Julian Assange - Wikileaks: Warrior For True Part 5

When Julian started to work for Suburbia in 1993, Brian Martin and his whistleblowers had already been active for two years. As network administrator at Suburbia, he had access to all the information circulating around the site, which gave him a lot of ideas.

One day, Suburbia received a request from a defender of the Church of Scientology, asking that the company block a site providing confidential doc.u.ments of the movement and denouncing some of their practices.

Julian got the request and refused to honor it. He pa.s.sed the request onto the management. Mark Dorset, who was in charge, backed Julian up.

The site's creator was David Gerard, living in Melbourne at the time. He created the site mainly to criticize and condemn an international organization that was against freedom of speech, abused copyright and hara.s.sed anyone who criticized them. He was quickly picked up by the Scientology movement of Ron Hubbard and played a game of cat and mouse with them for years. The site about the Church of Scientology is still on line, but it hasn't been updated since 2000.

In 2010, David Gerard, journalist for Forbes, said that a.s.sange had "t.i.tanium b.a.l.l.s." He saluted his courage of having stood up to this organization to protect someone fighting for freedom of expression.

In 1997, Julian collaborated with Suelette Dreyfus to write the book Underground, which told the story of six famous Australian hackers: Phoenix, Nom, Electron, Prime Suspect, Trax and Mendax.

Julian has yet to publicly admit that he was Mendax. They are similar in many ways, which would lead one to believe he was Mendax. Julian likes to tell certain journalists that he was just an advisor for the book!

At that time, the two authors along with Ralph-Philipp Weinmann co-invented an encryption system, Rubberhose, designed as a tool for human rights organizations, which needed to protect sensitive data in the field.

In 1998, before his family battle was settled, Julian founded his first company with Richard Jones, Earthmen Technology, with the aim of developing "network intrusion detection technology." It was a hackers' club since Richard Jones was none other than the famous Electron. Richard Jones managed most developments. Back then he wrote hacking programs for the Linux kernel and fast-pattern matching algorithms.

A bunch of geeks were developing security software in their living rooms, but their business never really took off.

Ralf-Philipp Weinmann was also part of the club. Today he's a research a.s.sociate in cryptology at the University of Luxembourg. He developed a data decryption program for most Apple devices, used today as an iPhone hack.

At that time Julian was also interested in politics. He was a man of 'challenges,' concerned by the world. He wanted what the Australian Labour Party did when it started: ensure equality. Julian was the type of person who could say: 'I know how to do that' and really mean it, while others just kept talking about it. He was disillusioned after courting with left-wing politics, and after a meeting in Melbourne, he criticized politicians, saying that they were all mixed up. He felt the government was a joke. Although he was a brilliant, yet socially inept, geek who would rather interact with machines than humans, he was also determined to change the world.

Friends described him as a man who served no master, a Renaissance man with the tools of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries at his disposal. He decided earlier on that the world was unfair, that it could be fair and that the Internet provided the means to create a higher level of playground in terms of justice. He naturally moved toward a solution to put all of this into place, slowly but surely.

In 2003, Julian started studying again at the University of Melbourne in mathematics and theoretical physics. Damjan Vukcevic, president of the mathematics department at the University, remembers him as someone who had courageous political views, an impressive knowledge of computers and an aura of mystery.12 Julian didn't graduate. He stopped studying, disappointed. He saw so many students and academic staff conduct research for the American Department of Defense and espionage agencies. In 2004, before leaving the university, he was a student at the same time as his own son Daniel, who was fifteen, and in his first year of genetics. In a presentation of his studies during a cla.s.s on democracy, Julian said he was interested in neurosciences and philosophy. He also claimed that he had been to six universities, but not a single trace of any registration could be found except for the one in Melbourne. He basically sat in on a few cla.s.ses. Was it the press or the man who tended to globalize experience?

In 2005, he went on a road trip to Hanoi on his motorcycle. He first wanted to follow in the footsteps of a young Che Guevara, but then decided that there were better places to visit politically.

The potholes in the road got his attention. They made it not only dangerous, but were also a reminder of the war and of others who had taken that very road.

Julian linked it to a theory on information by a.n.a.logy. Using a physical description of how potholes form, he arrived at the conclusion that it was more efficient to fill a pothole as soon as it was noticed. Unfortunately, people preferred to drive and think of their little worries instead of trying to repair the road. And why did people think of their little worries? Precisely because n.o.body emphasized the possible impact of these potholes in the long term.

He made this allegory to get to the real problem: a lack of information. The world is made up of information potholes: if we're blinded by other worries, we let the potholes get worse.

