1. The basis is of real substance and interest in the form of never before released leaked documents of potentially significant political importance.
2. Discovery and creation are augmented by the nature of the material and its moral calling. These are real puzzles with real discoveries to be found.
3. In addition to traditional or academic honors, there is the ultimate honor: to have a positive impact on civilization through one’s labours and for this to be internationally recognised.
Each team will receive a previously unanalyzed leaked document or series of leaked documents. . . . Proposed awards: over-all winner, lightning (24 hour), best analysis, best critical analysis, best news story. Where ‘best’ is defined as ‘whose insights contribute most to humanity.’
“I think it would be fair to say that he saw Wikileaks, in some ways, at some times, as a political version of the Puzzle Hunt, with great social implications,” Daniel Mathews, one of Assange’s college friends and an early volunteer for WikiLeaks, would tell an editor of Paradox. Like the hackers and code rebels playing games of Crypto Anarchy with nested envelopes on Eric Hughes’s living room floor, Assange approached WikiLeaks as a great game, an elaborate cypherpunk puzzle of leakers, friends, and adversaries playing by rules laid out in the landscape of cryptography.
But for all his talk of “an engine of justice” and “reforms likely to save tens of thousands of lives,” the other goal in WikiLeaks’ game—or perhaps just a bonus perk for a fire-starter like Assange—was its potential for explosive chaos. The rebellious young Australian felt the same yearning to outsmart and tear down the corrupt establishment as Tim May expressed in his earliest crypto-anarchist dreams.
Four years later, after the firestorms of Bradley Manning’s alleged record-breaking, world-shaking releases, the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling wrote of WikiLeaks: “At last—at long last—the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off.”
The denizens of the Cypherpunk Mailing List drew the blueprints for that massive improvised explosive device, refining the recipe not just with theory but with years of trial and error, testing the limits of anonymity and antigovernment provocation. And it was Assange who watched the experiments, studiously mixed the chemicals from their notes, and then opened the fateful valve.
John Young knows something about how to stage a dramatic rendezvous. On an April afternoon, he’s asked me to come to Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and wait for him in front of Gracie Mansion. With the precision of his architectural training, he’s sent me an aerial still from Google Maps that shows a semicircular bulge in the promenade where I’m to stand, overlooking the East River with a view of the Roosevelt Island lighthouse and the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge.
It’s raining, and Young has not been as precise with time as he is with location. So I’m left alone in the eerily empty park, standing under an umbrella by the guardrail holding a briefcase and feeling like a character out of a John Grisham or Tom Clancy novel, which I imagine is exactly what Young had in mind.
Ten minutes later he walks out from behind a row of bushes, a stooped figure with his head down, wearing large black galoshes and holding a closed umbrella at his side while the rain pours down onto a limp fishing hat. He shakes my hand gravely, and as we walk out of the park I ask him why he doesn’t carry a cell phone, which makes a useful tool for changing meeting locations from outdoors to indoors on rainy days. “Horrendous spying machines,” he answers simply.
Young brightens as we reach East End Avenue. “How about we go find someplace warm and dry to talk,” he says. Then, just as quickly, his eyes narrow and he gazes ruefully down the street. “This neighborhood is full of shitty restaurants.”
Sitting in one of those shitty restaurants a few minutes later, Young lays down some ground rules: “You’re interviewing me, but I’m interviewing you too,” he says in a grumbled voice so low that I have to lean forward to hear him. “This interview goes both ways.”
Fair enough, I agree. But a few questions in, it’s clear that his idea of this bidirectional interview is significantly more adversarial than mine. “Where are you from originally?” I ask genially. Young pauses, and seems for a moment to be holding his breath.
“I take umbrage at that question. That is a stupid question, and it’s the kind of question asked by stupid people,” he says in the same whisper, so soft that I can’t tell if he’s inhumanly calm or holding back enormous anger. “And it shows me that you’re not serious. So let me tell you that if you ask another question like that I will walk out that door.”
I must appear so flabbergasted by this response that Young seems to feel the need to explain. “We need more friction in this interview.”
Young’s strange style of conversation shouldn’t come as a surprise; it’s no stranger than the equally conspiratorial tone of his singularly strange website, Cryptome.org. In his sixteen years of running Cryptome, Young has become a kind of paranoid twenty-first-century newspaperman, a collector of leaks, curios, raw data, and clues to mysteries that often only he and perhaps his less visible partner, Deborah Natsios, understand.
In the days before our meeting in Manhattan, for instance, Cryptome published archival footage of Hiroshima in the days after its bombing: dazed survivors walking around makeshift shelters and children collecting stones amid the rubble. Another post shows the immigration papers for Barack Obama Sr., perhaps a clue related to Obama’s birthplace conspiracy theories. A third shows the finances for WikiLeaks over the year 2010, as collected by the German Wau Holland Foundation. Few of the half a dozen documents that Young and Natsios put online daily are accompanied by any analysis or even an explanation as to why the reclusive couple chose to publish them.
