Essays: The Cypherpunk Revolutionary - Julian Assange: The Unknown Story, by Robert Manne

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https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2011/february/1324596189/robert-manne/cypherpunk-revolutionary

The Cypherpunk Revolutionary

March 2011
By Robert Manne

Julian Assange: the unknown story

Fewer than 20 years ago Julian Assange was sleeping rough. Even a year ago
hardly anyone knew his name. Today he is one of the best-known and
most-respected human beings on earth. Assange was the overwhelming winner
of the popular vote for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” and Le
Monde’s less politically correct “Man of the Year”. If Rupert
Murdoch, who turns 80 this month, is the most influential Australian of
the postwar era, Julian Assange, who will soon turn 40, is undoubtedly the
most consequential Australian of the present time. Murdoch’s importance
rests in his responsibility for injecting, through Fox News, the poison of
rabid populist conservatism into the political culture of the United
States; Assange’s in the revolutionary threat his idea of publishing
damaging documentary information sent by anonymous insiders to WikiLeaks
poses to governments and corporations across the globe.

Julian Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice,
most recently to a journalist from the New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian,
and some 15 years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette
Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of
computer hacking, Underground, for which Assange was the primary
researcher. In what is called the “Researcher’s Introduction”,
Assange begins with a cryptic quote 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.” Nothing about Assange has ever been straightforward. One
of the main characters in Underground is the Melbourne hacker Mendax.
Although there is no way readers at that time could have known it, Mendax
is Julian Assange.

Putting Khatchadourian and Dreyfus together, and adding a little detail
from a blog that Assange published on the internet in 2006–07 and
checking it against common sense and some material that has emerged since
his rise to fame, the story of Assange’s childhood and adolescence can
be told in some detail. There is, however, a problem. Journalists as
senior as David Leigh of the Guardian or John F Burns of the New York
Times in general accept on trust many of Assange’s stories about
himself. They do not understand that their subject is a fabulist. By
contrast, when Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Assange’s lieutenant at WikiLeaks
between late 2007 and September 2010, heard that Assange was writing an
autobiography he tells us in Inside WikiLeaks that his “first thought”
was that it should be placed “in the fiction section”.

According to Assange, his mother left her Queensland home for Sydney at
the age of 17, around 1970, at the time of the anti–Vietnam War movement
when the settled culture of the western world was breaking up. In Dreyfus,
Assange’s mother is not named; in Khatchadourian, she is called
“Claire”. In fact she was Christine Hawkins. Assange told Dreyfus that
his mother’s parents were both “academics”. This seems a little
grandiose. Christine’s father, Warren Hawkins, was the principal of the
Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education. Christine fell in love with
a man called John Shipton in Sydney. A year or so after Julian was born,
in Townsville, they parted. Assange did not meet Shipton again till he was
25.

When Julian was about one, Christine met and married a roving theatrical
producer and member of what was by now called the counterculture, Brett
Assange. According to what Julian told Khatchadourian, Brett was the
descendant of a Chinese immigrant who had settled on Thursday Island, Ah
Sang or Mr Sang. Together Brett and Christine travelled around the
country, performing. He painted a vivid portrait for Khatchadourian of an
idyllic life after the family settled for a time on Magnetic Island.
“Most of this time was pretty Tom Sawyer. I had my own horse. I built my
own raft. I went fishing. I was down mine shafts and tunnels.” To
Dreyfus, Julian claimed his stepfather was a decent man but also an
alcoholic. By the time he was addressing audiences worldwide, his father
– he could only be referring to Brett Assange – had become idealised
as a “good and generous man” who had taught him the most fundamental
lesson in life: to nurture victims rather than to create them. Assange
also told Dreyfus about a foundational political memory, an incident that
had occurred while he was about four. His mother and a male friend had
discovered evidence concerning the British atomic bomb tests that had
taken place in Maralinga in greatest secrecy, which they intended to give
to an Adelaide journalist. The male friend had been beaten by police to
silence him. Christine had been warned that she was in danger of being
charged with being “an unfit mother”. She was advised to stay out of
politics. For a four year old to grasp the political meaning of an
encounter such as this seems a little improbable.

When Julian was eight or nine years old, Christine and Brett Assange
separated and then divorced. His mother now formed a “tempestuous”
relationship with an amateur musician, Keith Hamilton, with whom she had
another child, a boy. To Dreyfus, Julian described Hamilton as a
“manipulative and violent psychopath”. A bitter battle for the custody
of Julian’s half-brother began. Christine’s family was now once more
on the move – this time not as before on a “happy-go-lucky odyssey”,
but hiding on both sides of the continent in permanent terror. To
Khatchadourian but not Dreyfus, Julian claimed there was evidence that
this man was a member of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult The Family and,
rather fancifully, that he probably discovered their whereabouts from the
“moles” that the cult had inside the government. Because of his
itinerant life as a child, and also because his mother was suspicious of
the authoritarian culture of formal schooling, Julian claimed that he was
home-schooled or independently educated either by professors encountered
on their travels or by following his curiosity in public libraries. He
did, however, also claim to have attended very many schools. According to
Dreyfus, by the time Mendax was 15 he “had lived in a dozen different
places” and had “enrolled in at least as many different schools”.
His lawyer in his trial of 1996, Paul Galbally, also told the court
Assange had been enrolled in about 12 schools. By 2006, Assange claimed he
had attended 37 different schools. Given that after his rise to fame the
Northern Star reported that he had attended Lismore’s Goolmangar Primary
School between 1979 and 1983, the story of 37 schools seems unlikely.

One of the schools Julian attended was in rural Victoria. In the blog he
posted on 18 July 2006, there is an account of his and another
outsider’s experience at this school.



We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant
subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable
boneheads.

This unwillingness to accept the authority of a peer group considered
risible was not appreciated. I was quick to anger and brutal statements
such as “You're a bunch of mindless apes out of Lord of the Flies”
when faced with standover tactics were enough to ensure I got into a
series of extreme fights and I wasn’t sorry to leave when presented with
the dental bills of my tormentors.



Eventually Julian’s family settled on the outskirts of Melbourne in
Emerald and then Tecoma, according to Dreyfus. Christine bought Julian a
$700 computer and a modem. Assange fell in love with a 16-year-old girl,
Teresa, whom he had met through a program for gifted children. He left
home, moved in with and then married his girlfriend. They had a son. This
was the period when the underground subculture of hacking was forming in
Melbourne. Around 1988 Assange joined this subculture, under the handle
Mendax. By October 1989 an attack was mounted from Australia on the NASA
computer system via the introduction of what was called the WANK worm in
an attempt to sabotage the Jupiter launch of the Galileo rocket as part of
an action of anti-nuclear activists. No one claimed responsibility for
this attack, which is outlined in the first chapter of Underground. In an
article he later published in the left-wing magazine CounterPunch, Assange
would claim the WANK worm attack was “the origin of hacktivism”. In a
Swedish television documentary, WikiRebels, made with Assange’s
co-operation, there are hints he was responsible.

Mendax formed a closed group with two other hackers – Trax and Prime
Suspect. They called themselves the International Subversives. According
to Dreyfus, their politics was fiercely anti-establishment; their motive
adventure and intellectual curiosity; their strict ethic not to profit by
their hacking or to harm the computers they entered. Mendax wrote a
program called Sycophant. It allowed the International Subversives to
conduct “massive attacks on the US military”. The list of the
computers they could recall finding their way into “read like a Who’s
Who of the American military-industrial complex”. Eventually Mendax
penetrated the computer system of the Canadian telecommunications
corporation Nortel. It was here that his hacking was first discovered. The
Australian Federal Police conducted a long investigation into the
International Subversives, Operation Weather. Eventually Trax lost his
nerve and began to talk. He told the police that the International
Subversives had been hacking on a scale never achieved before. In October
1991 the Australian Federal Police raided Prime Suspect’s and Mendax’
homes. They found Assange in a state of near mental collapse. His young
wife had recently left him, taking their son Daniel. Assange told Dreyfus
that he had been dreaming incessantly of “police raids … of shadows in
the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his
backdoor at 5 a.m.” When the police arrived, the incriminating disks,
which he had been in the habit of hiding inside a beehive, were scattered
by his computer. The evidence was removed.

Assange descended into a personal hell. He entered a psychiatric ward
briefly. He tried and failed to return home to live with his mother. He
frequently slept along Merri Creek in Melbourne or in Sherbrooke Forest.
He told Dreyfus that 1992 was “the worst year in his life”. The formal
charges against Assange were not laid until July 1994. His case was not
finally settled until December 1996. Although Assange had been speaking in
secretive tones about the technical possibility of a massive prison
sentence, in the end he received a $5000 good behaviour bond and a $2100
reparations fine. The experience of arrest and trial nonetheless scarred
his soul and helped shape his politics. In his blog of 17 July 2006,
Assange wrote:



If there is a book whose feeling captures me it is First Circle by
Solzhenitsyn. To feel that home is the comraderie [sic] of persecuted, and
in fact, prosecuted, polymaths in a Stalinist labor camp! How close the
parallels to my own adventures! … Such prosecution in youth is a
defining peak experience. To know the state for what it really is! To see
through that veneer the educated swear to disbelieve in but still
slavishly follow with their hearts! … True belief only begins with a
jackboot at the door. True belief forms when lead [sic] into the dock and
referred to in the third person. True belief is when a distant voice booms
“the prisoner shall now rise” and no one else in the room stands.



This is a characteristically self-dramatising passage. Solzhenitsyn was
incarcerated in the Gulag Archipelago, harassed for years by the KGB and
eventually expelled from the Soviet Union. Assange was investigated by the
AFP and received a good behaviour bond and a fine.

