It's tempting to want the dating ad to be real, since it contains so much spot-on hilarity, even though an assistant to Assange's London lawyer, Mark Stephens, told AOL News today it was fake.
"Passionate and pig-headed activist intellectual seeks siren for love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy," reads the profile, which is accompanied by photos that appear to be of Assange. "Warning: Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving. I am not the droid you're looking for. Save us both while you still can."
Dan Kitwood, Getty Images
A dating profile attributed to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be a fake -- or a "brilliant PR stunt."
The name on the profile is "Harry Harrison," making the plot thicken even further. Harry Harrison is a sci-fi writer best known for his series of books called "The Stainless Steel Rat," about a one-time criminal mastermind conned into working for the government.
In the profile, Assange comes off as a self-deprecating egomaniac with just enough charm to offset a whiff of misogyny.
Personality tests taken within the site reveal him to be "87% slutty" and he claims to have "Asian teengirl stalkers." He prefers women from countries that have "sustained political turmoil" rather than Western women who can be "valueless and inane."
As for his work, he explains that he directs a "consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated."
OkCupid CEO Sam Yagan told AOL News today that engineers at the site checked the account after they were notified of it on Saturday and didn't find "any of the usual red flags" they spot in fraudulent accounts.
The Village Voice deconstructed the dating profile "mystery" with the help of some of Assange's old blog posts and found some similarities. Since the profile was posted to Reddit and Quora on Sunday, some have speculated that it is authentic because it was last accessed at the end of 2006.
Nobody would have bothered to create a fake profile of Assange in 2006, the thinking goes, which was just before WikiLeaks launched and well before anyone knew who he was.
But time stamps, which indicate the date and time of most everything created online, can easily be falsified by system administrators inside a closed community like a dating website, Internet security experts say.
Why Assange would want this profile online is something of a mystery given that he was arrested and is being held in a British jail in connection with rape and sexual molestation allegations in Sweden. Yagan told the Village Voice that profiles stay up on the site until the member -- in this case either Assange or the counterfeit poster -- decides to have it removed.
Gregg Housh, a longtime Internet activist who at one time was linked to the "Anonymous" hacker group and still retains many ties to them, told AOL News today that he wonders if the profile is real.
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"I've talked to lots of other people on the other side about this and the consensus is that it's a brilliant PR stunt," Housh said. "I've read a ton of stuff written by Julian over the years and it doesn't sound like him. Especially the 'Star Wars' droid reference. He was a little bit more careful and sophisticated in all the writing I've seen of his. But of course you don't know for sure. It could be legit."Yagan said he has "no reason to believe the profile is not real" and thinks it could be legitimate. But he has no proof one way or the other, he said.
Yagan said neither he nor anyone at the company had ever time-stamped anything. "It's definitely not a PR stunt."