Assange to write an autobiography

prot · Dec 26, 2010

Assange to write an autobiography

Assange signed two book deals, with an American and British publishers, suming up to $1.5 milion, for an autobiography that's suppossed to be published in March. he will use the money to pay for his lawyers.

Assange:

"I don't want to write this book, but I have to."

Assange Book Deal: WikiLeaks Founder Lands $1.5 Million Autobiography Deal

OnTheWaterfront · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

Intriguing questions (well not really).

Will amazon sell the books.

Will master card and/or visa process credit card transactions for people trying to buy the books.

The answer is of course yes, because this is just too much money to walk away from. Just another line in the sand of the hypocritical desert these corporations operate in.

genoramix · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

prot;1383864 said:

Assange:

Assange Book Deal: WikiLeaks Founder Lands $1.5 Million Autobiography Deal

i like Assange and his ideas...but it seems hes becoming a huge egofag.

Doesn't mean he doesn't deserve support though. but...oh and cocks

Anonymous · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

So he says he didn't want to write a book, but he needs legal fees that might accumulate for a case that has not even been filed yet.

A case that could have easily been avoided, and one in which nothing of value was gained.

DarkSpecterAnon · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

If he doesn't want to write a book then don't write it. On the other hand... It MIGHT be an interesting read... Certainly worth more than the entire Scilon Library put together.... I say carry on... I'd be interested in buying it if all works out.

Warhawk57 · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

you really think he is going to write it? I think he will hire a ghost writer. Much more effective use of his time. the book is going to be extraordinarily bland i expect. he wont want to put much work into giving all the facts about his life.

Anonymous · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

DarkSpecterAnon;1383889 said:

If he doesn't want to write a book then don't write it. On the other hand... It MIGHT be an interesting read... Certainly worth more than the entire Scilon Library put together.... I say carry on... I'd be interested in buying it if all works out.

In case you haven't noticed he needs the money.

Anonymous · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

There is already a book about a part of his life, when he was known as the hacker mendax.
Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier

Anonymous · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

Anonymous;1383920 said:

In case you haven't noticed he needs the money.

Note to Self,

Before molesting Swedish women, and / or pissing off half of the governments of the free world, start a savings account.

sincerely,
Self

Anonymous · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

An excerpt:

Like their predecessors, the three IS hackers had started out in the
Melbourne BBS scene. Mendax met Trax on Electric Dreams in about 1988,
and Prime Suspect on Megaworks, where he used the handle Control
Reset, not long after that. When he set up his own BBS at his home in
Tecoma, a hilly suburb so far out of Melbourne that it was practically
in forest, he invited both hackers to visit `A Cute Paranoia' whenever
they could get through on the single phone line.

Visiting on Mendax's BBS suited both hackers, for it was more private
than other BBSes. Eventually they exchanged home telephone numbers,
but only to talk modem-to-modem. For months, they would ring each
other up and type on their computer screens to each other--never
having heard the sound of the other person's voice. Finally, late in
1990, the nineteen-year-old Mendax called up the 24-year-old Trax for
a voice chat. In early 1991, Mendax and Prime Suspect, aged seventeen,
also began speaking in voice on the phone.
...
Mendax had a deep voice for his age; it would have been impossible to
even contemplate social engineering without it. Cracking adolescent
male voices were the kiss of death for would-be social engineers. But
even though he had the voice, he didn't have the office or the Sydney
phone number if the intended victim wanted a number to call back on.
He found a way to solve the Sydney phone number by poking around until
he dug up a number with Sydney's 02 area code which was permanently
engaged.
...
by the time he was fifteen Mendax had lived in a dozen
different places including Perth, Magnetic Island, Brisbane,
Townsville, Sydney, the Adelaide Hills, and a string of coastal towns
in northern New South Wales and Western Australia. In fifteen years he
had enrolled in at least as many different schools.

His mother had left her Queensland home at age seventeen, after saving
enough money from selling her paintings to buy a motorcycle, a tent
and a road map of Australia. Waving goodbye to her stunned parents,
both academics, she rode off into the sunset. Some 2000 kilometres
later, she arrived in Sydney and joined the thriving counter-culture
community. She worked as an artist and fell in love with a rebellious
young man she met at an anti-Vietnam demonstration.

