Julian Assange: Man Of The Year

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Julian Assange: Man Of The Year

Posted On : Dec-29-2010 | seen (1266) times | Article Word Count : 2424 |

Julian Assange- life before Wikileaks
According to Wikipedia, Julian Paul Assange was born on the 3rd of July 1971, in Townsville, Queensland, Australia.
He is 39 years old.

When Julian was one year old, his mother Christine married Brett Assange, a theatre director, and together ran a touring theatre company.
Even then, Brett Assange described Julian as kid with a “ keen sense of right and wrong”.

In 1979, Julian’s mother remarried. Her new husband belonged to a New Age Group-a cult called The Family.
They had a son, broke up in 1982 and a custody battle followed. Eventually, Christine Assange took Julian and his half-brother into hiding for five years.

By the time Julian reached the age of 14, he moved home 37 times.
Due to these circumstances, he was partly home-schooled.
He spent a lot of time in libraries, reading books on a wide variety of topics.

When he was in his early teens, his mother rented a house across the street from an electronics shop.
He got himself a Commodore 64 on which he wrote his first programs. Later, he acquired a modem, which enabled him to plug into primitive computer networks.
This introduced him to the world of computer hacking, a world he took an instant liking to.

Aged 16, he joined two other hackers and formed a posse which called itself the “International Subversives”.
Julian used the nickname “Mendax”-in Latin, it means liar.
Together, they started hacking into the computer systems of some of America’s most sensitive government installations, including nuclear weapon labs, as well as Australian universities and the Canadian Telecom company Nortel.

During his hacking days he became increasingly paranoid about police coming to arrest him.
In 1989 he had a son, Daniel, with his girlfriend.
But he became so strung out waiting for the knock on the door, that his teenage sweetheart, whom he married, moved out and took their son with her.

After they split up, they engaged in a lengthy custody battle and an arrangement was only reached in 1999.
This experience left Assange with a deep antipathy to bureaucracy which he believed was ‘squashing people’.

It made him form ‘Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection’ together with his mother. This was an activist group with the task of creating a “central databank” for otherwise inaccessible legal records related to child custody issues in Australia.

Back to hacking and the knock on the door came eventually, the Australian police charged him with 31 counts of computer-related crimes. Assange pleaded guilty to 24 of them after years of pre-trial litigation and got away with paying a fine of AU$2100.
In 1993, Julian Assange was involved in starting one of Australia’s first public Internet Service Providers.

From 1994, he lived in Melbourne as a programmer and developer of free software.
He contributed to the writing of a book called ‘Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier’ as a researcher, drawing on his earlier experience with International Subversives.

From 2003 to 2006, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He also studied philosophy and neuroscience.
He never graduated. On his personal web page, he claims to have represented his university at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005.

Julian Assange- The Wikileaks Years

Wikileaks was founded in 2006. That year, Assange wrote two essays setting out the philosophy behind Wikileaks. These essays reflect his distaste for government conspiracies, dictatorial systems of governance, and the means to redress the balance by uncovering the secrets which make it possible using the power of the Internet technologies.

Assange is one of the nine members of Wikileaks advisory board and a prominent media spokesman on its behalf.
He calls himself 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 is an unpaid volunteer like all other people who work for Wikileaks.

By December 2007, Assange was so deeply immersed in the world of international computer outlaws that he participated at the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club, a German hacker group.
There he met up with like-minded hacktivist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German programmer.

In the early 2009, Domscheit-Berg joined Wikileaks full-time, and for about 18 months he and Assange were partners and soul mates.
The Swedish sex inquiry brought dissension in the ranks of Wikileaks. Assange was accused that his work suffers because of his personal problems and was even asked to step down as Wikileaks leader until the legal issues regarding the sex allegations are resolved.

Assange told the would-be mutineers:
“ I am the heart and the soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest.”
Domscheit-Berg left Wikileaks also broke with Assange in spectacular fashion after a shouting match in which he accused Assange of acting like a dictator, and running Wikileaks like an autocratic ruler.
He is currently writing a book about the Wikileaks experience and is creating a disclosure site as a rival to Wikipedia, called Open Leaks.
OK, Julian Assange is not perfect. Who is?
His personality flaws and some perhaps questionable actions do not detract from his brilliant achievements and the fact that he has balls the size of …WhiteHouse?!

Until his arrest on the 7th of December, Assange did not have a permanent address. He has been constantly on the move. He has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and rented a house in Iceland, where he worked with other activists on the ‘Collateral murder’ video.

Most of 2010 he visited United Kingdom, Sweden, Iceland , Switzerland and other European countries.

Julian Assange-The legal case against him

On 20th of august 2010 an arrest warrant was issued in Sweden for Julian Assange in connection with two women aged 26 and 31. At very short time after the investigation opened chief prosecutor Ewa Finne withdrew the warrant to arrest Assange, saying” I don’t think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape”.
Subsequently a possible charge of harassment was considered. It might be worth mentioning what the women’s lawyer, Claes Borgstrom is a Swedish politician who could be trying to further her own career through a high profile trial.

Also, in 2007, the Swedish government launched a three year program designed to educate elements in the criminal-justice system on how to aggressively pursue rape claims, on the premise that rape victims drop their charges more often than any other.
And in Sweden the definition of rape includes having sex with a sleeping woman.

While I personally believe strongly in consensual sex and I oppose sexual violence, I can’t help but point out that the same woman consented to sexual intercourse with Assange before she went blissfully to sleep in the same bed with the accused. This is the same woman who accompanied Julian Assange to the train station and bought him a ticket.

That’s why this insistence about extraditing Assange to Sweden to put him on trial has something farcical about it, the timing of it all adding to the doubt-the arrest warrant was issued just after the release of the diplomatic cables.
In the second half of October Assange’s application for Swedish residency was denied.
On 20th of November Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange via Interpol.

He was accused of molestation and unlawful coercion.
Assange claims consensual but unprotected sex.
On the 7th of December Julian Assange was arrested in London after meeting with the police of his own volition.
He was refused bail and spent 7 days in custody on remand in Wandsworth prison, in isolation and was denied a computer and writing materials.

Why the restrictions? The above are granted to more or less any criminal or accused detained in an UK prison.
After the seven days passed it was back to the Royal Court where District Judge Howard Riddle granted Julian Assange bail. He remained in custody for an extra 48 hours, because the British prosecutors lodged an appeal, obviously at the request of their fellow Swedish colleagues.

On the 16th Assange was finally freed on bail , restricted by an electronic tag, a 10 pm curfew and regular visits to the police station.
Even the bail had to be collected in cash, because of the big credit card companies refusal to handle any transactions related to Julian Assange.

Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, they are all instruments of The State who demonstrated that they are actively involved in repressing freedom of speech . Assange has yet to be proven guilty of any wrong-doing, but just because the American politicians want it, these big financial institutions are ready to persecute someone and deny his rights on hearsay and political pressure.

Nine celebrities helped put together the bail money, Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, Ken Loach and a few others.
It took a further five hours after the decision until finally Assange was out, free.
Until the next court hearing , which is on the 11th of January, he will stay at Ellingham Hall, a country mansion, owned by Vaughn Smith, 47, former captain in the Grenadier Guards and founder of the Frontline Club.
From there, with Wikileaks colleagues, they will work on releasing yet more diplomatic cables.

The biggest threat for Julian Assange in the meantime is still an extradition request by the US. His lawyers believe a secret US grand jury was assembled and legal arguments are being sought to put together a case against Mr. Assange and preparing an indictment against Assange in Virginia.

Throughout this case, Assange’s lawyers complained of being watched and followed, fact denied of course by the CIA and other American agencies (now this is why we need Wikileaks).
They complained of intimidation- the mail sent to them by the State Department made it a point of putting Mr. Assange and his lawyers in the same bracket.

United Kingdom has a fast extradition treaty with the United States, Sweden has not.
It is going to be a very aggressive investigation, too many ‘important ‘ people lost face, Obama has to explain himself and the US diplomats contemptuous views behind closed doors to other countries leaders, it is a mess indeed.
What makes them really mad is the TRUTH being told, their lies being made public.
And America’s controllers will pursue Julian Assange with all they got. If there are no laws against what he did, they will think of creating them.

Obama administration had asked Britain, Germany, Australia and other allies to consider criminal charges against Assange.
While all foreign ministers of the countries involved deny such requests were made (we’ll see about that in future leaks), Australian Federal Police today stated that by leaking the US cables, Wikileaks has committed no crimes in Australia.

The President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva labelled the arrest of Julian Assange as an attack on ‘freedom of expression’.
On Facebook, Wikileaks already has over 1.4 million fans and growing.
More than 600 000 people signed a petition in support of Wikileaks on campaigning website Avaaz, and Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s druze community, called for Assange to receive a Nobel prize-fat chance of that, they dish them out in Sweden, and although he deserves it much more than Obama, I doubt he will get this prize or any prize for that matter in Sweden.

