Julian Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice – most recently to a journalist from The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian, and some 15 years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of computer hacking, Underground, for which Assange was the primary researcher.In what is called the “researcher’s introduction”, Assange begins with a cryptic quote from Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”Nothing about Assange has ever been straightforward. One of the main characters in Underground is the Melbourne hacker Mendax. Although there is no way readers at that time could have known it, Mendax is Julian Assange.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/inside-the-brain-of-wikileaks-julian-assange/story-e6frg6z6-1226015754791Also see:Assange’s rage against the state by Robert Manne
The world’s best-known ‘cypherpunk’ has long been on a mission to stop governments watching our every move. It is said to be the key to understanding WikiLeaks.Although there are tens of thousands of articles on Julian Assange in the world’s newspapers and magazines, no mainstream journalist so far has grasped the critical significance of the cypherpunks movement to Assange’s intellectual development and the origin of WikiLeaks.The cypherpunks emerged from a meeting of minds in late 1992 in the Bay Area of San Francisco.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10710269
Inside the brain of WikiLeak’s Julian Assange by Robert Manne: book extract
Julian Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice – most recently to a journalist from The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian, and some 15 years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of computer hacking, Underground, for which Assange was the primary researcher.