grew up reading superhero stories. Spiderman to superman, the dark knight to the Thor. Every character has influenced me in its own way. Every heroic story gives me goosebumps. But in real it takes a lot of sacrifice guts and dedication to be a superhero. They just seem good in fantasies. We feel great when Uncle Ben says, “With great power comes great responsibility,” handling that responsibility and living with it is not a fairy tale. Well, the last sentence would probably be the right thing to describe the hero/villain of this news article. He marks the beginning of an era of brilliant computer programming, picking up on backdoors, firewalls, breaching systems to hacking networks. Yes, Julian Assange, presently in asylum at the Ecuador embassy in London.
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If you are still wondering who this man is, Julian Paul Assange (born 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer, publisher, and journalist. He is editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, an organization which he founded in 2006. His life is a legacy, and his deeds can be considered as tales of glory. Assange began hacking under the name Mendax. He and two others—known as “Trax” and “Prime Suspect”—formed a hacking group they called the International Subversives. During this time, he hacked into the Pentagon and other U.S. Department of Defense facilities, MILNET, the U.S. Navy, NASA, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission; Citibank, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Panasonic, and Xerox; and the Australian National University, La Trobe University, and Stanford University’s SRI International. He is thought to have been involved in the WANK (Worms against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989. After getting caught in the act in 1991, he spent till 1996 in jail. But in 1993, he started providing technical advice to the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit and assisted them with prosecutions. And started authoring and coauthoring a number of open source documents and publications.
But the major turn around again was WikiLeaks, after his period of study at the University of Melbourne, Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange is a member of the organization’s advisory board and describes himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010. WikiLeaks published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. By 2015, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents and associated analyzes, and has been described by Assange himself as “a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents”. The published material between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of publicity, but it was only after it began publishing documents supplied by Chelsea Manning that WikiLeaks became a household name. The Manning material included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).
However, things didn’t go well after U.S. authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally with a view to prosecuting them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010, and Until August 2015, Assange was wanted for questioning over two counts of sexual molestation and one count of unlawful coercion, alleged to have been committed against two women during a visit to Sweden in August 2010 by the Swedish authorities. He now has one charge on an allegation of rape and he has decided to throw himself into the hands of law now. On 19 May 2017, the Swedish prosecutors dropped the investigation into rape accusations against Assange and applied to revoke his arrest warrant
Hopefully, everything goes well for the Vigilante of our times.