Julian Assange life and biography

Julian Paul Assange is an Australian journalist, publisher and Internet activist. He is best known as the spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website. Before working with the website, he was a physics and mathematics student as well as a computer programmer. He has lived in several countries and has told reporters he is constantly on the move. He makes irregular public appearances to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative reporting; he has also won three journalism awards for his work with WikiLeaks.

After the hacking trial, Assange lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software. In 1995, Assange wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. Strobe inspired Fyodor to develop the Nmap port scanner.

Assange has said that it is “pretty much true” that he is constantly on the move, and that he is “living in airports these days”. Assange has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and has visited many other places including Vietnam, Sweden, Iceland, Siberia, Iraq, Belgium and the United States.

Assange was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award (New Media), awarded for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya with the investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances.

Wikileaks is an international organization based in Sweden that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of sources.

In April 2010, a video posted on a website called Collateral Murder established Wikileaks as a prime portal for unauthorized, accurate accounts, documents and video from distant battlefields. In July of the same year, Wikileaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 90,000 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.

On 30 November 2010, Interpol placed Assange on its red notice list of wanted persons;concomitantly, a European Arrest Warrant was issued for him. He was wanted for questioning on suspicion of "sex crimes"; it is alleged that while having consensual sex his condom broke and he either did not disclose the breakage to his partner or continued after his partner asked him to stop. He has not been formally charged with any crime. He was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police on 7 December by appointment, after a voluntary meeting with the police.

Awards

Assange was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award (New Media), awarded for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya with the investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances. In accepting the award, he said: "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented. Through the tremendous work of organisations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR, Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world." He also won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award.

Assange was awarded the 2010 Sam Adams Award by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. In September 2010, Assange was voted as number 23 among the "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010" by the British magazine New Statesman. In their November/December issue, Utne Reader magazine named Assange as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World".

On 12 November he was leading in the poll for Time magazine's "Person of the Year, 2010".

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