WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

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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