A short biography of Julian Assange

This was originally published by pawz on the old site and has been retained for interest’s sake, though it’s somewhat rambling and covers many topics.

A Short Biography of Julian Assange (aka "Mendax")

Who I Am and Why I Am Writing This

I think it’s important firstly to disclose a little bit about who I am and why I am writing this article. I am an Australian citizen, and I have followed Julian Assange’s story for a good third of my life after I learned about him through sources explained below. I have never met, nor spoken to physically or electronically the person who you know as Julian Paul Assange, or the "man behind WikiLeaks". One of the reasons I developed an interest in Assange is that we shared a very similar upbringing in some of the following ways:

• We were both born in North Queensland, Australia during the 1970’s.
• We both were born to working class parents.
• We both attended dozens of Australian state schools for brief periods as our parents moved around frequently with home schooling making up the majority of our schooling.
• We both started our computing careers on Commodore 64 microcomputers.
• We both frequented Aussie BBS systems such as Electric Dreams, Starbase and Crystal Palace.
• We both developed an interest in "computer hacking" – Assange on BBS’s during the late 80’s and myself on the internet in the early 90’s.
• We both had our unstable, free-loader wives leave us and take our only child with them due to the damage that they felt hacking was having on their relationships.

While I am not directly aware if we share any acquaintances, I would be very surprised if we don’t share at least one common associate among the many individuals I have communicated with online over the years. That’s about where the similarity ends, because to put it bluntly – Assange was in a totally different league than me. While I may have allegedly gained access to NASA boxes in my time, and played a critical part in the formation of the MP3 release scene, I was a rank amateur compared to the amazing skill shown by Julian Assange. Comparing us would be like comparing a high school science teacher to Steven Hawking (unless by some odd coincidence, your high school science teacher was Steven Hawking).

The primary reason our paths never crossed though, is that Assange was charged and convicted of hacking and dropped out of the scene, at least publicly, a few years before I entered it. While our expoits might be similar, in terms of hacking culture, we were a generation apart. Assange was the last of the BBS hackers, where I was part of the Internet generation. Perhaps it might be more relevant given the NASA connection to compare the gap in terms of space missions. Assange was active during the Gallileo mission, whereas I started out as NASA prepared to launch Cassini.

I am writing this because I believe it is in the worldwide public interest that people have an opportunity to learn a little about the man who’s right now got the whole world’s politicians running scared and looks like having a huge impact on modern history. Despite accusations he has an enormous ego, Assange doesn’t want to talk about himself. He wants to let his work speak for him and he gets very annoyed when people insist on ignoring his accomplishments and pressing him on personal matters. But that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t know. Before you decide whether you trust or believe this enigmatic whistleblower, it’s only fair you know who he is, and where he came from.

I don’t feel I’m unmasking Assange so much as filling in his back-story for an interested public, and at this point in time, the journalistic community at large has reported very little factual information about him. I don’t know why they seem unable to perform the most basic research into a person whose history is well known to the greater Australian IT community, but the coverage has been very fact-poor due to the sorry state of journalism today which mostly involves copy/pasting articles from other news agencies into Quark Express and sending it off for editing with only a couple of minor changes of sentence structure. Where’s the real story ? Who the hell is Julian Assange ?

Assange, the hacker

Jullian Paul Assange was born to a poor family in Townsville in 1971 and moved around frequently, being enrolled at dozens of Australian schools, but being primarily home schooled by his mother who believed that public schools instilled an obedience to authority which she did not agree with. Julian never knew his father as he was out of the scene before Julian was born. His mother Christine remarried and gave birth to Julian’s half-brother, of whom little is known. The family spent many years moving around to avoid Christine’s new husband taking custody of Julian’s half-brother.

Julian was actively involved in the hacking scene in Australia during the late 80’s under the handle Mendax which means "nobly untruthful" in Latin. He worked actively with Australian hackers Phoenix, Prime Suspect, Force and Electr0n and founded a hacking group called "International Subversives", though they were all Australian. He co-authored the Australian hacker novel "Underground" with Suelette Dreyfus (the entire book is available for download or reading online here and is widely considered one of the canonical works on hackers) and is clearly credited in the introduction with the words "By Suelette Dreyfus with Research by Julian Assange".

