Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (8 page)

“Sure, WikiLeaks is still a small business even if it has a global impact. And like any start-up, the boss or leader of the movement is very important. The idea is based on him, on what he thinks. He's the character under attack. To say that it's a move by the government to diminish the movement is ridiculous! You could also say that the American government was waiting for the man's weakness to be expressed to put him back in his place.”

“He's still very interesting to me as a man, adventurer, prophet or hero...”

Élise and Xavier talked for more than an hour. They left the bar, promising to share information on the subjects they were both interested in: freedom, Anonymous, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

Julian was candid when at age sixteen he discovered a new playground with his Commodore 64. It was such an extraordinary inspiration for his mind to be challenged in such a simple and direct way. He was like a child who had discovered a world where everything was possible, a world where he could find his place and where he felt ‘at home.' He enjoyed this return to nature, to his human nature. He felt his mind being shaped, its density and vitality, which made him stronger.

At the beginning of 1990 Julian, his mother and her new friend lived in a shack in a Melbourne suburb. When he was eighteen, Julian met a woman two years younger than him, intelligent and slightly introverted, and quickly started a relationship with her.

The young couple then moved a few kilometers away from their ‘parents' and set up house in a cottage divided into two apartments. Julian spent most of his time in front of a computer screen, and as the Internet continued to expand, the number of computers to hack into grew, offering Julian an exceptional place to learn.

His skin color changed. Mendax took on a pale, vampire-like tint and fed at night, as the sun and the light of day couldn't give him what he needed. His drink was a row of binary code, ideally some Basic or assembly language.

Even the birth of his son Daniel didn't pry Julian away from his newly acquired Amiga 500. His neighbors were surprised to see this young girl alone, shopping with a baby in a stroller, going to the laundromat to wash baby clothes. It was so rare to see them together!

A little while later, feeling isolated, the little family returned to Melbourne. When the police broke into their apartment, the young mother was shocked. The couple fell apart completely and split up. His wife left with their child and Julian ended up alone.

In October 1991, Julian was in terrible shape. Sleeping at night brought its share of ghosts, as he knew he was being watched. Mendax started to dream of police raids. He dreamt of noises on the steps of the gravel parking lot, shadows in the dark near daybreak, armed police squads busting down the door and crashing into the room at 5 a.m. He rarely slept, rarely ate. His house was a real mess. His collection of old
Scientific American
and
New Scientist
magazine were piled up in a corner. He had been dumped. He only communicated with his friends at International Subversives by phone.

He found a vital balance thanks to the beehive he kept. Bees fascinated him. He liked watching them interact and studying their sophisticated social structure. He took advantage of their impressive number to hide his diskettes under the cover. It was only after he hid them that he could try to get some proper sleep. Julian trained the bees not to sting him when he archived his diskettes. He fed the bees using a cloth moistened with sugar water and the sweat from his armpits. The bees had associated his odor to flower nectar.

He connected his phone to a radio and listened to police signals. It wasn't surprising when a police officer knocked at
his door. He was however shocked to be accused of some thirty cyber crimes without even having taken the time to put away his diskettes in their honey-filled hideout.

While waiting for the verdict of the trial, Julian fell into a depression and was hospitalized for a week. He then tried to spend some time with his mother, but after a few days, he set off to wander and slept in parks. He lived and rambled through dense eucalyptus forests of the national park Dandenong Ranges
¹¹
, full of mosquitoes that ate at his face. This was a mystical experience for him. First, his internal dialogue was strongly stimulated by a desire to talk, tell stories and express himself. There weren't any echoes in this forest, as his inner voice finally calmed down. His vision of himself disappeared to give way to more philosophical questions. What I am doing with my life?

He felt a need: the need for experience. He then saw what to do with it, which would satisfy his internal thirst. He had an idea: “After a certain amount of experimenting, I'll know how to feed my character.”

In 1994, he registered with Central Queensland University for a beginner's course in programming. Why would a hacker like him sign up for a beginner's course in programming? Did he need to update his programming skills?

In the world of geeks, hackers exchange programs and information, and so training continues. Computer languages are like human languages: the more you learn them, the quicker you learn them. But this is obviously not why he registered.

Did he want to show his good behavior after this long trial? It was possible, but why sign up for an option he knew perfectly well? To ace exams “with two hands tied behind his back” or to forge a new identity? It remained a mystery, as he was engaged
in another battle, this one for the custody of his son, which he had started at the beginning of his own trial.

Julian and his mother were engaged in a battle to get complete custody of Daniel, a legal battle that proved difficult, and on some points, harder than his own defense as a ‘criminal.' Julian and Christine were convinced that the mother of little Daniel and her new boyfriend were putting the child's life in danger and had firmly decided to limit her rights. What did he have to offer in return? Maybe an all-new registration at the university would make him look like a good young father? But the report of the child protection agency (Health and Community Services) turned down their request.

The advanced explanations by the agency were so inadmissible that Julian and his mother weren't satisfied. They were confronted with a lack of professionalism and respect for their request.

