WikiLeaks | The enemy of the deep state 

WikiLeaks’ fortunes have been inextricably tied with the travails of its co-founder Julian Assange

The slow but sure process of extraditing Julian Assange, co-founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks from the U.K. to the U.S. took a firm step on Friday when the British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, gave the go-ahead to the move. WikiLeaks promptly released a statement promising another legal battle to appeal the decision.

Mr. Assange is wanted in the U.S. for criminal charges, including breaking the Espionage Act for WikiLeaks’ actions of leaking thousands of secret U.S. files in 2010. He could face punishment ranging up to 175 years in prison for violations of the Espionage Act. On the same day, the Assange Defense Committee, a U.S.-based coalition of media rights and human rights groups, released a statement through its co-chairs, which include the renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky and former U.S. military analyst and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, that said the decision “was a sad day for western democracy”. It added: “U.S. government argues that its venerated Constitution does not protect journalism the government dislikes and that publishing truthful information in public interest is a subversive, criminal act. This argument is a threat not only to journalism, but to democracy itself.”

These were strong words in favour of a man who has been held in the U.K.’s Belmarsh prison ever since the Ecuador Embassy revoked his asylum and citizenship after he stayed for seven years on its premises in London. Mr. Assange initially underwent imprisonment for bail violations during his stay in the Ecuador Embassy and got a reprieve from a U.K district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in January 2021, when she ruled that he could not be extradited to the U.S. because of concerns about his mental health and the possibility of suicide in a U.S prison with strict incarceration conditions.

U.S. prosecutors later filed an appeal, and the British High Court, this time in December 2021, ruled in favour of the U.S. following the Joe Biden administration’s assurances on the terms of Mr. Assange’s possible incarceration — that it would not hold him at the highest security prison facility (ADX Florence in Colorado, which houses terrorists, drug traffickers, and high-profile criminals) and that if he were convicted, he could serve his sentence in his native Australia if he requested it. Mr. Assange moved the British Supreme Court against the verdict, but on March 14, the Court refused permission to appeal.

Mr. Assange’s travails have mirrored those of the WikiLeaks organisation itself. In February 2022, on WikiLeaks’ website, the submission system for files (by whistleblowers, ‘hacktivists’, etc.) and its email server went completely offline, months after the organisation’s secure chat services had stopped working in October 2021. This was no surprise.

The organisation has been inevitably linked to its co-founder, who still remains a director. Ever since his incarceration, the release of whistleblower documents have only been few and far between and much less in consequence compared to what the organisation managed to achieve between 2010 and 2019.

WikiLeaks’ journey began in 2006 when the website was first established and its domain name registered by Mr. Assange. While initially the website began as a disclosure portal on the lines of the Wikipedia model, with anonymous submissions being put up and edited by volunteers, it soon became a repository of anonymously sourced material. News and classified information could be uploaded on it using the anonymity software Tor, which protects the uploader’s identity from being eavesdropped on any network and even by WikiLeaks itself.