written an article critical of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks tweeted that "[Satter]'s always ben(sic) a rat. But he's jewish and engaged with the ((()))) issue".

Exaggerated and misleading descriptions of the contents of leaks

WikiLeaks has been criticised for making misleading claims about the contents of its leaks. Media outlets have also been criticised for uncritically repeating WikiLeaks' misleading claims about its leaks. According to University of North Carolina Professor Zeynep Tufekci, this is part of a pattern of behaviour. According to Tufekci, there are three steps to WikiLeaks' "disinformation campaigns": "The first step is to dump many documents at once - rather than allowing journalists to scrutinise them and absorb their significance before publication. The second step is to sensationalise the material with misleading news releases and tweets. The third step is to sit back and watch as the news media unwittingly promotes the WikiLeaks agenda under the auspices of independent reporting."

Most experts and commentators agree that Phineas Fisher was behind the AKP email leak. Fisher said WikiLeaks had told her that the emails were "all spam and crap" but published them anyway despite being asked not to.

Buying and selling leaks

In 2008, WikiLeaks attempted to auction off the emails of an aide to Hugo Chavez, drawing criticism. University of Minnesota media ethics professor Jane Kirtley asked, "Ethically speaking, why don't they just publish it?" WikiLeaks later posted the emails on their website. In 2010, Assange considered a subscription service which would give high paying subscribers early access to leaks. In 2012, WikiLeaks put the Global Intelligence files behind a paywall, drawing intense criticism from supporters including Anonymous.

In 2015, WikiLeaks began issuing "bounties" of up to $100,000 for leaks. WikiLeaks has issued crowd-sourced rewards for the TTIP chapters, the TPP and information on the Kunduz Massacre. WikiLeaks has issued other bounties for leaks on Troika Crisis Planning, LabourLeaks, Trump-Comey tapes, evidence of Obama administration officials destroying information, 2016 U.S. Presidential election-related information, information to get a reporter at The Intercept fired over the Reality Winner case, the U.S. Senate torture report, and documents and Sweden's vote on placing Saudi Arabia on the UN Women's Rights Commission. WikiLeaks had defended the practice with their vetting record, saying "police rewards produce results. So do journalistic rewards."

Inadequate curation and violations of personal privacy

WikiLeaks has drawn criticism for violating the personal privacy of individuals and inadequately curating its content. These critics include transparency advocates, such as Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the Sunlight Foundation and the Federation of American Scientists.

In response to a question in 2010 about whether WikiLeaks would release information that he knew might get someone killed, Assange said that he had instituted a "harm-minimization policy." This policy meant that people named in some documents might be contacted before publication to warn them, but that there were also times were members of WikiLeaks might have "blood on our hands." One member of WikiLeaks told The New Yorker they were initially uncomfortable with Assange's editorial policy, but changed her mind because she thought no one had been unjustly harmed.

When asked to join their initial advisory board, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists declined and told TIME that "they have a very idealistic view of the nature of leaking and its impact. They seem to think that most leakers are crusading do-gooders who are single-handedly battling one evil empire or another." Aftergood has opined that WikiLeaks "does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals." Aftergood went on to state that WikiLeaks engages in unrestrained disclosure of non-governmental secrets without compelling public policy reasons and that many anti-corruption activists were opposed to the site's activities.

WikiLeaks has published individuals' Social Security numbers, medical information, and credit card numbers. An analysis by the Associated Press found that WikiLeaks had in one of its mass-disclosures published "the personal information of hundreds of people - including sick children, rape victims and mental health patients". WikiLeaks has named teenage rape victims, and outed an individual arrested for homosexuality in Saudi Arabia. Some of WikiLeaks' cables "described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children or refugees". An analysis of WikiLeaks' Saudi cables "turned up more than 500 passport, identity, academic or employment files ... three dozen records pertaining to family issues in the cables - including messages about marriages, divorces, missing children, elopements and custody battles. Many are very personal, like the marital certificates that proclaims whether the bride was a virgin. Others deal with Saudis who are deeply in debt, including one man who says his wife stole his money. One divorce document details a male partner's infertility. Others identify the partners of women suffering from sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and Hepatitis C." Two individuals named in the DNC leaks were targeted by identity thieves following WikiLeaks' release of their Social Security and credit card information. In its leak of DNC e-mails, WikiLeaks revealed the details of an ordinary staffer's suicide attempt and brought attention to it through a tweet.

