WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

Julian Assange

Melbourne, Australia

December 2006

“Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth”

OSCAR WILDE

The unusual Australian who wrote up his dating profile for the OKCupid website used the name ‘Harry Harrison’. He was 36 years old, 6ft 2ins tall and, said the site’s test, “87% slut.” He began:

“WARNING: Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving. I am not the droid you are looking for. Save us both while you still can. Passionate, and often pig headed activist intellectual seeks siren for love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy. Such a woman should be spirited and playful, of high intelligence, though not necessarily formally educated, have spunk, class & inner strength and be able to think strategically about the world and the people she cares about.

“I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women!

“Although I am pretty intellectually and physically pugnacious I am very protective of women and children.

“I am DANGER, ACHTUNG, and ??????????????!”

“Harry” went on to say he was directing a “consuming, dangerous, human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated”. He also suffered from “Asian teengirl stalkers”. The question what “could [he] never do without” produced the answer, “I could adapt to anything except the loss of female company and carbon.” The profile warned: “Do not write to me if you are timid. I am too busy. Write to me if you are brave.”

Harry’s stated activities were extraordinary. He described himself as “variously professionally involved in international journalism/books, documentaries, cryptography, intelligence activities, civil rights, political activism, white collar crime and the internet”. His gallery of photographs showed a man with pale skin, sharp features and wind-blown silver-grey hair. In some he has a half-smile, in others he stares down the barrel of the camera.

Harry Harrison was a pseudonym, and the person behind the mask was Julian Assange, a computer hacker living in a crowded student house in Melbourne, dreaming up a scheme for an idealistic information insurgency which was eventually to become celebrated – and execrated – worldwide as WikiLeaks. Assange had a striking and, some critics would say, damaged personality. It was on peacock display in this dating profile, but probably rooted deep in his Australian childhood and youth.

His obsession with computers, and his compulsion to keep moving, both seemed to have origins in his restless early years. So too, perhaps, did the rumblings from others that Assange was somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Assange would himself joke, when asked if he was autistic: “Aren’t all men?” His dry sense of humour made him attractive – perhaps too attractive – to women. And there was his high analytical intelligence. In a different incarnation, Assange could perhaps have been the successful chief executive of a major corporation.

There were a few demerits OKCupid couldn’t capture. Assange’s social skills sometimes seemed lacking. The way his eyes flickered around the room was curious; one Guardian journalist described it as “toggling”. And occasionally he forgot to wash. Collaborators who fell out with him – there was to be a long list – accused him of imperiousness and a callous disregard for those of whom he disapproved. Certainly, when crossed, Assange could get very angry indeed, his mood changing as if a switch had been flicked. But in one way the OKCupid profile, last modified in 2006, proved in the end to be dizzyingly accurate. Four years later, in 2010, nobody would be left in any doubt that Assange really did mean, DANGER, ACHTUNG!

Julian was born on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, in the state of Queensland, in Australia’s sub-tropical north. His mother Christine was the daughter of Warren Hawkins, described by colleagues as a rigid and traditionalist academic who became a college principal; the family settled in Australia from 19th-century Scotland. Julian’s biological father is absent from much of the record: at 17, Christine abruptly left home, selling her paintings to buy a motorcycle, a tent and a map. Some 1,500 miles later she arrived in Sydney and joined its counter-culture scene. According to the book Underground, a revealing docu-novel to which Assange contributed, his mother worked as an artist and fell in love with a rebellious young man she met at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in 1970. He fathered Julian. But the relationship ended and he would apparently play no further role in Assange’s life for many years. They had no contact until after Assange turned 25.

His father was not forgotten, though. In 2006, at the start of Julian’s remarkable mission to uncover secrets, he registered the wikileaks.org domain name under what is, according to court records, his biological father’s identity – John Shipton. After the birth of her child, Christine moved as a single mother to Magnetic Island, a short ferry ride across the bay from Townsville. Magnetic Island was primitive and bohemian. Its small population included hippies who slept on beaches and in rock caves. The local kids would fish, swim, and play cricket with coconuts. There were koalas, possums, and giant clams. The Great Barrier Reef was nearby, and the islanders were eco-pioneers who grew their own vegetables and helped themselves to what was in the sea – fish, prawns, crabs and crayfish.

