JULIAN Assange steps into the glare of lights at a London club. He is believed to be 38 and his hair is white. He is wearing a jacket, white shirt and combat trousers. He speaks with a soft Australian accent.
Behind him, on the wall, is Don McCullin’s celebrated image from the Vietnam War: a shell-shocked US marine. Assange is presiding over his greatest triumph: one of the largest leaks of intelligence documents in history.
The founder of WikiLeaks compares the leak of 91,201 US military records to the Pentagon Papers that in 1971 exposed lies by the US government and changed the course of the US involvement in Vietnam.
“The course of the war [in Afghanistan] needs to change,” he says.
WikiLeaks, the website he designed in 2007, is hosted primarily on a Swedish internet server, routed through another server in Belgium and then another until its contents exist on 20 servers around the world.
It is almost invulnerable to legal threats, cyber-terrorists and attempts by governments to block or dismantle it.
Assange claims it is more secure than any banking network. The system allows him to push leaked documents almost in their entirety and almost immediately.
His journey from Queensland to London’s Frontline Club has been an extraordinary one.
His parents ran a touring theatre company that meant he was never in one place or at one school for long; his mother felt that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority.
After 11 years of this, his parents separated and, in the ensuing custody battle, his mother went on the run with him until he was 16.
In his late teens he became a hacker. He operated under the pseudonym Mendax, breaking into computer systems in Europe and North America with two fellow hackers, who called themselves the International Subversives.
He fathered a child in his late teens and married the boy’s mother. As investigators closed in, his wife left with his son. This provoked a bitter struggle for custody in which Assange formed a campaign group and used freedom of information inquiries and leaked documents to battle against social services.
Assange leads an itinerant life, sleeping in different places. He says the Australian government has received requests from the US to monitor his activities but that most have been rejected.
In May 2009, the Pentagon was searching for the source of a leak. It received a tip-off from Adrian Lamo, a Californian hacker. Lamo had been chatting online with someone who claimed to be an intelligence analyst with access to two secret networks for US diplomatic and military intelligence.
He spoke of a massive database of information. At times he suggested that he had been downloading files on to blank CDs labelled as Lady Gaga albums
Lamo passed on a transcript of their online conversations to Pentagon officials in a branch of Starbucks. The following day, an intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning, 22, was arrested in Iraq, taken to Kuwait and locked in a military prison.
Manning has now been charged with improperly downloading and releasing information, including the video of a helicopter shooting civilians in Iraq.
“There is no allegation that we can detect that this information [the thousands of released files on Afghanistan] is connected to Bradley Manning,” Assange says.
His organisation has made funds available to Manning’s defence team.
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