Julian Assange - WikiLeaks

Warrior for Truth

by Valerie Guichaoua & Sophie Radermecker 
Virtual Words Translations - Natasha Cloutier
With the collaboration of Franck Bachelin

Julian Assange - WikiLeaks

Warrior for Truth
 Published by Cogito Media Group.

Copyright ©2011 Valerie Guichaoua & Sophie Radermecker 

The reproduction or transmission of any part of this publication in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, or storage
in a retrieval system, without prior consent of the publisher, is an infringe-
ment of copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic
production of the material, a license must be obtained from the Canadian
Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright) before proceeding.

ISBN: 978-1-926893-55-6

Cover design: François Turgeon and Kayo Tomura

Text design and composition: Benjamin Roland

Cover photo:
© Photography by Jillian Edelstein, CAMERA PRESS LONDON

Authors photography:
© Arber Kucana

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Printed and Bound in the United States of America

 Contents

Acknowledgments 9
Foreword 13
Climax 19

Part I 25
1. Magnetic Island 27
2. Élise 33

Part II 43
3. Mendax 45
4. Hackers’ dialogue 52
5. Sophox 63

Part III 69
6. Élise and Xavier 71
7. Life Experience 79

Part IV 93
8. Maternal Influence 95
9. Inspiration and Reference 101

Part V 109
10. The Genesis of WikiLeaks 111
11. The Organization 116
12. The First Leaks 128
13. Julian as seen by Élise 139
Part VI 149
14. A Chain of Leaks 151
15. Project B 161

Part VII 177

16. Iceland 179
17. A Fellow Traveler 188
18. A Friend Who Wishes You Well 195
19. A Holographic Committee 198
20. The Double 204
21. Cryptome 209
22. DDoS: Daniel Domscheit-Berg Or Schmitt 216
23. David against Goliath 235
24. Political Support 242

Part VIII 255

25. Family heritage 257
26. Assange’s shadows 262
27. Shockwaves 270
28. An Unexpected Partnership 285
29. Revolution 297
30. A 180-Degree Turn 308
31. Transparency 318

Part IX 329
32. A Man and His Opposite 333
33. Reprisals 342
34. The Prosecutors’ Stories 350
35. Clashing truths 360
36. Heading to Surrender 369
37. Behind Bars 380

Conclusion 391
Epilogue 395
 Acknowledgments

From The Authors

We would like to take a moment to thank all of the people
who helped us carry out this incredible feat.
First, our contacts, Elisabeth Nataf and Bob Oré. Thanks to
both of you for giving us the wonderful opportunity to write this
extremely interesting book.
Thanks to our publisher Pierre Turgeon for all the confidence
he had in us.
The utmost recognition goes to Franck Bachelin, without
whom we would not have been able to write this book. He was a
collaborator throughout the entire process of this project. Thanks
to his thorough research, he was able to provide us with exclusive
documents that greatly helped us in our work. His help was
essential.
A big thanks to the entire team of Cogito Média for their
incredible work.
We would like to thank all the people we met:
Xavier Damman, Frédéric Jacobs, Jonas Morian, Ian Katz,
Ian Traynor, Nick Davies, Christian Engström and Henrik
Alexandersson, as well as our anonymous sources who prefer to
stay in the shadows.
We would also like to thank the people who opened doors for
us in Iceland and Sweden: Cécilia, Jonas and Stina in Stockholm,
and Leifur and Carl in Iceland.
10 Julian Assange

Thanks to Martina Norell for these precious contacts.

A warm thanks to Arnaud Ozharun who made us beautiful by
taking care of us at Natural Mind, and to Letizia Ferrara.
Thanks to all the bloggers who provide analyses and to all
Internet users who express themselves online.

From Valérie
Thanks to Sophie for having introduced me to such a
passionate project and for being the guardian in terms of taking
care that the project should unfold properly.
Thanks to my children Chloé, Pol and Lilou for supporting
me during the intense writing of this book.
Thanks to my husband who assisted me while I took a plunge
into the universe of Julian Assange. I have a deep appreciation
for his wise advice, patient reviewing and extraordinary listening
capabilities.
I would like to emphasize my great interest in Joseph Campbell
and his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His inspiration
was great in aiding in the understanding the heroes of our times.

From Sophie
Thanks to my two number one fans: my sisters Valérie and
Muriel for their unconditional support at all times.
Big hugs to Léa and Matéo who pamper me with their
amazement seen through their drawings and to Justine who
warmed my heart with her I love you’s.
A naughty thought for my granny and a wink to the entire
‘Rader’ clan.
My thoughts go out to my parents: to my adorable father and
my exceptional mother.
To you, who have read so many books in your life, this work
is dedicated to you with all my love.
 WikiLeaks 11

I would also like to warmly thank my friends in Brussels: Aude,

Marc, Maria, Philip, Nathalie, Yves, Co, Lio and Emmanuelle.
Thanks to the unexpected people, particularly Charlotte,
Richard and Matthaios. A special dedication to my master M.M.
who guided me with such kindness.
Finally, a special tribute, full of tenderness to my friend and
partner Valérie, without whom I never could have written this
book.
 Foreword

Our human stories are linked to myths through an imaginary

world. Throughout our lives we go through many stages that
open up paths that lead us back to ourselves. Some of us become
heroes. It may sound like a big word, but not if it is defined as a
person who will mark our lives forever.
The challenge here was to evaluate the accomplishments of a
living person. Julian Assange wants to change the world. Without
any judgment, we followed his path from his birth until present
day. We wanted to understand the man through his story. Not
judge him, but rather present him as close as possible to who he
is, and especially, what he reveals about himself. We took care
to separate his personal story from his mission by highlighting
his accomplishments: freedom of the press and freedom of
expression on the Internet.
It seems clear to us that Julian Assange’s actions should
elevate him to the level of hero as defined by Joseph Campbell1.
In fact, since his commitment to the mission of the Internet,
Julian Assange has overcome many challenges that make him an
extraordinary man. With his determination to open the channels
of truth, he has been through a long process of self-discovery and
has uncovered his true personality.
Our goal was to collect and verify enough information so that
readers could ask themselves different questions than those that

1 Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was an American mythologist famous for his thoughts
on heroes, their motivations, their success as well as their mistakes.
14 Julian Assange

have already been asked by the media. Does Julian deserve to be

judged like an ordinary man or does he deserve to be considered
a warrior of truth?

By searching the vast immaterial world of the Internet, we found

people who were involved and responsible: hackers and bloggers
seeking the truth and committed to sharing information. We also
noticed that many of them are sometimes better informed than
journalists. WikiLeaks has redefined the role of the media.
That is why we introduced the fictive characters of Élise and
Xavier, inspired by our meetings with hackers and bloggers, as
well as what we read on blogs. They represent the individuals
who are active online, and we wanted to pay tribute to them as
well.
To become a hero, Julian Assange needed troops to support
him, people who were also attracted to the adventure that one
may call the Internet, to join and reinforce his actions.
As a man, he must also face the accusations made against
him. Everyone will be able to either understand and accept him or
condemn him after reading this book. Julian Assange is a hero of
our time for having dared to go so far in his actions and for having
pushed the repressive boundaries of the established rules of the
media and the way information is shared with the general public.
To commit and act, putting his life in danger for what he believes
in seems extremely honorable to us. He shows us that a group of
people can oppose a perfectly dehumanized bureaucracy, and it is
because of this that we feel his actions deserve to be pointed out.
Will going above and beyond make him a better man? We
don’t think so. We’re only spectators of the Assange affair
currently in conflict with the authorities. However, we also have
a role to play in defending our freedom on the Internet. Let us be
 WikiLeaks 15

able to mobilize and change the way governments around the

world try to regulate the flow of information on the Internet.
May this book impassion and inform so that everyone can
take a position and respond with fair thoughts, fair opinion and
fair action. Men and women have already committed themselves:
Kristinn Hrafnsson and Jacob Appelbaum with their constant
work for and with WikiLeaks; Birgitta Jónsdóttir for her balanced
stance on Assange and for her actions in favor of freedom of
the press accompanied by Smári McCarthy; John Young for his
commitment through his site Cryptome; Daniel Domscheit-Berg
and his friends in the torch they lit with OpenLeaks, and so many
others...
The army of truth warriors has risen. Today it’s up to us, the
foot soldiers, to choose our rank instead of being part of the silent
majority: those without the strength to choose, the ghosts of this
world.
Is Julian Assange facing his final ordeal? Can we rightfully
call him a hero? It’s up to you, the readers, to decide.
 Climax2

Monday, December 6, 2010, an unlikely time of the evening.

Julian was perfectly still in front of his computer, with the

exception of his tapping feet. Sue was standing next to him,
watching the screen. She touched the keyboard from time to time
so that it wouldn’t go into sleep mode.
When Vaughan walked into the room, she looked at him
questioningly. “Don’t look surprised, he’s always like that when
he’s focused,” he said.
Vaughan suddenly got the impression that he was in the way,
but Julian smiled at him. Julian was really good at that: he made
you feel like you were very important to him, while most people
in his situation would be way too preoccupied to let you know
you were even remotely important. Vaughan greatly appreciated
that character trait.
Vaughan Smith was Julian’s host since he had arrived in the
United Kingdom. He invited Julian to stay at his beautiful ten-
bedroom, Georgian manor as a place of residence, so that Julian
could be released on bail.
Vaughan Smith was a forty-seven-year-old British citizen. He
served as an officer in the British Army’s Grenadier Guards, the
same regiment as his father. He became a pioneer of independent
video journalism in the 1990s and worked as a war correspondent

2 Source: The World’s Most Wanted House Guest by Vaughan Smith published by
“The Telegraph” and on the Frontline Club website (16/12/2010).
20 Julian Assange

in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc. To ensure

coverage of these conflicts, he founded a freelance agency with
three other journalists called Frontline News TV to represent
the interests of young video journalists and promote their work.
In 2003, he continued his activities in favor of independent
journalism by creating the Frontline Club whose goal was to
promote a better understanding of international information.
Vaughan was not for or against what Julian did, but when
he saw him at the hands of the British authorities, he decided to
make sure he was not denied any of his basic rights. And it was
this decision that would have Julian experience the most unusual
Christmas holiday ever.
It all started with the evening’s setting: everyone was huddled
around a computer, talking via Skype to Mark Stephens, one of
Julian’s lawyers in London.
Julian was constantly in front of the computer, completely
engrossed and impossible to interrupt. Vaughan tried to think of
a way to lighten the mood; he pictured himself waltzing into the
huge dining room in a clown costume singing Christmas carols.
However, he knew that Julian wouldn’t pay any attention to this
clowning around in his honor. Julian had his own special way of
being hypnotized by the screen, but when someone said hi to him
nicely, he would stop whatever he was doing and spend half an
hour chatting.
Mark explained the situation, and everyone listened carefully.
When the call was finished, Julian got up and walked to the
mantle. He stared at the flames dancing in the fireplace. At that
very moment, he was a thousand miles away from the eighteenth-
century manor. Friends and sympathizers present started talking,
but the conversation quickly died; as everyone had heard his call
with Mark. Julian listened to them and kept quiet. A few of them
came up with ideas, and there seemed to be several options, but
 WikiLeaks 21

like wisps of straw thrown into the fire, Julian burnt them one by
one.
He didn’t want to act as though he had something to hide. The
British police said that they want him and that he would have to
report to them.
Sue and the others discussed this option. Vaughan grabbed his
camera and started filming them preparing the logistics. He didn’t
work for WikiLeaks. He didn’t even want to debate whether
WikiLeaks was right or wrong. As far as he was concerned, the
issue was, above all, about standing up to the tyrant. He still
wanted to believe that his historically tolerant country was an
independent haven that would remain loyal to its fundamental
values.
After a few minutes, Julian plopped down on the couch. He
laid down and fell asleep. He had been up for forty-eight hours.
Vaughan stopped his camera, as he wouldn’t film the instructions
or the decisions.

It was a few hours later, and they had to get ready. Mark, and
the team entrusted with his defense, had asked Julian to come by
at 7 a.m. since he had to report to the police at 9 a.m., and Sue
and Jeremy have made desperate attempts to get Julian to hurry.
They also wanted to make sure that the mood was as pleasant and
relaxed as possible. They joked with him, knowing that he had
little time to joke around.
Everyone was exhausted. It was time to get into the car.
Sue held back her tears, getting in behind Julian. Vaughan was
driving, a heavy silence filled the air, there was tension, but there
was also hope that everyone would be back that night.
It was still dark when they got to Mark’s place. Vaughan
noticed a photographer camped outside the attorney’s house, with
his camera placed on the trunk of his car. He probably deserved
22 Julian Assange

to get a few pictures, having braved the terrible London morning

cold, but he wasn’t going to get any. They parked further away.
Mark told them to meet him in a greasy spoon not far from
there. They had breakfast in the back room. Julian was very
hungry, since he hadn’t had dinner the night before. They sat
down and before anything else, Mark cut right to the chase:
“The police have switched the police station you have to
report on a daily basis,” he said to Julian.
Julian started eating without answering, listening very
carefully. Mark’s tone was serious, yet comforting. Julian’s
tension was tangible. Unable to take it anymore, Sue got up and
went outside to smoke a cigarette.
Jennifer Robinson joined them a few minutes before they left.
The dynamic young woman with blonde hair specialized in media,
defamation and human rights. Sue was driving and Vaughan was
sitting next to her, while Julian was flanked by his two lawyers.
Mark spent most of the trip on the phone, and Julian’s eyes were
glued to his computer, working on the order statement following
the European arrest warrant issued against him.
The screen reflected its familiar glow onto the car’s passengers.
Shortly after, Vaughan noticed that the computer was in sleep
mode and Julian did nothing to wake it up, his gaze transfixing
the gloomy little rectangle. His thoughts darkened at that very
moment. His mind was filled with anxious clouds filled with
options. Vaughan looked over to the road to try to empathize with
Julian’s situation.
When they showed up in front of the white building of the
London police station on Holmes Road, the effects of this order
were not yet clear to Julian.
The blue gate opened. The car passed through it in a split
second, a very difficult moment for Julian. Everything flashed
through his mind in a whirlwind of emotions; the urge to flee,
 WikiLeaks 23

mixed with courage and desperation, coupled with unshakable

faith. “I did what I had to do.”
The large doors closed. The world shifted. Several faceless
police officers surrounded the car. Although the space in the car
was limited, the passengers were thoroughly examined. Mark and
Julian got out of the car. A woman in uniform pointed out a tiny
parking spot to Sue, so small that she had to fight to park the car
properly. She was exasperated. She felt a hot flash go up her spine
and sweat begin to form under her arms. She would’ve liked to
soften the blow by yelling to the world, “Why make things more
difficult than they already are?”
Vaughan and her felt intimidated. Vaughan had often visited
police stations and prisons, but he had never felt this uncomfortable.
He wondered what his role was at times like these: journalist,
accused, friend, or representative of the Frontline Club?
After parking the car, they hurried to join up with Mark and
Julian. A policeman clearly read the four Swedish charges. Julian
listened to the man without flinching. He had known for a long
time that he had lit the fuse of an inevitable explosion: WikiLeaks
couldn’t be stopped, the spill couldn’t be dammed and the leap
had been made, no matter what happened to him.
A man facing Justice. The media had often portrayed him as
a cold, calculating, almost Machiavellian individual, coming out
of hiding like the devil. The main hideout was, of course, the
Frontline Club where many members had already had the chance
to interview him.
Vaughan considered for a moment the harm the media has
done to Julian. They had turned him into the Bin Laden of the
Internet. If there was one word that scared everyone, it was the
word ‘terrorist.’ But that day, the attention was entirely focused
on the fight between Julian and the courts, so that nobody focused
24 Julian Assange

on the impervious political systems that the leaks of WikiLeaks

had exposed to the light of day.
Who was talking about the real battle of the WikiLeaks man
these days? Nobody. Instead, people were talking about a man
who was under suspicion and had been accused.
With that kind of media coverage, Julian could no longer be
considered an ordinary person. Vaughan had discovered a truly
ingenious and obsessed man who was also amusing and knew
when to step back and take a look at himself. The revelations
of WikiLeaks were like an erupting volcano, and its lava was
flowing anywhere and everywhere it could. Vaughan believed
that the attack of the authorities was a feeble attempt at best.
The victim may have been vulnerable, but his message, already
widely broadcast, was ready to be broadcast over and over again.
Vaughan didn’t want to give up on Julian. Regardless of how
he felt about WikiLeaks, he wanted to believe that his country
was ready to fight for fundamental principles like justice, and had
decided to join the ranks.
Part I
 1

Magnetic Island

Picture a pale blue sky, a crystal clear sea and a richly diverse
collection of flora and fauna off the Great Barrier Reef. Then
picture a white sandy beach with bright green trees that contrast
the gray rocks beautifully. This little paradise has a predestined
name, Magnetic Island, a name it got from Capitan Cook in
1770 because of the magnetic effect the island had on his ship’s
compass when he was sailing up the Australian coast.
Magnetic Island is located eight kilometers from Townsville,
Queensland, on the northeastern coast of Australia. It is a
mountainous island of fifty-two square kilometers, a blip on
the world map. Nobody ever talks about it: the island is remote
and has about two thousand inhabitants. A surfer’s paradise, it
survives on tourism, thanks to the beauty of its twenty-seven-
square-kilometer nature park.

