Julian Assange
Based on Wikipedia: Julian Assange
In December 1996, a twenty-five-year-old Australian hacker stood before a judge in Melbourne facing a theoretical sentence of 290 years in prison. He had breached the computer systems of the Pentagon, NASA, and major telecommunications corporations. The judge ultimately let him walk with a fine of about $2,100 Australian dollars and a good behavior bond, citing his "disrupted childhood" and lack of malicious intent. That young man was Julian Assange, and the experience would set him on a path that would make him one of the most controversial figures of the twenty-first century—a man some consider a heroic champion of transparency and others view as a reckless endangerer of lives and national security.
The Making of a Hacker
Julian Paul Hawkins was born on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Queensland. His biological father, John Shipton, was an anti-war activist and builder who separated from Julian's mother, Christine Ann Hawkins, before he was born. When Julian was about a year old, his mother married an actor named Brett Assange, who ran a small theatre company with her. Julian would later choose Brett's surname as his own, considering him his true father.
The family's stability didn't last. Christine and Brett divorced around 1979, and she became involved with a man named Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton. Julian later described Meynell as "a member of an Australian cult" called The Family—a notorious commune led by a woman named Anne Hamilton-Byrne who claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and collected children, often through dubious means, to raise as her own. Whether Julian was directly affected by this group remains unclear, but his mother separated from Meynell in 1982.
This instability meant constant movement. Julian lived in more than thirty Australian towns and cities during his childhood, attending multiple schools and often being educated at home. The family finally settled in Melbourne when he was in his mid-teens. By seventeen, he had moved in with a girlfriend.
It was during these teenage years that Assange discovered his calling.
Mendax: The Noble Liar
By 1987, at just sixteen years old, Assange had become what Australian newspapers would later call one of the country's "most notorious hackers." He adopted the handle Mendax, from the Latin phrase "splendide mendax"—meaning "nobly untruthful"—a reference to the Roman poet Horace. The name itself was a kind of manifesto: the idea that some lies, or at least some breaches of rules, serve a higher truth.
Assange wasn't in it for money. He developed his own code of ethics: never damage or crash the systems he hacked, never corrupt the data, and share what he found. He formed a hacking group called "the International Subversives" with two others known only as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect." Together, they regularly broke into systems belonging to what one journalist called a "who's who of the U.S. military-industrial complex."
The group's ambitions were remarkable for teenagers operating from bedrooms in Melbourne. In mid-1991, they began targeting MILNET—a data network used by the United States military. Assange later claimed they found a backdoor and "had control over it for two years." He wrote a program called Sycophant that allowed massive automated attacks on U.S. military systems. Years later, he would boast that he had been "reading generals' emails since I was 17."
There's speculation that Assange may have been involved in the WANK hack at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1989—one of the earliest examples of what would later be called "hacktivism." The hack displayed the message "WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS" on infected systems, timed to disrupt the launch of a spacecraft carrying nuclear material. Assange has never confirmed his involvement, but he has called it "the origin of hacktivism," and a Swedish documentary made with his cooperation hinted at his participation.
The Fall and Rise
The Australian Federal Police eventually caught up with the International Subversives. In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian telecommunications corporation. One of his fellow hackers turned informant, and the police tapped Assange's phone line and raided his home at the end of October.
What followed was a lengthy legal ordeal. Assange was charged in 1994 with 31 counts related to hacking, including fraud, unauthorized access, and altering data. He fell into such a deep depression while awaiting trial that he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital. After leaving, he spent six months essentially homeless, sleeping in the wilderness around Melbourne.
The trial, when it finally came in late 1996, ended with that remarkably light sentence. The judge acknowledged the charges were "quite serious" but showed leniency given Assange's chaotic upbringing and the fact that he hadn't acted out of malice or greed.
Assange's response to the verdict was telling. He told the judge he had "been misled by the prosecution" and that "a great misjustice has been done." Even when the system showed him mercy, he saw conspiracy. The judge advised him to be quiet.
But Assange didn't stay quiet. Instead, the experience radicalized him further. According to The New Republic, the trial "set him on the intellectual path" that would lead him to found WikiLeaks.
The Cypherpunk Years
After his conviction, Assange channeled his skills in a new direction. He joined the cypherpunk mailing list in late 1993 or early 1994—a community of activists, programmers, and cryptographers who believed that widespread encryption and privacy tools could fundamentally reshape the balance of power between individuals and institutions.
The cypherpunks weren't just theorists. They built things. Assange contributed to this tradition, authoring or co-authoring several significant pieces of software. His most notable creation was Rubberhose, a "deniable encryption" system. The concept is ingeniously paranoid: if someone forces you to reveal your password at gunpoint—or through legal coercion—you can give them a password that unlocks an innocent-looking set of files, while your truly sensitive data remains hidden behind a different password. There's no way to prove additional encrypted data exists. It was encryption designed for a world where governments might torture or imprison people for their secrets.