Assange’s mother later recalled, “I rented an island cottage for $12 a week in Picnic Bay … I lived in a bikini, ‘going native’ with my baby and other mums on the island.” She married Brett Assange, an actor and theatre director. The surname apparently derives from Ah Sang, supposedly a 19th-century Chinese settler. Their touring lifestyle was the backdrop to Assange’s early years. His stepfather staged and directed plays, according to Underground, and his mother did the make-up, costumes and set design. She was also a puppeteer.

In 2010, Assange described his stepfather’s productions as good preparation for WikiLeaks, a mobile organisation that could be rolled out or packed up in a matter of hours – “something that my family did do when they were involved in the theatre and movie business which is go to locations, set it up, bring all your people, get it all together, get ready for the production launch and – bang – you go.”

The adult Assange became a shape-shifter: frequently changing hairstyles, and dressing up in other people’s clothes. One day he was an English country gentleman; the next an Icelandic fisherman; or an old woman. Even his role at WikiLeaks seemed unclear. Was he a leaker, a publisher, a journalist, or an activist? When the show was over he would move on.

The Assanges lived for some of the time in an abandoned pineapple farm on Horseshoe Bay. Christine recalled slashing her way to the front door with a machete. She also claimed to have shot a taipan – a deadly snake – in the water tank. Royce Dalliston, who still lives on Magnetic Island, recalls Christine used to swim and paint under the banyan trees. The other boys would steal waste cooking fat from hotels, and smear it on the roof of the jetty’s sheds to go sliding into the bubbling swell whenever the ferry pulled in from Townsville. Dalliston and the bigger boys called Assange a “raspberry” because the “scrawny little blond-haired kid” seemed too scared to go jetty jumping. But Assange told the New Yorker profile writer Raffi Khatchadourian: “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

By 1979 Christine was again living close to her parents in Lismore, in New South Wales, where local farmers and the hippies co-existed in a state of mutual incomprehension. Nimbin – the scene of the Age of Aquarius, a 1973 hippy music festival – was just up the road. She had a long swirly skirt and drove a green Volkswagen Beetle. Local hippies successfully stopped the logging of one of the area’s surviving virgin rainforests at Terania. It was the first victory for Australia’s nascent eco-movement. Old footage from the march shows a young woman wearing dungarees trudging along a track, together with a group of bearded activists and guitar-strummers. She looks remarkably like Assange’s mother.

Christine did not want her son to have a conventional Lismore schooling. Lismore was a traditional place, with women banned in the local club from leaving the carpet area, apart from on dance nights. Jennifer Somerville, whose children went to a small rural primary with Assange, recalls: “She was a little bit alternative, and she didn’t believe in terribly formal education. She apparently decided that it would be best if Julian went to a little country school.”

His two-year stint there was one of his most sustained periods of education; according to his own account, during his childhood he attended 37 different schools, emerging with no qualifications whatsoever. “Some people are really horrified and say: ‘You poor thing, you went to all these schools.’ But actually during this period I really liked it,” Assange later said. Classmates at the school in the hamlet of Goolmangar remember a quiet but sociable boy. His exceptional intelligence and blond, shoulder-length hair marked him out.

One former classmate, Nigel Somerville, says there were “always puppets hanging out of his window … His mum was very artistic. I had a kite she’d made for many years. It was very colourful and had big eyes on it with oranges and reds and blues.” He and Julian would talk about crystal radios and experiment by pulling things apart. Amid the laid-back anti-establishment times, there were paranoid moments. In Adelaide, when Assange was four, his mother’s car had been menacingly pulled over, having left a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. The police officer told her: “You have a child out at two in the morning. I think you should get out of politics, lady.”

