Here’s a quick question, what does Pentagon, US DoD, US Navy, MILNET, NASA, Panasonic, Xerox, Citi Bank, Motorola, and Lockheed Martin have in common? Well, they were all hacked by Juliane Assange.
Source: Flicker
Juliane Assange was born in Australia on July 3, 1971. He was a prodigy who went to hack his way into these behemoths and founded the most well-renowned and notorious ‘Whistle Blower Organization’ called WikiLeaks. He went by the name of Mendax. He was the kind of person that you would expect to see in a movie. In the year 1999, Juliane bought the domain leakrs.org which sat dormant for 7 years until 2006.
Initial Activities
Wikileaks distinguished itself from other organizations by allowing anyone with access to classified documents to post them anonymously, which was unusual at the time. As a result, the organization was exonerated because it did not actively hack into the systems and gather that information.
This also meant that any document or information published by WikiLeaks could be presented in any US court. This was a game changer, and it terrified the wealthy and powerful with dark secrets. The organization began posting its first leaks in 2007, but it failed to gain public attention.
Rise of revolutionary whistleblower
But this was set to change in the year 2010 when the organization decrypted and posted a video titled ‘Collateral Murder,’ which was a low-quality video from the US Apache Attack helicopter from the Baghdad operations.
They showed the helicopter attacking a group of people it referred to as “armed hostiles.” The attack took the lives of 18 people including the journalists. This uncovered the friendly fire upon the journalists and civilians in Baghdad.
Trouble After
This video certainly piqued the interest of many people, including the US government. The government attempted to sever their funding. However, the organization simply switched to Bitcoin.
When Assange was in Sweden in 2010 trying to secure additional funding for the organization after posting the Collateral Murder video, he was charged with sexual assault. Despite pleading innocence, he surrendered to British police. He was released on bail. However, the Högsta domstolen, or Swedish Supreme Court, decided to extradite Juliane.
Where’s Juliane
However, there appeared to be a minor issue. Juliane wasn’t to be found. It wasn’t until he was seen at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London seeking asylum from the government there that he realized he was in trouble. In 2012, the Ecuadorian government decided to grant Assange asylum and asked the British government for safe passage. But that did not happen.
Juliane was now trapped inside the Ecuadorian embassy, which was watched over by American and British officials with arrest warrants, unaware that the worst was yet to come. On March 7, 2017, Juliane released Vault 7, arguably the worst data leak in the CIA and US government’s history.
This harmed the agency’s reputation and resulted in the world’s best hackers being hacked, leaking all operational information, including how they could potentially tap into any mobile phone in the open for all to see. President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump both saw bringing Assange back on their to-do list.
Justice Strikes
As with overstaying at someone’s house, the Ecuadorian government grew tired of Assange by 2018. Particularly after he chastised the president. By March 2019, the Ecuadorian government had welcomed a British official into the embassy in order to arrest Julian Assange. He was put on trial, and the US government added another 17 charges, bringing his sentence to a whopping 170 years in prison. Assange responded by saying,
“I do not wish to surrender myself for extraction for doing journalism that has won many many awards and protected many people.”
Juliane
