The End Of Secrecy_ The Rise And Fall Of WikiLeaks Part 2

BEN L LAURIE, ENCRYPTION EXPERT.

Julian a.s.sange can be seen on the conference video giving an enthusiastic raised-fist salute. Alongside him stands a thin, intense-looking figure. This is the German programmer Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who has just met a.s.sange at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, the European hackers' gathering, and is about to become a key lieutenant. Domscheit-Berg eventually gave up his full-time job with US computer giant EDS, and devoted himself to perfecting WikiLeaks' technical architecture, adopting the underground nom de guerre "Daniel Schmitt".

Domscheit-Berg's friendship with a.s.sange was to end in bitter recriminations, but the relationship marked a key step in the Australian hacker's emergence from the chrysalis of his Melbourne student milieu. "I heard about WikiLeaks in late 2007 from a couple of friends," says Domscheit-Berg. "I started reading about it a bit more. I started to understand the value of such a project to society."

The Chaos Computer Club is one of the biggest and oldest hacker groups in the world. One of its co-founders in 1981 was the visionary hacker Herwart "Wau" Holland-Moritz, whose friends set up the Wau Holland Foundation after his death. This charity was to become a crucial channel to receive worldwide WikiLeaks donations. Chaos Computer Club members at the Berlin congress such as Domscheit-Berg, along with his Dutch hacker colleague Rop Gonggrijp, had mature talents that proved to be crucial to the development of a.s.sange's guerrilla project. (a.s.sange himself nevertheless later tried to reject the hacker label. He told an Oxford conference that "hacking" has now come to be regarded as an activity "mostly deployed by the Russian mafia in order to steal your grandmother's bank accounts. So this phrase is not as nice as it used to be.") Domscheit-Berg was fired up with social idealism, and preached the hacker mantra that information should be free: "What att.i.tude do you have to society?" he would later exhort. "Do you look at what there is and do you accept that as G.o.d-given, or do you see society as something where you identify a problem and then you find a creative solution? ... Are you a spectator or are you actively partic.i.p.ating in society?" He and a.s.sange wanted to develop physical havens for WikiLeaks' servers across the globe. Domscheit-Berg whipped up his fellow hackers at Berlin, urging them to identify countries which could be used as WikiLeaks bases: "A lot of the countries in today's world do not have really strong laws for the media any more. But a few countries, like for instance Belgium, the US with the first amendment, and especially for example Sweden, have very strong laws protecting the media and the work of investigative or general journalists. So ... if there are any Swedes here, you have to make sure your country [remains] one of the strongholds of freedom of information."

Sweden did eventually become the leakers' safe haven ironically, in view of all a.s.sange's subsequent trouble with Swedish manners and morals. The hackers in Berlin had links to the renegade Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. And from there the trail led to a web-hosting company called PRQ, which went on to provide WikiLeaks with an external face. The bearded owner of the internet service provider (ISP), Mikael Viborg, was later to demonstrate his operation, located in an inconspicuous bas.e.m.e.nt in a Stockholm suburb, on Swedish TV. "At first they wanted to tunnel traffic through us to bypa.s.s bans in places where they don't like WikiLeaks." he says. "But later they put a server here."

PRQ offers its customers secrecy. They say their systems prevent anyone eavesdropping on chat pages, or finding out who sent what to whom.

"We provide anonymity services, VPN [virtual private network] tunnels. A client connects to our server and downloads information. If anyone at the information's source tries to trace them, they can only get to us and we don't disclose who was using that IP [internet protocol] number. We accept anything that is legal under Swedish law, regardless of how objectionable it is. We don't make moral judgments."

This uncompromising att.i.tude appealed to Domscheit-Berg: "PRQ has a track record of being the hardest ISP you can find in the world. There's just no one that bothers less about lawyers hara.s.sing them about content they're hosting."

WikiLeaks' own laptops all have military-grade encryption: if seized, the data on them cannot be read, even directly off the disk. The volunteer WikiLeaks hacker, Seattle-based Jacob Appelbaum, boasts that he will destroy any laptop that has been let out of his sight, for fear that it might have been bugged. None of the team worries deeply about the consequences of losing a computer, though, because the lines of code to control the site are stored on remote computers under their control "in the cloud" and the pa.s.swords they need for access are in their heads.

Popular for day-by-day in-house conversations is the internet phone service Skype, which also uses encryption. Because it was developed in Sweden rather than the US, the team trusts it not to have a "back door" through which the US National Security Agency can peer in on their discussions.

As its name suggests, WikiLeaks began as a "wiki" a user-editable site (which has sometimes led to confusion with the user-editable Wikipedia; there is no a.s.sociation). But a.s.sange and his colleagues rapidly found that the content and need to remove dangerous or incriminating information made such a model impractical. a.s.sange would come to revise his belief that online "citizen journalists" in their thousands would be prepared to scrutinise posted doc.u.ments and discover whether they were genuine or not.

But while the "wiki" elements have been abandoned, a structure to enable anonymous submissions of leaked doc.u.ments remains at the heart of the WikiLeaks idea. British encryption expert Ben Laurie was another who a.s.sisted. Laurie, a former mathematician who lives in west London and among other things rents out bomb-proof bunkers to house commercial internet servers, says when a.s.sange first proposed his scheme for "an open-source, democratic intelligence agency", he thought it was "all hot air". But soon he was persuaded, became enthusiastic and advised on encryption. "This is an interesting technical problem: how do you reveal things about powerful people without getting your a.r.s.e kicked?"

