Julian Assange is only 41 years old, yet has lived out one of the most productive and colorful lives of any man on this earth today. Known by most of the world for his work as editor of Wikileaks, a controversial website that allows whistleblowers to leak secret information to the World Wide Web. His story embodies similar company such as Martin Luther King Jr. and even Mohandas Gandhi.
The parallels between the three men are numerous. All three leaders were active in a social justice movement, especially concerned with issues of human rights tragedies. All three leaders are or were wanted dead for their lives work, while all three also enjoyed, for the most part, popularity among the people in the world following their moral messages. Dig deeper into the story of Julian Assange, and it is easily seen that his story has many more similarities to a whole host of peace advocates and civil rights leaders. To better understand this, outlined below will be the life story of Julian Assange, a unique one to say the least. This will be followed upon with an analysis of his work as a hacker and within the Wikileaks transparency movement. Finally, I will attempt to show how the Wikileaks project does not only relate to the world wide peace movement but essentially embodies the bigger picture of world peace through facts and increased knowledge, as opposed to previously leaders who focused on individual movements.
On July 3rd, 1971 Christine Assange gave birth to a baby Julian on the small hippie island, known as Magnetic Island, Australia. Julian never really knew his biological father, but in 1973, his mother got into another romantic relationship with a traveling theatre group leader, Brett Assange, who gave Julian little more than his family name (Guichaoua, 2011, p. 27). In his autobiography, Assange describes his childhood growing up having gone to “well over thirty schools in all. It was just that kind of life, in which consistency was a matter of style and values, not of where you parked your car or how you paid your debts.” (Assange, 2011, p. 15). This type of upbringing shows where Julian has been able to get his unique personality and perspective on the world. Even by these standards alone, his childhood background can be identified as anything but normal, living with traveling parents he says they often had him become a part of the team and work as if he was not a ten year old boy. He appreciates his young traveling lifestyle saying, “it gave me a sense of meeting new challenges all the time. With mum and Brett, it felt like we were gulping down experiences without fear.” (Assange, 2011, p. 20). Yet as the story of a vagabond youth continues on its path of abnormality, it seems to only veer further into the realm of oddity.
Christine’s relationship with Brett Assange deteriorated by the time Julian was nine. In 1979, she divorced Brett and started to see a peace activist she met in Sydney during an anti-Vietnam movement, Keith Hamilton. Described as an abusive man, the relationship did not last long. Worried by Hamilton’s violence character and dark history, she escaped with her two boys in 1982, having to stay on the run to avoid Hamilton’s wrath for over five years (Higgins, 2011, p18). During this time, Julian describes his appeal to his forced refugee-like upbringing, saying “he liked life on the road” (Guichaoua, 2011, p. 29). Many credit his uniquely drifter-like past to his global outlook and his ability to, not only respond quickly to unique challenges, but also be very adaptive to any challenge that comes his way. Further, this lifestyle also produced the strongest relationship Julian had growing up, with his mother, Christine. To this point, she truly contributed to who he is today by giving her son his first computer at the age of 14. This is where our story of Julian Assange turns from the story of a physical man into the story of his many cyber identities and themes of fighting social injustice start to emerge.
Before indulging into the almost mythical tale to come, context surrounding the hacker community must be presented. Julian’s hacker morality was different from a lot in the field. “His moral sense about breaking into computer systems was: ‘I’m not going to do any harm, so what’s wrong with it?” (Guichaoua, 2011, p. 48). This differs from many other hackers, who will break in to grandma’s bank account and steal her retirement fund; all the while, stealing from her from right inside her personal computer siting in her living room. This was not Julian’s goal, even if he is portrayed as a criminal by state institutions. With consideration to the beginning of his cyber hacking career, he simply wanted to learn and explore internet systems. Then as his knowledge expanded this changed into wanting more people to learn and inspired the basic foundation of Wikileaks. With this in mind, we move ahead within the story where we left off with a 14 year old, after receiving his first personal computer, a Commodore 64 (Leigh, 2011, p. 47).
Within two years of having his own computer, Assange became known as under his first nickname, Mendax. Very quickly with this new identity, Mendax established himself in the online community of hackers. He teamed up with two other hacker friends to create the group International Subversives, to explore telecommunication systems around the world. International Subversives three members followed a strict code of conduct: “do not damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them), don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks), and share information.” (Guichauoua, 2011, p. 46). With this in mind, the three hackers went about different nation’s telecommunications systems like three friends playing a tough computer in Chess. The challenges engulfed them and far too quickly, engulfed the authorities as well. At age 18, Julian was arrested in his home with his newly moved in girlfriend. Although the charges against him were dropped fairly soon after, the price paid was within his relationship to significant other.
His significant other would soon become his wife and mother to his only son, Daniel. However, the drama from his first arrest, when the couple had just moved in together, would be relived in 1991. Federal police had already launched Operation Weather, an investigation into young Assange’s hacker group. One night in September of 1991, while hacking into a Canadian telecommunication’s network, Assange was caught. The authorities were quickly notified and sent to apprehend the ring leader of International Subversives. Julian, already tracking the communication between investigators on the case, realized they were coming for him. When investigator Ken Day arrived to arrest Julian, “he told him: ‘I bet you knew we were coming.”. Julian faced the charges against him, ending up with a 2,000 dollar fine. The real price paid was within his relationship to his wife, whom was terrified by the danger presented in Julian’s choices online. She fled with their son shortly after, leaving Julian alone to pursue his virtual conquest (Guichaoua, 2011, p. 48-52). For the remainder of the 1990’s Julian would be locked in a custody battle with his ex-wife over their son, Daniel (Higgins, 2011, p. 101). This also led to the next chapter in his life, expanding his online portfolio.
