This content was published on August 15, 2022 – 18:29
(AFP)
US lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange filed a lawsuit against the US Central Intelligence Agency and its former director, Mike Pompeo, on Monday, accusing them of recording their conversations and copying the contents of their phones and computers.
The lawyers and journalists who joined the lawsuit, all Americans, deplored the CIA’s violation of the constitutional right to protect secret conversations, in this case with Australian Julian Assange.
They say the CIA worked with a security firm hired by the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Assange was living at the time, to spy on the WikiLeaks founder, his lawyer, journalists and others he met.
British police arrested Assange in 2019 after taking refuge for seven years at the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Since then he has been imprisoned in Belmarsh, near the British capital.
On June 17, the British government announced that it had signed the decree to extradite him to the United States, a decision that Assange appealed.
The United States accuses him of publishing US military and diplomatic documents in 2010 related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, charges for which he could be sentenced to up to 175 years in prison.
Richard Roth, the New York attorney representing the plaintiffs, says Assange’s attorney’s alleged spying means that “the WikiLeaks founder’s right to a fair trial has been rescinded, if not destroyed.”
“Recording meetings with friends and lawyers and digital copies of their lawyers and friends’ information invalidates criminal prosecution because the government now knows the content of those communications,” Roth told reporters.
“There should be penalties up to and including dropping these charges or withdrawing an extradition request in response to these flagrantly unconstitutional activities,” he added.
The lawsuit was filed by attorneys Margaret Ratner Konstler and Deborah Herbeck and journalists Charles Glass and John Goetz.
They all visited Assange when he was living at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, which granted him political asylum before withdrawing it years later.
The lawsuit cites the CIA, former agency director and former US Secretary of State Pompeo, security firm Undercover Global and its CEO David Morales Gillen.
He claims that Undercover Global, which had a security contract with the embassy, captured the information from his electronic devices and provided it to the CIA.
He also placed microphones around the embassy and sent recordings and photos from surveillance cameras to the CIA.
Roth says this violates the privacy protections of US citizens.
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