As it now stands, WikiLeaks claims to be uncensorable and untraceable. Doc.u.ments can be leaked on a ma.s.sive scale in a way which "combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies". a.s.sange and co have said they use OpenSSL (an open source secure site connection system, like that used by online retailers such as Amazon), FreeNet (a peer-to-peer method of storing files among hundreds or thousands of computers without revealing where they originated or who owns them), and PGP (the open source cryptographic system abbreviated from the jocular name "Pretty Good Privacy").

But their main anonymity protection device is known as Tor. WikiLeaks advertises that "We keep no records as to where you uploaded from, your time zone, browser or even as to when your submission was made." That's a cla.s.sic anonymisation via Tor.

US intelligence agencies see Tor as important to their covert spying work and have not been pleased to see it used to leak their own secrets. Tor means that submissions can be hidden, and internal discussions can take place out of sight of would-be monitors. Tor was a US Naval Research Laboratory project, developed in 1995, which has been taken up by hackers around the world. It uses a network of about 2,000 volunteer global computer servers, through which any message can be routed, anonymously and untraceably, via other Tor computers, and eventually to a receiver outside the network. The key concept is that an outsider is never able to link the sender and receiver by examining "packets" of data.

That's not usually the case with data sent online, where every message is split into "packets" containing information about its source, destination and other organising data (such as where the packet fits in the message). At the destination, the packets are rea.s.sembled. Anyone monitoring the sender or receiver's internet connection will see the receiver and source information, even if the content itself is encrypted. And for whistleblowers, that can be disastrous.

Tor introduces an uncrackable level of obfuscation. Say Appelbaum in Seattle wants to send a message to Domscheit-Berg in Berlin. Both men need to run the Tor program on their machines. Appelbaum might take the precaution of encrypting it first using the free-of-charge PGP system. Then he sends it via Tor. The software creates a further encrypted channel routed through the Tor servers, using a few "nodes" among the worldwide network. The encryption is layered: as the message pa.s.ses through the network, each node peels off a layer of encryption, which tells it which node to send the payload to next. Successive pa.s.ses strip more encryption off until the message reaches the edge of the network, where it exits with as much encryption as the original in this case, PGP-encrypted.

An external observer at any point in the network tapping the traffic that is flowing through it cannot decode what is being sent, and can only see one hop back and one hop forward. So monitoring the sender or receiver connections will only show a transmission going into or coming out of a Tor node but nothing more. This "onion" style encryption, with layer after layer, gave rise to the original name, "The Onion Router" shortened to Tor.

Tor also allows users to set up "hidden services", such as instant messaging, that can't be seen by tapping traffic at the servers. They're accessed, appropriately, via pseudo-top-level domains ending in ".onion". That provides another measure of security, so that someone who has sent a physical version of an electronic record, say on a thumb drive, can encrypt it and send it on, and only later reveal the encryption key. The Jabber encrypted chat service is popular with WikiLeakers.

"Tor's importance to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated," a.s.sange told Rolling Stone Rolling Stone, when they profiled Appelbaum, his west coast US hacker a.s.sociate. But Tor has an interesting weakness. If a message isn't specially encrypted from the outset, then its actual contents can sometimes be read by other people. This may sound like an obscure technical point. But there is evidence that it explains the true reason for the launch of WikiLeaks at the end of 2006 not as a traditional journalistic enterprise, but as a piece of opportunistic underground computer hacking. In other words: eavesdropping.

On the verge of his debut WikiLeaks publication, at the beginning of 2007, a.s.sange excitedly messaged the veteran curator of the Cryptome leaking site, John Young, to explain where his trove of material was coming from: "Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inexhaustible supply of material. Near 100,000 doc.u.ments/emails a day. We're going to crack the world open and let it flower into something new ...We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, opec, UN sections, trade groups, tibet and falun dafa a.s.sociations and ... russian phishing mafia who pull data everywhere. We're drowning. We don't even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped storing it at 1Tb [one terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes]."

A few weeks later, in August 2007, a Swedish Tor expert, Dan Egerstad, told Wired Wired magazine that he had confirmed it was possible to harvest doc.u.ments, email contents, user names and pa.s.swords for various diplomats and organisations by operating a volunteer Tor "exit" node. This was the final server at the edge of the Tor system through which doc.u.ments without end-to-end encryption were bounced before emerging. The magazine reported that Egerstad "found accounts belonging to the foreign ministry of Iran, the UK's visa office in Nepal and the Defence Research and Development Organisation in India's Ministry of Defence. In addition, Egerstad was able to read correspondence belonging to the Indian amba.s.sador to China, various politicians in Hong Kong, workers in the Dalai Lama's liaison office and several human rights groups in Hong Kong. "It kind of shocked me," he said. "I am absolutely positive that I am not the only one to figure this out." magazine that he had confirmed it was possible to harvest doc.u.ments, email contents, user names and pa.s.swords for various diplomats and organisations by operating a volunteer Tor "exit" node. This was the final server at the edge of the Tor system through which doc.u.ments without end-to-end encryption were bounced before emerging. The magazine reported that Egerstad "found accounts belonging to the foreign ministry of Iran, the UK's visa office in Nepal and the Defence Research and Development Organisation in India's Ministry of Defence. In addition, Egerstad was able to read correspondence belonging to the Indian amba.s.sador to China, various politicians in Hong Kong, workers in the Dalai Lama's liaison office and several human rights groups in Hong Kong. "It kind of shocked me," he said. "I am absolutely positive that I am not the only one to figure this out."