In December 2006, he wrote to a friend to tell him about his experience in Hanoi. He thought his e-mail was so poetic that he decided to post it on his blog. Here's his final a.n.a.lysis: Foresight requires trustworthy information about the current state of the world, cognitive ability to draw predictive inferences and economic stability to give them a meaningful home. It's not only in Vietnam where secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten into the first requirement of foresight ("truth, and lots of it").

Foresight can produce outcomes that leave all major interests groups better off. Likewise the lack of it, or doing the dumb thing, can harm almost everyone. Computer scientists have long had a great phrase for the dependency of foresight on trustworthy information, "garbage in, garbage out."

In intelligence agency oversight we have "The Black Budget blues," but the phrase is probably most familiar to American readers as "The Fox News Effect."

FOX has been accused numerous times for its right-wing information serving Republicans and producing propaganda rather than journalism (a doc.u.mentary revealed their practices).

Foresight is applicable on the necessary condition that it be based on the truth and nothing else. Julian explained that for foresight to be accurate, it must have correct information about the state of the world, trends and emerging phenomena. If this were not the case, the predictions of our possible future would be false and we'd be preparing for a future that didn't correspond to a current state of our society. It was the phenomenon of garbage in, garbage out.

Providing trustworthy information takes on meaning because it implies antic.i.p.ating a view of the future. States lie and manipulate. The media deform everything. Julian now had a mission: provide quality information. The road to WikiLeaks was unfolding before him.

MENTORS.

Poor is the pupil who does not surpa.s.s his master.

Leonardo da Vinci.

8.

MATERNAL INFLUENCE.

"Boy, one day you'll be a man" is a famous phrase fathers tell their sons when they feel they're on the road to becoming adults, a sentence Julian a.s.sange has probably never heard.

Julian never really knew his biological father. His mother Christine took care of him on her own after having split up with a rebellious young man named John s.h.i.+pton who she met at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration.

At the end of the 1960s in Queensland, North East Australia, Christine Hawkins was seventeen. She lived with her parents, both of whom were university professors, Australians of Irish origin and very traditional. Her father Warren was an authoritarian who ran a tight s.h.i.+p at home and at work. He was very involved in his work, which was appreciated by everyone, and he strongly believed in education. In 1978, he wrote the report for a conference on training teachers in regional colleges.

Christine, who was very young at the time, felt a need for independence, to be part of this wave of freedom that was was.h.i.+ng over Australia (and many other parts of the world) at the time. She could no longer relate to parental control and inst.i.tutions.

One day, on a whim she sold her paintings, burnt her schoolbooks, bought a motorcycle, a tent and a map of Australia and left her parents astounded. She traveled almost 1,200 miles to join the counterculture movement in Sydney. Australia also had soldiers in Vietnam, almost 60,000, and anti-war demonstrations were impa.s.sioned. New ideas and various forms of art emerged, and the pacific convergence of peoples and hippie culture replaced aboriginal culture as the main source of inspiration. The student movement led by the Australian Union of Students also created its own festival called 'Aquarius,' first held in Canberra, then in Nimbin, a small village still considered today as the hippie capital of the country, with its incessant fight to legalize cannabis.

When Julian was born, Christine came to live on Magnetic Island, the cradle of Australian hippie culture. She returned to nature to experience true freedom, spending most of her days in a bikini. Today she likes to reminisce about this golden age where she lived with other single moms on the island's heavenly beaches. Back then she lived off selling drawings she made in the shade of banyan trees. She rented a cottage on Picnic Bay for twelve dollars a week. She walked her son on the beach, picking up the occasional cypraea carneola or cowry, tropical seash.e.l.ls that were once used as currency on nearby islands. Once a week, she would visit old Pat for tea, a former cook who lived in a stone house on the tip of n.o.bbys Headland.

When Julian was two years old, Christine met Brett a.s.sange and joined him and his touring theater, enjoying a bohemian lifestyle. Brett directed while Christine built sets, created costumes and did makeup. Julian was the only child in this world of artists. Sometimes, he'd go to the local school, other times he'd be home schooled. Christine and Brett were very busy trying to successfully run their little troop. They preferred talking to Julian like an adult, giving him responsibilities at a very young age to increase his autonomy. He also learned a lot by listening to adults talk about art and politics since Christine was still a politically committed activist. She partic.i.p.ated in different demonstrations that she found out about and that inspired her.

