Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (11 page)

Daniel Ellsberg will not let the US government condemn Julian Assange and Bradley Manning: “Calling them terrorists is not only mistaken, it's absurd and slanderous. Neither of them are terrorists any more than I am, and I'm not.”

The spiritual father had woken up, finally offering recognition to the one who hadn't had a guide, pushing him to believe that he could offer his self as a sacrifice for the truth and be absolved like Ellsberg was in his time.

Before we arrived, the world lacked nothing, after our arrival, it will not lack anything

–Omar Khayyam

Throughout his philosophical journey, Julian Assange has come to believe that humans are not a left-wing idea against a right-wing one, or faith against reason, but rather individuals against institutions.

After having read Kafka, Koestler and Solzhenitsyn, he believes that hierarchical institutions have corrupted truth, creativity, art, love and compassion.
¹⁶

His trips, his involvement in the Internet for all, his four years of study, as well as his political activities, all represent a sum of experiences pushing him to envision the world in a new, more global way.

He mirrored the world between philosophy and the scientific mind, and wanted to share this vision, mixing personal thoughts with famous quotes.

Julian launched his blog in June 2006, which he amusingly called ‘IQ' for
Intellectual Quotient
. Later on, he posted on the potential significance of this acronym. He particularly liked
Infinite Quest
,
International Question
and even
Isaac's Quest
, a reference to the Bible character in Genesis. In the Bible, God asks Abraham,
Isaac's father, to sacrifice his only son. Abraham fears God and obeys him, but just before killing him, an angel stops him and saves Isaac. During the First and Second Crusades, Isaac was considered a martyr and an example to follow. He's the one we sacrifice out of fear, and the one God saves.

Julian started his first post with a quote by Douglas Adams, English author and dramatist who died in 2001. He used this quote, but omitted the author:

His view of diplomacy and war was dominated by logic. Julian was increasingly interested in how governments work and analyzed them with his literary culture and scientific sensibility.

Julian weeded through research project reports tagged ‘MDA904.' Reports with this code name were research documents ordered by the Maryland Procurement Office, accused today of being an umbrella for the National Security Agency (NSA), one of the branches of the CIA.

In November 2006, Julian wrote his first article entitled ‘State and Terrorist Conspiracies,' as if it were a research paper. In it, he described a report by mathematicians and applied the graph theory to analyze terrorist conspiracies.

In December 2006, Julian re-used the analysis applying it to state conspiracies and wrote his manifesto entitled ‘Conspiracy as Governance.' He then expanded on “this understanding of
terrorist organizations and turns it on the likes of its creators, where it becomes a knife to dissect the power conspiracies used to maintain authoritarian government.”

Julian also explained what bad governance is by defining it as ‘conspiratorial': Civil servants who secretly collaborate work to the detriment of populations. According to him, when internal lines of communication within organizations are interrupted, the flow of information among conspirators starts to disappear. When the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. That's when leaks become a weapon of information warfare.

Even though Julian kept working for a few years as a developer, network administrator and security advisor, he felt destined for something greater: exposing state secrets to the light of day to see the true workings of the world and its geopolitical interaction. He was convinced that the world would be revolutionized and felt he had a duty to history.

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 greater good. Carrying out actions against conspiracies means carrying out a war against secrecy and tirelessly weakening bad governance, state or institutional.

Julian was imbued with hacker ethics. He believed that sharing information was a powerful source of good and it was his duty as a hacker to share his expertise by offering free software and easy access to IT resources any time he could.

That was what he had started to do with Suburbia.

Most hackers and free and open-source software programmers adhere to this ‘rule,' and many act accordingly by creating and
giving away software. Some go even further and believe that any information must be free and any proprietary control is bad.

The similarity between these ethics and WikiLeaks' philosophy is fundamental: to be a tool for sharing information. The quality of information was seen as particularly defining. ‘Bad information' has to be fought without question.

WikiLeaks main goal is to provide raw, quality information following the founding principles of Wikipedia: online encyclopedia (knowledge for all), a neutral point of view (information remains pure), free content (content can be re-used), interacting in a respectful and civil manner (ethics ensured by members), and not having firm rules (errors are self-regulated by the community).

However, the nature of the content aimed by WikiLeaks – convergence with the world of journalism, which was also involved in sharing information – had to be questioned.

In the beginning, Julian didn't see himself as a journalist, but did say he'd provide journalists with quality information. He felt a burning desire to bring some class to said profession. He believed in freedom of the press (Suburbia mission) and easily understood that the press remained a choice as means of distribution.

