Hopefully he can safely return to his home country and take a long deserved rest from this all.
It’ll probably take a decade or more to recover mentally from all the shit he has gone through.
I just hope he takes his time to recover and passes the wikileaks torch as all the accumulated resentment and paranoia will probably take a while to shed off. Going all out on anti-american frenzy on social media and whatnot would likely lead to undesirable outcome for him in public eye.
I’m wondering if it was worth the sacrifice. The governments and tech companies are spying more than ever on everyone.
Snowden revelations and Wikileaks have made E2EE pretty much a standard for most internet services. People are also far less naive when it comes to online privacy which has spawned bunch of regulations like GDPR and bunch of investigations on how well services and products handle information security.
Keep in mind that during the US Presidential Election of 2016 Assange had already spent 3~ years living in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. Add in how the United states wanted him extradited to serve potentially life in prison and was probably using all sorts of surveilance and information gathering methods against him and wikileaks to prevent and mitigate any future leaks.
Now when you’re facing an opponent known for its power to assasinate world leaders and powerful political figures, power to spy, hack and survey even their close allies for years, influence other goverments and politicians through blackmail, extortion and economic means you’re bound to get a bit stressed and go a bit paranoid. When it comes to Russia the oppinions towards them where a lot more favorable in 2010-2022 as most of Europe wanted to keep access to affordable oil and gas. Meanwhile Anti-imperialist sentiment against US was probably at it’s alltime high with the War in Afghanistan and Libya.
Wikileaks was never really a beacon of free speech its always been more of a platform where people can leak information about goverments and other powerful individuals or organizations doing bunch of shady or downright evil stuff behind our back. These often offer rare glimpse behind the scenes allowing us to be little less blind when voting during whathever election comes next.