Julian Assange criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and asked allied nations for assistance. In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange. He had been questioned there months earlier over allegations of sexual assault and rape. Assange denied the allegations, and said that he would be extradited from Sweden to the United States because of his rôle in publishing secret American documents. Assange surrendered to UK police on 7 December 2010 but was released on bail within 10 days. Having been unsuccessful in his challenge to the extradition proceedings, he breached his bail and absconded. He was granted asylum by Ecuador
Julian Assange voice-data harvesting technology: "This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency." Systematic abuse of technology by governments against fundamental freedoms of world citizens remained an abiding concern—more than a decade later, in the introduction to "Cypherpunks" (2012), Assange summarised: "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen". After his period of study at the University of Melbourne, Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange is a member