Christine’s marriage was now also running into problems. Brett Assange, who ran the puppet theatre with her, was a good and close stepfather. Assange would in later life often quote sayings “from my father” such as, “Capable, generous men do not create victims: they nurture them.” Brett Assange would later describe his stepson as “a very sharp kid” with a “keen sense of right and wrong”. But according to transcripts of a court hearing Brett was, at the time, “plagued with difficulties with alcohol”. When Assange was seven or eight, his stepfather was removed from his life, when he and Christine divorced.
Assange’s mother then became tempestuously involved with a third, much younger man, Keith Hamilton. Hamilton was an amateur musician and a member of a New Age group, the Santiniketan Park Association. He was also, according to Assange, a manipulative psychopath. Hamilton allegedly had five different identities. “His whole background was a fabrication, right down to the country of his birth,” Assange claimed in Underground. Despite its respectable-sounding name, The Santiniketan Park Association was a notorious cult presided over by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, a yoga teacher who convinced her middle-class followers she was a reincarnation of Jesus. Keith Hamilton was not only associated with the cult. He may even have been Hamilton-Byrne’s son. Hamilton-Byrne and her helpers collected children, often persuading teenage mothers to hand over their babies. She and her disciples – “the aunties” – lived together in an isolated rural property surrounded by a barbed wire fence and overlooking a lake near the town of Eildon, Victoria. Here, they administered a bizarre regime over their charges, who at one point numbered 28 children. There were regular beatings. Children had their heads held down in buckets of water.
Assange’s mother tried to leave Keith Hamilton in 1982, a court transcript reports, resulting in a custody battle for Assange’s half-brother, Jamie. Hamilton was an abusive partner who “had been physically violent”, court documents allege. Assange says Hamilton now pursued his mother, forcing her to flee repeatedly with her children. Assange told an Australian journalist in 2010: “My mother had become involved with a person who seems to be the son of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult in Australia, and we kept getting tracked down, possibly because of leaks in the social security system, and having to leave very quickly to a new city, and lived under assumed names.”
For the next five or six years, the three lived as fugitives. Christine travelled to Melbourne, then fled to Adelaide for six months, and on to Perth. As a teenager, Assange returned to Melbourne, living with his mother in at least four different refuges. The WikiLeaks founder was to act out this pattern of evasive action all over again in 2010, believing he was being pursued by US intelligence because of his WikiLeaks exposures.
Court files from the teenage Assange’s eventual hacking trial in Melbourne – of which more later – document some of the effects of such a strange life on a gifted teenager with a strong aptitude for mathematics. His lawyer said Assange was deprived of the chance to make friends or associate normally with his peers. “His background is quite tragic in a way.” Underground describes a “dead boring” Melbourne suburb: “merely a stopping point, one of dozens, as his mother shuttled her child around the continent trying to escape from a psychopathic former de facto [spouse]. The house was an emergency refuge for families on the run. It was safe and so, for a time … his exhausted family stopped to rest before tearing off again in search of a new place to hide.”
When Assange was 13 or 14, his mother had rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange began going there and working on a Commodore 64. His mother saved to buy the computer for her older son as a present. Assange began teaching himself code. At 16 he got hold of his first modem. He attended a programme for gifted children in Melbourne, where he acquired “an introverted and emotionally disturbed” girlfriend, as he put it. Assange grew interested in science and roamed around libraries. Soon he discovered hacking. By the age of 17 he suspected Victoria police were about to raid his home. According to Underground: “He wiped his disks, burnt his printouts, and left” to doss temporarily with his girlfriend. The pair joined a squatters’ union, and when Assange was 18 she became pregnant. They married and had a baby boy, Daniel. But as Assange’s anxiety increased, and police finally closed in on his outlaw circle of hackers, his wife moved out, taking their 20-month-old son Daniel with them. Assange was hospitalised with depression. For a period he slept outdoors, rambling around the eucalyptus forests in Dandenong Ranges national park.
*
Human relationships must have seemed unstructured for the teenage Assange, prone to abandonment, confusion and reversals. The world of computers, on the other hand, was predictable. Algorithms – the key to Assange’s later skill as a cryptographer – were reliable. People were not. Assange would later tell the New Yorker the “austerity” of interaction with computers appealed to him. “It is like chess … There is no randomness.” During his 1996 hacking trial his defence lawyer, Paul Galbally, said in mitigation that his computer became “his only friend”. As Assange shifted from school to school he was targeted by bullies as the outsider: “His only real saviour in life or his own bedrock in life was this computer. His mother, in fact, encouraged him to use this computer … It had become an addictive instrument to him at a very early age.” Galbally describes Assange as “super smart”; not a nerdy hacker but someone unusual and flamboyant.
