What does it take to change the world?
A big army?
A cure to a pandemic?
A Revolution?
All of these either take a lot of people, thousands of hours, or massive amounts of space.
But for Julian Assange, all he needs is one room, an internet connection, and the world will listen.
Assange is located here, and more specifically, right here.
And from that location he's posted government secrets, classified documents, and leaked
emails of some of the world's most powerful people.
And in doing so been labeled a hero, a villain, a nihilist, and everything in between.
This is how an Australian programmer sequestered in the Ecuadorian embassy in London became
one of the most influential and notorious people in the world.
Born in 1971 in Townsville, Australia.
Assange has always been on the move.
Living in over 30 homes by the time he was in his mid-teens, Assange along with his mother
and half brother finally settled down in Melbourne.
His introduction to hacking started at 16 when he was given a Commodore 64
which he attached to a modem.
He attended the University of Melbourne where he studied programming, physics and mathematics.
He never graduated but that doesn't mean he didn't get an education.
By 1991, Assange hacked into the Pentagon, US Navy and other branches of the U.S. government.
In 1996, he was caught by the Australian Federal Police and charged for over 30 counts of hacking
and computer related crimes.
He didn't get any jail time but was fined $2,100.
I think the first taste of what would come later was the hacking that he did as a young programmer.
And that really sort of foreshadowed a healthy skepticism of the use and abuse of technology
by governments
That's Vernon Silver.
I'm a reporter at Bloomberg's investigations team.
Assange's youth as a hacker laid the foundation for him to start Wikileaks in 2006.
But what is WikiLeaks?
It's a website that posts unfiltered, usually classified documents.
What separates it from every other media outlet is they have no editorial hierarchy.
With a publication like the NY Times, information comes in, they take that information, package
it, then disseminate it for the public to see.
Wikileaks however, cuts out the middleman.
Wikileaks gathers information most of it given to them anonymously so what they're doing
is really very simple, they get the information in one end from who gives it to them and out
the other with sometimes minimal interference.
Julian Assange is the leader of that, the mastermind, the creator and really because
he thinks of it as a journalistic enterprise, the editor in chief.
But every story starts with a source and Assange has some unconventional sources.
Julian Assange does not hack as far as we know.
He is the recipient of people who are either insiders who give him secret documents or
hacked emails from a foreign power.
That's Eli Lake.
I'm a columnist for Bloomberg.
And there was no source bigger for Assange than Chelsea Manning, who used to be known
as US soldier Bradley Manning.
In 2010, Manning provided Assange and Wikileaks with hundreds of thousands of leaked government documents.
Wikileaks quietly began releasing the documents in February of 2010, then made big headlines
in April by posting what is now known as the Collateral Murder video.
It was a vivid graphic video, it changed the debate on the Iraq war and importantly it
put wikileaks on the map when they put it online and they couldn't be ignored at point.
And those leaks were just the beginning.
They went on to post more than 90,000 leaked documents known as the Afghan War logs, 390,000
documents known as the Iraq war logs, and a quarter of a million private messages between
diplomats, called cables, in what is now known as cablegate.
These leaks were met with very real ethical questions.
The problem with publishing those cables was that a number of confidential sources for
US diplomats who faced real danger when their names were exposed...
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton drove the point home that...
Every country including the United States must be able to have candid conversations
about the people and nations with whom they deal.
Shortly after Cablegate the Swedish Government issued an arrest warrant for Assange on allegations
of rape and molestation.
He claimed the allegations were fabricated to get him extradited to the United States,
a claim the US government denied.
Either way, Assange's next move was….
to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy which really was the beginning of the new chapter
in his life and what we are dealing with now which is him being him stuck in london.
What was supposed to be an office in an embassy is now Assange's self-imposed prison to
this very day.
But that doesn't mean he's slowed down.
Since being trapped in the Embassy, Wikileaks has leaked files about Guantanamo Bay prisoners,
Syrian political figures, and the draft to the Trans Pacific Partnership.
And then came the 2016 US election.
Thousands of leaked emails show Democratic party officials possibly plotting against
Bernie Sanders in his race against Hillary Clinton.
Over the course of 68 days, Wikileaks released 20,000
confidential Democratic National Committee emails.
In terms of the Presidential race, if you look right here, when Assange released the
first batch of emails, Trump actually takes his first lead against Clinton.
I think we've had enough of the Clintons in all fairness.
Once wikileaks started exposing secrets of the Democratic party, Julian Assange became
a hero to many on the right.
Public opinion kind of flip flopped.
Wikileaks!
From the emails we now know Hillary Clinton's campaign manager makes risotto...
and also how the DNC squashed Bernie Sanders' campaign.
One thing we don't know is who gave Assange the stolen emails in the first place.
Many leading democrats say they suspected it was the Russians.
They released an analysis from a private cybersecurity firm that had said it was the Russians.
But Assange claims...
Our source is not the Russian government and it is not state party.
So this is where we stand today.
The public still does not know who provided the emails to WikiLeaks.
Meanwhile, Assange is still running Wikileaks and still leaking documents.
In March 2017, he started publishing documents from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence.
called "Vault 7".
The CIA, the agency charged with finding and keeping our top secrets, can't keep its
own secrets.
As long as Assange has a connection to the world, no government secret will never be
too far from exposure.
Julian Assange is still in the embassy, maybe he'll leave, maybe he won't.
Kind of regardless, his work has been done.
He's changed the way that people think about their governments, about their own secrets,
about their own hackability, and really the world has changed because of him.
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