Julian Assange has walked out of a U.S. court in the Northern Mariana Islands a free man, putting an end to his dozen years of incarceration, first in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, hiding from justice, then in a British prison, awaiting an extradition to America that will never come. Assange is now headed home to Australia, his legal troubles ended.
For more than a decade, the Australian hacktivist, who’s either a “free speech champion” or a dangerous “information terrorist” depending on your viewpoint, has played a prominent role in American domestic politics. In 2016, his “privacy” organization WikiLeaks placed Democratic National Committee emails online, to the detriment of Hillary Clinton’s presidential run with their unflattering inside information. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russian military intelligence hacked those DNC emails then employed WikiLeaks as a conduit to show them to the public.