Within a year of Mendax's birth, his mother's relationship with his
father had ended. When Mendax was two, she married a fellow artist.
What followed was many turbulent years, moving from town to town as
his parents explored the '70s left-wing, bohemian subculture. As a
boy, he was surrounded by artists. His stepfather staged and directed
plays and his mother did make-up, costume and set design.

One night in Adelaide, when Mendax was about four, his mother and a
friend were returning from a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. The
friend claimed to have scientific evidence that the British had
conducted high-yield, above-ground nuclear tests at Maralinga, a
desert area in north-west South Australia.

A 1984 Royal Commission subsequently revealed that between 1953 and
1963 the British government had tested nuclear bombs at the site,
forcing more than 5000 Aborigines from their native lands. In December
1993, after years of stalling, the British government agreed to pay
[sterling]20 million toward cleaning up the more than 200 square
kilometres of contaminated lands. Back in 1968, however, the Menzies
government had signed away Britain's responsibility to clean up the
site. In the 1970s, the Australian government was still in denial
about exactly what had happened at Maralinga.

As Mendax's mother and her friend drove through an Adelaide suburb
carrying early evidence of the Maralinga tragedy, they noticed they
were being followed by an unmarked car. They tried to lose the tail,
without success. The friend, nervous, said he had to get the data to
an Adelaide journalist before the police could stop him. Mendax's
mother quickly slipped into a back lane and the friend leapt from the
car. She drove off, taking the police tail with her.

The plain-clothed police pulled her over shortly after, searched her
car and demanded to know where her friend had gone and what had
occurred at the meeting. When she was less than helpful, one officer
told her, `You have a child out at 2 in the morning. I think you
should get out of politics, lady. It could be said you were an unfit
mother'.

A few days after this thinly veiled threat, her friend showed up at
Mendax's mother's house, covered in fading bruises. He said the police
had beaten him up, then set him up by planting hash on him. `I'm
getting out of politics,' he announced.

However, she and her husband continued their involvement in theatre.
The young Mendax never dreamed of running away to join the circus--he
already lived the life of a travelling minstrel. But although the
actor-director was a good stepfather, he was also an alcoholic. Not
long after Mendax's ninth birthday, his parents separated and then
divorced.

Mendax's mother then entered a tempestuous relationship with an
amateur musician. Mendax was frightened of the man, whom he considered
a manipulative and violent psychopath. He had five different
identities with plastic in his wallet to match. His whole background
was a fabrication, right down to the country of his birth. When the
relationship ended, the steady pattern of moving around the
countryside began again, but this journey had a very different flavour
from the earlier happy-go-lucky odyssey. This time, Mendax and his
family were on the run from a physically abusive de facto. Finally,
after hiding under assumed names on both sides of the continent,
Mendax and his family settled on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Mendax left home at seventeen because he had received a tip-off about
an impending raid. Mendax wiped his disks, burnt his print-outs and
left. A week later, the Victorian CIB turned up and searched his room,
but found nothing. He married his girlfriend, an intelligent but
introverted and emotionally disturbed sixteen-year-old he had met
through a mutual friend in a gifted children's program. A year later
they had a child.
...
Using a program called Sycophant written by Mendax, the IS hackers had
been conducting massive attacks on the US military. They divided up
Sycophant on eight attack machines, often choosing university systems
at places like the Australian National University or the University of
Texas. They pointed the eight machines at the targets and fired.
Within six hours, the eight machines had assaulted thousands of
computers. The hackers sometimes reaped 100000 accounts each night.

Using Sycophant, they essentially forced a cluster of Unix machines in
a computer network to attack the entire Internet en masse.
...
Mendax couldn't believe it. The US military was hacking its own
computers. This discovery led to another, more disturbing, thought. If
the US military was hacking its own computers for practice, what was
it doing to other countries' computers?

As he quietly backed out of the system, wiping away his footprints as
he tip-toed away, Mendax thought about what he had seen. He was deeply
disturbed that any hacker would work for the US military.

