I’ve followed Julian Assange since the Cypherpunks Mailing list days. I was in Kuwait during the Manning reveal (and PFC Manning was transported out of Iraq via the base I was on). Wikileaks was always interesting as both a technical challenge (how does one distribute highly-censored information) and an organizational/personnel challenge (how does an organization with very limited resources persist despite infinite “dirty tricks” and other opposition by many nation states.
Once Assange was arrested, it seemed likely he wasn’t going to get away. The extended embassy residency (and his personal disagreeableness turning into a major factor in getting kicked out of the embassy…) was insane and seemed like something out of a Cold War spy novel, the parallels to Edward Snowden later, other targets (including Manning) were substantial, and overall, this was a pretty amazing story to follow.
Given that Assange was never likely to just walk away, and if he went to trial in the US could have basically faced more and more charges, a plea of some kind did seem like the ultimate resolution. I was initial surprised a bit by the timing — focusing on the US elections, waiting for the next administration (assuming Biden isn’t re-elected in November, or even if so, some potential changes in personnel or removal of the issue as a political question) seemed like the default — which would have pushed this into 2025.
However, looking at it more from UK politics makes more sense. With UK elections coming up, and the Conservatives looking like they’ll do poorly, the role of Keir Starmer, likely to be the next UK Labor PM, as former Director of Public Prosecutions for CPS back in 2008 when the Sweden charges were starting, probably is a major factor. If I were Assange, taking any deal to get this resolved before that handover makes sense. With Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, China, and the upcoming election as much bigger ongoing news than anything related to Wikileaks former operations, this is the best possible time to resolve the issue.
It’s interesting that the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (Saipan) is the venue for this deal — it’s a US Territory (same as Puerto Rico, where I live) and is physically vaguely near Australia (3300 miles from Saipan to Sydney, but I guess that’s “close” in the Pacific.). This lets Assange avoid entering the mainland US, but there’s the same Federal jurisdiction there, so it’s really just a technicality/face saving measure for him.
The “time served” of 62 months in UK prison, on top of the de-facto prison time in the Ecuador embassy (7 years!) plus some other jail time all seems disproportionate to “running a website which published some leaked data”, but the enticement/etc. of Manning to do this probably was never going to be treated anything but harshly by the state.
With respect to successfully publishing information in spite of State restrictions, this seems like a guy with feathers glued to his arms, a hot air balloon, or at best flights by an unpowered glider compared to the Cypherpunks dream of jet aircraft and rockets; the dream of cryptoanarchy is not yet demonstrated.