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Before his trial, Julian Assange was extremely sensitive about his
reputation. In 1994 he offered to assist the director of Dogs in Space,
Richard Lowenstein, with a film he was thinking of making about hackers.
Assange spoke about the 290 years he might theoretically spend in prison.
He learned that Lowenstein had not kept this information confidential. He
was furious. He sent Lowenstein a series of threatening emails in which he
outlined details of Lowenstein’s sexual life. Lowenstein protested. Had
Assange no understanding of the concept of privacy? Privacy, Assange
replied, is “relative”. “I could monitor your keystrokes, intercept
your phone and bug your residence. If I could be bothered … As one
who’s has [sic] one’s life monitored pretty closely, you quickly come
to the realisation that trying to achieve complete privacy is
impossible.” If Lowenstein wanted to keep details of his life
confidential he should use encrypted email. Lowenstein told Assange he had
not realised that the information was confidential. “I do not doubt your
reasons were not malicious. Stupidity, ignorance and lack of respect come
to mind. You seem to think I have only one life. I have many.”

While awaiting trial, Julian Assange began to try to reconstruct his life.
One overwhelming preoccupation was the bitter struggle waged for the
custody of his son, Daniel. In their struggle, Julian and Christine
Assange formed a small activist group – Parent Inquiry into Child
Protection. They found sources of support inside the Victorian Department
of Health and Community Services. An insider provided them with a document
of great value to their cause – an internal departmental manual
outlining the current rules determining custody disputes. It is almost
certainly from this experience that Assange became seriously interested in
the political possibilities of leaks. He told Dreyfus that in his fight
against government corruption in Victoria he had “acted as a conduit for
leaked documents”. On several occasions recently, Assange has claimed
that while he registered a domain site in 1999 known as “leaks.org” he
did nothing with it. This cannot be accurate. In November 1996 he sent the
following enigmatic message to those on certain email lists he had
created.



A few pointy heads in Canberra have been considering your moderator’s
continued existence. Consequentially I’ve been called on to justify
labour and resources spent on all projects under my control, particularly
those that can’t easily be quantified such as IQ, BOS, LACC, IS, LEAKS
…



All these lists were connected to an internet service provider, Suburbia
Public Access Network, that Assange had taken over when its original
owner, Mark Dorset, went to live in Sydney. He likened it to a “low cost
power-to-the-people enabling technology”. Suburbia was the vehicle for
several email lists – Interesting Questions (IQ), Best of Security
(BOS), Legal Aspects of Computer Crime (LACC), Inside-Source (IS) and,
presumably, LEAKS – that Assange created. It was also the free site for
several groups of Melbourne activists, artists and others – the
Powerline Action Group; the Alternative Technology Association; the Centre
for Contemporary Photography; the Australian Public Access Network
Association and, strangely enough, the Private Inquiry Agents Association.
It is because of the continued existence on the internet of some of the
commentary he wrote for these lists in his mid twenties that we can begin
to hear, for the first time, the distinctive political voice of Julian
Assange. In general, it is intelligent and assured. One of Suburbia’s
clients had published some of the Church of Scientology’s holy
scriptures. The church threatened legal action against Suburbia. The
client, Dave Gerard, fought back. In March 1996, Assange issued an appeal
to join an anti-Scientology protest.



What you have then is a Church based on brainwashing yuppies and other
people with more money than sense … If Nicole Kiddman [sic], Kate
Cerbrano [sic], John Travolta, Burce [sic] Willis, Demi Moore and Tom
Cruise want to spend their fortunes on learning that the earth is in
reality the destroyed prison colony of aliens from outer space then so be
it. However, money brings power and attracts the corrupt … Their worst
critic at the moment is not a person, or an organisation but a medium –
the Internet. The Internet is by its very nature a censorship free zone
… The fight against the Church is far more than the Net versus a bunch
of wackos. It is about corporate suppression of the Internet and free
speech. It is about intellectual property and the big and rich versus the
small and smart.



At this time, to judge by the pieces he wrote that have survived,
Assange’s main political preoccupation seems to have been the
extraordinary democratic possibilities of the information-sharing virtual
communities across the globe created by the internet, and the threat to
its freedom and flourishing posed by censorious states, greedy
corporations and repressive laws.

Not everything Assange wrote at this time was serious. He was interested
in a computer security software program developed by Dan Farmer of Silicon
Graphics known as SATAN. One evening in April 1995 he composed ‘The Dan
Farmer Rap’ for ‘firewalls’, a list to which he subscribed.



I’m Dan Farmer you can’t fool me —

The only security consultant to be on MTV,



I’ve got red hair – hey hands off man! don’t touch the locks of the
mighty Dan.

AC/DC – from the front or from behind, you can fuck my arse but you
can’t touch my mind.



philosophy’s the trip – evil ’n’ stuff,

god, we know a lot, Mike me and Muff.



A real ardent feminist – just like she tells me to be,

See me out there rooting for sexual e-qual-ity …



I coded it all – yes the mighty Dan did it alone,

if you can’t believe it, you and your note pad can fuck off home.



I’m Dan Farmer – now take that down – it’s not every

day you get to interview the world’s biggest security clown.



Several subscribers to ‘firewalls’ were appalled. One wrote: “Just
reading this made me feel dirty. In 20+ years associated with this
business, I don’t think I’ve ever seen debate among professionals
degraded to quite this slime-ball level. Mr Assange is an unprincipled ass
…” Assange wrote a sort-of apology. “It was perhaps an error of
judgment on my behalf to equate the people on this list with those who
knew myself and Dan more fully. Such mistakes are ripe to happen when one
is merry and full of wine in the wee hours of the morning.” Nonetheless,
he expressed high amusement regarding all those who had publicly condemned
him while privately sending their congratulations. “You know who you
are.” Assange’s Dan Farmer ‘peccadillo’ was still remembered six
years later by a British computer geek, Danny O’Brien.

By 1997 Julian Assange, with his friends Suelette Dreyfus and Ralf
Weinmann, had written ‘Rubberhose’, a piece of ‘deniable
cryptography’ for human rights activists and troublemakers, the purpose
of which was to make it impossible for torturers or their victims to know
whether all the encrypted data on a computer hard drive had been revealed.
It was designed to make torture to extract passwords pointless, and
defection and betrayal in the face of such torture impossible. The concept
was Assange’s. Assange argued a convoluted and rather improbable
psychological case about why Rubberhose would cause rational torturers to
put away their weapons. Danny O’Brien captured the obvious objection
rather well. Despite Rubberhose’s deniable cryptography, “won’t
rational torturers just beat you up ‘forever’?”

I am in no position to judge the sophistication of the Rubberhose software
or the level of creativity it required. I can however assess the quality
of the posting announcing its creation, which Assange sent to the
firewalls list in June 1997. Assange called it “One Man’s Search for a
Cryptographic Mythology”. His search to find a suitable name for
Rubberhose takes him, in a zany and hilarious stream of consciousness, on
a journey through Greek and Roman mythology, the incestuous Cerberus and
the clichéd Janus; to the moral pessimism of David Hume, who argued the
inescapable connection between joy and despondency; to an unexplained
rejection of his request for mythological advice by the Princeton History
Department; to Sigmund Freud, the Medusa’s Head and the castration
complex; to a spoof on Zen Buddhism; to a memory of a visit to a mercenary
hypnotherapist in Melbourne’s Swanston Street – until, through the
suggestion of a Swedish friend with an interest in ancient Sumerian
mythology – “who calls himself Elk on odd days and Godflesh on even
days. Don’t ask why” – he finally arrives with a joyous heart at the
Mesopotamian god MARUTUKKU, “Master of the Arts of Protection”.



If MARUTUKKU was my exquisite cryptographic good, of wit, effusive joy,
ravishing pleasure and flattering hope; then where was the counter point?
The figure to its ground – the sharper evil, the madness, the
melancholy, the most cruel lassitudes and disgusts and the severest
disappointments. Was Hume right?



Alas, he was. Assange, “on a cold and wintry night here in Melbourne”,
discovers in the 4000-year-old Babylonian tablets a reference to the
supposedly secret eavesdropping intelligence agency in Maryland, the
National Security Agency! It is a magnificently exuberant, bravura
literary performance. Assange was not merely a talented code writer and
computer geek. There was in him daring, wildness and a touch of genius.
For a while he signed his emails not with his customary “Proff.” but
“Prof. Julian Assange”.

Assange was by now a committed member of the free software movement,
pioneered by Richard Stallman, whose aim was to regulate communication in
cyberspace by software not by law. As members of the movement put it,
freedom here meant free speech rather than free beer. The movement
stressed democratic, collective contribution.

Assange tended to be somewhat sceptical about the movement, on one
occasion arguing that in reality usually one or two people did 80% of the
work. Assange was nonetheless involved in the development of NetBSD, an
open source computer operating system derived from the original Berkeley
Software Distribution source code. Some of the slogans he invented to
spruik its virtues can still be found on the internet. Here are three.
“We put the OS in OrgaSm”; “Bits for Tits”; “More ports than a
Norwegian crack whore”.

