Controversial Figures

Episode 11: Julian Assange Part 1 (Robinhood of Hacking?)

• Tammy Hawkins • Season 1

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How did Julian Assange, a convicted Australian teenage hacker of the 1990s, become a secret revealing refugee on the run, attempting to evade extradition? Why did America to investigate if he broke the espionage act? And did Julian really hang out with Lady Gaga in London?  Find out all of this and more on Part 1 of Julian Assange today on Controversial Figures.


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00:00

Julian Assange is a self-described advocate of information transparency and market libertarianism. Other people might describe him as "the Robinhood of hacking" or a traitor and terrorist - all depends on who you ask.

 

00:07

Julian has said "the internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen." 

 

00:28

To battle that totalitarianism, Julian created Wikileaks in 2006.

 

00:36

The revelations from Wikileaks over the past decades, which have included highly confidential government documents, and have literally created revolutions, have certainly garnered attention; especially from the United States government. 

 

00:51

So, how did Julian Assange, a convicted Australian teenage hacker of the 1990s, become a secret revealing refugee on the run, attempting to evade extradition? Why did America to investigate if he broke the espionage act? And did Julian really hang out with Lady Gaga in London?  Find out all of this and more on Part 1 of Julian Assange today on Controversial Figures.

 

01:17

Musical Interlude

 

01:45

Welcome to Controversial Figures; a podcast about intriguing figures in the media. My name is Tammy Hawkins. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave a 5 star rating and comment on Apple Podcasts; that really helps others find the podcast. 

 

02:01

Donating to Controversial Figures on Patreon helps me continue to bring new content - and you will get a shout out on a future show as one of my show producers. It also really, really helps when you subscribe to the show in your podcasting app.

 

02:18

Alright, let's get started with Part 1 of the exciting life story of Controversial Figure Julian Assange. This episode will discuss Julian's formative years, the creation of Wikileaks, the alleged charges Julian faced in Sweden and his abscondment to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. So, let's start with where it all began.

 

02:40

Julian Paul Hawkins was born on July 3, 1971 in Queensland, Australia. His mother and paternal father would separate before Julian was born.

 

02:53

When Julian was 1 year old, his mother would discover a new love and marry Brett Assange, an actor with whom she ran a small theatre company. Julian would later regard Brett Assange as his father, and would choose Assange as his surname - becoming the now infamous Julian Assange.

 

03:12

I am going to quote an Independent UK article which features extracts from Julian Assange's unauthorized biography.

 

03:20

Julian would say in his own words about this time with his stepfather Brett:

"My own father was missing from my life, and only became part of it again when I was grown up. But it meant that Brett Assange was the male figure I related to, the good father. Brett was one of those cool 1970s people who were into guitars and everything that went with the music scene. I've got his name... Brett and my mother divorced when I was nine. He had been good to me, and was good in general, but not so good to himself, and the end of their relationship represents the end of a kind of innocence in my life."

 

04:02

As Julian mentions, the love between Christine and Brett Assange would not last - they would divorce in 1979. 

 

04:09

Soon, Christine would become involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton. And unfortunately for Julian, Leif was a member of Australian cult The Family. For anyone that doesn't know what The Family was, in short, it was an Australian New Age Group known for dropping LSD and brainwashing their followers that was later investigated for adoption fraud charges. Not a great group to be around as a child.

 

04:42

Further quoting the Independent UK article about this time, Julian said:

"I remember he had shoulder-length blond hair and was quite good-looking; a high forehead, and the characteristic dimpled white mark of a smallpox injection on his arm. 

 

05:00

From the darkness at his roots, it was obvious he bleached his hair. And one time I looked in his wallet and saw that all his cards were in different names. He was some sort of musician and played the guitar. But mainly he was a kind of ghost and a threatening mystery to us.

 

05:16

I was opposed to him from the start. Perhaps that's normal, for a boy to resist a man like that, or any man, in fact, who appears to be usurping his preferred father or stepfather. Leif didn't live with us, though my mother must have been besotted with him at first. But whatever her feeling for him was, it didn't last. 

 

05:37

She would see him off, but he had this ability to turn up and pretend it was otherwise. Eventually, it was a matter of us escaping from him. We would cross the country and only then suffer this sinister realisation that he had found us. He'd suddenly be back in our lives and this grew to be very heavy. 

