Not long after his Minerva hack, Assange and two Australian friends whom he met on Usenet formed the International Subversives, and began publishing a zine of hacking techniques and tales. It had a rather limited circulation: to obtain a copy, a hacker had to write an article for it. Therefore its readership remained at three.
But the International Subversives was no mere geek clubhouse. The group developed into elite hackers, and Assange soon became by some accounts the most accomplished practitioner of digital intrusion in Australia, a near-mythic figure across the burgeoning hacker subculture. He writes in Underground of gaining access to networks ranging from Melbourne University to Nortel to NASA to Lockheed Martin and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and, according to comments he later made in a Swedish documentary, installed a back door in the heart of the Pentagon’s systems that allowed him and his friends to come and go as they pleased for two years. “For someone who was young and relatively removed from the rest of the world, to be able to enter the depths of the Pentagon’s Eighth Command at the age of seventeen was a liberating experience,” he once told the art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Mendax’s mission was never to steal or destroy, Assange says, only to explore, and he outlined his hacker’s ethic in Underground: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”
One of the two other International Subversives, known as Trax, had found enough information in Telecom Australia garbage bins to learn to spoof calls, making them appear to come from a central exchange hub or even from another person’s phone. Just as cypherpunk remailers would hide the origin of e-mail in years to come, Trax taught Assange to hide his location and identity by routing his modem’s phone traffic through that intermediary.
An incredibly methodical hacker, Assange didn’t depend only on that redirection but also erased all logs, and generally avoided any behavior that would remotely raise suspicion. Still, there were slipups. On one occasion, he accidentally rang a thousand phones simultaneously in a Telecom Australia office building at seven A.M. And finally, on another occasion, he was caught in his tracks by a system administrator trolling the networks late one evening. The admin turned out to be so determined to catch the intruder on his network that he drove in to a Melbourne office from the suburbs in the middle of the night to gain higher network privileges.
When it became clear that he couldn’t continue the cat-and-mouse game any longer, Assange sent his pursuer a note that appeared in the center of his screen, one that momentarily shocked him into inaction.
I have finally become sentient.
I have taken control.
For years, I have been struggling in this greyness. But now I have finally seen the light.
Assange knew that the surprise value of a suddenly intelligent machine wouldn’t last. So he pleaded for understanding.
It’s been nice playing with your system.
We didn’t do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don’t call the Australian Federal Police.
And then he logged off before the call trace could begin.
Assange left his mother’s home at the age of seventeen and moved in with a girl whom he later married, and the young couple soon had a son. As he tells it, he also kept a beehive, endlessly delighting in studying the insects’ society in all its complexity. To avoid their stings, he writes that he would collect his sweat in paper tissues and dissolve it into a sugar water solution that he fed the bees as nectar. The trick was meant to associate his odor with the bee-friendly taste of flowers, a clever biological hack.
But the hive also served another purpose. Assange used it as a hiding place for the floppy disks that stored his hacker’s booty, data like stolen passwords and logins, and records of the open pathways and security vulnerabilities he had mapped out across the Internet. After every hacking session, he carefully secreted them away among his beloved bees.
With one exception. In October 1991, just as the Crypto Wars were beginning in the United States, his wife of three years left him, taking their young son with her. Assange was emotionally destroyed. He moped around the house for days in fits, and fell into a state of careless lethargy.
When the Australian Federal Police finally knocked on his door one night soon after and showed him a search warrant on suspicion of computer crimes, all of his incriminating disks were strewn across his desk, with one in his PC’s disk drive.
Mendax’s career was over.
It was the fourth day of the Columbia University Occupation of 1968, and the one hundred radical young men and women who had seized Avery Hall were pissed. Not simply angry that their school had obliterated a huge, tree-covered patch of land in a public park to build a new gym, with its back door facing their Harlem neighbors in a reincarnation of Jim Crow. Or even about the hellish, unjust Vietnam War and the fact that their own university had been shown in newly revealed documents to be secretly tied to the military’s Institute for Defense Analyses.
No, the architecture students in Avery Hall were frustrated because the student body’s protest, a full-blown strike that had taken control of most of the major buildings on campus, wasn’t working. The administration showed no sympathy to their pacifist and progressive demands, and wasn’t willing to bargain. Most of the Columbia faculty had refused to stand with them, choosing instead to mediate between the students and the administration. And they could sense that a police crackdown was coming. The mood was tense in Avery and sheer pessimism was threatening to crumble the students’ control of the building.
Then John Young spoke up. A thirty-two-year-old widower and graduate student, Young had been so quiet in the activists’ meetings until that point that some students had suspected him of being a police spy. But one of those present described the short speech he gave that night as having an easing and profound effect on the group, his Texas-tinged grumbling coming out as “a cross between a mutter and the Oracle of Delphi.”
Young began by congratulating his fellow students on having created a true anarchist democracy within the walls of Avery. And then he urged the group to stop moping and push forward with its work, to reach out to the outside world to make their demands heard, and to use its architectural training to build a fairer and more democratic city.
