Searching for Assange

JULIAN Assange is a hard man to pin down.

Australian-born WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange in London in July.

JULIAN Assange is a hard man to pin down.

When we first make email contact he is rumoured to be living in Nairobi, where he has spent much of the past two years exposing government corruption and extrajudicial killings. After making the impractical suggestion that we meet at an anti-corruption conference in Athens, he promptly jets off to central Asia, promising to call me on his satellite phone. Then Assange disappears for a long time; third-hand reports suggest he is in war-ravaged Georgia. Months later he surfaces for a brief interview on American public radio, refusing to say where he is.

Elusiveness has been a lifelong habit for Assange - he did, after all, spend much of his adolescence in Melbourne as a semi-legendary computer hacker evading the authorities. But since he was revealed as the brains behind the whistleblowers' website WikiLeaks two years ago, Assange has had a whole new set of reasons to make himself hard to find.

Conceived as an electronic dead-drop for confidential documents, WikiLeaks has exposed all manner of hidden and nefarious dealings, from corruption allegations in Kenya to the private records of Swiss banks to the Rudd Government's secret list of banned internet sites. As the site's unofficial figurehead, Assange has in the process acquired a lot of enemies in a very short space of time. When WikiLeaks won a major prize from Britain's Index On Censorship organisation in April last year, he caused a stir just by turning up to the award dinner in London. Before rising to accept the award, he whispered to one onlooker: "Someone may lunge at the stage to present me with a subpoena. I cannot allow them to do this and shall leave if I see them."

YouTube's footage of Assange at that event - a youthful, handsome man with tousled white hair, wearing a black T-shirt under a woollen sportscoat - is among the very few images of him that exist. He rarely grants interviews in person and refuses to divulge his age, which is believed to be 37. Even some of the people who helped set up WikiLeaks still haven't met him. ("I believe he does exist," one offers helpfully.) When I suggest to Assange via email that I would like to meet him face-to-face, he retorts: "What'd you want to see - the way I move my eyebrows?"

Nine months after our first tantalising email exchange, it seems Assange is no closer to granting this magazine an interview. But by then it has become clear that, despite his secretiveness, there are clues about him scattered around the internet - many of them, curiously, left by Assange himself. Follow that trail and the story of his colourful and sometimes tumultuous life can be pieced together.

And then the telephone rings unexpectedly one day and a soft, slightly clipped Australian voice on the line announces: "This is Julian Assange."

Documentary
On March 18 this year, a new document suddenly appeared on the website www.wikileaks.org - a voluminous computer print-out of 2395 internet addresses, most of them pornographic, which are banned by the Australian Government. That list is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the care of the Australian Communications and Media Authority and plays a key role in the Rudd Government's contentious plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship. In an instant WikiLeaks had embarrassed the Government, destabilised its censorship plan and publicised a vast catalogue of some of the most repulsive child pornography in the world. It was a classic outbreak of what WikiLeaks calls "radical democracy", a philosophy that has taken online activism into new and uncharted ethical territory.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was so furious that he threatened the website with criminal prosecution - a threat not easily carried out, given WikiLeaks' opaque structure. But any Federal Police officers unlucky enough to be assigned that task would be advised to dig out the records of a long-ago investigation called Operation Weather, which marked the first time that Australian authorities had run up against the man behind WikiLeaks.

In October 1989 the computer system at the US space agency NASA was attacked just as the Atlantis space shuttle was about to be launched. NASA computer monitors across America suddenly lit up with a digital display of one giant word - "WANK" - the acronym for a hacker group calling itself Worms Against Nuclear Killers. Underneath was a couplet from a Midnight Oil song ("You talk of times of peace for all and then prepare for war") and a misspelt declaration: "Your system has been officically WANKed."

The perpetrator of that attack remains a mystery but in the investigations that followed, Australian Federal Police charged six teenage hackers from Melbourne who had infiltrated a range of prestigious academic, government and telecommunications computer systems.

Among them was Julian Paul Assange, then a teenager living in the hills outside Melbourne and a key member of a hacker group called the International Subversives. After tapping his phone and running surveillance, Federal Police arrested him in October 1991 and charged him with more than 30 counts of computer crime. Assange was never implicated in the NASA attack; by the time his case was finalised five years later he had pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking Australian sites, was placed on a good behaviour bond and ordered to pay $2100.

Even then, Assange was a young man on a political mission. "He was not motivated by money," recalls Ken Day, the former federal cop who ran Operation Weather, now a risk-management consultant. "He was opposed to Big Brother, to the restriction of freedom of communication. His moral sense about breaking into computer systems was: 'I'm not going to do any harm, so what's wrong with it?' But that's a bit like a burglar saying: 'I'm just going to wander through your house, but I won't touch anything.' It doesn't quite cut it."