In 1971, Christine Assange came to live on the island with baby

Julian Paul. As a single mom, she wanted a simple and natural life
for her and her child. She wanted to be free and live without rules.
Back then, Magnetic Island was the meeting place for Australian
hippies. It was the lifestyle Christine adopted, spending most of
her days in a bikini.
28 Julian Assange

Julian and his mother first lived on Picnic Bay beach in a

small cottage for twelve dollars a week.
In 1973, Christine started a relationship with touring theater
director Brett Assange, the man who became Julian’s father for a
few years and gave him a family name.
On the beach or in an abandoned farm, Jules, as his mother
liked to call him, had a very unrestricted childhood. He was a
very active child, who could easily keep busy on his own, like a
little Tom Sawyer. He walked around, observed nature, and went
fishing. He built rafts and dug wells, and he even had his own
horse to gallop through the northeastern Australian nature. He
built networks of tunnels and bridges.
One day, he fell from a tree and broke his arm. He lied to
his father about how he had hurt himself. His father saw a kind
of bravery in Julian’s action, but Julian didn’t want to show his
feelings. He wanted to be stronger than the pain. He thought he
fell by mistake. He should have picked better climbing points on
the tree.
Brett described him as a very sharp and perceptive child
who was very self-assured. Till this day he supports Julian
unconditionally, no matter what he does.
The touring theater life, which Christine adhered to, meant
moving around a lot. They had a nonconformist, bohemian
lifestyle. Together Brett and Christine set up small, eccentric
theater productions, specializing in puppets. Barely more than
five years old, Julian had fun taking apart and putting together
video and audio equipment, spotlights and all kinds of things
Brett brought home. Brett saw that Julian was different from
other kids, sometimes capable of violent, angry outbursts.
Brett was a kind father, but he had a drinking problem. Some
time after Julian turned nine, Christine finally decided to end
 WikiLeaks 29

her relationship with Brett. She then started dating an amateur

musician with whom she had a rocky relationship.
Christine remarried the alleged son of Anne Hamilton-
Byrne who was running a sect known as the Santiniketan Park
Association in Australia. She had his child, a son. In 1982, the
couple split up and argued over custody of Julian’s half-brother.
Christine wanted to protect her children from this violent man.
Moreover, she knew how the sect operates. Anne Hamilton-Byrne
was then ‘in possession’ of fourteen children that she totally cut
off from the world, drug them on a regularly basis to keep calm
and starve them in order to control them. Christine knew from
her boyfriend that Anne harshly disciplined the children and beat
them often.
Julian was always scared of this manipulative man that he
would eventually call a ‘dangerous psychopath.’ To avoid getting
on his stepfather’s bad side, he often kept quiet and observed
him, as if he were fascinated. The man had no less that five ID
cards in a wallet, ready to use. He created his life like patchwork,
his life story, and even the city where he was born.
Christine eventually ran away with her two sons. She made
them move often, changing cities and even names. They were
hunted down by Christine’s ex-husband as well as by social
security.
Julian went from school to school to escape his stepfather. His
ability to adapt was remarkable, as he didn’t seem to be affected
by this unusual lifestyle. Some people think that changing
schools was terrible, but he actually liked it. He liked life on the
road, just like his mother. Julian’s ancestors on his mother’s side
came to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century from Scotland
and Ireland looking for land to farm. Assange suspected half-
jokingly that his inclination to wander was genetic. In any case, it
was a lifestyle he’d known since childhood. Not worrying about
30 Julian Assange

change, appreciating this perpetual discovery and rediscovery of

landscapes and of his environment.
When Julian would grow up, he would learn that traveling
was a passion of his. He would go on to change residences every
six weeks if things got slow.
As a child, he couldn’t stand injustice. He would get angry
when a gang of kids would attack a kid who was by himself. He
was one of those kids who would let spiders run when all the
other kids just wanted to stomp on them.
After Christine left Brett, she moved with little Jules five
thousand kilometers south, to the city of Lismore. He went to
Goolmangar Primary school not far from there. Goolmangar was
a relatively rural town, surrounded by endless fields. He had a
hard time fitting in at the schools he attended and getting along
with other pupils, children of farmers with a more down-to-
earth attitude than he. To circumvent these problems, Christine
would home-school Julian regularly or sign her boys up for
correspondence courses. What was important to her was that her
sons’ personalities were not damaged by the school system. She
already taught them not to blindly follow authority figures.
Julian therefore developed a solid personality, not too distant
from others, but truly self-centered. He spent hours reading in
libraries. He literally devoured every book he could get his hands
on, one after the other. He noted certain sentences, turned them
into slogans, building his own bible of ideas and deep convictions.
Understand, cross and think.
Before he turned fourteen years old, he had already attended
thirty-seven schools. At that time he was living in the suburbs
of Melbourne, in front of a computer equipment store. It was in
that store that Julian wrote his first programs. Christine didn’t
have the means to buy him his own computer, but his newfound
passion and affinity would see him spending several hours a week
 WikiLeaks 31

on the store’s computers. Finally, Christine bought him his first

used Commodore 64. He’d soon be able to get into well-known
programs where programmers had left hidden messages.

He developed a fatal attraction for computers. Nothing was

simpler than a computer. If it made a mistake, it meant you messed
up. It was not because it didn’t like you, or it felt threatened by
you, or because you were a little rascal, or because it didn’t like
to teach or that you shouldn’t be there. All you have to do is play.
And cracking a program was like playing chess. It was an
uncompromising game with simple rules. There was nothing left
to chance and the problem was very complicated. Exactly the
type of challenges Julian needed.
The young Julian lived his life as an outsider. A small group
of them felt this way, angry at the dominant culture and proudly
determined to cause problems to all those right-thinking minds.

In 1987, at sixteen, Julian got a modem that allowed him to convert

his computer into a portal. Back then you could buy a modem
for eighty dollars. It was the device of choice for real computer
enthusiasts. Websites didn’t exist yet, but the Internet had been in
use since 1984 and one thousand computers were connected to it
around the world, mostly universities and government sites.
While some Australian kids were playing with Flight
Simulator, others were trying to set up computer networks. Julian
was one of those kids.
He spent countless hours in front of his computer, learning
different systems, understanding them and improving them.
He got a reputation as a programmer capable of cracking the
most secure systems. He had yet to realize that for some people
he was like a masked avenger of the truth. He ironically chose his
handle inspired by a formula of the Roman poet Horace, splendide
32 Julian Assange

mendax, meaning ‘nobly untruthful.’ Was it possible to hide the

truth for a just cause? That was the main issue preoccupying
Julian when he was sixteen. He’d already answered this with a
‘no.’ Nobody could judge what was right or wrong for someone
else. That’s the way he operated, code name Mendax.
 2

Élise

Élise turned on the electric heating and drew some water for
a bath. Her body was aching for a really hot bath, just the way
she liked it. She slowly took off her clothes, starting with her
turtleneck, and massaged her shoulders. Then she unbuttoned
her jeans and wiggled her hips out of them. The clothes piled up
on the floor like a skin being shed. A beige top fell onto a blue
sweater, with delicate socks and white underwear topping off the
small mound. She breathed and smiled. She was finally alone.
She slowly stepped into the bathtub, aware of how her skin
would react when it would touch the steaming hot bath.
She slid into the bathtub and let the water come up to her
ears. It was like being in a hyperbaric chamber: the noise outside
disappeared and no longer held any meaning. Her body calmly
floated up and down in the bathtub to the rhythm of her breathing.
She let her mind wander. The world no longer existed; Élise didn’t
exist. She was just an extension of the water that first carried her
and then absorbed her.
To get rid of a tear in her eye, she plunged her face in the
water. Little pleasures, regrets, the past and happy moments
flashed through her head, nothing that could really be expressed,
just emotions.
34 Julian Assange

She washed herself with orchid-scented shower gel and let the
enticing aroma take her away. She imagined herself surrounded
by flowers, closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
She naturally crossed her arms over her chest, and then
opened her eyes. Her foot slid along the side of the bathtub and
grabbed the small chain with the plug between her toes. Her
skin turned slightly red due to the hot water. She breathed in the
orchid fragrance still in the air. The bathroom mirror was fogged
up. Time stood still. She instinctively yanked the small chain in
one go, and the atmosphere in the bathroom changed. The water
started draining very loudly, the noise outside could be heard
again and the bathtub emptied out. She tried to hold back time
by sitting still. Now that the bathtub had become a cold and hard
nest with no more water in it, it was time to get out.
She slipped into polar fleece pajamas and picked out a pair
of pink socks to liven up her outfit. She got out of the bathroom
smelling nice, with her workday behind her. She went to the
kitchen to put together a tray of food and brought it into the
living room a few minutes later. It featured a lentil salad, a slice
of bread with cheese, plain yoghurt and an apple. It was 7:45 p.m.
on November 5, 2010. She turned on the TV and noticed that
Julian Assange was a guest on TSR, the French-language Swiss
television network.
The journalist introduced the interview by talking about
battling the United States. Élise smiled when she heard that. Was
it possible for a single man to fight against this superpower? She
knew a bit about the WikiLeaks movement, but nothing about
its spokesperson. Xavier would talk to her about it once in a
while until about four months ago, just before they broke up. She
remembered him mentioning the movement by explaining that
it wants to release information by revealing state secrets and the
secrets of banks and large organizations. They leak thousands of
 WikiLeaks 35

documents on their website for anyone to read. Even newspapers

use the site to supply citizens with information.
To be honest, before that night, November 5, 2010, she was
never interested in WikiLeaks, because Xavier was spending too
much time in front of his computer. Her battle was directed at
WikiLeaks and its hackers-journalists-ideologists who believed
they could change the world by broadcasting information over
the Internet.
They advocated total freedom of the press and massive
broadcasting of raw information. That was pretty much all she
knew since she had never visited their site. She mostly remembered
having to go to bed alone because Xavier was always glued to his
computer for whatever information the world needed. She saw
him again in her mind with a vacant look and remembered how
he tried to explain to her his level of commitment. Every time
he tried, she thwarted his attempts with a pithy remark. She felt
as though she were competing with the movement. Xavier was
so absorbed by his mission and so enthusiastic about the idea
of being on the right track. Their relationship broke down; she
began to feel inadequate, she neglected to show him how much
she really cared about their staying together. When he started to
travel last spring, she fought her final battle.
“If you leave, we’ll have to break up...”
“Élise, this is way too important, it’s really going to change
things.”
“What about us? We need to change things too...”
“Listen, I can explain some stuff to you so you’ll understand.”
“I don’t want to hear about this anymore, Xavier.”
She lost the war and Xavier went on a trip for WikiLeaks.
He returned on April 5, 2010 and moved out of the apartment
on June 6, 2010. They politely divided up the stuff they had
bought together. She kept the bedroom, while Xavier took the
36 Julian Assange

living room. They each had their own desk, and the rest was
just junk. During the summer, Élise bought a white couch and
a square coffee table. She also bought herself a small brown
leather armchair that matched the rest of the furniture. She felt
comfortable in this place that she could now call home. She had
changed so much in the past four months.
She focused on the staging of the news. The journalist was
at ease and smiled when he greeted Julian Assange. Julian was
almost filmed from behind, and Élise noticed that he repositioned
himself slightly on his chair when the host said his name. His
back seemed stiff, and except for his nod to the journalist, Élise
felt that he was in control of every move he made. The camera
turned and she finally saw Julian’s face.
He was very pale, despite the TV make-up. His forehead was
large and high. His hair, which seemed colored, was combed back,
accentuating the size of his forehead. His gray eyes stared at the
journalist and a small unemotional smile appeared on his face.
Élise studied the man carefully, to better understand his secrets.
He blinked often, as if he were nervous. His facial expression
stayed the same until he started talking about information. At
that very moment, his smile disappeared and he seemed to be
expressing things that were fundamentally important. After all,
he had revealed more scoops in a few weeks than the Washington
Post had in the past thirty years.
While Julian talked live, words danced in Élise’s head.
“Revelations, documents, small organization, important issues,
Afghanistan, Russia, Europe, money laundering, etc.” They were
all words she’d heard Xavier use before.
It was as if she were hypnotized by this man on TV. Hypnotized
by the world he exposed without emotion. It had a taste of reality.
A world beyond daily life. Could it be possible that he was
involved in this solely to inform citizens? What was his secret?
 WikiLeaks 37