The speculation was largely confirmed in 2010, when a.s.sange gave Raffi Khatchadourian access to write a profile. The New Yorker New Yorker staffer wrote: "One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions pa.s.sed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments' information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site's foundation, and a.s.sange was able to say, 'We have received over one million doc.u.ments from 13 countries.' In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first doc.u.ment: a 'secret decision', signed by Sheikh Ha.s.san Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic pa.s.sing through the Tor network to China." staffer wrote: "One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions pa.s.sed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments' information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site's foundation, and a.s.sange was able to say, 'We have received over one million doc.u.ments from 13 countries.' In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first doc.u.ment: a 'secret decision', signed by Sheikh Ha.s.san Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic pa.s.sing through the Tor network to China."

The geeky hacker underground was only one part of the soil out of which WikiLeaks grew. Another was the anti-capitalist radicals the community of environmental activists, human rights campaigners and political revolutionaries who make up what used to be known in the 1960s as the "counter-culture". As a.s.sange went public for the first time about WikiLeaks, he travelled to Nairobi in Kenya to set out their stall at the World Social Forum in January 2007. This was a radical parody of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, where rich and influential people gather to talk about money. The WSF, which originated in Brazil, was intended, by contrast, to be where poor and powerless people would gather to talk about justice.

At the event, tens of thousands in Nairobi's Freedom Park chanted, "Another world is possible!" Organisers were forced to waive entry fees after Nairobi slum dwellers staged a demonstration. The BBC reported that dozens of street children who had been begging for food invaded a five-star hotel tent and feasted on meals meant for sale at $7 a plate when many Kenyans lived on $2 a day: "The hungry urchins were joined by other partic.i.p.ants who complained that the food was too expensive and police, caught unawares, were unable to stop the free-for-all that saw the food containers swept clean."

a.s.sange himself spent four days in a WSF tent with his three friends, giving talks, handing out flyers and making connections. He was so exhilarated by what he called "the world's biggest NGO beach party" that he stayed on for much of the next two years in a Nairobi compound with activists from Medecins Sans Frontieres and other foreign groups.

"I was introduced to senior people in journalism, in human rights very quickly," he told an Australian interviewer later. "[Kenya] has got extraordinary opportunities for reforms. It had a revolution in the 1970s. It has only been a democracy since 2004." He wrote that he met in Africa "many committed and courageous individuals banned opposition groups, corruption investigators, unions, fearless press and clergy". These brave people seemed like the real deal to him: his mail-out contrasted them witheringly with western fellow-travellers. "A substantial portion of Social Forum types are ineffectual pansies who specialise in making movies about themselves and throwing 'dialogue' parties for their friends with foundation money. They ... love cameras."

a.s.sange cast himself in contrast to these people, as a man of courage. He invoked one of his personal heroes in that WikiLeaks mail-out: "This quote from Solzhenitsyn is increasingly germane: 'A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the west today. The western world has lost its civic courage ... Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites.'" a.s.sange would often p.r.o.nounce to those around him: "Courage is infectious."

It was Kenya that gave WikiLeaks its first journalistic coup. A ma.s.sive report about the alleged corruption of former president Daniel Arap Moi had been commissioned from the private inquiry firm Kroll. But his successor, President Mwai Kibaki, who commissioned the report, subsequently failed to release it, allegedly for political reasons. "This report was the holy grail of Kenyan journalism," a.s.sange later said. "I went there in 2007 and got hold of it."

The actual circ.u.mstances of publication were more complex. The report was leaked to Mwalimu Mati, head of Mars Group Kenya, an anti-corruption group. "Someone dumped it in our laps," he says. Mati, prompted by a contact in Germany, had previously registered as a volunteer with WikiLeaks. The fear of retribution made it too dangerous to post the report on the group's own website: "So we thought: can we not put it on WikiLeaks?" The story appeared simultaneously on 31 August on the front page of the Guardian Guardian in London. The full text of the doc.u.ment was posted on WikiLeaks' website headed, "The missing Kenyan billions". A press release explained, "WikiLeaks has not yet publicly 'launched'. We are open only to submissions from journalistic and dissident contacts. However, given the political situation in Kenya we feel we would be remiss to withhold this doc.u.ment any longer." The site added: "Attribution should be to ... 'Julian A, WikiLeaks' spokesman'." in London. The full text of the doc.u.ment was posted on WikiLeaks' website headed, "The missing Kenyan billions". A press release explained, "WikiLeaks has not yet publicly 'launched'. We are open only to submissions from journalistic and dissident contacts. However, given the political situation in Kenya we feel we would be remiss to withhold this doc.u.ment any longer." The site added: "Attribution should be to ... 'Julian A, WikiLeaks' spokesman'."

