Julian Assange

Julian Paul Assange (born 3 July 1971) is an Australian publisher, journalist, software developer and Internet activist. He is the spokesperson and editor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for news leaks.

Assange has worked as a computer programmer and was a hacker during his youth. He has lived in several countries, and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.

Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste duming in Africa, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. In 2010, he published classified details about American involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media partners began publishing secret US diplomatic cables.

For his work with WikiLeaks, Assange has received public condemnation and calls for his execution as well as glowing praise and accolades. Assange is currently wanted for questioning in Sweden regarding alleged sexual offences, and was arrested in London, England on 7 December 2010. He is currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an extradition hearing. Assange has denied the allegations and claimed that they are politically motivated.

Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, and spent much of his youth living on Magnetic Island. When he was one year old, his mother Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname. Brett and Christine Assange ran a touring theatre company.

In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician who belonged to a New Age group led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The couple had a son, but broke up in 1982 and engaged in a custody struggle for Assange's half-brother. His mother then took both children into hiding for the next five years. Assange moved several dozen times during his childhood, attending many schools, sometimes being home-schooled.

Wikileaks and Assange

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006. That year, Assange wrote two essays setting out the philosophy behind WikiLeaks: "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not."

He sits on Wikileaks's nine-member advisory board, and is a prominent media spokesman on its behalf. While newspapers have described him as a "director" or "founder" of Wikileaks, Assange has said, "I don't call myself a founder"; he does describe himself as the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, and has stated that he has the final decision in the process of vetting documents submitted to the site.

He advocates a "transparent" and "scientific" approach to journalism, saying that "you can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism."

In 2006, CounterPunch called him "Australia's most infamous former computer hacker." The Age has called him "one of the most intriguing people in the world" and "internet's freedom fighter." Assange has called himself "extremely cynical". The Personal Democracy Forum said that as a teenager he was "Australia's most famous ethical computer hacker." He has been described as being largely self-taught and widely read on science and mathematics, and as thriving on intellectual battle.

Awards

Assange won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award. He won the 2009 Amnesty International UK Media Award (New Media), for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya by distributing and publicizing the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR)'s investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances. Accepting the award, Assange said, "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented."

In 2010 Assange was awarded the Sam Adams Award, Readers' Choice in Time magazine's Person of the Year poll, and runner-up for Person of the Year. An informal poll of editors at Postmedia Network named him the top newsmaker for the year after six out of 10 felt Assange had "affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered".

Le Monde named him person of the year with fifty six percent of the votes in their online poll. Le Monde is one of the five publications to cooperate with Wikileaks' publication of the recent document leaking.