WikiLeaks' publishing of Sony's hacked e-mails drew criticism for violating the privacy of Sony's employees and for failing to be in the public interest. Michael A. Cohen, a fellow at the Century Foundation, argues that "data dumps like these represent a threat to our already shrinking zone of privacy." He noted that the willingness of WikiLeaks to publish information of this type encourages hacking and cyber theft: "With ready and willing amplifiers, what's to deter the next cyberthief from stealing a company's database of information and threatening to send it to Wikileaks if a list of demands aren't met?"

In July 2016, Edward Snowden criticised WikiLeaks for insufficiently curating its content. When Snowden made data public, he did so by working with The Washington Post, the Guardian and other news organisations, choosing only to make documents public which exposed National Security Agency surveillance programs. Content that compromised national security or exposed sensitive personal information was withheld. WikiLeaks, on the other hand, made little effort to do either, Snowden said. WikiLeaks responded by accusing Snowden of pandering to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. At the same time, Glenn Greenwald criticized WikiLeaks for refusing to redact, telling Slate "I definitely do not agree with that approach and think that they can be harmful to innocent people or other individuals in ways that I don't think is acceptable."

In January 2017, the WikiLeaks Task Force, a Twitter account associated with WikiLeaks, proposed the creation of a database to track verified Twitter users, including sensitive personal information on individuals' homes, families and finances. According to the Chicago Tribune, "the proposal faced a sharp and swift backlash as technologists, journalists and security researchers slammed the idea as a 'sinister' and dangerous abuse of power and privacy."

Internal conflicts and lack of transparency

In January 2007, John Young quit the advisory board and accused the group of being a CIA conduit. He published 150 pages of WikiLeaks emails. In a 2010 interview with CNET.com Young accused the group of a lack of transparency regarding their fundraising and financial management. He went on to state his belief that WikiLeaks could not guarantee whistleblowers the anonymity or confidentiality they claimed and that he "would not trust them with information if it had any value, or if it put me at risk or anyone that I cared about at risk." He later became supportive of the group again.

On 25 September 2010, after being suspended by Assange for "disloyalty, insubordination and destabilisation", Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the German spokesman for WikiLeaks, told Der Spiegel that he was resigning, saying "WikiLeaks has a structural problem. I no longer want to take responsibility for it, and that's why I am leaving the project." Assange accused Domscheit-Berg of leaking information to , with Domscheit-Berg claiming that the WikiLeaks team was unhappy with Assange's management and handling of the Afghan war document releases. Daniel Domscheit-Berg wanted greater transparency in the articles released to the public. Another vision of his was to focus on providing technology that allowed whistle-blowers to protect their identity as well as a more transparent way of communicating with the media, forming new partnerships and involving new people. Domscheit-Berg left with a small group to start OpenLeaks, a new leak organisation and website with a different management and distribution philosophy.

While leaving, Daniel Domscheit-Berg copied and then deleted roughly 3,500 unpublished documents from the WikiLeaks servers, including information on the US government's 'no-fly list' and inside information from 20 right-wing organisations, and according to a WikiLeaks statement, 5 gigabytes of data relating to Bank of America, the internal communications of 20 neo-Nazi organisations and US intercept information for "over a hundred Internet companies". Assange stated that Domscheit-Berg had deleted video files of the Granai massacre by a US Bomber. WikiLeaks had scheduled the video for publication before its deletion. In Domscheit-Berg's book he wrote: "To this day, we are waiting for Julian to restore security, so that we can return the material to him, which was on the submission platform." In August 2011, Domscheit-Berg claimed he permanently deleted the files "in order to ensure that the sources are not compromised."

Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old Icelandic university student, resigned after he challenged Assange on his decision to suspend Domscheit-Berg and was bluntly rebuked. Iceland MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir also left WikiLeaks, citing lack of transparency, lack of structure, and poor communication flow in the organisation. According to the British newspaper, The Independent, at least a dozen key supporters of WikiLeaks left the website during 2010.

Non-disclosure agreements

Those working for WikiLeaks are reportedly required to sign sweeping non-disclosure agreements covering all conversations, conduct, and material, with Assange having sole power over disclosure. The penalty for non-compliance in one such agreement was reportedly £12 million. WikiLeaks has been challenged for this practice, as it is seen to be hypocritical for an organisation dedicated to transparency to limit the transparency of its inner workings and limit the accountability of powerful individuals in the organisation.

Public positions taken by politicians concerning WikiLeaks

In 2010, after WikiLeaks' release of classified U.S. government documents leaked by Chelsea Manning, then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was asked whether he saw Assange as closer to a high-tech terrorist than to Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Biden responded that he "would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers". Biden said Assange "has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world."

