Dream - Seen briefly in the dim light on a night in London, England, the figure could possibly be considered an old woman. The calendar points to the end of January 2011. She carefully emerges from the doorstep and enters an old red car. There are several friends - including a gloomy-faced man with Nordic features and some bookish young people. It seems that someone is giving their coat to the old woman. The car passes through the quiet Paddington traffic, heading north towards Cambridge.

There are no signs of any other cars following. Nevertheless, they periodically stop on the road and wait - with the lights turned off - in the darkness. At 22.00, they reach the plains in East Anglia, an unused sugar factory landscape. Fifteen miles later, in the village of Ellingham, they turn left. The car passes an ancient pigeon shelter before stopping in front of a magnificent Georgian-style mansion. The old woman gets out of the car. There is something strange about her.

From up close, it is only clear that the old woman figure is Julian Assange. His silver hair is concealed by a wig. With a height of over 186 cm, he would never pass as a convincing old woman. Assange changed his gender in an attempt to disguise himself and avoid possible pursuit. In a very short time, the WikiLeaks he founded has indeed moved from its previous position as an unknown radical website to a widely recognized online news platform.

Assange has released leaked footage showing US air helicopter pilots executing 18 Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in Baghdad, Iraq, as if they were playing a video game. He followed up this leaked video with an even bigger sensation: a deal with a global newspaper that has never happened before, to expose hundreds of thousands of secret US military field reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it is the largest intelligence leak in history.***

Julian Assange was born on July 3, 1971 in Townsville, in the state of Queensland, in northern Australia. His mother, Christine, is the daughter of Warren Hawkins, who is described by his colleagues as a strict and traditionalist academic who became a headmaster. The family settled in Australia after moving from Scotland in the 19th century. Julian's biological father, John Shipton, was absent for most of his life.

At the age of 17, Christine suddenly left home, selling her paintings to buy a motorcycle, a tent, and a map. About 1,500 miles later, she arrived in Sydney and joined a countercultural camp. She fell in love with Shipton, a rebellious young man she met at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in 1970. The relationship quickly ended. Christine became pregnant and Shipton no longer played a role in Julian Assange's life for years.

They did not have contact until Assange was 25 years old. Then when they met, and Julian found out that he inherited his father's intelligence, who later became a very logical and impartial architect. A friend said that Shipton was "like a mirror that reflects Julian". Assange believes he inherited the "rebel gene" from his unusual father. In 2006, at the beginning of Julian's extraordinary mission to uncover secrets, he registered the domain name wikileaks.org on behalf of Shipton.

After the birth of her child, Christine moved as a single mother to Magnetic Island, taking a short ferry ride across the bay from Townsville. She married Brett Assange, an actor and theater director. Their nomadic lifestyle became the backdrop for Assange's early years. His stepfather staged and directed dramas, while his mother did makeup, costumes, and set designs. During his childhood, Assange attended 37 different schools, but he attended them without any qualifications. "Some people were very scared and said, 'Poor you, you went to all these schools.' But actually, during this period, I really enjoyed it," said Julian Assange later.

After her relationship with Brett Assange ended, Christine became fully involved with a much younger third man, Keith Hamilton, an amateur musician and member of the New Age group, Santiniketan Park Association. According to Assange, her new stepfather is also a manipulative psychopath. When Assange was 13 or 14 years old, his mother rented a house across from an electronics store. Assange started going there and working on a Commodore 64. His mother saved up to buy a computer for her eldest son as a gift. Assange began teaching himself computer programming code. At the age of 16, he got his first modem.

He attended a program for gifted children in Melbourne, where he found a girlfriend who was "introverted and emotionally disturbed," as he said. Assange became more interested in science and explored the library. Soon he discovered the world of hacking. In 1991, Assange was possibly the most skilled hacker in Australia.

He and two other hackers established the International Subversives magazine, which offered tips on "phreaking" - the illegal method of hacking into telephone systems and making free calls. The magazine had exclusive readership; its circulation was only three copies, namely the hackers themselves. In the spring of 1991, the three hackers found an interesting new target: MILNET, the secret military defense data network of the US. Quickly, Assange found a backdoor. He entered. "We had full control over it for two years," he later claimed. The hackers also routinely hacked computer systems at the Australian National University.

However, he suspected that the Victoria police would raid his house. According to Underground: "He deleted his disks, burned the printouts, and left" for a while with his girlfriend. This couple joined a squatters' union, and when Assange was 18 years old, she became pregnant. They got married and had a baby boy, Daniel. But as Assange's anxieties grew and the police finally managed to close in on his hacking circle, his wife moved away, taking their 20-month-old son, Daniel, with her.

