What a long, strange trip it's been.

Let's see. Through Wikileaks, Julian publishes a video that pisses off the American government. Goes to Sweden, two women accuse him of rape after having sex with them and they withdraw their consent. He flees to England, seeks refuge at the Ecuadoran embassy who let him in. I think Ecuador doesn't have an extradition treaty with the USA. Ecuador grants him citizenship, apparently considering granting him diplomatic status which would give him immunity from prosecution which would cause so much fun and laughter.

Sweden drops the investigation after not being able to get anywhere in the investigation - including interviewing Assange in the embassy, but I've heard they have the ability to refile the charges. He's a lousy guest to the Ecuadorans: doesn't keep his space clean, continues to publish Wikileaks when he's specifically asked not to, I seem to recall rumors of him attempting to hack Ecuadoran Embassy systems and uses massive amounts of WiFi bandwidth.

Then a big thing happens. Ecuador has a change in government: the one that was friendly towards Assange is out of power, the new one - doing something very familiar to Americans - sets about reversing many of the policies of the previous administration. And they call the London police and ask them if they'd be interested in making a pickup, and kick him out.

Assange is arrested, convicted of evading "Bail Evasion", whatever that is, and is now trying to avoid extradition to the USA. Apparently a scheme is in the works where he could come here, face trial, and if convicted, serve the sentence in an Australian prison.

Frankly, I don't really care. I find him rather bothersome.

To a degree, I like the concept of Wikileaks. I think some of the exposures are good for people. The video that got him into trouble was akin to the Pentagon Papers in that it showed the government was lying to the people about innocents being killed in Iraq. We knew it was happening, the government was lying about it. But Assange does not sanitize information, he just dumps it, regardless of the consequences to people. And that can include private information about people, information, or processes that shouldn't be made public and can endanger lives.

When Edward Snowden released information to reporters, they didn't just dump it out there, they carefully reviewed it so that private information didn't risk lives, while it still showed that the government was spying on the United States and the rest of the world. That's the responsible way to do it.

Assange wants to claim to be a journalist and hide behind First Amendment Freedom of the Press protections, but he doesn't follow Press Practices.

I don't think I would go quite so far as calling him an anarchist, but he is pretty close to being a bomb thrower. Does he deserve prison time? I'm not sure on that call. Those Swedish rape charges sound a little weird to me - the women absolutely have the right to withdraw consent. But he's a public political target, and it wouldn't surprise me if some money exchanged some hands to encourage them to withdraw their consent. I think it deserves investigating.

We shall see how this all plays out. I don't think that this loss of Ecuadoran citizenship will really mean a thing in the short or long term personally.

https://gizmodo.com/ecuador-tells-julian-assange-his-citizenship-has-been-r-1847379150

In his attempt to flee Swedish police questioning, he broke bail, and yesterday he was thrown in the pokey for almost a year for those antics. Yet to be faced is potential extradition to the USA.

So now he will get a taste for what prison is really like.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/01/uk/julian-assange-court-gbr-intl/index.html