Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (9 page)

One day, Suburbia received a request from a defender of the Church of Scientology, asking that the company block a site providing confidential documents of the movement and denouncing some of their practices.

Julian got the request and refused to honor it. He passed the request onto the management. Mark Dorset, who was in charge, backed Julian up.

The site's creator was David Gerard, living in Melbourne at the time. He created the site mainly to criticize and condemn an international organization that was against freedom of speech, abused copyright and harassed anyone who criticized them. He was quickly picked up by the Scientology movement of Ron Hubbard and played a game of cat and mouse with them for years. The site about the Church of Scientology is still on line, but it hasn't been updated since 2000.

In 2010, David Gerard, journalist for
Forbes,
said that Assange had “titanium balls.” He saluted his courage of having stood up to this organization to protect someone fighting for freedom of expression.

In 1997, Julian collaborated with Suelette Dreyfus to write the book
Underground,
which told the story of six famous Australian hackers: Phoenix, Nom, Electron, Prime Suspect, Trax and Mendax.

Julian has yet to publicly admit that he was Mendax. They are similar in many ways, which would lead one to believe he was
Mendax. Julian likes to tell certain journalists that he was just an advisor for the book!

At that time, the two authors along with Ralph-Philipp Weinmann co-invented an encryption system, Rubberhose, designed as a tool for human rights organizations, which needed to protect sensitive data in the field.

In 1998, before his family battle was settled, Julian founded his first company with Richard Jones, Earthmen Technology, with the aim of developing “network intrusion detection technology.” It was a hackers' club since Richard Jones was none other than the famous Electron. Richard Jones managed most developments. Back then he wrote hacking programs for the Linux kernel and fast-pattern matching algorithms.

A bunch of geeks were developing security software in their living rooms, but their business never really took off.

Ralf-Philipp Weinmann was also part of the club. Today he's a research associate in cryptology at the University of Luxembourg. He developed a data decryption program for most Apple devices, used today as an iPhone hack.

At that time Julian was also interested in politics. He was a man of ‘challenges,' concerned by the world. He wanted what the Australian Labour Party did when it started: ensure equality. Julian was the type of person who could say: ‘I know how to do that' and really mean it, while others just kept talking about it. He was disillusioned after courting with left-wing politics, and after a meeting in Melbourne, he criticized politicians, saying that they were all mixed up. He felt the government was a joke. Although he was a brilliant, yet socially inept, geek who would rather interact with machines than humans, he was also determined to change the world.

Friends described him as a man who served no master, a Renaissance man with the tools of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries at his disposal. He decided earlier on that the world was unfair, that it could be fair and that the Internet provided the means to create a higher level of playground in terms of justice. He naturally moved toward a solution to put all of this into place, slowly but surely.

In 2003, Julian started studying again at the University of Melbourne in mathematics and theoretical physics. Damjan Vukcevic, president of the mathematics department at the University, remembers him as someone who had courageous political views, an impressive knowledge of computers and an aura of mystery.
¹²

Julian didn't graduate. He stopped studying, disappointed. He saw so many students and academic staff conduct research for the American Department of Defense and espionage agencies. In 2004, before leaving the university, he was a student at the same time as his own son Daniel, who was fifteen, and in his first year of genetics. In a presentation of his studies during a class on democracy, Julian said he was interested in neurosciences and philosophy. He also claimed that he had been to six universities, but not a single trace of any registration could be found except for the one in Melbourne. He basically sat in on a few classes. Was it the press or the man who tended to globalize experience?

In 2005, he went on a road trip to Hanoi on his motorcycle. He first wanted to follow in the footsteps of a young Che Guevara, but then decided that there were better places to visit politically.

The potholes in the road got his attention. They made it not only dangerous, but were also a reminder of the war and of others who had taken that very road.

Julian linked it to a theory on information by analogy. Using a physical description of how potholes form, he arrived at the conclusion that it was more efficient to fill a pothole as soon as it was noticed. Unfortunately, people preferred to drive and think of their little worries instead of trying to repair the road. And why did people think of their little worries? Precisely because nobody emphasized the possible impact of these potholes in the long term.

He made this allegory to get to the real problem: a lack of information. The world is made up of information potholes: if we're blinded by other worries, we let the potholes get worse.

In December 2006, he wrote to a friend to tell him about his experience in Hanoi. He thought his e-mail was so poetic that he decided to post it on his blog. Here's his final analysis:

FOX has been accused numerous times for its right-wing information serving Republicans and producing propaganda rather than journalism (a documentary revealed their practices).

Foresight is applicable on the necessary condition that it be based on the truth and nothing else. Julian explained that for foresight to be accurate, it must have correct information about the state of the world, trends and emerging phenomena. If this were not the case, the predictions of our possible future would be false and we'd be preparing for a future that didn't correspond to a current state of our society. It was the phenomenon of
garbage in, garbage out
.

Providing trustworthy information takes on meaning because it implies anticipating a view of the future. States lie and manipulate. The media deform everything. Julian now had a mission: provide quality information. The road to WikiLeaks was unfolding before him.

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master

–Leonardo da Vinci

“Boy, one day you'll be a man” is a famous phrase fathers tell their sons when they feel they're on the road to becoming adults, a sentence Julian Assange has probably never heard.

