Julian Assange

Assange speaking in Copenhagen (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/)

I’m not going to talk about how the earth is getting destroyed by the second, I'm not going to talk about how bad the economic state is, and I certainly won’t be explaining how many people are dying from deadly diseases. This person I'm going to be talking about is a hero in my eyes and in the eyes of many others. The fact that he is a controversial character won’t change anything in my eyes. He is a hero because he did what he thought was right for the community, whether or not the government liked it. The government hated him and tried to silence him, but you cannot silence the one voice people can rely upon. His name is Julian Assange.

Although he tried to conceal his childhood I have found a few sources that helped me uncover his hidden life. He was born in Townsville, Queensland on July 3rd 1971 and the majority of his time was on the magnetic island just 8 km off the coast of Townsville. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". "He always stood up for the underdog ... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people." When he was 8 years old he had a lot of family issues and he, his half brother, and his mother fled across Australia, he stated that he had lived in 50 different towns and attended 37 different schools.

At the age of only 16 he began hacking under the name of “Mendax”. Along with two other hackers they created the group called “International Subversives”. Assange wrote down the early rules of the subculture: "Don't damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don't change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information". The Personal Democracy Forum said he was "Australia's most famous ethical computer hacker." The Australian Federal Police became aware of this group and set up "Operation Weather" to investigate their hacking. In 1991 he was caught in the act of hacking Nortel, the Canadian telecommunications company, he also had access to computers of an Australian university, the USAF 7th Command Group in the Pentagon, and other organizations through modem. After 3 years they were finally able to charge him with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes but he was released for good conduct after being fined 2100 Australian dollars. The judge said "there is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what's the expression—surf through these various computers" and stated that Assange would have gone to jail for up to 10 years if he had not had such a disrupted childhood.

Later on in the late 1990s and early 2000s he developed open source software and freeware for the world to use and he wrote a few hacking books including “Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier”. He also attended Melbourne University at this time and studied multiple subjects such as neuroscience and physics but didn’t acquire a degree of any sort. But while he was studying these subjects, some of the other students in his classes were working for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a part of the pentagon. This was a contributing factor to his motivation of creating “wikileaks” the famous website of all sorts of information governments hide. This is why the government says he’s a “bad” person. Why people believe the politicians? I suspect it’s because we have the instinct of believing whatever the government says… but the reality is, not everything they say is true, and they know it.

Assange on Time magazine (http://www.kolumbus.fi/antti.heiskala/wikileaks-julian-assange-time-cover.jpg)

Wikileaks was actually founded in 2006, and it had hundreds of thousands of leaked government files to date. The site shows the TRUTH of what is hidden. There will always be people that are unwilling to keep the secret of something that the government did wrong. And for that reason this site will be forever relevant as long as humans keep making mistakes. I like wikileaks because it gave us insight of what happened in Iraq and Iran. One video in particular caught my eye, it was brutal and unjustified. It is the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike titled “collateral murder ”. This is what opens our eyes; this is what we need to know.

In the end he’s been criticized for this and that, he has done a ton of work as the editor in chief and spokesperson for wikileaks. He made the world a better place because now we know what kinds of things are happening on earth on a regular basis. I believe that he truly is a hero since he is helping the world step by step after all the hardship he’s gone through with his family and with his life. He is my hero.