The first chapter of Underground describes the WANK worm that targeted NASA and shut down their networks the day prior to the Gallileo launch. The source of the worm has never been identified, but hints included the fact that it was specifically programmed not to attack any New Zealand computers (believed to be because that was where the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was sunk), that it quoted Midnight Oil lyrics, which suggests an Australian author, and it uses the word "wank" which is a euphamism for masturbation in Australia. It is widely believed in the hacking community that Electr0n and Phoenix were the two primary hackers responsible. It is not thought that Assange was involved, though he almost certainly knows the identity of those who were, and they were likely members of International Subversives.

Assange’s hacking exploits are well documented in Drefus’ novel and via various discussions and blogs online and to read the intimate details of his activities I urge you to read Underground and then seek out the discussions about the hackers online. I will suffice to say, he was a prolific hacker who infiltrated thousands of systems around the world and in Australia and

Julian knew that federal police were onto him and was able to eavesdrop on them eavesdropping on him via his sophisticated knowledge of the telephone network. On October 9th 1991, AFP officer Ken Day arrived at Julian’s house where his extreme paranoia had led him to hook up his phone to his stereo and fall asleep listening to the busy signal for the tiny variations that would let him know that his line was being interfered with. When Day knocked on his door, he greeted Julian with "I’m Ken Day. I believe you’ve been expecting me"

Julian had a girlfriend during his hacking career, and they married and she fell pregnant and gave birth in 1990 to his son Daniel when Julian was just 18 years old. They split up some time after and she was awarded custody. Julian fought strongly for custody rights and to claim that she was an unfit mother, but Children’s Services did not agree and refused again and again to award him custody. This is when Julian committed the act that likely led him to the idea of WikiLeaks. He contacted many Children’s Services workers, posing as a whistleblower within the organisation investigating potential abuses of power and requesting any inside information from the organisation that might help expose any corruption within the organisation. One of the employees he contacted offered to suppy him with the internal manual for assessing suitability for custody rights. Julian used this information to gain insight into the organisation and he was subsequently able to gain custody of his son by carefully adhering to the guidelines contained in the manual and presenting information that the organisation would consider sufficient to cancel the mother’s parental custody rights.

What we know about Assange’s time spent after his arrest is that in 1993 he was involved in the launch of one of the first public ISP’s in Australia, known as Suburban Publica Access Network, attended classes in physics, mathematics and neuroscience at the University of Melbourne, where he represented the uni in the Australian National Physics Competition in 1995.

WikiLeaks

While WikiLeaks was officially founded in December 2006, it is clear that the idea was conceived by Julian very early and developed in his mind in intricate detail. He developed contingencies to deal with contingencies that dealt with contingencies. When he founded WikiLeaks, their first means of acquiring information was to run a Tor exit node, where they captured all the decrypted traffic as it left their node, leading to them acquiring about a million documents, mostly from Chinese hackers attempting to gain intelligence on western targets. This formed the basis of their claims that they had received "over a million confidential documents".

WikiLeaks shot to fame in April 2010 when they published a Baghdad airstrike video of an apache helicopter firing on civilians and killing two journalists and wounding two small children. The 38 minute video was edited down to a much shorter version with most of the banter between the men removed and released to the internet under the name “Collateral Murder”. Astonishingly, this video is still available here on YouTube today , who are yet to buckle to political pressure to remove it. It is currently just shy of 10 million views.

WikiLeaks has won a number of awards since 2006 including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award and Amnesty International’s UK Media Award for 2009 for his work exposing Kenyan election corruption. In 2010 the New York Daily Times listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of “websites that could totally change the news” although considering they may have already been in negotiations with WikiLeaks over the publication of "cablegate" documents they clearly had inside information to base this on. Assange is currently a clear leader in Time’s 2010 Person Of The Year poll, which at the time of writing is still open here.

In November 22 2010 the WikiLeaks Twitter feed announced that the nexdt release would be “7x the size of the (previous) Iraq War Logs”. Assange’s lawyer sent a letter to the US Department of State asking for their cooperation in the redaction of sensitive names from documents but were refused, saying “We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials.”