One night in Adelaide when Julian was four, his mother and a friend came back from an anti-nuclear protest. They fought for many years to make the English government admit they had been conducting aerial nuclear tests in the desert of Maralinga in North West Australia for eight years, displacing more than 5,000 aboriginals from their native land. It was only in 1993 that the British agreed to allocate a budget to clean up the area. That night Christine was with a friend who claimed he had scientific proof of these tests. Driving through the suburbs of Adelaide, they realized they were being followed by an unmarked car. Sensing they were in danger, the friend who had to hand over his proof to a journalist, jumped out the car. Chased by the police, Christine was finally stopped. The police saw the young Julian in the car and said to her: "You have a child outside at 2 a.m. in the morning. I think it's time to quit politics, lady!"

Even if she had become less of an activist after this event, she was as convinced as ever of her ideas. Back at the non-conformist haven of Magnetic Island, between two tours Christine crafted coconut tree leaf hats and educated Julian, keeping him away from any kind of authority that she felt was an instrument for destroying young minds.

Eventually, her impetuosity toward the system was confirmed when she ran away from the father of her second son. Julian who was terrified by his stepfather was somewhat relieved by her actions.

Later on, Christine also pushed Julian as far as possible in the custody battle for his son Daniel. No matter what her battles were, she led them with her children under her wing like a mother wolf protecting her young and defending her territory, with her freedom of expression and living the way she saw fit, in a bikini the entire day if she felt like it. She believed that any impediment to freedom kills intelligence and creativity. It was in this view of the world that she raised her children.

While living in Melbourne, Christine noticed that Julian was increasingly interested in computers and regularly went to the shop across the street from their apartment. As soon as she could afford it, she bought him a second-hand computer.

A few years later she met Judge Leslie Ross who explained to her that her son could be considered a 'computer junkie.' She was dumbfounded, as she hadn't seen her son's pa.s.sion with a critical eye.

She would, however, defend him tooth and nail, convinced of Julian's good faith and not seeing any harm in him expressing his talent, even though he was a bit too curious.

Christine came back to her battle for freedom in 2006 by organizing a 'Bikini March' demonstration, wearing beach fas.h.i.+on in the streets of Melbourne in response to s.e.xist comments made by an Islamic leader of the city.

Imam Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly had declared in his Ramadan sermon: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside in the street, [...] and the cats come and eat it... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."

Christine declared to the press, with fervor and sincerity: "We don't need this in our country, we have a wonderful country, people from all over the world come to live in Australia because they want freedom." This fifty-five-year-old woman, walking in the streets of Melbourne in a bikini and cover-up with a sign that read 'He's not our mufti13,' was calling upon the conscience of Australians.

Many discussions on the Internet questioned her actions. In fact, she became a.s.sociated with a friend, Chris Gemmel-Smith, a man who owns a textile business that he proudly calls 100% Aussie. For the occasion he created a T-s.h.i.+rt with Uncovered Meat printed on it. Internet users and bloggers debated the commercial approach of this bikini march for Chris Gemmel-Smith. They ended up calling Christine's opinions simplistic and populist, blowing the affair out of proportion.

The movement on the Internet ended in conspiratorial unrest. A local nationalist leader decided to support the action and an upset and tired Christine announced that the demonstration was cancelled, scared of being taken over by right-wing activists.

Julian supported his mother in her action by creating a website for her and promoting it on his blog.

Christine had always shared with Julian her desire for individual freedom and aversion against reductive and legislative systems. And like Julian, she was quick to commit with fervor actions and words at the risk of sometimes being misinterpreted or accused of dubious alliances.

However, like Julian, she tended to be clumsy in her defense, protecting her private life above all, which only added to the mystery surrounding her.

During this smear campaign, she declared that she didn't want to talk about herself, that she was just a grandmother, that she didn't have any links to any party. It was this mystery that evoked all the theories, even attributing a second degree of relations.h.i.+p with Miss Universe 2004, Jennifer Hawkins.

Christine seemed to be a woman with simplistic ideas and humanist convictions. For many years she's run a papier-mache puppet theater with puppets she makes herself and fills the faces of hundreds of Australian school children with joy.

Christine likes children and strongly believes in their ability to change the world. In fact, she defines her art as a quality show for children aimed at a far-sighted audience. It was with these values that she raised her children and she has absolute confidence in their choices. In London, in December 2010, she declared that she wanted to hold her son in her arms: "I'm reacting as any mother would... He's my son and I love him."

9.

INSPIRATION AND REFERENCE.

Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor of the Nixon administration, called him "The most dangerous man in America." It was 1971 and the man he was talking about was Daniel Ellsberg, a military a.n.a.lyst he once collaborated with.

It was the 'Pentagon Papers' affair that would propel Ellsberg to the forefront and light the fuse that would help blow up the Nixon administration.

