A UK judge determined Wednesday that Julian Assange, who created the leaking website Wikileaks in 2006, will be extradited to the United States. The judgement will now be made by UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, and the defence will have until May 18 to submit its arguments.

Wikileaks, according to its official website, “is an international media organisation and related library.” Assange, its publisher, created it in 2006. Wikileaks “specialises in the study and dissemination of enormous datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official files concerning conflict, surveillance, and corruption.”

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Assange and Wikileaks were engaged in well-known leaks such as the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video, the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and the Cablegate breach of US diplomatic cables.

The Cablegate records showed US surveillance against the UN and other international leaders, highlighted disagreements between the US and its allies, and exposed corruption in nations throughout the world as documented by US diplomats, all of which contributed to the Arab Spring to a large extent.

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During the 2016 presidential campaign, Wikileaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, demonstrating that the party’s national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

Wikileaks published internal CIA papers showing tools used by the agency to hack devices such as mobile phones and routers in 2017.

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In a TED Talks interview, he explained the Wikileaks approach, saying, “These are as far as we can tell traditional whistleblowers. And we offer a variety of methods for them to communicate with us. We employ (this) cutting-edge encryption to bounce data across the internet, disguise tracks, and transit it via legal jurisdictions such as Sweden and Belgium to execute those legal protections. We get information in the mail, whether it is encrypted or not. (We) vet it as if it were a real news organisation, format it, disseminate it to the public, and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.”