Several Republicans who had once been highly critical of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange began to speak fondly of him after WikiLeaks published the DNC leaks and started to regularly criticise Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Having called WikiLeaks "disgraceful" in 2010, President-elect Donald Trump praised WikiLeaks in October 2016, saying, "I love WikiLeaks." In 2019, Trump said "I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It's not my thing." Newt Gingrich, who called for Assange to be "treated as an enemy combatant" in 2010, praised him as a "down to Earth, straight forward interviewee" in 2017. Sean Hannity, who had in 2010 said that Assange waged a "war" on the United States, praised him in 2016 for showing "how corrupt, dishonest and phony our government is". Sarah Palin, who had in 2010 described Assange as an "anti-American operative with blood on his hands", praised Assange in 2017.

In popular culture

is a documentary released in 2013, directed by Johannes Wahlström, produced by Ken Loach's company Sixteen Films and featuring the people behind WikiLeaks. The film debuted at the Raindance Film Festival. It was released for free online to counter The Fifth Estate which was released at the same time.

Underground: The Julian Assange Story is a biography movie of the early life of Julian Assange, directed by Robert Connolly.

The documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks by director Alex Gibney premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. WikiLeaks released a complete, annotated transcript of the film prior to its release. WikiLeaks criticised the film for containing dozens of factual errors and instances of "sleight of hand". It also criticised the film's depiction of Chelsea Manning's decision to leak US military and diplomatic documents as "a failure of character, rather than a triumph of conscience".

The Fifth Estate is a film directed by Bill Condon, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange. The film is based on WikiLeaks defector Domscheit-Berg's book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange and the World's Most Dangerous Website, as well as WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy by David Leigh and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks leaked the full script of the film prior to its release and criticised both books on which the film was based as "inaccurate and libellous". WikiLeaks said that the film was "careful to avoid most criticism of US foreign policy actually revealed by WikiLeaks" and covered "almost none of the evidence WikiLeaks published that year of serious abuses within the US military and the State Department". It said the film contained fabrications which had the effect of obscuring the benefits of WikiLeaks' releases and demonising Assange.

War, Lies and Videotape is a documentary by French directors Paul Moreira and Luc Hermann from press agency Premieres Lignes. The film was first released in France, in 2011 and then broadcast worldwide.

is a 2014 oratorio by Ted Hearne, with a libretto by Mark Doten that features WikiLeaks document disclosures by Chelsea Manning.

The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange is a 2020 documentary by Juan Passarelli.

A Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks Exposés was published in December 2020. The book contains 18 essays by Julian Burnside, Antony Loewenstein, Scott Ludlam, Helen Razer and others about how WikiLeaks has affected the Australian media and the Australian government's connections to the US intelligence and military industries.

Release of United States diplomatic cables was followed by the creation of a number of other organisations based on the WikiLeaks model.

OpenLeaks was created by a former WikiLeaks spokesperson. Daniel Domscheit-Berg said the intention was to be more transparent than WikiLeaks. OpenLeaks was supposed to start public operations in early 2011 but despite much media coverage, as of April 2013 it is not operating.

In December 2011, WikiLeaks launched Friends of WikiLeaks, a social network for supporters and founders of the website.

On 9 September 2013 a number of major Dutch media outlets supported the launch of Publeaks, which provides a secure website for people to leak documents to the media using the GlobaLeaks whistleblowing software.

RuLeaks was launched in December 2010 to translate and mirror publications by WikiLeaks. In January 2011, it started to publish its own content as well.

Leakymails is a project designed to obtain and publish relevant documents exposing corruption of the political class and the powerful in Argentina.

Distributed Denial of Secrets is a whistleblower site founded in 2018. Sometimes referred to as an alternative to WikiLeaks, it's best known for its publication of a large collection of internal police documents, known as BlueLeaks. The site has also published data on Russian oligarchs, fascist groups, shell companies, tax havens, banking in the Caymans and the Parler leak.

References

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WikiLeaks () is an international non-profit organisation that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organisation Sunshine Press, stated in 2015 that it had released online 10 million documents in its first 10 years.

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Thispost originally appeared on Revelist.
Abercrombie -- the brand that haunted your middle school days and made you think that wearing two polos stacked on top of each other would suddenly make you popular -- is dying. And I am here to sing its eulogy from the treetops.

Abercrombie's stock dropped 11% on Thursday -- even more than originally predicted. That's not exactly new for Abercrombie, which lost $63.2 million in its first quarter last year, and has yet to show steady improvement. A Google News search for the company turns up dozens of articles about the company's decline.