He also developed Strobe, a port scanner capable of probing hundreds of thousands of computers simultaneously for security vulnerabilities. In an ironic twist, Assange spent part of this period working as a security consultant for large corporations—essentially teaching them how to defend against people like his younger self.
During these years, Assange also showed an unexpected side. In 1993, he helped the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit prosecute people distributing child pornography. His lawyers later emphasized that he received no benefit for this cooperation and wasn't an informant—he simply wanted to help catch predators. He also reportedly assisted police in removing bomb-making instructions from the internet.
The Seeds of WikiLeaks
Throughout the 1990s, Assange was already experimenting with the concepts that would become WikiLeaks. While awaiting trial and fighting for custody of his son (from his teenage relationship), he and his mother formed an activist group called Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection. The group's methods presaged WikiLeaks' approach: they used freedom of information requests to obtain documents, secretly recorded meetings with government agencies, distributed flyers encouraging insiders to come forward anonymously, and cultivated "moles" within government departments.
A Canadian magazine would later call it "a low-tech rehearsal for WikiLeaks."
In November 1996—the same month as his sentencing—Assange sent an email mentioning a "LEAKS" project. He claimed to have registered the domain "leaks.org" in 1999, though he didn't use it. By August 1999, he was publicly warning about surveillance technology, calling attention to a National Security Agency patent for voice-data harvesting. "This patent should worry people," he wrote. "Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency."
He was ahead of his time. It would take another fourteen years, and another leaker named Edward Snowden, for most people to realize how right he was.
WikiLeaks Is Born
In 2006, Assange and a group of fellow activists, mathematicians, and dissidents established WikiLeaks. The timing was significant. Social media was emerging, the internet was becoming truly global, and traditional journalism was struggling to adapt to the digital age. Assange saw an opportunity to create something new: a platform for anonymous whistleblowers that would be essentially impossible to censor or shut down.
That December, the same month WikiLeaks posted its first leak, Assange published a five-page essay outlining his philosophy. It was, he said, a "thought experiment" about how to use leaks strategically to reform corrupt institutions. His reasoning was almost mathematical: secretive organizations that behave unjustly face a choice. They can become more open and honest, or they can double down on secrecy—but secrecy itself has costs. Every secret that must be protected requires resources, creates internal friction, and breeds paranoia. Assange called this the "secrecy tax."
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in the leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms.
In other words, leak enough secrets, and you force an organization to become either more honest or less effective. Either outcome, Assange believed, served the public interest.
From 2007 to 2010, Assange traveled almost constantly on WikiLeaks business, crisscrossing Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. The organization published the internal documents of a Swiss bank, footage of Chinese security forces during the 2008 Tibetan unrest, and a report on political killings in Kenya that ran in partnership with The Sunday Times. Each leak built the organization's reputation and refined its methods.
But 2010 would change everything.
Chelsea Manning and the Year of Revelations
In February 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing material from what would become the most significant leak in modern military history. The source was Chelsea Manning, a 22-year-old United States Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq. What Manning provided was unprecedented in scale: hundreds of thousands of classified documents spanning years of American military and diplomatic activity.
The most explosive release came in April 2010: a video that WikiLeaks titled "Collateral Murder." The footage, shot from a U.S. Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007, showed American forces killing a group of men on the ground, including two Reuters journalists. The soldiers can be heard laughing and making callous remarks as they fire. When a van arrived to help the wounded, it too was attacked, seriously injuring two children inside. The military had previously claimed the casualties resulted from a firefight with insurgents.
The video went viral. It forced a global conversation about the conduct of the Iraq War and the gap between official narratives and ground-level reality.
More followed. In July, WikiLeaks released the Afghan War Diary: over 90,000 documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. In October came the Iraq War Logs: nearly 400,000 documents. These weren't polished press releases—they were raw field reports, revealing civilian casualties that had never been acknowledged, evidence of torture by Iraqi forces that American troops had ignored, and countless small horrors that collectively painted a devastating picture of the wars.
Then, in November, WikiLeaks began releasing a quarter million U.S. diplomatic cables. These offered an unfiltered view of American foreign policy: candid assessments of world leaders, behind-the-scenes negotiations, and embarrassing revelations about everything from corruption to espionage. Some were merely awkward; others had real diplomatic consequences.
Assange was now the most famous—or infamous—publisher in the world.
The Swedish Investigation
That same month, November 2010, Swedish authorities announced they wanted to question Assange about allegations of sexual assault involving two women. The timing struck many as suspicious, coming just as WikiLeaks was at the peak of its global influence. Assange denied wrongdoing and suggested the investigation was politically motivated.
