Julian Assange

He married a girl called Teresa while he was still in his teens. They had a son named Daniel in 1989. The couple later separated and was involved in a bitter custody battle over the child.

Details of his personal life over the recent past are not known though it was rumored that he was once in a relationship with journalist Sarah Harrison.

Julian Paul Assange was born on 3 July 1971, in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. His parents, Christine Ann, a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder, had separated before Julian was born.

His mother married Richard Brett Assange when Julian was a year old. Richard was an actor who ran a small theatre company. The couple ran theatrical productions together and travelled frequently, taking Julian with them. He had lived in over 30 different towns and attended as many schools by the time he was in his mid-teens.

He developed a passion for computers and discovered that he was really skilled at hacking and breaking into computer systems. He began hacking under the name Mendax in 1987. Along with two of his friends he formed an ethical hacking group.

During this time he hacked into several U.S. Department of Defense facilities, the U.S. Navy, NASA, and Australia's Overseas Telecommunications Commission. He also hacked the websites of several prominent corporations and institutions like Citibank, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Panasonic, Xerox, the Australian National University, La Trobe University, and Stanford University.

His hacking activities came to light in the early 1990s and he was eventually charged with 31 counts of hacking related crimes in 1994. He pleaded guilty to 25 charges in 1996 and got away with a fine.

He embarked on a career as a programmer and software developer. In 1994 he started working on the Transmission Control Protocol scanner strobe.c which was completed in 1995. During this time he also worked on the open-source database PostgreSQL, Usenet caching software NNTPCache and the Rubberhose deniable encryption system.

He spent three years as a researcher working with the academic, Suelette Dreyfus, who was researching on the subversive side of the internet. Their intensive research culminated in the publication of ‘Underground’ (1997), a book about Australian hackers that became a bestseller in the computing fraternity.

Assange registered the domain leaks.org in 1999 and publicized a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999 for voice-data harvesting technology. He felt that the common man should be concerned about the patent as it meant that everyone’s overseas phone calls could be tapped by foreign spy agencies.

He enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study mathematics in 2003 but dropped out without completing his degree in 2006.

In 2006, he began working on WikiLeaks, a website intended to share secret information and news leaks on an international scale. The site was officially launched in 2007. Assange ran the site from Sweden, leveraging the country’s strong laws protecting a person’s anonymity.

Julian Assange is best known as the founder, editor-in-chief, and director of the website WikiLeaks which publishes secret information. He gained international prominence after the site published controversial documents and footage from the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public. He received widespread support from several prominent personalities including the Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.