The result was indeed sensational. There was uproar, and a.s.sange was later to claim that voting shifted 10% in the subsequent Kenyan elections. The following year, his site ran a highly praised report on Kenyan death squads, "The Cry of Blood Extra-Judicial Killings and Disappearances". It was based on evidence obtained by the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights. Four people a.s.sociated with investigating the killings were themselves subsequently murdered, including human rights activists Oscar Kingara and John Paul Oulu.

a.s.sange was invited to London to receive an award from the human rights organisation Amnesty: it was a moment of journalistic respectability. Characteristically, he arrived in town three hours late after a convoluted series of flights from Nairobi which involved withholding his pa.s.sport details from the authorities until the last minute. His acceptance speech was generous, if a little grandiose: "Through the courageous work of organisations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR [Kenya National Commission on Human Rights], Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world. I know that they will not rest, and we will not rest, until justice is done." Again, there was a symbiotic relationship with the MSM, the mainstream media: the Kenyan story only gained global traction when followed up by Jon Swain of the London Sunday Times Sunday Times.

A coda to the Kenya episode left a bad taste. In March 2009, journalist Michela Wrong published a book on corruption in the east African nation, called It's Our Turn to Eat It's Our Turn to Eat, which took her three years to write. Nairobi bookshops proved nervous about stocking it, but she was startled to find a pirated copy posted worldwide on WikiLeaks without consultation. "This was a violation of copyright, involving a commercial publication, a book not banned by any African government, not a secret doc.u.ment. It left me feeling pretty jaundiced."

She wrote protesting: "I was delighted when WikiLeaks was launched, and benefited personally from its fearlessness in publishing leaked doc.u.ments exposing venality in countries like Kenya. This strikes me as a totally different case." In what she terms a "gratingly self-righteous" reply, WikiLeaks, who eventually agreed to take the book down, wrote: "We are not treating doc.u.ment as a leak; it has been treated as a censored work that must be injected into the Kenyan political sphere. We thought you ... had leaked the PDF for promotional reasons. That said, the importance of the work in Kenya as an instrument of political struggle eclipses your individual involvement. It is your baby, and I'm sure it feels like that, but it is also its own adult and Kenya's son."

a.s.sange and his group were by now starting to see a flow of genuinely leaked doc.u.ments, including some from UK military sources. a.s.sange sought to market them. He wrote several times to the Guardian Guardian, calling himself the "editor" or the "investigative editor" of WikiLeaks, trying to get the paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to take up his stories. He seemed unable to accept that sometimes his leaks might just not be that interesting no, the lack of response was always due to a failure of nerve, or worse, on the part of the despised MSM.

In July 2008, for instance, he declared: "[Have] the Guardian Guardian and other UK press outlets lost their civic courage when dealing with the Official Secrets Act?" He was offering the media access to a leaked copy of the 2007 UK counter-insurgency manual, but no one had signed up to his proffered "embargo pool": "I suggest the UK press has lost its way ... Provided all are equally emasculated, all are equally profitable. It is time to break this cartel of timidity." and other UK press outlets lost their civic courage when dealing with the Official Secrets Act?" He was offering the media access to a leaked copy of the 2007 UK counter-insurgency manual, but no one had signed up to his proffered "embargo pool": "I suggest the UK press has lost its way ... Provided all are equally emasculated, all are equally profitable. It is time to break this cartel of timidity."

Those who recalled his Melbourne dating-site entry would have been intrigued by his remark that running combative journalistic exposures as he did was also, in fact, an excellent way to get laid: "In Kenya, where we are used to newspaper raids and manageable arrests, we don't care too much. These hamfisted attempts drive home the story that ignited them, sell newspapers, look good on the CV, and attract lovers like knighthoods."

A further a.s.sange experiment in media manipulation in 2008 saw him try to auction a cache of what were claimed to be thousands of emails from a speechwriter to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. The winning bidder was to get exclusive access, for a time, to the doc.u.ments. The auction was based on his theory that n.o.body took material seriously if it was provided free of charge. He pointed out: "People magazine notoriously paid over $10 [million] for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's baby photos." Bafflingly, the minutiae of Venezuelan politics did not prove as saleable as celebrities' baby pics: n.o.body bid. magazine notoriously paid over $10 [million] for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's baby photos." Bafflingly, the minutiae of Venezuelan politics did not prove as saleable as celebrities' baby pics: n.o.body bid.

a.s.sange had by now discovered, to his chagrin, that simply posting long lists of raw and random doc.u.ments on to a website failed to change the world. He brooded about the collapse of his original "crowd-sourcing" notion: "Our initial idea was, 'Look at all those people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that they're working on ... Surely all those people that are busy working on articles about history and mathematics and so on, and all those bloggers that are busy pontificating about ... human rights disasters ... surely those those people will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something?' No. It's all bulls.h.i.t. It's people will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something?' No. It's all bulls.h.i.t. It's all all bulls.h.i.t. In fact, people write about things, in general (if it's not part of their career), because they want to display their values to their peers, who are already in the same group. Actually, they don't give a f.u.c.k about the material." bulls.h.i.t. In fact, people write about things, in general (if it's not part of their career), because they want to display their values to their peers, who are already in the same group. Actually, they don't give a f.u.c.k about the material."

