Julian Assange Concedes He is a Villain — Gets a Cat

Published in

Homeland Security

4 min readMay 23, 2016

Remember Julian Assange? The founder of Wikileaks? Once described by John Oliver as “a rodenty Australian computer hacker, driven to embarrass governments into greater transparency”…remember him?

Here he is.

Doesn’t he look great? Staring forward into the future…hair a little windblown. What’s that on the horizon? A world open to anonymous sharing of government and corporate secrets? A way out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London? Extradition to face rape charges? No. Not yet.

A brief refresher…Julian Assange helped to found Wikileaks in 2006. Wikileaks, by the way…not a “wiki.” Not anymore anyway. According to Wikipedia (and as a side note kids, this may be the only time that it’s appropriate to cite Wikipedia as an original source) a wiki is “a website which allows collaborative modification of its content and structure directly from the web browser.” Wikileaks is a web publication, not a wiki. (Alanis Morisette has not yet commented on whether or not this is ironic.)

Since 2006 Wikileaks has published thousands of classified documents, including documents leaked by Chelsea Manning, exposing secret information about major world governments, including the United States, Britain, and Saudi Arabia. It has also published leaked information from businesses such as Julius Baer and Barclays Bank, exposing corporate secrets.

Some have called him a hero.

by Sophie Radermecker and Valerie Guichaoua

Others have have called him a criminal.

So what has he been up to?

As the BBC recently reported, Mr. Assange “has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012, after seeking asylum there in his bid to avoid extradition to Sweden on a rape allegation.” He forfeited £240,000 in bail and a free trip to Sweden for the privilege of living here:

He could do worse.

Now, after years of reasonably pleasant “asylum” in the small piece of Ecuador located right around the corner from the Harrods on Brompton, Road in London, Mr. Assange has finally come clean and decisively resolved the debate about whether he is a hero or a villain.

Julian Assange got a cat.

A bloody cute one too…the fiend!

This is a strong villain move from the 2013 Yoko Ono Courage Award winner.

(Yes, it’s a real thing. Imagine that?)

Debate over. Villains have cats.

Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blowfeld. Founder of SPECTRE…the most awkwardly acronymed evil organization of all time. (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion). Cat.

Gargamel. The evil cartoon wizard who, like Mr. Assange, is committed to revealing secrets…in his case the location of Smurfs’ village so he can stamp out the blue menace for good, or else turn them into gold. Cat.

Vito Corleone. Patriarch of the Corleone family. The original “Godfather” of organized crime. Cat.

Now, Julian Assange adds his name to this august list of professional cat-wielding villains.

And if there was any lingering doubt…Assange immediately added to his list of crimes, real and alleged. Assange’s cat has a Twitter feed! @EmbassyCat. Full of adorable photos, often combined with teeth clenching cat puns.