Julian Assange

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts.
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He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org.
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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 Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account.
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The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency.
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It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office.
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Assange does not even have a home.
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He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me,
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I’m living in airports these days.
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He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does.
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At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time.
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Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services.
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The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.
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Iceland was a natural place to develop Project B. In the past year, Assange has collaborated with politicians and activists there to draft a free-speech law of unprecedented strength, and a number of these same people had agreed to help him work on the video in total secrecy.
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The video was a striking artifact—an unmediated representation of the ambiguities and cruelties of modern warfare—and he hoped that its release would touch off a worldwide debate about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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He was planning to unveil the footage before a group of reporters at the National Press Club, in Washington, on April 5th, the morning after Easter, presumably a slow news day.
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To accomplish this, he and the other members of the WikiLeaks community would have to analyze the raw video and edit it into a short film, build a stand-alone Web site to display it, launch a media campaign, and prepare documentation for the footage—all in less than a week’s time.
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Assange also wanted to insure that, once the video was posted online, it would be impossible to remove.
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He told me that WikiLeaks maintains its content on more than twenty servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. (Expenses are paid by donations, and a few independent well-wishers also run “mirror sites” in support.)
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Assange calls the site “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis,” and a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself.
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So far, even though the site has received more than a hundred legal threats, almost no one has filed suit.
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Lawyers working for the British bank Northern Rock threatened court action after the site published an embarrassing memo, but they were practically reduced to begging.
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A Kenyan politician also vowed to sue after Assange published a confidential report alleging that President Daniel arap Moi and his allies had siphoned billions of dollars out of the country.
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The site’s work in Kenya earned it an award from Amnesty International.
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Assange typically tells would-be litigants to go to hell.
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In 2008, WikiLeaks posted secret Scientology manuals, and lawyers representing the church demanded that they be removed.
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Assange’s response was to publish more of the Scientologists’ internal material, and to announce more was on file
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WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon.
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In his writing online, especially on Twitter, Assange is quick to lash out at perceived enemies.
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By contrast, on television, where he has been appearing more frequently, he acts with uncanny sang-froid.
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Under the studio lights, he can seem—with his spectral white hair, pallid skin, cool eyes, and expansive forehead—like a rail-thin being who has rocketed to Earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth.
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This impression is magnified by his rigid demeanor and his baritone voice, which he deploys slowly, at low volume.
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Lily Mihalik/Wired