Western Outlaw

Even in his youth, Julian Assange’s intellectual pursuits stretched far wider than the technical skills of computing Source: Supplied

JULIAN Assange fascinates. he stands at a painful nexus of power, information and technology, taking great risks and asking hard questions. Or making us ask them.

He is unusually able to project intelligent ideas clearly. he has a lot of friends and some immensely powerful enemies, and is about as cunning as he needs to be. Assange’s life and activities are fraught with ambiguity, contradiction and danger. We need to understand him and what he does. so far, instant books are all the help we’ve had.

When he was a teenager in the late 1980s, Assange was one of a bunch of youngsters in Melbourne who, along with some scattered groups of young people in Europe, Britain and the US, all of them in touch with each other, practised a new and arcane skill. This was the art of living and moving inside the evolving machinery of the early computer systems being developed by commercial, scientific and military institutions.

All of these institutions were obsessed by secrecy. In the days before the internet became widely accessible, the hidden network of protected information was an irresistible challenge for immensely clever, obsessive and imperfectly socialised teenagers. Infant home computers, unbelievably primitive seen from today, were their way in.

How it happened is told, rather messily, in what is by far the most interesting of this clutch of books, Suelette Dreyfus’s strangely compelling Underground. It isn’t well written. its middle-class suburbs are always leafy, its corporations pay handsomely, or a pretty penny, spring nights are balmy, flies are on walls, or wish they had been during interesting conversations, and records are gone through with fine-toothed combs. Personal reversals and triumphs are always roller-coasters. If a cliche floats by, Dreyfus grabs it.

Underground has some wonderful moments, though. an anxious American teenager works through the night, and the fish in his bedroom aquarium, drawn by the phosphorescent glow of his computer monitor, press their faces to the glass and stare out at the screen. The world beyond the night-time glow is barely perceived. A mention of Homer’s Ulysses on another kid’s shelf consigns the Odyssey and James Joyce to the same vague space of the millennia before electronic data storage.

The youngsters are bright and callow at once. their great but limited challenge is to play against manmade systems of vast complexity and technical resource — and yet, because they are of human devising, immensely fallible. It sounds like chess going on higher mathematics.

The chess analogy seems to fit the rational yet intuitive way they work. A recurring moment in the earlier part of the book, where ancient myth meets video game, is the username and password moment when the high-school hacker stands at the gateway to the inner workings of NASA, Citibank, Telecom USA or one of the scarier systems. The teenager feels his way into the mind of whoever set up the system. he does this with great sophistication and endless patience, only to be staggered at the end by the banality and obviousness of the key chosen to the forbidden realm. It’s very Thousand and One Nights, and the promised magic keeps you hacking through the dire prose.

The Open Sesame entries to Aladdin’s electronic cave are matched by the oh no! moments when everything freezes or starts shutting down. these usually show another presence lurking in the system. The cavern’s dragon defender is woken and the episodes of mutual stalking and hiding, the NASA system administrator versus the teenage interloper in the Melbourne suburb in the early hours of the morning, are thrilling, though the end is nearly always inconclusive.

The story of the teenage hacker who, with a few keystrokes, swivelled the NASA satellite on its axis is several times mentioned though never examined. It’s the book’s central myth. The Brothers Grimm would have loved it. Dreyfus never mentions dungeons and dragons, but you can see the weird attraction of the medieval for adolescent denizens of the darkly conceptual online worlds.

Dreyfus’s book is not new; it first came out in 1997, a few years after the Melbourne trials that ended the phase of internet culture it describes. Underground now reappears 14 years later, essentially unchanged, though Assange has been promoted from researcher to co-author. far from seeming dated, however, it has acquired a historical patina and deep fascination. This is how things were, all those aeons ago in the 90s.

Dreyfus has the hard job of making early computer networks, their workings and their operatives, intelligible or at least plausible to technical know-nothings of the daytime world, like this reviewer. And of doing it without losing credibility among her source informants and the book’s clued-up core audience. Her book is a jungle of acronyms and aliases, but there is a glossary.

Dreyfus also avoids analysis or any sketch of the context in which events happen. It seems an exasperating choice, but Underground belongs to the time it describes, almost a generation ago. And by the end, its accumulated human density makes the choice feel right. Ultimately this is a book about people rather than technology or politics, and is the better for it.

It is the world before the internet. Seventeen year olds are shaking up the worlds of banking, telecommunications, the military, space travel at the end of the 80s through their primitive PCs, and they’re now nearing middle age.

Assange will be 40 in July and has an adult son. he also has an increasingly vocal mother and three fathers: a biological father, a good stepfather and a mad, bad stepfather. not to mention a former wife from his earlier days, a younger child and numerous former girlfriends, two of whom, or rather two former one-night stands in Sweden, precipitated his present difficulties.

The younger Assange is less present in Underground than his connection with Dreyfus makes you expect. His remarkable childhood is barely mentioned. Modesty or astuteness on his part, or both? All the young hackers who drift in and out of the story exist only through their online aliases, and at times their generic similarities of age, background and interest make them hard to distinguish from one another. The most vivid parts of the book concern two others, and both acquire a retrospective power from what we know about events since the early 90s, in the world and in Assange’s life.

The American teenager "Par" was an early target of the US secret services. he had wandered by chance into the online secrets of the US Star Wars project of waging war via space satellites. he immediately knew the danger he was in. Fearing long imprisonment and-or elimination, he went on the run, living as a fugitive and helped by the scattered network of the hacker underground. The story of his adventures, streaked with paranoia, resilience and resourcefulness, is breathtaking.

The other happened in country Victoria. "Anthrax" was the often playful elder son of an unhappy marriage between an Indian nurse and a bigoted and violent British prison officer father, trapped moreover in the casual racism of a school and town that assumed he was an Aborigine. His withdrawal into phreaking — more concerned with telecommunications than computer networks — runs parallel to his reading of Malcolm X as a model of resistance to a deep and lasting, though evidently non-jihadist, interest in Islam and his eventual conversion. This was more than 10 years before the attacks of September 2001 made Western countries suddenly aware of the culture and politics of Islam.

The young hackers were convicted and punished, though none of the Australians went to jail. Some of them were traumatised by the intensity of the Australian Federal Police pursuit: front doors smashed in, suburban homes ransacked in the night, long and bullying interrogations. but the Australian judiciary, administering new laws on computer hacking for the first time, got it more or less right and recognised the offenders had made no profit and done no real damage. The federal police emerge as clumsy, ignorant and rather brutal, at least in the eyes of their intelligent victims. At the higher level, the AFP seems to have been driven, like the Australian legislators who brought in the new anti-hacking laws, by relentlessly punitive pressure from the US.

The hackers grew up. Most of them found work in the area that still fascinated them. Only Assange, whose intellectual world was never more than partly technical, continued along his early path. It wasn’t always clearly marked, since his interests extended far wider than the technical skills of computing. but unexpected things led back to it, such as his long tangle with the bureaucracy over custody of his son, or the academic anticlimax of studying physics in Melbourne.

Assange’s anarchist impulse made him derisive of institutional politics and contemptuous of the journalism that lived in symbiosis with the institutions. Powerful closed systems that controlled information, and people’s lives, by force of arms or money needed cracking open. he made an early foray against the Scientology cult and failed. The internet was now universally available and he saw how to use it.

Assange’s elementary libertarian politics and his technological sophistication coincided at the end of 2006 in the WikiLeaks project. This was the publishing — universal, simultaneous and untraceable across the internet — of raw data provided by anonymous sources inside big organisations. Most of it concerned political, financial and military crimes on a vast scale.

WikiLeaks had its own internal contradictions from the start and was still struggling to make itself noticed at the time of its publication in April last year of the video film and soundtrack of an Apache helicopter crew killing a group of people in a Baghdad street. The film WikiLeaks released as Collateral Murder was seen by millions of people and changed everything for WikiLeaks and Assange.

He immediately became one of the world’s most famous people and made a formidable enemy in the US government, whose hostility intensified six months later when WikiLeaks published more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables. The presumed source of all of this material was a young US intelligence officer serving in Iraq, Bradley Manning, who was arrested soon after the showing of the video and is still being held under great duress while awaiting trial. Manning’s plight, and Sweden’s extradition warrant against Assange to face charges of rape, are all matters in the daily news.

The story of Assange’s adult career remains to be told. Andrew Fowler’s instant book The Most dangerous Man in the World gives a rapid run-through of its episodes in made-for-television prose, snappy quick-moving episodes and a strictly journalistic context. beside it, Underground reads like Dostoevsky. Assange’s difficult relations with colleagues and allies are well known, and Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s Inside WikiLeaks is a partisan memoir by a disaffected deputy. The most vivid portrait of Assange from the time he released Collateral Murder is in Raffi Khatchadourian’s article published in The new Yorker last June, and it is the best piece available for anyone who wants to get an idea of what Assange is like. Micah Sifry’s WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency is a lively, very American primer on the politics of the internet.

The best thing to come out of Assange’s difficulties in fighting extradition to Sweden, and the danger of onward extradition to the US and a trial for espionage, is the mega book deal he signed to raise the money he needed to keep going. WikiLeaks Versus the World: my story, which Text Publishing will publish in Australia (coming soon, according to its website), will be something to read. In the meantime, these instant books can keep things ticking over. Underground stands on its own.

Peter Robb’s most recent book is Street Fight in Naples: A Book of Art and Resurrection. he will be a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, which starts on Monday.

UndergroundBy Suelette Dreyfus and Julian Assange William Heinemann Australia, 479pp, $24.95

The Most dangerous Man in the WorldBy Andrew FowlerMelbourne University Press, 271pp, $32.99Inside WikiLeaksBy Daniel Domscheit-BergScribe, 304pp, $29,95WikiLeaks and the Age of TransparencyBy Micah Sifry Scribe, 224pp, $22.95

<a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/portrait-of-the-internet-hacker-as-a-young-man/story-e6frg8nf-1226054103131tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/portrait-of-the-internet-hacker-as-a-young-man/story-e6frg8nf-1226054103131Fri, 13 May 2011 14:11:58 GMT 00:00″>Portrait of the internet hacker as a young man