She suddenly realized what kind of world she’d been living

in: a world ignorant of the international stage, their affairs and
undersides. She believed in truisms almost automatically these
days: ‘The world is corrupt,’ ‘Politicians are all the same, six of
one and half a dozen of the other,’ ‘We can’t possibly do anything
at our level, so there’s no use talking about it,’ etc.
She discovered a man who seemed to be slowly heading
toward his obsession: revealing the secrets of the world’s most
powerful authorities to the world. And that evening, she realized
that she wanted to know more. Who was this man? What was his
message? Was he really what he appeared to be? Was he some
kind of modern-day avenger? For a split second, Élise wondered
if she was dealing with reality. She pictured herself in a spy
movie, chased by American henchmen. So who was this Jason
Bourne guy?
Julian was explaining how dangerous his actions were. He
had to change residences, didn’t stay in hotels and kept changing
phone numbers. He lived like a fugitive. Who wanted to kill off
Jason Bourne?
Suddenly her heart started beating faster and she felt a bit
queasy when Julian explained that WikiLeaks’ actions were not
only dangerous for him, but also for the volunteers who worked
with him. At that moment, she picked up the phone and dialed
Xavier’s number without thinking.
Three rings...
“Damn, voicemail,” she thought to herself.
“Friends and enemies, this is Xavier’s voicemail. Leave a
message, whoever you are and I’ll call you back.”
“Xavier, it’s me. I just saw an interview with Julian Assange
on TSR and I thought of you. I don’t know what to say, but I’d
like to hear from you, to make sure everything’s OK with you.
Call me.”
38 Julian Assange

She hung up, a bit disappointed. The queasy feeling was still
there. Where was Xavier?
How many times had they called each other over the last
four months? The first month they talked about dividing up the
furniture many times. And since neither one of them wanted to end
up together at parties hosted by friends, they would call to check
before embarrassing anyone by both showing up. The following
month, they weren’t invited to the same parties and didn’t have
any reason to call each other up anymore. That evening she just
wanted to talk, find out where he was and what he was doing:
work, the organization, his involvement.
“I think people are at their best when they have a real passion
for something and I’m very lucky,” said Julian Assange to the
journalist.
Élise felt like she was hearing Xavier when he tried to explain
to her that he didn’t need to sleep eight hours a day and that
spending a few hours at night in front of the computer was a
better use of his time.
On November 5, 2010 Élise formulated a new opinion of her
ex-boyfriend.
When the interview was over she turned off the TV, fascinated
by the world she had caught a glimpse of.
Was Xavier really putting his own life at risk to search for
information? She was impressed.
She brought back her tray to the kitchen and put the kettle on.
She then walked toward her desk and turned on the computer,
waited until it booted and launched Radiohead’s Kid A.
In the kitchen, the water was boiling. She filled a cup,
grabbed a tea bag from the cupboard and put it in a saucer with
her cup. She brought it all to her desk and sat down in front of
her computer. She logged onto www.heroesbysophox/wordpress.
com, password: dontforgetseb.
 WikiLeaks 39

The homepage appeared with Pop-art-type photos of

Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, John F. Kennedy, and even more
personalities as she continued to build her blog. She had been
writing about Michael Jackson for a few days now. As the King
of Pop, he took up all the space on her blog.
She’d only been blogging for two months and posted about
life and the world. Did she write about stuff she’d put in her diary?
No, not really because she didn’t just write for herself. She liked
to get comments from other bloggers, and she received all kinds
of comments. She got personal comments, help with the blog
layout, and details about the major events and personalities she
wrote about. It surprised her to see all the fans these ‘murdered
prophets’ have. As well, fans were always interested in murderers
and investigations, as the Internet helped them come up with all
kinds of theories. Everything was on the Internet, the good, the
bad and the ugly as far as information was concerned, and all
these opinions were allowed under the cloak of anonymity, so
people let their imaginations run wild, while others investigate
like on NCIS.
Élise checked out her blog and went directly to the category
‘Moods’ to share what she had just experienced. She wrote…
40 Julian Assange

Julian Assange

Published on 5 November 2010 by sophox | Leave a comment |

I’ve just found out who Julian Assange is on TSR. I don’t

know much about WikiLeaks, but now Mr. WikiLeaks has shown
up on my media radar.
The man is impressive, calm and sure of himself. I couldn’t
help but notice his little sarcastic smile. It’s tough to say whether
he really feels superior, but it seems like he’s making fun of us
by sitting straight on his chair, as if he were holding back a huge
burst of laughter.
“It’s a battle between Hillary Clinton and I.” Does this amuse
him? I’m intrigued. He seems to be threatened, since he is ready to
ask for political asylum in Switzerland. How can a single person
scare the Americans and suddenly become the man to take down?
He’s a fugitive. It must be tough. Doesn’t he take the time to
settle down every once in a while rather than live like a nomad?
The stakes must really be high.
We’re very nice to want to grant him asylum in our country.
I don’t know how I feel about that, but I will explore how I feel.
He says that passion energizes him, but does passion deserve
all these sacrifices? I think it’s all a bit much. If you’re going to
be Public Enemy Number One, it better be worth it. Yes, we’re
being lied to; yes, governments are running the world while we
work like idiots for two weeks of paid vacation. But what can we
do about it? I don’t even feel like my vote counts at the municipal
level. Whether I’m there or not doesn’t make a difference.
 WikiLeaks 41

So why has he set this thing in motion and being considered a

dangerous man? I think he has a kind of angelic face.
This man is mysterious, so I’m going to look into it. Today, I
declare the category ASSANGE open in my blog.

This entry was published in Moods. You can bookmark it as a favorite with this permalink.
 Part II

The Call to Adventure

Ye who enter into the ball of life, choose your mask
wisely.
– André Maurois
 3

Mendax

Mendax. It was his world from now on. A world of electrons

and switches: the beauty of the baud.
Julian joined forces with two hacker friends, Prime Suspect
and Trax, to create a group called International Subversives. They
hacked into already existing phone lines without paying.
They poked around. They broke into computer systems in
Europe and North America, including the network of the US
Department of Defense, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory:
a government research institution specialized in science and
technology.
The three boys were exploring. The golden rules of hacking
already apply: don’t damage computer systems you break into
(including crashing them), don’t change the information in those
systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks), and share
information.
They existed online devoid of skin color, nationality and
religious dogma. They created another life for themselves, a
second life that sometimes came dangerously close to obsession,
almost at the point of forgetting or abandoning the first. Curiosity
like a drug: one had the urge to dig deeper, the need to know
and understand, excel and outdo them all. The hours of the night
went by in a strange way, quickly. Eyes, hands, computer screen:
46 Julian Assange

everything else disappeared bit by bit. There was nothing left

but the clicking of the keyboard in the silence of obscurity. Was
someone there, could someone hear him, could someone see him
while he was no longer his physical self? He was not lost. Nobody
knew what he looked like, but he had a name. It was Mendax.

One needs some know-how to be able to pass through the hidden

electronic fields that connect telecom systems and computer
networks. It was a nice challenge for the outsiders of International
Subversives. For them it was much more than just a simple game
of chess. Exploring the world and being involved in international
politics from their own bedroom gave them the feeling of being
on the right path. Solving problems, building things and believing
in freedom and voluntary mutual help were the major pieces of
the game played by Julian and his two friends.
It was experience that continued to feed young Julian’s
personality. He felt like he could help change things that he found
unbearable. Although one still had to recognize injustice, have
ideals and understand the world, online people were judged by
what they thought and what they said, not by what they looked
like.
Julian was a very sharp young man, easily frustrated by slow
thinking minds. All his real rivals were online. He was creative
and never had to waste his time engaging in boring tasks, except
to acquire more skills.
His new tools gave him an ever-increasing sense of freedom.
His desire to be online verged on fascination since he worked at
it non-stop.
At the same time, he noticed that authoritarians fed on
censorship and secrecy. They distrusted voluntary mutual help
and sharing information. They only appreciated cooperation when
they could control it. Julian therefore developed an instinctive
 WikiLeaks 47

hostility toward censorship and secrecy. He detected those who

made use of force or ruse to dominate responsible adults.

Julian was eighteen years old and had the preoccupations that
boys his age had, despite a propensity to prefer computers to
humans. He fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl and left his
mother’s home to live with her. A few weeks after moving in
together, the police suddenly broke into their apartment.
“Federal Police, don’t move! Take all that equipment away!
It looks like you’re involved in a robbery of 500,000 dollars at
Citibank. We know you’re a hacker... Mendax, right?”
Julian didn’t answer.
“We know you like to do odd jobs, but this time, we’re taking
everything with us. You’re finished hacking for tonight.”

Finally, no charges were brought against Julian and he picked up

his equipment a few days later. He learned his lesson this time:
vigilance and discretion were his hacking keywords from now
on.
Julian and his girlfriend lived in a squat in Melbourne for
some time until she found out that she was pregnant. Julian
wanted to assume his responsibilities and decided to get closer to
his mother, Christine. He also put his university studies on hold
to be able to care for his young son, Daniel.
Hacking, the best nighttime activity ever, remained a passion
for Julian despite his role as a young father. And the thrill of
digital exploration was still there, too. Knowledge grew within
International Subversives. The authorities kept an eye on their
activities, and the federal police launched an investigation into
the group’s activities called Operation Weather. The cat and
mouse game was on.
48 Julian Assange

The International Subversives paid regular visits to the master

terminal of Nortel, a Canadian telecom based in Melbourne. One
night in September 1991, Julian hacked into the system a bit
earlier than usual, but this time, a Nortel administrator was still
online and detected Julian immediately. The error was fatal and
he had to come up with a retort quickly.
He made up his mind and went with humor. He sent the
following message to the administrator: “I have taken control,” he
wrote without giving his name. “For years, I have been struggling
in this grayness. But now I have finally seen the light.”
The administrator didn’t reply, so he decided to send a final
message: “It’s been nice playing with your system. We didn’t do
any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don’t call
the police.”
But the identification of the incursions of International
Subversives into Nortel’s system arrived just in time for Operation
Weather. The administrator’s presence helped trace the intrusion
and localize the phone line used by Mendax.
As for Julian, he listened to the conversations of the
investigators of Operation Weather. He knew that they knew. He
knew that they were coming to get him. Running away would be
admitting a crime he didn’t believed he had committed, and so he
waited, frozen with fear.
When investigator Ken Day arrived at Julian’s place, he told
him:
“I bet you knew we were coming.”
Today a risk management consultant, Ken Day wrote this
report on Julian: “He was the most knowledgeable and the most
secretive of the lot. I think he acted on the belief that everyone
should have access to everything. He was opposed to Big Brother,
to the restriction of freedom of communication. His moral sense
about breaking into computer systems was: ‘I’m not going to do
 WikiLeaks 49

any harm, so what’s wrong with it?’ But that’s a bit like a burglar
saying: ‘I’m just going to wander through your house, but I won’t
touch anything.’ It doesn’t quite cut it.”

It was all too much for little Daniel’s mom. She couldn’t handle
this danger, neither for her nor for her child. She didn’t approve
at all of the activities of Julian and his acolytes, and decided to
leave Julian. In fact, one could say that she left her ‘husband,’
since they had made it official during an informal ceremony some
time before the baby was born.

Australia was one of the first countries in the world to have

persecuted hackers. The government founded a cell to battle
computer crime in 1989, following an affair that NASA called
an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor.’ A few minutes before the Atlantis
shuttle was to be launched in October 1989, the computers of
the Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington suddenly froze
up. All of a sudden nobody could use their computer because the
passwords had been changed. The astonishment could be read on
everybody’s face when the following message appeared on every
screen: “Your system has been officially WANKed.” The hacker
group who committed this offence called themselves ‘Worms
Against Nuclear Killers.’ At the same time as the sentence
appeared, an audio message could be heard from the verse of a
Midnight Oil song: “You talk of times of peace for all, and then
prepare for war.”
Nobody ever imagined something like this could happen;
NASA’s computer security staff was stunned. The investigations
of the federal police led to six young hackers of the Melbourne
suburbs. Which ones were fans of Midnight Oil? Probably all
of them! The Australian federal authorities couldn’t find enough
evidence to prosecute the authors of this crime, but their suspicions
50 Julian Assange

clearly pointed to the hackers who had already infiltrated a range

of prestigious computer systems of universities, companies and
telecoms. The government had to act. Due to a lack of evidence,
the official response took the shape of a power of deterrence.

The first raid took place following the eight-week long tapping of
a hacker called Phoenix and his two stooges, Nom and Electron.
Their conversations clearly mentioned their exploits and future
hacking targets.
The cell was well formed and the investigators were doing
very well. The second raid landed the three young members of
the International Subversives: Mendax, Prime Suspect and Trax.
Operation Weather was almost complete, but it would take
three years for the authorities to bring the case to court.
For the trial, the computer security team at Nortel in Canada
wrote up a report claiming that the hacking caused damages
that have to be paid to the tune of 100,000 dollars. The attorney
general described Julian Assange as a person who allowed
himself unlimited online access and acted like an almighty god in
the virtual world. And in a way, that was true because no system
could quench his thirst for knowledge.
Facing the attorney general’s request asking for a sentence of
ten years in prison, Julian was suddenly confounded. He believed
that hacking, or having a ‘look-see,’ was a victimless crime and
intended to fight the charges, but the two other members of
the group decided to cooperate with the authorities. Julian felt
betrayed and couldn’t accept Prime Suspect’s confession.
When the judge addressed the court at the end of the trial
by announcing, “the accused shall now rise,” nobody stood up.
Julian decided not to get up, showing great strength of character.
Nevertheless, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five out of the
thirty-one charges, as the six others were dropped. During final
 WikiLeaks 51

sentencing, Judge Leslie Ross said, “It seems clear that the facts
are nothing else than an extreme and intelligent inquisitiveness
and the pleasure of being able to surf through these various
computers.”
Assange got off with a fine of some 2,000 dollars.

The virtual world offered Julian a richer and more vibrant life,
regardless of the trials faced in the real world.
For him the choice was clear. What could there possibly
be in a world where you were accused even though there were
no victims? The call to adventure was online, waiting, with its
challenges, battles and revolutions.

Julian has never felt guilty about his desire to find out and learn
everything the computer world has placed at his disposal. To-
day he says that this experience contributed to his geopolitical
education. He’s proud of having been such a young activist. He
honed his skills in two worlds that were already clashing. The
virtual world reveals the naked truth of how systems, companies
and governments work, while in the real world you are perse-
cuted and punished for your desire to learn and ability to know
said information.
 4

Hackers’ dialogue

Xavier Mattelet rarely used the two straps of his black

backpack. He threw it over his shoulder and walked briskly out
of his office.
Xavier was an energetic and enthusiastic man. He graduated
from engineering school a year ahead of everyone when he was
just twenty-three years old. Three years later, he started freelancing
as an IT security engineer – he liked his freedom. He had to travel
for work sometimes for an audit, but most of the time his work
was sedentary. Like every other day that week, around 7 p.m. he
walked down Rue des Maraîchers. Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t
notice that he had run into an old lady with a dog, a mother with
her two children and a man in a suit that would turn around in his
direction after having looked at him for a moment. Further up, he
turned to the right, Rue des Bains. While passing in front of the
Center for Contemporary Art, he smiled thinking to himself that
he’d never been there. Another right turn then a quick left and he
was at number 5 Rue Charles-Humbert. He lived in a nice little
old building in the center of Geneva. The tenant on the ground
floor lovingly kept flowers on her windowsill. He told himself
that people live in the same place, but not necessarily in the same
world. Fourth floor, no elevator, nice old-fashioned wooden door.
He unlocked the door and walked in.
 WikiLeaks 53

The first thing he always did was to turn on the computer,

even before turning on the lights or taking off his jacket and his
shoes. He opened his IRCII client and logged onto his personal
channel. He then went to the kitchen, put two pods in the Senseo
coffee machine and presses the ‘start’ button.
Back in front of his screen, Neo212 was already online in the
chat room, as always.