What followed was a Byzantine legal saga. Assange initially cooperated with Swedish authorities but left the country. Sweden then issued a European Arrest Warrant to extradite him from the United Kingdom, where he was staying. Assange fought the extradition, losing at multiple levels of the British court system.
In June 2012, facing imminent extradition, Assange made a dramatic move. He breached his bail conditions and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London—a small suite of offices in a Victorian townhouse in the upscale Knightsbridge neighborhood. Ecuador granted him political asylum in August 2012, citing fears he might ultimately be extradited to the United States to face prosecution for WikiLeaks' activities.
The Swedish investigation was officially dropped in 2019, with prosecutors saying they couldn't proceed because too much time had passed. But by then, Assange had been inside the embassy for nearly seven years.
Life in the Embassy
For 2,487 days—nearly seven years—Julian Assange lived in what was essentially a few rooms in the Ecuadorian embassy. He had no access to outdoor space, no direct sunlight. His health deteriorated. He rarely left, reportedly taking most of his exercise by pacing the halls. A cat named Embassy Cat became a minor celebrity on social media, one of the few humanizing details that emerged from his confinement.
But Assange didn't retreat from public life. He continued to run WikiLeaks, conducted interviews, and even mounted a symbolic campaign for the Australian Senate in 2013 under the banner of the WikiLeaks Party. He lost, but not overwhelmingly.
Relations with his hosts gradually soured. Ecuador accused him of interfering in other countries' affairs, of poor hygiene, and of mistreating staff. The specific complaints ranged from the petty (he allegedly didn't clean up after his cat) to the serious (accusations that he hacked into embassy communications). In 2018, Ecuador cut off his internet access.
The 2016 Election
WikiLeaks' most controversial moment came during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In July of that year, just before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks released thousands of internal Democratic Party emails. The messages showed that officials at the Democratic National Committee had favored Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders during the primary campaign, contradicting the party's claims of neutrality.
The leak was devastating for party unity. The DNC chair resigned. Sanders supporters, already suspicious of the process, had their worst fears confirmed.
Then, in October—just weeks before the election—WikiLeaks began releasing emails from the account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman. The steady drip of releases dominated news cycles and provided ammunition for Clinton's opponents.
U.S. intelligence agencies later concluded that Russian military intelligence had hacked the Democratic Party and provided the emails to WikiLeaks. The question of whether Assange knew the source—and whether WikiLeaks had coordinated with Russian operatives—became central to the investigation into Russian interference in the election.
Assange has consistently denied being a tool of Russian intelligence. WikiLeaks, he argued, publishes newsworthy material regardless of its source. But the episode permanently changed how many Americans viewed him. To some, he had transformed from a transparency advocate into a partisan actor who helped elect Donald Trump.
The CIA's Response
In March 2017, WikiLeaks struck again, this time targeting American intelligence directly. A release called "Vault 7" detailed the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) capabilities for hacking into smartphones, computers, and even internet-connected televisions. The documents revealed that the CIA had developed an arsenal of cyber weapons—and had lost control of them, allowing the tools to circulate among hackers and foreign governments.
The agency's response was extreme. According to later reports, senior CIA officials discussed potentially kidnapping or assassinating Assange. These discussions apparently reached high levels of the intelligence community before being rejected. Whether such discussions were serious proposals or merely the venting of frustrated officials remains unclear, but the fact they occurred at all illustrates how much of a threat the intelligence community considered Assange to be.
Arrest and Imprisonment
On April 11, 2019, Ecuador's patience finally ran out. The country's new president, Lenín Moreno, had grown hostile to Assange, who he accused of repeatedly violating the terms of his asylum. That morning, Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum status and invited British police into the embassy.
The arrest footage was striking. Assange, now heavily bearded and visibly aged, was carried out by multiple police officers while shouting and gesturing. He held a copy of a book by Gore Vidal, "History of the National Security State"—a final, defiant bit of messaging.
He was immediately convicted of breaching bail in 2012 and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison—close to the maximum. But the bail violation was a sideshow. The real threat was waiting.
On the same day as his arrest, the U.S. government unsealed an indictment charging Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. Prosecutors alleged he had helped Chelsea Manning crack a password to access classified material. The charge carried a maximum sentence of five years.
But the government wasn't finished. In May 2019 and again in June 2020, prosecutors added new charges under the Espionage Act of 1917—a law passed during World War I to prosecute spies and saboteurs. The full indictment eventually included seventeen Espionage Act counts and alleged that Assange had conspired with hackers beyond Manning.
The Espionage Act charges were unprecedented. The law had never been used to prosecute a publisher for releasing classified information. Newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian had all published material from the Manning leaks—yet only Assange faced prosecution.