By the time Assange was working on NetBSD he had been involved for several
years with a movement known as the cypherpunks. It was the cypherpunks
more than the free software movement who provided him with his political
education. Although there are tens of thousands of articles on Julian
Assange in the world’s newspapers and magazines, no mainstream
journalist so far has grasped the critical significance of the cypherpunks
movement to Assange’s intellectual development and the origin of
WikiLeaks.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The cypherpunks emerged from a meeting of minds in late 1992 in the Bay
Area of San Francisco. Its founders were Eric Hughes, a brilliant Berkeley
mathematician; Timothy C May, an already wealthy, former chief scientist
at Intel who had retired at the age of 34; and John Gilmore, another
already retired and wealthy computer scientist – once number five at Sun
Microsystems – who had co-founded an organisation to advance the cause
of cyberspace freedom, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They created a
small group, which met monthly in Gilmore’s office at a business he had
created, Cygnus. At one of the early meetings of the group, an editor at
Mondo 2000, Jude Milhon, jokingly called them cypherpunks, a play on
cyberpunk, the “hi-tech, low-life” science-fiction genre. The name
stuck. It soon referred to a vibrant emailing list, created shortly after
the first meeting, which had grown to 700 by 1994 and perhaps 2000 by 1997
with by then up to a hundred postings per day. It also referred to a
distinctive subculture – eventually there were cypherpunk novels,
Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, Indecent Communications; a cypherpunk porno
film, Cryptic Seduction; and even a distinctive cypherpunks dress:
broad-brimmed black hats. Most importantly, however, it referred to a
political–ideological crusade.

At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great
question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state
would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for
electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually
undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of
electronic weapons newly at hand. Many cypherpunks were optimistic that in
the battle for the future of humankind – between the State and the
Individual – the individual would ultimately triumph. Their optimism was
based on developments in intellectual history and computer software: the
invention in the mid 1970s of public-key cryptography by Whitfield Diffie
and Martin Hellman, and the creation by Phil Zimmerman in the early 1990s
of a program known as PGP, ‘Pretty Good Privacy’. The seminal
historian of codes, David Kahn, argued that the Diffie–Hellman invention
represented the most important development in cryptography since the
Renaissance. Zimmerman’s PGP program democratised their invention and
provided individuals, free of cost, with access to public-key cryptography
and thus the capacity to communicate with others in near-perfect privacy.
Although George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the
cypherpunks’ foundational texts, because of the combination of
public-key cryptography and PGP software, they tended to believe that in
the coming battle between Big Brother and Winston Smith, the victor might
be Winston Smith.

At the time the cypherpunks formed, the American government strongly
opposed the free circulation of public-key cryptography. It feared that
making it available would strengthen the hands of the espionage agencies
of America’s enemies abroad and of terrorists, organised criminals, drug
dealers and pornographers at home. For the cypherpunks, the question of
whether cryptography would be freely available would determine the outcome
of the great battle of the age. Their most important practical task was to
write software that would expand the opportunities for anonymous
communication made possible by public-key cryptography. One of the key
projects of the cypherpunks was ‘remailers’, software systems that
made it impossible for governments to trace the passage from sender to
receiver of encrypted email traffic. Another key project was ‘digital
cash’, a means of disguising financial transactions from the state.

Almost all cypherpunks were anarchists who regarded the state as the
enemy. Most but not all were anarchists of the Right, or in American
parlance, libertarians, who supported laissez-faire capitalism. The most
authoritative political voice among the majority libertarian cypherpunks
was Tim May, who, in 1994, composed a vast, truly remarkable document,
“Cyphernomicon”. May called his system crypto-anarchy. He regarded
crypto-anarchy as the most original contribution to political ideology of
contemporary times. May thought the state to be the source of evil in
history. He envisaged the future as an Ayn Rand utopia of autonomous
individuals dealing with each other as they pleased. Before this future
arrived, he advocated tax avoidance, insider trading, money laundering,
markets for information of all kinds, including military secrets and what
he called assassination markets not only for those who broke contracts or
committed serious crime but also for state officials and the politicians
he called “Congressrodents”. He recognised that in his future world
only elites with control over technology would prosper. No doubt “the
clueless 95%” – whom he described as “inner city breeders” and as
“the unproductive, the halt and the lame” – “would suffer, but
that is only just”. May acknowledged that many cypherpunks would regard
these ideas as extreme. He also acknowledged that, while the overwhelming
majority of cypherpunks were, like him, anarcho–capitalist libertarians,
some were straitlaced Republicans, left-leaning liberals, Wobblies or even
Maoists. Neither fact concerned him. The cypherpunks formed a house of
many rooms. The only thing they all shared was an understanding of the
political significance of cryptography and the willingness to fight for
privacy and unfettered freedom in cyberspace.

Like an inverse Marxist, Tim May tended to believe that the inexorable
expansion of private cryptography made the victory of crypto-anarchism
inevitable. A new “balance of power between individuals and larger
entities” was already emerging. He predicted with some confidence “the
end of governments as we know them”. Another even more extreme
cypherpunk of the libertarian Right, Jim Bell, like an inverse Leninist,
thought that history might need a push. In mid 1995, drawing upon May’s
recommendation of assassination markets, he began a series explaining his
“revolutionary idea”, which he called “Assassination Politics”.
These were perhaps the most notorious and controversial postings in the
history of the cypherpunks list. Bell devised a system in which citizens
could contribute towards a lottery fund for the assassination of
particular government officials. The prize would go to the person who
correctly predicted the date of the death. The winner would obviously be
the official’s murderer. However, through the use of public-key
cryptography, remailers and digital cash, from the time they entered the
competition to the collection of the prize no one except the murderer
would be aware of their identity. Under the rubric “tax is theft” all
government officials and politicians were legitimate targets of
assassination. Journalists would begin to ask of politicians, “why
should you not be killed?” As prudence would eventually dictate that no
one take the job, the state would simply wither away. Moreover, as
assassination lotteries could be extended across borders, no leader would
again risk taking their people to war. Eventually, through the idea of the
assassination lottery, then, not only would the era of anarchy arise
across the globe, the condition of permanent peace humankind had long
dreamt of would finally come to pass. Bell ended his 20,000 word series of
postings with these words. “Is all this wishful thinking? I really
don’t know.” A year or so later he was arrested on tax avoidance
charges.

Julian Assange joined the cypherpunks email list in late 1995 at the time
the controversy over “Assassination Politics” was raging. There were
many reasons Assange was likely to be attracted to the cypherpunks. As his
encounter with Richard Lowenstein had revealed, he was already interested
in the connection between privacy and encrypted communication. Even before
his arrest he had feared the intrusion into his life of the totalitarian
surveillance state. An atmosphere of paranoia pervaded the cypherpunks
list. Assange believed that he had been wrongly convicted of what he
called a “victimless crime”. The struggle against victimless crimes
– the right to consume pornography, to communicate in cyberspace
anonymously, to distribute cryptographic software freely – was at the
centre of the cypherpunks’ political agenda. Moreover the atmosphere of
the list was freewheeling – racism, sexism, homophobia were common. Not
only Tim May believed that political correctness had turned Americans into
“a nation of sheep”. On the cypherpunks list no one would disapprove
of “The Dan Farmer rag”. Yet there was probably more to it than all
this. Cypherpunks saw themselves as Silicon Valley Masters of the
Universe. It must have been more than a little gratifying for a
self-educated antipodean computer hacker, who had not even completed high
school, to converse on equal terms with professors of mathematics,
whiz-kid businessmen and some of the leading computer code-writers in the
world.

Julian Assange contributed to the cypherpunks list from December 1995
until June 2002. As it happens, almost all his interventions have been
placed on the internet. On the basis of what historians call primary
evidence, the mind and character of Julian Assange can be seen at the time
of his obscurity.

The first thing that becomes clear is the brashness. Over a technical
dispute, he writes: “[B]oy are you a dummy.” When someone asks for
assistance in compiling a public list of hackers with handles, names,
email addresses, Assange responds: “Are you on this list of morons?”
In a dispute over religion and intolerance one cypherpunk had written:
“Because those being hatefully intolerant have the ‘right’ beliefs
as to what the Bible says. Am I a racist if I don’t also include an
example from the Koran?” “No, just an illiterate”, Assange replied.
Following a savaging from Assange for total computer incompetence, a
hapless cypherpunk pointed out that he has been writing code since the age
of 14. If one thing is clear from the cypherpunks list, it is that the
young Julian Assange did not suffer those he regarded as fools gladly.

In his posts there is humour, although often it is sarcastic. In one of
his earliest interventions Assange has read about the arrest of someone
caught with diesel fuel and fertiliser. “Looks like I’ve just been
placed into the ranks of the pyro-terrorist. Golly, Deisel [sic] fuel.
Gosh, Fertilizer. Ma, other items.” Some posts reflect his faith in the
theory of evolution. Assange forwarded an article about the role played by
the CIA in supplying crack gangs in Los Angeles. A cypherpunk responded:
“I wish they’d get back to the business, but add an overt poison to
the product. Clean out the shit from the cities. Long live Darwinism.”
“Darwinism is working as well as it ever was. You may not like it but
shit is being selected for,” Assange shot back. Other posts reflect his
recent life experiences. Assange had helped Victoria Police break a
paedophile ring in 1993. On the cypherpunks list he defended the
circulation of child pornography on the internet on the grounds that it
would cut the need for new production and make it easier for police to
capture paedophiles. In another post he expressed deep anger at perceived
injustice regarding those with whom he identifies – convicted hackers.
One, Tsutomu Shimamura, had not only played a role in the hunting down of
a notorious American fellow hacker, Kevin Mitnick (known personally to
Assange through his research for Underground), but had even co-authored a
book about it, Takedown. “This makes me ill. Tsutomu, when Mitnick
cracks will you dig up his grave and rent his hands out as ash trays?”
Assange also posted on the reports of violence against another hacker, Ed
Cummings AKA Bernie S, imprisoned in the US. “I was shocked. I’ve had
some dealings with the SS … Those that abuse their power and inflict
grave violence on others must be held accountable and their crimes
deplored and punished in the strongest manner. Failure to do so merely
creates an environment where such behaviour becomes predominant.”

