Who is Julian Assange?

He has never spent a day in a newsroom, attended a journalism school or penned a newspaper column, but has changed the way news is gathered and disseminated around the world, says S Kalyana Ramanathan

It is hard to define Julian Assange, the 39-year-old computer geek-turned-whistle blower, who is now at the centre of a worldwide controversy for leaking US diplomatic cables on the WikiLeaks website. Perhaps he comes closest to two fictional characters, both created by the American novelist Ayn Rand — John Galt, the anarchist with good intentions in Atlas Shrugged (1957), as also devil-may-care Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.

Assange exudes a sense of subdued purpose. He does not raise his voice, even when provoked and barely reveals his irritation at being made to drive to a police station outside London between 2 pm and 5 pm every day.

His short stint in solitary confinement in a London prison, Assange told the world media this Sunday standing outside the police station, has “only increased my resolve [and my] strength not to be beaten down”.

‘I found that I rather liked myself’
Assange says he’s been using his time in prison to think things over. Nothing specific, but “philosophical things. What people do with their lives, how they survive and whether I can withstand such conditions. I found that I rather liked myself and that I could withstand very uncomfortable conditions. I do not have the fear of them anymore.”

Despite his difficulties with the authorities, Assange speaks out for his former fellow inmates at Wandsworth prison. “I saw many people in that prison. Notes were slipped under my door by some people who had been on remand for five months, languishing without any attention. I was fortunate that I had the attention of the press.”

The nomadic life Assange has been leading until he was grounded in London (where the courts are hearing extradition charges from Sweden) is something he has grown up with. His mother, who was fighting a custody battle over Assange and his step-brother, is believed to have moved cities with the boys quite often and, for some years, was forced to remain underground.

Recent media reports also suggest that Assange’s mother did not send him to school fearing he would develop “an unhealthy respect for authority”. Assange, however, attended university in Melbourne where he studied physics and mathematics.

Assange’s anti-establishment traits took shape as a teenager when he became a computer hacker — and almost landed in prison. For someone who does not believe in commonly accepted rules, he had his own set of dos and don’ts even as a hacker. One of them was not to change data in the computers he hacked.

Gradually, however, he gave up hacking to expose the way governments around the world functioned. “Strangely enough I always thought he would do something like this,” Brett Assange, his step-father, said in an interview to Seven News at the peak of the ‘Cablegate’ leaks.

Wikileaks is born
WikiLeaks took shape in 2006 but its popularity and notoriety peaked in the winter of 2010, when Assange and his team started revealing disquieting details about the war in Afghanistan and earlier in Iraq to a handful of publications in the US, UK, France and Australia. The most shocking of these was the revelation that US soldiers had attacked Afghan civilians. With that single video footage Wikileaks had arrived. In the process, however, Assange made some very serious enemies.

With steely calmness Assange says he fears for his life and those of his colleagues as well. Despite all the noise around his personal life, especially the sexual assault he is alleged to have committed in Sweden, he believes his work goes beyond personalities and is too important to be suppressed.

“That is not because I view every word we have ever released as having tremendous positive value. On an average, what we have released will grealty help move towards a more just state. It is vital not to take arbitrary decisions but to keep to publicly stated policy.”

Assange, who has never spent a day in a newsroom, attended a journalism school or penned a newspaper column, is changing the way news is gathered and disseminated around the world. Journalism ought to be like science, Assange says.

Raw data must be put out in the public domain and honest journalism given a fair chance. That seems to be the thought driving Assange now. And it’s one for which he is willing to risk his life. n