THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD by Andrew Fowler (2011)
SECRET POWER: Wikileaks and Its Enemies by Stefania Maurizi, translated by Lesli Cavanaugh-Bardelli (2022)
I've read two more books about Julian Assange that I recommend.
Andrew Fowler, an Australian journalist, wrote about Assange at the height of his fame and success. He provides Assange's back story and insights into his sometimes difficult character.
I never thought Assange's personality traits mattered when it came to assessing the political impact and legal defense of his work. Also, he has been the target of systematic character assassination.
But he's an interesting person, and Fowler's warts-and-all portrait is a fair and balanced look at Assange, the man.
Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who worked closely with Assange, took up the story where Fowler left off.
She puts him in the broader context of the struggle for transparency in government and privacy for the individual during the past decade. Assange isn't the only person who's been imprisoned for truth-telling.
If I had to recommend just one book about Assange, it would be Maurizi's.
Assange was an original thinker and a brilliant programmer. In his 20s, he was a member of a hackers' club called the International Subversives. Assange managed to hack into top-secret U.S. military sites, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration computers. On the day of a space launch in 1989, the computers NASA lit up with the words, YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN WANKED.
This was quite an achievement, inasmuch as the public Internet did not exist. Assange was arrested, tried and let off with a warning, inasmuch he hadn't done any harm or made any money out of his prank.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a movement called the Cypherpunks, of which Assange was a part. Their dual objectives were complete privacy for the individual and complete transparency for governments and other systems of authority.
Wikileaks was the realization of that ideal. A whistle-blower could leave secret information with Wikileaks without anyone, including Wikileaks itself, knowing who they were. Wikileaks could then, after verifying the information, throw light onto hidden power.
Among Wikileaks' early exploits were exposes of African dictators, the Church of Scientology, crooked Icelandic bankers and Sarah Palin's private emails.
The organization's most consequential disclosures - the the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs, the Cablegate disclosures and the Guantanamo Bay files - came from a single individual, a conscience-stricken Army private we now know as Chelsea Manning.
It's interesting, for what it's worth, that two of the world's most important truth-tellers are a transgender woman, Chelsea Manning, and a gay man, Glenn Greenwald. But Manning, unlike Greenwald and the others, did not start out as a social activist. She was an ordinary person who was unwilling to be silent about atrocities.
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