A campaigner for transparency, the man who WikiLeaks is arguably the most debated journalists of all time. Julian Assange, the Australian computer genius, was shot into the limelight with his self-appointed role as the world’s whistle-blower.   Â
He won the Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal for Peace with Justice in 2011, previously awarded to only three people—Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Buddhist spiritual leader Daisaku Ikeda.
Â
Early Life
Julian Paul Assange was born on July 3, 1971 in the Queensland city of Townsville. Â As a child, Assange travelled a lot with his mother. He ended up attending roughly 37 different schools growing up, and was frequently home-schooled.
Â
Hacking and Programming
In 1987, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax with two others—known as “Trax” and “Prime Suspect”—forming an ethical hacking group they called the International Subversives.
During this time he hacked into the Pentagon and other US Department of Defense facilities, MILNET, the US Navy, NASA, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission; Citibank, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Panasonic, and Xerox.
He began programming in 1994, authoring the TCP ‘half-open’ port scanner and also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum. He ran Best of Security, a website “giving advice on computer security” that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996.
Â
Wikileaks
Assange established Wikileaks in 2006. Member of the organisation’s advisory board, he calls himself as the editor-in-chief. He was on the move ever since then, staying in Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Germany, Malaysia to develop the organisation’s infrastructure, promote its activities at conferences, and further his editorial work.
WikiLeaks posted large amounts of material exposing government and corporate wrongdoing between 2006 and 2009, attracting various degrees of publicity. It gained worldwide attention after it published documents regarding Collateral Murder video (April 2010) the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010) a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantanamo files (April 2011).
International leaders were both against and in favour of Assange. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard described his activities as “illegalâ€. While US Vice President Joe Biden and others called him a “terrorist”.
Support came from people including the Brazillian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Â
Controversy
Assange is wanted for questioning over one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation, and one count of lesser-degree rape alleged to have been committed against two women during a visit to Sweden in August 2010. He denies the allegations as politically motivated and said that he fears Sweden could in turn extradite him to the US to be tried for one of the largest leaks of classified information in the US history.
After a series of extradition hearings in early 2011 to appeal the warrant, Assange learned on November 2, 2011, that the High Court dismissed his appeal. Still on conditional bail, Assange made plans to appeal to the UK Supreme Court, in regard to the case.
He came to the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in June 2012, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden. Nearly two months later, in August 2012, Assange was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorean government but they could “protect Assange from British arrest, but only on Ecuadorean territory, leaving him vulnerable if he tries to leave the embassy to head to an airport or train stationâ€.