Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Julian Assange

Today I happened to read a newspiece on the infamous Julian Assange. Those who didn’t yet hear of the man, he is the brain behind the wikileaks website. Wikileaks is a worldwide network of websites that contains secret documents about US government.


Suddenly I get to hear about wikileaks everywhere, friends starts to talk about it in office, a piece of news everyday in newspapers and such. At first I thought it must be a brother of wikipedia, what with the name similarity and all :P

But last day I did a little research and stumbled upon many news items and documents that gave detailed information about wikileaks. You believe it or not its straight from a Hollywood script, infact much more difficult to believe than the movies. (But it couldn’t beat the Inception idea, kudos to Christopher Nolan). Just like the story of every successful nerd , Julian Assange has had a turbulent childhood, with his mother in many relationships and no real schooling. At an early age he got into computers and hacking interested him the most. Many of the incidents surrounding his childhood indicates that he was a paranoid. It seems he used to wait in his room to hear the footsteps of police arriving at his home for a raid. His wife found it so intolerable that she moved out with their son. He was arrested later and charged with computer related crimes. Later in 2007 he joined hands with a similar minded hacker from germany to start wikileaks.

Their first major breakthrough came with the publication of a secret pentagon official video which they renamed ‘collateral damage’.The video showed an army crew in an apache helicopter opening fire simply on a crowd of people on the ground (related to Iraq war).Thus wikileaks obtained international notoriety. But they began losing credibility when allegations brew about exaggerated materials and videos. There were also sexual charges against Assange.

Currently he is behind bars due to these sexual charges .

I guess no one from India would come forward to expose the government here with something similar to wikileaks. If in case anyone does, most of his time would be spent to battle the home ministry . As someone said in our country we have more serious leaks to take care of, the tapes leak, exam paper leak, defence secrets, sting operations, bhopal gas etc and still etc..:)
By the way Assange didn’t had to face these things because he had put up his base in Sweden . He had built a den, underground for his facility. Two days ago there were photographs in newspapers of his den being compared to that of batmans in the movie.

And guess who his supporters are? Hackers all over the world.

Eventhough his activity and perception is flawed, it would take a whole lot of courage to venture into something as enormous as this. For more details, you can go through the following link.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/special-report-julian-assange-versus-world-20101213-102059-356.html

5 comments:

Krish said...

Very good Post.. Keep writing..

B/w : Did you write this blog in office hiding from your manager ? :P
Looks like you were in a hurry while writing :)

soorya said...

you are right, i did write this in a hurry, but not in office :P

Sheb said...

Good Post....
Though it leaves you craving for more...Its like the sneak preview of a movie which has the potential to really hold our attention....

Wish you'd write a bit more...

But hey, good post considering you were in a hurry...

anandalakshmi said...

hai sooo...
its great...happy to hear u again..all the best...:-)

soorya said...

hai lekshmi...
long time.. hope u r doing well dear..