Execs tried to shake things up starting in 2014, ousting their controversial CEO, Mike Jefferies. The company vowed to cut the sexy images from their bags, and removed the once-coveted moose logo from most of their clothing.

But these changes to Abercrombie's "brand" don't obscure what's at its rotten core: A company set on propagating an outdated, unattainable image of perfection. I know, because I helped them.

I started working for Abercrombie my first year of college. My second week of school, two women approached me at the campus coffee shop and asked if I wanted to model for their company.

"We work for Abercrombie and Fitch," they whispered, leaning in conspiratorially. It was my official invite to the "exclusive" club Abercrombie has built.

I went to the interview, admittedly a little flattered at the request. Once there, I learned that "model" is Abercrombie code for sales associate -- a title used so the company can legally hire and fire their front-of-house staff based on appearance. I arrived 20 minutes late to the group interview, told them I had no retail experience, and was still hired on the spot. Not as lucky were the three other (much more qualified) women at my interview, who had submitted applications instead of being "scouted." I never saw them again.

A friend who worked at the company headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, confirmed that hiring at Abercrombie is based largely on looks.

"I was asked to go look at a group of people interviewing and see if they were attractive enough," she told me. Later, when she applied to work at one of the retail stores, she was required to submit only a picture.

A "model's" job is to stand in predetermined areas of the store -- purportedly to assist customers, but largely to act as a human mannequin. As a model I was provided a uniform, which changed seasonally, but was always short on fabric.

Every aspect of my appearance was inspected -- I was once sent to the back to scrub eyeliner off of my face because it violated the "natural" look they strove for.

Appearance approved, I was stationed at front of the store for hours on end, with nothing to do but spout pithy, store-fed "taglines." I once complained to a co-worker about how I was always assigned the entrance position, where I stood shivering in my barely-there outfit. She told me I should take it as a compliment.

"You remember that picture they took of you your first day?" she asked me. I did. I had been told it was for record keeping. "They send that picture to the district manager. You have to be approved to stand at the entrance."

I don't say this to brag about my appearance. I wasn't hired because I am any great beauty, but because I fit within the Abercrombie boundaries of what is acceptable: white, blond, tall, skinny. The company needs people like me working at its stores to attract people like me to shop at them -- and to keep everyone else out.

Reflecting on it now, it is a frighteningly Donald Trump-esque business model. Both Trump and Abercrombie harken back to a mythical, by-gone era of American greatness, where the wealthy, healthy and white were celebrated, and everyone else was largely invisible. In Trump's case, this is accomplished by building walls. In Abercrombie's, it's done by constructing strict "look" policies that only a select few can meet.

Samantha Elauf learned that the hard way, when Abercrombie denied her a job because she wears a hijab. So did thousands of Latino, Black and Asian employees who Abercrombie paid out in 2005 for denying them front-of-house positions. And so did I, when I learned that my membership to this privileged, front-of-house class was based on my willingness to act simply as decoration.

I wish I could say that Abercrombie's declining sales were evidence of America's rejection of this mentality. I wish it signified a greater acceptance of diversity, and an acknowledgement of women's virtues other than beauty. But as Donald Trump has taught us so well, it's not acceptance or acknowledgement that talks -- it's money.

Hopefully in this case, plunging profits can shut Abercrombie up.

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Why This Former Abercrombie Employee Is Thrilled the Company Is Tanking

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Thispost originally appeared on Revelist. Abercrombie -- the brand that haunted your middle school days and made you think that wearing two polos stacked on top of each other would suddenly make you popular -- is dying. And I am here to sing its eulogy from the treetops.

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May 28 (Reuters) - Teen apparel retailer Abercrombie & Fitch Co reported a 14 percent fall in quarterly sales due to weak demand, a strong dollar, and higher discounts.

The company's net loss widened to $63.2 million, or 91 cents per share, in the first quarter ended May 2, from $23.7 million, or 32 cents per share, a year earlier.

Net sales fell to $709.4 million from $822.4 million, while comparable sales fell 8 percent. (Reporting by Ramkumar Iyer in Bengaluru; Editing by Joyjeet Das)

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Abercrombie Sales Just Keep Spiraling Downward

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May 28 (Reuters) - Teen apparel retailer Abercrombie & Fitch Co reported a 14 percent fall in quarterly sales due to weak demand, a strong dollar, and higher discounts. The company's net loss widened to $63.2 million, or 91 cents per share, in the first quarter ended May 2, from $23.7 million, or 32 cents per share, a year earlier.

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ABC News' Rebecca Jarvis reports:

The viral backlash against Abercrombie & Fitch for refusing to offer larger sizes for their customers, and for controversial remarks made by their CEO, Mike Jeffries, isn't going away.

