The power of Wikileaks in upholding whistle-blower rights is the reason millions of dollars has been spent by a global coalition of the rich, powerful, and corrupt to discredit the co-founder, Julian Assange.

The case is widely viewed as a global landmark event that violates press freedom, purportedly enshrined in the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution.

President Donald Trump seeks Assange's extradition from the UK this week to face 175 years in prison for publishing outside the United States about US war crimes, as a foreign journalist. 

The extradition result will impact our so-called information-based economy and shape the power balance between the world's rich and poor masses for generations to come, broadly impacting tomorrow’s workforce.

Wikileaks, a global repository of leaked documents exposing war crimes, cults, and corrupt politicians, was designed by Assange with computer security in mind to keep the site online, free to the global public, even when powerful people want it taken down.

Wikileaks' sophisticated security has preserved leaks, while triggering citizen rebellions that toppled corrupt US backed governments.

The database can transform western neo-colonial thought as university departments, including at Columbus State University, examine the leaks' primary source material and expose the gears of our war economy, offering a rare account of what the US military does with nearly half of every US tax dollar.

Collateral Murder, a video showing multiple war crimes from a US Helicopter in Iraq, hit global audiences on April 5th, 2010 showing the murder of two Reuters journalists, and Iraqi civilians, including the driver of a rescue vehicle, thus exposing multiple war crimes and US disregard for their own rules of engagement.

Army Private and research analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the video and massive archive of military documents--one of the biggest leaks in human history. She was betrayed by a personal friend she thought she could trust. When captured by authorities, she didn’t cave to pressure. She came out as a transgender woman. Manning’s 35-year sentence was reduced by President Obama, who originally prosecuted her, and she was released after 7 years, only to be jailed by a grand jury for 62 days while recovering from gender transition surgery.

Four months after the Collateral Murder leak in August 2010, Assange’s bank account was frozen in order to silence Wikileaks, forcing him to rely on the hospitality of supporters as he evaded a multi-million dollar international manhunt, partially exposed by Wikileaks in the Stratfor leaks.

As the manhunt against Assange intensified, in August 2010, he was in Sweden at a crayfish and beer party called kräftskiva, a Swedish traditional event, in August 2010. The host, identified as AA, wanted Assange to stay the night, according to two police witness statements, but Assange stayed with another woman, identified as SW. When the two women exchanged stories later, AA proposed SW go to the police so the two women could get Assange to take a sexually transmitted disease test.

SW claimed she was half asleep when they had unprotected sex, which formed the basis for Swedish prosecutors to claim rape had occurred. But she wrote to a friend while at the police station that she hadn’t wanted him to be charged with anything, but they were trying to get “their hands on him.”

Professor Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, said, “I speak fluent Swedish and was thus able to read all of the original documents. I could hardly believe my eyes: According to the testimony of [SW] a rape had never even taken place at all. And not only that: The woman’s testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape.”

In a Twitter-message of 22 April 2013, AA herself publicly denied having been raped (jag har inte blivit våldtagen).”

Assange left for the UK after getting clearance to travel from investigators, but after he left, Sweden sent out an Interpol red notice, a global crime alert. An analyst from Stratfor--a US intelligence firm--on an internal chat focused on taking Assange down, noted: “Charges of sexual assault rarely are passed through Interpol red notices, like this case, so this is no doubt about trying to disrupt WikiLeaks release of government documents.”

Assange offered to answer investigators questions, but said he would not return to Sweden, unless he was given assurance that he would not be extradited to the US if he went. Swedish prosecutors never gave that assurance. He then gained asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on the grounds that he was in danger of being extradited to the US to face charges for journalistic activity. The UK refused to honor Assange's asylum status, and so he was arbitrarily detained in the embassy, according to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in an operation that cost 10s of millions of worth of taxpayer British pounds.

Now with the Swedish investigation closed without charges ever being filed, the Trump administration is working to set a legal precedent that will have a profound impact on the world for generations to come.

Democratic Party operatives, and the CIA have publicly accused Wikileaks of getting a trove of emails from Russia of corrupt practices of US Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US presidential race. But after an FBI investigation into the matter spanned several years, no hard evidence has yet been produced to confirm these authentic documents came though Russia, which Assange denies.

Melzer said at first he didn’t believe Assange was deserving of support, but “In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed.”