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The 2010 Julian Assange arrest happened in December of that year in good old London. Charges were trumped up that spelled out acts of sexual misconduct. These charges were believed to be the well-organized efforts of both the Swedes and the Americans.
WikiLeaks had been accused of leaking very sensitive and incriminating documents. It also put out some extensively damaging video footage that detailed the involvement of Washington and some specific allies in acts that included assassinations, rendition, regime change, torture, and most damaging of all was the exposure of criminal activities involving U.S. -led military interventions that took place in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The film about this story is a work of fiction done by the Australian film director Robert Connolly. He is also known for his works 'Balibo' in 2009 and 'The Bank' in 2001.
The story depicts a young Assange growing up in 1980's Melbourne, Australia. He was a hacker. They used materials taken from the current version of 'Underground'. This body of work was a collaboration perfected by Assange and his co-author Suelette Dreyfuss. Connolly attempted to reconstruct the early years of Assange. He painted him as a young talented teenager landing into adulthood with a determination that he would expose the government malfeasance he observed.
The part of Julian was played by Alex Williams. The character was part of a sub-culture of underground hackers which he joined with under the handle of 'Mendax'. This was around 1988. In 1989 the computer system at NASA suffered an attack that came out of Australia via the 'WANK' worm.
The goal was to sabotage launching of the 'Galileo' rocket to Jupiter. The attack was taken to be part of some anti-nuclear protest. Even though nobody ever took full responsibility for the action, in the film there is an inference that Julian was actively involved.
That prompted Julian (Mendax) and a couple of his friends to form their own group called the 'International Subversives'. They considered themselves to be 'white hat hackers' whose only interest was to look at and then share any and all information they could find without stealing it.
There were other members of the group involved as well. There was 'Prime Suspect', who was played by Callan McAliffe, and 'Trax', who was played by Jordan Raskopoulos.
Trax was considered a leading expert (phreaker) in telephony. That meant he was proficient in the use of communication equipment for connecting phones over long distances. There one motto was 'We will reveal the truth'.
As a boy Julian gets dragged to many various anti-nuclear demonstrations. This is because his mother Christine was a radical campaigner for the anti-nuclear cause. She had a paper mache' puppet in the form of Uncle Sam that Julian (Mendax) ridiculed by saying "Your puppets can change nothing. They still launch plutonium into outer space."
The character 'Electra' was played brilliantly by Laura Wheelright. In this film she is a girlfriend of Julian's. She turns up pregnant and constantly demands that Julian give up his hacking activities. They live as squatters under tough conditions and after he has enough of her wining they break up.
From there they go on to hack into many different government and corporate systems. One of their largest targets was the Pentagon. Finally the FBI teams up with the Australian Federal Police and creates a special task force. On the very eve of Julian's arrest he is able to hack into MILNET which is one of the websites of the U.S. Military Networks.
The film was brilliantly done with an intelligent rendering of the events. Connolly addressed the public screening crowd touting how crucial he thought it was that he addressed the outright falsehoods and unjust aspersions cast at Julian by the media and governments.
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