WIKILEAKS Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy
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WIKILEAKS Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy Author: David Leigh and Luke Harding Publisher: PublicAffairs Date of Publication: February 2011 ISBN: 9781610390613 No. of Pages: 352 (This summary was published: March 10, 2011) About the Author: DAVID LEIGH is investigations editor at The Guardian. LUKE HARDING is The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. General Overview: Within the space of a few short years, WikiLeaks has been transformed from an obscure Web site which contained the musings of a lone Australian computer hacker with conspiracy theory tendencies into one of the most well known media brands in the world. At the same time, the company’s founder Julian Assange has been on a rocket propelled ride which has seen him at various times described as everything right across the spectrum from America’s public enemy number one to a sexual predator to a champion of free speech and transparency who will stop at nothing to make sure the truth gets out. Whatever the viewpoint, it is clear WikiLeaks is a story which is far from over. Digital disclosure of confidential information, even that normally concentrated at senior government level, is now a reality of the world in which we live. Whether that will cause the world as a whole to move to broader sunlit uplands powered by democracies or to descend into a web of increasingly strident dictatorships remains to be seen but there is no question the genie is now out of the bottle. In many ways, WikiLeaks is an opportunity for free nations to show whether or not they walk the talk when it comes to freedom of the press and the benefits of transparency. Interesting times still lie ahead as the WikiLeaks phenomena plays out. * Please Note: This political book summary does not offer judgment or opinion on the book’s contents. The ideas, viewpoints and arguments are presented just as the book’s author had intended. WikiLeaks – Page 1 Who is Julian Assange? Julian Assange is the founder and editor of WikiLeaks.org, a whistle blower Web site which was set up in 2006. WikiLeaks started life as something of an obscure and radical Web site but it morphed into a news platform when it published leaked footage showing US helicopter pilots killing two Reuters employees in Baghdad as casually as if they were playing a video-game. WikiLeaks gained further fame and notoriety when it published thousands of classified US military field reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them describing what was happening in less than glowing terms. Julian Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia on July 3, 1971. Assange took his name from his stepfather Brett Assange who was an actor and theater director in Australia. As a youngster, Julian traveled a lot as his family went from city to city with touring productions which his stepfather staged and directed. Julian’s mother was a passionate and active member of Australia’s nascent eco-movement. Assange’s mother and stepfather divorced when Julian was seven or eight years old and his mother became involved in a short-lived but violent relationship with another man. For the next five or six years, Julian, his mother and his half-brother lived almost as vagabonds and fugitives as they traveled from state to state in Australia trying to avoid any further contact with this violent newcomer. While his home life may have been stressed and unsettled, Assange took to computers with a passion. He became a well known player in Australia’s hacker underground which flourished in Melbourne in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, Julian Assange was arguably Australia’s most accomplished hacker, breaking into several Australian government owned computers as well as numerous mainframe systems of large corporations. In 1996, Assange pleaded guilty to 24 counts of hacking in the Victoria County Court. He was fined $2,100 with the judge noting Assange’s actions had been motivated more by intellectual inquisitiveness rather than an attempt to seek personal gain. While all of this was happening, Assange was also working as an unpaid computer programmer. Julian was an active and passionate member of the open source movement. He set up a Web site giving free advice on computer security. By 1996, he had 5,000 subscribers who received free information and free software. This early site, called Best of Security, would eventually evolve into WikiLeaks. Assange developed the Usenet caching software NNTPCache and Surfraw, a command-line interface for search engines. He also collaborated with some other hackers to develop the Rubberhose deniable encryption system – something human rights activists who faced torture could use to protect information. With this software, a password unlocks one layer of information without revealing there is another layer beneath that. Assange wrote: “We hope that Rubberhose will protect your data and offer a broader kind of protection for people who take risks for just causes. Our motto is: ‘Let’s make a little trouble.’” Between 2003 and 2006, Julian Assange attended Melbourne University where he studied physics and maths although he did not graduate. While there, he announced on his blog IQ.org: “The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what is actually going on.” In line with that sentiment, Assange announced he was launching WikiLeaks.org dedicated to disseminating leaked information as the most cost-effective form of political intervention. “WikiLeaks will be an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations.” The launch of WikiLeaks.org drew very little if any attention from the mainstream media but that was about to change dramatically. Most early supporters of WikiLeaks.org considered it to be a naive venture which would go nowhere. WikiLeaks – Page 2 The Rise of WikiLeaks WikiLeaks began as a true “wiki” – a user editable site, but Assange quickly realized this model was impractical for dangerous or incriminating information. Assange attended a European hacker’s conference run by the Chaos Group, one of the biggest and oldest hacker groups in the world. There he linked up with Daniel Domscheit-Berg who agreed to help Assange find safe havens where WikiLeaks’ servers could be located without fear of being taken down. Others joined in to provide ideas on how information could be submitted in an untraceable form so it could then be circulated in uncensored form without recrimination to the source. Eventually, WikiLeaks developed an anonymity protection device known as Tor which does not provide any information as to where records are uploaded from whatsoever. It features above military grade anonymity and runs on a network of about 2,000 servers worldwide. Any submission sent by Tor is completely anonymous and 100% untraceable. WikiLeaks published its first online secret document in December, 2006. It was a “secret decision” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union. Assange traveled to the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya in January 2007 to publicize WikiLeaks and ended up staying there for two years with activists. While there, he managed to get a copy of a report which detailed the alleged corruption of former president Daniel Arap Moi. When his successor, President Mwai Kibaki, failed to release the report for political reasons, WikiLeaks published it on August 31, 2007. The result was sensational and a huge uproar ensued. WikiLeaks would later publish a follow-up report on Kenyan death squads for which it would receive an award from the human rights organization Amnesty. For all that early success, however, WikiLeaks was still struggling to gain traction. It needed a business model which would bring in working revenue and at the same time gain political attention. After a while, it became clear the best way to achieve both these aims was for WikiLeaks to become more like a “publisher of last resort” than to remain a pure anonymous document dump. As 2009 ended, WikiLeaks was struggling to make a name for itself when Assange got hold of military footage from an AH-64 Apache helicopter which was involved in an incident in Baghdad which eventually resulted in the death of twelve people including two innocent employees of the Reuters news agency. Assange premiered this video at the National Press Club in Washington on April 5, 2010 under the title “Collateral Murder.” The video caused a stir but not the universal outrage and pressure for reform Assange had hoped for. While the reaction to the botched helicopter attack in Baghdad may not have been all that was hoped for, Assange’s contact in the U.S. military intelligence network was busy feeding him some other interesting data. US army information analyst Bradley Manning was based at Camp Hammer in the middle of the Mada’in Qada desert in Iraq where he pored over top-secret information fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. He had access to two military laptops which gave access to US state secrets through the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which is used for top-secret dispatches. Manning became shocked by the duplicity and corruption of his own country he discovered as he read from a vast database of top-secret documents and videos he found on those networks.