 

05:55

He had this brilliant ability to insinuate himself. He punched me in the face once and my nose bled. Another time, I pulled a knife on him, told him to keep back from me; but the relationship with him wasn't about physical abuse. It was about a certain psychological power he sought to have over us.

 

06:18

In 1980, my mother became pregnant by Leif and, seeing the possible impact of my opposition, he tried at first to be reasonable, pointing out that he was now the father of my brother and that my mother wanted him around. "But if you ever don't want me around," he said, "then I'll leave immediately." He wanted to stay with us, and did, for a time, but I was conscious of wanting to look after my mother and the baby.

 

06:45

My mother was in love with Leif. And I was too young to understand what sexual love was all about. I just knew that he wasn't my father and that he was a sinister presence. He tried, again and again, to make the case that I should not reject him and he had this thing with my mother and he was my brother's father and everything. 

 

07:13

But a time came when I told him I no longer accepted this deal. He had lied to us in a way that I hadn't known adults could lie. I remember he once said all ugly people should be killed. He beat my mother from time to time, and you felt he might be capable of just about anything. I wanted him to leave, as he had promised me he would, but he denied that the conversation had ever happened.

 

07:36

And so we started moving. Nomadism suits some people; it suits some people's situations. We just kept moving because that's what we did: my mother had work in a new town and we would find a house there. Simple as that. Except that the moving in these years, because of Leif, had a degree of hysteria attached, and that, in a sense, took all the simplicity away and replaced it with fear. 

 

08:03

It would take time for us to understand what the position was, and it was this: Leif Meynell was a member of an Australian cult called The Family. On reflection, I can now see that his obsessional nature derived from that, as well as his egocentricity and his dark sense of control.

 

08:22

The Family was founded by a woman called Anne Hamilton-Byrne in the mid-1960s. It started in the mountains north of Melbourne, where they meditated, had meetings and sessions where they used LSD. The basic notion was that Anne happened to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ, but with elements of Eastern philosophy thrown in, such that her followers beheld a karmic deity obsessed with cleansing their souls. Anne prophesied the end of the world.

 

08:53

Leif Meynell was part of that cult. And everything he did relating to us was informed by his association with The Family. It was so tiring. Just moving all the time. Being on the run. 

 

09:05

My mother changed her name. We worked out that Leif must have had contacts within the social security administration – that was how The Family is thought to have worked – so it seemed best to change the names that would be held inside the government computer system. But he was quite a gifted talker and would get friends to supply him with information about our whereabouts and he would always catch up. 

 

09:29

It was a private investigator who eventually came and told us about his close relationship with the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult. We were living in Fern Tree Gully, and I was now 16 years old. We'd come to the end of the road. 

 

09:42

He was lurking round the bounds of the house and I walked over and told him to fuck off. It was the first and the last time, and something in the way I said it ensured that we would never see him again."

 

09:58

It is estimated during Julian Asange's nomadic childhood during the ages of 11-16, he lived in more than 30 Australian towns and cities before settling in Melbourne.

 

10:12

With this nomadic lifestyle, there was one place in which Julian found an identity and constant sense of community. And that was the booming new landscape of the internet. Julian loved learning how to push the edges of these new technical capabilities.

 

10:28

In 1987 a 16 year old Julian began hacking under the name Mendax. He and two others, known by handles "Trax" and "Prime Suspect", formed a hacking group called "the International Subversives".

 

10:42

Julian says about this time:

"When I started hacking you were just one layer above the bare metal. You were typing into this wonderful emptiness, waiting to be populated with minds. A few of us were interested in projecting our thoughts into the computer to make it do something new. We began writing codes and we began cracking them, too.

 

11:02

The thrill was exorbitant. It was like the first time you beat an adult at chess. I'm amazed when I run into people who don't understand the pleasure in this, for it is the pleasure of creation itself, of understanding something intimately and making it new.

 

11:19

Every hacker has a handle, and I took the name Mendax, from Horace's Splendide Mendax – nobly untruthful, or perhaps "delightfully deceptive". I liked the idea that in hiding behind a false name, lying about who or where I was, a teenager in Melbourne, I could somehow speak more truthfully about my real identity. By now, the computer work was taking up a great deal of my time. 

 

11:46

I was beginning to get the hacker's disease: no sleep, bottomless curiosity, single-mindedness, and an obsession with precision. Later, when I became well known, people would enjoy pointing out that I had Asperger's or else that I was dangling somewhere on the autistic spectrum. 