Press freedom advocates were alarmed. If the government could prosecute Assange for publishing classified material, what would stop it from prosecuting traditional journalists who did the same thing? The charges, critics argued, represented a fundamental threat to investigative journalism.
The case was further complicated in 2021, when a key witness for the prosecution—an Icelandic man who had been granted immunity in exchange for his testimony—publicly admitted that he had fabricated his evidence. He said he had lied about Assange's involvement in computer crimes to secure his own immunity deal.
Five Years in Belmarsh
From April 2019 to June 2024, Assange was held in Her Majesty's Prison Belmarsh, a high-security facility in southeast London sometimes called "Britain's Guantanamo Bay." Originally built to house IRA terrorists and later used for suspected Islamic extremists, it was an incongruous home for a publisher whose most direct crime was skipping bail.
Assange spent much of his time in solitary confinement. His health, already poor from years in the embassy, declined further. Supporters warned he might die in custody. His father, John Shipton, traveled the world advocating for his release. His partner, Stella Moris—a lawyer who had worked on his case and with whom he had fathered two children while in the embassy—married him in Belmarsh in 2022.
Throughout this period, the extradition case wound through British courts. Assange's lawyers argued that he would face inhumane treatment if sent to the United States, that the charges were politically motivated, and that his mental health made him a suicide risk. The U.S. government provided assurances that he would be treated fairly and could serve any sentence in Australia.
The case seesawed. A judge initially blocked extradition on mental health grounds. The U.S. appealed and won. Assange appealed. The government responded. Each ruling was followed by another appeal, another hearing, another delay.
Australia Intervenes
For years, successive Australian governments had maintained a studied neutrality on the Assange case, treating it as a matter for the British and American legal systems to resolve. This began to change with the election of the Labor government led by Anthony Albanese in 2022.
Albanese had long been sympathetic to Assange's cause. As prime minister, he began quietly advocating for Assange's release through diplomatic channels. Australian officials argued that the case had gone on long enough, that Assange had already been punished substantially, and that it was time to bring the matter to a close.
This intervention mattered. Australia is one of America's closest allies, a member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, and host to critical U.S. military facilities. When Australia's government said publicly that Assange should come home, it carried weight in Washington.
The Plea Deal
In 2024, after a British court granted Assange the right to a full appeal of his extradition, the legal landscape shifted. A full appeal would mean months or years of additional proceedings, with an uncertain outcome. For both sides, there were reasons to seek a resolution.
The result was a remarkable plea agreement. Assange would plead guilty to a single count under the Espionage Act—conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defense documents. In exchange, his sentence would be time served. He would not set foot in a U.S. prison.
The hearing took place in an unusual location: a federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands—a U.S. territory in the Pacific that was convenient for both sides and allowed Assange to avoid traveling to the American mainland.
On June 26, 2024, Julian Assange walked out of Saipan's courthouse a free man. He boarded a plane and flew to Australia, landing in his home country for the first time in over a decade.
The Assange Legacy
How should we understand Julian Assange? The question has divided people for more than fifteen years, and it won't be resolved now that he's free.
To his supporters, Assange is a hero who exposed war crimes and government abuses that the public had a right to know about. The footage of the Baghdad airstrike, the evidence of unreported civilian casualties, the revelations about surveillance—these were genuine public services, they argue, acts of journalism that powerful interests wanted to suppress. His prosecution, in this view, was an attack on press freedom itself.
To his critics, Assange was reckless and possibly criminal. They argue that WikiLeaks' mass releases endangered intelligence sources and diplomatic relationships, that the organization showed poor judgment in not redacting names that could put people at risk, and that Assange's willingness to accept material from Russian intelligence—and release it in ways that clearly favored one side in an American election—revealed him as something other than a neutral transparency advocate.
The truth is probably that Assange was both: a genuine believer in radical transparency who also made choices that compromised his stated principles. He helped reveal real abuses and also became entangled with interests that didn't share his professed ideals. He championed whistleblowers while allegedly treating his own staff poorly. He claimed to stand above partisan politics while intervening decisively in the most contentious election in recent American history.
What's clear is that the Assange case has reshaped the landscape of journalism, national security, and the law. The use of the Espionage Act against a publisher—even one who pleaded guilty—sets a precedent whose implications are still unfolding. The tensions between government secrecy, public accountability, and press freedom that his case illuminated haven't been resolved. They've only intensified.
Assange himself remains what he has always been: a figure who refuses to fit neatly into categories, whose story reveals the contradictions of an age caught between the old structures of state power and the new possibilities of a networked world. Whatever else he may be, he is one of the defining characters of our era—the teenage hacker who became the most wanted publisher alive, the man who made transparency itself into a weapon.