Neo212: Hey Clue, what’s new with you, engineer boy?

Clue: I just finished a thing for the European Parliament.
What’s new in your world?
Neo212: I had fun with MS Research’s structure
deformation model. I can deform my face into all kinds
of stuff ;)
Clue: Fun!
Neo212: The info is on the forum.

Xavier turned up the heat by two degrees. He got up to fetch his

coffee mug in the kitchen even though the water hadn’t finished
dripping yet. A few drops fell into the receptacle. He walked
silently through his apartment and put the mug on his desk.

Neo212: I made it into a FB3 application. I got 400,000

players in one day. And I got more than 90% of ‘like’.
Who’s the king?
Fkb00: Hey king, I’m staring at passports of all the
guys at the university and the most common passwords
are ‘password’ and ‘home’. Talk about lame.
Neo212: That’s why Jazz wrote this little script to
be able to figure out the level of difficulty and crack
passwords. You can find it on all kinds of sites.

3 FB: Facebook.
54 Julian Assange

Fkb00: I think we’ll have to install it at the university

because that was just too easy.
Clue: The first meeting of the hacker party is being held
next week. You’re all ready to log out for that?
Neo212: ????
Fkb00: Tell me more.
Clue: We can change things with what we know how
to do.
Fkb00: Change what?
Clue: Improve democracy, develop the sharing of info,
improve open source. Go beyond the fun attitude.
Fkb00: Hm, it’s all been done, right? WWIII has already
started, it could even be over. Did anybody notice?
Neo212: I’m in the matrix, I know that I can do what I
want ;)

Xavier smiled.

Clue: Give it some meaning. We can develop the

applications that tomorrow’s democracy will use. It’s
up to us to define which system we want.
Clue: They’re going to impose tons of laws on us to try
and diminish a movement they don’t understand.
Neo212: I don’t care about laws, I just want to define
the future. I think it’s funny that these dinosaurs around
the world don’t get it.
Fkb00: You’re not alone.
Neo212: Well, yeah, that’s the point. Proud to be a
n3rd4!
Do you know any girls for a guy like me?

4 ‘Nerd’ in leet speak. Leet speak is a partially coded langage used on the Internet that
replaces certain letters with numbers or signs that look like them.
 WikiLeaks 55

Fkb00: If I had one I’d keep her to myself! But let’s not
talk about that now in front of Clue.
Neo212: I’m not fan of groups.
Clue: It’s not about that, it’s about defining new
democratic codes together before others do it for us…
Clue: … in a way that we don’t like.
Clue: WikiLeaks is starting to shake things up. There’s
going be a clampdown of the old world.
Fkb00: So it’s like Generation Y, time to get up? Pass.
But the battle will be fought online, right?
Neo212: Democracy is at the fringe of technology, it’s
so cool to experience this online.
Clue: Did you see what they did for the expenses of the
English MPs? They’re going to think twice now before
spending taxpayers’ money.
Neo212: Missed that, do tell...
Clue: Some hackers cracked open the data and sent a
copy of the expense accounts of 646 English MPs to the
Daily Telegraph that broke the story. It was more than a
year ago. Abuses and excessive reimbursements, more
often than not committing fraud, but they also realized
that the system itself allowed for incongruities. They’ve
now come up with new laws to adjust the system.
Fkb00: They should do that to every political system.
Clue: If we all get involved, it’ll happen. A WikiLeaks
for every country.
Fkb00: The moment we know that people have personal
interests, we’ll know which way these people are going
to tip the scales. It’s strange to be analyzing our own
human truth. Does truth set people free?
56 Julian Assange

Clue: Truth frees from manipulation and deceitful

constraints, so everybody can choose their own path.
Neo212: To choose the path of passion, we’d have
to blow up a serious number of systems, including
the university’s system with the bits of paper called
diplomas.
Clue: To do all that we need liberators, minors of truth
who destroy every corrupt institution.
Neo212: And exposing them would be enough to
destroy them. If we have to break into secure systems,
I’m the guy for the job.

Then the phone rang. It was about 8 p.m. and all was calm in
November 2010. Xavier glanced at the caller ID number. He
sighed. The ghosts of the past had come back to haunt him for a
brief moment. The breath of a lost love.
He grabbed his mug and gulped his cold coffee, taking him
straight back to crystal clear reality. If you let a good coffee get
cold, it got even more bitter and difficult to swallow. So he didn’t
want to give up, now was the time to play it out. He moved a bit
more toward his keyboard.5

Clue: All the systems of governance are authoritarian.

They use secret to turn their actions to their advantage
without citizens knowing the scope of these actions.
Fkb00: Would you go as far as saying it’s a conspiracy?
Clue: You said it first!
Neo212: We can make models of power structures to
discover their flaws.
Clue: To neutralize any conspiratorial system, the first
thing to do is to organize massive leaks.

5 This dialogue reflects Julian Assange’s conspiracy theories. http://iq.org/conspiracies.

pdf.
 WikiLeaks 57

Neo212: Ah, the joys of leaks!

Fkb00: A strategy of disorganization, not bad!
Clue: If the leaks are massive, the environment of the
systems will change by exposing their functional mode.
Fkb00: In other words, as soon as people are aware of
abuse, they’ll rebel.
Clue: At least they’ll put pressure in one way or another.
The abusive systems of governance will then have to
face increasingly more constraints that will force them
to either reform or fall.
Neo212: It sounds easy, but the different power
structures are affected differently by leaks.
Clue: It’s mostly about exposing their real motivations,
and everyone can take up a position relative to that.
Fkb00: I dare say that injustice remains unanswered
unless it is revealed. For people to act intelligently they
have to know the truth about what’s going on.
Neo212: The verb conspire comes from the Latin con,
together, and spirare, to breathe.
Clue: There ya go, that’s it!
Neo212: And what do we do now, breathe together,
right?
Fkb00: 1d1076! Conspiracy feeds on holding back info!
Clue: 570p7, you guys, stick with me.
Clue: To radically change the behavior of a regime,
we have to think clearly and courageously because if
we’ve learned anything, it’s that regimes don’t want to
be changed. We have to think beyond those who came
before us.

6 Idiot.
7 Stop.
58 Julian Assange

Neo212: New technology and what we’re able to do with

it gives us means of action that our predecessors didn’t
have. Don’t forget, I’m the king. I can do something...
Fkb00: b19 3908! Then what key structure leads to bad
governance? And I answer secret, manipulation and the
feeling of power.
Clue: We need to develop a way of thinking about
this structure that is strong enough to carry us through
the mire of competing political moralities and into a
position of clarity.
Neo212: I’m not for parties and I don’t like morality.
You understand what I do virtually!
Fkb00: That whole left-right political thing is over. The
entire world understands something is rotten in almost
all systems. The entire political elite conspires, but not
always for the same reasons. Some want more power,
others financial favors or something else... Do we have
to rate these reasons?
Neo212: In any case conspiracy is the primary planning
methodology to maintain or strengthen authoritarian
power. I’m fleeing this rotten world to go and play with
distorting my face and those of my friends.
Clue: What’s shocking is that the authoritarian power
opposes people’s will to truth, love and self-realization.
In the end, people don’t even fight against injustice, but
accept it, as they no longer believe in their power to act
or the weight of their voice.
Neo212: And Neo saw the source in front of him
eliminating everything, so he moved forward to merge
with it!

8 Big ego.
 WikiLeaks 59

Xavier thought that Neo212 must be quite young to keep coming

back to these Matrix references.

Fkb00: Our action online started on its own, with

curiosity and a technical challenge. We’re all connected.
It’s definitely a type of resistance.
Clue: That’s why we have to use it for the greater good.
Once discovered, plans that assist in the action of an
authoritarian regime will provoke more resistance from
people.
Neo212: The people, the people, it’s all very Bolshevik
sounding...
Clue: The problem is that the conspirators and
conspiracies are all connected. It’s like a network of twine
on nails. Nail = conspirator, twine = communication.
All the nails are connected either two by two or by
going through another nail. Some are on the fringe of
the conspiracy, others are central and communicate with
many conspirators and others still may know only two
conspirators, but act as a bridge between two important
sections of the conspiracy.
Neo212: Let’s get crafty now. Your engineer side is
showing.
Clue: It reminds me of the Heroes timeline. Knowing
that a conspirator cannot conspire alone, what’s the
minimum number of links that have to be cut to separate
the conspiracy into two groups? Come on guys, it’s time
to start using your brains!
Fkb00: Assassinating a ‘bridge’ conspirator would be a
radical and efficient method.
60 Julian Assange

Clue: True, but we’ll use our brains to find an answer

that holds true for all conspiracies, except if Fkb00
wants to become a mercenary.
Fkb00: I’m sure I’d be good at it. My job at the
university is depressing. Should I dare say that it smells
like a conspiracy?
Neo212: Something is missing in your theory for it to
be representative.
Clue: ????
Neo212: We have to add some importance to the type
of information, some weight, like in logical diagrams.
When you look at diplomacy, there are diplomats who
don’t communicate anything of importance, while
others deal with war and peace in some parts of the
world.
Clue: Thanks for your analytical insight. You’re right,
the weight of the link is essential, but I wonder about
conspiracies in general, no matter the weight of the links
because it changes from one conspiracy to the next.
Neo212: To cut a conspiracy in two, you have to cut the
network that links the conspirators in two. Divide and
conquer.
Clue: There is a crucial difference between a conspiracy
and the individuals that make it up because individuals
don’t conspire when they’re isolated. It’s probably here
that we have to add the abstract value of the weight
of the link between two conspirators, and then we
can calculate conspiratorial power. It’s the sum of the
weight of the links between the conspirators.
Neo212: Oh, he’s stealing my idea! It’s always the same
between the engineer and the analyst.
 WikiLeaks 61

Clue: Get back to your craft with the nails and putting
bigger or smaller twine according to the importance or
the number of information shared.
Fkb00: Your total conspiratorial power is also
independent of the specific disposition of the links
between the nails.
Clue: Exactly. Separating a conspiracy in two is
separating the total conspiratorial power in two. Any
half split could then be considered a conspiracy itself
and we could continue to indefinitely cut it in the same
way.
Neo212: It’s true that it’s possible to have fun
implementing it graphically, with beeps and whooshes
like in War Games.
Fkb00: Another possibility: throttling the conspiracies
by reducing the weight of the heavy links that acts as
bridges between regions of equal total conspiratorial
power.
Clue: A guy I really like wrote: “A man in chains
knows he should have acted sooner for his ability to
influence the actions of the state is near its end.” Faced
with powerful conspiratorial actions, we must therefore
anticipate. We can foil a conspiracy by drastically
restricting the information available to it. If we attack
it properly, it will no longer be able to comprehend its
environment or formulate an action plan.
Neo212: Nice demo. That’s going to cause hell in US
diplomacy. It’s about attacking the way information is
transmitted and the type of information. IT resources
today strengthen the capacity of the US to conspire.
And us hackers are actually the only ones able to fight
on this level to find more fair systems.
62 Julian Assange

Fkb00: Seems clear to me. I’d like to talk about it in

person on Thursday.
Neo212: Sure, but if that’s why we have to form a party,
count me out. It’s just not my thing. But I’m OK with
supporting the action using my technical skills. Keep
me posted.
Clue:  Thanks for the sparring, guys.
Fkb00: Send me the info for Thursday.
Neo212: I’m off to have some fun, until next time.

Xavier left the channel and toggled to Twitter to check his recent
DMs. He had new followers. Someone called @SciF0r seemed
to be interested in his ideas. New tweets appeared on the corner
of his screen, but he didn’t pay any attention to them. He decided
to spend the night on a new encryption code.
 5

Sophox

Hacker

Published on 28 November 2010 by sophox | Leave a comment |

Nobody is left unscathed from childhood. Parents, people and

places brand us for life. Julian has had quite an epic life. Like an
Australian Tom Sawyer, he lived very free in the middle of nature
the first years of his life. Sometimes home-schooled, sometimes
at school or taking correspondence courses, this shapes a man
to be inevitably self-centered. Julian seems happy to say that
he’s lucky to do what he likes, to have a passion. He’s proud of
himself.
When I think about his childhood I think he was marked by
life with a stepfather who was part of a sect or linked to it in some
way or another. His stepfather was a son of Anne Hamilton Byrne
who founded a sect often referred to as ‘The Family.’ She would
dress all her supposed children the same way and bleach their
hair. If you’ve seen the film Village of the Damned, you get the
64 Julian Assange

idea. It’s very scary. While searching for pictures of Julian I was
surprised to see that he’s had white hair for a long time. Was he
part of the sect? When he was on TSR, his hair was light chestnut,
which begs the question: did he dye his hair? Since he became
a public figure, he’s wanted to change his physical image. The
question very often comes back to his hair. His mother said that
his hair turned white after a stressful custody battle for his son.
Julian tells a whole other story:

I was very blond until 12-ish, until puberty. I built a

cathode ray tube at 15, at school, and connected it
backwards. The Geiger counter went 1000, 2000, 3000,
40,000. That was about the time. Also I had some head
scans, because I had something like viral encephalitis.
It was very mild. I just lost feeling in one cheek. Earlier
on, at nine, I’d had head X-rays because I’d headbutted
a giant earth ball.

