Who Founded WikiLeaks?

(July 26) -- Seemingly out of nowhere, Julian Paul Assange, a silver-haired Australian, has emerged as the world's most important newsman. He's done so, of course, by hosting a website, WikiLeaks.org, that publishes classified military reports and other secret information.

"Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantanamo Bay, and the 'Climategate' e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin's private Yahoo account," reported The New Yorker's Raffi Khatchadourian in the best profile of Assange to date. "The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home."

WikiLeaks garnered worldwide attention in April when it posted footage taken from a U.S. Apache military helicopter over Iraq in 2007. The footage showed American soldiers killing at least 18 people, including two journalists. On Sunday, in its latest disclosure, the site posted roughly 92,000 classified documents on the American war effort in Afghanistan. But just who is this Seymour Hersh of the Internet age?

1. He was born in 1971 in Townsville, Australia.

2. He had a peripatetic, unconventional childhood. Assange's mother left his theater director father for an abusive singer, from whom mother and son later fled. (Assange believes the singer was a member of a powerful cult.) The "family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible," Khatchadourian writes.

3. He got married at 18 and had a son, but his family soon fell apart. Assange then spent years fighting for custody of his child, and in 1999 worked out an agreement with his wife.

4. He discovered computers at an early age and became a skilled hacker. When he was a teenager, police raided Assange's home on allegations that he had stolen money from Citibank. Though they took his computers, he was never charged. As Assange continued to hack, the Australian government spent three years mounting a case against him and his confederates. Though he pleaded guilty to 25 charges, he was penalized with only a fine.

5. He says he wasn't interested in harming computers systems, only snooping around. His ethos, described in the book "Underground," which he co-wrote, was: "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."

6. He came up with the idea for WikiLeaks after spending the next several years traveling, studying physics and working at various computer-related jobs. Khatchadourian explains his thinking:

"He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by 'patronage networks' -- one of his favorite expressions -- that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled 'Conspiracy as Governance,' which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial -- the product of functionaries in "collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.' He argued that, when a regime's lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare."

7. He first tested his concept in 2006. WikiLeaks' first post was a document allegedly signed by a Somali rebel leader calling for the assassination of Somali government officials.

Read more at The New Yorker.