Assange continued his work within the field of internet technologies (IT) for most of the 90s. He has started public internet service providers, created free encryption software, and even founded his own company, known as Earthmen Technology (Rintoul, 2010). Although, he no longer still does, he use to have a blog up and running. Since he became more prominently known, others have achieved his early work. One particular example of his social injustice work was software he created a Rubberhose deniable encryption. This was an encryption system which according to Assange’s blog at the time, would be used “as a tool for human rights workers and who needed to protect sensitive date in the field” (Dreyfus, 2010). The idea behind the system was to be able to encrypt files multiple times with differing passwords. This way, if a dissident was caught by authorities or even caught by anyone wanting to know, if tortured for this information, the dissident would not be able to release the whole encryption code because they only need part of it. This idea of secrecy, which Assange has fought his whole life against, will appear more frequently as his story goes on. This particular project was to help other’s keep secrets, almost a negative of what Wikileaks is based upon. Yet, even in the 90s, it could be said Julian was already thinking about his future ground breaking work. In 1999, he secretly bought the domain name, leaks.com, possibly a predecessor to Wikileaks itself (Barrowclough, 2010).
After almost a decade in the legal IT field, Assange decided to go back to school. He spent three years at differing Universities across Australia, yet never finished his Bachelor of Science degree to receive a diploma. While in school he studied in four differing fields, ranging from neuroscience to philosophy to mathematics and physics (Assange, 2011, Ch. 5). In 2005, he decided to drop out of school. Although keeping it a very big secret, Assange was going to finally start his work on Wikileaks (Khatchadourian, 2010). The foundation of Julian’s life had been set and it was time for him to find others to help in his lifelong goal of governmental transparency.
Again, a moment to reflect upon the bigger picture is necessary, only this time referring to Wikileaks. Wikileaks is an organization founded on the ideas of transparency. According to their website, “Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public” (Wikileaks). This is quite an honorable code and one reason Assange sometimes refers to himself as a journalist. Although intentions are moral, to complete these intentions, the organization is constantly breaking all sorts of international treaties and national laws from many differing countries. Assange and other members of Wikileaks are currently wanted by the American government for crimes varying from espionage laws, established in the 1920’s to other financial crimes because of his status within our government as a cyber-terrorists. Some have media critics have even recommended we simply assassinate the man behind Wikileaks, because “a dead man can’t leak stuff.” (Fox, 2010). With all this in mind, Assange has taken over a unique role within Wikileaks. He says he is only the chief editor of the site, yet recently, he has become more of a figurehead to the organization than anyone else in the world (Guichaoua, 2011, p. 193). I believe because of this Assange and Wikileaks have to be thought about as one entity. Although, this is not one hundred percent correct in historical application, the line has been blurred for his own safety, so severely, that it would be an injustice to do otherwise. With all of this in mind, the story of Julian Assange’s Wikileaks and his fight against social injustice continues.
The morality behind Wikileaks can be seen from Assange’s perspective as something as follows. “His IT knowledge and hacker past provided him with a certain kind of power. If major power implied great responsibilities, then Julian felt as though he needed to use his abilities for the great good. Carrying out actions against conspiracies means carrying out a war against secrecy and tirelessly weakening bad governance, state or institutional.” (Guichaoua, 2011 p. 113). It could easily be said that Julian’s response to this great responsibility bestowed upon him was Wikileaks. He believed in freedom of press whole heartedly. Further he thought, the truth could set us free in many ways. With that said Wikileaks was founded in 2006, yet in many aspects the organization started when 14 year old Assange got his first personal computer and started International Subversives. International Subversives, ended with a 2,000 dollar fine yet was a small shrimp compared to the mammoth project, Wikileaks, both in potential impact and potential criminal charges.
First, work had to be completed prior to the start of this secret and whistleblower’s heaven website. Assange needed a board of directors, workers to help manage the massive amount of content, servers to run the huge traffic the site anticipated, and further donors to fund it all. Some credit the start of finding the correct team back to 2001, when he contacted a hacking network to host documents and images known as Cryptome (Guichaoua, 2011 p. 116). After he established where to host the site, messages to potential collaborators followed strict security guidelines. The website was referred in email as “w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-.o-r-g. [even had a header that read,] Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to ‘WL.’ This list housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer and plenty of backbone.” (Guichaoua, 2011 p 117). From here, Julian was able to establish his beginning team for Wikileaks. This team would evolve as the website and Julian, himself, became more popular and a powerful force in social change. The first documents would be release by the end of 2006 and signify the start to a new, powerful, and non-state controlled outlet for information. From this point on, Wikileaks was known for the information it released, as much as the idea it embodied.
Wikileaks has sense leaked millions and millions of documents, video files, and other previously unattainable information. During a TED Talk, Julian describes his bigger projects and their impact they have had on the world. This truly will embody the idea of social change that has inspired Wikileaks from the start. Julian describes one of his first leaks known as the “Kroll Report. This was a secret intelligence report commissioned by the Kenyan government after its election in 2004…and – I mean, to cut a long story short – word of the report leaked into Kenya, not from the official media, but indirectly, in all the surrounding countries of Kenya, in Tanzanian and South African press. And so it came in from the outside. And that, after a couple days, made the Kenyan press feel safe to talk about it. And it ran for 20 nights straight on Kenyan TV, shifted the vote by 10 percent, according to a Kenyan intelligence report, which changed the result of the election.” (Anderson, 2010)
The impact of the documents outlined directly above, is not the normal by any standard. Yet, since the release of Wikileaks in 2006, they have release more ground breaking news than “all of the world media in the last 30 years” (Anderson, 2010). And the Kroll report is just one example of that. Wikileaks has also worked tirelessly to undercover material related to the 2008 world banking crisis, specifically relating to Iceland and the U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq.
Written in ~2013 by J. Fox