Interestingly, some of the world’s most talented programmers come from broken families. Jacob Appelbaum, who would become WikiLeaks’ representative in the US, says he was the son of a paranoid schizophrenic mother and heroin addict father. He spent much of his boyhood in a children’s home. As a boy, he discovered a woman convulsing in his father’s bathroom with a needle sticking out of her arm. Appelbaum told Rolling Stone magazine that programming and hacking allowed him, however, “to feel like the world is not a lost place. The internet is the only reason I’m alive today.”
Melbourne’s hacking underground in the 1980s, in which Assange became prominent, was a small, almost entirely male group of self-taught teenagers. Many came from educated but poor suburban homes; all were of above average intelligence. They experimented on Commodore 64s, and the Apple IIe. They wrote code and used painfully slow modems. There was no internet yet, but there were computer networks and bulletin board systems, known as BBSs. In his “real” life Assange might have been considered a failure. He failed to complete his Higher School Certificate via a correspondence course. He also studied computers and physics inconclusively at an adult further education college.
But in his electronic life, Assange was a god. These geeky and socially awkward young men could reinvent themselves as swaggering heroes with names like Phoenix, Gandalf or Eric Bloodaxe. Assange used the pseudonym Mendax. Lewis and Short’s Latin dictionary says that means “given to lying” – the root for the English word mendacious. But Assange was more specifically inspired by Horace’s Odes. Assange’s mother had enthusiastically introduced him to the Greek and Latin classics. In book III, xi, Horace tells the story of the 50 daughters of Danaus. Their father is angry that they are being forced to marry their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus. He makes them swear to kill their husbands on their wedding night. Forty-nine carry out his order, but the 50th, Hypermnestra, tips off her husband, Lynceus, and they escape. (In some versions they go on to found a dynasty.) For this Horace calls her splendide mendax or “splendidly deceiving”. Another translation could be “deceitful with glory”. The name was well picked. It evoked what the intensely ambitious Assange would do next, something both deceitful and glorious: hack into the US’s military network.
Underground: tales of hacking, madness & obsession on the electronic frontier appeared in 1997. Published under the byline of Suelette Dreyfus, a Melbourne academic, Assange is credited as researcher, but his imprint his palpable – in parts it reads like an Assange biography. The book depicts the international computer underground of the 90s: “a veile
d world populated by characters slipping in and out of the half-darkness. It is not a place where people use their real names.” Assange chose an epigraph 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.”
“Sometimes Mendax went to school,” runs the story in Underground. “Often he didn’t. The school system didn’t hold much interest for him. It didn’t feed his mind … The Sydney computer system was a far more interesting place to muck around in than the rural high school.”
In 1988, Assange (Mendax) is busy trying to break into Minerva, a system of mainframes in Sydney belonging to the government-owned Overseas Telecommunications Commission, or OTC. For the computer underground, hacking into OTC was a sort of rite of passage.
Mendax phones an OTC official in Perth posing as an operator from Sydney, Underground describes. To add authenticity, he records his home printer chattering in the background, and even mumbles passages from Macbeth to simulate office noise. The official innocently reveals his password – LURCH. Mendax is in! It is one of the dramatic moments in the book. In 2010, recalling his hacker exploits as a teenager, Assange said, “You were young. You hadn’t done anything for criminal gain. You had done this for curiosity, challenge, and some activism. We hadn’t destroyed anything. If you were a teenager in a suburb of Melbourne this was an incredibly intellectually liberating thing.”
In 1989 Melbourne hackers carried out a spectacular stunt, launching a computer worm against Nasa’s website. Bemused Nasa staff read the message: “Your system has been officially WANKed.” The acronym stood for Worms Against Nuclear Killers. Was Assange behind WANK? Possibly. But his involvement was never proved. By 1991 Assange was probably Australia’s most accomplished hacker. He and two others, using the names Prime Suspect and Trax, founded International Subversives magazine, offering tips on “phreaking” – how to break into telephone systems illegally and make free calls. The magazine had an exclusive readership: its circulation was just three, the hackers themselves.
Assange next set about hacking into the master terminal of Nortel, a big Canadian company that manufactured and sold telecommunications equipment. He also penetrated the US military-industrial complex, using his own sophisticated password-harvesting program, Sycophant. He hacked the US Airforce 7th Command Group Headquarters in the Pentagon, Stanford Research Institute in California, the Naval Surface War Center in Virginia, Lockheed Martin’s Technical Aircraft Systems plant in California, and a host of other sensitive military institutions. In the spring of 1991, the three hackers found an exciting new target: MILNET, the US military’s own secret defence data network. Pretty quickly, Assange discovered a back door. He got inside. “We had total control over it for two years,” he later claimed. The hackers also routinely broke into the computer systems at Australia’s National University.
