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.

The ice-man cometh . . .and all that

Power and the sources of power, and the people who wield it, fascinate me. Yet I find the Wikileaks saga, with its cool blonde condom-hating front man, Julian Assange,  an example of a rather spurious type of so-called power - in fact, there's something vaguely  comical about the whole thing.

The organisation is murky in the extreme, the cast of characters are, to put it mildly, unusual in their life styles and behaviour, and it is never obvious who is briefing who, lying or telling the truth, pushing a hidden agenda or simply fantasizing and making some of it up as they go along.  It's a beautifully complex story and God alone knows who and what is at the back of it because for the life of me I can't see anything that tells me who is funding it, and what the overall agenda is.

As Wikileakileaks.org says, Wikileaks' tagline is 'We open governments' yet the organisation itself is about as open as North Korea.

Assange's admirers seem to particularly love him because he's sticking one to the good old US of A.  Yeah, right.  He doesn't seem to like condoms either - though he says himself that women have been very generous to him.  Seems it's not just gentlemen who prefer blondes.

He has a certain star quality, he's photogenic - and, though I hate to use that cliched word, face to face he probably has charisma. My goodness, I'll be saying he's got the X-factor next. Time to move on and ask what he's actually done.

Amid all this fuss and uproar, what has Wikileaks really achieved?   As far as I can see, nothing has been leaked that  most people interested in current affairs didn't already know, or suspect.  So the Saudis have been urging the US to bomb the hell out of Iran?  Come on, is anyone really suprised that having Ahmadinejad as a near neighbour on the other side of the Persian Gulf makes the Saudis nervous?

Where did it all this begin? Maybe I'll take a look at the history of it in the New Year.