Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Photo: Mark Chew
One of Julian Assange's favourite books is
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. It is a bleak novel loosely based on the Stalinist purges and Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.
It tells the story of a Russian named Rubashov who was once a revered 1917 revolutionary, but who is cast out from his society. Suddenly he awakes in the middle of the night to find he is arrested and imprisoned. There are no charges, no due process and no justice. He can get no truth or explanation of what is going on. Eventually he is interrogated, and asked to sign a false confession admitting his guilt in a plot to assassinate the mysterious “No. 1”, the unknown and unnamed government leader.
He refuses.
From left: Julian Assange after being accused of hacking in 1995; a stressed Assange tells reporters last month that WikiLeaks staff were receiving death threats; Interpol's online wanted poster before Assange's arrest last week. Photo: Reuters/Getty Images
He is isolated in his cell, but finds a way of communicating with another prisoner by tapping on pipes. Ever so carefully, they begin secretly passing information and stories back and forth.
In the gloomy prison, an interrogation begins. First, an old friend of Rubashov's is brought in to start a soft persuasion. When that fails, because Rubashov refuses to admit to a crime he did not commit, his friend is arrested and executed for going too easy on the prisoner.
Then a coarse and violent interrogator takes over. He believes that torture is a good way to extract confessions from prisoners. He hates Rubashov because the prisoner is educated: being enlightened through learning is clearly a dangerous thing.
The activist on the cover of Time Magazine this month.
At the novel's end, Rubashov is summarily executed.
It's a case of life imitating art, with obvious parallels between Julian Assange's predicament and that of his favoured novel.
The world's most mysterious and famous publisher of verboten secrets is sitting in a jail cell in Britain awaiting extradition to a place with a very alien legal system, Sweden, to face questioning about criminal charges he does not understand. He has said publicly that he is at a loss to know how he could be accused of sexual offences against two women with whom he had sex when they have admitted it was consensual.
Assange has always been an avid reader of books. I know this because we worked together for almost three years to create
Underground, a book published in Australia in 1997 and again in an electronic version in 2001.
Underground is the true story of hackers in Australia and around the globe. Assange, the former hacker, contributed exceptional technical skills and analysis, and I brought years of experience as a journalist and writer. The book has become something of a classic among computer enthusiasts and has been translated into Czech, Chinese and Russian. Books were the basis of Assange's self-education. He attended school off and on during his childhood, but he was continually frustrated by teachers who were at a loss about what to do with him.
A geek friend of his once described Assange as having an IQ "in excess of 170". I suspect this could be true. I can only imagine how hard it must have been for a teacher in 1970s Australia to teach her class of normal children while also dealing with one small blond-haired boy who was off the charts.
So Assange largely gave up on school, finding it more efficient to educate himself by reading books. He learned to tune out if people didn't feed him information fast enough.
I've watched Assange do this many times. It's not meant to be rude, though it can make him seem aloof. It is, I suspect, a habit learned from these early years. It can give him the air of an absent-minded professor. He's not really absent; it's just that his brain is running several processors in parallel, like a high-powered desktop computer.
If some information is of more interest, more processing power will be diverted to that to optimise the running of the machine. Sometimes he thinks he has told you something when he hasn't. This is probably because his brain moves so much faster than his voice; by the time he opens his mouth to speak, his thoughts have zoomed a million light years down the next thought path.
The computer geek in him always gravitated towards optimisation of everything. Some people are born engineers and the desire to optimise is a good test of this.
Once, when Assange was packing boxes to move house, he complained at how long it took. Most people just throw things in boxes and tape them up. Not Assange. He approached putting his books in boxes as though he was solving a puzzle aimed at using all the space in the box most efficiently. If there was dead space in the box, the packing had not been optimal and was a failure. He would empty the box and restart the packing again.
This desire for optimisation might be dismissed as the quirky trait of a geek, but it is far more important. It is part of the larger puzzle of how WikiLeaks has come to exist today.
The need for optimisation and the deep desire for justice, reflected by his choice of books, came together with a few other convictions.
One of these can be found in another favourite piece of writing, this time by the World War II pilot and author of
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The quote, used by Assange to sign many of his emails, was this: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the seas."
The quote suggests that if you can show people why something is important, they will work to achieve that goal far more effectively than if you just tell them to tick off items on a banal to-do list. Large corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year trying to drum that message into their executives in high-end training courses. Assange knew it instinctively.
The final piece in the puzzle was curiosity. Like all good journalists, Assange has it in abundance. It is part of his clay. He understood that most people are curious and he spoke to me about the immense power of information to change the world for the better.
WikiLeaks is the picture that emerges when you lay the last puzzle piece in place.
If you want to improve the lot of the poorest, most oppressed people in the world, you can go to a destitute, corrupt African country and work in a community-aid program. It is a noble and self-sacrificing choice. But it only saves one village. Therefore, although it works towards greater justice (in this case economic justice) it is not optimal. A computer geek would consider it sub-optimal. To be optimal, it must be on a much larger scale. Larger than one village, larger than one country, even than one continent. The only way to do that is to use information which can be replicated endlessly – and cheaply – to promote change for the better. But it must be good information, not trashy information or PR spin. It must be the kind of information that plucks at those little threads of curiousity we all have in one measure or another.
It must be the kind of information news media organisations would publish for their readers.
Not everyone wants change, however. Tin-pot dictators like to steal money from their countries.
Average people may think they are happy in their ordinary lives: they don't want change. Yet imagine if there was a secret world these average people did not know about. What could be in that world? It could be a world of classified logs from the front line of a war. It could also be a world of secret diplomatic cables that tell the truth about what really happens behind the mahogany doors of power. The average people might actually want that information – if someone revealed it to them.
WikiLeaks has taught people to "long for the endless immensity of the seas". Who wants to go back to their cramped dog-box apartment now that they have tasted the salty air and seen the ocean's infinite horizon?
Yet Assange still sits in prison, waiting for answers and explanations, like Rubashov. It is more than likely the US will try to extradite him from Sweden if he is forced to leave Britain. Hints in the American media suggest that a secret grand jury investigation is under way or is even completed – without Assange even being in the country.
American politicians propose that Assange be assassinated. Forget a trial or jury. They are judge, jury and executioner, like the thuggish interrogator in
Darkness at Noon.
The office of US senator Joseph Lieberman tried to gag WikiLeaks this week by making a phone call that forced Amazon to stop hosting the publisher.
The New York Times has also released the diplomatic cables. Lieberman's office has called for an investigation but has not tried to order the paper to stop its presses. As if it could. There would be rioting in the streets of Manhattan.
In person, Assange is remarkably calm. He is sometimes dedicated to the cause of free speech in a pointed way that that affronts Americans, which is surprising, really, given their dedication to the right of free speech.
What matters is that WikiLeaks is changing the balance of power between average citizens and their governments like nothing else has this century. For the past decade the pendulum has swung towards government. WikiLeaks is pulling the pendulum back towards towards the citizens.
Suelette Dreyfus @
'SMH'
'Underground'
(Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier)