 

12:03

In my mid- to late teens I could barely focus on anything that didn't seem to me like a major breakthrough.

 

12:09

It was certainly addictive. You'd dive down into a computer system – typically, for me at the time, the Pentagon's 8th Command Group computers. You'd take it over, projecting your mind all the way from your untidy bedroom to the entire system along the halls, and all the while you're learning to understand that system better than the people in Washington. It was like being able to teleport yourself into the interior of the Pentagon in order to walk around and take charge.

 

12:37

It sounds ridiculous, but we found our own keyholes into the inner workings of vast corporations, and we installed others, until we found we would be able to control their whole system. Turn off 20,000 phone lines in Buenos Aires? No problem. Give New Yorkers free telephone calls for an afternoon with no good reason? Do it.

 

12:58

You would bump into your adversaries inside the system. Like meeting strangers on a dark night. There were maybe 50 people in the world at that time, adversaries and brethren, equally part of an elite group of computer explorers, working at a high level. 

 

13:13

On a typical night, you would have, say, an Australian computer hacker talking to an Italian computer hacker inside the computer system of a French nuclear complex. As experiences of young adulthood go, it was mindblowing. 

 

13:29

By day you'd be walking down the street to the supermarket, meeting people you know, people who have no sense of you as anything other than a slacker teenager, and you'd know you had spent last night knee-deep in Nasa. 

 

13:44

We were even able to hack into the police's systems. There we first came across a policeman called Sergeant Ken Day, who appeared to be obsessed with our activities – and who would later turn out to be our nemesis."

 

14:00

A 20 year old Julian Assange was discovered in September of 1991 hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a very powerful Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation at the time. Turns out, hacking an international telecomms company grabs the government's attention pretty quickly.

 

14:21

Julian says of the moment he knew he was caught:

"One night, as I explored Nortel's network, I realised I was being watched. It was 2.30am and a system administrator was on to us. I tried for an hour to circumvent his inspections, block his way, all the while deleting the incriminating directory and walking backwards, clearing the path of my footprints. 

 

14:46

The administrator had been logged on from home, but after a break he appeared at the main Nortel console. He had gone into work.

I was now in trouble: you can only obfuscate for so long. He had me."

 

15:00

The Australian Federal Police soon wiretapped Julian's phone line, observing his communications over his modem in addition to telephone communications. They raided his home at the end of October and would go on to charge him in 1994 with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes. This would be one of many times the government would attempt to teach Julian a lesson that he had no interest in learning.

 

15:27

Julian would begin finding more positive channels for his technical knowledge. In 1993, he gave technical advice to the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit that assisted in prosecutions. Later that year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. 

 

16:02

Julian would go on to co-author:

  • The TCP port scanner Strobe (1995)
  • Patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996)
  • Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996), 
  • the Rubberhose deniable encryption system (1997)
  • And Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000)

 

16:20

Julian also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, ran Best of Security - a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996, and he contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground in 1997, a book about Australian hackers. Julian was obtaining clout in the security and hacking circles while still fighting off his pending legal charges.

 

16:43

In December 1996, Julian pleaded guilty to 24 of the 31 charges from 1991, with the other charges dropped. Julian was ordered to pay reparations of $2,100 Australian Dollars and released on a good behavior bond. The perceived absence of malicious or mercenary intent and Julian's strange childhood were cited to justify the lenient penalty. The courts would probably go on to regret these rulings later, as this was only a small taste of the digital disruption Julian was yet to cause.

 

17:20

Julian states that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it" at that particular time. He did publish on the site a patent granted to the National Security Agency or NSA in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology. He stated along with the post "This patent should worry people."

 

17:46

Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency." Julian was foreshadowing what Edward Snowden would prove loud and clear years later. And Assange and Snowden would help each other in the future, but that comes later in this podcast tale.

 

18:10

Julian Assange and others would go on to fully establish the organization WikiLeaks in 2006. Julian became a member of the organization's advisory board, and would describe himself as the editor-in-chief.

 

18:23

WikiLeaks published internet censorship lists, leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources, including corruption across the Arab world, unlawful executions by Kenyan police, and the "Petrogate" oil scandal in Peru.

 

18:40

But WikiLeaks first came to the broad world spotlight and to the front and center attention of the US government in 2008.

 

18:48

In September 2008, during the United States presidential election campaign, the contents of a Yahoo! account belonging to Sarah Palin, running mate of then Republican presidential nominee John McCain, were leaked.

