In the late nineties of the last century, Australian journalist and researcher Suelette Dreyfus wrote a legendary book about the new teenage generation of hackers or hackers: Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier(Underground: Stories of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier). One of the researchers who collaborated on the work was called Julian Assange, who is easy to identify as Mendax, one of the characters. In fact, in the Canongate Books edition the joint authorship of the work is attributed to Dreyfus and Assange. In the chapter called Introduction of the Investigator a mysterious quote from Oscar Wilde slips in: “Man is less himself when he speaks in the first person. He gives him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” That chapter was written by the man who would eventually be co-founder of Wikileaks, the promoter of one of the most important investigations in recent history that shook the debate on access to information by public powers and that would later become the best-known fugitive on the planet.
Thirty years later, Assange continues to be for millions of people a mask that hides more the prejudices and ideology of his critics or the obsessions and causes of his followers than the true personality of the man. exhacker. For a legion of followers he is a martyr. His detractors see him as an exhibitionist hungry for notoriety who has not hesitated to destabilize institutions or countries with his leaks. And finally, for some people who analyze his figure from a distance, he is the symbol of an always unfinished struggle between freedom of information and the incessant effort of governments to suppress it.
Julian Assange was born on July 3, 1971 in Townsville, Australia. Much of his personality, as he himself has acknowledged, derives from his mother, Christine Hawkins, and the nomadic, adventurous, ever-changing life she provided for him. At 17, Christine left the family home and the rigid discipline of an academic father to join the world of the counterculture that was revolutionizing Western societies in the 1960s. Julian is the son of architect John Shipton, whom his mother met at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The relationship was brief, and father and son would not see each other again until Assange turned 25.
Beginnings of hacker
At age 13 or 14, obsessed with the new products sold by an electronics store right across the street from the apartment where he and his mother lived, Julian bought a Commodore 64, one of the first rudimentary computers that an entire generation came across. his first steps in computer programming.
By 1991, Assange was already one of Australia’s best-known hackers. He wrote in underground magazines, for example, along with other friends with the same obsessions, tricks to make free phone calls. But from the innocence of these pranks he made the leap to something more serious; along with two others hackersmanaged to access the US military’s secret database.
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Over the course of three years, until he was finally convicted by an Australian court of 24 computer hacking offences, Julian had time to erase all his hard drives and files, to start over, to have a son – Daniel – with his then girlfriend, who ended up leaving him. Of entering a hospital with a severe case of depression, of living for a while alone in the forest and of trying to flirt with one of the prosecutors who was pursuing his imprisonment.
And meanwhile, convinced of being a victim of many injustices and of his redemptive mission, he continued with his plans to boycott the powerful. “The more unfair or secretive an organization is, the easier it is to introduce fear and paranoia into its leaders or cliques through leaks,” he wrote at the time on his blog. IQ.org.
The emergence of Wikileaks
In December 2006, Assange launched Wikileaks, an internet portal where he began publishing confidential documents, images and videos. Morning Express was one of the media that participated in this concerted effort to publish these papers.
“To keep our sources safe, we had to disperse our assets, encrypt all material and constantly move our telecommunications equipment and personnel around the world in order to activate the protection offered at all times by different national jurisdictions,” Assange explained to the BBC in 2011.
In April 2010, Wikileaks shocked the world by showing footage of a US Army helicopter shooting at least 18 civilians in Iraq from the air.
His main coup was also the definitive cause that drove him to a life as a fugitive that has caused him, according to friends and family, profound physical and mental wear and tear. Following the publication of millions of secret and classified documents of the US Government, Washington began an all-out persecution that has lasted for more than a decade.
Along with the US case, the Swedish authorities also pursued the criminal prosecution of Assange for an alleged crime of rape and another of sexual abuse against two women whom he met in August 2010, during a visit to Stockholm. An international arrest warrant, on a charge she eventually dropped, led to her arrest and subsequent parole of her in the United Kingdom.
The protection of Ecuador
Through an extravagant maneuver, Assange managed to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy, located in the London neighborhood of Knightsbridge. The Government of then President Rafael Correa, an admirer of the fugitive and with whom he shared certain values, offered him his protection.
Seven years locked in a tiny room—the Ecuadorian legation is small—took a toll on Assange’s health. Even so, he remained active in his political maneuvers and even participated remotely, eager to influence, boycott or encourage political processes, such as the independence process in Catalonia in 2017.
On April 11, 2019, the British police arrested the fugitive, after being unexpectedly removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy. The new Government of Lenín Moreno did not want to know anything about Assange, a character who clouded his relations with Washington.
By then, clandestinely, Assange had begun a new romantic relationship with the lawyer Stella González Devant, of Spanish-Swedish origin, who was part of the fugitive’s legal team who visited him regularly in his small room at the Embassy. The two children conceived by the couple, who are now five and seven years old, have only seen their father all this time during visits to the maximum security prison in Belmarsh, on the outskirts of London. It is the same prison where his parents ended up getting married a little over a year ago.
Stella Assange, tireless in defending her husband and leading the international campaign demanding his release, recently explained to Morning Express the risk of suicide of a complex character who years of confinement were eroding: “He has a medical history in that aspect. He already tried to do it when he was in his twenties. And now he himself suffers from depression. But I want to be clear. “Julian is a fighter,” said Stella.
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