MICHELLE WAKIM, REPORTER: To understand the story of Julian Assange, we have to take a little trip into online history to see what the internet was like in the mid-noughties. 2006, in particular, was a huge year. Twitter had just launched; Facebook introduced 'News Feed'; And Elf Yourself was one of the biggest trends.
On top of this, a little website known as WikiLeaks was created by an Australian named Julian Assange. It was set up to help people expose secrets and classified information. Fast forward to 2010, and WikiLeaks became one of the most talked-about websites in the world.
NEWSREADER: WikiLeaks has published more than 90,000 US military documents.
NEWSREADER: At the centre of it all, of course, the mysterious, defiant editor in chief Julian Assange.
NEWSREADER: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been put on Interpol's most wanted list.
MICHELLE WAKIM, REPORTER: It published a video leaked by a US military worker, showing US soldiers killing unarmed civilians in Iraq. And followed that up with a huge amount of secret documents from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS FOUNDER: It really is the most extraordinary compendium of war that has ever been released.
MICHELLE WAKIM, REPORTER: Publishing secrets is nothing new. In fact, it's a really important part of journalism and there are lots of examples of the media exposing governments doing the wrong thing. But what WikiLeaks did was different. The newspapers that also ran these stories chose what information the public needed to know and what information should be left out to keep people safe. But Assange published everything, in a big information dump. And the leaks kept coming, including hundreds of thousands of messages between US diplomats that made a lot of people furious.
HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER US SECRETARY OF STATE: There is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends.
JOHN BELLINGER III, US GOVERNMENT LEGAL ADVISOR: It's really almost apocalyptic to have 250,000 cables lost. It affects our relations with every country in the world and puts sources of information, not only government sources, but human rights activists and dissidents and others at great risk.
MICHELLE WAKIM, REPORTER: Plenty of people agreed with them, and saw Assange as a hacker who only cared about himself. But others saw him as a hero, who'd exposed information that the public deserved to know.
JEREMY CORBYN, UK POLITICIAN: What I think he's done is spoken truth to power.
MICHELLE WAKIM, REPORTER: This all came to head at the end of 2010. Assange was in the UK, when he was accused of an unrelated crime in Sweden. He was arrested and Sweden tried to have him extradited, which means sent to another country for legal reasons.
JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS FOUNDER: The extradition proceeding to Sweden which is occurring in a very strange and unusual way is actually an attempt to get me into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite me to the US.
MICHELLE WAKIM, REPORTER: He took refuge in an unusual place: the Ecuadorian embassy in London. It meant local police weren't allowed to arrest him, as long as the Ecuadorian government agreed to keep him there. And they did, for 7 years. In that time Julian Assange got married, had kids, and kept the leaks coming, including some emails that were stolen from the Democratic party in the lead up to the 2016 election.
DONALD TRUMP, FORMER US PRESIDENT: WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks.
MICHELLE WAKIM, REPORTER: In 2019, Ecuador kicked him out and Assange was sent to jail in the UK for breaching bail, and he's been there ever since. He's no longer wanted in Sweden, but the US is trying to have him extradited and that's what last week's hearing was all about.
We won't know the outcome of the trial until next month, but a lot of people are watching this closely. For some, this about freedom of the press.
TIM DAWSON, INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF JOURNALISTS: If Julian Assange could be extradited to the United States and jailed for the rest of his life, then any journalist could face a similar fate.
MICHELLE WAKIM, REPORTER: Others say the US shouldn't have the right to charge someone who's not an American citizen, and didn't commit a crime while in the US.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: Enough is enough. There is nothing to be served by his ongoing incarceration and I am concerned about Mr Assange's mental health.
ANDREW WILKIE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICIAN: We call on the US, we call on the UK, to let him out of prison, drop the charges, let him be rejoined with his family, let him come home.