"Not only will I not let my kids shop at Abercrombie again, I will not let them wear what they already have in their closets," said one mom, reading from a letter in an online video.

The public outcry is still escalating a month after ABC News first reported the retailer doesn't carry women's sizes above a large, and that the CEO only wants cool kids in his clothes, once telling Salon magazine, "A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."

But the PR nightmare is just the tip of the iceberg for Abercrombie's problems. The trendy retailer announced Friday that its U.S. sales fell 17 percent in the first quarter, declines that occurred before the controversy erupted.

RELATED: Abercrombie & Fitch Unapologetic for Catering to Thin Clientele

However, the company finally responded last week to protestors, meeting with the organizers of a Chicago rally.

"These kids are serious," Darryl Roberts, the protest's organizer, told ABC News. "They have had enough."

"I'm cautiously optimistic, but I think if we continue an open dialogue with Abercrombie & Fitch, we can really make some real change to their business and business across the world," added Benjamin O'Keefe, 18, creator of an Abercrombie & Fitch petition on Change.org that garnered more than 73,000 signatures.

O'Keefe's petition caught the retailer's attention, who agreed to sit down with him on May 21 to discuss how Abercrombie can improve upon its lack of diversity in their clothing and branding.

Shortly after the meeting's conclusion, an Abercrombie spokesman released the following statement apologizing for past comments: "We look forward to continuing this dialogue and taking concrete steps to demonstrate our commitment to anti-bullying in addition to our ongoing support of diversity and inclusion. We want to reiterate that we sincerely regret and apologize for any offense caused by comments we have made in the past which are contrary to these values."

RELATED: Abercrombie & Fitch Faces Protests, Backlash For Not Selling Larger Sizes

But for some, like blogger Jes Baker, creator of a faux Abercrombie & Fitch campaign, it's too little too late.

"The only thing you've done through your comments is reinforce the unoriginal concept that fat women are social failures, valueless, and undesirable," Baker writes on her blog, The Militant Baker. "Your apology doesn't change this."

Sources at Abercrombie & Fitch tell ABC News' Rebecca Jarvis the company expects to make an announcement next week with more details on how they will support anti-bullying.

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Abercrombie Apologizes: Retailer Meets with Teens to Address Controversy

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ABC News' Rebecca Jarvis reports: The viral backlash against Abercrombie & Fitch for refusing to offer larger sizes for their customers, and for controversial remarks made by their CEO, Mike Jeffries, isn't going away.

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Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries: Stop telling teens they aren't beautiful; make clothes for teens of all sizes!

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After CEO Michael Jeffries' controversial comments about how Abercrombie & Fitch only "goes after the cool kids" resurfaced earlier this month, 18-year-old activist Benjamin O'Keefe decided to do something about it.

Benjamin wrote a blog for The Huffington Post and created a Change.org petition calling for a boycott of the company until Jeffries gave a formal apology. Not only has the petition collected over 74,000 signatures, but it also caught the attention of Abercrombie & Fitch executives.

Today, the teen appeared on HuffPost Live to chat about his meeting with Abercrombie & Fitch senior staff members and what consumers can expect from the company in the future.

"After we met with them, they promised us they'd be taking concrete steps to making changes in their company to become more inclusive and increase diversity," Benjamin explained. "By the end of next week, they will be announcing some of those changes and some of those concrete steps in their company."
Watch the full interview on HuffPost Live in the video above.
While Benjamin wasn't thrilled with Jeffries' first apology, he explained why he was more content after the company released their second statement.

"An apology says 'I'm sorry' and says that we did something wrong, and in his initial statement he didn't do that," Benjamin said. "It wasn't until after we met with Abercrombie and truly discussed our stories that they realized this is a farther reaching issue than they could've imagined. I think when they issued their second apology, it was heartfelt."

The teen also said that his viral Change.org petition -- and how it resulted in actual changes to come from Abercrombie -- is representative of all those who challenged what they thought was wrong and made sure their voices were heard.

"It's become so evident when people come together behind something they believe in, change really can come," he said.
What do you think of Abercrombie & Fitch and their "cool kids" comments? Tell us in the comments or tweet at @HuffPostTeen.

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benjamin o'keefe challenges abercrombie & fitch

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Meet The Teen Who Took On Abercrombie (VIDEO)

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After CEO Michael Jeffries' controversial comments about how Abercrombie & Fitch only "goes after the cool kids" resurfaced earlier this month, 18-year-old activist Benjamin O'Keefe decided to do something about it. Benjamin wrote a blog for The Huffington Post and created a Change.org petition calling for a boycott of the company until Jeffries gave a formal apology.