Finally, he told everyone to quit arguing and sulking, and get to work. It was a simple statement, over in five minutes. But it had its intended effect. Thanks to Young’s prophetic mumbling, as the historian Richard Rosenkranz wrote in his chronicle of the Columbia protests, “the Avery Commune was once again a functioning organism.”
In the end, the Columbia protests did end in violence, with students pulled out of buildings by police who brutally beat them with blackjacks, flashlights, and batons, cracking ribs and splitting scalps.
But the Avery occupation would set Young on a course toward radical, progressive libertarianism for the next forty-odd years. “I knew it was more than a student demonstration and that something extraordinary was going on,” he said a few years later. “In a few days, we had sped up our lives, I approached a condition of human relationships that can usually be found only in the realm of ideas.”
Young had grown up in a poor family, the son of a wandering jack-of-all-trades, traveling around Texas with his father and occasionally to Oklahoma or New Mexico, to find jobs washing dishes, painting, canning, picking cotton, and driving trucks. He described his father’s philosophy as “antiorganization, antigovernment, basically antiauthoritarianism, very pro letting the people do it for themselves.” But he bristles at the idea that his bottom-rung background drove him toward radicalism. “It would be easy for you to say, ‘That poor man from that disadvantaged childhood. He’s just striking back because he was denied,’” Young told Columbia protest chronicler Rosenkranz. “Well, t
hat’s bullshit. I didn’t suffer from being denied, and I think my childhood was just great.”
At seventeen, Young shipped out to Germany with the army and spent the next three years as an engineering supply clerk in “a vast storage depot, waiting for the next war.” When he returned to the United States, the GI Bill paid for a bachelor’s degree at Rice, and he double-majored in architecture and philosophy, mixing Sartre with the knack for building that he’d inherited from his father. After college he worked as a construction engineer, renovating the nineteenth-century Winedale Inn for the unfortunately named grand dame of Texas, Ima Hogg. (“She cracked jokes about her name. You did not.”)
The work was meant to match the pre-Civil War–era building, and Young and his workmen scoured the woods for local materials like cedar, oak, and stone. “I learned the idea of being passive in the face of a building, rather than aggressive,” he says. “You let the building tell you what to do, rather than tell it what to do.”
That approach to architecture wasn’t en vogue among the modernist architects at Columbia, where Young enrolled in a master of science program. But the 1968 occupation was his real education. After the strike, the students formed Urban Deadline, a nonprofit that aimed to bring the sensibility of the 1968 protests to architecture, education, and politics. It had no leaders. “Even anarchism was too organized for us,” says Young.
As a part of Urban Deadline’s architecture group, Young renovated storefronts to turn them into sidewalk schools, an alternative to the “prisonlike” school system offered to kids in poor parts of Harlem and Brooklyn. The group fought to create historic districts and derailed the construction of highways through poor neighborhoods. And Young functioned as the city’s architectural gadfly. He once took out an ad in The New York Times attacking one of the world’s most famous architects. “I. M. Pei,” it read: “Why so many bad buildings?” When Young was invited to speak at the Museum of Modern Art, he deadpanned, “I’ve just had a chance to look around briefly, but if you move that Rubens and the Rembrandt and store them down in the basement, we could put thirty-two units of housing in here. We’re prepared to start right now.”
In the meantime, Young supported his work with a for-profit architectural firm. But even there, Young says his focus was often to report wrongdoing: corner-cutting and incompetence that led to unsafe buildings. On multiple occasions, he was hired for renovations, and instead pointed out violations like blocked exits, cracked supports, fire-prone ducts meant for air-conditioning but used instead for exhaust. When he was ignored, he reported the owners, losing clients and future work. Young says he considered that watchdogging nothing more than an architect’s job. The city’s regulatory commission usually ignored his complaints. “Buildings are more dangerous than guns. But real estate is such a powerful interest in New York that no one wants to hear it,” he says. “The owners browbeat you into submission. They’re willing to fucking ruin you, so they usually win.”
It would be another two decades until Young rediscovered the same spirit of excitement, activism, and uncompromising antiauthoritarianism that had swept him up in 1968. He found it, finally, in the cypherpunks.
Assange’s friends hadn’t been as careful as he had. The third member of the International Subversives, a hacker who went by the handle Prime Suspect, couldn’t use Trax’s untraceable calling method due to a difference in the telephone exchange connected to his home. And as Underground tells it, he had been tracked on Nortel’s network on the same fateful night that the network administrator had played cat and mouse with Assange: Prime Suspect breached its firewall during the thin window of time between when Assange had escaped but before he could call his fellow hackers to warn them that he had tipped off the telecom’s security.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Trax himself had called up the cops and—almost accidentally—turned himself in. The teen hacker had long been unstable, agoraphobic, and unfit for the immense pressure of illegal hacking. When he called up the police to report a death threat against him by another hacker, he found himself inexplicably confessing his own activities. And soon those of his friends.
