Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (4 page)

On November 5, 2010 Élise formulated a new opinion of her ex-boyfriend.

When the interview was over she turned off the TV, fascinated by the world she had caught a glimpse of.

Was Xavier really putting his own life at risk to search for information? She was impressed.

She brought back her tray to the kitchen and put the kettle on. She then walked toward her desk and turned on the computer, waited until it booted and launched Radiohead's
Kid A
.

In the kitchen, the water was boiling. She filled a cup, grabbed a tea bag from the cupboard and put it in a saucer with her cup. She brought it all to her desk and sat down in front of her computer. She logged onto
www.heroesbysophox/wordpress.com
, password: dontforgetseb.

The homepage appeared with Pop-art-type photos of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, John F. Kennedy, and even more personalities as she continued to build her blog. She had been writing about Michael Jackson for a few days now. As the King of Pop, he took up all the space on her blog.

She'd only been blogging for two months and posted about life and the world. Did she write about stuff she'd put in her diary? No, not really because she didn't just write for herself. She liked to get comments from other bloggers, and she received all kinds of comments. She got personal comments, help with the blog layout, and details about the major events and personalities she wrote about. It surprised her to see all the fans these ‘murdered prophets' have. As well, fans were always interested in murderers and investigations, as the Internet helped them come up with all kinds of theories. Everything was on the Internet, the good, the bad and the ugly as far as information was concerned, and all these opinions were allowed under the cloak of anonymity, so people let their imaginations run wild, while others investigate like on NCIS.

Élise checked out her blog and went directly to the category ‘Moods' to share what she had just experienced. She wrote…

Julian Assange

Published on
5 November 2010
by
sophox
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I've just found out who Julian Assange is on TSR. I don't know much about WikiLeaks, but now Mr. WikiLeaks has shown up on my media radar.

The man is impressive, calm and sure of himself. I couldn't help but notice his little sarcastic smile. It's tough to say whether he really feels superior, but it seems like he's making fun of us by sitting straight on his chair, as if he were holding back a huge burst of laughter.

“It's a battle between Hillary Clinton and I.” Does this amuse him? I'm intrigued. He seems to be threatened, since he is ready to ask for political asylum in Switzerland. How can a single person scare the Americans and suddenly become the man to take down?

He's a fugitive. It must be tough. Doesn't he take the time to settle down every once in a while rather than live like a nomad? The stakes must really be high.

We're very nice to want to grant him asylum in our country. I don't know how I feel about that, but I will explore how I feel.

He says that passion energizes him, but does passion deserve all these sacrifices? I think it's all a bit much. If you're going to be Public Enemy Number One, it better be worth it. Yes, we're being lied to; yes, governments are running the world while we work like idiots for two weeks of paid vacation. But what can we do about it? I don't even feel like my vote counts at the municipal level. Whether I'm there or not doesn't make a difference.

So why has he set this thing in motion and being considered a dangerous man? I think he has a kind of angelic face.

This man is mysterious, so I'm going to look into it. Today, I declare the category ASSANGE open in my blog.

This entry was published in
Moods
. You can bookmark it as a favorite with
this permalink
.

Ye who enter into the ball of life, choose your mask wisely

–André Maurois

Mendax. It was his world from now on. A world of electrons and switches: the beauty of the baud.

Julian joined forces with two hacker friends, Prime Suspect and Trax, to create a group called International Subversives. They hacked into already existing phone lines without paying.

They poked around. They broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including the network of the US Department of Defense, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory: a government research institution specialized in science and technology.

The three boys were exploring. The golden rules of hacking already apply: don't 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.

They existed online devoid of skin color, nationality and religious dogma. They created another life for themselves, a second life that sometimes came dangerously close to obsession, almost at the point of forgetting or abandoning the first. Curiosity like a drug: one had the urge to dig deeper, the need to know and understand, excel and outdo them all. The hours of the night went by in a strange way, quickly. Eyes, hands, computer screen:
everything else disappeared bit by bit. There was nothing left but the clicking of the keyboard in the silence of obscurity. Was someone there, could someone hear him, could someone see him while he was no longer his physical self? He was not lost. Nobody knew what he looked like, but he had a name. It was Mendax.

One needs some know-how to be able to pass through the hidden electronic fields that connect telecom systems and computer networks. It was a nice challenge for the outsiders of International Subversives. For them it was much more than just a simple game of chess. Exploring the world and being involved in international politics from their own bedroom gave them the feeling of being on the right path. Solving problems, building things and believing in freedom and voluntary mutual help were the major pieces of the game played by Julian and his two friends.