He carried on hunting vainly for a WikiLeaks model that could both bring in working revenue and gain global political attention. His published musings from that period are revealing: they show he saw the problem from the outside, but could not yet crack it: "The big issue for WikiLeaks is first-rate source material going to waste, because we make supply unlimited, so news organisations, wrongly or rightly, refuse to 'invest' in a.n.a.lysis without additional incentives. The economics are counter-intuitive temporarily restrict supply to increase uptake ... a known paradox in economics. Given that WikiLeaks needs to restrict supply for a period to increase perceived value to the point that journalists will invest time to produce quality stories, the question arises as to which method should be employed to apportion material to those who are most likely to invest in it."

There was only one, relatively limited, way in which the a.s.sange model was beginning to gain the interest of the mainstream media: and that was by behaving not as the originally envisaged anonymous doc.u.ment dump, but as what he called "the publisher of last resort". A fascinating clash between WikiLeaks and a Swiss bank demonstrated that at least one of the key claims for a.s.sange's new stateless cyberstructure was true it could laugh at lawyers.

Rudolf Elmer ran the Cayman Islands branch of the Julius Baer bank for eight years. After moving to Mauritius, and vainly trying to interest authorities in what he said was outrageous tax-dodging by some of his former employer's clients, he contacted a.s.sange to post his doc.u.ments: "We built up contact over encrypted software and I received instructions on how to proceed ... I wasn't looking for anonymity."

The fuming Zurich bankers then went to court in California to force WikiLeaks to take down the files, claiming "unlawful dissemination of stolen bank records and personal account information of its customers". The bank won a preliminary skirmish when California-based domain name hosters Dynadot were ordered to disable access to the name "wikileaks.org". But Baer very quickly lost the entire war: WikiLeaks retained access to other sites hosted in Belgium and elsewhere; many "mirror sites" sprang up carrying the offending doc.u.ments; and the court ruling was reversed as a stream of US organisations rallied behind WikiLeaks in the name of free speech. They included the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a journalistic alliance which included the a.s.sociated Press, Gannett News Service, and the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times.

The Swiss bank and its corrupt customers merely managed to shine more light on themselves, while WikiLeaks demonstrated that it was genuinely injunction-proof. It was WikiLeaks one, Julius Baer nil. a.s.sange picked up another award in London from the free speech group Index on Censorship. One of the judges, poet Lemn Sissay, blogged about a typical piece of showmanship: "We did not know whether Julian a.s.sange ... was to turn up to accept. Thankfully he came, a tall, studious man with shock-blonde hair and pale skin. Seconds before stepping on stage he whispered, 'Someone may lunge at the stage to present me with a subpoena. I cannot allow them to do this, and shall leave if I see them.'"

The Guardian Guardian in London now saw the value in having its own sensitive doc.u.ments posted on WikiLeaks. Lawyers for Barclays Bank had woken up a judge one morning at 2am to force the takedown of the in London now saw the value in having its own sensitive doc.u.ments posted on WikiLeaks. Lawyers for Barclays Bank had woken up a judge one morning at 2am to force the takedown of the Guardian Guardian's leaked files detailing the bank's tax-avoidance schemes. But the files were promptly posted in full by a.s.sange, rendering the gag futile. (In an entertaining blend of old and new anti-censorship techniques, the Guardian Guardian and all other British media were also at first legally gagged from saying that the files were available on WikiLeaks. It took a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, speaking under the ancient device of parliamentary privilege, to blow that nonsense away.) and all other British media were also at first legally gagged from saying that the files were available on WikiLeaks. It took a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, speaking under the ancient device of parliamentary privilege, to blow that nonsense away.) Similarly, WikiLeaks functioned as an online back-up, along with Dutch Greenpeace and Norwegian state TV, in posting in full a d.a.m.ning report on toxic waste dumped by the oil traders Trafigura. Trafigura's lawyers had gagged the Guardian Guardian in the UK from running the leaked report: their draconian moves were thus proved to be a waste of time in a digitally globalised world. in the UK from running the leaked report: their draconian moves were thus proved to be a waste of time in a digitally globalised world.

Yet a.s.sange himself was still striving for a way to be more than a niche player. At the outset, in 2006, he had incurred the ire of John Young, of the parallel intelligence-material site Cryptome. Young deplored a.s.sange's approaches to billionaire George Soros, who funded a variety of mostly eastern European media projects, and he broke off relations angrily when a.s.sange talked of raising $5 million. "Announcing a $5 million fund-raising goal by July [2007] will kill this effort," he wrote. "It makes WikiLeaks appear to be a Wall Street scam. This amount could not be needed so soon except for suspect purposes. Soros will kick you out of the office with such over-reaching. Foundations are flooded with big talkers making big requests flaunting famous names and promising spectacular results."

Now, two years on from that false start, a.s.sange made another attempt to raise a substantial sum. He and his lieutenant, Domscheit-Berg, approached the Knight Foundation in the US, which was running "a media innovation contest that aims to advance the future of news by funding new ways to digitally inform communities". Domscheit-Berg asked for $532,000 to equip a network of regional newspapers with what were, in effect, "WikiLeaks b.u.t.tons". The idea, developed and elaborated by Domscheit-Berg, was that local leakers could make contact through these news sites, and thus generate a regular flow of doc.u.ments. A rival project, Doc.u.mentcloud, designed to set up a public database of the full doc.u.ments behind conventional news stories, was backed by staff at the New York Times New York Times and the nonprofit investigative journalism initiative ProPublica. They got $719,500. a.s.sange got nothing. As 2009 ended, WikiLeaks was still struggling to make a name for itself. and the nonprofit investigative journalism initiative ProPublica. They got $719,500. a.s.sange got nothing. As 2009 ended, WikiLeaks was still struggling to make a name for itself.