That year Daniel Ellsberg was just forty years old and working for the RAND Corporation since 1959, defining the military strategy of the US armed forces at the time. He was an intelligent man with a sharp ability to synthesize, demonstrating his allegiance to his country by joining the Marine Corps at age twenty-three as a platoon leader for two years. After a first stint at the RAND Corporation dealing with nuclear strategy, this ardent patriot and anti-communist worked for the Pentagon on the team of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara for one year. He became one of the most appreciated tactical a.n.a.lysts of the Cold War and Vietnam War the ultimate civil service grade of GS-18, equivalent to a Major General, which he obtained at age thirty-three.

Not content with just sticking to theory, Daniel Ellsberg transferred to Vietnam in 1965 and served in the US Emba.s.sy in Saigon where he evaluated methods of pacification on the front lines for General Edward Lansdale who appreciated him for his democratic commitment. However, his patriotism and military training pushed Ellsberg to partic.i.p.ate in several combat operations, despite the reticence of his superior who wanted to get closer to the Vietnamese instead of fighting them. He would deploy an astonis.h.i.+ng fury fighting Charlie14.

By being there and mingling with the population, he understood that the process of pacification would not work without involving the Vietnamese themselves.

Back in 1967 at the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg worked on the conduct of the South Vietnamese conflict within the McNamara Study Group. It was thanks to his high-level security clearance and mission that he had access to the most secret doc.u.mentation on the subject. It dawned on him that a large number of his a.n.a.lyses, carried out all these years for the US armed forces, could be used for much less pacifistic and culturally respectful ends than he had imagined during his tour in Vietnam. His mind raced, plagued by doubt and bitterness, and moved closer to pacifistic events.

In 1969, while attending a conference of the War Resisters League, he had an epiphany. He listened to a young man proudly claim that he would soon go to prison for desertion and draft resistance. The decision to deliberately go to prison for a cause he felt was just, shocked Ellsberg to the point where he admitted: There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger. Thousands of young men were dying each year. I left the auditorium and found a deserted men's room. I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I've reacted to something like that.

This emotional experience pushed him to be more critical of this work, trying to understand possible hidden agendas. Very quickly he understood Kissinger's peace plan: Put pressure on Hanoi through the USSR and China, and annihilate Cambodia by bombing it instead of negotiating with the French. He was disgusted. From that moment on, he compiled an entire file to try and revert the process, but Kissinger couldn't be bothered to even look at it. This file contained seven thousand pages and described the confidential a.n.a.lyses and decisions taken during the Vietnam War, known under the name 'Pentagon Papers.' He decided to expose it in the open and said about it: "I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision."

This decision was not easy to make for a man whose Harvard economics dissertation introduced a new theory in decision theory, known today as the Ellsberg paradox: When people have to choose between two options, the majority opt for the one whose law of probability is known.

Ellsberg certainly didn't try to calculate the success or failure probabilities of his decision; he acted with conviction and responsibility. However, the first leaks were a lot of work. After having photocopied all the doc.u.ments taken out every night from his office, with his children and his friend and colleague Anthony Russo, he would submit the file to anti-war Senator, J. William Fulbright. Fulbright didn't see this as an efficient enough tool to stop the conflict, and therefore didn't do anything. It was November 1969. He tried many political and parliamentary leads for more than a year without finding a single person willing to support him. Later he wrote: Humans are herd animals. They depend very much on being part of the group, and to remain part of the group, they'll do anything. And a much larger number will go along with anything. And the broadest form of that is keeping your mouth shut.

He then met Senator George McGovern who suggested he go to the press, more specifically The New York Times.

On Sunday June 13, 1971, the paper published its first article. It was six pages long, and the stories and revelations abound: Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower have committed the United States to Indochina through France, John F. Kennedy has turned this commitment into a war by using a secret "provocation strategy" that led eventually to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, Lyndon Johnson has planned from the beginning of his presidency to expand the war, the CIA has concluded that the bombing was utterly ineffective in winning it...

Ben Bradlee of The Was.h.i.+ngton Post was too scared to break the story when Ellsberg went to see him. But once The New York Times was attacked by the government, the paper made sure they published the information. The gears were in motion and the Nixon administration couldn't prevent the publis.h.i.+ng of the articles, one after the other. Many newspapers published the information Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch always fed by Ellsberg who chopped up his leaks from a safe house where he hid for thirteen days. Such a mobilization around the First Amendment of the Const.i.tution was a true declaration of independence of the American press with regards to the government.

The order of the Supreme Court, who would establish that national security did not justify censors.h.i.+p in this case, would be the founder of the freedom of the press in the United States.

The only solution left to stop this effusion was to attack the man. Track him down, stop him, and discredit him to lessen the impact of this scandal.