 

19:04

Sarah Palin's emails were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous. Not great for her international security position she was attempting to claim, and one of the first clear internet election influence internet hacks which was supported by Wikileaks revealing the contents. 

 

19:24

Days later Wikileaks received even more attention when the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on November 28, 2008.

 

19:36

In 2009, WikiLeaks reported a nuclear incident at an Iranian nuclear facility. This was thought to be the result of a cyberattack carried out using the Stuxnet computer worm; a cyberweapon thought later to be built jointly by the United States and Israel. 

 

19:53

With Wikileaks exposing international espionage to the world in addition to war crime violations. I think you can predict that Julian is making some serious enemies along the way.

 

20:06

The material WikiLeaks published between 2006 and 2009 attracted varying degrees of attention, but things would really, really heat up after Wikileaks began publishing documents supplied by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

 

20:24

OK. Here I would like to pause to give a trigger warning. I'm getting ready to briefly describe the contents of the US military documents disclosed. This will include listing war crimes that may be uncomfortable for some to listen to. Also, Julian is about to get himself into some trouble involving alleged sexual assault in Sweden.

 

20:44

For those that would like to avoid these topics, you may wish to choose to stop here and wait for Part 2 where we will focus on the more legal and refugee aspects of Julian Assange's life.  For those that are still here, I will keep things high level but the details are grim.

 

21:00

I think knowing the details is important to understand the global impact Julian's actions have had - good, bad, and otherwise. So with that, I think I've babbled enough to give you ample time to find the pause button if you wanted to - so now, on to the incredible details Wikileaks would expose.

 

21:22

The Manning material included the infamous Collateral Murder video from April 2010. This video showed United States soldiers in 3 air strikes fatally shooting at least 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq. Deaths included 2 Reuters journalists and a van containing school children. 

 

21:44

Other leaked materials also included the Afghanistan War logs, published in July 2010, the Iraq War logs, published in October 2010, and the Guantánamo files, published in April 2011. Wikileaks was publishing hit after hit after hit - and the world was noticing.

 

22:07

The Iraq and Afghanistan War logs leaks are considered to be one of the largest leaks in US military history. The US government classified secret logs consisted of hundreds of thousands of military documents from years 2004 to 2009.

 

22:25

The leak revealed information on the deaths of civilians which increased their estimated numbers by the tens of thousands, and described increased and escalating Taliban attacks as opposed to less as the war progressed. There was also documented involvement by other countries - namely Pakistan and Iran - in the insurgency. 

 

22:48

It was a 6 year look at the Iraq and Afghanistan War, and a much more grim picture than what the US government had portrayed. As a reminder of how of things were portrayed, let's remember George W. Bush standing in front of a Mission Accomplished banner in 2003 on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. It was clear the war was not only still going 6 years later, but seemingly escalating with combatants from additional countries. And I will remind you 11 years later, the United States is still invested in warfare in these countries.

 

23:27

The documents also exposed extreme human rights abuses. There was documentation confirming the US military handed over many prisoners to the Iraqi Wolf Brigade; an organization which was known to do such lovely things as torturing prisoners with electric drills to obtain information until they executed them. There was also documentation showing the US military chose to not investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape, and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers.

 

24:00

Additionally, the Guantanamo Bay leaked files clearly described hundreds of innocent civilians of Middle Eastern countries, primarily Pakistan and Afghanistan, had been detained for months and even years with no charges. Often these folks were detained based on confessions obtained from other detainees during torture.

 

24:23

Note that this continued documented use of torture and illegal detainment by the US government in warfare in 2009 is only a few brief years after the US military Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal. 

 

24:40

CBS News had exposed in 2004 the physical and sexual abuse, torture, and murder that had occurred during the early stages of the Iraq war by the US military and government agents. The torture tactics were documented in official US government secret documents later known as the "Torture Memos". 

 

25:00

And there were also haunting photos taken and later leaked by the United States Army and Central Intelligence Agency personnel that committed these violations and apparently wanted disgusting mementos of it. I was 23 when this scandal was all over the news, and I still remember seeing the few haunting psychological torture photos they could and did show, as they were so disturbing to me at that time. Considering that one human, a human paid by the US government, let alone a group of humans, could treat other humans with such torture frankly is still stunning to me.

