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Julian Assange was arrested in London this morning, emerging after more than six and half years from the Ecuadorian Embassy where he had been granted asylum in August 2012. Originally welcomed by leftist Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, Assange’s status has been in negotiation for almost a year by centrist President Lenin Moreno who took office in 2017. Moreno had cut off Assange’s internet connection in the embassy in March 2018, making communication with the outside world difficult. Assange founded Wikileaks, a public archive of leaked government documents, in 2006 and served as its editor for over a decade. In this capacity, Wikileaks has published war logs for both the Iraq and Afghan wars, U.S. State Department diplomatic cables and emails from the Democratic National Committee. The now-public documents have broken numerous new stories, from war crimes in Iraq to corruption at the DNC. While its defenders point to its record of accuracy and use of widely-accepted journalistic norms for obtaining classified documents, Wikileaks’ detractors consider it, in the words of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “a non-state hostile intelligence service.”
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