Already there are qualities in Assange’s postings unusual in the
standard cypherpunk. One is a fascination with language. Assange acquired
a software program that created anagrams. The deepest institutional enemy
of the cypherpunks was the National Security Agency. Assange put the name
into his computer. Among the anagrams that emerged were: “National
Anti-Secrecy Guy”; “Secret Analytic Guy Union”; “Caution Laying
Any Secret”; “Insane, ugly, acne atrocity”; and, Assange’s
apparent favourite: “National Gay Secrecy Unit”. He was also
interested in what he described as “tracking language drift; i.e. the
relative change in word frequency on the internet as time goes by”. He
informed the cypherpunks that he had just discovered that in a “10
billion word corpus” the following frequency occurred:



God – 2,177,242

America – 2,178,046

Designed – 2,181,106

Five – 2,189,194

December – 2,190,028



His eccentricity would also have been obvious after a member of the
firewalls’ list forwarded his MARUTUKKU fantasia to cypherpunks.

Where did Assange stand with regard to the radical cypherpunks agenda of
Tim May? This question is best answered in two parts. On the question of
cryptographic freedom and hostility towards the surveillance state and its
chief embodiment – the National Security Agency – Assange was, if
anything, even more absolute and extreme than May. In September 1996,
Esther Dyson, the chair of the lobby group for freedom in cyberspace, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as
being in favour of certain extremely limited restrictions on internet
anonymity. On the cypherpunks list a furious controversy, called “The
Esther Dyson Fuss”, broke out. Some cypherpunks defended Dyson on the
ground that she had every right to argue a more nuanced position and that
it was anyhow healthy for individuals to speak their mind. May vehemently
disagreed. The issue was not her freedom of speech. A critical moment in
the battle between freedom and surveillance had arrived. Dyson had
defected to the enemy camp. Assange went further. He launched a stinging
ad hominem attack.



Examining in detail Dyson’s interests it appears she maintains a
sizeable and longstanding interest in East European technology companies.
She is also very far to the right of the political spectrum (rampant
capitalist would be putting it mildly). She also speaks Russian. I’m not
saying she’s been working for the CIA for the past decade, but I would
be very surprised if the CIA has not exerted quite significant pressure
… in order to bring her into their folds during that time period.



“At least you don’t accuse me of being a Communist,” Dyson
responded. “For the record, I am not a tool of the CIA nor have they
pressured me, but there’s no reason for you to believe me.” Perhaps
Dyson remembered the incident. When Assange was in trouble last year she
wrote a piece on the Salon website arguing that even unpleasant characters
need to be defended.

A month or so after September 11 a controversy broke out on the
cypherpunks list over the report of a civilised discussion about increased
FBI surveillance over internet communications between Mitch Kapor, a
co-founder and former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
and Stu Baker, an attorney who had once been employed by the National
Security Agency. Some cypherpunks had some sympathy for Kapor’s
moderation. Even they recognised that with September 11 something major
had occurred. One pointed out, in addition, that Stu Baker was “a gun
for hire, not a doctrinaire blinders-on true believer for either the
surveillance enthusiasts or privacy freaks”. This was too much for
Assange:



Stu is a well known NSA zealot. The only reason there’s a bridge between
Kapor and Baker is due to the cavernous ravine that lays [sic] between
them. Kapor is now apparently half-way across, following Stu’s silently
beckoning finger, fearfully running from the sounds of angel’s wings;
fooled into believing that they lie behind and not ahead of him.



>From beginning to end Assange was, in short, a hard-line member of the
tendency among the cypherpunks that Tim May called the
“rejectionists”, an enemy of those who displayed even the slightest
tendency to compromise on the question of Big Brother and the surveillance
state.

On another question, however, Assange was at the opposite end of the
cypherpunks spectrum from Tim May. At no stage did Assange show sympathy
for the anarcho-capitalism of the cypherpunks mainstream. In October 1996,
a prominent cypherpunk, Duncan Frissell, claimed that in the previous
fiscal year the American government had seized more tax than any
government in history. Assange pointed out that, as the US was the
world’s largest economy and that its GDP had grown in the previous year,
this was a ridiculous statement designed to be deceptive. In October 2001,
Declan McCullagh expressed “surprise” when a “critique of
laissez-faire capitalism” appeared on the cypherpunks list “of all
places”. Assange replied:



Declan, Declan.

Put away your straw man … Nobel economic laureates have been telling us
for years to be careful about idealised market models … This years [sic]
Nobel for Economics won by George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph
E.Stiglitz “for their analysis of markets with assymmetric [sic]
information” is typical. You don’t need a Nobel to realize that the
relationship between a large employer and employee is brutally assymmetric
[sic] … To counter this sort of assymetery. [sic] Employees naturally
start trying to collectivise to increase their information processing and
bargaining power. That’s right. UNIONS Declan. Those devious entities
that first world companies and governments have had a hand in suppressing
all over the third world by curtailing freedom of association, speech and
other basic political rights we take for granted.



Assange was, then, an absolutist crypto-anarchist but one who leant
decidedly to the Left. Mainstream cypherpunks did not defend trade unions
or speak negatively of “rampant capitalists” and positively of
“human rights activists”. He was an electronic but not an economic
libertarian.

There is also evidence that Assange was increasingly repelled by the
corrosive cynicism common in cypherpunks ranks. Something in his spirit
seems to have changed after his trial and the writing of his MARUTUKKU
mythology. From 1997 to 2002 Julian Assange accompanied all his
cypherpunks postings with this beautiful passage from Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people
together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but
rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” On one
occasion in July 1999 William H Geiger III presented standard Ayn Rand
Objectivist praise of human selfishness. “Everyone is a predator out to
advance their own agenda at the expence [sic] of others. Tim is just more
honest than most about it.” Assange replied with a defence of altruism,
for Objectivists an evil.



No … Everyone maybe self-interested, but some are self-interested in a
way that is healthy (to you, or the people you care about), some in a way
which is benign, and some in a manner that is pernicious. It is important
to distinguish between these different behaviours and support or undermine
them accordingly.



On another occasion, a cypherpunk suggested that in the great struggle for
privacy and against censorship ordinary people could not give a damn.
Perhaps with Tim May’s contempt for “the clueless 95%” in his mind,
in March 2002, in what was one of his final cypherpunks postings, Assange
responded: “The 95% of the population which comprise the flock have
never been my target and neither should they be yours; it’s the 2.5% at
either end of the normal that I find in my sights, one to be cherished and
the other to be destroyed.” Already he seems to have imagined the future
as a struggle to the death between autocratic elites and electronic
freedom fighters. Increasingly, Assange began to mock Tim May. Many
thought of May as an anti-Semite, with good reason. In November 2001, when
May used a quote from a cypherpunk fellow traveller, David Friedman
(Milton’s son), Assange emailed: “Quoting Jews again, Tim?”

Julian Assange was a regular contributor to the cypherpunks mailing list
particularly before its decline in late 1997 following a meltdown over the
question of the possible moderation of the list – censorship! – and
the departure of John Gilmore. The cypherpunks list clearly mattered to
him deeply. Shortly before his travels in 1998, Assange asked whether
anyone could send him a complete archive of the list between 1992 and the
present time. While commentators have comprehensively failed to see the
significance of the cypherpunks in shaping the thought of Julian Assange,
this is something insiders to the movement understand. When Jeanne Whalen
from the Wall Street Journal approached John Young of Cryptome in August
last year, he advised her to read the Assange cypherpunk postings he had
just placed on the internet, and also Tim May’s “Cyphernomicon”.
“This background has not been explored in the WikiLeaks saga. And
WikiLeaks cannot be understood without it.” Likewise, in his mordant
online article on WikiLeaks and Assange, the influential cyberpunk
novelist and author of The Hacker Crackdown Bruce Sterling wrote: “At
last – at long last – the homemade nitroglycerin in the old
cypherpunks blast shack has gone off.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

In 2003 Julian Assange seems to have considered living a more conventional
life. He went to the University of Melbourne to study mainly mathematics
and physics. As a student of mathematics his results were mediocre. This
can hardly be explained by lack of talent. No one worked more closely with
Assange than Suelette Dreyfus. “A geek friend of his once described
Assange as having an IQ ‘in excess of 170’,” she wrote in the Sydney
Morning Herald of 12 December 2010. “I suspect this could be true.”
Assange claimed that he became disillusioned with the applied maths
department when he discovered its members were working with defence
authorities in the US on a military bulldozer adapted to desert conditions
known as “The Grizzly Plough”. He also claimed that visits to the ANU
were thoroughly dispiriting. On one occasion he represented University of
Melbourne students at a competition. “At the prize ceremony, the head of
ANU physics motioned to us and said, ‘you are the cream of Australian
physics.’ I looked around and thought, ‘Christ Almighty I hope he’s
wrong.’” On another occasion he saw 900 senior physicists in Canberra
proudly carrying bags with the logo of the Defence Science and Technology
Organisation. He described them as “snivelling fearful conformists of
woefully inferior character”.

Perhaps there were other reasons for dissatisfaction. By 2004 Assange had
reached the elevated position of vice-president of the students’
Mathematics and Statistics Society and chief organiser of their Puzzle
Hunt—a quiz leading the winner to $200 of buried treasure. He described
his role as “plot/script, general nonsense, Abstract(ion), Caesar
Cipher, Disc, Platonic, Score, Surstro:mming”. Organising a puzzle hunt
was a somewhat less engrossing ambition than planning world revolution.
And towards the end of his studies this was exactly what he was doing. A
female friend provided the journalist Nikki Barrowclough with a vivid
portrait of the atmosphere of a share house close-by the University of
Melbourne that Assange lived in at this time.



