> "Since the early days of WikiLeaks, Assange has spoken at hacking conferences to tout his own history as a “famous teenage hacker in Australia” and to encourage others to hack to obtain information for WikiLeaks. In 2009, for instance, Assange told the Hacking At Random conference that WikiLeaks had obtained nonpublic documents from the Congressional Research Service by exploiting “a small vulnerability” inside the document distribution system of the United States Congress, and then asserted that “[t]his is what any one of you would find if you were actually looking.”"

I don't remember that detail at all, but I did see him at HAR 2009, at a panel discussion about censorship and how to fight it. Afterward we set up a mailinglist for sharing information about censorship-related issues, especially laws and protests against them. It was never terribly active, unfortunately.