“My mentor, Jean-Paul Sartre, said that imagination is the only thing you can trust,” says Young, after I’ve smoothed out some of our friction. “Facts are not a trustworthy source of knowledge. Cryptome is not an authoritative source. It’s a source of imaginatory material. Don’t trust Cryptome, we lie to you helplessly. Don’t believe anything you see there.”
But as much as John Young tries to give the impression that Cryptome is a schizoid lunatic’s collage, it’s nothing so simple. Since launching the site fifteen years ago, Young has published the names of 2,619 CIA sources, 276 British intelligence agents, 600 Japanese intelligence agents, and internal documents from every company from Microsoft to Cisco to AT&T revealing their policies for secretly handing users’ data over to law enforcement.
Many were leaked to Young by unknown sources. And despite threats, legal attacks, and even maneuvers by Microsoft to remove his site from the Internet in 2010 after he published what he calls the company’s “spying guide,” Young has never—with a few exceptions to protect private individuals—taken down a document.
The FBI first visited Young in 2003—he describes the pair of agents in typically precise fashion as having “trim haircuts and dark suits, healthy-looking young Caucasians, no facial hair, shined shoes, clean teeth, no noticeable mouth or body odor”—and offered a polite warning about “threats to the nation” that might result from Cryptome’s postings of intelligence names and sources. Later, when he extended his repertoire to posting selections from databases of aerial photography, the Department of Homeland Security began calling him and politely asking him to stop. Young ignored all of them.
When Cryptome subsequently published detailed maps of Dick Cheney’s secret bunker in March 2005, the site was featured in a Reader’s Digest section called “That’s Outrageous!” The article was titled “Let’s Shut Them Down: These Sites Are an Invitation to Terrorists.” The interviewer asked Young if there was anything he wouldn’t publish—say, a security flaw in the president’s Secret Service detail. “Well, I’m actually looking for that information right now,” Young answered.
Four years later, when Yahoo!
asked Young to unpublish a manual that showed how it complied with law enforcement requests for users’ private information like search history and e-mail content, Young referred the company’s lawyer to the same Reader’s Digest story, which includes the words of former NSA counsel Stewart Baker. “If material is leaked to you, you can probably publish that,” Baker is quoted saying. “Unfortunately, it’s not illegal to be a jerk.”
And how did Cryptome obtain those leaks? Not through any promises of high-tech security. The website includes an e-mail address along with a PGP public key. There’s also a postal address, as well as a number to a telephone that no one answers.
The site’s privacy policy, as far as it even has one, promises that Cryptome doesn’t collect user data and deletes its logs several times a day. But its protections for the privacy of its leakers end there. The policy reads:
“As you know there are many, many ways to snoop on traffic, so much that Cryptome asserts there is no trustworthy privacy policy, not for Cryptome, not for anybody else. . . . Those who promise the most protection are out to skin you alive, those who promise the most privacy are selling your most private possessions. Cryptome is not trustworthy, and lies. It’s a free site, what else could it be but up to no good?”
Young doesn’t recommend that his secret-spillers use Anonymous remailers, like Tim May’s BlackNet, or Tor, like WikiLeaks. Cryptome doesn’t endorse any specific anonymity technologies, or make promises about safeguarding any identity information it does receive: The leaker’s anonymity is wholly his or her own problem. “Do not identify yourself, jerk,” says Young. “That’s our policy. Don’t send us stuff and think that we’ll protect you.”
But since the days of the cypherpunk remailers, tools for anonymous leaking have been in the hands of leakers, and the submissions have kept coming. When WikiLeaks launched in 2006, the site included a reference to John Young as the “spiritual godfather of online leaking.” In fact, his influence is more than spiritual; in the earliest days of WikiLeaks, it was Young’s name listed on the registration of the site’s domain. And aside from Assange himself, he is perhaps the strongest tie that the secret-spilling site has to its ideological roots in the cypherpunks.
After our lunch, the rain has let up and I walk with Young to the Eighty-Sixth Street subway entrance. I start to thank him for meeting me and ask when we can talk again, so that I can hear the rest of his story. He answers with one final point of friction. “I’ll talk to you. But until you publish something that puts you in prison, I won’t fully respect you,” he says, his face blank.
I tell him I’ll do my best. Then we shake hands, and he walks away.
In 1988, as Julian Assange tells it, a sixteen-year-old version of himself sat in a quiet room of a temporary refuge house for families in the Australian town of Emerald, on the eastern edge of Melbourne. He turned on the television news. Then he removed the cover from his Commodore MPS 801 printer and set it printing a long document, with its exposed mechanics emitting a noisy clacking rhythm. And then he started reading passages in Macbeth out loud from a Shakespeare anthology. Occasionally he would alter the pitch of his voice, ask himself random questions, pause, and answer them, all while periodically stomping around the room. To anyone watching, he would no doubt have appeared in need of antipsychotic medication.
Every epic hacker story has its Great Hack, when the teenage upstart first gains access to a powerful, faraway machine that opens up vast new possibilities. In 1983’s WarGames, Matthew Broderick unwittingly hacks the WOPR supercomputer, a vast engine of nuclear war analysis. In 1995’s Hackers, Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller breach the Gibson mainframe. And in Underground, the 1997 nonfiction book written by Julian Assange and Australian journalist Suelette Dreyfus that sketches the early Australian hacker subculture, that digital golden fleece was Minerva, a system of mainframes run by Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission in Sydney.