Christine’s marriage was now also running into problems. Brett Assange, who ran the puppet theatre with her, was a good and close stepfather. Assange would in later life often quote sayings “from my father” such as, “Capable, generous men do not create victims: they nurture them.” Brett Assange would later describe his stepson as “a very sharp kid” with a “keen sense of right and wrong”. But according to transcripts of a court hearing Brett was, at the time, “plagued with difficulties with alcohol”. When Assange was seven or eight, his stepfather was removed from his life, when he and Christine divorced.

Assange’s mother then became tempestuously involved with a third, much younger man, Keith Hamilton. Hamilton was an amateur musician and a member of a New Age group, the Santiniketan Park Association. He was also, according to Assange, a manipulative psychopath. Hamilton allegedly had five different identities. “His whole background was a fabrication, right down to the country of his birth,” Assange claimed in Underground. Despite its respectable-sounding name, The Santiniketan Park Association was a notorious cult presided over by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, a yoga teacher who convinced her middle-class followers she was a reincarnation of Jesus. Keith Hamilton was not only associated with the cult. He may even have been Hamilton-Byrne’s son. Hamilton-Byrne and her helpers collected children, often persuading teenage mothers to hand over their babies. She and her disciples – “the aunties” – lived together in an isolated rural property surrounded by a barbed wire fence and overlooking a lake near the town of Eildon, Victoria. Here, they administered a bizarre regime over their charges, who at one point numbered 28 children. There were regular beatings. Children had their heads held down in buckets of water.

Assange’s mother tried to leave Keith Hamilton in 1982, a court transcript reports, resulting in a custody battle for Assange’s half-brother, Jamie. Hamilton was an abusive partner who “had been physically violent”, court documents allege. Assange says Hamilton now pursued his mother, forcing her to flee repeatedly with her children. Assange told an Australian journalist in 2010: “My mother had become involved with a person who seems to be the son of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult in Australia, and we kept getting tracked down, possibly because of leaks in the social security system, and having to leave very quickly to a new city, and lived under assumed names.”

For the next five or six years, the three lived as fugitives. Christine travelled to Melbourne, then fled to Adelaide for six months, and on to Perth. As a teenager, Assange returned to Melbourne, living with his mother in at least four different refuges. The WikiLeaks founder was to act out this pattern of evasive action all over again in 2010, believing he was being pursued by US intelligence because of his WikiLeaks exposures.

Court files from the teenage Assange’s eventual hacking trial in Melbourne – of which more later – document some of the effects of such a strange life on a gifted teenager with a strong aptitude for mathematics. His lawyer said Assange was deprived of the chance to make friends or associate normally with his peers. “His background is quite tragic in a way.” Underground describes a “dead boring” Melbourne suburb: “merely a stopping point, one of dozens, as his mother shuttled her child around the continent trying to escape from a psychopathic former de facto [spouse]. The house was an emergency refuge for families on the run. It was safe and so, for a time … his exhausted family stopped to rest before tearing off again in search of a new place to hide.”

When Assange was 13 or 14, his mother had rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange began going there and working on a Commodore 64. His mother saved to buy the computer for her older son as a present. Assange began teaching himself code. At 16 he got hold of his first modem. He attended a programme for gifted children in Melbourne, where he acquired “an introverted and emotionally disturbed” girlfriend, as he put it. Assange grew interested in science and roamed around libraries. Soon he discovered hacking. By the age of 17 he suspected Victoria police were about to raid his home. According to Underground: “He wiped his disks, burnt his printouts, and left” to doss temporarily with his girlfriend. The pair joined a squatters’ union, and when Assange was 18 she became pregnant. They married and had a baby boy, Daniel. But as Assange’s anxiety increased, and police finally closed in on his outlaw circle of hackers, his wife moved out, taking their 20-month-old son Daniel with them. Assange was hospitalised with depression. For a period he slept outdoors, rambling around the eucalyptus forests in Dandenong Ranges national park.

