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CHAPTER 11 Enter Assange Thanks to Russia (and thanks to WikiLeaks), Snowden remains free. —JULIAN ASSANGE, Newsweek, 2015 ULIAN ASSANGE had made a brilliant career of trafficking in state, military, and corporate secrets. Born on July 3, 1971, in Queensland, Australia, Assange began his hacking career while still a teenager. Using the alias Mendax (“the untruthful one”), he had hacked into the computers of the Pentagon, the U.S. Navy, NASA, Citibank, Lockheed Martin, and Australia’s Overseas Telecommuni- cations Commission before he was twenty. At the age of twenty-five, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges of hacking in Australia but was released on a good behavior bond. In 2006, with the spread of Tor software, he co-founded WikiLeaks, a website in which secret documents could be anonymously sent and posted. The site received little public attention until Bradley Manning sent it several hun- dred thousand lowly classified U.S. military and State Department documents in April 2010. With these stolen documents, WikiLeaks became a media sensation, and Assange, the runner-up for Time’s Man of the Year for 2010, became a leading figure, along with Appel- baum, in the global hacktivist underground. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 99 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019587