The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev suggested that based on the knee-jerk reaction, there is no media freedom so touted in the West.
The presidents of Ecuador and Venezuela also expressed sympathy and solidarity with Assange, the former even offering him asylum if he chooses to ask for it in Ecuador.

Whatever the ‘geniuses ‘ in Virginia come up with, whatever the State Department chooses to do, for them is a lost battle.
Wikileaks cannot be stopped and Assange is by now too well known for ‘other options’ to work.
We will see how they will pursue Mr. Assange and wave the banner of righteousness and advocate the need for secrecy, censorship and global dictatorship.

But no-one will buy it. The Business will go bankrupt.
Sooner or later, history will mark down how an evil empire and its helpers-loyal gargoyles known also as banksters-saw their One World Order illusion blown away by the ripples of the 21st century cyber- war.

Awards:

Assange was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award (New Media), awarded for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya with the investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances. In accepting the award, he said: “It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented. Through the tremendous work of organisations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR, Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world.” He also won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award.

Assange was awarded the 2010 Sam Adams Award by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. In September 2010, Assange was voted as number 23 among the “The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures 2010″ by the British magazine New Statesman In their November/December issue, Utne Reader magazine named Assange as one of the “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World”. In December 2010, Julian Assange was named the Readers’ Choice for Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year as well as runner-up for 2010 Person of the Year.

And yet Time Magazine decided to award the prize to Mr. Mark Zuckerberg. While I appreciate Zuckerberg’s achievements, Time Magazine’s decision to remove Assange altogether from the award, although his popularity in 2010 surpassed Obama’s (oh, dear) due to controversy- and no doubt a few calls from the State Department-diminishes Facebook CEO’s award value.
Still, Julian Assange was reader’s choice , and no prizes are given for guessing the real winner of an impartial result.
What is important is that no matter who the official prize for Person of the Year goes to, people’s vote was given to Julian Assange.
And in the end, it will be people’s will which will shape the future and not some suits in a corporate boardroom.

Congratulations, Mr. Julian Assange! People have chosen you as 2010 Person of the Year!

Re-Publish this Article

<h1>Julian Assange: Man Of The Year</h1> Author: <a href='http://www.articleseen.com/profile_lstone.aspx'>lstone</a> Julian Assange- life before Wikileaks
According to Wikipedia, Julian Paul Assange was born on the 3rd of July 1971, in Townsville, Queensland, Australia.
He is 39 years old.

When Julian was one year old, his mother Christine married Brett Assange, a theatre director, and together ran a touring theatre company.
Even then, Brett Assange described Julian as kid with a “ keen sense of right and wrong”.

In 1979, Julian’s mother remarried. Her new husband belonged to a New Age Group-a cult called The Family.
They had a son, broke up in 1982 and a custody battle followed. Eventually, Christine Assange took Julian and his half-brother into hiding for five years.

By the time Julian reached the age of 14, he moved home 37 times.
Due to these circumstances, he was partly home-schooled.
He spent a lot of time in libraries, reading books on a wide variety of topics.

When he was in his early teens, his mother rented a house across the street from an electronics shop.
He got himself a Commodore 64 on which he wrote his first programs. Later, he acquired a modem, which enabled him to plug into primitive computer networks.
This introduced him to the world of computer hacking, a world he took an instant liking to.

Aged 16, he joined two other hackers and formed a posse which called itself the “International Subversives”.
Julian used the nickname “Mendax”-in Latin, it means liar.
Together, they started hacking into the computer systems of some of America’s most sensitive government installations, including nuclear weapon labs, as well as Australian universities and the Canadian Telecom company Nortel.

During his hacking days he became increasingly paranoid about police coming to arrest him.
In 1989 he had a son, Daniel, with his girlfriend.
But he became so strung out waiting for the knock on the door, that his teenage sweetheart, whom he married, moved out and took their son with her.

After they split up, they engaged in a lengthy custody battle and an arrangement was only reached in 1999.
This experience left Assange with a deep antipathy to bureaucracy which he believed was ‘squashing people’.

It made him form ‘Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection’ together with his mother. This was an activist group with the task of creating a “central databank” for otherwise inaccessible legal records related to child custody issues in Australia.

Back to hacking and the knock on the door came eventually, the Australian police charged him with 31 counts of computer-related crimes. Assange pleaded guilty to 24 of them after years of pre-trial litigation and got away with paying a fine of AU$2100.
In 1993, Julian Assange was involved in starting one of Australia’s first public Internet Service Providers.