Hackers, he thought, should be anarchists, not hawks.
...
Trax could now call out--anywhere--as if he was calling from a point
halfway between his own phone and the disconnected number. If he
called a modem at Melbourne University, for instance, and the line was
being traced, his home phone number would not show up on the trace
records. No-one would be charged for the call because Trax's calls
were ghosts in the phone system.

Trax continued to refine his ability to manipulate both the telephone
and the exchange. He took his own telephone apart, piece by piece,
countless times, fiddling with the parts until he understood exactly
how it worked. Within months, he was able to do far more than just
make free phone calls. He could, for instance, make a line trace think
that he had come from a specific telephone number.

He and Mendax joked that if they called a `hot' site they would use
Trax's technique to send the line trace--and the bill--back to one
very special number. The one belonging to the AFP's Computer Crime
Unit in Melbourne.

All three IS hackers suspected the AFP was close on their heels.
Roving through the Canberra-based computer system belonging to the man
who essentially ran the Internet in Australia, Geoff Huston, they
watched the combined efforts of police and the Australian Academic and
Research Network (AARNET) to trace them.
...
Mendax decided to crack passwords to the
NorTel system. He collected 1003 password files from the NorTel sites,
pulled up his password cracking program, THC, and started hunting
around the network for some spare computers to do the job for him. He
located a collection of 40 Sun computers, probably housed in Canada,
and set up his program on them.

THC ran very fast on those Sun4s. The program used a 60000 word
dictionary borrowed from someone in the US army who had done a thesis
on cryptography and password cracking. It also relied on `a
particularly nice fast-crypt algorithm' being developed by a
Queensland academic, Eric Young. The THC program worked about 30 times
faster than it would have done using the standard algorithm.

Using all 40 computers, Mendax was throwing as many as 40000 guesses
per second against the password lists. A couple of the Suns went down
under the strain, but most held their place in the onslaught. The
secret passwords began dropping like flies. In just a few hours,
Mendax had cracked 5000 passwords, some 100 of which were to root
accounts. He now had access to thousands of NorTel computers across
the globe.
...
Mendax sat frozen at his desk as his mind replayed the events of the
past half hour again and again. No more NorTel. Way too dangerous. He
was lucky he had escaped unidentified. NorTel had discovered him
before they could put a trace on the line, but the company would
almost certainly put a trace on the dial-up lines now. NorTel was very
tight with Telecom. If anyone could get a trace up quickly, NorTel
could. Mendax had to warn Prime Suspect and Trax.

First thing in the morning, Mendax rang Trax and told him to stay away
from NorTel. Then he tried Prime Suspect.

The telephone was engaged.

Perhaps Prime Suspect's mother was on the line, chatting. Maybe Prime
Suspect was talking to a friend.

Mendax tried again. And again. And again. He began to get worried.
What if Prime Suspect was on NorTel at that moment? What if a trace
had been installed? What if they had called in the Feds?

Mendax phoned Trax and asked if there was any way they could
manipulate the exchange in order to interrupt the call. There wasn't.

`Trax, you're the master phreaker,' Mendax pleaded. `Do something.
Interrupt the connection. Disconnect him.'

`Can't be done. He's on a step-by-step telephone exchange. There's
nothing we can do.'

Nothing? One of Australia's best hacker-phreaker teams couldn't break
one telephone call. They could take control of whole telephone
exchanges but they couldn't interrupt one lousy phone call. Jesus.

Several hours later, Mendax was able to get through to his fellow IS
hacker. It was an abrupt greeting.

`Just tell me one thing. Tell me you haven't been in NorTel today?'

There was a long pause before Prime Suspect answered.

`I have been in NorTel today.'
...
However, as RMIT prepared to phase out the AFP traps, the police had a
lucky break from a different quarter--NorTel. On 16 September, a line
trace from a NorTel dial-up, initiated after a complaint about the
hackers to the police, was successful. A fortnight later, on 1
October, the AFP began tapping Prime Suspect's telephone. The hackers
might be watching the police watch them, but the police were closing
in. The taps led back to Trax, and then to someone new--Mendax.

