On Nov. 28, 2010, the first of Manning's U.S. Diplomatic Cables were released. They helped spark a revolt in Tunisia that spread into the so-called Arab Spring, revealed Saudi intentions towards Iran and exposed spying on the UN secretary general and other diplomats.
Over the next few years WikiLeaks revealed embarrassing documents on Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the Sony Corporation, and secret details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
WikiLeaks in 2011 pioneered an anonymous online "drop box" for whistleblowers to deposit documents without their identities being known, even to WikiLeaks. The organization carefully authenticates every document it receives and has a perfect record of accuracy. Major news organizations like The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and CNN have copied WikiLeaks in creating their own anonymous drop boxes.
In 2016, WikiLeaks published leaked emails from the Democratic National Convention and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that exposed DNC efforts to derail the primary candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Hillary Clinton's role in the destruction of Libya and a pay-to-play scheme at the Clinton Foundation.
During the Trump administration, WikiLeaks published in March 2017 secret CIA documents that exposed "the entire hacking capacity of the CIA," which the agency had lost control of. WikiLeaks avoided "the distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons." But the documents it published revealed how the agency can remotely gain control of a citizen's television set and showed that the CIA can plant doctored fingerprints into a cyber-attack to falsely blame an adversary. The Vault 7 release led then CIA Director Mike Pompeo to label WikiLeaks a "non-state hostile intelligence service."
Over the past decade, WikiLeaks publications have spurred countless news reports and academic papers around the world, and have been used in numerous court cases promoting human rights.
Assange's Arrest
A month after the Afghan War Diaries were published, two women went to the police in Sweden to ask if Assange could be tested for sexually transmitted disease after having unprotected relations with both of them. One of the women later texted that she had been "railroaded" by police into making a formal complaint about rape and refused to sign her statement. The next day Sweden's chief prosecutor dismissed the allegations. She said: "I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape."
After Swedish authorities told him he was free to go, Assange returned to London when an extradition request was issued by a prosecutor, not a judge, and he was arrested in December 2010. This came after Swedish police had altered and signed the statement of one of the women who had refused to sign, in a way that permitted the case to be re-opened, according to a UN special rapporteur's investigation. Nils Melzer, the rapporteur on torture,said:
"I speak fluent Swedish and was thus able to read all of the original documents. I could hardly believe my eyes: According to the testimony of the woman in question, a rape had never even taken place at all. And not only that: The woman's testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape. I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages.
"While still in the police station, she wrote a text message to a friend saying that she didn't want to incriminate Assange, that she just wanted him to take an HIV test, but the police were apparently interested in  «getting their hands on him. » The police wrote down her statement and immediately informed public prosecutors. ... two hours later, a headline appeared on the front page of Expressen, a Swedish tabloid, saying that Julian Assange was suspected of having committed two rapes."
After he exhausted his appeals in British courts to fight extradition to Sweden, Assange sought and received political asylum by the government of Ecuador in its London embassy on June 19, 2012. Assange and his lawyers said at the time they feared onward extradition from Sweden to the U.S. to face charges for publishing classified material.
The former foreign minister of Ecuador on why his country gave Assange asylum:
Assange continued running WikiLeaks from inside the embassy. Despite needing medical care, British authorities said he would be arrested if he left the embassy and re-entered British territory. In February 2016 a UN panel ruled that Assange was a being "arbitrarily detained" in the embassy.
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