Julian Paul Assange ( ; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian publisher, journalist, He has lived in several countries, and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about
freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.
Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer.
Assange is currently wanted for questioning in Sweden regarding alleged sexual offences, and was arrested in London, England on 7 December 2010.
In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician who belonged to a New Age group called Santiniketan Park Association that was led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The couple had a son, but broke up in 1982 and engaged in a custody struggle for Assange's half-brother. His mother then took both children into hiding for the next five years. Assange moved several dozen times during his childhood, attending many schools, sometimes being home-schooled.
Hacking
In 1987, after turning 16, Assange began
hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of
Horace: "splendide mendax", or "nobly untruthful"). He and two other hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. Assange wrote down the early rules of the 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".
In response to the hacking, the Australian Federal Police raided his Melbourne home in 1991. He was reported to have accessed computers belonging to an Australian university, the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, the USAF 7th Command Group in the Pentagon In 1992, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and was released on bond for good conduct after being fined AU$2100. The prosecutor said "there is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what's the expression—surf through these various computers". The judge warned that if Assange had not had such a disrupted childhood he would have gone to jail for up to 10 years.
Assange later commented, "It's a bit annoying, actually. Because I co-wrote a book about [being a hacker], there are documentaries about that, people talk about that a lot. They can cut and paste. But that was 20 years ago. It's very annoying to see modern day articles calling me a computer hacker. I'm not ashamed of it, I'm quite proud of it. But I understand the reason they suggest I'm a computer hacker now. There's a very specific reason."
Child custody issues
In 1989, Assange started living with his girlfriend and they had a son, Daniel.
Computer programming and university studies
In 1993, Assange was involved in starting one of the first public
internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. In 1995, he wrote
Strobe, the first free and
open source port scanner. He contributed several
patches to the
PostgreSQL project in 1996. Starting around 1997, he co-invented the
Rubberhose deniable encryption system, a
cryptographic concept made into a software package for
Linux designed to provide
plausible deniability against
rubber-hose cryptanalysis; he originally intended the system to be used "as a tool for
human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field." Other
free software that he has authored or co-authored includes the
Usenet caching software NNTPCache and
Surfraw, a command-line interface for
web-based search engines. In 1999, he registered the domain leaks.org; "But", he says, "then I didn't do anything with it."
From 2003 to 2006, Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He has also studied philosophy and neuroscience. He never graduated and received the minimum passing grades in most of his math courses.
WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks was founded in 2006. That year, Assange wrote two essays setting out the philosophy behind WikiLeaks: "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not." and is a prominent media spokesman on its behalf. While newspapers have described him as a "director" or "founder" of Wikileaks, Assange has said, "I don't call myself a founder"; he does describe himself as the
editor in chief of WikiLeaks, Assange says that Wikileaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined: "That's not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are – rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It's disgraceful." He advocates a "transparent" and "scientific" approach to journalism, saying that "you can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism." Assange has called himself "extremely cynical". The
Personal Democracy Forum said that as a teenager he was "Australia's most famous ethical computer hacker." He has been described as being largely self-taught and widely read on science and mathematics, and as thriving on intellectual battle.
In late 2010, Assange was in the process of completing his memoirs for publication in 2011. the 2010 Logan Symposium in Investigative Reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and at hacker conferences, notably the 25th and 26th Chaos Communication Congress. In the first half of 2010, he appeared on Al Jazeera English, MSNBC, Democracy Now!, RT, and The Colbert Report to discuss the release of the Baghdad airstrike video by Wikileaks. On 3 June he appeared via videoconferencing at the Personal Democracy Forum conference with Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg told MSNBC "the explanation he [Assange] used" for not appearing in person in the USA was that "it was not safe for him to come to this country." On 11 June he was to appear on a Showcase Panel at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas, but there are reports that he cancelled several days prior.