Julian never really knew his biological father. His mother Christine took care of him on her own after having split up with a rebellious young man named John Shipton who she met at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration.

At the end of the 1960s in Queensland, North East Australia, Christine Hawkins was seventeen. She lived with her parents, both of whom were university professors, Australians of Irish origin and very traditional. Her father Warren was an authoritarian who ran a tight ship at home and at work. He was very involved in his work, which was appreciated by everyone, and he strongly believed in education. In 1978, he wrote the report for a conference on training teachers in regional colleges.

Christine, who was very young at the time, felt a need for independence, to be part of this wave of freedom that was washing over Australia (and many other parts of the world) at the time. She could no longer relate to parental control and institutions.

One day, on a whim she sold her paintings, burnt her schoolbooks, bought a motorcycle, a tent and a map of Australia and left her
parents astounded. She traveled almost 1,200 miles to join the counterculture movement in Sydney. Australia also had soldiers in Vietnam, almost 60,000, and anti-war demonstrations were impassioned. New ideas and various forms of art emerged, and the pacific convergence of peoples and hippie culture replaced aboriginal culture as the main source of inspiration. The student movement led by the Australian Union of Students also created its own festival called ‘Aquarius,' first held in Canberra, then in Nimbin, a small village still considered today as the hippie capital of the country, with its incessant fight to legalize cannabis.

When Julian was born, Christine came to live on Magnetic Island, the cradle of Australian hippie culture. She returned to nature to experience true freedom, spending most of her days in a bikini. Today she likes to reminisce about this golden age where she lived with other single moms on the island's heavenly beaches. Back then she lived off selling drawings she made in the shade of banyan trees. She rented a cottage on Picnic Bay for twelve dollars a week. She walked her son on the beach, picking up the occasional
cypraea carneola
or cowry, tropical seashells that were once used as currency on nearby islands. Once a week, she would visit old Pat for tea, a former cook who lived in a stone house on the tip of Nobbys Headland.

When Julian was two years old, Christine met Brett Assange and joined him and his touring theater, enjoying a bohemian lifestyle. Brett directed while Christine built sets, created costumes and did makeup. Julian was the only child in this world of artists. Sometimes, he'd go to the local school, other times he'd be home schooled. Christine and Brett were very busy trying to successfully run their little troop. They preferred talking to Julian like an adult, giving him responsibilities at a very young age to
increase his autonomy. He also learned a lot by listening to adults talk about art and politics since Christine was still a politically committed activist. She participated in different demonstrations that she found out about and that inspired her.

One night in Adelaide when Julian was four, his mother and a friend came back from an anti-nuclear protest. They fought for many years to make the English government admit they had been conducting aerial nuclear tests in the desert of Maralinga in North West Australia for eight years, displacing more than 5,000 aboriginals from their native land. It was only in 1993 that the British agreed to allocate a budget to clean up the area. That night Christine was with a friend who claimed he had scientific proof of these tests. Driving through the suburbs of Adelaide, they realized they were being followed by an unmarked car. Sensing they were in danger, the friend who had to hand over his proof to a journalist, jumped out the car. Chased by the police, Christine was finally stopped. The police saw the young Julian in the car and said to her: “You have a child outside at 2 a.m. in the morning. I think it's time to quit politics, lady!”

Even if she had become less of an activist after this event, she was as convinced as ever of her ideas. Back at the non-conformist haven of Magnetic Island, between two tours Christine crafted coconut tree leaf hats and educated Julian, keeping him away from any kind of authority that she felt was an instrument for destroying young minds.

Eventually, her impetuosity toward the system was confirmed when she ran away from the father of her second son. Julian who was terrified by his stepfather was somewhat relieved by her actions.

Later on, Christine also pushed Julian as far as possible in the custody battle for his son Daniel. No matter what her battles were, she led them with her children under her wing like a mother wolf protecting her young and defending her territory, with her freedom of expression and living the way she saw fit, in a bikini the entire day if she felt like it. She believed that any impediment to freedom kills intelligence and creativity. It was in this view of the world that she raised her children.

While living in Melbourne, Christine noticed that Julian was increasingly interested in computers and regularly went to the shop across the street from their apartment. As soon as she could afford it, she bought him a second-hand computer.

A few years later she met Judge Leslie Ross who explained to her that her son could be considered a ‘computer junkie.' She was dumbfounded, as she hadn't seen her son's passion with a critical eye.

She would, however, defend him tooth and nail, convinced of Julian's good faith and not seeing any harm in him expressing his talent, even though he was a bit too curious.

Christine came back to her battle for freedom in 2006 by organizing a ‘Bikini March' demonstration, wearing beach fashion in the streets of Melbourne in response to sexist comments made by an Islamic leader of the city.

Imam Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly had declared in his Ramadan sermon: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside in the street, […] and the cats come and eat it... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her
hijab
, no problem would have occurred.”

Christine declared to the press, with fervor and sincerity: “We don't need this in our country, we have a wonderful country, people from all over the world come to live in Australia because they want freedom.” This fifty-five-year-old woman, walking in the streets of Melbourne in a bikini and cover-up with a sign that read ‘
He's not our mufti
¹³
,' was calling upon the conscience of Australians.