GOP senator: Assange should be in an ‘orange jumpsuit’ for life

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be in “an orange jumpsuit” for life following a data dump that revealed CIA intelligence hacking strategies.  

Sasse, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a statement Thursday slamming Assange as a criminal and Kremlin ally.

“Julian Assange should spend the rest of his life wearing an orange jumpsuit. He’s an enemy of the American people and an ally to Vladimir Putin,” Sasse said. 

{mosads}“Mr. Assange has dedicated his life’s work to endangering innocent lives, abetting despots, and stoking a crisis of confidence in the West.”

Sasse’s statement comes in response to a Thursday press conference in which Assange promised to give technology companies access to the information it has about the CIA’s hacking tools.

The press conference came two days after Wikileaks published a massive trove of documents purportedly pertaining to the CIA’s hacking programs — the first of many document dumps the site says it has coming on the intelligence agency. 

Assange made his remarks at the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where he’s been since he sought asylum in 2012.

Assange said the shared data will allow tech companies to “develop fixes” before his organization releases the full details of how the CIA was hacking multiple devices. He says that information is not yet available because he doesn’t want the hacking techniques to be used against “journalists and people of the world.” 

At the moment, major tech companies such as Apple, Google and Samsung have the “exclusive access” to the CIA hacking techniques, Assange said. 

He also claimed this leak caused the CIA to lose “control of its entire cyber weapons arsenal.”

“This is an historic act of devastating incompetence to have created such an arsenal and stored it all in one place and not secured it,” Assange added. 

Tech companies are trying to detect their software’s security weak points as a result of the leaked documents, while also calling on CIA to release further details, according to a Reuters report.