Julian Assange, Embassy Of Ecuador on May 19, 2017, in London, England

From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

Following a 5-year solitary incarceration, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was released from a London prison after taking a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the publication of classified information online.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been released from prison after agreeing to a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department.

On Monday, the high-profile journalist was released from prison after agreeing to a deal in which he plead guilty for his involvement in publishing classified information received from a whistleblower working inside the U.S. government.

As CNN reported, Assange will receive a 62-month prison sentence according to the terms of the agreements. The sentence equals the time he spent in the high-security prison Belmarsh near London. The time served will be credited toward his sentence, allowing Assange to leave prison immediately and return to his native Australia.

“Julian Assange is free,” WikiLeaks announced in its statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. “He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.”

“This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalized. We will provide more information as soon as possible.”

“After more than five years in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars,” the statement continued, adding that “WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know.”

Assange is expected to officially plead guilty in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands on Wednesday, a U.S. territory located in the Pacific Ocean relatively close to Assange’s native Australia.

Assange faced life in prison in the U.S. for 17 counts of espionage and one charge of computer misuse related to the publication of millions of classified documents by WikiLeaks.

Assange’s legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified documents regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a video that showed a U.S. military helicopter killing several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad, Iraq. The information was provided by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. From 2012 to 2019, Assange lived in the Ecuadorian embassy in London under asylum status. After he was arrested by Metropolitan police in 2019 under an extradition warrant from the U.S. government, Assange was imprisoned at Belmarsh, a high-security prison close to London, where he has been held in solitary confinement up until Monday.

According to sources cited by CNN, officials at the Justice Department and the FBI opposed any deal that did not include a guilty plea to a felony by Assange.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald warned of the danger of Assange pleading guilty to a felony for publishing classified information, which, in the eyes of many, was not a crime but a service to society, namely providing information showing that governments are deceiving their citizens.

“I never believed that the Biden administration actually wanted to bring Julian Assange onto American soil to stand trial,” Greenwald said. “Imagine the spectacle that it would have created as Biden heads into an election.”

It would put on Joe Biden’s record that he would be the first American president in history to preside over the imprisonment, not of a source who leaked information, but of someone who published classified information, which every newspaper in the United States does on a regular basis…

The goal of… keeping him in prison was to crush Julian Assange physically and mentally, and they succeeded in doing that…

They wanted to break Assange and simultaneously send a message to any future Assanges that ‘We will ruin your life if you publish our secrets.’

Drawing parallels to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden not being allowed to return to the U.S., Greenwald said, “It is a deterrent message to keep the ability to hide their own crimes through secrecy, immune from the one vulnerability that they have which is that brave people inside the government leak that information to the public or through the media and reveal what it is they are doing.”

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner called the Trudeau government’s ‘Online Harms’ bill ‘irredeemable,’ and doubted it will ever be enforced.

A Conservative MP has contested that a Liberal government bill seeking to further clamp down on online speech is so flawed that it will never be able to be enforced nor come to light before the next election.  

“The government is close to the end of its mandate and does not have a lot of public support across the country,” said Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner in the House of Commons last Friday regarding Bill C-63, also known as the “Online Harms Act.” 

Rempel Garner observed that this bill “would not likely become law,” and that she is certain “the regulatory process is not going to happen prior to the next election even if the bill is rammed through.” 

The Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, was introduced by Justice Minister Arif Virani in the House of Commons in February and was immediately blasted by constitutional experts as troublesome. Put forth under the guise of protecting children from exploitation online, the bill also seeks to expand the scope of “hate speech” prosecutions, and even desires to target such speech retroactively.

The law also calls for the creation of a Digital Safety Commission, a digital safety ombudsperson, and the Digital Safety Office, all tasked with policing internet content.

The bill’s “hate speech” section is accompanied by broad definitions, severe penalties, and dubious tactics, including levying preemptive judgments against people if they are feared to be likely to commit an act of “hate” in the future. 

Details of the new legislation also show the bill could lead to more people jailed for life for “hate crimes” or fined $50,000 and jailed for posts that the government defines as “hate speech” based on gender, race, or other categories. 

Rempel Garner noted that members of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet do not have public support when it comes to Bill C-63. 

“We are presently living under a government that unlawfully invoked the Emergencies Act and that routinely gaslights Canadians who legitimately question efficacy or the morality of its policies as spreading misinformation,” she said, noting that harmful online internet content could be countered by “laws that are already on the books but have not been recently enforced due to a lack of extreme political will.” 

She called the bill “irremediable,” adding that its “not fixable and members do not have to take my word for it.” 

Bill C-63 an ‘Orwellian’ disaster 

In addition to being slammed by a number of Canadian legal experts, a number of high profile personalities domestically and abroad have taken the time to skewer the proposed law.   

Jordan Peterson, one of Canada’s most prominent psychologists, recently accused the bill of attempting to create a pathway to allow for “Orwellian Thought Crime” to become the norm in the nation.  

During Rumble’s first-ever free-speech-centered live event, speakers including Donald Trump Jr. critiqued Trudeau’s Online Harms Act. 

Even billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk remarked that it is “insane” the Trudeau government’s proposed “Online Harms” bill would target internet speech retroactively if it becomes law.