WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

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 Assange model was beginning to gain the interest of the mainstream media: and that was by behaving not as the originally envisaged anonymous document 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 Assange’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 Assange to post his documents: “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 documents; 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 Associated Press, Gannett News Service, and the 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. Assange 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 Assange … 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 in London now saw the value in having its own sensitive documents posted on WikiLeaks. Lawyers for Barclays Bank had woken up a judge one morning at 2am to force the takedown of the Guardian’s leaked files detailing the bank’s tax-avoidance schemes. But the files were promptly posted in full by Assange, rendering the gag futile. (In an entertaining blend of old and new anti- censorship techniques, the 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.)

Similarly, WikiLeaks functioned as an online back-up, along with Dutch Greenpeace and Norwegian state TV, in posting in full a damning report on toxic waste dumped by the oil traders Trafigura. Trafigura’s lawyers had gagged the 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.

Yet Assange 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 Assange’s approaches to billionaire George Soros, who funded a variety of mostly eastern European media projects, and he broke off relations angrily when Assange 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, Assange 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 buttons”. 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 documents. A rival project, Documentcloud, designed to set up a public database of the full documents behind conventional news stories, was backed by staff at the New York Times and the nonprofit investigative journalism initiative ProPublica. They got $719,500. Assange got nothing. As 2009 ended, WikiLeaks was still struggling to make a name for itself.

CHAPTER 5

The Apache video

Quality Hotel, Tonsberg, Norway

3am, 21 March 2010

“It’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle”

US 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 association of investigative journalists. “Bring nice clothes and good humour,” said the invitation; and although Assange 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 over the past 20 years.” But Assange 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 glasses, he could contain himself no longer. “Want to see something?” he asked David Leigh, the Guardian journalist who was also speaking at the conference. Assange, 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, Assange 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 passwords, and after a while a black-and-white video began to run. It was one of the most shocking things Leigh had ever seen.