The rise of WikiLeaks
Annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club,
Alexanderplatz, Berlin
December 2007
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BEN LAURIE, ENCRYPTION EXPERT
Julian Assange 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 Assange 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 Assange 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 Assange’s guerrilla project. (Assange 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 attitude do you have to society?” he would later exhort. “Do you look at what there is and do you accept that as god-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 participating in society?” He and Assange 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 Assange’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 basement in a Stockholm suburb, on Swedish TV. “At first they wanted to tunnel traffic through us to bypass 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 attitude 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 harassing 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 passwords 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 association). But Assange and his colleagues rapidly found that the content and need to remove dangerous or incriminating information made such a model impractical. Assange would come to revise his belief that online “citizen journalists” in their thousands would be prepared to scrutinise posted documents and discover whether they were genuine or not.
But while the “wiki” elements have been abandoned, a structure to enable anonymous submissions of leaked documents remains at the heart of the WikiLeaks idea. British encryption expert Ben Laurie was another who assisted. 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 Assange 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 arse kicked?”
As it now stands, WikiLeaks claims to be uncensorable and untraceable. Documents can be leaked on a massive scale in a way which “combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies”. Assange 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 classic anonymisation via Tor.
