The Plot to Hack America

Born in Australia in 1971, Assange had inconsistent homeschooling during a childhood marked by constantly being on the move. His family moved thirty-seven times by his fourteenth birthday.⁴ By the time he was a teenager, Assange had developed an interest in computers, and in 1987, at age sixteen, he received his first modem, which he hooked up to his Commodore 64 to connect to a network that existed four years before the World Wide Web came into use.⁵

Julian quickly discovered the world of hacking and “established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks,” including that of the U.S. Department of Defense.⁶ In 1991, Assange was under arrest and charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related charges stemming from his infiltration of telecommunications company Nortel; he pled guilty to twenty-five charges—the remaining six were dropped—but a judge ruled he only had to pay “a small sum” in damage, citing his “intelligent inquisitiveness.”^{--226, -193}

It wasn’t until 2010 that WikiLeaks entered the mainstream consciousness when the site published a video, dubbed “Collateral Murder,”⁷ showing two U.S. helicopters opening fire in Baghdad, killing at least a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounding two children.⁸ Reuters had been attempting to get the footage released under the Freedom of Information Act for years before WikiLeaks released it in April 2010. The New York Times wrote:

The release of the Iraq video is drawing attention to the once-fringe Web site, which aims to bring to light hidden information about governments and multinational corporations—putting secrets in plain sight and protecting the identity of those who help do so. Accordingly, the site has become a thorn in the side of authorities in the United States and abroad. With the Iraq attack video, the clearinghouse for sensitive documents is edging closer toward a form of investigative journalism and to advocacy.⁹

WikiLeaks then began publishing unprecedented numbers of classified documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and later the Guantanamo files—leaked by Army private Bradley Edward Manning, a U.S. Army soldier assigned to an intelligence unit in Iraq. Manning had access to the U.S. Army’s sensitive intelligence network and managed to copy and pass on to Assange hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents. Authorities caught Manning, prosecuted her in a court martial, and convicted her of the Espionage Act and abuse of government computer networks. She was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for the leak.¹⁰ Assange referred to Manning’s prosecution as “an affront to basic concepts of Western justice.”¹¹ World leaders and the public had mixed reactions to Assange’s actions. The U.S. government response, however, was decidedly anti-WikiLeaks. The Defense Department wrote: We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies. We know terrorist organizations have been mining the leaked Afghan documents for information to use against us, and this Iraq leak is more than four times as large. By disclosing such sensitive information, WikiLeaks continues to put at risk the lives of our troops, their coalition partners and those Iraqis and Afghans working with us. The only responsible course of action for WikiLeaks at this point is to return the stolen material and expunge it from their Web sites as soon as possible.¹²