The AFP considered putting taps on Mendax and Trax's telephones as
well. It was a decision to be weighed up carefully. Telephone taps
were expensive, and often needed to be in place for at least a month.
They did, however, provide a reliable record of exactly what the
hacker was doing on-line.

Before police could move on setting up additional taps in Operation
Weather, the plot took another dramatic turn when one of the IS
hackers did something which took the AFP completely by surprise.

Trax turned himself in to the police.
...
A loud knock at the door punctured the stereo thrum of the phone.

Mendax looked up from his book to see a shadowy figure through the
frosted glass panes of the front door. The figure was quite short. It
looked remarkably like Ratface, an old school friend of Mendax's wife
and a character known for his practical jokes.

Mendax called out, `Who is it?' without moving from the sofa.

`Police. Open up.'

Yeah, sure. At 11.30 p.m.? Mendax rolled his eyes toward the door.
Everyone knew that the police only raid your house in the early
morning, when they know you are asleep and vulnerable.

Mendax dreamed of police raids all the time. He dreamed of footsteps
crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness,
of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5 a.m.
He dreamed of waking from a deep sleep to find several police officers
standing over his bed. The dreams were very disturbing. They
accentuated his growing paranoia that the police were watching him,
following him.

The dreams had become so real that Mendax often became agitated in the
dead hour before dawn. At the close of an all-night hacking session,
he would begin to feel very tense, very strung out. It was not until
the computer disks, filled with stolen computer files from his hacking
adventures, were stored safely in their hiding place that he would
begin to calm down.

`Go away, Ratface, I'm not in the mood,' Mendax said, returning to his
book.

The voice became louder, more insistent, `Police. Open the door. NOW'.
Other figures were moving around behind the glass, shoving police
badges and guns against the window pane. Hell. It really was the
police!

Mendax's heart started racing. He asked the police to show him their
search warrant. They obliged immediately, pressing it against the
glass as well. Mendax opened the door to find nearly a dozen
plain-clothes police waiting for him.

`I don't believe this,' he said in a bewildered voice `My wife just
left me. Can't you come back later?'

At the front of the police entourage was Detective Sergeant Ken Day,
head of the AFP's Computer Crimes Unit in the southern region. The two
knew all about each other, but had never met in person. Day spoke
first.

`I'm Ken Day. I believe you've been expecting me.'

Mendax and his fellow IS hackers had been expecting the AFP. For weeks
they had been intercepting electronic mail suggesting that the police
were closing the net. So when Day turned up saying, `I believe you've
been expecting me,' he was completing the information circle. The
circle of the police watching the hackers watching the police watch
them.

It's just that Mendax didn't expect the police at that particular
moment. His mind was a tangle and he looked in disbelief at the band
of officers on his front step. Dazed, he looked at Day and then spoke
out loud, as if talking to himself, `But you're too short to be a
cop.'

Day looked surprised. `Is that meant to be an insult?' he said.

It wasn't. Mendax was in denial and it wasn't until the police had
slipped past him into the house that the reality of the situation
slowly began to sink in. Mendax's mind started to work again.

The disks. The damn disks. The beehive.

An avid apiarist, Mendax kept his own hive. Bees fascinated him. He
liked to watch them interact, to see their sophisticated social
structure. So it was with particular pleasure that he enlisted their
help in hiding his hacking activities. For months he had meticulously
secreted the disks in the hive. It was the ideal location--unlikely,
and well guarded by 60000 flying things with stings. Though he hadn't
bought the hive specifically for hiding stolen computer account
passwords for the likes of the US Air Force 7th Command Group in the
Pentagon, it appeared to be a secure hiding place.

He had replaced the cover of the super box, which housed the
honeycomb, with a sheet of coloured glass so he could watch the bees
at work. In summer, he put a weather protector over the glass. The
white plastic cover had raised edges and could be fastened securely to
the glass sheet with metal clasps. As Mendax considered his
improvements to the bee box, he realised that this hive could provide
more than honey. He carefully laid out the disks between the glass and
the weather protector. They fitted perfectly in the small gap.