There were beds everywhere, she says. There was even a bed in the kitchen.
This woman slept on a mattress in Assange’s room, and says she would
sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to find him still glued to
his computer. He frequently forgot to eat or sleep, wrote mathematical
formulas all over the walls and the doors, and used only red light bulbs
in his room – on the basis that early man, if waking suddenly, would see
only the gentle light of the campfire, and fall asleep again.



Between July 2006 and August 2007 – the period when WikiLeaks was being
planned and actualised – Julian Assange maintained a blog at IQ.ORG,
some of which he collected under the title “Selected Correspondence”.
The correspondence can still be found on the internet. Because of its
existence, a detailed map of his mind at the age of 35 and at the moment
of WikiLeaks’ creation is available. Strangely enough, even though there
are now some 27 million Google entries on Assange, so far as I am aware no
one has offered an analysis. When Domscheit-Berg released his memoir in
mid February there was excitement around the globe at his claim that
Assange had boasted about fathering several children. On his blog, Assange
includes a photo of a bonneted baby under the title “Those Eyes” with
the caption, “All the pink ribbons in the world can’t hide them.”
She is his new daughter. In an email of January 2007 he asks someone who
is about to publish confidential email correspondence to remove at least
the reference to IQ.ORG, which is “near my daughters [sic] photo”. The
existence of Assange’s son, Daniel, is well known. However, if any
journalist had read the evidence closely we would not have needed to wait
for Domscheit-Berg to learn of at least one of Assange’s more recent
“love children”.

The blog reveals a young man of unusual intellectual range, ambition and
curiosity. As expected, there are references to cypherpunks and his work
as a code-writer in the free software movement. Assange writes of his
loathing for the “‘everything which is not permitted is denied’
security types” who “make concurrent salutes to the Fuhrer, Baal and
Jack Straw”. He explains why as one of the committed developers of
NetBSD he has refused to sign a proposed contract: “The contract as well
as being an instrument of the state is written in the demeaning language
of the corporate state. It should have been written in the language of the
programmer world.” Some entries, such as his defence of altruism, are
familiar to those who have followed his postings on the cypherpunks list.
Many others have the range and also eccentricity revealed in his MARUTUKKU
performance. There are abstract speculations on philosophy, mathematics,
neuroscience, human physiology, the law, history and sociology.

There are also very striking and revealing extracts. One is from a
Buddhist text from 500 BC, Ajita Kesakambali, in defence of materialism.
“The words of those who speak of existence after death are false, empty
chatter. With the break-up of the body, the wise and the foolish are alike
annihilated, destroyed.” Another is a wonderful story from the Nazi
concentration camp. A Jewish inmate can save his daughter if he chooses
which eye of his guard is glass. He chooses the left eye, correctly. His
guard asks how he knew. “‘I’m sorry,’ trembled Moshe, ‘but the
left eye looks at me with a kindly gleam.’” Assange has great interest
in the history of European totalitarianism. One extract is a poem –
“bad … but elevated by its monumental context” – about the atom
bomb spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg: “Even so, we did what we believed
in: / Treason, yes, but with good cause.” There is also a long extract
from an article about the problems besetting those possessing super-high
IQs, such as the unfulfilled genius William James Sidis. It concludes with
these words: “And so we see that the explanation for the Sidis tragedy
is simple. Sidis was a feral child, a true man born into a world filled
with animals – a world filled with us.” It is not difficult to
understand why this article interested him.

Entries on the blog concerning women prefigure future problems. Some
passages are awkward in a Mills & Boon kind of way – “a lovely girl I
knew … stood for a moment fully clothed in her shower before letting the
wind and rain buffet her body as she made her tremulous approach to my
door and of course I could not turn her away.” Others are rather
sinister, like his study of the etymology of the word ‘cad’. “Caddie
or cadet used to denote the passenger of a horse-coach picked up for
personal profit by the driver … So a ‘cad’ is a man who picks up
women, profits from them and leaves them by the road side … Such
romantic etymology is enough to make a man want to don his oilskin and
mount his horse with whip and smile at the ready.” This coldness is
striking because other passages in the correspondence are tender. Assange
writes of meeting Antony, a country kid he had known since they were both
14, at a mental health centre in East Ringwood. “His smile was shaky but
characteristic. His physical edges rounded off by weight gain and his
imagination dulled … His limbs and jaw gently shuddered with some
frequency.” Assange visited him later still at a psychiatric hospital.
“When I asked about the cause of his shaking, suggesting a dopamine
antagonist, he said, ‘No … If you look closely you’ll notice a
number of people around here acting the same way. Julian … we’re all
doing the Mont Park shuffle.’”

What is most important about the correspondence, however, is that in it we
can hear for the first time Julian Assange’s distinctive political
voice. As a former cypherpunk crypto-anarchist the enemy for him is,
unsurprisingly, that abstraction he calls the State. “Where words have
power to change, the state tries hard to trap, burn or blank them, such is
its fear of their power.” The state represents the principle of
“mendacity”. “The state does what it can get away with.” True
understanding requires the individual “to know the state for what it
really is”. Yet, unlike most of his fellow cypherpunks, by now Assange
unambiguously extends his idea of the state to big business. In thinking
about the US, in one blog entry, he asks: “What kinds of states are
giant corporations?” He answers in the following way. As executive power
is wielded by a central committee; as there is unaccountable single-party
rule; as there is no freedom of speech or association, and “pervasive
surveillance of movement and electronic communication”, what then do you
have in that federation of giant corporations that control the US? What
else but a “United Soviet of America”. Assange is a profound
anti-communist. But he regards power in western society as belonging to
political and economic elites offering ordinary people nothing more
nourishing than a counterfeit conception of democracy and a
soul-destroying consumption culture. He points out that when the American
colonists waged their struggle for independence there was no talk of
shopping or even democracy. Such shallow ideas could not stir the
passions.

Assange’s selected correspondence is addressed to a small coterie of
followers. It involves a revolutionary call to arms. “If we can only
live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers
… Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in
their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.” Assange
seems not particularly interested in future political institutions or in
economic arrangements. The revolution he speaks about is moral. He
believes that individual action can re-fashion the world. The state may do
“what it can get away with” but it does “what we let it get away
with” and even “what we let ourselves get away with, for we, in our
interactions with others, form the state”. Over the whole selected
correspondence there is a quotation from the German–Jewish revolutionary
anarchist Gustav Landauer, beaten to death by right-wing troops after the
Munich soviet experiment of 1919. “The state is a condition, a certain
relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour. We destroy it by
contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one
another … We are the state and we shall continue to be the state until
we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of
men.” The question is how new institutions can be formed.

In the struggle to create a truly human society, Assange warns his
interlocutors not to believe they can think globally but act locally. This
is an illusion. Action must be taken on a truly global scale. He is also
witheringly contemptuous of those he calls “the typical shy
intellectual”.



This type is often of a noble heart, wilted by fear of conflict with
authority. The power of their intellect and noble instincts may lead them
to a courageous position, where they see the need to take up arms, but
their instinctive fear of authority then motivates them to find
rationalizations to avoid conflict.



For Assange the central political virtue is courage. One of his favourite
sayings is: “Courage is contagious.” He attributes it to the Pentagon
Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. In fact it was coined by the
evangelist Billy Graham. Assange’s politics are also generational.
“Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in
a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept
suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have
convictions are tasked to act on them.”

For Assange the great moving forces in history are the need for Love and
the thirst for Truth. In his final piece in the selected correspondence,
Assange admits that often “outcomes are treated with more reverence than
Truth”.



Yet just as we feel all hope is lost and we sink into the miasma, back to
the shadow world of ghosts and gods, a miracle arises, everywhere before
the direction of self interest is known, people yearn to see where its
compass points and then they hunger for truth with passion and beauty and
insight … Here then is the truth to set them free. Free from the
manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their
path, free to remove the ring from their noses, free to look up into the
infinite void and choose wonder over whatever gets them through. And
before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth
… on the Voltaires, the Galileos and Principias of truth, on the
Gutenbergs, Marconis and Internets of truth, those serial killers of
delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing,
smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds
of the new.



But how will the rotten edifice be smashed? On 22 November 2006 Assange
provides a link to a paper. He tells his coterie of readers: “No.
Don’t skip to the good stuff. This is the good stuff.” He is pointing
them to the central theoretical breakthrough that led to WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange published this paper twice, the first time on 10 November
2006 under the title “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”, the second
time, in more developed form, on 3 December under the title “Conspiracy
as Governance”. Stripped of its inessential mathematical gobbledegook,
its argument goes like this. The world is at present dominated by the
conspiratorial power of authoritarian governments and big business
corporations. As President Theodore Roosevelt understood, behind
“ostensible governments”, there exists “an invisible government
owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To
destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between
corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of
statesmanship.” Authoritarian governments and corporations maintain and
entrench their power through a conspiracy. For Assange the conspiracy
involves the maintenance of a network of links between the conspirators,
some vital, some less so. Conspiracies naturally provoke resistance. Among
revolutionaries of earlier generations resistance has involved the attempt
to break the links between the leaders of the conspiracy by
“assassination … killing, kidnapping, blackmailing, or otherwise
marginalising or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected
to”. Such methods are no longer appropriate. “The act of assassination
– the targeting of visible individuals, is the result of mental
inclinations honed for the pre-literate societies in which our species
evolved.” The new generation of revolutionaries “must think beyond
those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that
embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not”.