With typical self-conviction, Assange had decided by the time of his sentencing to reveal all about the exploits of the Melbourne hackers by collaborating on a book, Underground, with writer Suelette Dreyfus. Published to great acclaim in 1997, Underground is a gripping account of the early hacker community, thanks in no small part to Assange's inside knowledge. He later convinced Dreyfus to release the book online, thus making freely available a story that might, at least in part, be his ghostwritten autobiography.

Underground does not reveal the names of the Melbourne hackers, using only their online monikers: Phoenix, Nom, Prime Suspect, Electron, Mendax and Trax. But the court records of Assange's case and his biographical details on the WikiLeaks website are identical to the story of Mendax, which is chronicled in the book. According to Underground, Mendax was a prodigiously intelligent child who never knew his father and spent much of his childhood and adolescence in a turbulent drift from state to state as his mother formed difficult relationships, first with an alcoholic actor-director and later an unstable amateur musician they were forced to hide from. As a teenager, the book claims, Mendax devised a program called Sycophant, which enabled the International Subversives to infiltrate computers at the Pentagon, NASA, Motorola, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and numerous other supposedly secure organisations. He left home at 17 after being tipped off about a police raid, became a father at 18, and suffered a breakdown after he was charged by police. Briefly hospitalised, he lived rough in the hills outside Melbourne for a period; later he was shocked to find that a fellow hacker in the International Subversives, Prime Suspect, had "rolled" and agreed to give evidence against him.

Is this Julian Assange's story? In the years since Underground was published, Dreyfus has become a colleague of Assange and refuses to be drawn on that question. "I gave a commitment to all of the people I interviewed for the book that they would not be identified by name," she says. Ken Day can't recall whether Assange used the hacker name Mendax, although he confirms that the International Subversives hacked into a number of overseas internet sites. Perhaps Assange himself offered the best clue in the Oscar Wilde quote he chose as an epigraph for the book's online edition: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

What is known is that, after pleading guilty to computer hacking in 1996, Assange spent a number of years in Melbourne working in computer security, devising software and raising his intellectually gifted son. He travelled extensively through China, Asia, Europe and Russia, and for several years helped run a lobby group that raised allegations of neglect in the Victorian social welfare system. He also found time to enrol in a mathematics and theoretical physics course at Melbourne University, one of six universities and 33 schools he says he has attended. The former president of the university's Mathematics and Statistics Society, Damjan Vukcevic, recalls Assange as a man with strong political views, impressive computer skills and an aura of mystery - Vukcevic confesses he was completely unaware of Assange's run-in with the Feds a few years earlier.

But Assange quit the course before graduating, disillusioned that so many students and academics were conducting research for US defence and spy agencies. By 2005, he had already got the glimmer of an idea that would take his political ideas to the global stage.

'Nice laws'
When Julian Assange finally calls, he is in Belgium. "They have nice laws here," he explains. "Police and intelligence agencies aren't allowed to monitor journalists' telephone calls." When I offer to call him back he gives me a Sydney telephone number which, mysteriously, connects directly through to him.

The cloak-and-dagger precautions are by no means a pose; in Kenya, two human-rights lawyers who had been assisting WikiLeaks were shot dead in their car on a busy Nairobi street on March 5. Since late 2007, the website has published 1.2 million unauthorised documents from around the world, among them the US Government's classified operations manual for Guantanamo Bay, the entire 2005-08 email inbox of Venezuela's ambassador to Argentina, and a secret Kenyan government report alleging that former president Daniel Arap Moi and his cronies defrauded the country of $2 billion. Early last year the Swiss bank Julius Baer briefly shut WikiLeaks down with a US District Court injunction after the website published confidential details of its wealthy customers.

So Assange, perhaps unsurprisingly, demurs when I ask for contact numbers for friends and family in Australia. "I understand why it's important to the story," he says apologetically. "On the other hand, someone tends to sue us every month. And two associates in Kenya were assassinated two months ago. Another person was ambushed in a Luxembourg car park a few weeks ago and asked questions about me. Within that context, I don't like to be too predictable."

Assange's thoughts often have this tone of cerebral sangfroid, even when the subject is violence and death. Politically, he appears to be an ultra-libertarian, but with a mathematician's analytical bent. By way of explaining the WikiLeaks philosophy, he has written a 2350word essay that attempts to dissect the workings of journalism by applying the principles of physics. His conversation and emails are punctuated with the sayings of great men - Einstein, Churchill, Gandhi - and his ego is clearly in pretty good shape: the WikiLeaks website describes him as "Australia's most famous ethical computer hacker" and credits him with a number of important technological innovations. Discussing Britain's Official Secrets Act, he tells me: "The dead hand of feudalism still rests on every British shoulder; we plan to remove it."

WikiLeaks, according to the website, was founded by "dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists" from various countries. But according to several of those involved it was very much Assange's brainchild, developed in an intensive burst over 2005-06. "It took him months and months of hundred-hour weeks," says Suelette Dreyfus, an early collaborator. "The thing about Julian is that he is absolutely obsessively driven when he has a goal he wants to achieve. So he basically dropped everything, lived on the smell of an oily rag, enlisted a whole range of people from around the world and got them involved."