Mendax had even trained the bees not to attack him as he removed and
replaced the disks every day. He collected sweat from his armpits on
tissues and then soaked the tissues in a sugar water solution. He fed
this sweaty nectar to the bees. Mendax wanted the bees to associate
him with flowers instead of a bear, the bees' natural enemy.

But on the evening of the AFP raid Mendax's incriminating disks were
in full view on the computer table and the officers headed straight
for them. Ken Day couldn't have hoped for better evidence. The disks
were full of stolen userlists, encrypted passwords, cracked passwords,
modem telephone numbers, documents revealing security flaws in various
computer systems, and details of the AFP's own investigation--all from
computer systems Mendax had penetrated illegally.

Mendax's problems weren't confined to the beehive disks. The last
thing he had done on the computer the day before was still on screen.
It was a list of some 1500 accounts, their passwords, the dates that
Mendax had obtained them and a few small notes beside each one.

The hacker stood to the side as the police and two Telecom Protective
Services officers swarmed through the house. They photographed his
computer equipment and gathered up disks, then ripped up the carpet so
they could videotape the telephone cord running to his modem. They
scooped up every book, no small task since Mendax was an avid reader,
and held each one upside down looking for hidden computer passwords on
loose pieces of paper. They grabbed every bit of paper with
handwriting on it and poured through his love letters, notebooks and
private diaries. `We don't care how long it takes to do this job,' one
cop quipped. `We're getting paid overtime. And danger money.'

The feds even riffled through Mendax's collection of old Scientific
American and New Scientist magazines. Maybe they thought he had
underlined a word somewhere and turned it into a passphrase for an
encryption program.

Of course, there was only one magazine the feds really wanted:
International Subversive. They scooped up every print-out of the
electronic journal they could find.

As Mendax watched the federal police sift through his possessions and
disassemble his computer room, an officer who had some expertise with
Amigas arrived. He told Mendax to get the hell out of the computer
room.

Mendax didn't want to leave the room. He wasn't under arrest and
wanted to make sure the police didn't plant anything. So he looked at
the cop and said, `This is my house and I want to stay in this room.
Am I under arrest or not?'

The cop snarled back at him, `Do you want to be under arrest?'

Mendax acquiesced and Day, who was far more subtle in his approach,
walked the hacker into another room for questioning. He turned to
Mendax and asked, with a slight grin, `So, what's it like being
busted? Is it like Nom told you?'

Mendax froze.

There were only two ways that Day could have known Nom had told Mendax
about his bust. Nom might have told him, but this was highly unlikely.
Nom's hacking case had not yet gone to court and Nom wasn't exactly on
chummy terms with the police. The other alternative was that the AFP
had been tapping telephones in Mendax's circle of hackers, which the
IS trio had strongly suspected. Talking in a three-way phone
conversation with Mendax and Trax, Nom had relayed the story of his
bust. Mendax later relayed Nom's story to Prime Suspect--also on the
phone. Harbouring suspicions is one thing. Having them confirmed by a
senior AFP officer is quite another.

Day pulled out a tape recorder, put it on the table, turned it on and
began asking questions. When Mendax told Day he wouldn't answer him,
Day turned the recorder off. `We can talk off the record if you want,'
he told the hacker.

Mendax nearly laughed out loud. Police were not journalists. There was
no such thing as an off-the-record conversation between a suspect and
a police officer.

Mendax asked to speak to a lawyer. He said he wanted to call
Alphaline, a free after-hours legal advice telephone service. Day
agreed, but when he picked up the telephone to inspect it before
handing it over to Mendax, something seemed amiss. The phone had an
unusual, middle-pitched tone which Day didn't seem to recognise.
Despite there being two Telecom employees and numerous police
specialists in the house, Day appeared unable to determine the cause
of the funny tone. He looked Mendax dead in the eye and said, `Is this
a hijacked telephone line?'

Hijacked? Day's comment took Mendax by surprise. What surprised him
was not that Day suspected him of hijacking the line, but rather that
he didn't know whether the line had been manipulated.

`Well, don't you know?' he taunted Day.

For the next half hour, Day and the other officers picked apart
Mendax's telephone, trying to work out what sort of shenanigans the
hacker had been up to. They made a series of calls to see if the
long-haired youth had somehow rewired his telephone line, perhaps to
make his calls untraceable.