Contemporary conspiracies rely on unrestricted information flow to adapt
to and control their environments. Conspirators need to be able to speak
freely to each other and to disarm resistance by spreading disinformation
among the people they control, something they presently very successfully
achieve. Conspirators who have control over information flow are
infinitely more powerful than those who do not. Drawing on a passage from
Lord Halifax in which political parties are described as “conspiracies
against the rest of the nation”, Assange asks his readers to imagine
what would happen in the struggle between the Republican and Democratic
parties in the US “if one of these parties gave up their mobile phones,
fax and email correspondence – let alone the computer systems that
manage their subscribes [sic], donors, budgets, polling, call centres and
direct mail campaigns”. He asks them to think of the conspiracy as a
living organism, “a beast with arteries and veins whose blood may be
thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied; unable to sufficiently
comprehend and control the forces in its environment”. Rather than
attacking the conspiracy by assassinating its leading members, he believes
it can be “throttled” by cutting its information flows. “Later,”
he promises, “we will see how technology and insights into the
psychological motivations of conspirators can give us practical methods
for preventing or reducing important communication between authoritarian
conspirators, foment strong resistance to authoritarian planning and
create powerful incentives for more humane forms of governance.”

The promise is fulfilled in a blog entry of 31 December 2006. Here he
outlines finally the idea at the core of the WikiLeaks strategy.



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 (an
increase in cognitive ‘secrecy tax’) and consequent system-wide
cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the
environment demands adaptation.

Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are
nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by
their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper
hand, leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to
replace them with more open forms of governance.



There is a direct link between Assange’s cypherpunks period and the
theory behind WikiLeaks. As we have seen, Assange joined the cypherpunks
list at the time when Jim Bell’s “Assassination Politics” was being
hotly discussed. There is evidence that Assange was fascinated by the
idea. In January 1998 he had come upon an advertisement for a prize –
“Scoop the Grim Reaper. Who Will Live? Who Will Die?” – which was to
be awarded to the person who guessed on what dates certain Hollywood
celebrities would die. “Anyone noticed this before?” Assange posted
the advertisement on the cypherpunks list under the heading:
Jim…Bell…lives…on…in…Hollywood”. The similarity between
Bell’s thought and Assange’s are unmistakable. Like Bell, Assange was
possessed by a simple “revolutionary idea” about how to create a
better world. As with Bell, the idea emerged from reflection upon the
political possibilities created by untraceable anonymous communication,
through the use of remailers and unbreakable public-key cryptography. The
differences are also clear. Unlike with Bell, the revolution Assange
imagined would be non-violent. The agent of change would not be the
assassin but the whistleblower. The method would not be the bullet but the
leak. “Conspiracy as Governance” can most accurately be interpreted as
his answer to “Assassination Politics”.

In arriving at this position, Assange had drawn together three different
personal experiences. From his custody battles in the 1990s he had become
interested in the political potency of leaks. From his cypherpunk days he
had become interested in the political possibilities of untraceable
encrypted communication. And from his involvement in the free software
movement he had seen what collective democratic intellectual enterprise
might achieve. In essence, his conclusion was that world politics could be
transformed by staunching the flow of information among corrupt power
elites by making them ever more fearful of insider leaks. He believed he
could achieve this by establishing an organisation that would allow
whistleblowers from all countries to pass on their information, confident
that their identities would not be able to be discovered. He proposed that
his organisation would then publish the information for the purpose of
collective analysis so as to empower oppressed populations across the
globe.

There are few original ideas in politics. In the creation of WikiLeaks,
Julian Assange was responsible for one.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

In late 2006 Assange sought a romantic partner through OKCupid in the name
of Harry Harrison. Under the heading, “What am I doing with my life?”,
he answered: “directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project
which is, as you might expect, male-dominated”. Under the heading, “I
spend a lot of time thinking about”, he answered: “Changing the world
through passion, inspiration and trickery”. There was something
distinctly Walter Mittyish about it all. Under the informal leadership of
Julian Assange, a group of mainly young men, without resources and linked
only by computers, now began to implement their plans for a peaceful
global political revolution.

On 4 October Assange registered the domain name “WikiLeaks.org” in the
US. He called it WikiLeaks because he had been immensely impressed by the
success of the Wikipedia experiment, where 3 million entries had been
contributed through the input of a worldwide virtual community. As he put
it, WikiLeaks would be to leaks what Wikipedia was to the encyclopedia.
Strangely and perhaps revealingly, it was registered under the names of
two fathers, his biological one, John Shipton, and his cypherpunk
political one, John Young, a New York architect who ran the intelligence
leak website Cryptome, which could be seen as WikiLeaks’ predecessor.
Assange explained his request for assistance to Young like this:



You knew me under another name from cypherpunks days. I am involved in a
project that you may have a feeling for … The project is a mass document
leaking project that requires someone with backbone to hold the .org
domain registration … We expect the domain to come under the usual
political and legal pressure. The policy for .org requires that
registrants names not be false or misleading. It would be an easy play to
cancel the domain unless someone were willing to stand up and claim to be
the registrant.



The choice of Young reveals something about Assange. For Young was
undoubtedly the most militant security cypherpunk of all, who had
published on his website an aerial photo of Dick Cheney’s hideout
bunker, a photograph of the home of Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, and the
names of 276 British and some 600 Japanese intelligence agents and 2619
CIA “sources”. Young was also Jim Bell’s greatest champion. After
Bell’s arrest and imprisonment, Young nominated him for the Chrysler
Award for Innovation in Design. Bell had, he argued in his nomination,
contributed “an imaginative and sophisticated prospective for improving
governmental accountability by way of a scheme for anonymous, untraceable
political assassination”.

Serious work on the establishment of WikiLeaks began in December 2006. One
of the first tasks was to decide upon a logo. Before opting for the
hourglass, the WikiLeaks team thought seriously about a mole breaking
through a wall above which stood three sinister authoritarian figures,
arms folded. Another early task was to put together an advisory board. The
first person he wanted was Daniel Ellsberg. Assange explained the purpose
of WikiLeaks and why he had been approached:



We’d like your advice and we’d like you to form part of our political
armor. The more armor we have, particularly in the form of men and women
sanctified by age, history and class, the more we can act like brazen
young men and get away with it.



Here was one generation speaking to another. A month after being contacted
Ellsberg replied. “Your concept is terrific and I wish you the best of
luck with it.” He did not agree to join the board. Two leading
cypherpunks were approached – the British computer security specialist
Ben Laurie and one of the cypherpunks founders, John Gilmore. Laurie
became actively involved. Gilmore instead asked the Electronic Frontier
Foundation he had also co-founded to help. Assange’s old cypherpunk
sparring partner, Danny O’Brien, now with the EFF, offered to assist.
Also approached not long after were two Chinese Tiananmen Square
dissidents, a member of the Tibetan Association in Washington and
Australian journalist Phillip Adams. All agreed to join the board of
advisers and, then, most seem never to have heard from WikiLeaks again.

What do the early internal documents reveal about the charge that
WikiLeaks was an anti-American outfit posing as a freedom of information
organisation? In his invitation to Gilmore, Assange had pledged that
WikiLeaks “will provide a catalyst that will bring down government
through stealth everywhere, not least that of the Bushists”. In its
first public statement, WikiLeaks argued that “misleading leaks and
misinformation are already well placed in the mainstream media … an
obvious example being the lead-up to the Iraq war”. And in an email of 2
January 2007 Assange even argued that WikiLeaks could advance by several
years “the total annihilation of the current US regime and any other
regime that holds its authority through mendacity alone”. And yet,
despite these statements, the evidence surrounding WikiLeaks’ foundation
makes it abundantly clear that anti-Americanism was not the primary
driving force. Time and again, in its internal documents, it argued that
its “roots are in dissident communities” and that its “primary
targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and central
Eurasia”. China is a special focus. One or more of WikiLeaks’ inner
coterie were Taiwanese hacking into Chinese government sources. At the
time of its foundation, WikiLeaks claimed to have more than a million
documents. Almost certainly almost all came from China. For this reason,
WikiLeaks argued publicly that “a politically motivated legal attack on
us would be seen as a grave error in western administrations”.
Concerning its targets, the formulation is precise. WikiLeaks has in its
sights authoritarian governments, the increasingly authoritarian
tendencies seen in the recent trajectory of the western democracies, and
the authoritarian nature of contemporary business corporations.

What then of the charge that WikiLeaks was a revolutionary organisation
pretending to be concerned merely with reformist liberal issues such as
exposure of corruption, open government and freedom of information and
expression? The internal WikiLeaks documents show that the answer to this
question is complex. At its foundation, Assange frequently argued that
WikiLeaks’ true nature did indeed need to be disguised. Because
“freedom of information is a respected liberal value”, Assange argued,
“we may get some sympathy” but it would not last. Inevitably
governments would try to crush WikiLeaks. But if the mask of moderation
was maintained, at least for some time, opposition would be “limp
wristed”. A quotation from the Book of Isaiah, he believed, might be
suitable “if we were to front as a Ploughshares [peace] organisation”.
To John Young he wrote: “We have the collective sources, personalities
and learning to be, or rather appear to be, the reclusive ubermensch of
the 4th estate”. The emphases are mine. He also knew that if WikiLeaks
was to prosper, and also to win support from philanthropic bodies such as
the Soros Foundation, the hacker–cypherpunk origin of the inner circle
needed to be disguised. “We expect difficult state lashback [sic] unless
WikiLeaks can be given a sanctified frame (‘centre for human rights,
democracy, good government and apple pie press freedom project’ vs
‘hackers strike again’).” The key to WikiLeaks was that its true
revolutionary ambitions and its moderate liberal public face would be
difficult for opponents to disentangle. Open government and freedom of
information were standard liberal values. However, as explained in the
theory outlined in “Conspiracy as Governance”, they were the values in
whose name authoritarian structures would be undermined worldwide, through
the drying up of information flows and a paralysing fear of insider leaks.