The protagonist of that story? A hacker named Mendax, who only years later Assange would reveal was none other than Assange himself, using the handle that defined his hacker persona for many of his teen years. The name referred to splendide mendax, the “nobly untruthful” in Horace’s Odes.
Assange was determined to access Minerva, both for bragging rights and to exploit the mainframes’ capabilities to run scanning and cracking programs for other netherworld adventures. But he needed a password. And the only way he knew to get one was through what hackers call “social engineering,” simply calling up a human being and conning him or her into divulging secrets.
Hence the noisy layers of Shakespearean tragedy, television, and printer that the altogether sane young man was producing. Assange’s sound show was for the benefit of his cassette recorder, the better to simulate the background chaos of a busy office. A few minutes later, he had found a valid number within an OTC branch office in Perth. And using his uncannily deep sixteen-year-old’s voice while the noise-tape played behind him, he became “John Keller,” a trustworthy operator in the Sydney office trying to check a few data points corrupted by a crashed storage drive.
He dialed and a man picked up. Assange introduced himself and began the game. “The backup tape is two days old, so we want to check your information is up-to-date so your service is not interrupted,” he casually told the man who answered the phone, not missing a beat.
“Oh, dear. Yes. Let’s check it,” Assange’s mark responded in a concerned tone.
Assange read out a list of easily accessible information for Minerva staff users that he had downloaded, carefully inserting an error into one user’s fax number. The voice on the other end interrupted him helpfully.
“Oh, no, that’s wrong, our fax number is definitely wrong,” he said.
So Assange tried to match his victim’s worried tone and explained that they would need to confirm all the user’s information. “Let’s see. We have your account number, but we had better check your password . . . what was it?”
“Yes, it’s L-U-R-C-H—full stop.”
Lurch. Assange was in. He politely ended the conversation, gave his target a callback number that rang eternally busy, and hung up, victorious in the greatest hack of his young life.
Assange was born in Queensland, Australia, on July 3, 1971, less than one month after the first publication of the Pentagon Papers. From as early as he could remember, his family was on the move, as Assange’s mother, a free-spirited costume and makeup artist, traveled with his bohemian stepfather from town to town. For a time they lived on Magnetic Island, a tropical paradise off the eastern coast of Australia where Assange’s mother remembers “living in a bikini” and “going native.” She wore a sarong and would trek around the island with Assange on her back, often leaving him to sleep in the shade of a boulder by the sea while she sketched. The young Australian was dazzled by the phosphorescent phytoplankton that emitted an aqua flash as the ocean’s waves broke on the shore, and he swung from giant fig tree roots. His mother would slash a path to the front door with a machete and kept rifle cartridges for shooting snakes. On some occasions, opossums ran across their beds in the dark.
One evening, while the Assanges were out having dinner, their house mysteriously caught fire and burned to the ground, with their snake-shooting ammunition combusting like a series of firecrackers in the night. After losing most of their possessions, they lived with near-ascetic simplicity. “You didn’t have to have a lot of money to live a privileged lifestyle,” Assange’s mother told the local news outlet, the Magnetic Times. “It was so beautiful . . . at night, when the ferries stopped, we felt cut off from the world and its troubles. There was a sense of safety and security.”
Despite that idyllic setting, Assange made few friends in his “itinerant minstrel childhood,” as he called it. “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,” he wrote in 2006. “I wasn’t sorry to leave when presented with the dental bills of my tormentors.”
Assange’s birth father, whom his mother met at an anti-Vietnam rally, was gone before he was a year old. His next father figure, an alcoholic, was divorced from his mother when he was nine. His second pseudo-stepfather, whom Assange’s mother has described as a manipulative and abusive character, had fathered Assange’s younger half-brother, and when Assange’s mother left him, the man and a powerful cult to which he belonged searched persistently for Assange’s family. They stayed on the move, now out of fear rather than the innocent wanderlust of Assange’s earliest years. In all, Assange moved through fifteen different towns and at least as many schools, when he attended school at all.
Assange’s distrust of power was inculcated just as early as his rootless wandering. He remembers his mother driving through an Adelaide suburb late one night, after leaving an antinuclear protest, giving a ride to a friend who held evidence that the British had forced five thousand natives from their land to test nuclear weapons in the Maralinga region of South Australia. When Assange’s mother saw that she was being tailed by a car, she dropped off the friend in a back street and continued. The tail turned out to be a plainclothes policeman who pulled over the car, searched Assange’s mother, and made a thinly veiled threat that she “get out of politics” or risk being seen as an “unfit mother.”
But just as formative as that dark political lesson was his first computer, a Commodore 64 that he used in a computer shop across the street from a house his mother rented. Seeing his interest and skill, his mother bought it for him, a sacrifice that required moving into a cheaper home. Assange began simple coding and cracking software protections, and soon he was hooked on what he described as “the austerity of one’s interactions with a computer.” “It is like chess,” he told one reporter. “Chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.”
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