The Conspiracy Theories

One of the more solid conspiracy theories, based on a comment Julian made in an interview is that WikiLeaks deliberately arranged their hosting, dns, and banking through companies that he knew would be quick to give in to political pressure and pull the plug so that it would bring to light the hypocrisy of countries and organisations who were two-faced about their commitment to impartiality and freedom of speech. Some of the actions I have identified so far that appear to conform to this theory are as follows:

• WikiLeaks hosted the initial cables on Amazon’s EC2 cloud service, knowing full well that as one of the largest data centres in the US, they would be quickly targeted by the government and directed to shut the site down. When Amazon pulled the plug, he was ready, and quickly moved his hosting to France while simultaneously crying out that Amazon had bent to government pressure, showing it to be the obedient lap-dog of the Obama administration. The only explanation why Assange would host with Amazon if he expected them to pull the plug is so that he could expose them.
• The WikiLeaks.org domain was hosted by EasyDNS, who are a small, free DNS provider. EasyDNS claim not to have been contacted by the government at any point and asserted that the only reason they deleted his domain was due to the massive DDoS attacks which were crippling their network. When WikiLeaks.org was shut down, the site moved to a Swedish domain, WikiLeaks.se – hosted by… EasyDNS ! Why would he risk his site by using a registrar that had just deleted his domain unless that was his intention all along, and re-hosting the second domain with them was just giving them another opportunity to publicly gloat that despite being taken down a second time, the site remained online, albeit only by an IP address until the WikiLeaks.ch domain came online, yet again hosted by… you guessed it – EasyDNS.
• Swiss banks are normally thought to offer the highest level of privacy and confidentiality found anywhere in the world (in actual fact, this title should now belong to Singapore, who tightened their banking privacy laws in order to attract foreign investement) and are therefore chosen by criminals and tax evaders as the premiere location to "stash" your money safe from the prying eyes of the rest of the world. Why then, when Switzerland has so many "private" banks that enjoy the same privacy privileges as doctor-client and lawyer-client relationships, did he choose the small, state-run branch of the Swiss Postal Service known as PostFinance, knowing that if push came to shove, they would probably be the first bank to withdraw their services ? Assange apparently intends to show that even the banking haven of Switzerland is not immune to government pressure.
• Despite using domains from other countries, WikiLeaks continued to be hosted in France for some time after Amazon pulled the plug. The French Industry Minister Eric Besson demanded that the courts issue a determination on whether the hosting of the cablegate documents was in violation of French law. WikiLeaks shortly thereafter willingly pulled their French hosting without any pressure being imposed on them. Subsequently, the French judged asked to provide the ruling came back with the announcement that WikiLeaks was not breaking any French law and that there was no grounds for having the site removed. Despite this green light to host the site in France, WikiLeaks did not return to France, and continues to host in Sweden at the Pirate Bay’s PRQ hosting facility deep within an underground bunker (Google for some fabulous pics of this facility if you’re interested). Hosting the site in the country to which he is likely to be deported and brought to face a court seems an illogical and dangerous play by Assange, unless he has good reason to suspect that PRQ will not bend to government pressure and remove the site (which I believe is very unlikely). As to his motivations for hosting in Sweden rather than France, we can only wonder what sort of ace he has up his sleeve on this issue.
• Curiously, WikiLeaks’ RSS feed of 5/12/2010 leads with the story of the WANK worm before going on to attack the Australian PM and Attourney General over their comments about Assange. This use of the reference to Julian’s teenage hacking buddies was dangled in front of the world’s media screaming "Look ! Here’s a clue about our founder ! He was connected to the WANK worm, and if you research it, you’ll discover his history". Nevertheless, the message passed right over the heads of the world’s media, who completely failed to attach any significance to the mention of the worm and almost no foreign journalists bothered to open Google and discover or report on the connection between the Assange and the NASA hackers which is widely published online in Dreyfus’ novel, with attribution to Assange.

These are just a few of the major incongruous actions undertaken by the organisation that on the surface seem only able to be explained by absurd conspiracy theories, unless you consider that this is all a very carefully planned undertaking by Assange, who must have many "irons in the fire" if he is to successfully predict which organisations will pull the plug on his organisation. Whatever decisions Julian is making about his service providers, it seems that his goal is to generate the maximum public exposure of the site by repeatedly having it taken down, only to rise from the dead again like a phoenix, making everyone question the impartiality of the organisations that have spurned him, while simultaneously being impressed by the resilience and determination of the organisation to stay online despite all attempts to bring it down.