It was not only opponents who found it difficult to keep the public and
private faces of WikiLeaks distinct. Despite those involved understanding
the need for disguise, at its foundation the excitement was so palpable
and the ambition so boundless that, when it was called upon to explain
itself, the mask of apple pie liberal reformist moderation instantly fell
away. On 3 January 2007 a small crisis arose when WikiLeaks’ existence
was prematurely revealed. Assange immediately put together a brilliant
description of WikiLeaks for public release.



Principled leaking has changed the course of human history for the better;
it can alter the course of history in the present; it can lead to a better
future … Public scrutiny of otherwise unaccountable and secretive
institutions pressures them to act ethically. What official will chance a
secret corrupt transaction when the public is likely to find out? … When
the risks of embarrassment through openness and honesty increase, the
tables are turned against conspiracy, corruption, exploitation and
oppression …

Instead of a couple of academic specialists, WL will provide a forum for
the entire global community to examine any document relentlessly for
credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability … WL may become
the most powerful intelligence agency on earth, an intelligence agency of
the people … WL will be an anvil at which beats the hammer of the
collective conscience of humanity … WL, we hope, will be a new star in
the political firmament of humanity.



Julian Assange recognised that the language of what amounted to the
WikiLeaks Manifesto might appear a little “overblown”. He recognised
that it had about it too much the flavour of “anarchy”. But in general
when it was written he was pleased.

John Young was not. In early January 2007 he decided that WikiLeaks was a
CIA-backed fraud. “Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign.
Same old shit, working for the enemy … Fuck ’em all.” “We are
going to fuck them all. Chinese mostly but not entirely a feint,”
Assange cryptically replied. Young decided now to post all the WikiLeaks
correspondence between early December 2006 and early January 2007 on his
website. Later, in 2010, he published Assange’s contributions to the
cypherpunks list between 1995 and 2002. It is because of his baseless
suspicion that the mind of Julian Assange and the intellectual origins of
WikiLeaks are able to be understood.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

In February 2007, Julian Assange travelled to Nairobi to attend the World
Social Forum, a very large gathering of mainly left-wing human rights
activists and NGOs. He stayed on in Kenya for several months, involved
with anti-corruption forces but also fascinated and repelled by the world
of superstition he encountered:



Here, in Africa there was a two page fold out on the ‘Night Runner’
plague. Plague? Yes. Of people – typically old, who supposedly run
around naked at night … tapping on windows, throwing rocks on peoples
[sic] roofs, snapping twigs, rustling grass, casting spells and getting
lynched because it’s the ‘right thing to do’.

Insofar as we can affect the world, let it be to utterly eliminate guilt
and fear as a motivator of man and replace it cell for cell with love of
one another and the passion of creation.



Assange was a true Enlightenment Man.

The next Social Forum was to be held between 27 June and 4 July in
Atlanta. Assange wanted WikiLeaks volunteers to attend. Emails he sent in
early June can be found on the internet. They provide the clearest
evidence of his political viewpoint and strategic thinking at this time.
In the first he assures his supporters that WikiLeaks’ future is secure.
“[T]he idea can’t be stopped. It’s everyone’s now.” Some people
have apparently argued that WikiLeaks’ idealism or “childlike
naivety” is a weakness. He believes they are entirely wrong. “Naivety
is unfailingly attractive when it adorns strength. People rush forward to
defend and fight for individuals and organizations imbued with this
quality.” Confronted by it, “virtuous sophisticates” are
“marooned”. Some people are clearly worried that WikiLeaks will be
captured by “the Left”. Assange assures his followers they need not be
concerned. In the US the problem is rather that WikiLeaks is seen as too
close to the CIA and American foreign policy. In fact, “we’ll take our
torch to all.” Some people have clearly expressed doubts about Social
Forum types. Assange more than shares them. They are by and large
“ineffectual pansies” who “specialize in making movies about
themselves and throwing ‘dialogue’ parties … with foundation
money”, while fantasising that “the vast array of functional cogs in
brute inhumanity … would follow their lead, clapping, singing and
videotaping their way up Mt. Mostly Harmless”. In Africa Assange has
seen human rights fighters of real backbone. He warns his followers not to
expect to find such people in the US. He quotes at length from
Solzhenitsyn’s 1979 Harvard address about the radical decline of
“civic courage” in the West especially among the “ruling and
intellectual elites”. Nonetheless, to advance WikiLeaks’ cause, the
Social Forum – the world’s biggest NGO “beach party” – matters.
Assange anticipates that anti–Iraq War feeling will hold it together.
Although WikiLeaks has so far concentrated on “the most closed
governments”, he explains that it is about to publish explosive material
on American “involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan”. He hopes that the
anti-war movement will embrace these documents so that WikiLeaks can avoid
the “retributive” blast from pro-war forces. It is vital to position
itself “as everyone’s friend”. If anyone still needs it, this
despatch is proof that Assange has a biting tongue, a mordant wit and a
brilliant political mind.

It is obvious that by June 2007 several members of the Left had indeed
gravitated to WikiLeaks. In Assange’s view, this group were thinking of
publishing commentary on leaked documents in a way that allowed their
political bias to show. He sent a different email to them:



OK, you guys need to keep the Progressive Commie Socialist agendas and
rhetoric to yourselves or you’re going to go nowhere very, very fast.
Now, now, don’t get your dander up: if I can pass by gross
mis-characterizations of the existing world order as ‘capitalism’ or
‘white supremacy’, you can stay calm and listen a minute.



WikiLeaks was in danger, he argued, of being positioned either as a CIA
front by John Young types or as a same-old left-wing outfit “preaching
to the choir”. All partisanship would be lethal. WikiLeaks needed to
keep itself open to whistleblowers of all stripes – even “conservative
and religious types waking up to the fact that they’ve been taken for a
ride”. “What you need to strive for is the same level of objectivity
and analytical disinterest as the League of Women Voters. No, even higher.
Else I’ll be so disheartened that I’ll lower myself to government
contracting work.” This email is not only illuminating from the point of
view of WikiLeaks’ grand strategy. It is also decisive as to his true
political position. Assange might have been on the left of the spectrum by
anarcho-capitalist cypherpunk standards but he was by no means a standard
leftist. His politics were anti-establishment but genuinely beyond Left
and Right.

Between 2007 and 2010 Assange’s political thinking was shaped by two key
ideas. The first, as we have seen, was that all authoritarian structures
– both governments and corporations – were vulnerable to insider
leaks. Fear would throttle information flows. Assange called this a
“secrecy tax”. Inevitably, he argued, because of this tax, governments
and corporations with nothing to hide would triumph over their secretive,
unjust conspiratorial competitors. This aspect of his politics amounted to
a kind of political Darwinism, a belief not in the survival of the fittest
but of the most transparent and most just. As an organisation that
encouraged whistleblowers and published their documents, WikiLeaks was
aiding and speeding up this process.

There was, however, another dimension of his politics that reflected his
long association with the cypherpunks. Assange believed that, in the era
of globalisation, laws determining communication were going to be
harmonised. The world would either opt for a closed system akin to Chinese
political secrecy and American intellectual property laws, or an open
system found to some extent in Belgium and Sweden. Once more, Assange
hoped that WikiLeaks was assisting a positive outcome to this struggle
through its role as what he called a global publisher of last resort. If
WikiLeaks could survive the attacks certain to be mounted by governments
and corporations, the rights of human beings to communicate freely with
each other without the intervention of governments would be entrenched.
WikiLeaks was, according to this argument, the canary in the mine. Assange
was taken with the famous Orwell quote. He who controls the present
controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. The
world was at a turning point. Either Big Brother would take control of the
internet or an era of unprecedented freedom of communication would arrive.

Assange was by now in the habit of composing motivational emails for his
volunteers. This is the message he sent them on 12 March 2008:



Mankind has successfully adapted changes as monumental as electricity and
the engine. It can also adapt to a world where state sponsored violence
against the communications of consenting adults is not only unlawful, but
physically impossible. As knowledge flows across nations it is time to sum
the great freedoms of every nation and not subtract them. It is time for
the world as an international collective of communicating peoples to arise
and say ‘here I am’.



This might have come straight out of a cypherpunks manifesto. In the first
weeks of 2010 Assange was involved in an ultimately successful political
manoeuvre to turn Iceland into the world’s first “data haven” with
the most politically progressive anti-censorship laws on Earth. According
to Domscheit-Berg, Assange’s idea of a data haven came straight from the
canonical cypherpunk novel by Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, which ranked
with Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle as Assange’s favourite.

There was an aspect of WikiLeaks’ work that was, through 2008 and 2009,
beginning to trouble Assange. Although it was a peripatetic organisation
with only four permanent staff – Assange, Domscheit-Berg and two others
known as “ the architect” and “the technician” – WikiLeaks had
proven to be an outstanding success in attracting leaks and then
publishing them. By late 2009 it had published documents concerning an
Islamist assassination order from Somali; massive corruption in Daniel
arap Moi’s Kenya; tax avoidance by the largest Swiss bank, Julius Baer;
an oil spill in Peru, a nuclear accident in Iran and toxic chemical
dumping by the Trafigura corporation off the Ivory Coast. Further, it had
released the Guantanamo Bay operational manuals; secret film of dissent in
Tibet; the emails of Sarah Palin; a suppressed report into an
assassination squad operating in Kenya; American intelligence reports on
the battle of Fallujah, and reports into the conditions in its jails; the
Climategate emails; the internet censorship lists from Australia; and,
finally, the loans book of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. WikiLeaks had
never been successfully sued, although Julius Baer had tried. None of the
identities of the whistleblowers who sought to conceal them had been
uncovered. WikiLeaks had won awards from the Economist, in 2008, and from
Amnesty International, in 2009. Assange believed that WikiLeaks’
information had determined a Kenyan election. He knew that the publication
of the loans book in Iceland had riveted the nation, especially after
Kaupthing had brought down an injunction against the national
broadcaster’s evening television news. And yet, as his internal
communications make clear, he was puzzled and appalled by the world’s
indifference to his leaks.