It was experience that continued to feed young Julian's personality. He felt like he could help change things that he found unbearable. Although one still had to recognize injustice, have ideals and understand the world, online people were judged by what they thought and what they said, not by what they looked like.

Julian was a very sharp young man, easily frustrated by slow thinking minds. All his real rivals were online. He was creative and never had to waste his time engaging in boring tasks, except to acquire more skills.

His new tools gave him an ever-increasing sense of freedom. His desire to be online verged on fascination since he worked at it non-stop.

At the same time, he noticed that authoritarians fed on censorship and secrecy. They distrusted voluntary mutual help and sharing information. They only appreciated cooperation when they could control it. Julian therefore developed an instinctive
hostility toward censorship and secrecy. He detected those who made use of force or ruse to dominate responsible adults.

Julian was eighteen years old and had the preoccupations that boys his age had, despite a propensity to prefer computers to humans. He fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl and left his mother's home to live with her. A few weeks after moving in together, the police suddenly broke into their apartment.

“Federal Police, don't move! Take all that equipment away! It looks like you're involved in a robbery of 500,000 dollars at Citibank. We know you're a hacker... Mendax, right?”

Julian didn't answer.

“We know you like to do odd jobs, but this time, we're taking everything with us. You're finished hacking for tonight.”

Finally, no charges were brought against Julian and he picked up his equipment a few days later. He learned his lesson this time: vigilance and discretion were his hacking keywords from now on.

Julian and his girlfriend lived in a squat in Melbourne for some time until she found out that she was pregnant. Julian wanted to assume his responsibilities and decided to get closer to his mother, Christine. He also put his university studies on hold to be able to care for his young son, Daniel.

Hacking, the best nighttime activity ever, remained a passion for Julian despite his role as a young father. And the thrill of digital exploration was still there, too. Knowledge grew within International Subversives. The authorities kept an eye on their activities, and the federal police launched an investigation into the group's activities called
Operation Weather
. The cat and mouse game was on.

The International Subversives paid regular visits to the master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian telecom based in Melbourne. One night in September 1991, Julian hacked into the system a bit earlier than usual, but this time, a Nortel administrator was still online and detected Julian immediately. The error was fatal and he had to come up with a retort quickly.

He made up his mind and went with humor. He sent the following message to the administrator: “I have taken control,” he wrote without giving his name. “For years, I have been struggling in this grayness. But now I have finally seen the light.”

The administrator didn't reply, so he decided to send a final message: “It's been nice playing with your system. We didn't do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don't call the police.”

But the identification of the incursions of International Subversives into Nortel's system arrived just in time for
Operation Weather
. The administrator's presence helped trace the intrusion and localize the phone line used by Mendax.

As for Julian, he listened to the conversations of the investigators of
Operation Weather
. He knew that they knew. He knew that they were coming to get him. Running away would be admitting a crime he didn't believed he had committed, and so he waited, frozen with fear.

When investigator Ken Day arrived at Julian's place, he told him:

“I bet you knew we were coming.”

Today a risk management consultant, Ken Day wrote this report on Julian: “He was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything. He was opposed to Big Brother, to the restriction of freedom of communication. His moral sense about breaking into computer systems was: ‘I'm not going to do
any harm, so what's wrong with it?' But that's a bit like a burglar saying: ‘I'm just going to wander through your house, but I won't touch anything.' It doesn't quite cut it.”

It was all too much for little Daniel's mom. She couldn't handle this danger, neither for her nor for her child. She didn't approve at all of the activities of Julian and his acolytes, and decided to leave Julian. In fact, one could say that she left her ‘husband,' since they had made it official during an informal ceremony some time before the baby was born.

Australia was one of the first countries in the world to have persecuted hackers. The government founded a cell to battle computer crime in 1989, following an affair that NASA called an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor.' A few minutes before the
Atlantis
shuttle was to be launched in October 1989, the computers of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington suddenly froze up. All of a sudden nobody could use their computer because the passwords had been changed. The astonishment could be read on everybody's face when the following message appeared on every screen: “
Your system has been officially WANKed.
” The hacker group who committed this offence called themselves ‘Worms Against Nuclear Killers.' At the same time as the sentence appeared, an audio message could be heard from the verse of a Midnight Oil song: “
You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.
”

Nobody ever imagined something like this could happen; NASA's computer security staff was stunned. The investigations of the federal police led to six young hackers of the Melbourne suburbs. Which ones were fans of Midnight Oil? Probably all of them! The Australian federal authorities couldn't find enough evidence to prosecute the authors of this crime, but their suspicions
clearly pointed to the hackers who had already infiltrated a range of prestigious computer systems of universities, companies and telecoms. The government had to act. Due to a lack of evidence, the official response took the shape of a power of deterrence.