In fact, the dial tone on Mendax's telephone was the very normal sound
of a tone-dial telephone on an ARE-11 telephone exchange. The tone was
simply different from the ones generated by other exchange types, such
as AXE and step-by-step exchanges.

Finally Mendax was allowed to call a lawyer at Alphaline. The lawyer
warned the hacker not to say anything. He said the police could offer
a sworn statement to the court about anything the hacker said, and
then added that the police might even be wired.

Next, Day tried the chummy approach at getting information from the
hacker. `Just between you and me, are you Mendax?' he asked.

Silence.

Day tried another tactic. Hackers have a well-developed sense of
ego--a flaw Day no doubt believed he could tap into.

`There have been a lot of people over the years running around
impersonating you--using your handle,' he said.

Mendax could see Day was trying to manipulate him but by this stage he
didn't care. He figured that the police already had plenty of evidence
that linked him to his handle, so he admitted to it.

Day had some other surprising questions up his sleeve.

`So, Mendax, what do you know about that white powder in the bedroom?'

Mendax couldn't recall any white powder in the bedroom. He didn't do
drugs, so why would there be any white powder anywhere? He watched two
police officers bringing two large red toolboxes in the house--they
looked like drug testing kits. Jesus, Mendax thought. I'm being set
up.

The cops led the hacker into the bedroom and pointed to two neat lines
of white powder laid out on a bench.

Mendax smiled, relieved. `It's not what you think,' he said. The white
powder was glow-in-the-dark glue he had used to paint stars on the
ceiling of his child's bedroom.

Two of the cops started smiling at each other. Mendax could see
exactly what was going through their minds: It's not every cocaine or
speed user that can come up with a story like that.

One grinned at the other and exclaimed gleefully, `TASTE TEST!'

`That's not a good idea,' Mendax said, but his protests only made
things worse. The cops shooed him into another room and returned to
inspect the powder by themselves.

What Mendax really wanted was to get word through to Prime Suspect.
The cops had probably busted all three IS hackers at the same time,
but maybe not. While the police investigated the glue on their own,
Mendax managed to sneak a telephone call to his estranged wife and
asked her to call Prime Suspect and warn him. He and his wife might
have had their differences, but he figured she would make the call
anyway.

When Mendax's wife reached Prime Suspect later that night, he replied,
`Yeah, there's a party going on over here too.'

Mendax went back in to the kitchen where an officer was tagging the
growing number of possessions seized by the police. One of the female
officers was struggling to move his printer to the pile. She smiled
sweetly at Mendax and asked if he would move it for her. He obliged.

The police finally left Mendax's house at about 3 a.m. They had spent
three and half hours and seized 63 bundles of his personal belongings,
but they had not charged him with a single crime.

When the last of the unmarked police cars had driven away, Mendax
stepped out into the silent suburban street. He looked around. After
making sure that no-one was watching him, he walked to a nearby phone
booth and rang Trax.

`The AFP raided my house tonight.' he warned his friend. `They just
left.'

Trax sounded odd, awkward. `Oh. Ah. I see.'

`Is there something wrong? You sound strange,' Mendax said.

`Ah. No ... no, nothing's wrong. Just um ... tired. So, um ... so the
feds could ... ah, be here any minute ...' Trax's voice trailed off.

But something was very wrong. The AFP were already at Trax's house,
and they had been there for 10 hours.

The IS hackers waited almost three years to be charged. The threat of
criminal charges hung over their heads like personalised Swords of
Damocles. They couldn't apply for a job, make a friend at TAFE or plan
for the future without worrying about what would happen as a result of
the AFP raids of 29 October 1991.

Finally, in July 1994, each hacker received formal charges--in the
mail. During the intervening years, all three hackers went through
monumental changes in their lives.
...
In any case, by December 1991 Mendax had agreed to a police interview,
based on legal advice. Ken Day interviewed Mendax, and the hacker was
open with Day about what he had done. He refused, however, to
implicate either Trax or Prime Suspect. In February 1992, Prime
Suspect followed suit, with two interviews. He was also careful about
what he said regarding his fellow hackers. Mendax was interviewed a
second time, in February 1992, as was Trax in August.

