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 [
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
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.
CHAPTER 4
