Julian
Assange is the founder and head of WikiLeaks, an Internet website
dedicated to publishing confidential government documents and images,
which are typically obtained illegally through computer hacking.
Born
in Australia in 1971, Assange had established a reputation as a sophisticated
computer programmer who could break into even the most
well-protected networks by the time he was a teenager. Around 1987, he joined with two fellow hackers to
form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and the trio broke into computer systems from Europe to North America -- including,
most notably, networks belonging to the U.S. Defense Department and
the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In a book to which he contributed – Underground:
Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier –
Assange tried to create an aura of morality around this activity,
defining what he called the Golden
Rules of the hacker subculture:
“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.”
Hacking
remained an obsession for Assange throughout his late teens. Pursued
by authorities, he developed a nomadic lifestyle, moving from place to place, maintaining no real
home, for fear that international governmental agencies --
particularly those in the U.S. -- may have targeted him for reprisal
for the data leaks he had orchestrated.
In
September 1991, Assange hacked into the master terminal that the
Canadian telecom company Nortel maintained in Melbourne, Australia. Soon
thereafter, he was caught by federal investigators and was charged
with 31 counts of hacking and related offenses. Facing a potential
sentence of a decade behind bars, Assange pled guilty to 25 charges, 6 of which were dropped. At his final sentencing, the judge was lenient with him and he escaped with the lightest of penalties — the payment
of a small fine.
After
the hacking trial, Assange lived below the radar in Melbourne for a
number of years, working variously as a computer programmer and
software developer, among other pursuits. He also studied physics and
math at the University of Melbourne. Then, in 2006, he began the
process of creating WikiLeaks, a
website that would publish confidential government documents and
images. His inspiration for WikiLeaks was the infamous Daniel
Ellsberg, who in 1971 — the year of Assange’s birth — had
published the Pentagon
Papers. Assange has described WikiLeaks as "an activist organization" whose "method is transparency," and whose "goal
is justice."
Shortly after getting WikiLeaks off the
ground, Assange flew to Kenya to attend the World
Social Forum — a yearly symposium dedicated to the
redistribution of wealth and the eradication of capitalism — where
he delivered a presentation about his new enterprise.
Contending
that the primary objective of WikiLeaks was to expose injustice
wherever it might reside, Assange told
potential collaborators in 2006: “Our primary targets are those
highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but
we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to
reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their own governments and
corporations.” Assange further suggested
that a “social movement” to expose incriminating classified
information had the potential to “bring down many administrations
that rely on concealing reality—including the U.S. administration.”
Indeed, it has been the U.S. — rather than Russia and China — that
WikiLeaks has targeted most intensively.
At a London ceremony in June 2009, Amnesty International honored Assange with its Media Award, in recognition of
his expose of hundreds of recent extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya.