Julian Assange
Australian editor, publisher, and activist (born 1971)
Julian Paul Assange ( ə-SAHNZH; né Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, programmer, and publisher who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. He came to international attention in 2010 after WikiLeaks published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning, a United States Army intelligence analyst: footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad showing war crimes committed by the U.S. Army, U.S. military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange has won over two dozen awards for publishing and journalism.
Assange was raised in various places around Australia until his family settled in Melbourne in his middle teens. He became involved in the hacker community and was convicted of hacking in 1996. Following the establishment of WikiLeaks, Assange was its editor when it published the Bank Julius Baer documents, footage of the 2008 Tibetan unrest, and a report on political killings in Kenya with The Sunday Times. Publication of the leaks from Manning started in February 2010.
In November 2010 the Swedish Police Authority wanted to question Assange in an investigation and sought to extradite him from the UK. In June 2012, Assange breached his bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution and fears he might be extradited to the United States. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019.
“Julian Assange” enters the record as australian editor, publisher, and activist (born 1971). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Julian, Assange and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q360. VIAF identifies the subject as 168093721. The Library of Congress control number is n98037452. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 2006, 2010 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Julian Assange” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.