Earlier today WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested inside the Ecuadorian embassy for breaching U.K. bail conditions. He has also been further arrested by U.S. authorities with an extradition warrant on a conspiracy charge for publishing classified information by former army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
On Thursday the Justice Department prosecutors confirmed that Assange was charged with conspiracy to hack into a classified U.S. computer. Prosecutors said WikiLeaks founder aided Manning in cracking a password and therefore logging into SIPRNET, a classified U.S. government network.
While Manning’s sentence was commuted under President Obama just before his term ended in 2017 and released from prison that May, she was arrested in March 2019 for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.
The process of extraditing Assange from the U.K. to the U.S. could take years and the outcome is not a foregone conclusion.
