Julian Assange. Julian Assange
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clear that the subculture we were involved in wasn’t just local, wasn’t just Australian: there was a worldwide subculture of people who would take computer programs invented by software companies and modify them, breaking the encryption codes on them so you could then copy them and give them to your friends. It was mainly for the challenge. The guys who wrote the codes and the guys who broke them were in a kind of competition, except the guys who wrote them were in their twenties and working for companies. We were in our bedrooms laughing at the screen.
Those guys were the authorities. And we never met them. They would sometimes leave hidden messages inside the software, hidden under layers of encryption that we would have to get around, and sometimes the program was built in such a way as to attack parts of our computer as we struggled to decrypt the software. Our relationship with our computers was an important element in our own expanding minds. We had learned so much, so quickly, and we knew that we could teach the computer to expand its own complexity based upon our instructions. The competition between us and those initial software manufacturers actually speeded up the process: we may have been enemies, but together we pushed the art forward, which I suppose is what happens in a very good game of chess.
I began writing programs. Much later on, with WikiLeaks, some people would think it was all about politics. But much of what we are doing is locked into the logic of computer intelligence, and locked into what a precise interaction with computer intelligence makes inevitable. In many respects, nothing has changed since the box bedroom. The ultimate limits of computer power are not determined simply by the man who solders components together in the Chinese factory, they are written into the very meaning of what a computer is. It was Alan Turing who observed that any precise instruction that one could write on paper and give to another human being, could potentially be followed by a computer. And we championed that idea. People might get emotional about it, but it is simply what happens when inventions are allowed to fulfil their potential in company with ongoing human imagination. By cracking codes we were making the code better, and by writing code we were making the codes harder to crack. It was a circular irony and one that became joyful for teenagers inclined in that direction. Every night was like a new adventure.
I began receiving disks in the post from abroad. From America and Sweden and France, where new friends had cracked codes and would send me the stuff, and I would do the same, all of this postage coming for free because we had worked out a system of re-using stamps. It was great to be alive at a point when so much was changing – so much was new – and to feel the rush of progress flitting through your fingers and over the keyboard. I was sixteen and my time had come: I was finding my calling, my skill, my peer group and my passion, all at once. I’m sure we were, at some level, as arrogant as we were insubordinate, but young men need to feel their own power at that age, and we were flying.
I think it’s fair to say Australia was considered then to be some kind of provincial backwater. It suffered from a certain cultural cringe, a definite notion that the country existed as a permanent outback to the main currents of European culture and American life. And in a small way – a small way that became a big way – we opposed that. At this time I was living with my family in the suburbs just outside Melbourne, but I was beginning to take my place within an elite group of computer hackers. We felt we were the dead centre of the turning world, no less significant than cutting-edge computer guys in Berlin or San Francisco. Melbourne was prominent on the world computer map from early on, and we were partly responsible for that: we entertained a global notion of how the technology could work, and never for a second did we feel remote or provincial. We felt we could lead the world, which is a nice thing to feel at the bottom of the planet. Ordinarily, Australia is a lagoon in a sea of Englishness; the culture of Britain tended to wash over us, with its big colonial sense of national values. This had been our reality, so when we fought, we had to fight like kings. The hackers’ mentality in Melbourne was unashamed in that way. We had no sense of being away from the main currents: we were the main currents. And given that innovation often relies on self-certainty – however temporary, however misplaced – we found ourselves on top of the world. The Levellers of the seventeenth century aimed to turn a backwater into a political frontline: later historians would speak of A World Turned Upside Down. It was Christopher Hill who wrote of the possibility of ‘masterless men’, a population escaping lordship, who would become renegades or outlaws if need be. My former friends in the computer underground would have enjoyed the words of the Leveller called William Erbery: ‘Fools are the wisest of men, and mad men the most sober-minded . . . If madness be in the heart of every man . . . then this is the island of Great Bedlam . . . Come, let’s all be mad together.’
It was a time of new ideas, energy, engagement. The idea of popular sovereignty over the Internet, of ‘teeming freedom’ arriving in that arena, was a way off and would still need to be fought for, and hard. I didn’t know it until later, but we could have called on Milton, who wrote a kind of saintly justification for civil disobedience and spoke of ‘a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy in discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest human capacity can soar to’.
We were neither so ambitious nor so capable, but we knew we were onto something that the world had never known before. From our own suburban bedrooms, we were seeking and finding a global computer network. ‘The whirlwind comes from the North,’ wrote one of the Levelling heroes. Well, maybe. But in a modern world turned upside down, we might call it the south, and give Australia its due. In any event, the energy we had was connected, if only unconsciously, to many a great, untold effort to wrest freedom from the arms of invisible power. Some of us might have been deluded enough to think the future would thank us – it wouldn’t. There were prisons waiting for such victims of delusion.
The real morning of revelation came not with the computer, but with the modem. When I got that, I knew it was all over. The past. The old style. Australia as it used to be and the world as it once was. Over. I was about sixteen years old when this fresh dawn came in a little box that dialled up really slowly. Before the Internet, the sense of a global subculture in computing worked through bulletin boards. These isolated computer systems would be set up in, say, Germany, and you would dial in and swap messages and software. Suddenly, we were all connected. There was always a problem with the cost of these international calls, of course, but some of our friends became experts at manipulating the phone lines. They were called phreakers. There is all this nonsense about the early computer hackers stealing from banks and so on: most of the hackers I knew were only interested in pulling back some free phone time. That’s as rich as they got; but what riches, to spend the night connected to all this overseas expertise. And the sense of discovery was fairly galactic.
Within a few days of getting my modem, I had written a program to tell the modem how to seek out other modems. It scanned around the central business districts of Australia, and later other parts of the world, to discover which of the computers had modems. I knew there would be interesting things on the end of those telephone lines. I just wanted to find out what the numbers could lead you into; it was almost mathematical, seeing how the numbers could be played with. It’s not that it was subversive at that stage: it was simply a great reaching out and a great exploration of the world, and you felt you were riding on some brand new wave, the most technologically sophisticated part of industrial civilisation. It’s a grand thought, but it was a grand feeling and I can’t diminish it. The thing was sophisticated, but we weren’t, and to many of us it was like we were kids breaking into quarries or abandoned buildings. We had to see what was in there. We had to feel the rush of getting over the fence and making it inside. It was the thrill of making it into the adult world and being ready to challenge it.
That’s how hacking begins. You want to get past a barrier that has been erected to keep you out. Most of them had been erected for commercial reasons, to preserve profit flow, but for us it was a battle of wits, too, and in time we saw that many of those barriers were sinister. They were set up to limit people’s freedom, or to control the truth, which I suppose is just another kind of profit flow. We started by breaking the commercial desires of some companies, and the thrill was exorbitant. It was like the first time you beat an adult at chess. I’m amazed when I run into people who don’t understand the pleasure in this, for it is the pleasure of creation itself, of understanding something intimately and making it new. Hacking began to