Julian Assange – NNDB

Julian Assange

AKA Julian Paul Assange

Born: 3-Jul-1971 [1] Birthplace: Townsville, Australia

Gender: Male Religion: Atheist [2] Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Hacker, Journalist

Nationality: Australia Executive summary: Founder of Wikileaks

Computer programmer and secretive hacker Julian Assange is the public spokesman for Wikileaks, an online publisher of classified documents, founded in December 2006. The site's funding is shadowy, its staff unpaid; it claims to be propagated on twenty separate servers worldwide, making it difficult to muzzle. According to Assange, the site's key collaborators know each other only by initials which might or might not represent their true names.

In its first few years, the site's major scoops included an operations manual from the US prison at Guantanamo, emails hacked from Sarah Palin's Yahoo account, interoffice communications from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, secret Scientology texts. Their biggest media splash came in April 2010 with the release of Collateral Murder, a first-person video of American soldiers killing Reuters journalists from a gunship over Baghdad. It was followed over the next few months by several large leaks, coordinated with major newspapers, of American military reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a slow leak of 250,000 classified American embassy cables.

Wikileaks is believed to have received more than a quarter of a million classified embassy cables from a 22-year-old soldier, Bradley Manning, who was casually outed after confiding in ex-hacker Adrian Lamo in May 2010 and is now facing charges in a military prison. In 2010, Wikileaks published a secret American intelligence document assessing the perceived risk the site presents to US national security. Assange has said that the site's occasional technical difficulties are a consequence of on-line attacks launched by US operatives.

Beginning in 2010, Assange battled extradition to Sweden, where he faces charges of rape and sexual assault, charges he claims are "without basis". On 30 May 2012, he lost an appeal before the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, leaving his extradition a near certainty. A few weeks later, on 19 June 2012, Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has remained for more than a year.

[2] Per OkCupid profile.

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Julian Assange - NNDB