Julian Assange's youth in the 1980s in Australia was a time of constant chaos: before settling in Melbourne, he moved more than two dozen times, went to different schools and was at one point thrust into what he called a New Age cult.
So, at age 16, he found his calling: hacking, a career that would soon put him on the brink of global turmoil at a time of national security and anti-political establishment sentiment.
This week, the WikiLeaks founder, 52, boarded a private jet from London for the long-haul flight to the U.S. courthouse in Saipan, where he is due to plead guilty early Wednesday to one count of unlawful receipt and dissemination of national security information.
Assange will return to Australia.
Assange is expected to be released immediately after the Justice Department awarded him credit for the five years he has already served in Britain's Belmarsh prison, after which he will return to Australia, his wife said.
He has at least one more debt to pay: $520,000 to the Australian government for a charter flight home, which he hopes to raise through crowdsourcing.
It is unclear what Assange, who suffered from depression and a minor stroke during his imprisonment, will do next.
But he will once again be able to move freely, completing nearly 12 years of incarceration he spent first in self-imposed exile from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and then in prison after being charged in the United States and detained by British authorities.
He was a daring teenage hacker.
If past examples are any indication, Assange may not be able to stay idle for long.
By his late teens, Assange said he had become Australia's most skilled hacker, using aliases such as Mendax and claiming to have broken into thousands of systems, from the local telecommunications commission to servers at the Department of Defence. (As a teenager, he adopted the motto “Splendido Mendax,” Latin for “splendid lie”.)
Assange has said his goal had always been to publicly share important information hidden by big governments and corporations without damaging the systems he penetrated, and by the early 1990s, Assange and a group of hackers began systematically targeting systems run by what he called the “US military-industrial complex.”
Assange's first brush with the law came in 1994, when he faced 31 charges for hacking into servers owned by Telecom Australia. Sentenced to 290 years in prison, he fell into a deep depression and spent his time wandering and sleeping rough in the wilderness near Melbourne.
He ultimately pleaded guilty and received no prison time, but the experience proved a sore point and solidified his political resolve to attack institutions, including the National Security Agency, that he believed violated individual freedoms.
WikiLeaks has positioned itself as a symbol of transparency.
Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 with a group of like-minded activists, hackers, programmers and academics with the mission of tearing down the veil of secrecy that protects powerful secret societies in private and public life. He defined his role as a digital Robin Hood, liberating “persecuted documents” from those held captive in secret computer networks.
In its early days, WikiLeaks worked closely with mainstream media outlets to expose details of extrajudicial killings in Kenya, China's crackdown on dissidents, and possible financial corruption in the United States and Peru.
The group's success made its founder a celebrity: Mr. Assange was tireless, blunt and wanderlust-filled, traveling from country to country recruiting volunteers, courting potential leakers and touting the virtues of the organization's radical transparency.
In the 2010s, Assange increasingly turned to the United States, earning worldwide acclaim as a freedom of speech fighter and ultimately serving a five-year prison term in Britain.
WikiLeaks subsequently released vast troves of classified information about U.S. military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as classified cables shared among diplomats. During the 2016 election, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, providing embarrassing revelations for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's campaign.
He escaped many times.
At the time, he was already a fugitive, headed for London after being charged by Swedish authorities with sexual assault. (Assange denies the charges and claims they were a secret attempt to have him extradited to the US; the case was dropped in late 2019.)
In 2012, Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador and moved into a 300-square-foot space in the country's embassy in London.
In 2019, a federal grand jury indicted Assange on 18 charges related to WikiLeaks' dissemination of a wide range of national security documents, including a trove of material sent to WikiLeaks nearly a decade ago by Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who provided information on military plans and operations.
By this time, Assange had outgrown his welcome. He was detained by British police and transferred to Belmarsh, where he was held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. According to a story published in the Nation this year, he was surrounded by 232 books, ate his meals alone from a tray, and was allowed only one hour a day to exercise in the prison yard.
A secret hearing will pave the way for his release.
The choreographed multinational dance that eventually led to his release was performed behind closed doors at a secret bail hearing in London last Thursday, British authorities said.
Many of Assange's supporters have lamented the requirement that he plead guilty to any crimes, but images posted on social media by his wife and friends suggest that he is just relieved to be free.
At least he was moving again.