Julian Assange

Some Lesser Known Facts About Julian Assange

• Does Julian Assange smoke?: Yes

• Does Julian Assange drink alcohol?: Yes

• When Julian was one-year-old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange.

• Assange started hacking in 1987 under the name Mendax.

• He formed a hacking group with his two other friends known as “Trax” and “Prime Suspect”. They called the group International Subversives.

• At the end of the 1980s, he hacked into the Pentagon and other US Department of Defense facilities, MILNET, the US Navy, NASA, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission; Citibank, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Panasonic, and Xerox; and the Australian National University, La Trobe University, and Stanford University’s SRI International.

• In September 1991 Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne Master Terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation.

• At the end of October 1991, Australian Police tapped Assange’s phone line and raided his home and eventually charged him in 1994 with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes.

• In 1994, he started programming authoring or co-authoring the Transmission Control Protocol port scanner strobe.c (1995).

• Having finished his study in Melbourne University, Assange and his friends founded WikiLeaks in 2006.

• Currently, he is a member of WikiLeaks’s advisory board and works as the Editor-in-chief.

• Between 2006 and 2015, WikiLeaks published more than 10 Million documents and gained unprecedented popularity.

• WikiLeaks disclosed the Manning material included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010) which showed US soldiers shooting dead 18 people from a helicopter in Iraq, the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).

• Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard labeled his activities illegal, but Police said that he had broken no Australian law.                                                                                                                                                                           

• US Vice-President Joe Biden and others called him a “terrorist”.

• Many people supported him such as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, Spain’s Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias, Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, Argentina’s ambassador to the UK Alicia Castro, and activists and celebrities including Tariq Ali, John Perry Barlow, Daniel Ellsberg, Mary Kostakidis, John Pilger, Ai Weiwei, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Vaughan Smith, and Oliver Stone.                         

• Once Assange stated that he would run for Australian Senate in 2012 under the newly created WikiLeaks Party.

• In 2010 when he was visiting Sweden, he faced sexual assault allegations from two women with whom he had sex. He was questioned, the case was closed, and he was told he could leave the country.

• On 19 June 2012, he applied for Political Asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño announced his Political Asylum. He was confined at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for 1 year.                                                                                                                                                                           

• On his 41st birthday, he sent the cake to all the demonstrators protesting his confinement outside the embassy walls.

• He’s been threatened by the Church of Scientology, the President of Kenya, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, the Pentagon, and nearly everyone else.

• As per him, he’s not inspired by anarchy, but rather anti-Stalinism.

• At the Age of 18th, he got married to a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer. The Couple later separated and feuded over child custody.

• In an open letter to French President François Hollande, Assange stated his youngest child lives in France with his/her mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment due to his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.