WIKILEAKS                    

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Context: A U.K. court issued a formal order to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the U.S. to face trial over the publication of secret files relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

What is WikiLeaks?

• WikiLeaks was set up in 2006 as a platform for anonymous whistleblowers wanting to share top-secret information and data.
• Founded by Assange, it divided opinion around the world - many, on one side, argued WikiLeaks provided ground-breaking investigative journalism, while the other said it posed a risk to national security.

What sort of things has WikiLeaks released?

• The website has released numerous troves of documents, known as data or information dumps, in its 15 years of being active.
• Some of the most famous are 400,000 secret military reports relating to the war in Iraq, and a further 90,000 on Afghanistan.
• In 2010, the platform released the now infamous "Collateral Murder" video, which shows soldiers in a US Apache helicopter killing a dozen people on the ground in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists.

What happened to Assange?

• Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant for Assange in 2010 over charges of rape and sexual assault.
• He was later held in the UK, where he was living at the time, to await the result of an extradition request to face the charges in Sweden.
• Two years later, Assange skipped bail and sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he would spend the next seven years.
• US had launched an investigation into the publishing of the documents relating to Iraq and Afghanistan and later sought to press charges and extradite Assange from the UK.
• Such charges included 17 for espionage and one for computer misuse "by cracking a password".
• Poor relations between Assange and Ecuador had resulted in Assange being evicted.

What happened in the extradition case?

• K. court upheld the majority of the prosecution's arguments to extradite Assange, which included saying he could not rely on protections of free speech and freedom of the press.
• This was because several of his actions had been outside the remit of a journalist, and would have violated the Official Secrets Act if prosecuted in the UK.
• US wins appeal for paving the way for Assange to be extradited to the US.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/judge-sends-julian-assange-extradition-decision-to-uk-government/article65338223.ece