The Wizard of Oz

Julian Assange is a wiz of a wiz, if ever a wiz there was.  Put him, a computer and the internet together, add a big rebellious anti authority streak, a bunch of devoted followers and fans,  and there's nothing much he can't do.   He is a top-of-the-class hacker, an all time uber geek, a punk rock pirate.

And a babe magnet on a big scale.  Just check out the girly sites on the web devoted to this man, with his doe eyes and pale skin bathed in the strange white light of theTV screens and flash cameras that capture his image so regularly. With a toss of that white blonde hair, and a rare enigmatic smile,  he  draws women to him - even though a couple of ladies have been giving him some aggro in Sweden lately. Something to do with condoms, or the lack of . . .

 But there seems to be a protective female shield put up around our boy - remember, it was the beautiful socialite Jemima Khan who put up a lot of the bail money to spring him from prison recently,  and he came out to an adoring throng with phrases like 'I want to have your baby' tossed at him.

Rolling Stone has claimed him for their own - but is this photogenic,  softly spoken, brilliant computer programmer and man-on-a-mission, who has taken on the power of the USA by publishing something like 91,000 classified US documents on the war in Afghanistan, about to crash and burn? Whatever happens, we're not just talking about a pretty face here. Julian Assange has a hell of a lot of courage but he's made some very powerful enemies.

Is he hero or villain? Or just, for all his brilliance, a touch naive -  an extraodinarily gifted product of a very troubled childhood.

He was reportedly born in 1971 in Townsville in Australia.  He and his mother and half-brother spent his childhood fleeing the father of that half-brother.  It seems this man became  a member of a scary cult, led by a female ex-nurse who had her own weird ideas on kidnapping and bringing up children.

In all, Julian was enrolled in 17 schools and six universities by the time he finally came into adulthood.. He took adult education classes in physics and maths at Melbourne Uni and launched himself into the mysterious world of hackers. In 1995 he developed 'Strobe', the first free  port scanner, which allowed hackers to penetrate networks throughout the world. Two years later he developed another piece of encryption software, to allow hackers to conceal their identities when penetrating computers worldwide.

He discussed his expertise in the wonderfully titled 'Underground Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontiers", published in 1997.

(Also, along the way, he married and acquired a son).

And in 2006 he put all these stunning computer skills together to set up Wikileaks.

And that's very much an on-going story, for later.