Breaking News: Julian Assange was just expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrested by British police - News Paper

Will the WikiLeaks founder be extradited to the United States?

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London on Thursday after being expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy — and was arrested by British police.

Assange has had an outstanding arrest warrant in the United Kingdom for years, because, back in 2012, he skipped out on bail to avoid extradition related to sexual assault allegations against him in Sweden.

He took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy, where he has now been holed up for nearly seven years. But his relations with the Ecuadorian government soured after a new president took power, leading to his ultimate arrest at the embassy.

Swedish prosecutors have since dropped the Assange investigation. So the real question is whether Assange will be extradited to face charges in the United States, which have reportedly been filed by federal prosecutors under seal.

Assange has dogged the United States government with a series of leaks over the past decade — such as war documents and State Department cables provided by Chelsea Manning, and CIA hacking material.

Infamously, in 2016, Assange posted emails that had allegedly been hacked from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted twelve Russian intelligence officers with carrying out this hack and leak operation, but he did not file charges against Assange.

So it’s not clear what the reported sealed charges against Assange in the United States are in fact about — Mueller could have referred the Assange investigation elsewhere, or they could relate to an entirely separate matter. But depending on the specifics, charges against the WikiLeaks founder could well pose freedom of speech concerns.

Who is Julian Assange?

Assange is an Australian “hacktivist” who founded WikiLeaks in 2006, with the stated goal of publishing information the powerful were trying to keep secret. The group had its greatest successes in obtaining and posting US military, national security, and foreign policy documents, and Assange was a harsh critic of what he deemed the US’s imperialist ambitions.

Starting in 2010, WikiLeaks published a video of an airstrike in Iraq that killed civilians, military documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and State Department cables in which diplomats gave candid assessments of foreign governments — all provided by US Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning. The unprecedented leaks gained enormous attention and made Assange a sort of celebrity — and a target, as top US officials like Attorney General Eric Holder publicly mused about how they could charge him.

So in June 2012, Assange, a citizen of Australia who had lived abroad for several years, showed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and asked for political asylum. His imminent danger was extradition to Sweden, where authorities were investigating a rape allegation against him. But Assange’s pitch was that he truly needed asylum from the United States, because of WikiLeaks’ work. The Ecuadorian government granted his request, and he’s been holed up inside the embassy ever since — for nearly seven years now.

In that time, WikiLeaks has continued to post new material — and grown more controversial. Assange roiled the 2016 presidential campaign by posting hacked emails from, first, the Democratic National Committee and then Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. (Mueller has since charged several Russian intelligence officers with carrying out these hacks.)

Was Assange simply bringing more transparency by publishing powerful people’s communications? Was he effectively just helping out the Russians and Donald Trump? Was he engaged in a project to weaken the US politically? Perhaps it was all of the above. (“We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” Assange wrote privately in late 2015, according to messages obtained by the Intercept. Hillary Clinton, he continued, was “a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.”)

But Assange’s leaks didn’t stop once Trump was elected. In early 2017, WikiLeaks posted a new set of material about the CIA’s hacking capabilities, in a leak referred to as “Vault 7.” The New York Times wrote that this “appeared to be the largest leak of CIA documents in history,” and a former CIA software engineer, Joshua Schulte, has been charged in connection with it.

That year, however, Assange’s position in the Ecuadorian embassy began to become tenuous, as a new and more centrist president, Lenín Moreno, took power in the country. Moreno has said that Assange has “repeatedly violated” the conditions of his asylum. And now, they’ve kicked him out, leading to his arrest by British police.

What are the sealed US charges against Assange about?

We don’t know. And it’s really important.

The US government has already charged people whom they’ve accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, like Manning and Schulte. But charging Assange or WikiLeaks solely for publishing such information is a more troubling thing to do, due to its implications for freedom of the press.

“Never in the history of this country has a publisher been prosecuted for presenting truthful information to the public,” the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ben Wizner told CNN in 2017. “Any prosecution of WikiLeaks for publishing government secrets would set a dangerous precedent that the Trump administration would surely use to target other news organizations.”

Indeed, many journalists often publish important and newsworthy stories based on leaked classified information. This was one reason why the Obama Justice Department opted not to charge Assange — they called it a “New York Times problem,” the Washington Post’s Sari Horwitz reported in 2013.

“If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper,” Horwitz wrote, describing the officials’ conclusions.

However, it is possible that prosecutors are alleging that Assange’s conduct goes beyond simply receiving and publishing of stolen information — the Lawfare team and Marcy Wheeler have each floated various other possibilities. Depending on what exactly the government’s legal theory is, the implications for journalists could be enormous, or relatively minor.

We don’t even know which of the leaks, if any, the charges are about. It’s entirely possible that they pertain to the CIA hacking tool leaks (there’s been a lot of action in the prosecution of accused leaker Joshua Schulte lately), rather than the DNC or Podesta emails. To get a better idea, we’ll have to wait for the charges to be unsealed.

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Breaking News: Julian Assange was just expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrested by British police - News Paper