flight these days will probably use the technology that I developed. I earned around 50,000 euros a year—too little for what I was doing, but I didn't care. I was active in the open source community. I worked longer hours than the required forty a week and was always experimenting with new solutions. What I did was generally appreciated within the company. My coworkers and I constantly thought up the sort of pranks that technically gifted people use to keep up their spirits in companies like ours. To protest the quality of the coffee, we manipulated the menus of the supposedly economical coffee machines so that they needed constant maintenance. I would regularly send e-mails to a shorttempered colleague from an address on the company server called
[email protected] I enjoyed watching him becoming ever more enraged and would send him follow-up e-mails with statements like "God says you shouldn't get so excited." I lived nearby in the small city of Wiesbaden, and my girlfriend at the time, a very beautiful young woman, worked as a secretary for the company. All in all, I was content with, but hardly euphoric about, my life. My days were full and varied, but there was room for something more. After our falling-out, Julian reportedly said that I would have been nothing without WikiLeaks—that I only got involved with WL because I had nothing better to do with my life. He was right. WL is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although I hardly suffered from extreme boredom before I joined it. I had a server in my kitchen that ate up 8,500 kilowatt hours of electricity annually, I was constantly tinkering around with networks, and I met up with people at the local branch of the Chaos Club. Still, my heart was only half in these t