Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. Born in 1971, Assange hails form Queensland, Australia, where he was raised by his politically-engaged mother, Christine Ann Hawkins, who instilled antiwar values in her son. During his teenage years, Assange became a skilled computer programmer and was a member of the early hacker underground in Australia. Early in his hacker exploits, he concluded that government secrecy was the primary cause of injustice in the contemporary world.
Assange believes that computer specialists like himself are best positioned to challenge the authoritarianism of government, corporate, and military power. In 2006, he founded WikiLeaks.org, a website that facilitates whistleblowing by receiving documents anonymously and publishing them for the global public to read. Inspired by his participation in the cypherpunk movement, Assange built the site using digital encryption. Becasue WikiLeaks publishes the primary documents disclosed by whistleblowers—a practcie Assange calls scientific journalism—the website not only provides a platform for whistleblowers and a resource for journalists, it also operates as a library, perhaps the largest publicly-available archival collection of government and corporate documents in the world.