*

Human relationships must have seemed unstructured for the teenage Assange, prone to abandonment, confusion and reversals. The world of computers, on the other hand, was predictable. Algorithms – the key to Assange’s later skill as a cryptographer – were reliable. People were not. Assange would later tell the New Yorker the “austerity” of interaction with computers appealed to him. “It is like chess … There is no randomness.” During his 1996 hacking trial his defence lawyer, Paul Galbally, said in mitigation that his computer became “his only friend”. As Assange shifted from school to school he was targeted by bullies as the outsider: “His only real saviour in life or his own bedrock in life was this computer. His mother, in fact, encouraged him to use this computer … It had become an addictive instrument to him at a very early age.” Galbally describes Assange as “super smart”; not a nerdy hacker but someone unusual and flamboyant.

Interestingly, some of the world’s most talented programmers come from broken families. Jacob Appelbaum, who would become WikiLeaks’ representative in the US, says he was the son of a paranoid schizophrenic mother and heroin addict father. He spent much of his boyhood in a children’s home. As a boy, he discovered a woman convulsing in his father’s bathroom with a needle sticking out of her arm. Appelbaum told Rolling Stone magazine that programming and hacking allowed him, however, “to feel like the world is not a lost place. The internet is the only reason I’m alive today.”

Melbourne’s hacking underground in the 1980s, in which Assange became prominent, was a small, almost entirely male group of self-taught teenagers. Many came from educated but poor suburban homes; all were of above average intelligence. They experimented on Commodore 64s, and the Apple IIe. They wrote code and used painfully slow modems. There was no internet yet, but there were computer networks and bulletin board systems, known as BBSs. In his “real” life Assange might have been considered a failure. He failed to complete his Higher School Certificate via a correspondence course. He also studied computers and physics inconclusively at an adult further education college.

But in his electronic life, Assange was a god. These geeky and socially awkward young men could reinvent themselves as swaggering heroes with names like Phoenix, Gandalf or Eric Bloodaxe. Assange used the pseudonym Mendax. Lewis and Short’s Latin dictionary says that means “given to lying” – the root for the English word mendacious. But Assange was more specifically inspired by Horace’s Odes. Assange’s mother had enthusiastically introduced him to the Greek and Latin classics. In book III, xi, Horace tells the story of the 50 daughters of Danaus. Their father is angry that they are being forced to marry their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus. He makes them swear to kill their husbands on their wedding night. Forty-nine carry out his order, but the 50th, Hypermnestra, tips off her husband, Lynceus, and they escape. (In some versions they go on to found a dynasty.) For this Horace calls her splendide mendax or “splendidly deceiving”. Another translation could be “deceitful with glory”. The name was well picked. It evoked what the intensely ambitious Assange would do next, something both deceitful and glorious: hack into the US’s military network.

Underground: tales of hacking, madness & obsession on the electronic frontier appeared in 1997. Published under the byline of Suelette Dreyfus, a Melbourne academic, Assange is credited as researcher, but his imprint his palpable – in parts it reads like an Assange biography. The book depicts the international computer underground of the 90s: “a veiled world populated by characters slipping in and out of the half-darkness. It is not a place where people use their real names.” Assange chose an epigraph from Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

“Sometimes Mendax went to school,” runs the story in Underground. “Often he didn’t. The school system didn’t hold much interest for him. It didn’t feed his mind … The Sydney computer system was a far more interesting place to muck around in than the rural high school.”

In 1988, Assange (Mendax) is busy trying to break into Minerva, a system of mainframes in Sydney belonging to the government-owned Overseas Telecommunications Commission, or OTC. For the computer underground, hacking into OTC was a sort of rite of passage.

Mendax phones an OTC official in Perth posing as an operator from Sydney, Underground describes. To add authenticity, he records his home printer chattering in the background, and even mumbles passages from Macbeth to simulate office noise. The official innocently reveals his password – LURCH. Mendax is in! It is one of the dramatic moments in the book. In 2010, recalling his hacker exploits as a teenager, Assange said, “You were young. You hadn’t done anything for criminal gain. You had done this for curiosity, challenge, and some activism. We hadn’t destroyed anything. If you were a teenager in a suburb of Melbourne this was an incredibly intellectually liberating thing.”