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Abercrombie & Fitch Gets a Brand Readjustment #FitchTheHomeless

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Together, we can remake the A&F brand. #FitchTheHomeless Follow on Twitter: @GregKarber Shot by James DeLorean (@JamesDeLorean) and Daniel Lisi (@LisiDaniel)

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I was a guest on a body-positive podcast when the lightbulb went off: Not everyone in this work identifies as feminist.

There I was, sitting on my couch, my iPhone earbuds in, staring at the empty Skype screen in front of me, while the host asked me the most basic questions about what liberation from patriarchy looks like in practice. I can't raise one eyebrow (hell, I can't even wink). But if I had the skill, one eyebrow would have been raised in suspicion.

Maybe I had been naive before. Or maybe because my forays into both social justice and body acceptance had happened simultaneously, there was obvious overlap for me. But it hadn't occurred to me that it was possible to talk about body oppression without an explicitly intersectional feminist lens.

The truth is: You can't.

You can't have body positivity without feminism.

But the longer I'm involved with this work, the more I notice how frequently people (and, unsurprisingly, usually the most privileged folks) support the former without the latter - and how fucking harmful that is.

And yet, I (and others, especially more marginalized people) receive a lot of pushback from quote-unquote #bopo babes when I engage with them on this. Whether they explicitly believe that feminism and body acceptance are unrelated or more implicitly just don't infuse their body positivity with justice-oriented values, these folks feel offended, attacked, bullied, or called out when they're approached about this misalignment.

So I want to be clear: If you're doing body-positive work, you're borrowing directly from feminism. And if you're not owning that and practicing its inherent values, your body positivity is useless.

Here are three reasons why.

1. Viewing Bodies Socioculturally Is Rooted in Feminist Theory

I'm honestly confused about folks who can talk all day about tools of patriarchy - like narrow beauty standards and advertising media - without ever actually using the word patriarchy.

There's a clear understanding within the #bopo realm that women are culturally conditioned to hate our bodies and that our approximation to beauty is what defines our social value. The conversation about how we're not born with self-hatred, but taught it through propaganda, is there.

But, like, where do you think those ideas came from?

The concept that our bodies are imbued with socially constructed meaning - and that we need to unpack that to get at the core of the problem - isn't new. It's been the foundation of various feminist theory for, like, ever.

The idea of body acceptance is rooted in a structural evaluation of the world. And every watered down thing you say about women and bodies comes from a much more complex history of feminist analysis.

Need a place to start? Try Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.

2. Body-Based Oppression Exists On Intersecting Axes

Listen: Body-based oppression is a social justice issue. More to the point: It's an intersectional issue. It's not something that only affects women (or "men, too!"); it's not even something that only affects people on the axis of a/gender. Body-based oppression is an inherent part of all marginalization.

Racial profiling is body-based oppression. Discrimination for disability is body-based oppression. Lack of access to healthcare, nutritious food, and shelter is body-based oppression. Fetishization of queer women is body-based oppression. The murder of trans women is body-based oppression. Fat stigma is body-based oppression.

Intersectionality - a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, and a concept discussed previously by many Black feminists, including Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins - is the idea that we are all constellations, not single stars. I am not only a woman or only queer or only white or only cisgender. I am all of those things at once. And all of those identities together affect my experience within my body - and society's experience of it.

We can't leave this shit out.

Body positivity has to be feminist because it has to be intersectional.

And if you're ready to learn more about that (please! please be ready!), start perusing The Body Is Not an Apology.
3. Fat Acceptance Is Being Diluted

Let's be clear: Body positivity was stolen from fat acceptance. No, this isn't up for debate.

The fat acceptance movement - which arguably unofficially began in 1967 when 500 New Yorkers took to Central Park to protest anti-fat bias, but had stirrings leading up to that point - is a sociopolitical movement to end suffering under and seek liberation from the institution of power known as the thin ideal.

This means pushing for fairer representation of fat people in media. It means demanding that the fashion industry take fat bodies into consideration. It means pressuring the medical industrial complex to stop exploiting the "obesity crisis." It means asking for research studies with less inherent bias.

It means commanding the recognition of fat people's full humanity by the public at large.

It's radical af.

Body positivity, on the other hand - and particularly the way it shows up in mainstream culture - is a movement for folks to make peace with their bodies, without a specific target audience. It's much broader - and way less revolutionary.

