LONDON, April 12 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A London court found WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange guilty of breaching his bail conditions in 2012 and remanded him into custody pending sentencing.
Assange faces up to 12 months in prison on the charge.
He will face another court hearing on May 2 on a US request for his extradition for alleged computer hacking.
The WikiLeaks founder was arrested by British police and carried out of the Ecuadorean embassy after his South American hosts abruptly revoked his seven-year asylum.
Assange is being charged over his alleged role in a massive leak of military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the US Justice Department said.
Assange faces up to five years in jail on a federal charge of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified US government computer,” according to a statement.
The indictment alleges Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a former US Army intelligence analyst, to crack a password stored on Department of Defense computers, leading to “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”, the statement said.
Assange’s indictment arose from a long-running criminal investigation dating back to the administration of former President Barack Obama. It was triggered in part by the publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of US military reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and American diplomatic communications.
The Justice Department said Assange, 47, was arrested pursuant to the US/UK Extradition Treaty, and accused him of involvement in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.
The indictment said that Assange in March 2010 engaged in a conspiracy to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on US Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a US government network used for classified documents and communications.
He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.
The department said Manning had access to the computers as an intelligence analyst and was using them to download classified records to transmit to WikiLeaks. Cracking the password would have enabled Manning to log on to the computers under a username other than her own, making it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of the illegal disclosures, the department said.
The Obama administration decided not to prosecute WikiLeaks on the grounds that the work of WikiLeaks was too similar to journalistic activities protected by the US Constitution’s First Amendment. — NNN-AGENCIES