I did some research on his stepfather, but Julian is very discreet

about his relation with the man from the sect, a man who had
five ID cards, lied about his past, his studies... He must be a great
manipulator. Is Julian one as well?
Christine Assange fled to protect her children, but at the same
time denied them any roots. If they were always moving and on
the run like criminals, how could he make any friends?
Is it because of this life that he’s more attached to machines,
as he didn’t have any friends, or is it a natural inclination?
In any case he doesn’t talk about his childhood and there’s
not much to find on that part of his life on the Internet. Maybe he
has a secret to uncover. When you’re related to a grandmother by
marriage whose head of a sect, you can make up anything.
 WikiLeaks 65

Let’s move on to his hacker life. I know, I understand! Why

did society see this as a negative thing from the start? Ignorance
is afraid of knowledge! Absorbing the knowledge of the network
and the technology of the Internet on a daily basis was a real
revolution. It was fascinating for those who grew up with it like
Julian, but a bit overwhelming for older people. NASA personnel,
departments of defense and major laboratories work with the
Internet, but he just had fun with it and was even an integral part
of its creation. It must give you a feeling of power to dominate
machines when most people are so ignorant as to how they work.
Why have hackers always been considered criminals? Hacker
ethics are quite clear: knowledge and improvement. It’s true
that sometimes nobody asks them to do anything and yet they
fiddle with software that doesn’t belong to them. Illegality is
only present because the system is hidden. If it could be accessed
freely, hackers would poke around anyways to quench their thirst
for knowledge and possibly improve software.
Imagine considering everything a system with flaws and trying
to find a way to solve them. After having spent a few years with
a hacker, I can tell you that they’re obsessed with their computer.
Today the computer is just a means to get involved directly in the
world. For us it’s Facebook and Wikipedia, and for hackers it’s
source codes and chat forums.
But who is Julian Assange?
I found out what he was doing in Switzerland in early
November. He spoke at a conference organized at the UN by an
NGO called International Institute for Peace, Justice and Human
Rights (IIPJDH). Director Mehdi Ben Hamida explained that
the organization is fighting against the war in Iraq. It took three
months to convince Julian to speak at their conference on the
sidelines of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
66 Julian Assange

Ben Hamida asked him to present the cases of tortures

practiced by the United States in Iraq and elsewhere, published
in documents on the WikiLeaks site. This NGO was unknown,
and Julian was very suspicious at first, then he accepted to go to
Geneva on the condition that bodyguards would protect him.
On Friday, November 5th, the Human Rights Council
examined the case of the United States. Ben Hamida thought
that this would be an opportunity to influence American politics.
Friday afternoon Julian went to the Palace of Nations for a
meeting organized by the NGO on the sidelines of the council’s
session. He was flanked by two bodyguards and the international
police of Geneva ensured the building’s security.
Inside, in a hall in the basement, he gave a one-hour
presentation as an expert witness who was able to follow the
400,000 documents on Iraq and Afghanistan in a journalistic way.
He’s is in a strange position because not only is he an expert
witness of all the ‘secret’ actions of the United States, he’s
also had his freedom of expression violated with regards to his
organization.
The threat weighing down on him is quite real, as the vice
is tightening on his organization. The US government declared
that it’s trying to prosecute him and eventually trying to bring
a lawsuit against other WikiLeaks members. Even if he’s sure
he’s respected journalistic procedures, Julian knows that some
branches of governments operate above the law. Will WikiLeaks
hold tight under the threat of the world’s greatest power?
Assange explained that he’d had a one-hour briefing with
Geoff Morrell, chief spokesman of the Pentagon. The United
States demanded that WikiLeaks destroy everything that was
published on Iraq, Afghanistan and the Pentagon.
How did this briefing on behalf of the Secretary of Defense,
Department of State and the White House impact the volunteers?
 WikiLeaks 67

I imagine what it would be like if it were my ex Xavier who’s just

a hacker working at telecoms in Switzerland. He wants to help
change the world and all of a sudden he’d be caught up in a war
that is much more dangerous than the fight for truth.
There they go again with their authoritarianism and censorship!
And Julian doesn’t like the Pentagon any more than he did twenty
years earlier.
He knows the secrets and plays off the world’s greatest power
all too well. He imagines blowing it all up, so that the masses
wake up and start wanting to enjoy freedom and the naked truth.
The US government demands that the organization stop
dealing with its sources. This case of intimidation is the first in
American jurisprudence. Have they gone nuts? They went as
far as saying that they’d force the organization to respect these
demands. When Julian asked them how they planned to enforce
this, they answered: “We’re the Pentagon, law doesn’t concern
us. That’s the responsibility of other organizations.”

And this is exactly what Julian is fighting against. Is he the Don

Quixote of truth?
For once he’d like a government to be accountable for its
actions, including circumstances and consequences. For once
a government should stop acting like a bureaucratic system,
dividing up responsibilities that cause irresponsibility.
Lawyers warned Julian of some of the possibilities the
government had in starting this fight. Assassinating him is one of
them, as they have enough agents who do that very well. Friends
advised him to watch out for open windows and avoid parking
near bridges because ‘accidents’ happen. It sounds like a bad spy
film, but when it happens to you, it’s not cool anymore. Julian is
a marked man.
68 Julian Assange

To discredit WikiLeaks, they will try to discredit him, the man

carrying the message. Now he must run again like he did so long
ago as a child. He has to anticipate attacks on his personal life.
What kind of attacks could they be? Is he no longer allowed to
be a man?
 Part III

Back to Reality

Before a ram attacks, it will first back up.
– Anonymous
 6

Élise and Xavier

Élise had been fascinated by Julian Assange’s adventures

for a week now. She kept collecting tons of information, having
entered into a new world she had once glimpsed at briefly when
she was living with Xavier. Xavier sent her a text message to
suggest meeting up for coffee at a bar on a shopping street of
Geneva the next day at 10 a.m.
Élise arrived a little bit late for their meeting. She wanted to
make sure that Xavier would be there.
“I’m happy to see you,” she said, giving him a kiss.
“You called me first,” he said jokingly. “In fact you kind
of startled me, you sounded worried. I didn’t really understand
why.”
“Well, I had just watched an interview with Julian Assange
and I suddenly remembered that you were interested in the
WikiLeaks organization. Is that still the case?”
“Yes, I read what WikiLeaks releases. I downloaded the cables
and looked into the sources, and I wrote a program that analyzes
and reads them. I wanted to see how it was published and in
what format. In the beginning I wanted to build an application
to make the cables available on the iPad and see if Apple would
authorize it on the Apple Store. In the meantime, someone built
an unofficial WikiLeaks application that was refused by Apple,
72 Julian Assange

so I didn’t bother. Now I just follow the news. And you, why this
newfound interest in WikiLeaks?”
“Julian Assange really intrigued me when I saw him on
television and I felt like learning more about him. Since then,
I’ve been looking for a lot of information on the Internet and in
newspapers. I just read Underground, the book he co-wrote with
Australian journalist Suelette Dreyfus on the world of hackers.
Then, I felt like forging an opinion on his honesty. He shows up
like that all of a sudden on center stage with all his secrets...”
“You know, until now, what WikiLeaks has divulged is
a compilation of what’s already around on the Internet with, I
agree with you, a few new facts that don’t add anything important
because they just repeat what the entire world already knows.
They’re especially getting people worried with what they’re
going to release. WikiLeaks has apparently only released about
one per cent of the documents already in their possession, which
is what governments are worried about.”
“What can they do? Kill the guy?”
“I imagine if they wanted to they could, but I don’t think
they’d want to turn him into a victim. Governments usually try
to leverage him to reduce freedom on the Internet. In France,
the LOPPS I and HADOPI laws have already shut out part the
Internet.”
“Can you refresh my memory?”
“LOPPS I is a law that reorganizes the structures responsible
for the country’s domestic security, a law dating back to 2002.
The French government is currently voting on LOPPSI 2, a law
that will help control information on the Internet. The law plans
to store information on the content shared online for a year: IP
addresses, nicknames, equipment used and even the person’s
personal data, including content identifiers as well as logins and
passwords.”
 WikiLeaks 73

“And HADOPI?”
“HADOPI is a 2009 law that intends to block free broadcasting
and protect creation on the Internet. The government wants to
stop illegal file sharing.”
“And who decides if it’s illegal or not? Major record labels?”
Xavier shrugged his shoulders.
“For mp3s maybe, but the goal of the government is mainly to
insert an independent organization between the local entity that
manages the IP address register and the Internet service provider.
In the end, this organization will have the authority to block
Internet access to anyone the government designates as a pirate.”
“The problem is that security and freedom don’t mix very
well.”
“I think that less freedom doesn’t mean more security, and
that’s what they’re trying to make us believe. France’s Internet
liberties will be as restrictive as the ones in China with these
laws!”
“They keep scaring us with all these baddies running around,
but other countries will not necessarily follow suit.”
“In Belgium they tried to pass the same kind of law, but they
didn’t succeed. And look what they’re doing to Assange! It really
bothers them to see that guys like him are able to broadcast things
on a large scale. Music bothers major record labels, but the secrets
WikiLeaks could reveal terrifies governments.”
“Can we do something about it in our little corner of the
world?”
“Élise, when you have a computer in your hands, your corner
is the world! The days of being scared of the hacker who knows
machine language while you just use your computer as a television
and a post office are over. Today, all knowledge is accessible to
74 Julian Assange

everybody thanks to the Internet: music, information, or even

courses at Stanford. Everything you want is there and I’m ready
to fight for freedom. Free flow, free access.”
“And how would you go about it?”
“By logging into IRC, there are a lot of things going on.”
“IRC?”
“Internet Relay Chat, a real-time Internet chat forum.”
“Ah yes, like the BBS9 in Underground where hackers of the
1990s would connect to give advice in forums and possibly share
highly illegal information.”
“Yes, but back then it took thirty minutes to connect to
these kinds of systems and it felt more like activists meeting
in someone’s basement. On IRC things are shared globally, so
you’ll see messages from WikiLeaks and Anonymous.”
“Anonymous, who’s that?”
“It’s the idea behind a mask. The idea never dies because
thanks to its anonymity, it can be taken up by anybody. If one
of them dies, another one takes its place. It’s the idea of infinite
reproduction, the idea of sharing information on the Internet like
a constant flow. The symbol of the movement is the mask of Guy
Fawkes, the one created by Alan Moore and David Lloyd in the
graphic novel V for Vendetta.”
“Who started this movement?”
“It’s a movement that’s been around for a very long time. It
started from an idea on a forum and took off from there. There are
several versions of Anonymous. Anybody can commit an act of
piracy and say Anonymous did it. It’s an idea. In fact, it doesn’t
have a head and nobody knows who the sympathizers are or what
their job is or where they live. We don’t ask ourselves these kinds
of questions.”

9 Bulletin Board System: a server running software that acts as a virtual bulletin board.
 WikiLeaks 75

“We? Are you one of them?”

“For some actions, yes. And I believe in the idea that the
Internet is sacred. We shouldn’t mess it up. We should leave it
alone. I want to have a say when someone encroaches on this
freedom, knowing that freedom belongs to everyone, and so I’m
OK with it being hidden behind a mask. It’s a powerful idea.
Since the group doesn’t have a command structure, it’s not at
the mercy of an attack against its leader. If someone tries to take
over, the entire world will put him back in his place. If we were
to rally around a leader and the leader became the target of an
attack, the entire movement would be in danger.”
“That’s exactly what’s happening to Julian Assange: he’s
being attacked personally, which will weaken the movement.
What’s Anonymous fighting for?”
“The idea is to protect the neutrality of the Internet. Anonymous
defines itself as a group that wants to avoid censorship. We stand
together and are active with the WikiLeaks network to defend the
freedom of information and the broadcasting leaks. We’re for the
existence of WikiLeaks, and if the authorities throw a wrench in
the works, we’ll intervene one way or another.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“We coordinate DDoS10 attacks: we send useless requests to
sites and when there are enough of them, we can paralyze servers.
It doesn’t damage the system; it just makes the connection
unavailable for a few hours. It’s like a sit-in in front of a large
chain store. It’s like the demonstrations of the 1960s when the
only way to be heard was to hand out flyers, round up as many
people as possible and go down into in the streets. Today without
leaving the comfort of your own home, you can rally people from
around the world. It’s the expression of the people with the means
of today. Governments don’t like someone slipping through

10 Distributed Denial of Service.

76 Julian Assange

the net and so they do what they can to kill off movements
like Anonymous. Search warrants have already been issued in
England and the Netherlands. The IP address to attack is posted
in an IRC forum. When there’s an attack, you can find a computer
attacking its own IP address, which can be traced on the Internet.
You understand why beefing up control would give us away.”
“I understand very well why Julian Assange calls himself a
journalist. It gives him the right to express himself and broadcast
his information.”
“Yes, that’s how he wants to have his rights respected. The
United States still wants to make him out as terrorist. Just like the
Anonymous movement, the media are afraid and will describe
the movement as a terrorist one by using disinformation.”
“How would you explain it?”
“Chris Landers of the Baltimore City Paper wrote this
nice definition: ‘Anonymous is the first Internet-based
superconsciousness. Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a
flock of birds is a group. How do you know they’re a group?
Because they’re traveling in the same direction. At any given
moment, more birds could join, leave, and peel off in another
direction entirely.’ ”
“It’s very libertarian....”
“You know, on a forum there’s a guy who says what upsets
him and what he wants to do, but the attack only works if the idea
is approved by a large number of people, so if he’s just spewing
nonsense, nothing will happen.”
“That’s if people at their computers have democratic ideas,
but what if it’s the contrary?”
“Not having a leader is also a problem. Anybody can have
a good or bad idea and want to turn it into action. There are
always sheep that would follow and it could become dangerous.
Anonymous can be dangerous if people don’t think about what
 WikiLeaks 77

they’re doing. Personally I trust collective common sense. In any

case, I’d rather act from inside the movement and voice what I
believe in using my computer.”
“But if the entire world can join chat forums, the governments
could also be in them.”
“Yes, but hackers have always had less things to hide than
governments. It’s not a real problem for us. When we have an
idea or when an IP address is posted, the action is very quickly
copied hundreds, even thousands of times, which makes it really
difficult to find out where it came from.”
“The same goes for WikiLeaks. There’s no use in forbidding
the site, because all the information is mirrored on hundreds of
other sites.”
“There’s no link between Anonymous and WikiLeaks.
Anonymous acts like the nice defender of the Internet. Their
actions are solely done with the goal of maintaining Internet
neutrality. WikiLeaks lives off the Internet neutrality. Anonymous
backs up WikiLeaks indirectly, by supporting their right to exist
and to express themselves.”
“And what do you think of Julian Assange?”
“I think that he’s a die-hard hacker. He sees everything like
a system to be improved. And at one time he decided to make
agreements with the press and expose himself more and more to
strengthen his movement, which annoyed a lot of people, but it’s
the solution he chose. And you, where does this sudden interest
come from?”
“For two months I’ve been blogging about heroes. I draw
a parallel the greats of our time with their demise. We can
imagine them like prophets who have come bearing a message
to move the world forward and who have been assassinated or
so misunderstood that they have become depressed, alcoholics,
78 Julian Assange

addicts or something else. Then, with Assange’s story, I’m

wondering if he’s also a prophet of our time: a hero. So it would
be important to recognize this to help humanity progress.”
“Hero maybe, but with a real human ego.”
“Do you think he’s a better man because he’s given himself a
global sized mission? I don’t think so.”
“Sure, WikiLeaks is still a small business even if it has a
global impact. And like any start-up, the boss or leader of the
movement is very important. The idea is based on him, on what
he thinks. He’s the character under attack. To say that it’s a move
by the government to diminish the movement is ridiculous! You
could also say that the American government was waiting for the
man’s weakness to be expressed to put him back in his place.”
“He’s still very interesting to me as a man, adventurer, prophet
or hero...”

Élise and Xavier talked for more than an hour. They left the
bar, promising to share information on the subjects they were
both interested in: freedom, Anonymous, WikiLeaks and Julian
Assange.
 7

Life Experience

Julian was candid when at age sixteen he discovered a new

playground with his Commodore 64. It was such an extraordinary
inspiration for his mind to be challenged in such a simple and
direct way. He was like a child who had discovered a world where
everything was possible, a world where he could find his place
and where he felt ‘at home.’ He enjoyed this return to nature, to
his human nature. He felt his mind being shaped, its density and
vitality, which made him stronger.