In 1989 Melbourne hackers carried out a spectacular stunt, launching a computer worm against Nasa’s website. Bemused Nasa staff read the message: “Your system has been officially WANKed.” The acronym stood for Worms Against Nuclear Killers. Was Assange behind WANK? Possibly. But his involvement was never proved. By 1991 Assange was probably Australia’s most accomplished hacker. He and two others, using the names Prime Suspect and Trax, founded International Subversives magazine, offering tips on “phreaking” – how to break into telephone systems illegally and make free calls. The magazine had an exclusive readership: its circulation was just three, the hackers themselves.

Assange next set about hacking into the master terminal of Nortel, a big Canadian company that manufactured and sold telecommunications equipment. He also penetrated the US military-industrial complex, using his own sophisticated password-harvesting program, Sycophant. He hacked the US Airforce 7th Command Group Headquarters in the Pentagon, Stanford Research Institute in California, the Naval Surface War Center in Virginia, Lockheed Martin’s Technical Aircraft Systems plant in California, and a host of other sensitive military institutions. In the spring of 1991, the three hackers found an exciting new target: MILNET, the US military’s own secret defence data network. Pretty quickly, Assange discovered a back door. He got inside. “We had total control over it for two years,” he later claimed. The hackers also routinely broke into the computer systems at Australia’s National University.

But the Australian federal police’s computer crime unit was on their trail. They tapped the hackers’ phone lines and eventually raided Assange’s home. He confessed to police what he had done. But it wasn’t until 1994 that he was finally charged, with the case only being heard in 1996. He pleaded guilty in Melbourne’s Victoria County Court to 24 counts of hacking. The prosecution described Assange as “the most active” and “most skilful” of the group, and pressed for a prison sentence. Assange’s motive, according to the prosecution, was “simply an arrogance and a desire to show off his computer skills”.

At one point Assange turned up with flowers for one of the prosecution lawyers, Andrea Pavleka (described in Underground as “tall, slender and long-legged, with a bob of sandy blonde curls, booky spectacles resting on a cute button nose and an infectious laugh”). It was a courtly gesture. Galbally felt obliged to point out to Assange: “She doesn’t want to date you, Julian. She wants to put you in jail.”

Judge Leslie Ross said he regarded Assange’s offences as “quite serious”. But there was no evidence to suggest he had sought personal gain. He was indeed a “looksee” rather than a malicious hacker, and had acted, the judge said, out of “intellectual inquisitiveness”.

“I accept what your counsel said about the unstable personal background that you have had to endure during your formative years and the rather nomadic existence that your mother and yourself were forced to follow and the personal disruption that occurred within your household … That could not have been easy for you. It has had its impact on you obtaining formal educational qualifications which it seems were certainly not beyond you, and the submission that you are a highly intelligent individual seems to be well founded.”

The judge fined Assange $2,100. He warned him that if he carried on hacking he would indeed go to jail. Despite the fact the case was over, Assange got up to speak. The court transcript reads as follows:

PRISONER: Your Honour, I believe the prosecution has made several misleading claims in terms of the charges and therefore I elect to continue this defence if Your Honour would so let me.

HIS HONOUR: No, you have pleaded guilty, the proceedings are over. You would be well advised to come forward and sit down behind Mr Galbally.

PRISONER: Your Honour, I feel a great misjustice has been done and I would like to record the fact that you have been misled by the prosecution in terms of the charges of [indistinct] and a number of other matters.

HIS HONOUR: Mr Galbally, do you want to have a word with your client?

MR GALBALLY: Yes, Your Honour.

HIS HONOUR: Yes, go and have a word with him.

