Mr. Assange’s exploits were detailed in a 1997 book he co-authored called Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. The book chronicles some of the most notorious hacking incidents of the 1980s and 90s – back when Mr. Assange went by the nickname Mendax, from the poet Horace’s “splendide mendax,” or “nobly untruthful.” In his introduction to the book, Mr. Assange quotes Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
The book paints a picture of a teenager who escaped to the digital world for many of the same reasons that still draw in new hackers today: a chance to become someone more powerful, able with a few keystrokes to access confidential information that would be kept under lock and key in the real world. But perhaps most of all, the allure of hacking for Mr. Assange and countless others is the ability to effect change without becoming part of any government or corporate group. According to one story in Underground, Mr. Assange manages to break into the network of Canadian telecom firm Nortel, spending hours jumping from one of the company’s computers to the next. His technical skills earn him respect within the hacking community, and some of his closest friends exist only as aliases on a computer screen.
In the late 80s, it was very easy for Mr. Assange’s exploits to go unnoticed. But today’s generation of hackers, hacktivists and hangers-on, armed with easy-to-use tools and access to myriad government and corporate targets, are operating far less quietly. It is almost impossible to measure the financial and geopolitical ramifications should attacks such as Operation Payback continue to grow in popularity. Already, some security experts are bracing for disruptions to the lucrative holiday shopping season, as tens of thousands of people download the program that allows their computers to be used in DDoS attacks. A freelance cyberarmy of the dismayed and disgruntled is only just starting to flex its muscles.
Some clues as to where the hacktivist movement is headed might be found in the movement’s early days. Then, as now, the subculture was dominated by young, bright minds with fanatically held principles about issues such as transparency and a near-nihilistic skepticism of authority figures.
In one passage in Underground, Mr. Assange is dismayed to find out that some fellow hackers in the U.S. had gone to work for the military. It seems to him a violation of some unspoken code – a code he would continue to follow with the founding of WikiLeaks and the decision to release the biggest cache of classified documents in history.
“Hackers, he thought, should be anarchists, not hawks.”
