WikiLeaks founder Assange may be near end of long fight to stay out of US

[Emrys]

35. Utter B.S. Why do you seem to think you can type just anything?

Hacking

By 1987, aged 16, Assange had become a skilled hacker[44][45] under the name Mendax,[30][46][47] taken from Horace's splendide mendax (from Latin, "nobly untruthful&quot .[41][48][37] Around this time, the police raided his mother's home and confiscated his equipment. According to Assange, "it involved some dodgy character who was alleging that we had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from Citibank". Ultimately, no charges were raised and his equipment was returned, but Assange "decided that it might be wise to be a bit more discreet".[30]

In 1988, Assange used social engineering to get the password to Australia's Overseas Telecommunications Commission's mainframes.[42][37] Assange had a self-imposed set of ethics: he did not damage or crash systems or data he hacked, and he shared information.[37][49][42] The Sydney Morning Herald later opined that he had become one of Australia's "most notorious hackers",[50] and The Guardian said that by 1991 he was "probably Australia's most accomplished hacker".[47] Assange's official biography on WikiLeaks called him Australia's "most famous ethical computer hacker",[51] and the earliest version said he "hacked thousands of systems, including the Pentagon" when he was younger.[51][52][53]

He and two others, known as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect", formed a hacking group called "the International Subversives".[30][54][46][47] According to NPR, David Leigh, and Luke Harding, Assange may have been involved in the WANK hack at NASA in 1989, but this has never been proven.[55][4][27]: 42  Assange called it "the origin of hacktivism", and the Swedish television documentary WikiRebels, which was made with Assange's cooperation, also hinted he was involved.[29] The WANK worm was also discussed in the opening chapter of Underground, a book for which Assange was the researcher.

In mid-1991, the three hackers began targeting MILNET,[52] a secret data network used by the US military, where Assange found reports he said showed the US military was hacking other parts of itself.[37] Assange found a backdoor and later said they "had control over it for two years."[47][52] In 2012, Ken Day, the former head of the Australian Federal Police computer crime team, said that there had been no evidence the International Subversives had hacked MILNET. In response to Assange's statements about accessing MILNET, Day said that "Assange may still be liable to prosecution for that act — if it can be proved."[56]

Assange wrote a program called Sycophant that allowed the International Subversives to conduct "massive attacks on the US military".[29] The International Subversives regularly hacked into systems belonging to a "who's who of the U.S. military-industrial complex"[37][57][58] and the network of Australia National University.[47][30][52][59] At Hack in the Box Security Conference in Malaysia, Assange later said he had been "a famous teenage hacker in Australia, and I’ve been reading generals’ emails since I was 17". Assange has attributed his motivation to this experience with power.[60][61]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange

Follow the Wikipedia references and you'll see among the sources cited is his one-time ally The Guardian.