After over half a decade behind bars, Julian Assange has walked free. The WikiLeaks founder made a plea deal with the US preventing his extradition. As a result of this arrangement, he’ll admit guilt to one charge, being a conspiracy to obtain and disclose US national defense information. His time served in a UK prison is expected to be taken into account, with his likely sentence being five years and three months, the duration he spent at Belmarsh Prison starting from April 2019.
Assange has been a significant figure in the worlds of journalism, cybersecurity, and crypto. WikiLeaks, under his leadership, published over 700,000 confidential US documents and diplomatic cables in 2010. These publications divulged information about the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, provided by Chelsea Manning, a former military intel analyst.
The site hit a bump when PayPal froze WikiLeaks’ account. Undeterred, it turned to Bitcoin, a new and promising technology. This move drew mainstream attention to the novel digital currency. Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous Bitcoin creator, asked WikiLeaks to avoid stirring up controversy that might derail Bitcoin’s progress. Nevertheless, Assange persisted.
The Trump administration first brought charges against Assange in 2019 when he was hiding out in Ecuador’s embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations – claims which were eventually dropped. UK authorities arrested him from the embassy and he’s been fighting against extradition to the US from inside the Belmarsh Prison ever since. His supporters assert that the charges against him are an infringement on free speech, maintaining that there’s no criminality in publishing information.