“I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.”

Australian programmer, editor, and publisher

Julian Paul Assange is an Australian programmer, editor, and publisher. He founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and became widely known in 2010, when the site published a series of leaks from Chelsea Manning. Those disclosures included footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad that killed civilians, military logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange has received more than two dozen awards for publishing and journalism.