Who is Julian Assange?

Julian Paul Assange (ə-SAHNZH; born 1971) is an Australian internet activist and journalist best known for his involvement with Wikileaks, a whistleblower website. Assange was a physics and mathematics student, a hacker and a computer programmer, before taking on his current role as spokesperson and editor in chief for Wikileaks.

Biography
Early life
According to The New Yorker, Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, in 1971. In the past, Assange did not publish his exact age, only stating that he was born in the 1970s.

Assange has said that his parents ran a touring theatre company, and that he was enrolled in 37 schools and six universities in Australia over the course of his early life. From age eleven to sixteen, he lived on the run with his mother and half-brother, avoiding his half-brother's father who was believed to belong to a cult led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne.

Assange helped to write the 1997 book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier which credits him as researcher. It draws from his teenage experiences as a member of a hacker group named "International Subversives", which involved a 1991 raid of his Melbourne home by the Australian Federal Police.

Wired, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Sunday Times have pointed out that there exist similarities between Assange and the person called "Mendax" in the book.

The New Yorker has identified Assange as Mendax and explains its origin from a phrase of Horace: "splendide mendax", or "nobly untruthful". Assange was reported to have accessed various computers (belonging to an Australian university, Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, and other organizations) via modem[ to test their security flaws; he later pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and was released on bond for good conduct after being fined AU$2100.

According to the Personal Democracy Forum, Assange founded a civil rights group for children called "Pickup".

Computer programming
After the hacking trial, Assange lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software.

In 1995, Assange wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. Strobe inspired Fyodor to develop the Nmap port scanner.

Starting around 1997, Assange co-invented "Rubberhose deniable encryption", a cryptographic concept made into a software package for Linux designed to provide plausible deniability against rubber-hose cryptanalysis, which he originally intended "as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field".

Other free software that Assange has authored or co-authored includes the Usenet caching software NNTPCache and Surfraw, a command line interface for web-based search engines.

University studies and travel
Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne until 2006, when he began to focus heavily on Wikileaks.

He has been described as being largely self-taught and widely read on science and mathematics. He has also studied philosophy and neuroscience. vOn his personal web page Assange described how he represented his University at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005.

Assange has said that it is "pretty much true" that he is constantly on the move, and that he is "living in airports these days".

Assange has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and has visited many other places including Vietnam, Sweden, Iceland, Siberia, Iraq, Belgium, and the United States.

Assange began renting a house in Iceland on 30 March 2010, from which he and other activists, including Birgitta Jónsdóttir, worked on the collateral murder video.

In May 2010 upon landing in Australia, his passport was taken from him, and when it was returned he was told that his passport was to be cancelled. The Australian Customs Service stated that such confiscation was only because his passport was worn, and that Assange was otherwise free to travel.

In 1999, Assange registered the website, Leaks.org; "but", he says, "then I didn't do anything with it".

WikiLeaks
Main article: Wikileaks
Wikileaks was founded in 2006.[1][19] Assange now sits on its nine-member advisory board,[26] 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", but he does describe himself as the editor in chief of Wikileaks, and has stated that he has the final decision in the process of vetting documents submitted to the site. Like all others working for the site, Assange is an unpaid volunteer.

Assange was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award (New Media), awarded for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya with the investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances.


Julian Assange at New Media Days '09 in CopenhagenIn accepting the Amnesty International Media Award 2009, Mr. Assange stated:

It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented. Through the tremendous work of organizations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR, Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world. I know that they will not rest, and we will not rest, until justice is done.

—“WikiLeaks wins Amnesty International 2009 Media Award for exposing Extra judicial killings in Kenya”.

He has also won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award; and various other media awards.

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.

Public appearances
Since WikiLeaks has opened, Assange has appeared at news-oriented conferences such as New Media Days '09 in Copenhagen, the 2010 Logan Symposium in Investigative Reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and at hacker-oriented conferences, notably at the 25th and 26th Chaos Communication Congress (representing Wikileaks together with Daniel Schmitt).

In the first half of 2010, he has appeared on international news agencies such as Al Jazeera English, MSNBC, Democracy Now, RT, and The Colbert Report to discuss the release of the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike video by Wikileaks. The same was covered in literary journalistic fashion by The New Yorker.

On 3 June Assange appeared via Skype at the Personal Democracy Forum conference with Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel 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 are trying to determine his whereabouts. Based on this, there have been reports that U.S. officials want to apprehend Assange.

Ellsberg said that the arrest of Bradley Manning and subsequent speculation by U.S. 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, 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 Assange took part in 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 "[US] 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 US during this period".

On 17 July, Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City on 17 July, replacing Assange due to the presence of federal agents at the conference. He announced that the WikiLeaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended. Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that WikiLeaks was now accepting submissions again. On 26 July, after the release of the Afghan War Diary, Assange appeared at the Frontline Club for a press conference.

Legal difficulties
In the mid-1990's Assange stood trial for breaking into several government and corporate servers. In August 2010, Assange found himself the subject of two charges in Sweden - one of rape and one of molestation - but the rape charges were dropped within days. Assange has denied both accusations and referred to them as "dirty tricks" in response to his recent activities on Wikileaks.

Characterisation of Assange and his work
Assange 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".

In 2006, Assange was described in the magazine CounterPunch as "president of a NGO and Australia's most infamous former computer hacker". The Age has called him "one of the most intriguing people in the world" and "internet's freedom fighter". Assange has called himself "extremely cynical". The Personal Democracy Forum said that as a teenager he was "Australia's most famous ethical computer hacker".

Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg stated in an interview that Assange "is serving our (American) democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country." On the issue of national security considerations for the U.S., Ellsberg added that:

..any serious risk to that national security is extremely low. There may be 260,000 diplomatic cables. It’s very hard to think of any of that which could be plausibly described as a national security risk. Will it embarrass diplomatic relationships? Sure, very likely—all to the good of our democratic functioning. [...] "[Assange is] obviously a very competent guy in many ways. I think his instincts are that most of this material deserves to be out. We are arguing over a very small fragment that doesn’t. He has not yet put out anything that hurt anybody’s national security."[70]

Daniel Yates, a former British military intelligence officer, believes Julian Assange has gravely jeopardized the lives of numerous Afghan civilians for his central role in publishing the classified Afghan War Diary.

"As more detail of the information contained in the ‘Afghan war logs’ emerges it appears clear to me that, despite his protests otherwise, Julian Assange has seriously endangered the lives of Afghan civilians. The logs contain detailed personal information regarding Afghan civilians who have approached NATO soldiers with information. It is inevitable that the Taliban will now seek violent retribution on those who have co-operated with NATO. Their families and tribes will also be in danger. That danger should not be underestimated."

Personal life
In 1989, Assange married in an unofficial ceremony at the age of 18 and later had a son. His wife left him in the mid-1990's and took their son and they engaged in a lengthy custody struggle.