Assange was briefly hospitalized for depression. For some time, he slept outdoors, walked around the eucalyptus forest in the Dandenong Ranges National Park; he would wake up with mosquito bites all over his body. However, it was not until 1994 that he was finally charged, and his case was only brought to trial in 1996. He pleaded guilty in the Victoria County Court in Melbourne on 24 counts of hacking.

The prosecutor described Assange as "the most active" and "the most skilled" in the group, and urged that he be sentenced to prison. According to the prosecutor, Assange's motive was "only arrogance and a desire to show off his computer skills." The judge said he considered Assange's violations "quite serious." However, there is no evidence to suggest that he sought personal gain. Instead of being a malicious hacker, he acted, the judge said, out of "intellectual curiosity."

Punished but treated lightly, Assange is now an unemployed father in Melbourne and survives on a single parent allowance. The family court has granted him sole custody of his son.***Assange writes in his blog called IQ.org, a theory that seems like a delusion to overthrow injustice in the world: "The more secretive or unfair an organization, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning group...."

Because of an unfair system, based on its nature, persuading opponents, and in many places having almost no advantage, mass leaks make them very vulnerable to parties trying to replace them with a more open form of government. Assange talks about his big call: "If we can only live once, then let this be a brave adventure that utilizes all our strength... People who are in their prime, if they have beliefs, are assigned to act based on those beliefs."

He told his potential supporters about his new secret plan: "This is a limited internal development mailing list for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g. Please do not mention the word directly in this discussion; just refer to it as 'WL'." On December 9, 2006, an email marked "WL" suddenly arrived for Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Vietnam War whistleblower.

Underground hackers are just one part of the development of WikiLeaks. Another group is the radical anti-capitalist group - the environmental activist community, human rights activists, and political revolutionaries known as the "counter-culture" in the 1960s. Kenya was the one who provided the first journalistic scope to WikiLeaks. A massive report on the alleged corruption of former President Daniel Arap Moi was commissioned by the private investigation firm Kroll. However, his successor, President Mwai Kibaki, who ordered the report, failed to publish it.

"\u201cThis report is a sacred chalice of Kenyan journalism,\u201d Assange said later. "I went there in 2007 and got it." The actual publication situation is more complex. The report was leaked to Mwalimu Mati, the leader of Mars Group Kenya, an anti-corruption group. \u201cSomeone threw it into our lap,\u201d he said. Mati, driven by contacts in Germany, had previously registered as a volunteer with WikiLeaks."

Fear of retaliation made it too dangerous to publish the report on the group's own website: "So we thought: can we not publish it on WikiLeaks?" This story simultaneously appeared on the front page of The Guardian in London on August 31st. The complete text of the document was posted on the WikiLeaks website with the title "Billions of Missing Money in Kenya." Assange and his group are now beginning to see a flow of truly leaked documents. However, Assange now realizes, with disappointment, that simply posting a long list of raw and random documents on the website failed to change the world. ***

For his supporters, Julian Assange is a brave truth campaigner. For his critics, he is a publicity seeker who has endangered lives by releasing a large amount of sensitive information into the public domain. Assange is described by those who have worked with him as intense, passionate, and highly intelligent, with an extraordinary ability to crack computer codes.

He founded Wikileaks, which publishes secret documents and images, in 2006, and became headline news worldwide in April 2010 when they released footage showing US soldiers shooting dead 18 civilians and 2 Reuters journalists from a helicopter in Iraq. However, at the end of that year, he was arrested in the UK – and later released on bail – after Sweden issued an international arrest warrant on charges of sexual assault.

The Swedish authorities want to question him regarding the claim that he raped a woman and committed sexual harassment, as well as forcing another woman in August 2010, while visiting Stockholm to give a lecture. He said that both encounters were entirely consensual, and a long legal battle ensued, leading him to seek asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition.

After spending nearly seven years inside the embassy, Assange was arrested by British police on April 11, 2019. This happened after President of Ecuador, Lenín Moreno, tweeted that his country had made a "sovereign decision" to revoke his asylum status. The founder of Wikileaks has always argued that he couldn't leave the embassy out of fear of being extradited from Sweden to the US and being tried for leaking US secret documents. Officers then moved him from the embassy building and detained him at a central London police station.

Several weeks later, the US filed 17 new charges against Assange for violating the Espionage Act, related to the publication of classified documents in 2010. It puts Assange at risk of imprisonment for up to 175 years. In April 2020, it was revealed that Assange had become a father of two children while living inside the Ecuadorian embassy. Stella Morris, a lawyer from South Africa, stated that she had been in a relationship with the founder of Wikileaks since 2015 and has been raising their two sons alone.

Currently imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison in London, Assange's legal battle against extradition to the US continues. Assange may now be remembered as a pariah, the lowest caste in society. As a hacker, he may face 175 years in prison if deported to the US for violating the Espionage Act. And the world's major media outlets choose to remain silent. (eha)Source: Guardian, BBC, The New Yorker