In 1993, Assange gave technical advice to the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit and assisted with prosecutions.[59]In the same year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network.[32][60] He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the TCP port scanner Strobe (1995),[61][62] patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996),[63][64] the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996),[65] the Rubberhosedeniable encryption system (1997)[66][67] (which reflected his growing interest in cryptography),[68] and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000).[69] During this period, he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum,[68]r an Best of Security, a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996,[70] and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives.[49][71] In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.[57]During all of this Assange was basically raising his son Daniel alone.
Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it".[57] He did, however, publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: "This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency."[68] Systematic abuse of technology by governments against fundamental freedoms of world citizens remained an abiding concern-more than a decade later, in the introduction to Cypherpunks (2012), Assange summarised: "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen".[72]
Nothing published on WikiLeaks has ever been proven untrue. Compare that record to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News or any mainstream outlet. Assange has been nominated for multiple Nobel Peace Prizes, and nearly every respected media outlet has used source material from WikiLeaks in their reporting. Yet after all this and after seven years in captivity, the man who laid bare our criminal leaders and showed each one of us our chains is not receiving parades and accolades. He and those who helped him reveal the truth are the only ones endlessly punished.
We are all Julian Assange. As long as he's imprisoned, we can never be free.
Comment: See also: