Family Survival Protocol - Microcosm News: How a teenage misfit became the keeper of Julian Assange's deepest secrets

Thursday, January 9, 2014

How a teenage misfit became the keeper of Julian Assange's deepest secrets - only to betray him

Rolling Stone

The WikiLeaks Mole

Siggi Thordarson with Julian Assange in London 2011.

Allen Clark

By David Kushner

January 6, 2014 9:00 AM ET

On a recent frigid night near Reykjavik, Iceland, Sigurdur "Siggi" Thordarson slips into a bubbling geothermal pool at a suburban swim club. The cherubic, blond 21-year-old, who has been called everything in the press from "attention seeker" to "traitor" to "psychopath," ends many of his days here, where, like most places around the city, he's notorious. But even at a spa, he can find only the briefest moment of relaxation. Soon, the local prosecutor who is trying him for leaking financial records joins him in the tub, and Siggi quickly has to flee to another pool. "How does it feel to be the most dangerous man in Iceland?" a bather shouts across the steam.
Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
In person, Siggi's doughy shape and boyish smile make him seem less than menacing – unless you're another one of the world's most dangerous men, Julian Assange. Four years ago, just as WikiLeaks was winning international notoriety, the then-17-year-old hacking prodigy became Assange's youngest and most trusted sidekick. "It was like Batman and Robin," says Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a former WikiLeaks volunteer and member of the Icelandic parliament. But as Assange became more embattled and besieged, the protégé turned on his mentor in the most shocking of ways: becoming the first FBI informant inside the group.
Siggi's story of international espionage and teenage high-roller antics plays like James Bond meets Superbad, starring a confounding mash-up of awkward man-child and balls-out tech savant. And his tale reveals not only the paranoia and strife within WikiLeaks, but just how far the feds were willing to go to get Assange.
Siggi still lives with his parents in a nondescript high-rise, sitting at his computer in a bedroom lined with stuffed animals, including an orangutan-size Garfield he bought for $2,000. But his jet-black Mercedes ML350 is parked outside, which, along with his recent conviction for sexual misconduct against a 17-year-old boy (he says the relationship was consensual), speaks to his bizarre double life.
The Trials of Bradley Manning
The revelation of Siggi's role as an FBI snitch has polarized WikiLeaks insiders. When I met with WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson (Assange declined to talk for this story), he grew red in the face, dismissing Siggi as "a pathological liar," a party line echoed by the WikiLeaks faithful. "It all sounds rather absurd," Hrafnsson says, "to go and to spend all this time analyzing the absolute bullshit that is flowing out of this young man, who is so troubled that he should be hospitalized."
While other WikiLeaks insiders also question Siggi's credibility, they insist that his story can't be discounted, and there's more to it than the organization is letting on. Tangerine Bolen, founder of the whistle-blowing advocacy organization RevolutionTruth, which used to work closely with WikiLeaks, is among those who say the group's efforts to discredit Siggi are "patently false. They're scared. The fact is Siggi played a key role in the organization and was very close to Julian."
The truth, it seems, may be held in the leaks. Siggi has provided Rolling Stone with more than a terabyte of secret files he claims to have taken from WikiLeaks before he left in November 2011 and gave to the FBI: thousands of pages of chat logs, videos, tapped phone calls, government documents and more than a few bombshells from the organization's most heated years. They're either the real thing, or the most elaborate lie of the digital age.
Jacob Applebaum: The American WikiLeaks Hacker
Assange himself validated the importance of Siggi's documents when he filed an affidavit late this past summer asserting that "the FBI illegally acquired stolen organisational and personal data belonging to WikiLeaks, me and other third parties in Denmark in March 2012" and that the FBI "was attempting to entrap me through Sigurdur Thordarson."
Whatever their origins, the SiggiLeaks are a deep and revealing portal into one of the most guarded and influential organizations of the 21st century – and the extreme measures its embattled leader is willing to take. Of all Assange's allies who've come and gone, few served him as faithfully as Siggi, or betrayed him so utterly. "One thing is sure," Siggi tells me in his thick Icelandic accent, as the vapors from the thermal pool rise around him. "I have not lived a life like a teenager."
Like Assange and so many gifted hackers, Siggi had an isolated childhood. The son of a hairdresser and a paint-company sales manager, he grew up with his little sister in a middleclass suburb of Reykjavik. Though puckish and bright, he was bored by school, alienated from his classmates and dreamed of a life beyond bourgeois Nordic comfort. "When I was, like, 12 years old, I wished for a couple of things," he tells me as we drive one afternoon past some lava fields outside the capital. "I wished to be rich; I wished to be a famous guy; I wished to live an adventureful life."
He found the excitement he craved in computers, and at age 12 he says he hacked into his first website, a local union's home page, which he replaced with a picture of "a big fluffy monkey." The experience empowered him. "When you do something like that, you feel invincible," he says, "and if you can do that, what else can you do?"
He found out two years later, when, on a plane back from a family vacation, he fixed a laptop for a businessman sitting next to him. The executive was so impressed by his skills that he offered him a job at the Icelandic financial firm Milestone: scrubbing computers of sensitive documents. Siggi figures the company trusted him with such data because he was only 14 and must have thought, as he says, "I wouldn't understand what I was supposed to delete." Plus, the pay dwarfed that of his paper route.
WikiLeaks' Greatest Hits
Curious about the files he was erasing, he'd copy them and study them at night. What he eventually discovered astonished him: Employees of Milestone seemed guilty of large-scale corruption in collusion with local politicians. At this time, in 2009, Iceland was reeling from the worldwide financial crisis, and Siggi believed the people deserved to know the role of Milestone and their dirty politicians – even if that meant leaking the files. "Someone has to do it," he thought, "and why not me?"
In the fall, Siggi says he brought more than 600 gigabytes of Milestone data to the Icelandic newspaper Dagbladid Vísir, making front-page news and leading to investigations against the politicians and businessmen he exposed. Siggi believed in the importance of exposing the corruption he describes as "illegal as it gets." With his identity still secret, he kept on leaking to other media outlets until, for reasons he never learned, his childhood friend outed him, a betrayal that changed him. "I literally just stopped believing in humanity," he says. "Since then, I just basically stopped having feelings."
But after being arrested and splashed across the news, he found a powerful connection in Kristinn Hrafnsson. A well-known TV reporter in Reykjavik at the time, Hrafnsson considered Siggi's leaks to be "quite significant" and worthy of an introduction to another up-and-coming whistle-blower, Julian Assange, who was speaking at the University of Iceland. Though WikiLeaks had already exposed death squads in Kenya and financial malfeasance in the Swiss bank Julius Baer, the group was still largely unknown. But at the panel, Siggi found, to his surprise, that Assange was well aware of his work – he even chastised the reporter who revealed Siggi's name in the Milestone leak. "He was basically just condemning the guy, sayingouting whistleblowers is wrong," recalls Siggi, who reveled in the support.
The bond between the two was immediate. Assange too had been arrested for hacking when he was a young man in Australia. He also had a son, Daniel, who was roughly Siggi's age, whom he had little contact. "I think Julian saw himself in Siggi," says Jónsdóttir. "Julian felt an immediate sympathy toward the kid."
After the panel, Siggi says he took Assange to Sea Bar, a small, rustic restaurant on the water. Over lobster soup and whale steak, they spoke about politics, hacking and their shared sense of purpose in exposing the secrets of the elite. Assange struck Siggi as someone with the courage to take on anyone. "He's the kind of activist that does the thing that has to be done," Siggi tells me. After talking for a few hours, Assange took out a small metal box. "Have you ever seen this before?" he said.
Assange cracked open the container and revealed three phones inside. "These are encrypted cellphones," he said. "I'm going to give you one. Just keep it on at all times so I can communicate with you, day and night."

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