O Guardian também publica online trecho de um livro que começam a vender nesta segunda sobre o caso WikiLeaks (será que o livro vai vazar?), contando um pouco sobre a história de Assange em seus tempos de adolescente fugido e hacker fora-da-lei:

Julian was born on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, in the state of Queensland, in Australia’s sub-tropical north. His mother, Christine, was the daughter of Warren Hawkins, described by colleagues as a rigid and traditionalist academic who became a college principal; the family settled in Australia from 19th-century Scotland.

Julian’s biological father John Shipton is absent from much of the record: at 17, Christine abruptly left home, selling her paintings to buy a motorcycle, a tent and a map. Some 1,500 miles later she arrived in Sydney and joined its counter-culture scene. She fell in love with Shipton, a rebellious young man she met at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in 1970. The relationship ended and he would play no further role in Assange’s life for many years.

They had no contact until after Assange turned 25. Later they met, with Julian discovering he had inherited his architect father’s highly logical and dispassionate intellect. One friend said Shipton was “like a mirror shining back at Julian”. Assange believed he had inherited his “rebel gene” from his unconventional father. In 2006, at the start of Julian’s remarkable mission to uncover secrets, he registered the wikileaks.org domain name under Shipton’s name.

After the birth of her child, Christine moved as a single mother to Magnetic Island, a short ferry ride across the bay from Townsville. She married Brett Assange, an actor and theatre director. Their touring lifestyle was the backdrop to Assange’s early years. His stepfather staged and directed plays and his mother did the make-up, costumes and set design.

During his childhood Assange attended 37 different schools, emerging with no qualifications whatsoever. “Some people are really horrified and say: ‘You poor thing, you went to all these schools.’ But actually during this period I really liked it,” he later said.

After her relationship with Brett Assange broke down, Christine became tempestuously involved with a third, much younger man, Keith Hamilton.

Hamilton was an amateur musician and a member of a New Age group, the Santiniketan Park Association. He was also, according to Assange, a manipulative psychopath.

“My mother became involved with a person who seems to be the son of Anne Hamilton-Byrne, of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult in Australia,” said Assange, “and we kept getting tracked down, possibly because of leaks in the social security system, and having to leave very quickly to a new city, and lived under assumed names.” For the next five or six years, the three lived as fugitives.

When Assange was 13 or 14, his mother had rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange began going there and working on a Commodore 64. His mother saved to buy the computer for her older son as a present. Assange began teaching himself code. At 16 he got his first modem.

He attended a programme for gifted children in Melbourne, where he acquired “an introverted and emotionally disturbed” girlfriend, as he put it. Assange grew interested in science and roamed around libraries. Soon he discovered hacking.

(…)

By 1991 Assange was probably Australia’s most accomplished hacker. He and two others founded International Subversives magazine, offering tips on “phreaking” – how to break into telephone systems illegally and make free calls. The magazine had an exclusive readership: its circulation was just three, the hackers themselves.

In the spring of 1991, the three hackers found an exciting new target: MILNET, the US military’s secret defence data network. Quickly, Assange discovered a back door. He got inside. “We had total control over it for two years,” he later claimed. The hackers also routinely broke into the computer systems at Australia’s National University.

But he suspected Victoria police were about to raid his home. According to Underground: “He wiped his disks, burnt his printouts, and left” to doss temporarily with his girlfriend. The pair joined a squatters’ union, and when Assange was 18 she became pregnant. They married and had a baby boy, Daniel. But as Assange’s anxiety increased, and police finally closed in on his outlaw circle of hackers, his wife moved out, taking their 20-month-old son Daniel with them. Assange was hospitalised with depression. For a period he slept outdoors, rambling around the eucalyptus forests in Dandenong Ranges national park; he would wake up covered in mosquito bites.

But it wasn’t until 1994 that he was finally charged, with the case only being heard in 1996. He pleaded guilty in Melbourne’s Victoria County Court to 24 counts of hacking. The prosecution described Assange as “the most active” and “most skilful” of the group, and pressed for a prison sentence. Assange’s motive, according to the prosecution, was “simply an arrogance and a desire to show off his computer skills”.

O resto do perfil segue aqui.

Tags: guardian, hacker, julian assange, wikileaks