A German hacker offers a rare look inside the secretive world of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks
By Ellen Nakashima, Souad Mekhennet and Greg Jaffe January 17 at 11:03 AM
LONDON — The passengers stepping off the Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt, Germany, last month head straight for the passport-scanning machines that allow European residents to enter Britain quickly and without any human interaction.
A lone figure in a black hoodie and jeans breaks off from the pack. “Too many biometric details,” says Andy Müller-Maguhn, eyeing the cameras on the timesaving devices.
He has come here, as he does most months, to meet with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the world’s most controversial purveyor of government secrets. For most of the past six years, Assange has been confined to the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, fearful that if he leaves he will be extradited to the United States for prosecution under the Espionage Act. Ecuador recently granted Assange citizenship, but British officials said he is still subject to arrest if he leaves the embassy.
Müller-Maguhn is one of Assange’s few connections to the outside world. He typically brings Assange books, clothes or movies. Once in 2016, he delivered a thumb drive that he says contained personal messages for the WikiLeaks founder, who for security reasons has stopped using email.
These visits have caught the attention of U.S. and European spy chiefs, who have struggled to understand how Assange’s organization operates and how exactly WikiLeaks came to possess a trove of hacked Democratic Party emails that the group released at key moments in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The three major U.S. intelligence agencies — the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency — assessed “with high confidence” that Russia relayed to WikiLeaks material it had hacked from the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic officials. And last year, then-FBI Director James B. Comey said that the bureau believes the transfer was made using a “cut-out,” or a human intermediary or a series of intermediaries.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-german-hacker-offers-a-rare-look-inside-the-secretive-world-of-julian-assange-and-wikileaks/2018/01/17/e6211180-f311-11e7-b390-a36dc3fa2842_story.html