From 1994, he lived in Melbourne as a programmer and developer of free software.
He contributed to the writing of a book called ‘Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier’ as a researcher, drawing on his earlier experience with International Subversives.

From 2003 to 2006, he studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He also studied philosophy and neuroscience.
He never graduated. On his personal web page, he claims to have represented his university at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005.

Julian Assange- The Wikileaks Years

Wikileaks was founded in 2006. That year, Assange wrote two essays setting out the philosophy behind Wikileaks. These essays reflect his distaste for government conspiracies, dictatorial systems of governance, and the means to redress the balance by uncovering the secrets which make it possible using the power of the Internet technologies.

Assange is one of the nine members of Wikileaks advisory board and a prominent media spokesman on its behalf.
He calls himself 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 is an unpaid volunteer like all other people who work for Wikileaks.

By December 2007, Assange was so deeply immersed in the world of international computer outlaws that he participated at the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club, a German hacker group.
There he met up with like-minded hacktivist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German programmer.

In the early 2009, Domscheit-Berg joined Wikileaks full-time, and for about 18 months he and Assange were partners and soul mates.
The Swedish sex inquiry brought dissension in the ranks of Wikileaks. Assange was accused that his work suffers because of his personal problems and was even asked to step down as Wikileaks leader until the legal issues regarding the sex allegations are resolved.

Assange told the would-be mutineers:
“ I am the heart and the soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest.”
Domscheit-Berg left Wikileaks also broke with Assange in spectacular fashion after a shouting match in which he accused Assange of acting like a dictator, and running Wikileaks like an autocratic ruler.
He is currently writing a book about the Wikileaks experience and is creating a disclosure site as a rival to Wikipedia, called Open Leaks.
OK, Julian Assange is not perfect. Who is?
His personality flaws and some perhaps questionable actions do not detract from his brilliant achievements and the fact that he has balls the size of …WhiteHouse?!

Until his arrest on the 7th of December, Assange did not have a permanent address. He has been constantly on the move. He has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and rented a house in Iceland, where he worked with other activists on the ‘Collateral murder’ video.

Most of 2010 he visited United Kingdom, Sweden, Iceland , Switzerland and other European countries.

Julian Assange-The legal case against him

On 20th of august 2010 an arrest warrant was issued in Sweden for Julian Assange in connection with two women aged 26 and 31. At very short time after the investigation opened chief prosecutor Ewa Finne withdrew the warrant to arrest Assange, saying” I don’t think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape”.
Subsequently a possible charge of harassment was considered. It might be worth mentioning what the women’s lawyer, Claes Borgstrom is a Swedish politician who could be trying to further her own career through a high profile trial.

Also, in 2007, the Swedish government launched a three year program designed to educate elements in the criminal-justice system on how to aggressively pursue rape claims, on the premise that rape victims drop their charges more often than any other.
And in Sweden the definition of rape includes having sex with a sleeping woman.

While I personally believe strongly in consensual sex and I oppose sexual violence, I can’t help but point out that the same woman consented to sexual intercourse with Assange before she went blissfully to sleep in the same bed with the accused. This is the same woman who accompanied Julian Assange to the train station and bought him a ticket.

That’s why this insistence about extraditing Assange to Sweden to put him on trial has something farcical about it, the timing of it all adding to the doubt-the arrest warrant was issued just after the release of the diplomatic cables.
In the second half of October Assange’s application for Swedish residency was denied.
On 20th of November Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange via Interpol.

He was accused of molestation and unlawful coercion.
Assange claims consensual but unprotected sex.
On the 7th of December Julian Assange was arrested in London after meeting with the police of his own volition.
He was refused bail and spent 7 days in custody on remand in Wandsworth prison, in isolation and was denied a computer and writing materials.

Why the restrictions? The above are granted to more or less any criminal or accused detained in an UK prison.
After the seven days passed it was back to the Royal Court where District Judge Howard Riddle granted Julian Assange bail. He remained in custody for an extra 48 hours, because the British prosecutors lodged an appeal, obviously at the request of their fellow Swedish colleagues.

On the 16th Assange was finally freed on bail , restricted by an electronic tag, a 10 pm curfew and regular visits to the police station.
Even the bail had to be collected in cash, because of the big credit card companies refusal to handle any transactions related to Julian Assange.

Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, they are all instruments of The State who demonstrated that they are actively involved in repressing freedom of speech . Assange has yet to be proven guilty of any wrong-doing, but just because the American politicians want it, these big financial institutions are ready to persecute someone and deny his rights on hearsay and political pressure.

