WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

Assange popped back to his room, returning with a small black laptop. He showed Davies actual samples from the Afghan database. The WikiLeaks team had examined the data, he said, encouragingly. They had discovered that the killing had gone on at a much higher rate in Iraq than in Afghanistan. But the database samples themselves seemed vast, confusing and impossible to navigate – an impenetrable forest of military jargon. Davies, by this point exhausted after a long day, began to wonder whether they in fact included anything journalistically of value.

And there was another problem. How was Davies to get the Afghan material back to the Guardian in London? He could, of course, save it on a memory stick, but this ran the risk that British officials might confiscate it at customs control. Assange, the hacking prodigy, offered the answer: he would transfer the material in encrypted form to a special website. The website would only exist for a short period before disappearing.

Reopening his netbook, Assange typed away and then circled words on the Hotel Leopold napkin. They were the password to decrypt data downloadable from the temporary website he would set up, encrypted in GPG (also known by its generic name, Pretty Good Privacy or PGP). Without the password, the website would be virtually uncrackable unless an opponent happened to stumble on the two large prime numbers which generated the encryption. Armed with the password, Guardian staff would soon be able to access the first tranche of data – the Afghan war logs. The three other promised “packages” were to follow.

The two men agreed on other precautions: Davies would send Assange an email saying that no deal had been agreed. (Written on 23 June, it read: “I’m safely back at base. Thanks for spending time with me – no need to apologise for not being able to give me what I’m after.”) The idea was to throw dust in the eyes of the Americans. Assange and Davies parted.

Davies grabbed a pastry and a cup of railway station coffee the following dawn and took the first train back to London. In the office he bumped into Rusbridger. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” he said. According to Davies, the owlish Rusbridger’s reaction was, as ever, understated. But he clearly appreciated the implications. By 9.30am he had agreed to ring Bill Keller, his New York Times counterpart, as soon as he woke across the Atlantic.

Heading back to his home in Sussex, Davies waited for news from Assange. Mid-morning on 24 June an email arrived directing Davies to the website. He downloaded the huge file, but was unable to disentangle the procedure required for GPG decryption. He phoned his local computer specialist, who was unable to help. Frustrated, Davies put the still-encrypted data on to a memory stick, and deleted Assange’s email. Soon afterwards the website ceased to exist. Davies traveled back up to London and handed the stick to Harold Frayman, systems editor at the Guardian Media Group. Frayman easily downloaded the contents as a decrypted spreadsheet. “It wasn’t actually a terribly difficult thing to do at all. We knew what the password was,” Frayman said calmly.

So by that evening the Guardian had the Afghan database – an unprecedented hour- by-hour portrait of the real, harsh war being fought in the mountains and dusty streets of the Hindu Kush. But it didn’t look like it at the time: for the first five or six days the Afghan record proved almost impossible to read. “It was a fucker,” Davies said. “The spreadsheet was terribly difficult to extract information from, slow and difficult.” Nonetheless, he sent a triumphant email back to Assange. It read: “The good guys have got the girls.”

CHAPTER 8

In the bunker

Fourth floor, the Guardian, Kings Place, London

July 2010

“It felt like being a kid in a candy shop”

DECLAN WALSH, THE GUARDIAN

In the small, glass-walled office on the Guardian’s fourth floor, maps of Afghan and Iraqi military districts were stuck with magnets on to a whiteboard. Alongside them, the journalists were scrawling constantly updated lists of hitherto unknown US military abbreviations. “What’s EOF?” a reporter would shout? “Escalation of force!” someone would answer. HET? Human Exploitation Team. LN? Local national. EKIA was the body count: enemy killed in action. There were literally hundreds of other jargon terms: eventually the paper had to publish a lengthy glossary alongside its stories.

The discreet office, well away from the daily news operation, had become a multinational war room, with reporters flown in from Islamabad, New York, and eventually Berlin to analyse hundreds of thousands of leaked military field reports. They jostled with London-based computer experts and website specialists. A shredder was installed alongside the bank of six computer screens, and the air of security was intensified by the stern notice stuck on the door: “Project Room. Private & Confidential. No Unauthorised Access.”

Nick Davies was so fixated by secrecy that he initially even refused to tell the Guardian’s head of news, deputy editor Ian Katz, about the project. He was dismayed to discover how quickly word spread that he was involved in a top-secret story. Another colleague, Richard Norton- Taylor, the Guardian’s veteran security editor, soon asked Davies about his “scoop”. Davies refused to tell him. A couple of hours later Norton-Taylor encountered Davies again, and teased him gleefully: “I know all your secrets!” A newspaper office is a bad place in which to try and keep the lid on things for very long.

The paper’s staff did do their best, however. Declan Walsh, the Guardian’s Pakistan- based correspondent, was recalled in conditions of great secrecy. Meeting round a table in the editor’s office, the Guardian’s team chewed over the technical difficulties. David Leigh was cantankerous: “It’s like panning for tiny grains of gold in a mountain of data,” he complained. “How are we ever going to find if there are any stories in it?” The answer to that question set the Guardian’s old hands on a steep learning curve as they got to grips with modern methods.

First they discovered, embarrassingly, that their first download, the Afghan spreadsheet, did not contain 60,000 entries, as they had spent several days believing. It contained far more. But the paper’s early version of Excel software had simply stopped reading after recording 60,000 rows. The real total of hour-by-hour field reports – the war logs – amounted to 92,201 rows of data. The next problem was greater still. It transpired that a spreadsheet of such enormous size was impossibly slow to manipulate, although it could theoretically be sorted and filtered to yield reams of statistics and different types of military event. The Iraq war logs release dumped another 391,000 records into their laps, which quadrupled the data problems.

Harold Frayman, the technical expert, solved those problems: he improvised at speed a full-scale database. Like Google, or sophisticated news search engines such as LexisNexis, the Frayman database could be searched by