After the raid, Trax's psychiatric condition remained unstable. He
changed doctors and began receiving home visits from a hospital
psychiatric service. Eventually, a doctor prescribed medication.

The three hackers continued to talk on the phone, and see each other
occasionally. One or the other might drop out of communication for a
period, but would soon return to the fold. They helped each other and
they maintained their deep anti-establishment sentiments.

After the charges arrived in the mail, they called each other to
compare notes. Mendax thought out loud on the phone to Prime Suspect,
`I guess I should get a lawyer'.

`Yeah. I got one. He's lining up a barrister too.'

`They any good?' Mendax asked.

`Dunno. I guess so. The solicitor works at Legal Aid, an in-house guy.
I've only met them a few times.'

`Oh,' Mendax paused. `What are their names?'

`John McLoughlin and Boris Kayser. They did Electron's case.'

Trax and Prime Suspect decided to plead guilty. Once they saw the
overwhelming evidence--data taps, telephone voice taps, data seized
during the raids, nearly a dozen statements by witnesses from the
organisations they had hacked, the 300-page Telecom report--they
figured they would be better off pleading. The legal brief ran to more
than 7000 pages. At least they would get some kudos with the judge for
cooperating in the police interviews and pleading early in the
process, thus saving the court time and money.

Mendax, however, wanted to fight the charges. He knew about Pad and
Gandalf's case and the message from that seemed to be pretty clear:
Plead and you go to prison, fight and you might get off free.

The DPP shuffled the charges around so much between mid-1994 and 1995
that all the original charges against Trax, issued on 20 July 1994,
were dropped in favour of six new charges filed on Valentines Day,
1995. At that time, new charges--largely for hacking a Telecom
computer--were also laid against Mendax and Prime Suspect.

By May 1995, the three hackers faced 63 charges in all: 31 for Mendax,
26 for Prime Suspect and six for Trax. In addition, NorTel claimed the
damages attributed to the hacker incident totalled about $160000--and
the company was seeking compensation from the responsible parties. The
Australian National University claimed another $4200 in damages.

Most of the charges related to obtaining illegal access to commercial
or other information, and inserting and deleting data in numerous
computers. The deleting of data was not malicious--it generally
related to cleaning up evidence of the hackers' activities. However,
all three hackers were also charged with some form of `incitement'. By
writing articles for the IS magazine, the prosecution claimed the
hackers had been involved in disseminating information which would
encourage others to hack and phreak.

On 4 May 1995 Mendax sat in the office of his solicitor, Paul
Galbally, discussing the committal hearing scheduled for the next day.
...
As Phoenix was leaving the courtroom, a tall, skinny young man, loped
down the aisle towards him.

`Congratulations,' the stranger said, his long hair dangling in
delicate curls around his shoulders.
...
His hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, Mendax blinked and rolled
his eyes several times as if brought from a dark space into the
bright, white-walled courtroom.

Later that day, after Judge Ross had read the other judges' sentences,
he gave Mendax a sentence similar to Prime Suspect's--a recorded
conviction on all counts, a reparation payment of $2100 to ANU and a
three-year good behaviour bond.

There were two variations. Prime Suspect and Trax both received $500
good behaviour bonds; Judge Ross ordered a $5000 bond for Mendax.
Further, Judge Lewis had given Prime Suspect almost twelve months to
pay his $2100 reparation. Judge Ross ordered Mendax to pay within
three months.

...
Devastated by the break-down of his marriage and unhinged by the AFP
raid, Mendax sank into a deep depression and consuming anger. By the
middle of November 1991, he was admitted to hospital.

He hated hospital, its institutional regimens and game-playing
shrinks. Eventually, he told the doctors he wanted out. He might be
crazy, but hospital was definitely making him crazier. He left there
and stayed at his mother's house. The next year was the worst of his
life.

Once a young person leaves home--particularly the home of a
strong-willed parent--it becomes very difficult for him or her to
return. Short visits might work, but permanent residency often fails.
Mendax lived for a few days at home, then went walkabout. He slept in
the open air, on the banks of rivers and creeks, in grassy
meadows--all on the country fringes of Melbourne's furthest suburbs.
Sometimes he travelled closer to the city, overnighting in places like
the Merri Creek reserve.