It's also a thief. It takes the radical, complex aims of deconstructing the thin ideal for fat acceptance and dilutes it into a more general goal of women's empowerment. And then it profits off of the work that more marginalized people did.

Keep you eye out for the upcoming documentary Fattitude to learn more.

Feminism was at the heart of this thing. And we need to put it back.

Body acceptance is a beautiful - and wildly important - thing. I need it. You need it. Your mom's brother's neighbor's kid's best friend's teacher needs it. But it's only ever going to do us any good if we keep it feminist, intersectional, and radical. Because the apolitical, watered down, scared-of-the-F-word body positivity that's so popular right now might make (some of) us feel affirmed, but it's not a revolt.

And we need a revolt.

This incredible post came from the last "Beauty School"Newsletter that popped into my inbox and my jaw dropped as I read it. Yep, literal jaw droppage.

Because 1.) IT'S FROM A NEWSLETTER (wtf no one else writes original content this well for a newsletter) and 2.) Everything that's needed to be said ever. All of this to say: I STRONGLY SUGGESTSUBSCRIBING TO HER NEWSLETTER ASAP.

Melissa Fabello is (one of my favorite people and) a body acceptance activist, sexuality scholar, and patriarchy smasher living in Philadelphia. You can find her in various corners of the Internet, usually trying to cause trouble, or taking a break from the revolution to cuddle with her two cats.

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I was a guest on a body-positive podcast when the lightbulb went off: Not everyone in this work identifies as feminist. There I was, sitting on my couch, my iPhone earbuds in, staring at the empty Skype screen in front of me, while the host asked me the most basic questions about what liberation from patriarchy looks like in practice.

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On the Internet, words never die. Abercrombie & Fitch's CEO Mike Jeffries learned that the hard way in recent weeks as the company's brand has been battered online and on television for comments he made seven years ago.

A Business Insider story from May 3, which had no apparent news peg, noted that Abercrombie & Fitch does not sell pants for women larger than a size 10. The story included quotes from a retail analyst who said the company only wants "thin and beautiful people" shopping in its store and pointed readers to remarks made by Jeffries in a Salon article from 2006. In it, he reportedly said A&F markets to "the cool kids" ("A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes]. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely") and implied that thin young people are his target market ("those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny").

In response, A&F and its CEO's remarks have been pilloried across the Internet. Ellen DeGeneres criticized the company on her show earlier this week. A plus-sized blogger had photos taken of herself that were reflective of Abercrombie's suggestive ads, and they've gone viral. A producer made a video of himself giving Abercrombie & Fitch clothing to a homeless man that has been viewed 7 million times and inspired its own hashtag, #Fitchthehomeless. The company's Facebook page has been flooded with criticism and snarky comments.

And now, the company is finally responding to its critics. On May 15, Jeffries wrote on the company's Facebook page that while he believed the quote had been taken out of context, "I sincerely regret that my choice of words was interpreted in a manner that has caused offense." Then on Tuesday evening, A&F released a statement saying it had met with the president & CEO of the National Eating Disorder Association and members of America the Beautiful Teen Empowerment Series. "We look forward to continuing this dialogue and taking concrete steps to demonstrate our commitment to anti-bullying in addition to our ongoing support of diversity and inclusion," the statement read. "We want to reiterate that we sincerely regret and apologize for any offense caused by comments we have made in the past which are contrary to these values."

What's surprising about all this isn't that Abercrombie & Fitch wants thin, cool teens wearing its clothes. The brand is arguably more blatantly in-your-face about sex and body image than any other brand marketed to teenagers in the history of retail. Its drawn criticism or snark for everything from its racy catalogs to its extremely detailed fashion standards for its employees. And while Jeffries may have been the only one who actually admitted it-in language that was absolutely insensitive and inappropriate for a CEO-A&F is far from the only fashion brand to limit sizes.

What is surprising is that the company took 12 days (an eternity in the world of social media) to publicly respond to the viral backlash and nearly three weeks to meet with critics. The best thing for Jeffries to do would have been to speak up the day the story was posted, apologizing immediately for any offense the comments may have caused. It's unlikely this would have stopped the criticism, but it could have slowed the story down enough to allow the company to announce some corrective steps before things got out of hand.

The fact that the comments were made seven years ago or that they may have been taken out of context will not make a bona fide Internet sensation go away. If anything, it lessens the impact any corrective actions might have, as they become transparent responses to a PR problem rather than an immediately sincere effort to respond to customers and critics.

