Julian Paul Assange (
/əˈsɑːnʒ/ ə-SAHNZH; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian journalist,[4][5][6] publisher,[7][8] and Internet activist. He is the spokesperson andeditor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for news leaks. He has lived in several countries, and has made occasional public appearances to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.
/əˈsɑːnʒ/ ə-SAHNZH; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian journalist,[4][5][6] publisher,[7][8] and Internet activist. He is the spokesperson andeditor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for news leaks. He has lived in several countries, and has made occasional public appearances to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism. | Julian Assange | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Assange in 2010 | |
| Born | 3 July 1971 [1][2][3] Townsville, Queensland, Australia |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne |
| Occupation | Editor-in-chief and spokesperson for WikiLeaks |
| Known for | WikiLeaks |
| Children | Son |
| Awards | Economist Freedom of Expression Award (2008) Amnesty International UK Media Award (2009) Sam Adams Award (2010) |
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 Africa, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer.[9] In 2010, he published classified details about US involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media partners began publishing secret US diplomatic cables.[10] TheWhite House has called Assange's release of the diplomatic cables "reckless and dangerous".[11]
For his work with WikiLeaks, Assange received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya and Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.[12] Assange has worked as a computer programmer and was a hacker during his youth.[13]
Assange is currently wanted for questioning in Sweden regarding alleged sexual offences, and was arrested in London, England on 7 December 2010.[14] He is currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an extradition hearing.[15][16] He has denied the allegations and claimed they are politically motivated.[17][18]
Early life
Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, and spent much of his youth living on Magnetic Island.[19]
When he was one year old, his mother Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname.[2][20] Brett and Christine Assange ran a touring theatre company. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". "He always stood up for the underdog... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people."[20]
In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician who belonged to a New Age group 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.[2]
Hacking conviction
In 1987, after turning 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of Horace: "splendide mendax", or "nobly untruthful").[2] 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".[2]
In response to the hacking, the Australian Federal Police raided his Melbourne home in 1991.[21] He was reported to have accessed computers belonging to an Australian university, the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel,[2], the USAF 7th Command Group in the Pentagon[22] and other organisations, via modem.[23] In 1992, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and was released on bond for good conduct after being fined AU$2100.[2][24] 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".[2] The judge warned that if Assange had not had such a disrupted childhood he would have gone to jail for up to 10 years.[22]
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."[7]
Child custody issues
In 1989, Assange started living with his girlfriend and they had a son, Daniel.[25] After they split up, they engaged in a lengthy custody struggle, and did not agree on a custody arrangement until 1999.[2][26] The entire process prompted Assange and his mother to form Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection, an activist group centered on creating a "central databank" for otherwise inaccessible legal records related to child custody issues in Australia.
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.[7][27] Starting in 1994, Assange lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software.[24] In 1995, Assange wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner.[28][29] He contributed several patches to the PostgreSQL project in 1996.[30][31] He helped to write the bookUnderground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), which credits him as a researcher and reports his history with International Subversives.[32][33] 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;[34] he originally intended the system to be used "as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field."[35] Other free software that he has authored or co-authored includes the Usenet caching software NNTPCache[36] and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines. In 1999, Assange registered the domain leaks.org; "But", he says, "then I didn't do anything with it."[37]
From 2003 to 2006, Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He has also studied philosophy and neuroscience.[38] He never graduated and received the minimum passing grades in most of his math courses.[2][39] On his personal web page, he described having represented his university at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005.[2][40]
