With WikiLeaks again in the news, there is demand to know more about its editor in chief Julian Assange, the public face of the whistle-blowing website.
By many published accounts, the 39-year-old internet activist is as controversial as WikiLeaks is transparent.
Assange is extolled by human rights groups on the one hand and despised by governments and institutions around the world on the other — often for the same reason.
WikiLeaks, the website he founded in 2006, is known for posting classified government documents supplied by whistle-blowers in their entirety. The most controversial ones so far have been the hundreds of thousands of secret reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have gotten him attention from the CIA.
Both WikiLeaks and Assange are again in the spotlight after classified diplomatic cables between the U.S. State Department and its embassies were released Sunday and major news publications began publishing details of frank and sometimes unflattering assessments of world leaders, as well as candid views of rogue nations and discussions about global crises.
To some Assange is a hero. He won an Amnesty International Media Award last year, was named in Utne Reader this month as one of 25 visionaries changing the world and is being considered for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.
In a TedTalk last July, Assange provided some insight about why he encourages leaks of secret information.
“There’s a question as to what sort of information is important in the world — what sort of information can achieve, reform, and there’s a lot of information. So information that organizations spend economic effort in concealing that’s a really good signal that when the information gets out there’s a hope of it doing some good … and that’s what we’ve done in practice….”
He also spoke of his core value.
"Capable, generous men do not create victims. They nurture victims and that's something from my father and something from other capable, generous men that have been in my life," he said. "I am a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurturing but there's another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators of crimes."
But despite his good intentions, he's still viewed by some as a dangerous troublemaker, one that the U.S. government and other countries, including his native Australia, are trying to prosecute. There are even some who would rather see him dead.
Former U.S. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has accused President Barack Obama of not doing enough to stop Assange and wrote in a Facebook posting, "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?"
North of the border, Tom Flanagan, the prime minister's former chief of staff, told CBC News on Tuesday that he'd like to see Assange assassinated. In a panel interview on Power & Politics with Evan Solomon, he said Obama "should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something." But on Wednesday, Flanagan said that he regretted his remarks.
A secretive man
For someone who espouses openness and transparency, Assange is a private and secretive man. His current whereabouts are unknown, no surprise given the implied death threats he has received. He doesn't appear to have a fixed address and has acknowledged the use of "four bases" in the past several years, including ones in Iceland, Kenya and Sweden.
He is said to be constantly on the move, a way of life he's known since he was a child.
Born in July 1971 in Townsville on Australia's northeastern coast, Assange's parents ran a touring theatre company that travelled a lot. His mother later divorced and remarried a man who was part of a cult that Assange has joked about spending time running away from when he was young.
In his youth, Assange reportedly attended 37 schools and six universities. He studied physics and math at the University of Melbourne, but never completed a degree. In his twenties and early thirties, he was a computer programmer of free software in Melbourne before starting WikiLeaks.
Because of WikiLeaks, Assange said he has had to take security precautions. After the website published 400,000 documents on the war in Iraq in October, he brought bodyguards with him during a TV interview, Israel's Channel Two confirmed.
Not only is he trying to dodge possible physical danger, he's also fighting extradition to Sweden. He was placed on Interpol's "red notice" of wanted people on behalf of Sweden where he is wanted on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. The exact nature of the allegations is not clear because formal charges have not been filed.
His lawyer Mark Stephens has previously said that the allegations were made after Assange had consensual sex with two women who turned on him after becoming aware of each other's relationships. Swedish prosecutors have disagreed about whether to label the most serious charge as rape.
Sweden's Supreme Court was reviewing Assange's appeal of the order to detain him. Court official Kerstin Norman, who is handling the case, said a decision is expected late Wednesday or Thursday.
Read more:
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/12/01/profile-assange.html#ixzz17Hn50DjN
