The WikiLeaks founder who released secret U.S. diplomatic reports from around the world and disseminated the Hillary Clinton campaign emails is now in police custody.

Julian Assange had been living in Ecuador's embassy in London, England, since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on a rape charge.

He denied the allegation and the case was later dropped.

Ecuador granted Assange asylum but its government later revoked this and invited Scotland Yard officers inside the building.

Assange, 47, is also a wanted man in the United States for receiving databases from former U.S. intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.

It carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.

According to the indictment, which was released today, the database held 90,000 war-related significant activity reports from Afghanistan.

There were also 400,000 of these reports from Iraq, 800 Guantanamo Bay detailed assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables.

The vast majority of this information was released in 2010 and 2011.

Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, has claimed that extraditing Assange is an attack on journalistic freedom.

"This precedent means that any journalist can be extradited for prosecution in the United States for having published truthful information about the United States," she told reporters after his first court appearance.

https://twitter.com/cnni/status/1116358933831090176

Former Guardian editor offered thoughts on Assange

A veteran journalist who worked closely with Assange—and had to deal with his prickly personality—is Alan Rusbridger, who was editor-in-chief of the Guardian from 1995 to 2015.

The Guardian was one of a small number of media outlets with which Assange shared his initial huge dump of secret U.S. government documents.

In his 2018 book, Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, Rusbridger offers a nuanced view of the WikiLeaks founder, calling him "a new breed of player in the digital age".

"The old rules were not his rules," Rusbridger writes. "He belonged nowhere and had no identifiable political creed. He was a shape-shifter, a libertarian anarchist, a stateless provocateur—and, in future, even the most powerful states were going to have to work out how to deal with the ultimate asymmetry of one person declaring war on the system."

Rusbridger reveals in Breaking News that Assange felt much of the editing that was done prior to the release of the WikiLeaks documents was "unnecessary if not positively repressive".

Assange wasn't concerned about the niceties of libel law, either, according to the former Guardian editor-in-chief. Moreover, he believes that Assange "appeared to have contempt for all journalists and for journalism itself".

"But he did pose some difficult questions for practitioners of journalism," Rusbridger acknowledges in his book. "I sympathised to some extent with a looser idea of allowing the wider world—in a controlled way!—access to raw data rather than acting as a sometimes-impermeable filter. We were besieged by requests from colleagues around the world begging for sight of documents relating to particular regions or governments.

"We declined nearly all of them: that led to Pandora's box," he continued. "But who were we to appoint ourselves as gatekeepers?"