 

25:41

When the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light, George W. Bush said in 2004 that the abuses were isolated incidents and were not indicative of US policy. However, the secret documents leaked by Wikileaks showing the same and even worse behavior continuing through 2009, in multiple locations and across multiple government entities and military branches, showed quite the contrary to be true.

 

26:08

So anyway, while all this little war crime controversy was popping off, Julian Assange decided to visit Sweden in August 2010 to blow off some steam. And during this visit, he did not make wise choices, and he would become the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women.

 

26:29

It started on August 20, 2010. 2 women - a 26 year old and a 31 year old - reported to the Swedish police that Julian Assange had engaged in unprotected sexual activity with them that was beyond the scope of their consent, with one woman claiming she was asleep when the assault occurred.

 

26:49

Julian would be questioned and denied the allegations, stating it was all a consensual encounter. He was released while the investigation continued. Julian would leave Sweden on September 27, 2010.

 

27:06

By early November 2010, a special prosecutor in Sweden said she wanted to question Julian Assange further over two counts of sexual molestation, one count of unlawful coercion and one count of lesser-degree rape. Julian again vehemently denied the allegations and said he was happy to face questions in Britain, but he would not return to Sweden.

 

27:31

Due to his refusal to return to Sweden to face his charges, on November 20, 2010, the Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant via Interpol for Julian Assange. On December 8, 2010, Julian gave himself up to British police and attended his first extradition hearing where he was remanded in custody pending another hearing. But Julian's current criminal charges would soon not be his only charges.

 

28:00

The controversy surrounding WikiLeaks reached its greatest intensity when it published 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, also known as "Cablegate", in November 2010. Wikileaks worked with established Western media companies, and later with smaller regional media, while also publishing to WIkileaks the cables upon which the media reporting was based. 

 

28:28

These secretly confidential cables had been sent to the US State Department by hundreds of its consulates, embassies, and diplomatic missions around the world between December 1966 and February 2010. The cables contain diplomatic analysis from world leaders, and the diplomats' assessment of host countries and their officials.

 

28:53

The files showed United States espionage against member countries of the United Nations and other world leaders. They also revealed tensions between the US and its allies, and exposed corruption in countries throughout the world as documented by US diplomats. 

 

29:11

It is believed the release of these cables helped to spark the Arab Spring; a series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. And the release of these documents certainly harmed international relations between numerous countries and the United States.

 

29:38

Then United States Vice-President Joe Biden and other US polilticians called Julian a "terrorist", with some politicians even calling for his execution.

 

29:50

Julian did have some support, however. This came from the Presidents of Brazil, Ecuador, and Russia, as well as British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Julian would also garner support from some activists, celebrities and some US citizens, being chosen as the Time Person of the Year in 2010 by the readers.

 

30:10

But, Julian's past activities would come to haunt him. On February 4, 2011 the Swedish courts ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden to face sexual assault charges.

 

30:22

In December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed they had chat logs between Manning and someone else they claimed to be Julian Assange; Julian predictably denied this, saying it was "absolute nonsense". The prosecutors would claim the chat logs showed Julian helping Manning reverse-engineer a password, but Manning insisted she acted alone.

 

30:49

In a last ditch effort to avoid extradition, Julian fled to the Ecuadorian embassy on June 19, 2012 to claim diplomatic asylum. And he would stay in that embassy for quite a while, causing much more controversy, including hanging out with Lady Gaga and allegedly meddling in the 2016 United States Presidential election in partnership with Russia.

 

31:17

And that is where we will halt today's tale about the Australian "Robinhood of Hacking".         If you can't wait to hear Part 2 of the riveting Julian Assange story, please visit Patreon and donate to Controversial Figures. All Patreon subscribers get early access to episodes and a shout out on a future show.

 

31:41

Thank you for listening to this episode of Controversial Figures. Just a reminder, please like, subscribe, and leave a rating and comment for Controversial Figures in your favorite podcast app. We have a Twitter page @FiguresPodcast - so please follow us, give us recommendations of Controversial Figures you'd like to hear.

 

32:00

This podcast is an independent podcast created by Tammy Hawkins. This is funded by those that donate, so please join Controversial Figures on Patreon and give what you can - once I hit 50 Patreon subscribers, I'll send out swag to all donators! Research references are available in the show notes as are musical references. Thank you for spending your valuable time with me today. Go outside and enjoy the sun on your face and think of something great that happened this week. Remember we are lucky each day we wake up breathing. Be well.