And once a brand becomes a viral sensation, it takes on a life of its own. On Wednesday, the company was featured on BuzzFeed in a story that raises concerning questions about the company's governance. It reported that Jeffries' long-time partner, Matthew Smith, has an involved role at the company, quoting anonymous sources who say he polices "Workstation Standards," sits in on company meetings, and receives access to non-public reports. (An Abercrombie & Fitch spokesperson would only say that Matthew Smith is not an associate or a paid consultant.)

The reporter, who covers the specialty retail industry, may very well have written the story even if there hadn't been controversy surrounding the brand. But I doubt I'm going out on a limb to guess that bad press, poorly handled, begets more bad press.
Jena McGregor is a columnist for On Leadership. Read also: Judge considers injunction after ruling Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister unfriendly to disabled Retail trade group fights back amid growing pressure on US retailers to sign global pact Like On Leadership? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Abercrombie & Fitch's big, bad brand mistake

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On the Internet, words never die. Abercrombie & Fitch's CEO Mike Jeffries learned that the hard way in recent weeks as the company's brand has been battered online and on television for comments he made seven years ago.

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Abercrombie & Fitch ( A&F) is an American lifestyle retailer that focuses on casual wear. Its headquarters are in New Albany, Ohio. The company operates three offshoot brands: Abercrombie Kids, Hollister Co., and Gilly Hicks. As of February 2020, the company operated 854 stores across all its brands.

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It was the late 1990s and frosted tips were still fashionable when erstwhile boy band LFO declared that they " like girls that wear Abercrombie & Fitch." The clothing brand has a well-established history marketing itself as the favourite of young, nubile and attractive people. And in the fashion world, it's hardly the only one.

But now the retailer's CEO Mike Jeffries is attracting criticism for accusations that he does not want unattractive or fat people wearing his company's clothing.

In an interview with Business Insider last Friday, an industry analyst pointed out that while Abercrombie & Fitch sells XL and XXL sizes for men, it does not offer anything beyond a large size for women. While partly this is simply explained as vanity sizing, it reflects a larger marketing message from the retailer.

"He doesn't want larger people shopping in his store, he wants thin and beautiful people," Robin Lewis, analyst and co-author of The New Rules of Retail said in the interview . "He doesn't want his core customers to see people who aren't as hot as them wearing his clothing. People who wear his clothing should feel like they're one of the 'cool kids.'"

The article also cited a 2006 interview that Mr. Jeffries did with Salon.com, in which he said that his business is marketing to "the cool kids," and that the brand is purposefully "exclusionary."

"That's why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don't market to anyone other than that," he said at the time. The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.

While Mr. Jeffries' statements are nothing new, the analyst's comments have generated a great deal of attention online and on social media this week - and in response to his embrace of the "exclusionary," many on the Internet swiftly stooped to his level.

A popular thread on Reddit , posted on Wednesday, was entitled, "I present to you Mike Jeffries, CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch. Too ugly to work at his own stores." The thread attracted more than 3,000 comments as users insulted the 68-year-old CEO's appearance, and shared the most unflattering photos they could find. One user claiming to be a former employee also wrote claims about practices in the stores and recruiting policies that relied on appearance. It was not the only thread on the site set up to insult Mr. Jeffries.

The allegations of narrow beauty ideals at Abercrombie are certainly nothing new. A woman with a prosthetic arm sued Abercrombie in 2009, claiming that as an employee she was forced to work in the stock room because she did not fit its "look policy." In 2004, it reached a $40-million settlement in a class-action lawsuit in which Hispanic, black and Asian employees claimed they were also forced to work in the back of the store. (In addition to payment, Abercrombie was required to bring in diversity recruiters and to make its catalogues and advertisements more diverse as well.) In 2002, the company was taken to task for selling thong underwear in kids' sizes that were silkscreened with phrases such as "wink wink" and "eye candy." In 2001, it raised critics' ire with a summer catalogue featuring very young models partly undressed and in sexually suggestive poses.

The criticism over Abercrombie's position shows how a story can find new life in a social media age. There is nothing materially new about the issues many people have with the retailer's beauty standards, but all it takes is a comment from an analyst to stir up a debate again and drive Tumblr users to their keyboards .

Follow on Twitter:

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mike jeffries;abercrombie & fitch company;

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Fat or ugly? Abercrombie & Fitch doesn't want you

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It was the late 1990s and frosted tips were still fashionable when erstwhile boy band LFO declared that they " like girls that wear Abercrombie & Fitch." The clothing brand has a well-established history marketing itself as the favourite of young, nubile and attractive people. And in the fashion world, it's hardly the only one.

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BBC_Exploring the superpower of the Internet

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NEW TECHNOLOGIES vocabulary FINAL + stressed syllables