An Unmerited Taunting of Julian Assange
Julian Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, to a single mother, not knowing his biological father. When he was one, his mother married Brett Assange and they had another child, then divorced. A little while after, Julian’s mother remarried again and had another son and split two years later. It is believed that Assange had a penchant for computer hacking at such a young age being ever so influenced by all the men that “hacked” into his mother’s pants.
In 1987, at the age of 16, Assange began hacking under the name “Mendax.” He and two other hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. Assange wrote down the early rules of the subculture: “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.” They were later known as the Leo Tolstoys of Hacking.
Following in the steps of his mother, Assange had a son out of wedlock in 1989. Due to his son’s mother being difficult, there was not a custody arraignment until 1999 prompting he and his mother to develop the activist group “Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection” which allowed access to otherwise inaccessible legal records related to child custody. This was a heartwarming reunion for Assange and his mother, Christina, who herself had custody issues with Julian and his brothers which unfortunately were never resolved due to her inability to pair any of her children to specific biological fathers.
Assange has reportedly attended six universities at various times. From 2003 to 2006, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne, although he never graduated and received the minimum passing grades in most of his courses yet excelled in one: Home Gossipnomics.
Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006. That year, Assange wrote two essays setting out the philosophy behind it: “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.” One can see where the impetus for his obsession with regime change derived from: having grown up under the oppressive dictatorship of Australia.
WikiLeaks has been involved in the publication of material documenting extrajudicial killings in Kenya, a report of toxic waste dumping on the African coast, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, the July 12th Baghdad airstrike video of 2007 and material involving large banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. This has caused many Governments, including the United States, to label Assange an “International Cyber Terrorist,” “A crucial threat to the global community” and most cutting of all, “A real gossip king.”
On 20 August 2010, an investigation was opened against Assange and an arrest warrant issued in Sweden in connection with sexual encounters with two women, aged 26 and 31. Shortly after the investigation opened, chief prosecutor Eva Finné withdrew the warrant saying, “I don’t think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” It was later discovered that the sensual acts began consensual but the condom broke and he was asked to stop during intercourse which he did not, proving he wasn’t just afraid of “wiki” leaks.
In a Time interview conducted after the release of the secret U.S. cables in November, 2010, Richard Stengel asked Assange whether Hillary Clinton should resign; Assange responded by stating, “She should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up” a statement he ended with a wink – or as Assange calls them, “periods.”
On December 13, 2010, while incarcerated in London, Julian Assange was named the Readers’ Choice for Time magazine’s Person of the Year award for 2010. Assange’s 382,020 votes was more than double the vote for the second place person, a third of which were from those who mistook Assange for Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy.
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