Text Fwd: Inside the brain of WikiLeak's Julian Assange

Assange speaks at a press conference on the Iraq war logs, which were leaked last year. Picture: AFP Source: AFP
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* Text forward from Mark Servian and Bruce K. Gagnon through GN with the below words on March 14, 2011
'Even more detail to show how involved Assange was during our 1989 campaign in Florida to stop the plutonium launch of Galileo space mission. Bruce'
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The Australian
Inside the brain of WikiLeak's Julian Assange
March 5, 2011

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.

IN the late 1980s, Assange joined the underground subculture of hacking that was forming in Melbourne. By October 1989 an attack was mounted from Australia on America's 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.

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. 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 AFP raided Prime Suspect's and Mendax's 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 back door at 5am". When the police arrived, the incriminating disks, which he usually hid inside a beehive, were scattered beside his computer.

Assange descended into a personal hell. He entered a psychiatric ward briefly. He told Dreyfus that 1992 was "the worst year in his life". 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 July 17, 2006, Assange wrote: "If there is a book whose feeling captures me it is First Circle by [Alexander] 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.

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 No 5 at Sun Microsystems - who had co-founded an organisation to advance the cause of cyberspace freedom, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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 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

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. Although George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the cypherpunks' foundational texts, they tended to believe that in the coming battle between Big Brother and Winston Smith, the victor might be Winston Smith.

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 May who, in 1994, composed a vast, truly remarkable document, Cyphernomicon.

May called his system crypto-anarchy. He 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.

He recognised that in his future world only elites with control over technology would prosper. No doubt "the clueless 95 per cent" - 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 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 US Republicans, left-leaning liberals, wobblies or even Maoists.

Neither fact concerned him. 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.

Another even more extreme cypherpunk of the libertarian Right, Jim Bell, thought history might need a push. In mid-1995 he began an essay series explaining his "revolutionary idea", which he called Assassination Politics.

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, 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. Assange joined the cypherpunks email list in late 1995 at the time the controversy over Assassination Politics was raging. The first thing that becomes clear is the brashness. If one thing is clear from the cypherpunks list, it is that the young Assange did not suffer those he regarded as fools gladly.

From beginning to end Assange was, in short, a hard-line member of the tendency among the cypherpunks that 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 May. At no stage did Assange show sympathy for the anarcho-capitalism of the cypherpunks mainstream.

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 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.

While commentators have comprehensively failed to see the significance of the cypherpunks in shaping the thought of Assange, this is something insiders to the movement understand.

In his mordant online article on WikiLeaks and Assange, 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 a blog entry of December 31, 2006, Assange outlines finally the idea at the core of the WikiLeaks strategy: "The more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in the 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 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 Bell's Assassination Politics was being hotly discussed.

There is evidence 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. 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 on 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.

In late 2006 Assange sought a romantic partner through the online dating service 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 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.

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 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 January 2, 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's 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.

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 is 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?

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 were 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 Young he wrote: "We have the collective sources, personalities and learning to be, or rather appear to be, the reclusive ubermensch of the fourth estate". The emphases are mine.

He also knew that if WikiLeaks were 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.

BY June 2007 several members of the Left had indeed gravitated to WikiLeaks. In Assange's view, this group was 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."

WikiLeaks was in danger, he argued, of being positioned as a CIA front 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".

This email is not only illuminating from the point of view of WikiLeaks's 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 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 US 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 March 12, 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.

Edited extract. The full 15,000-word version of Robert Manne's essay is published in the March edition of The Monthly, available at newsagents or online at www.themonthly.com.au/node/3081. Subscription required.

Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne.