Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and expanding list of enemies
The mastermind behind the WikiLeaks website which posted threads of classified military documents showing U.S. failures in Afghanistan remains a mystery man with his own secrets.
Julkian Assange, white haired and very thin, he travels the world relentlessly, not sleeping in the same place two nights in a row because of a growing enemies list.
His aim, Assange mentioned in a recent New Yorker magazine profile, is to reveal the injustice by exposing secrets that could "bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality – including the U.S. administration."
"WikiLeaks aims to achieve political reforms by getting out information that has been suppressed to the public," he told Voice of America. "As far as we’re aware, we’ve never made a mistake."
He was born in an Australian beach town in 1971. Assange claimed that he is a self-schooled computer hacker who was caught after breaking into a telecom company’s master terminal and messaging the administrator, "It’s been nice playing with your system."
Confident to crack through the bureaucracy, Assange supported child protection workers to dish to a "central data bank."
WikiLeaks, whose goal is to create an "intelligence service of the people," went operational via online three years ago vowing to publish classified documents, after checking their correctness.
From then on, WikiLeaks has revealed everything from the inner workings of the Church of Scientology to Sarah Palin’s emails.
Amnesty International praised WikiLeaks for publishing a secret report accusing corruption by Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi.
The group’s largest coup, even now, was a shocking video of two Reuters journalists and Iraqi civilians being wiped out by a U.S. Apache helicopter attack in 2007.
WikiLeaks does not have central office and no paid staff. It solely depends on volunteers to validate documents and on shadowy sources to pay the bills.
Assange added they’ve suffered police harassment in Germany and Israel, and sustainserver sites around the world to ensure they’re not hacked, or removed from the Web.
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