CHAPTER 5.

The Apache video

Quality Hotel, Tnsberg, Norway 3am, 21 March 2010

"It's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle"

US HELICOPTER PILOT HELICOPTER PILOT.

Even in March, there was still ice in the harbour, and snow lay on the Slottsfjellet hill where the old fortress stood. But down in the waterfront hotel ballroom, the Boogie Wonder Band were hard at it: they were pumping out sweaty dance rhythms for hundreds of Norwegian reporters celebrating the Jubileumsfest the 20th anniversary shindig of SKUP, the lively a.s.sociation of investigative journalists. "Bring nice clothes and good humour," said the invitation; and although a.s.sange had not changed out of his regular brown leather jacket zipped up to the neck, he was certainly in a good mood. In fact, he was excited, and with good reason: he was about to take the first step towards becoming a world celebrity.

The billing for his lecture read, "Some believe the WikiLeaks site has done more investigative journalism than the New York Times New York Times over the past 20 years." But a.s.sange knew that the world had seen nothing yet, compared with what was about to come. After a night of reindeer steaks and repeated Viking-style toasts with raised gla.s.ses, he could contain himself no longer. "Want to see something?" he asked David Leigh, the over the past 20 years." But a.s.sange knew that the world had seen nothing yet, compared with what was about to come. After a night of reindeer steaks and repeated Viking-style toasts with raised gla.s.ses, he could contain himself no longer. "Want to see something?" he asked David Leigh, the Guardian Guardian journalist who was also speaking at the conference. a.s.sange, with his lean frame and long silver hair, had a boyishly enticing grin that had already been having its effect on nearby women: his present invitation was also intriguing. journalist who was also speaking at the conference. a.s.sange, with his lean frame and long silver hair, had a boyishly enticing grin that had already been having its effect on nearby women: his present invitation was also intriguing.

Up in Leigh's hotel bedroom, with the door locked and the chain on, a.s.sange produced one of his little netbooks from the backpack he never let out of his sight. He punched in a series of what seemed like lengthy pa.s.swords, and after a while a black-and-white video began to run. It was one of the most shocking things Leigh had ever seen.

The money shot, later played again and again on YouTube from China to Brazil, was a view from the air: it showed clouds of dust erupting among a scattering group of men, as they were knocked down and killed by the cannon-sh.e.l.ls of a helicopter gunship. One man, wounded, was trying to crawl away from the carnage off to the right of the screen. Later a driver can be seen trying to drag the wounded man into a van, which is shot up by more cannon-fire. Told on the radio traffic that children were hurt, a pilot transmits, defensively: "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle."

The pictures had been taken by an AH-64 Apache's military camera as it hovered over a Baghdad suburb, firing its 30mm gun while virtually invisible to those on the ground. The helicopter was a kilometre up in the sky. Leigh watched, stunned, as the uncut video of these killings ran on the little laptop for nearly 39 minutes.

The video was, explained a.s.sange, the cla.s.sified record of a scandal. In July 2007, US army pilots, in a pair of circling helicopters, had managed to kill two innocent employees of the Reuters news agency: Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. Noor-Eldeen was a 22-year-old war photographer. Chmagh was a 40-year-old Reuters driver and a.s.sistant, who had been wounded and attempted to crawl away. Altogether 12 people died in that single encounter. The van driver's two young children were wounded, but survived.

a.s.sange didn't say where the raw video had come from, other than that he had got hold of a cache of material from "military sources". But he did tell the Guardian Guardian journalist what he planned to do next. He was going to travel to Iceland, where he would arrange for this sensational leak to be verified and edited up into a properly captioned version. Then he would reveal it to the world. journalist what he planned to do next. He was going to travel to Iceland, where he would arrange for this sensational leak to be verified and edited up into a properly captioned version. Then he would reveal it to the world.

Iceland, in the far north Atlantic, was not so weird a destination for a.s.sange as might be thought. The nomadic WikiLeaks founder had recently become popular there, since agreeing to post a leaked secret doc.u.ment listing major Icelandic bank loans which had been made to bankers' cronies, and the bank's own large shareholders. Iceland's financial meltdown had left an angry and resentful populace behind, and they seemed to appreciate a.s.sange's brand of transparency.

Kristinn Hrafnsson was one of many Icelanders impressed by a.s.sange. He was so inspired that he subsequently became his close lieutenant. Hrafnsson, who was to travel to Baghdad with a cameraman to check out the Apache helicopter story on a.s.sange's behalf, says: "The first I heard of WikiLeaks was at the beginning of August 2009. I was working as a reporter for state television when I got a tip this website had important doc.u.ments just posted online. It was the loan book for the failed Kaupthing Bank ... They [the bank] got a gag order on the state TV the first and only one in its history."

