From London Review of Books, March 6 2014 regarding Julian Assange

"At the time of the Egyptian uprising, Mubarak tried to close down the country’s mobile phone network, a service that came through Canada. Julian and his gang hacked into Nortel and fought against Mubarak’s official hackers to reverse the process. The revolution continued and Julian was satisfied, sitting back in our remote kitchen eating chocolates."

I think someone had the author 'snowed'. Thoughts ?

While I find it somewhat unlikely that Julian Assange was personally involved in cracking the security of Nortel's network, I find it unlikely in the extreme that traffic on Egypt's cell phone network should somehow be routed through equipment in Canada.

It is possible that "hackers" broke into Nortel equipment in Egypt in order to thwart an attempt to shut down the network, and it is also possible that Julian Assange was aware that this was happening and he may even have played a minor role in the attack.

The author comes across as pretty clueless about technology in general.

Any statements from Nortel?

Interestingly, Nortel was hacked and did nothing about it. They didn't care. However, Nortel filed for bancruptcy in 2009, and the Mubarak indicent was in 2011.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortel#...being_detected

Asange also tried to take some credit for breaking Climategate, when it was actually a leak. In colequialisms? I think he's a tosser! I wouldn't beleive anything he's says with out irrifutable documented evidence that leads to proof of his claims. He's a narcasistic glory chaser. Just my humble thoughts. You did ask what we think

This is wrong it was Anonymous. It started off in Tunisia.

So I guess the conclusion is that the author was snowed

In the same article he was asked who as the 'best' hacker - he replied that he was # 3 ! How would you calculate that ? If I was the "#3 hacker", no one would ever know about it, and certainly not a journalist !