Defined in theses terms: what was considered quality information? It was first and foremost relevant information that would touch readers: secret documents that concerned the way the world was run, major corporations, banks and religions.

A journalist also needed ‘trustworthy' information, which was verified, checked and regrouped. WikiLeaks must be provided with false leaks to be able to check their veracity.

Then it was up to journalists to select the information to be considered and regroup it if necessary, cross-reference it and use it. This information had to be complete and easily accessible.

WikiLeaks didn't want to replace journalism. Some members still thought that traditional journalism, in its current state, was in transformation and they had little confidence in mainstream media, which struggled with commercial and political pressure.

This was why their choice of broadcasting would first be done using alternative Internet media. WikiLeaks wanted to give birth to ‘intensified' journalism, where competences and responsibilities would be divided along the way and where some people would take side roads to give the world something to think about.

Julian Assange was looking for no less than the biggest collaboration with independent and organically modern media on the basis of correct information – which had not been tampered with or cloaked by any kind of secrecy – in order to be able to extract some sense and ideally, more truth. The people who participated in the workings of war machines had to face their responsibilities, even cases of conscience, which were previously preserved by the nature of secrecy.

Julian Assange had been hatching his plan for a long time. Back in 2001, he had already started looking for a server to host critical content, and eventually called upon the Cypherpunk hacking network to host documents and images. Under the name ‘Proff', he shared his philosophical thoughts, security tips and program discoveries on the Cypherpunk mailing list. “The content is legal for the moment, constitutionally protected in the United States. If you're happy to host cryptome.org, then you'll perhaps be happy to host this material,” he wrote in his contact email to the network.

Cryptome is a website hosted in the United States that has been collecting thousands of documents since 1996 that were either controversial or have been censured by various governments. John Young, a New York architect, is the owner of the site.

It was quite logical for Julian to ask him for help to launch WikiLeaks in October 2006. Here's his e-mail request:

John Young accepted and created wikileaks.org, wikileaks.cn and wikileaks.info. He then received a password for the members' mailing list of the WikiLeaks project.

Every email sent has the following header:

This mailing list was set up for members to collaborate on the project, give advice, share their views on the visual identity of the site, the layout, realization, etc.

The goal was to stick to the look and feel of a
wiki
, a collaborative website known for its simple graphics and ease of use. The pages feature interconnected hyperlinks with content
such as writing, illustrations, etc. that can be modified by any of the pages' visitors.

Now they needed an illustration, a logo to establish WikiLeaks' identity. The discussions were going well on the proposal sent in by someone called Ani Lovins; he drew the first WikiLeaks logo: the mole.

E-mails were exchanged among WikiLeaks members throughout the world. The Germans loved it, the Americans discussed it, and Ani Lovins explained: “The group has already prototyped the platform; some technical details regarding security have been changed.”

Every WikiLeaks volunteer had an alias as a minimum guarantee of security. Julian gave them the following tips when making a name for themselves on the Internet: “An alias has to be easy to remember. It has to be a name that you can spell in one or two ways, be gender neutral or masculine. Two syllables for the
first name and one for the last name is the best alias so that it can be easily found, even with a typo. In fact, search engines are designed to improve queries: when you do a word search, it also searches for synonyms and similar spellings. If you type the complete name in Google, the alias should return as many hits as possible. It's a plus if this also happens with just the last name. Finally, it has to be simple, and the owner has to feel a sense of pride using their name.”

Here are a few famous aliases of Australian Labor Party members that Julian gives as an example, specifying that all the good aliases do not necessarily meet all the above-mentioned criteria: Hillary Bray, Spi Ballard, Lee Kline, Harry Harrison, Jack Lovejack, Larry Lovedocs, etc.

Once a WikiLeaks member created their alias, they could become visible, and in order to divulge information they needed maximum visibility.

Let's have a look at the name Harry Harrison, the alias Julian used. First, it has to be said that Harrison is a science fiction author, so his name is indexed because of his novels. Next, the author is the first hit that appears when this name is typed into Google. However, by making a typo in the name while respecting the phonetics, the links referenced on the author always appear on top. This is the perfect alias to be able to hide!

For WikiLeaks, it was imperative to find support from known, respectable and serious people. On December 9 2006, Julian decided to send an e-mail to Daniel Ellsberg, his mentor, for the activities he carried out on revealing secrets. He also enjoyed quite a bit of public notoriety.