WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

giant MasterCard followed suit, saying that WikiLeaks “contravened rules”. On Tuesday, Visa Europe did the same. These were popular and easy methods of donating online; seeing both closed down shut off much of WikiLeaks’ funding. (Critics pointed out that, while WikiLeaks was judged off-limits, the Ku Klux Klan’s website still directed would-be donors to a site that takes both MasterCard and Visa.) It was a wounding blow and left Assange struggling to pay his and WikiLeaks’ growing legal bills.

These salvoes against WikiLeaks did not go unanswered: they triggered a backlash against the backlash. Fury raged online at such a demonstration of political pressure and US corporate self-interest. While polls suggested many Americans backed a shutdown of WikiLeaks, others were angered by the suppression of free speech; and far more outside the US thought the company cave-ins were a bad portent for free expression on the internet.

Into the arena stepped “Anonymous”, a grouping of around 3,000 people. Some were expert hackers in control of small-scale botnets: others were net newbies seeking a cause to rally around. It was a loose collective, mainly of teenagers with time on their hands, and older people (almost all men) with more nous and technical skills. The Anonymous crowd was only a group in the loosest sense, the Guardian’s technology editor Charles Arthur wrote: “It’s more like a stampeding herd, not sure quite what it wants but certain that it’s not going to put up with any obstacles, until it reaches an obstacle which it can’t hurdle, in which case it moves on to something else.”

Anonymous – which grew out of the equally chaotic “/b/” messageboard on the discussion site 4chan.org – had in the past tormented the Scientologists, reposting videos and leaking secret documents that the cult hoped to suppress. Anonymous’s broad manifesto is to fight against the suppression of information – but its members were not above childish actions simply to annoy and frustrate web users for their own amusement (known as “doing it for the lulz”). Anonymous supporters turned up at demonstrations from time to time – some of them wearing the same spooky Guy Fawkes mask that adorned the group’s Anony_Ops Twitter page. “It’s complex, puerile, bizarre and chaotic,” one of them told Arthur.

Operation Payback had previously been directed against the websites of law firms that pursued online music pirates, as well as against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Now it was the online payment firms’ turn for “payback”. Despite having no hierarchy or recognisable leader, on Wednesday 8 December Anonymous hackers forced the main website of MasterCard offline for several hours. They temporarily disrupted Sarah Palin’s credit card account. Anonymous also claimed to have knocked out PostFinance’s site and that of the Swedish prosecutor’s office. Some Anonymous supporters posted a “manifesto”. “We support the free flow of information. Anonymous is actively campaigning for this goal everywhere in all forms. This necessitates the freedom of expression for the internet, for journalism and journalists, and citizens of the world. Though we recognise you may disagree, we believe that Anonymous is campaigning for you so that your voice may never be silenced.”

What effect the attack had on MasterCard’s actual financial operations is unclear: the company did not say whether transactions (which would be carried out over secure lines to its main computers) were affected. It largely ignored the attack, hoping not to inflame the attackers. The tactic worked; Anonymous next considered turning its ire on Amazon and PayPal, but the disorganised nature of the group meant they could not muster enough firepower to knock either site offline; Amazon was too big, while PayPal withstood some attacks. The suggestion made privately was that the powerful hackers who had acted against MasterCard did not want to inconvenience themselves by taking out PayPal, which they used themselves all the time.

This event was something new – the internet equivalent of a noisy political demonstration. What had begun with a couple of teenage nerds had morphed into a cyber-uprising against attempts to restrict information. As they put it in one portentous YouTube video, upon a soundtrack of thrashing guitars: “We are everywhere.” They were certainly in the Netherlands, at least, where, in December, police arrested a 16-year-old and a 19-year-old. Some Anonymous supporters without sufficient computer skills had overlooked the fact that the software – called LOIC – being offered to them to run attacks would give away their internet location. Police could, given time, tie that to a physical user.

Behind all this online turbulence, however, a much more serious game was afoot. President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, called a press conference to announce there was now an “active, ongoing, criminal investigation” into the leaking of classified information. He promised to hold those who broke US law “accountable”, and said: “To the extent that there are gaps in our laws, we will move to close those gaps, which is not to say that anybody at this point, because of their citizenship or residence, is not a target or a subject of an investigation that is ongoing.” In Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, rumours began to spread that a secret grand jury had been empanelled, and many subpoenas were being prepared for issue. Bradley Manning, the young soldier who had by now spent seven months in virtual solitary confinement, would only see an end to his harsh treatment, his friends started to believe, if he was willing to implicate Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in some serious crimes.

It seemed clear that prosecuting Assange – an Australian citizen now living in the UK – for espionage or conspiracy was going to be an uphill affair, not least because of the old-fashioned nature of the US Espionage Act. But it was also clear that an exasperated White House wanted to be seen vigorously pursuing this option. Would the justice department try and winkle Assange out of his hideaway in the English countryside? And was there not a still unresolved police investigation into his behaviour in Sweden? The threat of extradition – and the possibility of several decades in a US supermax jail – began to loom over Assange, as the rest of the world sought to digest the significance of the cascade of documents he had released.

CHAPTER 16

The biggest leak in history

Cyberspace

30 November 2010

“It is the historian’s dream. It is the diplomat’s nightmare”

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH, HISTORIAN

What did we learn from WikiLeaks? The question, as with virtually everything else to do with the leaks, was polarising. There was, from the start, a metropolitan yawn from bien pensants who felt they knew it all. Arabs don’t like Iran? The Russian government is corrupt? Some African countries are kleptocracies? Go on, astonish us. You’ll be telling us next that the pope is Catholic.

According to this critique the disclosures stated the obvious, and amounted to no more than “humdrum diplomatic pillow talk”. (This was from the London Review of Books. Academic Glen Newey said he was unimpressed by the revelation that French leader Nicolas Sarkozy “is a short man with a Napoleon complex”.)

Then there were the people who argued that the cables did not reveal enough bad behaviour by Americans. On the left this was a cause for disappointment – and, sometimes, suspicion. A small cabal began poring over the cables for evidence of ideological editing or censorship. And why so little on Israel? On the right, and from government, this served as fuel for the argument that there was no public interest in publication. This was not the Pentagon papers, they reasoned. There was little malfeasance in American foreign policy revealed in the