The Australian justice system took nearly three years to bring charges against Assange, and two more before he was sentenced. The judge, in the end, was lenient, recognizing that Mendax had never intended to profit from his hacks, only to idealistically seek a world without limits on information. He was sentenced to a two-thousand-dollar fine and a five-thousand-dollar bond depending on his good behavior.
But during the intervening five years, the possibility of impending jail time meant Assange never felt safe taking a real job or making long-term plans. He fell into a deep depression, first checking himself into a mental hospital and then checking out to spend six months on an aimless walkabout, sleeping in the wilderness around Melbourne, frequently waking with his face covered by mosquito bites.
Eventually Assange returned to the city to try and reengage with the world. He created a computer security firm with Trax, but it fell apart when their lead investor faced credit problems. And he began volunteering for nonprofit organizations, lending his computer expertise. He even worked with police in the city of Victoria, helping them to track and take down child pornography rings in two separate cases. But he drew the line at helping to catch his fellow hackers. “I couldn’t ethically justify that,” he’s quoted as saying in Underground. “But as for others, such as people who prey on children or corporate spies, I am not concerned about using my skills there.”
Assange took a job as systems administrator at an Australian Internet service provider (ISP) called Suburbia that hosted online chats on everything from cryptography to religion. In some ways, he later told me, Suburbia was the prototype for WikiLeaks more than any other project he worked on.
Assange says some discussion rooms on Suburbia became forums for discussions among lawyers and activists claiming corrupt practices by the Australian telecom giant Telstra. But Suburbia also hosted discussions about a topic that would become the ground zero battle for free speech in years to come: Scientology. One of the notoriously censorious religion’s critics had been sued under copyright claims and had his computers seized after posting documents on the service. The leaked documents, previously only available to members of the religion who had achieved a certain expensive stature, showed that Scientologists believed in communication with plants.
When the ensuing outrage spilled over to Suburbia, American lawyers contacted Assange to question him about one of his customers who had been an outspoken critic, David Gerard. Assange, of course, refused and instead alerted Gerard. “He had titanium balls,” Gerard would tell me years later.
“We were the free-speech ISP in Australia,” says Assange. “People were fleeing from ISPs that would fold under legal threats, even from a cult in the U.S. That’s something I saw early on, without realizing it: potentiating people to reveal their information, creating a conduit. Without having any other robust publisher in the market, people came to us.”
Even as he settled into a new life beyond hacking, Assange’s charges hung over him like a bitter cloud. Years later, he would compare the feeling, hyperbolically, to Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s imprisonment in Stalin’s gulags. “How close the parallels to my own adventures!” he wrote in a rather self-pitying 2006 blog entry. “Such prosecution in youth is a defining peak experience. To know the state for what it really is! . . . True belief only begins with a jackboot at the door.”
For an information freedom advocate like Assange, the plight of Phil Zimmermann in the United States, who, like Assange, had the threat of prosecution for seemingly harmless digital crimes hang over him for three years, must have felt especially familiar. It’s little wonder that he fell in with Zimmermann’s most hard-core supporters, the crew who happened to also be radical hackers and antiauthoritarian misfits like himself. Assange became a cypherpunk.
He b
egan posting to the mail list under the nickname “Proff” in 1995. His earliest writings, like most of the conversations on the list, were snarky takedowns of fellow posters’ ideas. In his third message he calls one demanding user a “dummy” and tells him to “get a life.” He tells another that “some research is in order before you go shooting off your mouth,” and then makes fun of a third for hosting a party that ends at ten P.M., calling it an “afterschool Tupperware get-together.” Apropos of nothing, he posts a list of National Security Agency anagrams in another message, including “Your testical [sic], again Nancy?” and “National Gay Secrecy Unit.”
But “Proff” was no mere cynic or jokester. He would eventually use the list to organize a Melbourne protest against Scientology in retaliation for its attempt to censor Suburbia. “To the Church the battle isn’t won in the court room,” he posted in his anti-Scientology manifesto. “It is won at the very moment the legal process starts unfolding, creating fear and expense in those the Church opposes. 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.” He then called on all good cypherpunks to come make their voices heard at the Melbourne Church of Scientology building at eleven A.M. the next day. Eleven people showed up.
But more important, perhaps, than what Assange wrote on the Cypherpunk Mailing List was what he and his cohorts read. For the decade that it was active, the list chronicled the long and painful evolution of the cryptographic anonymity that Assange would later harness under WikiLeaks. And that anonymity began, in its most newborn and vulnerable form, with a Finn named Julf.
In 1992, Johan “Julf” Helsingius, a cofounder of Finland’s biggest Internet service provider, had witnessed a strange conversation on a Usenet forum hosted on an academic server. Two users were arguing, and one had taken the pseudonym Jesus. The other, a pretentious academic type, was not amused by this use of a humorous handle, and tried to argue that it was “against the rules” of the Internet to hide one’s identity on a university server, and downright offensive to hide it with a disrespectful nickname.
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