The scandal brought an invitation to Reykjavik for a.s.sange and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and the two campaigners found themselves urging the small country to promote its own free speech laws. a.s.sange sat on the TV studio sofa and declared: "Why doesn't Iceland become the centre for publishing in the world?" Domscheit-Berg recalls: "Julian and I were just throwing that idea out, declaring on national TV that we thought this would be the next business model for Iceland. That felt pretty weird ... realising the next day that everyone wanted to talk about it."

a.s.sange was like a pied piper, gathering followers around him in region after region. Another Iceland-based WikiLeaks enthusiast, programmer Smari McCarthy, told Swedish TV, "We had failed as a country because we had not been sharing the information that we needed. We were in an information famine ... WikiLeaks gave us the nudge that we needed. We had this idea but didn't know what to do with it. Then they came and told us, and that is an incredibly valuable thing. They are information activists first and foremost, who believe in the power of knowledge, the power of information."

An Icelandic MP, Birgitta Jonsdottir, was at the forefront of subsequent moves to draw up a proposal the campaigners called MMI, the Modern Media Initiative, which was endorsed unanimously by the Icelandic parliament. The proposal was st.i.tched together by a.s.sange, his Dutch hacker-businessman friend Rop Gonggrijp, and three Icelanders: Jonsdottir, McCarthy and Herbert Snorrason. They called for laws to enshrine source protection, free speech and freedom of information. Jonsdottir, 43, is an anti-capitalist activist, poet and artist an unexpectedly romantic figure to find in the Reykjavik legislature. "They were presenting this idea they called the 'Switzerland of bytes'," she explains, "which was basically to take the tax haven model and transform it into the transparency haven model."

a.s.sange decided to publish some Icelandic tidbits from his newly acquired secret cache of military material to coincide with the MMI campaign: one was a very recent cable from the US emba.s.sy in Reykjavik, dated 13 January 2010, describing Icelandic officials' views about the banking crisis. The deputy chief of mission at the emba.s.sy, Sam Watson, had reported that those he met "painted a very gloomy picture for Iceland's future". a.s.sange followed this up with leaked profiles of the Icelandic amba.s.sador to Washington ("p.r.i.c.kly but pragmatic ... enjoys the music of Robert Plant, formerly of Led Zeppelin"), the foreign minister ("fond of the US"), and the prime minister, Johanna Sigurardottir ("although her s.e.xual orientation has been highlighted by the international press, it has barely been noted by the Icelandic public").

The US authorities took no visible action about these leaks. There was nothing apparently to connect Reykjavik, where this stuff was coming out, with an obscure military base in the Mesopotamian desert, thousands of miles away.

So at the end of March, a.s.sange returned to Iceland from his triumphant conference appearance in Norway, and, bankrolled by an advance of 10,000 ($13,000) from Gonggrijp, set about renting a house and editing his Apache helicopter film. Leigh, back in London, tried hard to get back into contact to propose a deal under which the Guardian Guardian would publicise the helicopter video. a.s.sange said he would get back to him, but never did. It was only later that it seemed a.s.sange might have struck a more attractive journalistic deal with the would publicise the helicopter video. a.s.sange said he would get back to him, but never did. It was only later that it seemed a.s.sange might have struck a more attractive journalistic deal with the New Yorker New Yorker, whose writer Raffi Khatchadourian was following a.s.sange about for a major profile. (It appeared in June under the t.i.tle "No Secrets: Julian a.s.sange's mission for total transparency". a.s.sange a.s.sured friends later that it was "too flattering".) Khatchadourian was present to record Jonsdottir, the feisty feminist MP for Reykjavik South, rather unwillingly tr.i.m.m.i.n.g a.s.sange's hair while he sat hunched over his laptop, engaged in important messaging. The profile writer was also taking notes when the message came back from Baghdad: The journalists who had gone to Baghdad ... had found the two children in the van. The children had lived a block from the location of the attack, and were being driven to school by their father that morning. "They remember the bombardment, felt great pain, they said, and lost consciousness," one of the journalists wrote ...Jonsdottir turned to Gonggrijp, whose eyes had welled up. "Are you crying?" she asked."I am," he said. "OK, OK, it is just the kids. It hurts." Gonggrijp gathered himself. "f.u.c.k!" he said ... Jonsdottir was now in tears, too, and wiping her nose.

a.s.sange premiered the Apache helicopter video at the National Press Club in Washington on 5 April. He chose to t.i.tle it "Collateral Murder". Although the video caused a stir, something went wrong. It did not generate the universal outrage and pressure for reform of, say, Seymour Hersh's earlier expose of leaked photos in the New Yorker New Yorker showing Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured in Abu Ghraib prison. showing Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured in Abu Ghraib prison.

One of the reasons why the video caused less of a storm than he had hoped was that Reuters, whose own employees had been killed, chose not to go on the attack over the leaked information. They had, it transpired, been shown privately a partial clip of the two men's deaths, within days of it happening, although subsequent freedom of information requests for the actual video had been repeatedly blocked. Reuters' editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger, wrote a muted, more-in-sorrow column for the Guardian Guardian: "Reuters editors were shown only one portion of the video. We immediately changed our operating procedures. The first portion of the video made clear that anyone walking with a group of armed people could be considered a target. We immediately made it a rule that our journalists could not even walk near armed groups. However, we were not shown the second part of the video, where the helicopter fired on a van trying to evacuate the wounded. Had we seen it, we could have adjusted our procedures further."