But the Australian federal police’s computer crime unit was on their trail. They tapped the hackers’ phone lines and eventually raided Assange’s home. He confessed to police what he had done. But it wasn’t until 1994 that he was finally charged, with the case only being heard in 1996. He pleaded guilty in Melbourne’s Victoria County Court to 24 counts of hacking. The prosecution described Assange as “the most active” and “most skilful” of the group, and pressed for a prison sentence. Assange’s motive, according to the prosecution, was “simply an arrogance and a desire to show off his computer skills”.
At one point Assange turned up with flowers for one of the prosecution lawyers, Andrea Pavleka (described in Underground as “tall, slender and long-legged, with a bob of sandy blonde curls, booky spectacles resting on a cute button nose and an infectious laugh”). It was a courtly gesture. Galbally felt obliged to point out to Assange: “She doesn’t want to date you, Julian. She wants to put you in jail.”
Judge Leslie Ross said he regarded Assange’s offences as “quite serious”. But there was no evidence to suggest he had sought personal gain. He was indeed a “looksee” rather than a malicious hacker, and had acted, the judge said, out of “intellectual inquisitiveness”.
“I accept what your counsel said about the unstable personal background that you have had to endure during your formative years and the rather nomadic existence that your mother and yourself were forced to follow and the personal disruption that occurred within your household … That could not have been easy for you. It has had its impact on you obtaining formal educational qualifications which it seems were certainly not beyond you, and the submission that you are a highly intelligent individual seems to be well founded.”
The judge fined Assange $2,100. He warned him that if he carried on hacking he would indeed go to jail. Despite the fact the case was over, Assange got up to speak. The court transcript reads as follows:
PRISONER: Your Honour, I believe the prosecution has made several misleading claims in terms of the charges and therefore I elect to continue this defence if Your Honour would so let me.
HIS HONOUR: No, you have pleaded guilty, the proceedings are over. You would be well advised to come forward and sit down behind Mr Galbally.
PRISONER: Your Honour, I feel a great misjustice has been done and I would like to record the fact that you have been misled by the prosecution in terms of the charges of [indistinct] and a number of other matters.
HIS HONOUR: Mr Galbally, do you want to have a word with your client?
MR GALBALLY: Yes, Your Honour.
HIS HONOUR: Yes, go and have a word with him.
Assange considered himself the victim of a Solzhenitsyn-style injustice. A decade later, he would blog: “If there is a book whose feeling captures me it is First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. To feel that home is the camaraderie of persecuted, and in fact, prosecuted, polymaths in a Stalinist slave labour 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! … Your belief in the mendacity of the state … begins only with a jackboot at the door. True belief forms when led 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.”
Convicted but leniently treated, Assange was now an unemployed father in Melbourne surviving on a single parent pension. The family courts had given him sole custody of his son. Assange and his mother would spend years battling his former wife over access to Daniel; this developed into a bitter fight with the state over access to information in the case. Assange was also working unpaid as a computer programmer. He set up a site on the internet giving advice on computer security, called Best of Security. By 1996 it had 5,000 subscribers. Assange’s early commitment to free information, and free software, would slowly evolve into WikiLeaks. In words that now seem prophetic, Galbally had told the judge in 1996: “He is clearly a person who wants the internet to provide material to people that isn’t paid for, and he freely gives his services to that.”
Assange co-authored several free software programs as part of what would become the open source movement. (They included the Usenet caching software NNTPCache, and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines.) He and a couple of collaborators invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption system. The idea was quite simple: that human rights activists who faced torture could surrender a password to one layer of information. Their torturers would not realise another layer was beneath.
According to the Rubberhose website, Assange conceived the software after meeting human rights workers, and hearing tales of abuse from repressive regimes such as East Timor, Russia, Kosovo, Guatemala, Iraq, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The website gives a flavour of Assange’s activist philosophy: “We hope that Rubberhouse will protect your data and offer a broader kind of protection for people who take risks for just causes … Our motto is: ‘Let’s make a little trouble.’”
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br /> As early as 1999 he came up with the idea of a leakers’ website, he says, and registered the domain name wikileaks.org. But otherwise he didn’t do much about it. Assange was living in Melbourne and quietly raising his son. The custody battle over, it was probably the most stable period in his life. Daniel – today a computer programmer – went to Box Hill high school in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Between 2003 and 2006 Julian studied physics and maths at Melbourne University as well as philosophy and neuroscience. He still didn’t manage to graduate. But the WikiLeaks idea stayed with him.
Assange drafted on his bravely named blog, IQ.org, an apparently fanciful theory for overthrowing injustice in the world: “The more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimisation of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive ‘secrecy tax’) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold on to power … Since unjust systems, by their nature, induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance. Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.”
Assange spoke of a high-flown calling: “If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers … The whole universe … is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering … Men in their prime, if they have convictions, are tasked to act on them.”
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