Underground

The controversial book behind the new Robert Connoly film Underground, The Julian Assange Story - described as a 'tale of madness, paranoia and brilliance', The Weekend Australian.

Suelette Dreyfus and embattled Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, tell the compelling true story of the computer underground and the bizarre lives and crimes of an elite group of young hackers who, in the 1980s and 1990s, took on the forces of the establishment.

Using home computers, they conquered some of the world’s biggest and most powerful organisations, including the US military. By day, sat in suburban school classrooms. By night they were knee-deep in NASA networks.

Brilliant and obsessed, many of them found themselves addicted to hacking. Some descended into drug addiction and madness. Others were convicted and served time in gaol before slowly piecing their lives back together.

From the inside, Dreyfus and Assange reveal this shadowy world of hidden identities and secret information.

'Underground is an adventure book for the brain .. Cowboys .. roamed unpatrolled electronic frontiers. Some made it into the systems of powerful organisations, [where] the hackers would leave their mark - akin to flashing a virtual brown-eye - [and] .. cause chaos to the powers that be. Underground takes us inside these gods of a new technology.. It's an action story.' - Sarah Macdonald, Triple J Radio