Julian Assange. Julian Assange
the Internet. Whenever someone connects to another site across the Internet, he or she typically types in the site name – say, ariel.unimelb.edu.au at the University of Melbourne. The computer then translates the alphabetical name into a numerical address – the IP address. All the computers on the Internet need this IP address to relay the packets of data onto the final destination computer. NIC decided how Internet computers would translate the alphabetical name into an IP address, and vice versa.
If you controlled NIC, you had phenomenal power on the Internet. You could, for example, simply make Australia disappear. Or you could turn it into Brazil.
We got inside, and the feeling was overwhelming. Some people make the mistake of saying it’s like playing God: it’s not, because God, if he’s God, already has all the answers. We were twenty. The joy was an explorer’s joy at breaking through to a new frontier despite all the odds. I created a back door into the system for future adventures. This system was awesome, and I felt almost subdued at the connectivity on offer: for me, and this is relevant to my future work on WikiLeaks, I saw a perfect join between a mathematical truth and a moral necessity. Even in those early days, I saw that breaking through the portals of power was not just a matter of fun. Governments depended on secrecy and patronage networks to deepen their advantages, but it began to appear possible that what street riots, opposition groups, human rights gurus and electoral reform had always struggled to achieve, we could actually begin to bring about with science. We could undermine corruption from its dead centre. Justice would always in the end be about human beings, but there was a new vanguard of experts, criminalised as we were, who had fastened on to the cancer of modern power, who saw how it spread in ways that were still hidden from ordinary human experience.
Our skills made us valuable, and some of us were unable to resist the Faustian pacts we were offered. It amazed the rest of us that some hackers were working for governments – hacking was innately anarchistic – but they were, and I saw it from inside the US Department of Defense network. They were hacking their own machines as target practice, and no doubt hacking computers around the world on behalf of what they understood to be US interests. As treasure hunters with an ethical bias, we entered a labyrinth of power, corruption and lies, always knowing that we would be the ones accused of corruption if we got caught. We were a hardcore unit of three: Prime Suspect, myself and Trax, who was the best phreaker in Australia. He wrote the book on how to control and manipulate telephone exchanges.
We were anarchists, I suppose, by temperament if not by political conviction. We had started off having fun and ended up wanting to change the world. There was a developing understanding that cryptography was a liberating concept and that it would allow individuals to stand up to government, to whole governments, and that it was now possible for people to resist the will of a superpower. Our temperaments were drawn to an Enlightenment sense of liberty and we felt we were part of the way forward for technology. Many mathematicians were involved with the cypherpunks. Timothy May wrote the ‘crypto anarchist manifesto’ and John Gilmore was another founding member of the group. These guys were pioneers in the IT industry – Gilmore was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems – and they had both made money and bailed out, to focus on trying to physically realise their liberation ideals with the help of mathematics and cryptography. For instance, they wanted to come up with a new kind of digital currency, a digital coin, something that would replace the Gold Standard, which would make financial transactions cleaner and not traceable by governments. Your credit rating and your credit history would be yours and yours alone. This was the dream of cryptography: to permit individuals to communicate securely and be at liberty. (If you look at the cypherpunk alumni, you see some of them went on to invent watered-down versions of all this, such as PayPal.) If allowed to develop, I foresaw that it would permit small activist groups who were in danger of being surveilled to resist government coercion. That was the hope, anyway. That was the plan and the dream. But many of the brilliant minds of my generation of cypherpunks floated off in the dot com bubble. They became obsessed with stock options and Palm Pilots and lost the urge for real change.
Digging down into our cypherpunk mindsets, we saw that one of the great battles – our Spanish Civil War, if you like – was going to be about how we served in the effort to defend the world against the surveillance of private computer networks. Issues of freedom and the fight against oppression were located there, as surely as they once were in the hills of Catalonia, and we wanted to zip up and go out and fight the good fight against police statehood as best we could. We were idealistic, of course, and young: the usual condition of people wanting to make a difference. We would make mistakes and we would be punished for them. We also might never gain the sense of possibility again that we had among ourselves. That is life’s risk, almost life’s certainty, though we set out nonetheless.
The issue of privacy would always haunt me. It haunts me now. At WikiLeaks, I would come to seem the arch-proponent of transparency, forever described as the man who thinks all privacy is bad. But it was never my position that all privacy is bad: rather the opposite. We fought, as cypherpunks, to protect people’s privacy. What I opposed, and continue to oppose, is the use of secrecy by institutions to protect themselves against the truth of the evil they have done. This is a clear distinction. Even in this book, where I try to tell my story as best I can, there will be moments of privacy, because I owe it to some greater sense of justice, to my children, for example, not to drag them into the limelight. Some people, in love with a category error, will wish to hold me to account on this score, as if the founder of WikiLeaks must, out of some bogus sense of consistency, blow the whistle on every element of his private self.
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