Julian Assange. Julian Assange
power but unseat it. If we were at all subversive, it was the kind of subversion that worked from the inside. We had the same mindset as the boys who were running the computer systems. We knew the language and had cracked their codes. The question would increasingly become one of following the inevitable, following the logic of what we had discovered and seeing how it held society to account. Around the time of the Australian bicentenary, 1988, there was a new confidence, a new abundance of home computers, a new vibrancy in popular culture, and a sense among my kind that the military–industrial complex of bombing people and buying stuff should be subverted. We grew up fast and made ready for trouble. We were already being targeted by the Bureau.
It is probably right to say I was more political than many of my friends. I had always believed, and still believe, that oppressive forces draw much of their strength from their ability to wield their power in secret. It wasn’t long before I realised, from my experience inside the systems, that the ‘clandestine’ zone might be the right place to confront them. Hacking gave us a start. We knew from the hysteria our fun had created, and from the new government legislation, that we had hit upon something fundamental about how secrets were hidden. Governments were scared: much more scared, it turns out, than they were of people demonstrating in the street or throwing petrol bombs over barricades. The Internet would offer a model of insurrection that baffled corrupt authority with plain science. It said, ‘You no longer control how I think of you.’
One Australian headline, of 1990, read: ‘When sharing your disc can be as dangerous as sharing a needle.’ This manages to get information-sharing to sound like Aids-spreading, which is pretty much the level of attack we’ve been dealing with ever since. We were Ned Kelly; we were Robin Hood; we were the Mongol hordes: but, in fact, we were young men in our late teens, discovering what made the world tick and then asking why certain clocks were rigged. We had a finger on the pulse of our new technology and, when the opportunity arose, we wished to use our knowledge for justice and decency. But many people didn’t want that. Many authorities hated us. It has been the major element in the story of my life – lock him up, keep him quiet.
Only now, twenty years later, can I see how I was running on nervous energy. I thought high pressure was just how it rolled in a young life, never having known an extended period of calm since I was about ten. The sheer size of our trespassing was beginning to make me shudder. We were kids, and finally we were dealing with forces so sinister, and so powerful, it began to dawn on each of us that we would not only be raided but also that we would likely be marked for life. The world was full of Goliaths and we were vulnerable. Time teaches you – or my time has taught me, anyhow – the ways of smearing and avenging that characterise the powerful when they are forced into a corner. You learn to hold your position, correct errors where you can, keep your chin up and never forget that people who fight grand public liars have always been vilified. The wiles of vilification would become almost comic in my case, but, back then, as a teenager not quite ready for handcuffs, it was hard to keep my bottle. After the raid on my mother’s house I felt the shadowy forces getting nearer and nearer. I wiped all my disks and burned all my printouts and ran away from the suburbs with my girlfriend to live in a squat in the city. Life on the run had begun again in earnest, and it would never stop.
5
The International Subversives were different from other hackers. Some hackers were noisy, leaving footprints everywhere. But we were silent and contemplative. We operated like ghosts, haunting the halls of power, passing like ectoplasm through keyholes and under doors. I always felt hacking was like looking at a painting. You see the canvas, you see the achievement, the movement of the paint and the drawing-out of themes. But what you were really looking for, if you were like us, was the flaw. And once you found it, the flaw in the picture, you worked on it until it became larger and took over. At one point, we wanted to take over the world of communications. Can you imagine that, not as a science-fiction trope or a crazy comic-book imagining, but as a real possibility in the mind of a bunch of teenagers? It sounds ridiculous, but we found our own keyholes into the inner workings of vast corporations, and we installed others, until we found we would be able to control their whole system. Turn off 20,000 phone lines in Buenos Aires? No problem. Give New Yorkers free telephone calls for an afternoon with no good reason? Do it.
But the stakes were high. There were many trials for the hackers before my own. The legislation was new and was finding its feet, and we watched those steps with our breath held and our self-esteem high, knowing it would be our turn next. We saw ourselves as a group of young freedom fighters under fire from forces that just didn’t get what it was all about. That’s how we saw those trials, though to others, to Australians in thrall to American corporations or to secret servicemen crazy at being outwitted, we were the dangerous harbingers of a new kind of white-collar crime. We sniggered at that – through the vanity and confidence of youth, no doubt – thinking collars were meant for dogs, or for those who might take their self-strangulation for granted. But it was getting serious. He wasn’t yet my friend, but Phoenix of The Realm was someone I was aware of, another Melbourne hacker chased from the dim light of his bedroom to the harsh light of the courthouse.
Phoenix was arrogant – he had once telephoned a New York Times reporter, calling himself ‘Dave’, to boast about attacks Australian hackers were making on American systems. The reporter wrote about it, putting ‘Dave’ and the other hackers on the paper’s front page. Some hackers were more withdrawn, but Phoenix liked the attention. He ended up getting the wrong sort, facing forty criminal charges in a case that had a shadow of US pressure hanging over it. I went to the court that day and sat anonymously in the public gallery, watching the face of Judge Smith with a rising sense both of public threat and private honour. I thought the case might prove a pivotal day for our brand of explorer, and I wanted to witness it. As it turned out, Phoenix did not get a custodial sentence. I breathed freely, if breathing freely is ever something one can do in an Australian court. As Phoenix left the dock I went down to offer my congratulations.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Do I know you?’
‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘I’m Mendax. I’m about to go through what you did, only worse.’
When you’re a hacker, you live above, or beneath, or within, or beyond the scope of your everyday friends. That’s not a boast or a value statement: it’s just a fact. You live otherwise from the norm, not only using a nom de plume or a nom de guerre, but a series of masks within masks, until eventually, if you are any good at all, your activity is your identity and your knowledge is your face. After a long time with computers, there’s a measure of detachment that makes you homeless within your own home, and you find yourself only really yourself with others like you, people with cartoon names whom you’ve never met.
Even though most of my hacking friends lived in Melbourne or its suburbs, like me, I usually met them online on bulletin board systems – a bit like chat rooms – such as Electric Dreams or Megaworks. The first BBS I set up myself was called A Cute Paranoia – a further sign of my well-balanced nature – and I invited Trax and Prime Suspect onto it as much as they could manage. I was nineteen in 1990, and had never spoken to those guys, except modem to modem. You build up a picture of the reality of a person without ever really meeting them. It can give in to paranoia, and too much secrecy, and too much alienation, I suppose, and it would be fair to say I thought Trax and Prime Suspect were odd. I wasn’t in the least without oddness myself, as people would always be quick to tell me. But I trusted these guys’ instincts. My endless travels across the Australian landscape – and education system – made me something of a social outsider, but in Trax I found a kindred spirit. Like me, he came from a poor but intellectual family. Both of his parents were recent immigrants to Australia, still retaining the German accents that had embarrassed Trax as a child. Prime Suspect, on the other hand, came from an upper-middle-class background and on the surface was a studious grammar-school boy bound for university. But Prime Suspect was a damaged young man. The only thing that had saved his parents from an acrimonious divorce battle was his father’s death from cancer when Prime Suspect was eight. Widowed and stuck with two young children, his mother had retreated into bitterness and anger. And