At the beginning of 1990 Julian, his mother and her new friend
lived in a shack in a Melbourne suburb. When he was eighteen,
Julian met a woman two years younger than him, intelligent and
slightly introverted, and quickly started a relationship with her.
The young couple then moved a few kilometers away from
their ‘parents’ and set up house in a cottage divided into two
apartments. Julian spent most of his time in front of a computer
screen, and as the Internet continued to expand, the number of
computers to hack into grew, offering Julian an exceptional place
to learn.
His skin color changed. Mendax took on a pale, vampire-like
tint and fed at night, as the sun and the light of day couldn’t give
him what he needed. His drink was a row of binary code, ideally
some Basic or assembly language.
80 Julian Assange

Even the birth of his son Daniel didn’t pry Julian away from
his newly acquired Amiga 500. His neighbors were surprised to
see this young girl alone, shopping with a baby in a stroller, going
to the laundromat to wash baby clothes. It was so rare to see them
together!
A little while later, feeling isolated, the little family returned
to Melbourne. When the police broke into their apartment, the
young mother was shocked. The couple fell apart completely and
split up. His wife left with their child and Julian ended up alone.

In October 1991, Julian was in terrible shape. Sleeping at night

brought its share of ghosts, as he knew he was being watched.
Mendax started to dream of police raids. He dreamt of noises
on the steps of the gravel parking lot, shadows in the dark near
daybreak, armed police squads busting down the door and
crashing into the room at 5 a.m. He rarely slept, rarely ate. His
house was a real mess. His collection of old Scientific American
and New Scientist magazine were piled up in a corner. He had been
dumped. He only communicated with his friends at International
Subversives by phone.
He found a vital balance thanks to the beehive he kept. Bees
fascinated him. He liked watching them interact and studying
their sophisticated social structure. He took advantage of their
impressive number to hide his diskettes under the cover. It was
only after he hid them that he could try to get some proper sleep.
Julian trained the bees not to sting him when he archived his
diskettes. He fed the bees using a cloth moistened with sugar
water and the sweat from his armpits. The bees had associated his
odor to flower nectar.
He connected his phone to a radio and listened to police
signals. It wasn’t surprising when a police officer knocked at
 WikiLeaks 81

his door. He was however shocked to be accused of some thirty

cyber crimes without even having taken the time to put away his
diskettes in their honey-filled hideout.
While waiting for the verdict of the trial, Julian fell into a
depression and was hospitalized for a week. He then tried to
spend some time with his mother, but after a few days, he set off
to wander and slept in parks. He lived and rambled through dense
eucalyptus forests of the national park Dandenong Ranges11, full
of mosquitoes that ate at his face. This was a mystical experience
for him. First, his internal dialogue was strongly stimulated by a
desire to talk, tell stories and express himself. There weren’t any
echoes in this forest, as his inner voice finally calmed down. His
vision of himself disappeared to give way to more philosophical
questions. What I am doing with my life?
He felt a need: the need for experience. He then saw what to
do with it, which would satisfy his internal thirst. He had an idea:
“After a certain amount of experimenting, I’ll know how to feed
my character.”
In 1994, he registered with Central Queensland University for
a beginner’s course in programming. Why would a hacker like
him sign up for a beginner’s course in programming? Did he need
to update his programming skills?
In the world of geeks, hackers exchange programs and
information, and so training continues. Computer languages are
like human languages: the more you learn them, the quicker you
learn them. But this is obviously not why he registered.
Did he want to show his good behavior after this long trial?
It was possible, but why sign up for an option he knew perfectly
well? To ace exams “with two hands tied behind his back” or to
forge a new identity? It remained a mystery, as he was engaged

11 No secrets, Julian Assange’s mission for a total transparency by Raffi

Khatchadourian on www.newyorker.com.
82 Julian Assange

in another battle, this one for the custody of his son, which he had
started at the beginning of his own trial.

Julian and his mother were engaged in a battle to get complete

custody of Daniel, a legal battle that proved difficult, and on
some points, harder than his own defense as a ‘criminal.’ Julian
and Christine were convinced that the mother of little Daniel and
her new boyfriend were putting the child’s life in danger and had
firmly decided to limit her rights. What did he have to offer in
return? Maybe an all-new registration at the university would
make him look like a good young father? But the report of the
child protection agency (Health and Community Services) turned
down their request.
The advanced explanations by the agency were so inadmissible
that Julian and his mother weren’t satisfied. They were confronted
with a lack of professionalism and respect for their request.
The agency concluded that the child lived in a healthy family
environment. Julian and Christine couldn’t find any means to
appeal the decision. They felt helpless toward the bureaucratic
machine, a fine example of injustice. They found out very quickly
that the agency didn’t pay enough attention to their request. They
also noticed that their case wasn’t isolated and that there were
many things wrong with the administration.
Christine always said that bureaucracy is a system that
crushes people. She raised Julian to have profound antipathy for
this absurd system, which only led to injustice. At that moment,
he experienced it firsthand. The battle for custody turned into a
bitter fight against the institution. Christine and Julian organized
a campaign against the local child authorities. They called it
Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection (PIICP).
Christine had a past as an activist, she knew how it worked:
find people on the inside of the agency, meet them, talk to them,
establish trust so that they would confide in you and divulge
 WikiLeaks 83

the secrets weighing down on them over time. Then patiently,

with presence and insistence, give them the strength to express
themselves to a greater number. By meeting them, the PIICP
members wanted to force them to speak and then secretly record
them. The Australian organization called Action for the Freedom
of Information and obtained documents from the Health and
Community Services. Then, they distributed flyers “You can
remain anonymous if you want” to the workers of the child
protection agency, encouraging them to provide information from
inside the agency, which fed a database they had just created.
One of the workers gave them an important internal handbook.
The battle was almost won, as they had a mole on the inside
that guaranteed the veracity of the information and digging
burrows with ease in the ground from the inside of a movement
falling apart. They said moles were blind and didn’t need to rise
above their action in order to understand the implications and
consequences. Others were there to analyze and guide those who
wanted to rebel.
A WikiLeaks embryo was growing: digging for the truth,
encouraging leaks, collecting the information for citizens’ needs.
In 1995, a parliamentary committee accused the agency of
vagueness and not properly handling some less straightforward
cases. Only in 1998, and after three-dozen phone calls and
hearings, Julian received an arrangement with his ex-wife
concerning Daniel’s custody.
This experience was extremely difficult and stressful for
Julian. Christine said that he was totally committed. He felt like
after a post-traumatic shock, like coming back from war, and his
once brown hair lost all its color.
Julian needed to get away from everything for a while. He
decided to take a trip during the entire last semester of 1998. He
wrote this e-mail:
84 Julian Assange

I’m about to escape from the perils of a summer in “the

planet’s most livable city” (Melbourne, Australia) and
go trekking about the wonderful world of snow, ice,
slush, and imploding communism.
 
I’ll be hopscotching though the US, Western/Eastern
Europe, Russia, Mongolia and China (in that order).
If anyone feels like getting together for beer, Vodka,
Siberian bear steak, or just a good yarn, please let me
know.
 
What follows is a (very) approximate itinerary.
Homegrown accommodation, a warm hearth, pulsating
Ethernet, interesting company (or a pointer to it) is
capable of shifting dates and leagues. I am backpacking
through eastern Europe and Siberia, so no hovel, couch
or spare room is too small (even in the SF bay area),
and would be highly thought of :)
 
28 Oct 98 San Francisco
05 Nov 98 London
06 Nov 98 Frankfurt/Berlin
09 Nov 98 Poland / Slovenia / Eastern-Europe-on-a-shoe-string
15 Nov 98 Helsinki
16 Nov 98 St Petersburg
20 Nov 98 Moscow (Trans-Siberian express)
25 Nov 98 Irkutsk
29 Nov 98 Ulan Bator
03 Dec 98 Beijing
 
Cheers,
Julian.
 WikiLeaks 85

Back from his trip, he decided to lead a normal life. It was time
for him to put his knowledge to the service of businesses and
organizations. He wanted some peace of mind and some new
experiences in the real world.
His view on equality had him gravitate toward open source.
In 1995, he wrote Strobe, a free and open-source security tool
for computers. In 2000, he created Surfraw, a command-line
interface for web-based search engines. The hacker community
considered him to be a good developer.
Julian had a large part to play in the development of Internet in
Australia. As of 1993, he was a system administrator at Suburbia,
Australia’s oldest public access network. It was launched in
1990 and open to everyone in 1993 even before the Internet
became a commercially viable network. While other competitors
forged a commercial identity, Suburbia remained true to its
original ambition: offer a private and secure system that supports
newsgroups and the editing of online content.
Suburbia was and is a non-profit organization that has always
fought for freedom of the press. The organization didn’t receive
any grants and existed only thanks to the generosity of its
members who gave their time and equipment without obligation.
The members included convinced judges and politicians as
well as hackers. They agreed on the idea that everyone online had
the right to publish without worrying about politics, opinions,
pressure or financial means.
Since 2008, Suburbia stopped accepting new members, as the
demands were too high. Nevertheless, they said that they could
be contacted by NGOs with a specific need or if co-opted by a
current member. They could then filter out nasty intrusions that
didn’t serve Suburbia’s basic interests.
By analyzing domain names, one could see that suburbia.com.
au hosted www.whistleblowers.org.au on one of their servers. A
86 Julian Assange

whistleblower’s standard procedure was to expose bad practices

by providing evidence of wrongdoing. The whistleblower then
investigated using different means that were not divulged,
especially not to the media. The risk to informers was high, as
the people they accused were sometimes criminals, people in
important positions or entire organizations. They often made
serious enemies in political parties, state departments and major
corporations.
As retaliation, the whistleblower was often attacked personally
by being called a troublemaker, crazy person or malicious liar.
They might have been given the cold shoulder from colleagues
and superiors or have been attacked in other ways, even physically.
Brian Martin, Professor of Social Sciences at the University
of Wollongong, Australia had been active in the organization
since 1991 and was president of Whistleblowers Australia from
1996 to 1999.
In an article of the UPIU, an advice paper for future
journalists, Martin explained: “The wider picture is exercise
of power in society. I think we’re all mostly better off when
people are more equal. That means we’re able to speak out and
freely negotiate things. In most organizations, and certainly in
governments, they’re very hierarchical and people at the bottom
don’t have free speech. People can stand up on a street corner
and say lots of things, or these days you can set up a blog and
write any comments that you like. Basically, if you say a bunch
of tripe, you’re going to lose credibility.” The journalist added:
“Perhaps losing one’s credibility and reputation should be the
only punishment for people who make false accusations, and
when unethical and criminal actions are brought to light, it seems
natural that whoever is exposed suffers public embarrassment.
Too often however, the whistleblower is attacked for going public
with his evidence.”
 WikiLeaks 87

When Julian started to work for Suburbia in 1993, Brian

Martin and his whistleblowers had already been active for
two years. As network administrator at Suburbia, he had access
to all the information circulating around the site, which gave him
a lot of ideas.

One day, Suburbia received a request from a defender of the Church

of Scientology, asking that the company block a site providing
confidential documents of the movement and denouncing some
of their practices.
Julian got the request and refused to honor it. He passed the
request onto the management. Mark Dorset, who was in charge,
backed Julian up.
The site’s creator was David Gerard, living in Melbourne at
the time. He created the site mainly to criticize and condemn an
international organization that was against freedom of speech,
abused copyright and harassed anyone who criticized them. He
was quickly picked up by the Scientology movement of Ron
Hubbard and played a game of cat and mouse with them for
years. The site about the Church of Scientology is still on line,
but it hasn’t been updated since 2000.
In 2010, David Gerard, journalist for Forbes, said that Assange
had “titanium balls.” He saluted his courage of having stood up
to this organization to protect someone fighting for freedom of
expression.
In 1997, Julian collaborated with Suelette Dreyfus to write the
book Underground, which told the story of six famous Australian
hackers: Phoenix, Nom, Electron, Prime Suspect, Trax and
Mendax.
Julian has yet to publicly admit that he was Mendax. They are
similar in many ways, which would lead one to believe he was
88 Julian Assange

Mendax. Julian likes to tell certain journalists that he was just an

advisor for the book!
At that time, the two authors along with Ralph-Philipp
Weinmann co-invented an encryption system, Rubberhose,
designed as a tool for human rights organizations, which needed
to protect sensitive data in the field.

In 1998, before his family battle was settled, Julian founded his
first company with Richard Jones, Earthmen Technology, with
the aim of developing “network intrusion detection technology.”
It was a hackers’ club since Richard Jones was none other than
the famous Electron. Richard Jones managed most developments.
Back then he wrote hacking programs for the Linux kernel and
fast-pattern matching algorithms.
A bunch of geeks were developing security software in their
living rooms, but their business never really took off.
Ralf-Philipp Weinmann was also part of the club. Today he’s a
research associate in cryptology at the University of Luxembourg.
He developed a data decryption program for most Apple devices,
used today as an iPhone hack.

At that time Julian was also interested in politics. He was a man

of ‘challenges,’ concerned by the world. He wanted what the
Australian Labour Party did when it started: ensure equality.
Julian was the type of person who could say: ‘I know how to do
that’ and really mean it, while others just kept talking about it. He
was disillusioned after courting with left-wing politics, and after
a meeting in Melbourne, he criticized politicians, saying that they
were all mixed up. He felt the government was a joke. Although
he was a brilliant, yet socially inept, geek who would rather
interact with machines than humans, he was also determined to
change the world.
 WikiLeaks 89

Friends described him as a man who served no master, a

Renaissance man with the tools of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries at his disposal. He decided earlier on that the world
was unfair, that it could be fair and that the Internet provided the
means to create a higher level of playground in terms of justice.
He naturally moved toward a solution to put all of this into place,
slowly but surely.

In 2003, Julian started studying again at the University of

Melbourne in mathematics and theoretical physics. Damjan
Vukcevic, president of the mathematics department at the
University, remembers him as someone who had courageous
political views, an impressive knowledge of computers and an
aura of mystery.12
Julian didn’t graduate. He stopped studying, disappointed. He
saw so many students and academic staff conduct research for
the American Department of Defense and espionage agencies.
In 2004, before leaving the university, he was a student at the
same time as his own son Daniel, who was fifteen, and in his first
year of genetics. In a presentation of his studies during a class on
democracy, Julian said he was interested in neurosciences and
philosophy. He also claimed that he had been to six universities,
but not a single trace of any registration could be found except for
the one in Melbourne. He basically sat in on a few classes. Was it
the press or the man who tended to globalize experience?

In 2005, he went on a road trip to Hanoi on his motorcycle. He

first wanted to follow in the footsteps of a young Che Guevara,
but then decided that there were better places to visit politically.