The Media Circus

The final conspiracy theory is less theory than journalistic fact. World renowned journalist Niko Price of Associated Press penned this story which says that WikiLeaks have formed an arrangement with 5 major media outlets – two in France (Le Monde and El Pais), one in Germany (Spiegel), one in the UK (The Guardian) and one in the US (The New York Times). What he reveals is these two astonishing facts:

• The media organisations are in possession of the entirety of the cables, and rather than their release schedule being dictated by Assange and WikiLeaks, it is in fact the other way around. The news agencies read the cables, analyse them, and report on them, and then inform WikiLeaks personnel that they should release the relevant cables that back up the story, which WikiLeaks then releases onto the net so that the news article and the documents it is based on are released nearly simultaneously.
• Perhaps most shockingly, the media outlets are also completely 100% responsible for the redactions to names and other sensitive information contained in the documents. At Julian’s request, around 200 journalists from all five media organisations all collaborate together and discuss possible redactions, and when they reach an agreement, the redactions are passed on to WikiLeaks to make the appropriate edits before releasing the documents.

What this shows is that despite public perception that WikiLeaks is dragging out the release to gain maximum publicity (as of today only around 980 of the 251,000+ documents have been released), this whole media circus is being run by the "old media", not the shady newcomer. What this means is that if you wanted to lay any blame for the timely publication of the documents, the lack of redaction, or collaboration to share state secrets, the blame, in the US jurisdiction at least, falls squarely on the shoulders of The New York Times. They are the real coordinators behind this storm in a teacup.

Friends and Enemies

Due to its strong stance against secrecy and censorship, WikiLeaks has found support in Internet activist group Anonymous who have initiated a revenge campaign to punish those organisations who have withdrawn services to WikiLeaks includuing PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Amazon and Twitter (for supressing #wikileaks tweets from the trending topics page, despite Twitter’s repeated insistence that it is doing no such thing). They briefly took down online payment giant PayPal’s blog site for a day and are at the time of writing, currently focussing their efforts on keeping Mastercard’s and Visa’s websites offline (which is currently successful worldwide).

The underground spying/cryptography/hacking website Cryptome has published Assange’s WikiLeaks manifestos and several essays by him on the subject of conspiracy, leaks, and cyberpunk culture. Despite generally supporting its motives, users of the site are particularly critical of Assange’s excessive ego and its apparent desire to illicit seemingly endless sums of donations. Cryptome leader John Young was initially drafted into the WikiLeaks circle by adding him to their private mailing list, though Yong claims he did not request this honour. When he expressed criticism of the organisation’s goal to raise $5 Million, he was unceremoniously removed from the mailing list.

Reference Sources

I include here the various sources used for this article as well as links to other particularly enlightening or interesting articles. At this point in time, these are some of the few notable exceptions to the parrot-talking journalism community who have for the most part failed to expose any of Julian’s past.

Wikipedia’s Julian Assange page.

Wikipedia’s WikiLeaks page.

WikiLeaks’ Manifesto, by Julian Assange

Julian Assange’s essay on Conspiracy theory.

Internet Archive of Assange’s personal blog IQ.org.

Interesting Reading

The WikiLeaks Sex Files: How Two One-Night Stands Sparked a Worldwide Hunt for Julian Assange

The WikiLeaks Cable FAQ

Open letter to Julia Gillard from Julian Assange (over 5,000 comments)

The Psychedelic Dungeon’s series of articles on WikiLeaks and Assange (good reading)

Julian Assange: One odd duck. Should we blame his mother ? Thank his mother ? (from the New Yorker)

Mohammed Abbasi’s blog. An interview with Julian Assange

Download WikiLeak’s cablegate AES256 encrypted “insurance” file (1.4 GB) via bittorrent.

Lulz

Play the WikiLeaks video game ! As Julian, you must sneak into Obama’s office, plug a USB drive into his computer, and download the secret files ! Be careful, he’s a very light sleeper !

The WikiLeaks video game

Julian Assange doesn’t need online dating, right ?

Ok this rumour/story was too amusing not to bring to light. Some bored lonely heart was browsing the dating website OKCupid, when they found a profile that sounds a lot like it could fit our Julian. Now I personally took one look at the photo and said “That’s not Julian”, but then I read the profile. How many mid-to-late 30’s melbourne anarchists are into neuroscience ? It’s not a huge stretch to reach the conclusion that this could be Julian, but I’d like some more evidence before I consider it more than amusing coincidence.

“Harry Harrison’s OKCupid profile – you be the judge