Assange considered himself the victim of a Solzhenitsyn-style injustice. A decade later, he would blog: “If there is a book whose feeling captures me it is First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. To feel that home is the camaraderie of persecuted, and in fact, prosecuted, polymaths in a Stalinist slave labour camp! How close the parallels to my own adventures! … Such prosecution in youth is a defining peak experience. To know the state for what it really is! To see through that veneer the educated swear to disbelieve in but still slavishly follow with their hearts! … Your belief in the mendacity of the state … begins only with a jackboot at the door. True belief forms when led into the dock and referred to in the third person. True belief is when a distant voice booms ‘the prisoner shall now rise’ and no one else in the room stands.”

Convicted but leniently treated, Assange was now an unemployed father in Melbourne surviving on a single parent pension. The family courts had given him sole custody of his son. Assange and his mother would spend years battling his former wife over access to Daniel; this developed into a bitter fight with the state over access to information in the case. Assange was also working unpaid as a computer programmer. He set up a site on the internet giving advice on computer security, called Best of Security. By 1996 it had 5,000 subscribers. Assange’s early commitment to free information, and free software, would slowly evolve into WikiLeaks. In words that now seem prophetic, Galbally had told the judge in 1996: “He is clearly a person who wants the internet to provide material to people that isn’t paid for, and he freely gives his services to that.”

Assange co-authored several free software programs as part of what would become the open source movement. (They included the Usenet caching software NNTPCache, and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines.) He and a couple of collaborators invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption system. The idea was quite simple: that human rights activists who faced torture could surrender a password to one layer of information. Their torturers would not realise another layer was beneath.

According to the Rubberhose website, Assange conceived the software after meeting human rights workers, and hearing tales of abuse from repressive regimes such as East Timor, Russia, Kosovo, Guatemala, Iraq, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The website gives a flavour of Assange’s activist philosophy: “We hope that Rubberhouse will protect your data and offer a broader kind of protection for people who take risks for just causes … Our motto is: ‘Let’s make a little trouble.’”

As early as 1999 he came up with the idea of a leakers’ website, he says, and registered the domain name wikileaks.org. But otherwise he didn’t do much about it. Assange was living in Melbourne and quietly raising his son. The custody battle over, it was probably the most stable period in his life. Daniel – today a computer programmer – went to Box Hill high school in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Between 2003 and 2006 Julian studied physics and maths at Melbourne University as well as philosophy and neuroscience. He still didn’t manage to graduate. But the WikiLeaks idea stayed with him.

Assange drafted on his bravely named blog, IQ.org, an apparently fanciful theory for overthrowing injustice in the world: “The more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimisation of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive ‘secrecy tax’) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold on to power … Since unjust systems, by their nature, induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance. Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.”

Assange spoke of a high-flown calling: “If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers … The whole universe … is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering … Men in their prime, if they have convictions, are tasked to act on them.”

Those on his mailing list soon learned more detail. John Young, of the Cryptome intelligence-material site, was one of those asked (unsuccessfully) to “front” a new WikiLeaks organisation. Secrecy was built in, including the avoidance of the secret word itself: “This is a restricted internal development mailing list for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g. Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to ‘WL’.” On 9 December 2006, an email signed “WL” also arrived out of the blue for Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower of Vietnam war renown. Assange boldly invited Ellsberg to become the public face of a project “to place a new star in the firmament of man”. Governance “by conspiracy and fear” depended on concealment, Assange wrote. “We have come to the conclusion that fomenting a worldwide movement of mass leaking is the most cost effective political intervention.” Ellsberg, who eventually became an enthusiastic supporter, originally feared it was “a very naive venture, to think that they can really get away with it”.

In the new year, Assange went public for the first time. Canada’s CBC News was one of the few who reported the news:

“Deep Throat may be moving to a new address – online. A new website that will use Wikipedia’s open-editing format is hoping to become a place where whistleblowers can post documents without fear of being traced. WikiLeaks, according to the group’s website, will be ‘an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their own governments and corporations,’ the group said.”

Most of the mainstream media (MSM), however, paid very little attention to this news. For hackers, who had long lamented the inadequacies of the MSM, that came as no surprise.