12 No secrets, Julian Assange’s mission for a total transparency by Raffi

Khatchadourian on www.newyorker.com.
90 Julian Assange

The potholes in the road got his attention. They made it not
only dangerous, but were also a reminder of the war and of others
who had taken that very road.
Julian linked it to a theory on information by analogy. Using
a physical description of how potholes form, he arrived at the
conclusion that it was more efficient to fill a pothole as soon as it
was noticed. Unfortunately, people preferred to drive and think
of their little worries instead of trying to repair the road. And
why did people think of their little worries? Precisely because
nobody emphasized the possible impact of these potholes in the
long term.
He made this allegory to get to the real problem: a lack of
information. The world is made up of information potholes: if
we’re blinded by other worries, we let the potholes get worse.
In December 2006, he wrote to a friend to tell him about his
experience in Hanoi. He thought his e-mail was so poetic that he
decided to post it on his blog. Here’s his final analysis:

Foresight requires trustworthy information about the

current state of the world, cognitive ability to draw
predictive inferences and economic stability to give
them a meaningful home. It’s not only in Vietnam where
secrecy, malfeasance and unequal access have eaten
into the first requirement of foresight (“truth, and lots
of it”).
Foresight can produce outcomes that leave all major
interests groups better off. Likewise the lack of it, or
doing the dumb thing, can harm almost everyone.
Computer scientists have long had a great phrase for
the dependency of foresight on trustworthy information,
“garbage in, garbage out.”
 WikiLeaks 91

In intelligence agency oversight we have “The Black

Budget blues,” but the phrase is probably most familiar
to American readers as “The Fox News Effect.”

FOX has been accused numerous times for its right-wing

information serving Republicans and producing propaganda
rather than journalism (a documentary revealed their practices).
Foresight is applicable on the necessary condition that it be
based on the truth and nothing else. Julian explained that for
foresight to be accurate, it must have correct information about
the state of the world, trends and emerging phenomena. If this
were not the case, the predictions of our possible future would be
false and we’d be preparing for a future that didn’t correspond to
a current state of our society. It was the phenomenon of garbage
in, garbage out.
Providing trustworthy information takes on meaning
because it implies anticipating a view of the future. States lie
and manipulate. The media deform everything. Julian now had a
mission: provide quality information. The road to WikiLeaks was
unfolding before him.
Part IV

Mentors
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
– Leonardo da Vinci
 8

Maternal Influence

“Boy, one day you’ll be a man” is a famous phrase fathers tell

their sons when they feel they’re on the road to becoming adults,
a sentence Julian Assange has probably never heard.
Julian never really knew his biological father. His mother
Christine took care of him on her own after having split up with
a rebellious young man named John Shipton who she met at an
anti-Vietnam war demonstration.

At the end of the 1960s in Queensland, North East Australia,

Christine Hawkins was seventeen. She lived with her parents,
both of whom were university professors, Australians of Irish
origin and very traditional. Her father Warren was an authoritarian
who ran a tight ship at home and at work. He was very involved
in his work, which was appreciated by everyone, and he strongly
believed in education. In 1978, he wrote the report for a conference
on training teachers in regional colleges.
Christine, who was very young at the time, felt a need for
independence, to be part of this wave of freedom that was washing
over Australia (and many other parts of the world) at the time.
She could no longer relate to parental control and institutions.

One day, on a whim she sold her paintings, burnt her schoolbooks,
bought a motorcycle, a tent and a map of Australia and left her
96 Julian Assange

parents astounded. She traveled almost 1,200 miles to join the

counterculture movement in Sydney. Australia also had soldiers
in Vietnam, almost 60,000, and anti-war demonstrations were
impassioned. New ideas and various forms of art emerged, and
the pacific convergence of peoples and hippie culture replaced
aboriginal culture as the main source of inspiration. The student
movement led by the Australian Union of Students also created
its own festival called ‘Aquarius,’ first held in Canberra, then
in Nimbin, a small village still considered today as the hippie
capital of the country, with its incessant fight to legalize cannabis.

When Julian was born, Christine came to live on Magnetic Island,

the cradle of Australian hippie culture. She returned to nature to
experience true freedom, spending most of her days in a bikini.
Today she likes to reminisce about this golden age where she
lived with other single moms on the island’s heavenly beaches.
Back then she lived off selling drawings she made in the shade
of banyan trees. She rented a cottage on Picnic Bay for twelve
dollars a week. She walked her son on the beach, picking up the
occasional cypraea carneola or cowry, tropical seashells that
were once used as currency on nearby islands. Once a week, she
would visit old Pat for tea, a former cook who lived in a stone
house on the tip of Nobbys Headland.

When Julian was two years old, Christine met Brett Assange and
joined him and his touring theater, enjoying a bohemian lifestyle.
Brett directed while Christine built sets, created costumes and
did makeup. Julian was the only child in this world of artists.
Sometimes, he’d go to the local school, other times he’d be
home schooled. Christine and Brett were very busy trying to
successfully run their little troop. They preferred talking to Julian
like an adult, giving him responsibilities at a very young age to
 WikiLeaks 97

increase his autonomy. He also learned a lot by listening to adults

talk about art and politics since Christine was still a politically
committed activist. She participated in different demonstrations
that she found out about and that inspired her.

One night in Adelaide when Julian was four, his mother and a
friend came back from an anti-nuclear protest. They fought for
many years to make the English government admit they had
been conducting aerial nuclear tests in the desert of Maralinga in
North West Australia for eight years, displacing more than 5,000
aboriginals from their native land. It was only in 1993 that the
British agreed to allocate a budget to clean up the area. That night
Christine was with a friend who claimed he had scientific proof
of these tests. Driving through the suburbs of Adelaide, they
realized they were being followed by an unmarked car. Sensing
they were in danger, the friend who had to hand over his proof to
a journalist, jumped out the car. Chased by the police, Christine
was finally stopped. The police saw the young Julian in the car
and said to her: “You have a child outside at 2 a.m. in the morning.
I think it’s time to quit politics, lady!”
Even if she had become less of an activist after this event, she
was as convinced as ever of her ideas. Back at the non-conformist
haven of Magnetic Island, between two tours Christine crafted
coconut tree leaf hats and educated Julian, keeping him away
from any kind of authority that she felt was an instrument for
destroying young minds.

Eventually, her impetuosity toward the system was confirmed

when she ran away from the father of her second son. Julian who
was terrified by his stepfather was somewhat relieved by her
actions.
98 Julian Assange

Later on, Christine also pushed Julian as far as possible in the

custody battle for his son Daniel. No matter what her battles
were, she led them with her children under her wing like a mother
wolf protecting her young and defending her territory, with her
freedom of expression and living the way she saw fit, in a bikini
the entire day if she felt like it. She believed that any impediment
to freedom kills intelligence and creativity. It was in this view of
the world that she raised her children.

While living in Melbourne, Christine noticed that Julian was

increasingly interested in computers and regularly went to the
shop across the street from their apartment. As soon as she could
afford it, she bought him a second-hand computer.
A few years later she met Judge Leslie Ross who explained
to her that her son could be considered a ‘computer junkie.’ She
was dumbfounded, as she hadn’t seen her son’s passion with a
critical eye.
She would, however, defend him tooth and nail, convinced of
Julian’s good faith and not seeing any harm in him expressing his
talent, even though he was a bit too curious.

Christine came back to her battle for freedom in 2006 by organizing

a ‘Bikini March’ demonstration, wearing beach fashion in the
streets of Melbourne in response to sexist comments made by an
Islamic leader of the city.
Imam Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly had declared in his Ramadan
sermon: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside in
the street, […] and the cats come and eat it... whose fault is it, the
cats’ or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.
If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem
would have occurred.”
 WikiLeaks 99

Christine declared to the press, with fervor and sincerity:

“We don’t need this in our country, we have a wonderful country,
people from all over the world come to live in Australia because
they want freedom.” This fifty-five-year-old woman, walking in
the streets of Melbourne in a bikini and cover-up with a sign that
read ‘He’s not our mufti13,’ was calling upon the conscience of
Australians.
Many discussions on the Internet questioned her actions. In
fact, she became associated with a friend, Chris Gemmel-Smith,
a man who owns a textile business that he proudly calls 100%
Aussie. For the occasion he created a T-shirt with Uncovered Meat
printed on it. Internet users and bloggers debated the commercial
approach of this bikini march for Chris Gemmel-Smith. They
ended up calling Christine’s opinions simplistic and populist,
blowing the affair out of proportion.
The movement on the Internet ended in conspiratorial unrest.
A local nationalist leader decided to support the action and an
upset and tired Christine announced that the demonstration was
cancelled, scared of being taken over by right-wing activists.
Julian supported his mother in her action by creating a website
for her and promoting it on his blog.

Christine had always shared with Julian her desire for individual
freedom and aversion against reductive and legislative systems.
And like Julian, she was quick to commit with fervor actions and
words at the risk of sometimes being misinterpreted or accused
of dubious alliances.
However, like Julian, she tended to be clumsy in her defense,
protecting her private life above all, which only added to the
mystery surrounding her.

13 A mufti is a interpreter of Islamic law.

100 Julian Assange

During this smear campaign, she declared that she didn’t want
to talk about herself, that she was just a grandmother, that she
didn’t have any links to any party. It was this mystery that evoked
all the theories, even attributing a second degree of relationship
with Miss Universe 2004, Jennifer Hawkins.

Christine seemed to be a woman with simplistic ideas and

humanist convictions. For many years she’s run a papier-mâché
puppet theater with puppets she makes herself and fills the faces
of hundreds of Australian school children with joy.
Christine likes children and strongly believes in their ability to
change the world. In fact, she defines her art as a quality show for
children aimed at a far-sighted audience. It was with these values
that she raised her children and she has absolute confidence in
their choices. In London, in December 2010, she declared that
she wanted to hold her son in her arms: “I’m reacting as any
mother would... He’s my son and I love him.”
 9

Inspiration and Reference

Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor of the Nixon

administration, called him “The most dangerous man in
America.” It was 1971 and the man he was talking about was
Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst he once collaborated with.
It was the ‘Pentagon Papers’ affair that would propel Ellsberg
to the forefront and light the fuse that would help blow up the
Nixon administration.

That year Daniel Ellsberg was just forty years old and working for
the RAND Corporation since 1959, defining the military strategy
of the US armed forces at the time. He was an intelligent man
with a sharp ability to synthesize, demonstrating his allegiance
to his country by joining the Marine Corps at age twenty-three
as a platoon leader for two years. After a first stint at the RAND
Corporation dealing with nuclear strategy, this ardent patriot and
anti-communist worked for the Pentagon on the team of Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara for one year. He became one of the
most appreciated tactical analysts of the Cold War and Vietnam
War the ultimate civil service grade of GS-18, equivalent to a
Major General, which he obtained at age thirty-three.
102 Julian Assange

Not content with just sticking to theory, Daniel Ellsberg

transferred to Vietnam in 1965 and served in the US Embassy
in Saigon where he evaluated methods of pacification on the
front lines for General Edward Lansdale who appreciated him
for his democratic commitment. However, his patriotism and
military training pushed Ellsberg to participate in several combat
operations, despite the reticence of his superior who wanted to
get closer to the Vietnamese instead of fighting them. He would
deploy an astonishing fury fighting Charlie14.
By being there and mingling with the population, he understood
that the process of pacification would not work without involving
the Vietnamese themselves.
Back in 1967 at the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg worked on
the conduct of the South Vietnamese conflict within the McNamara
Study Group. It was thanks to his high-level security clearance and
mission that he had access to the most secret documentation on
the subject. It dawned on him that a large number of his analyses,
carried out all these years for the US armed forces, could be used
for much less pacifistic and culturally respectful ends than he had
imagined during his tour in Vietnam. His mind raced, plagued by
doubt and bitterness, and moved closer to pacifistic events.
In 1969, while attending a conference of the War Resisters
League, he had an epiphany. He listened to a young man proudly
claim that he would soon go to prison for desertion and draft
resistance. The decision to deliberately go to prison for a cause
he felt was just, shocked Ellsberg to the point where he admitted:

There was no question in my mind that my government was

involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get
larger. Thousands of young men were dying each year. I left the
auditorium and found a deserted men’s room. I sat on the floor
14 ‘Charlie’ is the name given to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Viet
Cong), referred to as ‘Victor Charlie’ by American soldiers.
 WikiLeaks 103

and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life
I’ve reacted to something like that.

This emotional experience pushed him to be more critical of

this work, trying to understand possible hidden agendas. Very
quickly he understood Kissinger’s peace plan: Put pressure on
Hanoi through the USSR and China, and annihilate Cambodia
by bombing it instead of negotiating with the French. He was
disgusted. From that moment on, he compiled an entire file to try
and revert the process, but Kissinger couldn’t be bothered to even
look at it. This file contained seven thousand pages and described
the confidential analyses and decisions taken during the Vietnam
War, known under the name ‘Pentagon Papers.’ He decided to
expose it in the open and said about it: “I felt that as an American
citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in
concealing this information from the American public. I did this
clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the
consequences of this decision.”
This decision was not easy to make for a man whose Harvard
economics dissertation introduced a new theory in decision
theory, known today as the Ellsberg paradox: When people have
to choose between two options, the majority opt for the one
whose law of probability is known.

Ellsberg certainly didn’t try to calculate the success or failure

probabilities of his decision; he acted with conviction and
responsibility. However, the first leaks were a lot of work. After
having photocopied all the documents taken out every night from
his office, with his children and his friend and colleague Anthony
Russo, he would submit the file to anti-war Senator, J. William
Fulbright. Fulbright didn’t see this as an efficient enough tool
to stop the conflict, and therefore didn’t do anything. It was
104 Julian Assange

November 1969. He tried many political and parliamentary leads

for more than a year without finding a single person willing to
support him. Later he wrote:
Humans are herd animals. They depend very much on
being part of the group, and to remain part of the group,
they’ll do anything. And a much larger number will go
along with anything. And the broadest form of that is
keeping your mouth shut.

He then met Senator George McGovern who suggested he go to

the press, more specifically The New York Times.
On Sunday June 13, 1971, the paper published its first article.
It was six pages long, and the stories and revelations abound:

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower have committed

the United States to Indochina through France, John F.
Kennedy has turned this commitment into a war by using
a secret “provocation strategy” that led eventually
to the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, Lyndon Johnson has
planned from the beginning of his presidency to expand
the war, the CIA has concluded that the bombing was
utterly ineffective in winning it...

Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post was too scared to break

the story when Ellsberg went to see him. But once The New
York Times was attacked by the government, the paper made
sure they published the information. The gears were in motion
and the Nixon administration couldn’t prevent the publishing
of the articles, one after the other. Many newspapers published
the information – Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago
Sun Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch – always fed by Ellsberg
who chopped up his leaks from a safe house where he hid for
thirteen days. Such a mobilization around the First Amendment
 WikiLeaks 105

of the Constitution was a true declaration of independence of the

American press with regards to the government.
The order of the Supreme Court, who would establish that
national security did not justify censorship in this case, would be
the founder of the freedom of the press in the United States.
The only solution left to stop this effusion was to attack the
man. Track him down, stop him, and discredit him to lessen the
impact of this scandal.
A secret team was set up from the White House with a free
hand to find anything to discredit Ellsberg. They broke into his
shrink’s office to steal his file and failed. The team, called the
‘White House Plumbers,’ would be the same people who would
break into the Watergate building a year later, with consequences
everyone would learn about.
On June 28,  1971, Ellsberg finally gave himself up at the
Attorney General’s Office in Boston. He and his friend Anthony
Russo were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 of spying,
theft and conspiracy against the State, risking a total sentence of
115 years!
It was only after the court case on May 11, 1973 that all charges
were dropped against Ellsberg, following the discovery of many
illegal actions carried out by the government in this matter. Aside
from the failed theft, there was evidence of illegal wiretapping,
as well as an attempt to bribe the judge by offering him a job as
the director of the FBI. Gordon Liddy’s memoirs, himself chief
of the ‘White House Plumbers,’ tell of certain other operations
that had been thought up like putting LSD in Ellsberg’s soup
during a charity dinner so that when he would give his speech,
he’d sound incoherent, a sign of psychological weakness or hard
drug addiction.
106 Julian Assange

Ellsberg continued his activism by participating in articles,

books, conferences, and televised debates. He fervently opposed
the policies of George W. Bush, going as far as being arrested
in 2005 for too strong a demonstration protest against the war
in Iraq. He also called upon all the informants in power to
leak government plans on invading Iran. He still believed that
leaking information was the best way to access the truth. In fact,
he defended whistleblowers many times. In 2003, for example,
he spoke up when a female employee of a British intelligence
agency was suspected of having leaked a top secret diplomatic
memo to the press mentioning plans from the National Security
Agency to spy on UN delegates in the scope of a new resolution
on Iraq.
These are the words of Bradley Manning, US army intelligence
analyst who disclosed several documents to WikiLeaks. They
echo what Daniel Ellsberg declared back in 1971 word for word.