Mostly, he haunted Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenong Ranges National
Park. Because of the park's higher elevation, the temperature dropped
well below the rest of Melbourne in winter. In summer, the mosquitoes
were unbearable and Mendax sometimes woke to find his face swollen and
bloated from their bites.

For six months after the AFP raid, Mendax didn't touch a computer.
Slowly, he started rebuilding his life from the ground up. By the time
the AFP's blue slips--carrying 29 charges--arrived in July 1994, he
was settled in a new house with his child. Throughout his period of
transition, he talked to Prime Suspect and Trax on the phone
regularly--as friends and fellow rebels, not fellow hackers.

Anonymous · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

IS = International Subversives

The International Subversive, the underground magazine edited by Mendax:

An electronic magazine, The International Subversive had a simple
editorial policy. You could only have a copy of the magazine if you
wrote an `article'. The policy was a good way of protecting against
nappies--sloppy or inexperienced hackers who might accidentally draw
police attention. Nappies also tended to abuse good phreaking and
hacking techniques, which might cause Telecom to close up security
holes. The result was that IS had a circulation of just three people.

To a non-hacker, IS looked like gobbledygook--the phone book made more
interesting reading. But to a member of the computer underground, IS
was a treasure map. A good hacker could follow the trail of modem
phone numbers and passwords, then use the directions in IS to
disappear through secret entrances into the labyrinth of forbidden
computer networks. Armed with the magazine, he could slither out of
tight spots, outwit system admins and find the treasure secreted in
each computer system.

Looks like he was into publishing early on

kryptos973281 · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

I'm sure the book could be fun.

I actually love the little anecdotes from Underground such as:

Now, to test a command. Mendax wanted something innocuous, which
wouldn’t screw up the 1000 lines permanently. It was almost 7 a.m. and
he needed to wrap things up before Telecom employees began coming into
work.
‘RING’ seemed harmless enough. It might ring one of the numbers in the
range after another--a process he could stop. He typed the command in.
Nothing happened. Then a few full stops began to slowly spread across
his screen:
. . . . . . .
RUNG
The system had just rung all 1000 numbers at the same time. One
thousand phones ringing all at once.

It would also let people see that he doesn't want to harm anyone.

But yeah, I guess for americans he will always be a hi-tech terrorist (while in fact he was simply exploring)...but to me, the US are the real terrorists hi-tech and otherwise (for killing many many native americans who were peacefully living there until the white men came and did some "exploring").

But for me, Assange is not a terrorist. He is just someone who tries to make the world a better place. (I have a friend who is pretty similar, and at times I do think someone needs to save those guys from themselves, because they usually do tons of good things for others and forget about themselves). Also, as Assange rightly said, most of the time the world "doesn't want to be changed"...but the good people still try anyway.

Anonymous · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

kryptos973281;1384048 said:

I'm sure the book could be fun.

I actually love the little anecdotes from Underground such as:

It would also let people see that he doesn't want to harm anyone.

But yeah, I guess for americans he will always be a hi-tech terrorist (while in fact he was simply exploring)...but to me, the US are the real terrorists hi-tech and otherwise (for killing many many native americans who were peacefully living there until the white men came and did some "exploring").

BLAME the FUKING SPANISH !

kryptos973281 · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

I blame anyone who kills or hurts innocent people.

Just took the native americans as yet another example of why the USA are terrorists.

(other example can be seen here: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBJOBl1G3Kc"][/ame])

Anonymous · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

kryptos973281;1384059 said:

I blame anyone who kills or hurts innocent people.

Sounds like the Spaniards to me !

YouTube - Spanish inquisition

kryptos973281 · Dec 26, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

Could have given the same reasons why the US are terrorists as Assange does here: , but always giving the same reason is boring, but fact still remains.

Kilia · Dec 27, 2010

Re: Assange to write an autobiography

It's a shame that Assange has to write a book to sell to get legal funds for himself for all this negative media stuff. Anyways, I would buy the book if it can be published.

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