Assange = Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning in uniform PVT Bradley Manning blew the whistle on USA war crimes in Iraq to Julian Assange...fascist Amerikkka is retaliating against truth tellers like Wikileaks by phony charges of secrecy violators the same crimes BILLARY is guilty of ..... SNOWDEN working for the CIA exposed CIA spying upon EVERY CELLPHONE ON THE PLANET USA all countries all people calling each other only Snowden escaped to Moscow too smart for dumb fascist USA murderers zionists and polluter oil war crime profiteering banksterS

To give a slight note about the basics: Assange was the owner of a server, Wikileaks, a computer or number of computers that do nothing but distribute data to anyone who has the permission to get it. He had the main control of the servers. Others (anyone) sent information to have distributed to any and all who would want to see it. Chelsea Manning was part of the Army and can across information that she thought would be informative to the population of the US. This information was about what the Army was doing in Irag and Afghanistan that was not legal and she thought the population of the US would like to know was being done in their name. She took the information and placed it on a server of Assange's. Since the information was so sensitive I think it was given to two newspapers for them to look at and see if they wanted to print it, they went through the information and decided to print the parts we all saw on the news.
Snoden worked for a company that the NSA used to do what it was they did and do. He found that the NSA was copying all the calls Americans were making, along with some other actions which are illegal. They were also doing other things that were illegal and so he pulled the plug on them. He along with some others gave the information he had to two newspapers for distribution.
Now it was up to the newspapers to look at the information they were given and see if they wanted to be legally liable for publishing it. They decided to publish only a part of the information leaving most of it unpublished.
Both of these people had a number of others that were also in line between the original information and the publishing of that material. All of this was because what these people saw was not really in the interest of the people of the US.
Snoden has written two books on what and how he did what he did. They are both interesting as they tell one what he did for the company he worked for, what he found, and why he did what he did.
Snoden was a citizen of the US, Chelsea Manning is a citizen of the US, and Julian Assange was born in Australia (I think) moved to Sweden, then to England and the Uruguayan Embassy, and now in England without the support of the Uruguayan Embassy, he is no in England and today they stopped the extradition of him to the US. In order to prosecute these people there is going to be a lot of action from the newspapers and the government about actions the government was doing that are illegal. This would be almost impossible to bring before a judge and have a trial as it would involve a lot of information that would be embarrassing to the many people who let it happen.
This was off the top of my head but I think it is mostly correct. Any questions and I will do the research to answer them.