Another reason for the limited response was the tendentious t.i.tle: "Collateral Murder". Readers and viewers often hate the feeling they are being bulldozed into a particular point of view. What went on in the video could be interpreted as a much more nuanced event, to eyes not entirely blinded by rage or sorrow.

For the soldiers had clearly made a mistake. Some of the group they fired on were indeed armed, and the Reuters cameraman's long lens did look like a weapon pointed furtively at "our brothers on the ground" as one of the pilots put it. The cruel decision to treat the Baghdad streets as a battle-s.p.a.ce on which all were fair game was made not by individual s.a.d.i.s.ts or war criminals, but by the US military at a much higher level. The pilots were doing the murderous things they had been trained to do as some soldiers in the ground unit concerned were later to publicly say. Clearly there was far more to be debated than could be encompa.s.sed in the crude legend "Collateral Murder".

Nevertheless, it was a debate that might never have been held at all, had not one young US soldier somewhere decided the video ought to be seen, and had not a.s.sange boldly put it on public display. From now on, the civilian death that American soldiers so often rained down from the sky would be treated a little less casually by the US public. This was surely what free speech was meant to be all about. In many people's eyes, a.s.sange deserved to be seen as a hero.

CHAPTER 6.

The Lamo dialogues

Contingency Operating Station Hammer, Iraq 21 May 2010

"I can't believe what I'm telling you"

BRADa.s.s87.

At his sweltering army base in the Iraqi desert, specialist Bradley Manning showed signs of considerable stress in the weeks following a.s.sange's release of the Apache helicopter video. In web chats, he confided that he had had "about three breakdowns" as a result of his emotional insecurity, and was "self-medicating like crazy". He added: "I've been isolated for so long ... I've totally lost my mind ... I'm a wreck." On 5 May, Manning posted on Facebook that he was "left with the sinking feeling that he doesn't have anything left".

Part of this emotional turmoil was probably related to the break-up of Manning's relationship with Tyler Watkins back in Boston, which took place around the same time. But he was also feeling scared about the possible fall-out from his "hacktivist" activities, as he described them, with WikiLeaks. At one point he boasted that "No one suspected a thing ... Odds are, they never will." But at others he contemplated going to prison for the rest of his life, or even the death penalty.

"I've made a huge mess ... I think I'm in more potential heat than you ever were," he would confide online to Adrian Lamo, a hacker in the US who himself had been sentenced to two years' probation for having hacked into computers in a range of enterprises including the New York Times New York Times. The combination of losing Watkins and feeling under threat of discovery by the authorities had clearly left Manning feeling rattled. Days before he began unburdening to Lamo over the internet, he was demoted from the rank of specialist to that of private first cla.s.s, after he punched another soldier in the face.

Julian a.s.sange had recently publicised, in rapid succession, four leaked cla.s.sified files he had laid his hands on, all of different types, but all accessible to a member of the US army in Manning's position. At some point between mid-January and mid-February, a.s.sange received a copy of the cable from the Reykjavik emba.s.sy, which he published to good effect during his Iceland media campaign. Posted on 18 February, it was later described by Manning as a "test".

On 15 March, a.s.sange next posted a lengthy report about WikiLeaks itself, written by an army "cyber counter-intelligence a.n.a.lyst" and headlined by a.s.sange "US intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks". The "special report" dated from 2008 and its author was exercised about lists of military equipment WikiLeaks had managed to obtain. Despite its 32 pages, the report was really a statement of the obvious: that a good way to deter WikiLeaks would be to track down and punish the leakers. But a.s.sange's bold headline was a sound journalistic method of advertising and attracting donations.

Two weeks later, on 29 March, a.s.sange caused more turbulence in Iceland by posting the series of US state department profiles of top local politicians: they appeared to have been taken from a separate biographical intelligence folder, rather than from a cabled dispatch. Icelandic officials called in the US charge d'affaires, Sam Watson, to make a complaint.

Just one week on, a.s.sange flew from Reykjavik to Washington to publicise the Apache video. It appeared from what Manning said subsequently that he had done detective work on the video and leaked it in February after finding it in a legal dossier, a Judge-Advocate-General (JAG) file, presumably because the Reuters employees' deaths led to a formal investigation at the time.

These four leaks were, of course, only hors d'oeuvres. a.s.sange had also acquired a whole banquet of data: a file on Guantanamo inmates; a huge batch of US army "significant activities" reports detailing the ongoing Afghan war; a similar set of logs from the occupation of Iraq; and most sensational of all following the successful "test" with the Reykjavik cable leak, Manning had, it was later alleged, managed to supply a.s.sange with a second entire trove of all 250,000 cables to be found in the "Net-Centric Diplomacy" database to which his security clearance gave the young soldier access.

Although the precautions practised by Manning and a.s.sange had apparently worked well to date, it was perhaps no wonder that Manning felt exposed.

The process in which he first reached out to, and gained confidence in, a.s.sange had been slow and painstaking, according to the later published extracts from what were said to be his chat logs. Neither he nor his lawyers have disputed their authenticity. The geeky young soldier seems to have first contacted the "crazy white-haired dude" in late November 2009, but tentatively so. He needed to be certain that WikiLeaks could be trusted to receive dynamite material without his own ident.i.ty becoming known.