Julian Assange: Background information when reading Purity

Julian Assange

This article relates to Purity

In Purity, Andreas Wolf, who starts The Sunlight Project to expose corruption worldwide, is often compared to Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks.

A computer scientist by training, Assange was named to Forbes magazine's "Most Powerful People" list in 2010 for being the "genius provocateur behind Wikileaks, hard at work providing startling glimpse of near future, where confidential and classified documents are routinely made available to the general public."

"Governments and corporations with dirty laundry should be afraid, very afraid," the article said. And indeed, the U.S. government was embarrassed by a string of leaks of classified documents, military reports, and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables that Wikileaks released in 2010. Wikileaks also released a video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 in which Iraqi civilians were killed. The American government labeled the leaks a criminal act and requested that Assange be extradited for trial in the United States. Vice-president Joe Biden called Assange a "hi-tech terrorist" and Bradley Manning, the young soldier accused of passing a large haul of classified documents (including 250,000 diplomatic cables) to WikiLeaks, was held in conditions described as "cruel and inhuman" before being sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Interestingly, WikiLeaks has no desk, no office and no paid workers. Hundreds of volunteers worldwide keep the website and its many complex servers (funded largely through donations) going.

Assange was born in 1971 in Townsville (northeast Australia) and had an itinerant childhood with his parents being part of a traveling theater group. Mostly homeschooled, he developed a strong interest in science. The power of the Internet led him to many hacking activities as a young man, and he formed a group called International Subversives along with a set of friends. The group had charges filed against them, but a few were dropped and Assange got away with paying a small sum in fines to the Australian government.

Assange eventually took courses in physics and math at Melbourne University and worked with an academic, Suelette Dreyfus, to research the subversive side of the Internet.

Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 with a mission to serve as an anonymous forum for whistleblowers to expose corrupt practices. In an article on BBC.com, Daniel Schmitt, a co-founder of WikiLeaks, described Assange as one of the few people who really care about positive reform in this world to a level where "they're willing to do something radical to risk making a mistake, just for the sake of working on something they believe in."

The materials published by WikiLeaks range from the standard operating procedures for Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay; to the "Climategate" e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England; to the contents of Sarah Palin's private Yahoo account. Always a polarizing figure, Assange ran into controversy of a different kind when he was accused of rape and molestation charges. Sweden requested that the UK (where Assange was at that time) extradite him back to the country on sexual assault allegations, announcing that Assange had raped a woman and sexually molested another while working in Sweden. Assange has been under the protection of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for three years now. He worries that travel to Sweden will enable the Swedish authorities to extradite him to the United States to face their criminal charges. While time has run out on a few of the allegations, the one for rape will hold until 2020.

Julian Assange, courtesy of ClnupwrksckTúr.

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to Purity. It originally ran in October 2015 and has been updated for the August 2016 paperback edition. Go to magazine.