Free Julian Assange - WikiLeaks by Sophie Radermecker

at Suburbia, Australia’s oldest public access network. It was launched in 1990 and open to everyone in 1993 even before the Internet became a commercially viable network. While other competitors forged a commercial identity, Suburbia remained true to its original ambition: offer a private and secure system that supports newsgroups and the editing of online content.
    Suburbia was and is a non-profit organization that has always fought for freedom of the press. The organization didn’t receive any grants and existed only thanks to the generosity of its members who gave their time and equipment without obligation.
    The members included convinced judges and politicians as well as hackers. They agreed on the idea that everyone online had the right to publish without worrying about politics, opinions, pressure or financial means.
    Since 2008, Suburbia stopped accepting new members, as the demands were too high. Nevertheless, they said that they could be contacted by NGOs with a specific need or if co-opted by a current member. They could then filter out nasty intrusions that didn’t serve Suburbia’s basic interests.
    By analyzing domain names, one could see that suburbia.com. au hosted www.whistleblowers.org.au on one of their servers. Awhistleblower’s standard procedure was to expose bad practices by providing evidence of wrongdoing. The whistleblower then investigated using different means that were not divulged, especially not to the media. The risk to informers was high, as the people they accused were sometimes criminals, people in important positions or entire organizations. They often made serious enemies in political parties, state departments and major corporations.
    As retaliation, the whistleblower was often attacked personally by being called a troublemaker, crazy person or malicious liar. They might have been given the cold shoulder from colleagues and superiors or have been attacked in other ways, even physically.
    Brian Martin, Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia had been active in the organization since 1991 and was president of Whistleblowers Australia from 1996 to 1999.
    In an article of the
UPIU
, an advice paper for future journalists, Martin explained: “The wider picture is exercise of power in society. I think we’re all mostly better off when people are more equal. That means we’re able to speak out and freely negotiate things. In most organizations, and certainly in governments, they’re very hierarchical and people at the bottom don’t have free speech. People can stand up on a street corner and say lots of things, or these days you can set up a blog and write any comments that you like. Basically, if you say a bunch of tripe, you’re going to lose credibility.” The journalist added: “Perhaps losing one’s credibility and reputation should be the only punishment for people who make false accusations, and when unethical and criminal actions are brought to light, it seems natural that whoever is exposed suffers public embarrassment. Too often however, the whistleblower is attacked for going public with his evidence.”
    When Julian started to work for Suburbia in 1993, Brian Martin and his whistleblowers had already been active for two years. As network administrator at Suburbia, he had access to all the information circulating around the site, which gave him a lot of ideas.
    One day, Suburbia received a request from a defender of the Church of Scientology, asking that the company block a site providing confidential documents of the movement and denouncing some of their practices.
    Julian got the request and refused to honor it. He passed the request onto the management. Mark Dorset, who was in charge, backed Julian up.
    The site’s creator was David Gerard, living in Melbourne at the time. He created the site mainly to criticize and condemn an international organization that was against freedom of speech,