Assange had once regarded WikiLeaks as the people’s intelligence agency.
In January 2007 he sincerely believed that when WikiLeaks published
commentary on the Somalia assassination order document it would be “very
closely collaboratively analysed by hundreds of Wikipedia editors” and
by “thousands of refugees from the Somali, Ethiopian and Chinese expat
communities”. This simply had not happened. Commentary by the people on
material produced by their intelligence agency never would. He had once
hoped for engaged analysis from the blogosphere. What he now discovered
were what he thought of as indifferent narcissists repeating the views of
the mainstream media on “the issues de jour” with an additional
flourish along the lines of “their pussy cat predicted it all along”.
Even the smaller newspapers were hopeless. They relied on press releases,
ignorant commentary and theft. They never reported the vitally significant
leaks without WikiLeaks intervention. Counterintuitively, only the major
newspapers in the world, such as the New York Times or the Guardian,
undertook any serious analysis but even they were self-censoring and their
reportage dominated by the interests of powerful lobby groups. No one
seemed truly interested in the vital material WikiLeaks offered or willing
to do their own work. He wrote to his volunteers:



What does it mean when only those facts about the world with economic
powers behind them can be heard, when the truth lays [sic] naked before
the world and no one will be the first to speak without a bribe?

WikiLeaks’ unreported material is only the most visible wave on an ocean
of truth rotting in draws [sic] of the fourth estate, waiting for a lobby
to subsidize its revelation into a profitable endeavour.



In Iraq, a junior American intelligence analyst, Private Bradley Manning
– at least according to very convincing evidence yet to be tested in
court – had been following WikiLeaks’ activities with interest. On 25
November 2009 WikiLeaks released a document comprising 573,000 messages
from September 11. As this material could only come from a National
Security Agency leak, Manning was now convinced that WikiLeaks was
genuine. Eventually, after sending WikiLeaks some cables concerning the
American Ambassador in Iceland, he decided to download 93,000 logs from
the Afghan War, 400,000 incident reports from the war in Iraq and 250,000
State Department cables, to which he and hundreds of thousands of American
officials had access, and to send them to WikiLeaks. As a cover, he
brought along Lady Gaga CDs and, while downloading these documents onto
disc, pretended to be mouthing the words to the music. Some time after, he
confessed to a convicted hacker, Adrian Lamo, what he had done. The most
secure encryption and remailing systems were powerless against human,
all-too-human frailty. Lamo in turn informed the FBI and American military
authorities. Shortly after, Manning was arrested and taken to a military
prison in West Virginia. Lamo also went with his evidence to a
longstanding acquaintance, another convicted hacker, Kevin Poulsen, who
worked at the magazine Wired. Poulsen published the log of some of the
conversation between Manning and Lamo.



(12.15:11 PM) bradass87: hypothetical question: if you had free reign
[sic] over classified networks for long periods of time … say 8-9 months
… and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that happened
in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in
Washington DC … what would you do?

(12.26:09 PM) bradass87: lets just say ‘someone’ I know intimately
well, has been penetrating US classified networks, mining data like the
ones described … and been transferring that data from the classified
networks over the ‘air gap’ onto a commercial network computer …
sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a
crazy white haired aussie who can’t stay in one country very long.



One of the items sent to WikiLeaks was a video of a cold-blooded, American
Apache helicopter attack on a group of Iraqis, in which up to 15 men were
gunned down. Assange made the decision to concentrate the resources and
the energies of WikiLeaks on publishing it under the title: “Collateral
Murder”. In early April 2010, he flew to Washington to launch it, with
his temporary chief-of-staff in Iceland (where the video had been edited),
Rop Gonggrijp, the Dutch veteran of Berlin’s Chaos Computer Club. On 5
April, Assange addressed the National Press Club. His frustration with the
indifference of the world was, to put it mildly, about to end.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

For once, the cliché is true. What happened over the next ten months is
stranger than fiction. With the release of the “Collateral Murder”
footage, WikiLeaks became instantly famous. At the suggestion of a
journalist at the Guardian, Nick Davies, Assange decided to publish the
new material he had received from Manning anonymously in association with
some of the world’s best newspapers or magazines. Complex and heated
negotiations between WikiLeaks and the Guardian, the New York Times and
Der Spiegel were now conducted. Even though these negotiations are one of
the less interesting aspects of this story, already three books from the
news outlets involved offering their own perspectives have been published.
Assange had long regarded the western media as narcissistic. It is likely
that his judgement was now confirmed.

In July the first of the Manning tranche, the Afghan War Diary, was
published. Assange held back only 15,000 of the 93,000 reports.
Unforgivably, those released included the names of perhaps 300 Afghans who
had assisted western forces. A Taliban spokesperson, Zabiullah Mujahid,
claimed that a nine-member commission had been created after the documents
were released “to find out about people who were spying”. Assange was
unrepentant. Both in private and in public, he argued that if they were
collaborators they deserved to die. Assange did, however, learn from the
experience. When the Iraq War logs were released in October most names had
been redacted.

By now, WikiLeaks was beginning to implode. Relations between Assange and
Domscheit-Berg became increasingly tense, especially after Assange warned
him, in April 2010, rather alarmingly: “If you fuck up, I’ll hunt you
down and kill you.” Some insiders such as Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the
anarchist Icelandic parliamentarian, were concerned about the cavalier way
in which Assange had handled the moral issue of the Afghan War Diary. Many
resented what they saw as the increasingly dictatorial tendency inside
WikiLeaks. Assange told the Icelandic anarchist historian Herbert
Snorrason: “I don’t like your tone. If it continues you’re out. I am
the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher,
spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all of the rest.
If you have a problem … piss off.”

On 21 August, Assange discovered that he was under investigation for
sexual crime after he slept with two Swedish supporters during a triumphal
visit to Stockholm, one of whom, Anna Ardin, to complicate matters, had
written advice on her blog concerning seven legal kinds of revenge women
might take after sexual mistreatment. Facing these charges, Assange
expected total loyalty. Neither Domscheit-Berg nor Jónsdóttir were
willing to give him what he wanted. Domscheit-Berg was suspended from
WikiLeaks; Jónsdóttir quit. The “architect” followed. He and
Domscheit-Berg took the WikiLeaks’ submissions with them, at least
temporarily, on the grounds that its sources needed far more scrupulous
protection. Yet there was more to the implosion of WikiLeaks than concerns
about Assange’s laxity over security, or his cavalier and dictatorial
behaviour. In December, Rop Gonggrijp confessed to the Chaos Computer
Club: “I guess I could make up all sorts of stories about how I
disagreed with people or decisions, but the truth is that [during] the
period that I helped out, the possible ramifications of WikiLeaks scared
the bejezuz out of me. Courage is contagious, my ass.” Assange had taken
on the power of the American state without flinching. His identification
with Solzhenitsyn was no longer empty.

Assange decided to release the 250,000 US Department of State cables
WikiLeaks still had in its possession on drip-feed so their content could
be absorbed. On 28 November the first batch was published. The American
vice-president, Joe Biden, called Assange a “high-tech terrorist”. The
rival vice-presidential candidate of 2008, Sarah Palin, thought he should
be hunted down like Osama Bin Laden, a suggestion that led Assange to quip
to Paris Match that at least that option assured him of a further ten
years of freedom. Visa, Mastercard and PayPal severed connections with
WikiLeaks. A global guerrilla hacker army of WikiLeaks supporters,
Anonymous, mounted an instant counterattack. Assange was by now facing two
legal threats – extradition to Sweden to be interviewed about his
relations with Anna Ardin and Sofia Willen or extradition to the US where
a secret grand jury had been established to look into whether he had
committed crimes outlined in the 1917 Espionage Act or broken some other
law. After a preliminary hearing in London on the Swedish extradition
request, he was first imprisoned in Wandsworth jail and then placed under
a form of house arrest.

In early April 2010 hardly anyone had heard of Julian Assange. By December
he was one of the most famous people on Earth, with very powerful enemies
and very passionate friends. A future extradition to the US was almost
certain to ignite a vast Left vs Right global cultural war, a kind of
twenty-first-century equivalent of the Dreyfus Affair. Ironically, if that
broke out, his staunchest and most eloquent defenders were likely to be
people such as John Pilger or Tariq Ali, whom Assange privately had once
derided as followers of the “Progressive Commie Socialist” agenda, or
the left-wing American film-maker Michael Moore, whom, Domscheit-Berg
tells us, Assange considered “an idiot”. He would also be championed
by millions of “average shy intellectuals” across the western world
who had watched on passively as the political and business elites and
their spin-masters in the US and beyond plunged Iraq into bloody turmoil,
brought chaos to the global financial markets and resisted action over the
civilisational crisis of climate change.

Assange had long grasped the political significance of his compatriot,
Rupert Murdoch. In “Conspiracy as Governance” he had called the
disinformation the political and business elites fed the people to
safeguard their power and their interests the “Fox News Effect”. As
the pressure on Assange mounted, Murdoch was clearly on his mind. In
December, he spoke to Pilger in the New Statesman of an “insurance
file” on Murdoch and News Corp his supporters would release if he came
to harm and to Paris Match about Murdoch’s supposed “tax havens”. If
a culture war was engaged over Assange’s extradition to the US it would
involve, strangely enough, the clash of cultural armies mobilised by the
creators of Fox News and WikiLeaks, the two most influential Australians
of the era.