The aim, as Assange has since explained, was to change the world by making companies and governments accountable to the masses. Ben Laurie, a British computer security expert, recalls Assange visiting him in 2006 to discuss the idea of the site and how to make documents completely untraceable. Laurie thought it was a brilliant idea that would never work, and recalls asking: "Who would be insane enough to contribute stuff?"

Hundreds of people have answered that question since, and in the past two years WikiLeaks has broken scores of stories that have been cited in major newspapers throughout the world. But the site has also been attacked for its refusal to filter or edit documents - the tax records of the actor Wesley Snipes and the Church of Scientology's secret 612-page "bible" have both appeared on the site, prompting even some web activists to accuse WikiLeaks of trampling on individuals' privacy and religious beliefs. The publication of the Australian Government's porn list - complete with links to each site - rekindled those criticisms in March.

Assange says WikiLeaks would withhold information if it felt there were a real risk of someone suffering death or serious personal harm from its release. But the site is opposed to censorship, he says, because so many stories are self-censored by the mainstream media. By way of example he cites the Abu Ghraib torture revelations, which CBS News withheld for weeks at the request of US military officials until The New Yorker magazine published them.

WikiLeaks has no headquarters; the core team of five investigators who assess and verify documents are scattered around the world, as are the servers on which the system runs. Documents are uploaded from Sweden so they are protected by a Swedish law which makes it a criminal offence to breach the anonymity of journalists' sources. There's a nine-member advisory board, one of whom is identified on the site as Australian broadcaster and columnist with this magazine, Phillip Adams. But Adams, who has never met Assange, says he quit the board due to ill-health shortly after WikiLeaks was launched and never attended a meeting. "I don't think the advisory board has done any advisoring," he quips.

Daniel Schmitt, a German computer security expert who works for WikiLeaks, says: "It's very asymmetric ... We are not structured in a hierarchical way, so there is no one who is boss." Another WikiLeaks researcher is Daniel Mathews, a 28-year-old Australian maths prodigy who attended Melbourne University with Assange and is now at Stanford University in California. Mathews is now one of Stanford's most outspoken activists.

Assange's role is sometimes described as "investigations editor" but, despite his evident pride in WikiLeaks, he is vague about exactly what that means. "You shouldn't assume that because someone is effectively spokesperson that they do everything. This does a disservice to the people who are a bit more shy. It seems to be inevitable that people want a figurehead. I didn't particularly want that role but I had experience across all the relevant fields - with encryption, with journalism, with intelligence agencies and with running one of the first internet service providers in Australia."

Asked about his earlier experience - as a teenage hacker - he pauses. "That was part of my geopolitical education, there's no doubt," he says. "That sort of activism as a teenager is something I am proud of. But whether this project should be associated with that aspect of my life is something I am not so comfortable with."

Is he the Mendax character in Underground? "I would have to think about whether, in the context of an interview about the project, that is something I could talk about," Assange responds. "It's public information ... But there's a dangerous thing I want to avoid, which is the false allegation that we as editors go out and break into websites and steal information."

Assange is widely tipped to win an Amnesty International media award next week for his courageous work in Kenya. But if WikiLeaks has offered a vision of a new kind of activist online journalism, it has also outlined problems still to be ironed out. The site is a bottomless labyrinth of raw data - millions of words, often in foreign languages, about subjects that are arcane and impenetrable to the layman. When it was launched, Assange was hopeful the site would be edited and maintained by the internet's global diaspora of activists and armchair experts. He has been disenchanted to discover that the kind of "bored white people" who maintain blogs and Wikipedia pages have little interest in deciphering complex official documents.

Consequently, WikiLeaks confronts the tricky economics of financing labour-intensive and legally risky investigative journalism without any advertising. Last year the site dallied briefly with the idea of auctioning material to mainstream journalists, but abandoned it when the logistics proved impossible. The site is supported by financial donors, probono lawyers, volunteer programmers and investigators; whether any of the staff receive a conventional wage is unclear. Assange says he has investments that provide him with an income, but money does not seem to be an overriding motivation for any of them.

"I don't really know what [Julian's] life is like," says Ben Laurie, "but I do get the impression that these days he's got a rucksack, a laptop and that's about it ... If I was in his position I'd be doing what he does: move around a lot and be ready to move at a minute's notice. But he has always struck me as being a bit of a wanderer."

Asked whether WikiLeaks allows him any time for a conventional life, Assange responds with a philosophical musing. "I have already had a conventional life in parts. I've raised a family; my son is in university. Actually, this is a broader philosophical question: what does anyone do with their life? My thinking on this is that you have to experiment and see what you can put up with, what satisfies you, and after some experimentation you get an idea of what your personality demands."

If WikiLeaks were a religion, he muses, the manpower necessary to run it properly could be easily found. "But it's hard to make a religious movement out of the truth. And believe me, I've tried hard."

This story was published in the Weekend Australian Magazine on May 30, 2009