ASSANGE SUPPORTERS GATHER NEAR UK PARLIAMENT FOR WIKILEAKS FOUNDER’S BIRTHDAY

Sat 03 July 2021:

Dozens of supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gathered at London’s Parliament Square on Saturday for a picnic marking Assange’s birthday.

The WikiLeaks founder is spending his fiftieth birthday in a UK prison, just as the UK court is considering the US request for Assange’s extradition.

The participants in the picnic tried to maintain a safe distance from each other to avoid spreading the coronavirus. They used the lawn to lay out posters asking not to extradite Assange to the United States and chanted slogans.

The activists said they wanted to send their best wishes to Assange and draw the parliament’s attention to the problem.

On January 4, the UK court declined the US request for extradition, but the United States appealed that ruling. Assange’s legal team says the hearings may take years.

The US Justice Department charged Assange with espionage and computer intrusions over WikiLeaks’ publishing thousands of classified documents. If extradited and convicted in the US, Assange could face decades in prison.

Interesting Facts About Julian Assange

Julian studied mathematics, physics and programming at Central Queensland University in 1994 and the University of Melbourne between 2003–2006, yet not completing his degree.
Assange did not like and objected to other students working on computer projects for the military.
In 1987, Julian began hacking under the name Mendax, which translates into “nobly untruthful”.
He formed the International Subversives, an ethical hacking group along with two others, known as Trax and Prime Suspect (code names).
He and his group hacked into the Pentagon, the U.S. Navy and other U.S. Department of Defense facilities; government organizations such as NASA, MILNET and Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission; private companies suchlike Citibank, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Panasonic and Xerox; and educational institutions like the Australian National University, La Trobe University and Stanford University’s Stanford Research Institute.
He also co-wrote ‘Underground: Tales of Hacking‘, a book about hacking, around this time.
He was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications firm, in September 1991 and was summoned to court on such offence.
In 1993, Julian Assange gave technical advice to the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit and assisted with prosecutions.
In the same year, he was involved in starting Suburbia Public Access Network, one of the first public free internet systems in Australia providing web, shell, irc, email and more services to non-profit groups and individuals.
He was charged with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes in 1994, to which he pleaded guilty to 25 charges in December 1996 and six of them were dropped. Comically so, Julian had even hacked computers to monitor the Australian Federal Police investigation into his hacking.
1996 saw Julian Assange run ‘Best of Security‘, a website giving advice on computer security that had 5,000 subscribers.
He contributed research to ‘Suelette Dreyfus’s Underground‘, a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives, in 1997.
In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology, with the aim of developing “network intrusion detection technologies”.
In 1999, he registered the domain leaks.org, yet did nothing with it. Today it’s owned by Andreas Fink, CEO and owner of Backbone ehf, an Internet Backbone provider at Iceland.
In 2000, he programmed Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines and now is licensed in the public domain, hosted as part of the Debian project.
The controversial yet “free and unrestrained press” publication, WikiLeaks, officially launched in 2007 and it was run out of Sweden at the time because of the country’s strong laws protecting a person’s anonymity.
He was continuously on the move, with periods in Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, France and Germany(2007–2008); Austria, Spain, Malaysia, and Denmark(2009); and Iceland, the United States, Norway, Australia, Belgium, Sweden and the United Kingdom(2010).
For his efforts, this internet activist earned the Reader’s Choice for Time magazine “Person of the Year” title in 2010.
On 26th September 2012, Julian delivered a speech, via satellite to a full conference room at the United Nations, asking the U.S. government to end its actions against him and his website.
Julian Assange has entertained some famous people while at the embassy, to raise money for WikiLeaks.
His book, “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet,” was released in November 2012.
In 2016, Assange was once again in the limelight after Wikileaks publishers thousands of emails from the US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee, which is believed to have cost her the election.