Thanks to Russia (and thanks to WikiLeaks), Snowden remains

CHAPTER 11 Enter Assange Thanks to Russia (and thanks to WikiLeaks), Snowden remains free. —JULIAN ASSANGE, Newsweek, 2015 ULIAN ASSANGE had made a brilliant career of trafficking in state, military, and corporate secrets. Born on July 3, 1971, in Queensland, Australia, Assange began his hacking career while still a teenager. Using the alias Mendax (“the untruthful one”), he had hacked into the computers of the Pentagon, the U.S. Navy, NASA, Citibank, Lockheed Martin, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommuni- cations Commission before he was twenty. At the age of twenty-five, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges of hacking in Australia but was released on a good behavior bond. In 2006, with the spread of Tor software, he co-founded WikiLeaks, a website in which secret documents could be anonymously sent and posted. The site received little public attention until Bradley Manning sent it several hun- dred thousand lowly classified U.S. military and State Department documents in April 2010. With these stolen documents, WikiLeaks became a media sensation, and Assange, the runner-up for Time’s Man of the Year for 2010, became a leading figure, along with Appel- baum, in the global hacktivist underground. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 99 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019587