Julian Assange. Julian Assange
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set up to protect power, and making a difference. Keeping people out of the world’s computer systems was, for the people who ran them, a matter of control, much as Orwell understood the meaning of state control, and it was only a natural progression for us to go to work on them as part of our youthful attempt to explore the world.
Governments, of course, had computer systems at this time whose sophistication existed in direct proportion to that nation’s wealth and military might. For us the most interesting computer network was X.25, through which most countries ran their classified military computer sites. About eight hackers in the world had discovered and shared the access codes: it was just breathtaking to see how governments and corporations were working together across this kind of network. And the crème de la crème of the world hacking community was watching them. I was entering my later teenage years, and the Berlin Wall was about to come down and change everything; a great epochal change in the meaning of ideology that played out on the news every night. But we were already changing the world. When the TVs were switched off, when the parents went to bed, a battalion of young computer hackers were going inside those networks, seeking to create a transformation, I would argue, in the relationship between the individual and the state, between information and governance, that would come in time to partner the wall-breakers in their effort to bust the old order.
Every hacker has a handle, and I took the name Mendax, from Horace’s splendide mendax – nobly untruthful, or perhaps ‘delightfully deceptive’. I liked the idea that in hiding behind a false name, lying about who or where I was, a teenager in Melbourne, I could somehow speak more truthfully about my real identity. By now, the computer work was taking up a great deal of my time. I was beginning to get the hacker’s disease: no sleep, bottomless curiosity, single-mindedness, and an obsession with precision. Later, when I became well known, people would enjoy pointing out that I had Asperger’s or else that I was dangling somewhere on the autistic spectrum. I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, so let’s just say I am – all hackers are, and I would argue all men are, a little bit autistic. But in my mid- to late teens I could barely focus on anything that didn’t seem to me like a major breakthrough. Homework was a struggle; ordinary conversation was a chore. In some way I found myself tuning out the local noise, the local weather, to maintain a sense of a frequency that was international. We saw a thousand tasks and became obsessed with exploring those early networks, the internet before the ‘Internet’. There was this American system called Arpanet, which, early on, Australians could only connect to if they were part of a university. That’s how we piggybacked onto the system. It was certainly addictive, projecting your mind across the world in that way, where every step was unauthorised. First you would have to hack the university computer system, then hack your way back out of it. While inside, you would then hack into some computer system elsewhere in the world – typically, for me at the time, the Pentagon’s 8th Command Group computers. You’d dive down into its computer system, taking it over, projecting your mind all the way from your untidy bedroom to the entire system along the halls, and all the while you’re learning to understand that system better than the people in Washington. It was like being able to teleport yourself into the interior of the Pentagon in order to walk around and take charge, like a film in which you got to bark orders at the extras in shirtsleeves sitting at banks of radar screens. Awesome was the word. And we quickly stepped away from the fantasy of it all to see that some bright new element of the future was being played with. Virtual reality – which used to be a mainstay of science fiction and is now a mainstay of life – was born for many of us in those highways we walked solo at night.
It was spatial. It was intellectual. You had to want to connect to the minds of the people who had built the paths. You had to understand the structure of their thinking and the meaning of their work. It was all wonderful preparation for dealing with power later, seeing how it works and what it does to protect its own interests. The weird thing is you didn’t especially feel like you were robbing anyone or engaging in any sort of crime or insurrection. You felt you were challenging yourself. People don’t get that: they think we were all rapaciously going after riches or engaged in some dark dream to run the world. No. We were trying to understand the scope and capacity of our own minds, and see how the world worked in order to fulfil a commitment, a commitment we all might have, to living in it fully and making it better if possible.
You would bump into your adversaries inside the system. Like meeting strangers on a dark night. I’d say there were maybe fifty people in the world at that time, adversaries and brethren, equally part of an elite group of computer explorers, working at a high level. On a typical night, you would have, say, an Australian computer hacker talking to an Italian computer hacker inside the computer system of a French nuclear complex. As experiences of young adulthood go, it was mindblowing. By day you’d be walking down the street to the supermarket, meeting people you know, people who have no sense of you as anything other than a slacker teenager, and you’d know you had spent last night knee-deep in NASA. At some basic level, you could feel you were taking on the generals, taking on the powerbrokers, and in time some of us came to feel we were in touch with the central thrust of the politics of our countries. It didn’t feel sinister; it felt natural. It didn’t feel criminal; it felt liberationist. And in the end, we had no sense of entitlement beyond that which came with our expertise. We owned the box. We looked at the Pentagon or Citibank and we said, ‘We hacked that. We came to understand that system. Now part of that computer system is ours. We have taken it back for general ownership.’
None of us ever harmed anybody or caused any damage in our night-time forays, but we were never naive enough to think that the authorities would see it that way. By about 1988, the Australian authorities were trying to establish some test cases to justify a new Computer Crimes Bill, and it was clear I had to be careful. I used to hide my floppy disks inside the beehive. I was sure the guys from the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence wouldn’t risk getting stung for real as they went about their sting.
There were some totally inspired hackers who were friends of mine: Phoenix, Trax and Prime Suspect. The latter two bonded together with me into a group we called the International Subversives. We were doing nightly raids on the Canadian telecom company, Nortel, on NASA and on the Pentagon. One time, I got the passwords I needed to access the Overseas Telecoms Commission by phoning their office in Perth pretending to be a colleague. As I spoke, I played around me a tape I had made of fake office noise – photocopiers whirring, keyboards clicking, a hum of conversation – just to create the right ambience for my fraud. They came up with the password in seconds. It sounds playful, and in a way it was, I suppose. But when the new legislation came in we went from feeling like climbers breaking into a nature reserve to explore, to criminals facing ten years in jail. Some of my friends had already been busted, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I got raided.
In the event, my brother let them in. He was only eleven. By sheer good fortune I wasn’t there. Anyway, the police had no evidence and the whole raid was a fishing expedition. There was a lot of fiction doing the rounds about hackers stealing from Citibank. Bullshit, actually. We were worried about stealing electricity to run our computers, and stealing phone calls and postage, but money, no. Far from looking for commercial gain, we were careful not to destroy anything in our path. If we hacked a system then we repaired our way back out of it, leaving, oftentimes, a back door to let ourselves back in again.
They started tapping some of our phones on a 24-hour basis. It was weird, and the weirdness crept into the characters of some of those kids. True to say, some of us were weird anyway, coming from what are now called dysfunctional families, where addictions had played a part, where disguises were already part of the picture. That was true enough of me, and I was probably one of the less obsessive kids. My friend Trax, for instance, had always been eccentric and seemed to suffer some kind of anxiety disorder. He hated to travel, rarely came to the city and once made reference to seeing a psychiatrist. But I have often found that the most interesting people are a little unusual, and Trax was both.
Hacking was a way for us to connect with other kids who didn’t feel like hostages to normality. We wanted to go our own way and we had an instinct for questioning authority. In my case, I was born into that instinct. We were born into a permissive society, but our generation was perhaps more questioning of what permission meant. We weren’t into ’60s psychobabble about freedom – neither were my parents, who