The Deeper History: Who Is Julian Assange?

Personal Life of Julian Assange

Julian Paul Hawkins was born on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to an anti-war activist and builder, but his parents separated prior to his birth.

When Julian Hawkins was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Assange regards as his father (choosing Assange as his surname). His Childhood home was destroyed by fire.

His mother and Step-father divorced about 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of an Australian cult.

Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty Australian towns by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, Victoria.

He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006), but did not complete a degree.

While in his teens, Assange married a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer. The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child. Assange was Daniel's primary caregiver for much of his childhood.

Assange has other children; in an open letter to French President François Hollande, he stated that his youngest child lives in France with his mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.

Julian's Hacking

In 1987, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax. He and two others—known as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect"—formed a hacking group they called the International Subversives. He is thought to have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but he does not acknowledge this.

In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange's phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October, and eventually charged him in 1994 with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes.

In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges (the other six were dropped), and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behavior bond. The perceived absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood were cited to justify his lenient penalty.

Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it". He did, however, publicize a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: "This patent should worry people." This gives the NSA the ability to tap everyone's phone calls, "transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency," he said.

Systematic abuse of technology by governments against fundamental freedoms of world citizens remained an abiding concern—more than a decade later, in the introduction to Cypherpunks (2012), Assange summarized: "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen".

WikiLeaks

Assange and The Love/Hate Relationship

After his period of study at the University of Melbourne, Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange is a member of the organization's advisory board and describes himself as the editor-in-chief.

WikiLeaks has published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. By 2015, WikiLeaks had published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as "a giant library of the world's most persecuted documents".

The published material between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of publicity, but it was only after it began publishing documents supplied by Chelsea Manning, that WikiLeaks became a household name.

The Manning material included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010) which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 people from a helicopter in Iraq, the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).

Opinions of Assange at this time were divided. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard described his activities as "illegal," but the police said that he had broken no Australian law.

United States Vice President Joe Biden and others called him a "terrorist". Some called for his assassination or execution.

Support came from people including Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President of Ecuador Rafael Correa, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Britain's Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (then a backbench MP), Spain's Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, Argentina's ambassador to the UK Alicia Castro, and activists and celebrities including; Tariq Ali, John Perry Barlow, Daniel Ellsberg, Mary Kostakidis, John Pilger, Ai Weiwei, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Vaughan Smith, and Oliver Stone.

Public Approval and Releases

The year 2010 culminated with the Sam Adams Award, which Assange accepted in October, and a string of distinctions in December—the Le Monde readers' choice award for person of the year, the Time readers' choice award for person of the year (he was also a runner-up in Time's overall person of the year award), a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3 million, and selection by the Italian edition of Rolling Stone as "rockstar of the year".

Assange announced that he would run for the Australian Senate in March 2012 under the new WikiLeaks Party, and Cypherpunks was published in November.

In 2012, Assange hosted a television show on RT (formerly known as Russia Today), a network funded by the Russian government. In the same year, he analyzed the Kissinger cables held at the US National Archives and released them in searchable form. On 15 September 2014, he appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom's Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland.

The following February, he won the Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal for Peace with Justice, previously awarded to only three people—Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhist spiritual leader Daisaku Ikeda.

He was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in June, having earlier won the Amnesty International UK Media Award (New Media) in 2009.

United States Criminal Investigation

On 16 October 2011, after WikiLeaks released the Manning material, the Obama administration began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally with a view to prosecute them under the Espionage Act of 1917.

In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.

An email from an employee of intelligence consultancy Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor) leaked in 2012 said, "We have a sealed indictment on Assange." The US government denied the existence of such an indictment.

In December 2011 prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an alleged WikiLeaks interlocutor they claimed to be Assange; he denied this, dismissing the alleged connection as "absolute nonsense".

The logs were presented as evidence during Manning's court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helped Manning reverse-engineer a password, but evidence that the interlocutor was Assange was circumstantial, and Manning insisted she (he at the time) acted alone.

Assange was being examined separately by "several government agencies" in addition to the grand jury, most notably the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was still under "active and ongoing" investigation at that time.

Moreover, some Snowden documents published in 2014 show that the United States government put Assange on the "2010 Manhunting Timeline", and in the same period they urged their allies to open criminal investigations into the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.

In the same documents there was a proposal by the National Security Agency (NSA) to designate WikiLeaks as a "malicious foreign actor", thus increasing the surveillance against it.

On 26 January 2015, WikiLeaks reported that three members of the organization had received notice from Google that Google had complied, with a federal warrant by a US District Court, to turn over their emails and metadata on 5 April 2012.

At the time, Google had been prohibited by the court's order from disclosing the existence of the warrant, but a subsequent order by the court gave Google permission to notify WikiLeaks regarding the warrant's existence and that Google had complied with the order.

The warrants cited 18 USC 371, 641, 793(d), 793(g), and 1030, which include espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, theft or conversion of property belonging to the United States government, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and general conspiracy.

According to the statement by WikiLeaks, the alleged offenses could add up to a total of 45 years of imprisonment each for Assange and other WikiLeaks staff.

In a December 15, 2015 court submission, the United States confirmed its "sensitive, ongoing law enforcement proceeding into the Wikileaks matter."

Since Trump Took Office

On April 13, 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia."

On April 20, 2017, US officials told CNN that they were preparing to file formal charges against Assange.

United States prosecutors accidentally revealed the existence of criminal charges against Assange in an unrelated ongoing sex crime case in the Eastern District of Virginia.

In early 2019, individuals began to come forward with news of being questioned about Assange by prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia. Legal scholar Stephen Vladeck stated that the prosecutors, after refusing to unseal the indictment, accelerated the case in 2019 due to the impending statute of limitations on Assange's largest leaks.

Witnesses named in the investigation included Jacob Appelbaum, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, David House, Jason Katz and Chelsea Manning, all of whom condemned it as a form of government overreach.

The House eventually revealed that he had testified in July 2018 while Manning was held in contempt and jailed on 8 March 2019.