On 10 June 2010, it was reported that Pentagon officials were trying to determine his whereabouts. Based on this, there were reports that U.S. officials wanted to apprehend Assange. Ellsberg said that the arrest of Bradley Manning and subsequent speculation by US officials about what Assange may be about to publish "puts his well-being, his physical life, in some danger now." In The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder called Ellsberg's concerns "ridiculous", and said that "Assange's tendency to believe that he is one step away from being thrown into a black hole hinders, and to some extent discredits, his work." In Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald questioned "screeching media reports" that there was a "manhunt" on Assange underway, arguing that they were only based on comments by "anonymous government officials" and might even serve a campaign by the U.S. government, by intimidating possible whistleblowers.
On 21 June 2010, he took part at a hearing in Brussels, Belgium, appearing in public for the first time in nearly a month. He was a member on a panel that discussed Internet censorship and expressed his worries over the recent filtering in countries such as Australia. He also talked about secret gag orders preventing newspapers from publishing information about specific subjects and even divulging the fact that they are being gagged. Using an example involving The Guardian, he also explained how newspapers are altering their online archives sometimes by removing entire articles. He told The Guardian that he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert and will avoid travel to America, saying "[U.S.] public statements have all been reasonable. But some statements made in private are a bit more questionable." He said "politically it would be a great error for them to act. I feel perfectly safe but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the U.S. during this period."
On 17 July, Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York City, replacing Assange due to the presence of federal agents at the conference. On 26 July, after the release of the Afghan War Diary, he appeared at the Frontline Club for a press conference.
Release of US diplomatic cables
On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing some of the 251,000 American
diplomatic cables in their possession, of which over 53 percent are listed as
unclassified, 40 percent are "
Confidential" and just over six percent are classified "
Secret". The following day, the Attorney-General of Australia,
Robert McClelland, told the press that Australia would inquire into Assange's activities and WikiLeaks.
The United States Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation related to the leak. US prosecutors are reportedly considering charges against Assange under several laws, but any prosecution would be difficult. which are intended to "recognise excellence in human rights journalism" Assange has said that he has been publishing factual material since age 25, and that it is not necessary to debate whether or not he is a journalist. He has stated that his role is "primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists".
Awards
Assange won the 2008
Economist Index on Censorship Award. He won the 2009
Amnesty International UK Media Award (New Media), for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in
Kenya by distributing and publicizing the
Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR)'s investigation
The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances.
In 2010 Assange was awarded the Sam Adams Award, and told the BBC, "This has been a very successful smear campaign and a very wrong one."
The extradition hearing is set for 7–8 February 2011 at Belmarsh Magistrates' court, Thamesmead, south east London.
For much of 2010, he was visiting the United Kingdom, Iceland, Sweden and other European countries. On 4 November 2010, Assange told Swiss public television TSR that he was seriously considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and moving the operation of the WikiLeaks foundation there.
In a hearing at the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court on 7 December 2010, Assange identified a post office box as his address. When told by the judge that this information was not acceptable, he submitted "Parkville, Victoria, Australia" on a sheet of paper. His lack of permanent address and nomadic lifestyle were cited by the judge as factors in denying bail. He was ultimately released, in part because journalist Vaughan Smith offered to provide Assange with an address for bail during the extradition proceedings, Smith's Norfolk mansion, Ellingham Hall.
References
External links
Full coverage at Aljazeera Profile: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at BBC News Julian Assange: Hero or Villain? – slideshow by Life magazine Archived versions of the home page on Julian Assange's web site iq.org (at the Internet Archive) Russia Today via You tube">WikiLeaks editor on Apache combat video: No excuse for US killing civilians - April 2010. Russia Today via You tube Interview with Julian Assange on release of Afghan war files - 1 August 2010 Russia Today via YouTube Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks - July 2010 video at ted.com Frost Over the World - Julian Assange - December 2010. Al Jazeera English via You tube Category:1971 births Category:Australian Internet personalities Category:Australian activists Category:Australian computer programmers Category:Australian journalists Category:Australian whistleblowers Category:Internet activists Category:Living people Category:People from Townsville, Queensland Category:University of Melbourne alumni Category:WikiLeaks
