Who is Julian Assange? Three Profiles of the WikiLeaks Founder

Try­ing to make heads or tails of Wik­iLeaks, which just released 250,000 US diplo­mat­ic cables this week? Then you may want to spend some time with one arti­cle and one video. First, The New York­er pub­lished this sum­mer an exten­sive pro­file of Julian Assange, the dri­ving force behind Wik­iLeaks. A key pas­sage explain­ing Assange’s world view appears below, and you can get the full pro­file right here. Next up, we have Chris Ander­son, the head of TED, in con­ver­sa­tion Assange. The inter­view, run­ning 20 min­utes, tells you essen­tial­ly “Why the World Needs Wik­iLeaks.” And then why not add to the list Forbes’ lengthy inter­view with Assange, pub­lished ear­li­er this week. (Thanks Avi for that.)

He had come to under­stand the defin­ing human strug­gle not as left ver­sus right, or faith ver­sus rea­son, but as indi­vid­ual ver­sus insti­tu­tion. As a stu­dent of Kaf­ka, Koestler, and Solzhen­it­syn, he believed that truth, cre­ativ­i­ty, love, and com­pas­sion are cor­rupt­ed by insti­tu­tion­al hier­ar­chies, and by “patron­age networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that con­tort the human spir­it. He sketched out a man­i­festo of sorts, titled “Con­spir­a­cy as Gov­er­nance,” which sought to apply graph the­o­ry to pol­i­tics. Assange wrote that ille­git­i­mate gov­er­nance was by def­i­n­i­tion conspiratorial—the prod­uct of func­tionar­ies in “col­lab­o­ra­tive secre­cy, work­ing to the detri­ment of a pop­u­la­tion.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion are dis­rupt­ed, the infor­ma­tion flow among con­spir­a­tors must dwin­dle, and that, as the flow approach­es zero, the con­spir­a­cy dis­solves. Leaks were an instru­ment of infor­ma­tion war­fare.