As a computer activist or journalist, Julian Assange has dedicated much of his adult life to spreading state and business secrets, especially through his digital portal WikiLeaks, which has cost him his health and the enmity of powers. like the United States.
Assange, who has spent more than a decade confined to the UK without having been convicted of any crime, is set to remain in prison after British Justice denied parole on Wednesday for the risk of absconding.
The journalist hoped to be released on parole after a British judge on Monday rejected his extradition to the US, which accuses him of espionage, for his frail mental health.
Afflicted with depression and suicidal tendencies, the 49-year-old Australian will not be able to be with his partner, Stella Moris, and their two young children, born when he was a refugee at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid his extradition to Sweden.
Born in Townsville, Australia on July 3, 1971, his pale-skinned, characteristic white figure remains a mystery even to his collaborators, who describe him as charismatic and intelligent. but unpredictable, more so now with its impaired faculties.
The computer scientist, who is said to have spent hours at work in his heyday without washing, eating or sleeping, had a nomadic childhood in Australia, where his mother, artist Christine Ann, was constantly changing. of residence escaping from the father of his younger brother, from whom he claimed custody.
In his youth, he was prosecuted in this country for computer crimes by accessing, with his group International Subversives, protected systems of official bodies, but he came out on top with a simple fine when assessing the judge that the their activities responded to curiosity and not to criminal purposes.
Still a teenager, he married a girl with whom he had a son in 1989, Daniel Assange, now a software designer, the custody they ended up sharing after separating.
During the trials in London it was indicated that he could have more children, whose identities are unknown.
In the mid-1990s, Assange worked as a free software programmer, in encryption programs for Linux, and collaborated on the book “Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier”, by Suelette Dreyfuss (1997), where he set out his philosophy of not damaging the computer systems accessed.
After studying mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne (although he did not graduate), in 2006 he co-founded WikiLeaks with the mission of exposing government information that he said should be available to citizens.
It came to light when in April 2010 WikiLeaks aired a controversial video in which U.S. soldiers shot at civilians in Iraq in 2007, and later those 250,000 diplomatic cables that embarrassed world leaders.
In recent years he has not hesitated to confront the de facto powers to fulfill his goal of spreading his murky secrets, at the same time as he has denounced a persecution by the US and its allies in Sweden to silence him.
After Ecuador withdrew the asylum granted to him in 2012 to prevent his surrender to the Swedish state in 2019, Assange faced his worst nightmare, being arrested at the request of the United States, which he is charged with 18 counts of espionage and computer intrusion for the revelations of his portal.
The hope of his team and its thousands of followers is that the new US administration of Joe Biden will drop the charges against him, that his lawyers say they are of a political nature and that, if they prosper, they would undermine the journalistic work. all over the world.