Internet's freedom fighter Julian Assange ( Person of the Year 2010)

Julian Paul Assange (born 3 July 1971) is an Australian journalist,publisher and Internet activist. He is the spokesperson and

editor in chief for WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for news leaks. Before working with the website, he was a hacker, university student and computer

programmer.He has lived in several countries and has made occasional public appearances to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative

journalism.Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has been involved in publishing material about extrajudicial killings

in Kenya, for which he won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award.In 1987, after turning 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax" .He and two other

hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. Assange wrote down the early rules of the subculture: "Don’t damage computer systems

you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks) and share information".

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006.That year, Assange wrote two essays setting out the philosophy behind WikiLeaks: "To radically shift regime behavior we must

think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and

discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.Assange sits on Wikileaks's nine-member advisory board and

is a prominent media spokesman on its behalf. While newspapers have described him as a "director" or "founder" of Wikileaks, Assange has said, "I don't call

myself a founder" he does describe himself as the editor in chief of WikiLeaks and has stated that he has the final decision in the process of vetting

documents submitted to the site.Assange says that Wikileaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined "That's not

something I say as a way of saying how successful we are – rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people

has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It's disgraceful.In 2006, CounterPunch

called him "Australia's most infamous former computer hacker." The Age has called him "one of the most intriguing people in the world" and "internet's freedom

fighter." Assange has called himself "extremely cynical". The Personal Democracy Forum said that as a teenager he was "Australia's most famous ethical

computer hacker." He has been described as being largely self-taught and widely read on science and mathematics and as thriving on intellectual battle.

WikiLeaks has been involved in the publication of material documenting extrajudicial killings in Kenya, a report of toxic waste dumping on the African coast,

Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike video, and material involving large banks such as Kaupthing and Julius

Baer among other documents.Assange was awarded the 2010 Sam Adams Award by the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. In September 2010, Assange was voted as number 23 among the "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010" by

the British magazine New Statesman.In their November/December issue, Utne Reader magazine named Assange as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World".

In December 2010, Julian Assange was named the Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year, as well as runner-up for 2010 Person of the Year.