The agency concluded that the child lived in a healthy family environment. Julian and Christine couldn't find any means to appeal the decision. They felt helpless toward the bureaucratic machine, a fine example of injustice. They found out very quickly that the agency didn't pay enough attention to their request. They also noticed that their case wasn't isolated and that there were many things wrong with the administration.

Christine always said that bureaucracy is a system that crushes people. She raised Julian to have profound antipathy for this absurd system, which only led to injustice. At that moment, he experienced it firsthand. The battle for custody turned into a bitter fight against the institution. Christine and Julian organized a campaign against the local child authorities. They called it Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection (PIICP).

Christine had a past as an activist, she knew how it worked: find people on the inside of the agency, meet them, talk to them, establish trust so that they would confide in you and divulge
the secrets weighing down on them over time. Then patiently, with presence and insistence, give them the strength to express themselves to a greater number. By meeting them, the PIICP members wanted to force them to speak and then secretly record them. The Australian organization called Action for the Freedom of Information and obtained documents from the Health and Community Services. Then, they distributed flyers “You can remain anonymous if you want” to the workers of the child protection agency, encouraging them to provide information from inside the agency, which fed a database they had just created. One of the workers gave them an important internal handbook.

The battle was almost won, as they had a mole on the inside that guaranteed the veracity of the information and digging burrows with ease in the ground from the inside of a movement falling apart. They said moles were blind and didn't need to rise above their action in order to understand the implications and consequences. Others were there to analyze and guide those who wanted to rebel.

A WikiLeaks embryo was growing: digging for the truth, encouraging leaks, collecting the information for citizens' needs.

In 1995, a parliamentary committee accused the agency of vagueness and not properly handling some less straightforward cases. Only in 1998, and after three-dozen phone calls and hearings, Julian received an arrangement with his ex-wife concerning Daniel's custody.

This experience was extremely difficult and stressful for Julian. Christine said that he was totally committed. He felt like after a post-traumatic shock, like coming back from war, and his once brown hair lost all its color.

Julian needed to get away from everything for a while. He decided to take a trip during the entire last semester of 1998. He wrote this e-mail:

Back from his trip, he decided to lead a normal life. It was time for him to put his knowledge to the service of businesses and organizations. He wanted some peace of mind and some new experiences in the real world.

His view on equality had him gravitate toward open source. In 1995, he wrote Strobe, a free and open-source security tool for computers. In 2000, he created Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines. The hacker community considered him to be a good developer.

Julian had a large part to play in the development of Internet in Australia. As of 1993, he was a system administrator at Suburbia, Australia's oldest public access network. It was launched in 1990 and open to everyone in 1993 even before the Internet became a commercially viable network. While other competitors forged a commercial identity, Suburbia remained true to its original ambition: offer a private and secure system that supports newsgroups and the editing of online content.

Suburbia was and is a non-profit organization that has always fought for freedom of the press. The organization didn't receive any grants and existed only thanks to the generosity of its members who gave their time and equipment without obligation.

The members included convinced judges and politicians as well as hackers. They agreed on the idea that everyone online had the right to publish without worrying about politics, opinions, pressure or financial means.

Since 2008, Suburbia stopped accepting new members, as the demands were too high. Nevertheless, they said that they could be contacted by NGOs with a specific need or if co-opted by a current member. They could then filter out nasty intrusions that didn't serve Suburbia's basic interests.

By analyzing domain names, one could see that suburbia.com. au hosted
www.whistleblowers.org.au
on one of their servers. A
whistleblower's standard procedure was to expose bad practices by providing evidence of wrongdoing. The whistleblower then investigated using different means that were not divulged, especially not to the media. The risk to informers was high, as the people they accused were sometimes criminals, people in important positions or entire organizations. They often made serious enemies in political parties, state departments and major corporations.

As retaliation, the whistleblower was often attacked personally by being called a troublemaker, crazy person or malicious liar. They might have been given the cold shoulder from colleagues and superiors or have been attacked in other ways, even physically.

Brian Martin, Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia had been active in the organization since 1991 and was president of Whistleblowers Australia from 1996 to 1999.

In an article of the
UPIU
, an advice paper for future journalists, Martin explained: “The wider picture is exercise of power in society. I think we're all mostly better off when people are more equal. That means we're able to speak out and freely negotiate things. In most organizations, and certainly in governments, they're very hierarchical and people at the bottom don't have free speech. People can stand up on a street corner and say lots of things, or these days you can set up a blog and write any comments that you like. Basically, if you say a bunch of tripe, you're going to lose credibility.” The journalist added: “Perhaps losing one's credibility and reputation should be the only punishment for people who make false accusations, and when unethical and criminal actions are brought to light, it seems natural that whoever is exposed suffers public embarrassment. Too often however, the whistleblower is attacked for going public with his evidence.”

When Julian started to work for Suburbia in 1993, Brian Martin and his whistleblowers had already been active for two years. As network administrator at Suburbia, he had access to all the information circulating around the site, which gave him a lot of ideas.