Julian Assange (Mendax)
termhackingprivacy
The Australian hacker who as a teenager, under the handle Mendax, was part of the International Subversives and pleaded guilty in 1996 to intrusions including Nortel - later the founder of WikiLeaks and the most disputed figure of the disclosure era.
Before WikiLeaks he co-authored the cryptographic deniable-storage tool Rubberhose and researched the book Underground, which remains the definitive account of the Australian scene. His later career - the 2010 military and diplomatic leaks, the Ecuadorian embassy, extradition proceedings and a 2024 plea deal - divides the hacker community as sharply as any subject in it, along the same fault line the culture has argued since the 1980s: whether releasing information is inherently a public good.
Also known as: mendax, wikileaks, international subversives