A secret team was set up from the White House with a free hand to find anything to discredit Ellsberg. They broke into his shrink's office to steal his file and failed. The team, called the 'White House Plumbers,' would be the same people who would break into the Watergate building a year later, with consequences everyone would learn about.

On June 28, 1971, Ellsberg finally gave himself up at the Attorney General's Office in Boston. He and his friend Anthony Russo were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 of spying, theft and conspiracy against the State, risking a total sentence of 115 years!

It was only after the court case on May 11, 1973 that all charges were dropped against Ellsberg, following the discovery of many illegal actions carried out by the government in this matter. Aside from the failed theft, there was evidence of illegal wiretapping, as well as an attempt to bribe the judge by offering him a job as the director of the FBI. Gordon Liddy's memoirs, himself chief of the 'White House Plumbers,' tell of certain other operations that had been thought up like putting LSD in Ellsberg's soup during a charity dinner so that when he would give his speech, he'd sound incoherent, a sign of psychological weakness or hard drug addiction.

Ellsberg continued his activism by partic.i.p.ating in articles, books, conferences, and televised debates. He fervently opposed the policies of George W. Bush, going as far as being arrested in 2005 for too strong a demonstration protest against the war in Iraq. He also called upon all the informants in power to leak government plans on invading Iran. He still believed that leaking information was the best way to access the truth. In fact, he defended whistleblowers many times. In 2003, for example, he spoke up when a female employee of a British intelligence agency was suspected of having leaked a top secret diplomatic memo to the press mentioning plans from the National Security Agency to spy on UN delegates in the scope of a new resolution on Iraq.

These are the words of Bradley Manning, US army intelligence a.n.a.lyst who disclosed several doc.u.ments to WikiLeaks. They echo what Daniel Ellsberg declared back in 1971 word for word.

I was actively involved in something that I was completely against. I want people to see the truth... because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

At the time, Julian a.s.sange and Daniel Ellsberg didn't know each other personally and had yet to meet, however, Daniel personified Julian's mentor. Julian very much admired his courage, rigor and righteousness. His actions had served as an example and encouraged him to go down this path. Ellsberg succeeded in getting media coverage for his story, giving him notoriety that made him a respected man today among modern American thinkers. And being heard was one of Julian's goals as well.

However, in December 2006, Ellsberg did not answer Julian's call, asking him to be part of the advisory board of the new organization, as he only saw a technical means without any real implication or democratic commitment. He didn't really discern the human stories behind this technological facade.

Of course, if Ellsberg had had these means for the 'Pentagon Papers,' he wouldn't have spent nights photocopying, he wouldn't have had to arrange secret meetings to hand over doc.u.ments and his partners wouldn't have lost time traveling across the country to give to the press an entire case of files to weed through.

Julian claimed that he could produce one 'Pentagon Papers' a week, echoing the hopes Ellsberg had once expressed. The tribute was nice, but he was not the congratulatory type. All of this just seemed like a question of means to him. Where were the real motivations of this new organization? Who were the people behind it?

And so Ellsberg waited and observed this website delivering bombs of information little by little and becoming ever so loud. At the beginning, he thought the leaks of WikiLeaks represented 'low-level' information, too raw to cause radical change. When he was asked to compare the War Logs15 to his own 'Pentagon Papers,' he regretted that these leaks were just military notes written up in the field, like those he had written when he was in Vietnam. Nevertheless, he noted that these doc.u.ments show the similarity between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War.

Everything changed from the moment when the WikiLeaks adventure showed its human face. Ellsberg started to come out of woodwork when the Collateral Murder video was broadcast-Julian spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks for the first time. Some critics, like John Young, would say that it was only when visibility would become really hyped that Daniel Ellsberg would come out to play. However, he did demonstrate his solidarity with WikiLeaks when he recognized Bradley Manning as the insider that he was in 1969, scared by his a.s.sociation with the atrocities committed by his army and government. He started getting loud when he recognized Julian as the warrior he was in 1971, plagued by accusations and a discredited campaign: "Every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian a.s.sange was made against me and the release of the 'Pentagon Papers' at the time."

Daniel Ellsberg will not let the US government condemn Julian a.s.sange and Bradley Manning: "Calling them terrorists is not only mistaken, it's absurd and slanderous. Neither of them are terrorists any more than I am, and I'm not."

The spiritual father had woken up, finally offering recognition to the one who hadn't had a guide, pus.h.i.+ng him to believe that he could offer his self as a sacrifice for the truth and be absolved like Ellsberg was in his time.

CROSSING THE THRESHOLD.

Before we arrived, the world lacked nothing, after our arrival, it will not lack anything.

Omar Khayyam.