Honest answer AFAIK: I met Julian back in 1997 in Australia at the security conference that launched his and Suelette Dreyfus' book about the history of the Melbourne hacker scene, Underground. I met him again at HAR2009 in the Netherlands. He was very interested in the fact that I had been living in China for nearly 10 years and confided that he was really surprised after Wikileaks launched not to have received Chinese materials. I hope to meet him again as a free man... or the next time I'm in London. In my opinion he's a fantastic person, an internationalist and a pragmatist who shares knowledge and resources, has truly excelled in multiple fields and genuinely embodies the triple ideals of curiosity, intelligence and social concern. The world needs more Julians, but I think he would agree it would be better if an organization like Wikileaks wasn't required to keep the bastards honest. Shame on those working in defense and surveillance industries.

PS. Everyone here should play the 4 hour game Orwell which does a great job of communicating the social ethics at play in surveillance abuse of technology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13549725