Nine celebrities helped put together the bail money, Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, Ken Loach and a few others.
It took a further five hours after the decision until finally Assange was out, free.
Until the next court hearing , which is on the 11th of January, he will stay at Ellingham Hall, a country mansion, owned by Vaughn Smith, 47, former captain in the Grenadier Guards and founder of the Frontline Club.
From there, with Wikileaks colleagues, they will work on releasing yet more diplomatic cables.

The biggest threat for Julian Assange in the meantime is still an extradition request by the US. His lawyers believe a secret US grand jury was assembled and legal arguments are being sought to put together a case against Mr. Assange and preparing an indictment against Assange in Virginia.

Throughout this case, Assange’s lawyers complained of being watched and followed, fact denied of course by the CIA and other American agencies (now this is why we need Wikileaks).
They complained of intimidation- the mail sent to them by the State Department made it a point of putting Mr. Assange and his lawyers in the same bracket.

United Kingdom has a fast extradition treaty with the United States, Sweden has not.
It is going to be a very aggressive investigation, too many ‘important ‘ people lost face, Obama has to explain himself and the US diplomats contemptuous views behind closed doors to other countries leaders, it is a mess indeed.
What makes them really mad is the TRUTH being told, their lies being made public.
And America’s controllers will pursue Julian Assange with all they got. If there are no laws against what he did, they will think of creating them.

Obama administration had asked Britain, Germany, Australia and other allies to consider criminal charges against Assange.
While all foreign ministers of the countries involved deny such requests were made (we’ll see about that in future leaks), Australian Federal Police today stated that by leaking the US cables, Wikileaks has committed no crimes in Australia.

The President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva labelled the arrest of Julian Assange as an attack on ‘freedom of expression’.
On Facebook, Wikileaks already has over 1.4 million fans and growing.
More than 600 000 people signed a petition in support of Wikileaks on campaigning website Avaaz, and Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s druze community, called for Assange to receive a Nobel prize-fat chance of that, they dish them out in Sweden, and although he deserves it much more than Obama, I doubt he will get this prize or any prize for that matter in Sweden.

The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev suggested that based on the knee-jerk reaction, there is no media freedom so touted in the West.
The presidents of Ecuador and Venezuela also expressed sympathy and solidarity with Assange, the former even offering him asylum if he chooses to ask for it in Ecuador.

Whatever the ‘geniuses ‘ in Virginia come up with, whatever the State Department chooses to do, for them is a lost battle.
Wikileaks cannot be stopped and Assange is by now too well known for ‘other options’ to work.
We will see how they will pursue Mr. Assange and wave the banner of righteousness and advocate the need for secrecy, censorship and global dictatorship.

But no-one will buy it. The Business will go bankrupt.
Sooner or later, history will mark down how an evil empire and its helpers-loyal gargoyles known also as banksters-saw their One World Order illusion blown away by the ripples of the 21st century cyber- war.

Awards:

Assange was the winner of the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award (New Media), awarded for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya with the investigation The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances. In accepting the award, he said: “It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented. Through the tremendous work of organisations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR, Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world.” He also won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award.

Assange was awarded the 2010 Sam Adams Award by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. In September 2010, Assange was voted as number 23 among the “The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures 2010″ by the British magazine New Statesman In their November/December issue, Utne Reader magazine named Assange as one of the “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World”. In December 2010, Julian Assange was named the Readers’ Choice for Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year as well as runner-up for 2010 Person of the Year.

And yet Time Magazine decided to award the prize to Mr. Mark Zuckerberg. While I appreciate Zuckerberg’s achievements, Time Magazine’s decision to remove Assange altogether from the award, although his popularity in 2010 surpassed Obama’s (oh, dear) due to controversy- and no doubt a few calls from the State Department-diminishes Facebook CEO’s award value.
Still, Julian Assange was reader’s choice , and no prizes are given for guessing the real winner of an impartial result.
What is important is that no matter who the official prize for Person of the Year goes to, people’s vote was given to Julian Assange.
And in the end, it will be people’s will which will shape the future and not some suits in a corporate boardroom.

Congratulations, Mr. Julian Assange! People have chosen you as 2010 Person of the Year!About the Author: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://hottopics.me">hottopics</a> 
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://hottopics.me">wikileaks assange</a> Article Source: <a href='http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Julian-Assange-Man-Of-The-Year_46414.aspx'> http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Julian Assange: Man Of The Year_46414.aspx</a>

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