I was actively involved in something that I was

completely against. I want people to see the truth…
because without information you cannot make informed
decisions as a public.

At the time, Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg didn’t know each
other personally and had yet to meet, however, Daniel personified
Julian’s mentor. Julian very much admired his courage, rigor
and righteousness. His actions had served as an example and
encouraged him to go down this path. Ellsberg succeeded in
getting media coverage for his story, giving him notoriety that
made him a respected man today among modern American
thinkers. And being heard was one of Julian’s goals as well.
However, in December 2006, Ellsberg did not answer Julian’s
call, asking him to be part of the advisory board of the new
 WikiLeaks 107

organization, as he only saw a technical means without any real

implication or democratic commitment. He didn’t really discern
the human stories behind this technological facade.
Of course, if Ellsberg had had these means for the ‘Pentagon
Papers,’ he wouldn’t have spent nights photocopying, he wouldn’t
have had to arrange secret meetings to hand over documents and
his partners wouldn’t have lost time traveling across the country
to give to the press an entire case of files to weed through.
Julian claimed that he could produce one ‘Pentagon Papers’
a week, echoing the hopes Ellsberg had once expressed. The
tribute was nice, but he was not the congratulatory type. All of
this just seemed like a question of means to him. Where were the
real motivations of this new organization? Who were the people
behind it?
And so Ellsberg waited and observed this website delivering
bombs of information little by little and becoming ever so loud.
At the beginning, he thought the leaks of WikiLeaks represented
‘low-level’ information, too raw to cause radical change. When
he was asked to compare the War Logs15 to his own ‘Pentagon
Papers,’ he regretted that these leaks were just military notes
written up in the field, like those he had written when he was in
Vietnam. Nevertheless, he noted that these documents show the
similarity between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War.

Everything changed from the moment when the WikiLeaks

adventure showed its human face. Ellsberg started to come out
of woodwork when the Collateral Murder video was broadcast-
Julian spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks for the first time. Some
critics, like John Young, would say that it was only when
visibility would become really hyped that Daniel Ellsberg would
come out to play. However, he did demonstrate his solidarity with

15 A collection of internal US war logs published by WikiLeaks.

108 Julian Assange

WikiLeaks when he recognized Bradley Manning as the insider

that he was in 1969, scared by his association with the atrocities
committed by his army and government. He started getting loud
when he recognized Julian as the warrior he was in 1971, plagued
by accusations and a discredited campaign: “Every attack now
made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me
and the release of the ‘Pentagon Papers’ at the time.”
Daniel Ellsberg will not let the US government condemn
Julian Assange and Bradley Manning: “Calling them terrorists is
not only mistaken, it’s absurd and slanderous. Neither of them are
terrorists any more than I am, and I’m not.”
The spiritual father had woken up, finally offering recognition
to the one who hadn’t had a guide, pushing him to believe that he
could offer his self as a sacrifice for the truth and be absolved like
Ellsberg was in his time.
 Part V

Crossing the Threshold

Before we arrived, the world lacked nothing, after our
arrival, it will not lack anything
– Omar Khayyam
 10

The Genesis of WikiLeaks

Throughout his philosophical journey, Julian Assange has

come to believe that humans are not a left-wing idea against a
right-wing one, or faith against reason, but rather individuals
against institutions.
After having read Kafka, Koestler and Solzhenitsyn, he
believes that hierarchical institutions have corrupted truth,
creativity, art, love and compassion.16
His trips, his involvement in the Internet for all, his four years
of study, as well as his political activities, all represent a sum of
experiences pushing him to envision the world in a new, more
global way.
He mirrored the world between philosophy and the scientific
mind, and wanted to share this vision, mixing personal thoughts
with famous quotes.

Julian launched his blog in June 2006, which he amusingly called

‘IQ’ for Intellectual Quotient. Later on, he posted on the potential
significance of this acronym. He particularly liked Infinite Quest,
International Question and even Isaac’s Quest, a reference to
the Bible character in Genesis. In the Bible, God asks Abraham,

16 No secrets, Julian Assange’s mission for a total transparency by Raffi

Khatchadourian on www.newyorker.com.
112 Julian Assange

Isaac’s father, to sacrifice his only son. Abraham fears God and
obeys him, but just before killing him, an angel stops him and
saves Isaac. During the First and Second Crusades, Isaac was
considered a martyr and an example to follow. He’s the one we
sacrifice out of fear, and the one God saves.

Julian started his first post with a quote by Douglas Adams,

English author and dramatist who died in 2001. He used this
quote, but omitted the author:
“The history of warfare is subdivided into three equal
parts:
Retribution: I’m going to kill you because you killed my
brother.
Anticipation: I’m going to kill you because I killed your
brother.
Diplomacy: I’m going to kill my brother and then kill
you on the pretext that your brother did it.”
His view of diplomacy and war was dominated by logic.
Julian was increasingly interested in how governments work and
analyzed them with his literary culture and scientific sensibility.
Julian weeded through research project reports tagged
‘MDA904.’ Reports with this code name were research documents
ordered by the Maryland Procurement Office, accused today of
being an umbrella for the National Security Agency (NSA), one
of the branches of the CIA.
In November 2006, Julian wrote his first article entitled ‘State
and Terrorist Conspiracies,’ as if it were a research paper. In it,
he described a report by mathematicians and applied the graph
theory to analyze terrorist conspiracies.
In December 2006, Julian re-used the analysis applying it to
state conspiracies and wrote his manifesto entitled ‘Conspiracy
as Governance.’ He then expanded on “this understanding of
 WikiLeaks 113

terrorist organizations and turns it on the likes of its creators,

where it becomes a knife to dissect the power conspiracies used
to maintain authoritarian government.”
Julian also explained what bad governance is by defining it
as ‘conspiratorial’: Civil servants who secretly collaborate work
to the detriment of populations. According to him, when internal
lines of communication within organizations are interrupted, the
flow of information among conspirators starts to disappear. When
the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. That’s when
leaks become a weapon of information warfare.

Even though Julian kept working for a few years as a developer,

network administrator and security advisor, he felt destined for
something greater: exposing state secrets to the light of day to see
the true workings of the world and its geopolitical interaction. He
was convinced that the world would be revolutionized and felt he
had a duty to history.

His IT knowledge and hacker past provided him with a certain

kind of power. If major power implied great responsibilities,
then Julian felt as though he needed to use his abilities for the
greater good. Carrying out actions against conspiracies means
carrying out a war against secrecy and tirelessly weakening bad
governance, state or institutional.
Julian was imbued with hacker ethics. He believed that
sharing information was a powerful source of good and it was his
duty as a hacker to share his expertise by offering free software
and easy access to IT resources any time he could.
That was what he had started to do with Suburbia.
Most hackers and free and open-source software programmers
adhere to this ‘rule,’ and many act accordingly by creating and
114 Julian Assange

giving away software. Some go even further and believe that any
information must be free and any proprietary control is bad.
The similarity between these ethics and WikiLeaks’ philosophy
is fundamental: to be a tool for sharing information. The quality of
information was seen as particularly defining. ‘Bad information’
has to be fought without question.
WikiLeaks main goal is to provide raw, quality information
following the founding principles of Wikipedia: online
encyclopedia (knowledge for all), a neutral point of view
(information remains pure), free content (content can be re-used),
interacting in a respectful and civil manner (ethics ensured by
members), and not having firm rules (errors are self-regulated by
the community).
However, the nature of the content aimed by WikiLeaks –
convergence with the world of journalism, which was also
involved in sharing information – had to be questioned.
In the beginning, Julian didn’t see himself as a journalist, but
did say he’d provide journalists with quality information. He felt a
burning desire to bring some class to said profession. He believed
in freedom of the press (Suburbia mission) and easily understood
that the press remained a choice as means of distribution.

Defined in theses terms: what was considered quality information?

It was first and foremost relevant information that would touch
readers: secret documents that concerned the way the world was
run, major corporations, banks and religions.
A journalist also needed ‘trustworthy’ information, which was
verified, checked and regrouped. WikiLeaks must be provided
with false leaks to be able to check their veracity.
Then it was up to journalists to select the information to be
considered and regroup it if necessary, cross-reference it and use
it. This information had to be complete and easily accessible.
 WikiLeaks 115

WikiLeaks didn’t want to replace journalism. Some members

still thought that traditional journalism, in its current state, was
in transformation and they had little confidence in mainstream
media, which struggled with commercial and political pressure.
This was why their choice of broadcasting would first be done
using alternative Internet media. WikiLeaks wanted to give birth to
‘intensified’ journalism, where competences and responsibilities
would be divided along the way and where some people would
take side roads to give the world something to think about.
Julian Assange was looking for no less than the biggest
collaboration with independent and organically modern media on
the basis of correct information – which had not been tampered
with or cloaked by any kind of secrecy – in order to be able
to extract some sense and ideally, more truth. The people who
participated in the workings of war machines had to face their
responsibilities, even cases of conscience, which were previously
preserved by the nature of secrecy.
 11

The Organization

Julian Assange had been hatching his plan for a long time.
Back in 2001, he had already started looking for a server to host
critical content, and eventually called upon the Cypherpunk
hacking network to host documents and images. Under the
name ‘Proff’, he shared his philosophical thoughts, security tips
and program discoveries on the Cypherpunk mailing list. “The
content is legal for the moment, constitutionally protected in the
United States. If you’re happy to host cryptome.org, then you’ll
perhaps be happy to host this material,” he wrote in his contact
email to the network.
Cryptome is a website hosted in the United States that has been
collecting thousands of documents since 1996 that were either
controversial or have been censured by various governments.
John Young, a New York architect, is the owner of the site.
It was quite logical for Julian to ask him for help to launch
WikiLeaks in October 2006. Here’s his e-mail request:

Dear John,
You knew me under another name from Cypherpunk
days. I am involved in a project that you may have
feeling for. I will not mention its name yet in case you
feel you are not able to be involved.
 WikiLeaks 117

The project is a mass document-leaking project that

requires someone with backbone to hold the .org domain
registration. We would like that person to be someone
who is not privy to the location of the master servers,
which are otherwise obscured by technical means.
We expect the domain to come under the usual
political and legal pressure. The policy for .org requires
that registrants’ details not be false or misleading. It
would be an easy play to cancel the domain unless
someone were willing to stand up and claim to be the
registrant. This person does not need to claim any other
knowledge or involvement.
Will you be that person?

John Young accepted and created wikileaks.org, wikileaks.cn and

wikileaks.info. He then received a password for the members’
mailing list of the WikiLeaks project.
Every email sent has the following header:
This is a restricted internal development mailing list
for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g. Please do not mention that
word directly in these discussions; refer instead to ‘WL.’
 This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective
in Seattle with an established lawyer and plenty of
backbone.

This mailing list was set up for members to collaborate on the

project, give advice, share their views on the visual identity of the
site, the layout, realization, etc.
The goal was to stick to the look and feel of a wiki, a
collaborative website known for its simple graphics and ease of
use. The pages feature interconnected hyperlinks with content
118 Julian Assange

such as writing, illustrations, etc. that can be modified by any of

the pages’ visitors.
Now they needed an illustration, a logo to establish WikiLeaks’
identity. The discussions were going well on the proposal sent in
by someone called Ani Lovins; he drew the first WikiLeaks logo:
the mole.

E-mails were exchanged among WikiLeaks members throughout

the world. The Germans loved it, the Americans discussed it,
and Ani Lovins explained: “The group has already prototyped
the platform; some technical details regarding security have been
changed.”

Every WikiLeaks volunteer had an alias as a minimum guarantee

of security. Julian gave them the following tips when making a
name for themselves on the Internet: “An alias has to be easy
to remember. It has to be a name that you can spell in one or
two ways, be gender neutral or masculine. Two syllables for the
 WikiLeaks 119

first name and one for the last name is the best alias so that it
can be easily found, even with a typo. In fact, search engines
are designed to improve queries: when you do a word search, it
also searches for synonyms and similar spellings. If you type the
complete name in Google, the alias should return as many hits as
possible. It’s a plus if this also happens with just the last name.
Finally, it has to be simple, and the owner has to feel a sense of
pride using their name.”
Here are a few famous aliases of Australian Labor Party
members that Julian gives as an example, specifying that all the
good aliases do not necessarily meet all the above-mentioned
criteria: Hillary Bray, Spi Ballard, Lee Kline, Harry Harrison,
Jack Lovejack, Larry Lovedocs, etc.
Once a WikiLeaks member created their alias, they could
become visible, and in order to divulge information they needed
maximum visibility.
Let’s have a look at the name Harry Harrison, the alias Julian
used. First, it has to be said that Harrison is a science fiction
author, so his name is indexed because of his novels. Next, the
author is the first hit that appears when this name is typed into
Google. However, by making a typo in the name while respecting
the phonetics, the links referenced on the author always appear
on top. This is the perfect alias to be able to hide!

For WikiLeaks, it was imperative to find support from known,

respectable and serious people. On December 9 2006, Julian
decided to send an e-mail to Daniel Ellsberg, his mentor, for the
activities he carried out on revealing secrets. He also enjoyed
quite a bit of public notoriety.
Dear Mr. Ellsberg,
120 Julian Assange

We have followed with interest and delight your recent

statements on document leaking. We have come to the
conclusion that fomenting a world wide movement of mass
leaking is the most cost effective political intervention
available to us. *
We believe that injustice is answered by good governance
and for there to be good governance there must be open
governance.
Governance by stealth is governance by conspiracy
and fear. Fear, because without it, secrecy does not last for
long. (…)
When governance is closed, man’s eyes become
cataracts. When governance is open, man can see and so
act to move the world towards a more just state. (…)
us*: some attributes may have been swapped to protect
selected identities, no particular order.
1) Retired New York architect and notorious intelligence
leak facilitator
2) Euro cryptographer/programmer
3) Pacific physicist and illustrator
4) A pacific author and economic policy lecturer
5) Euro, Ex-Cambridge mathematician/cryptographer/
programmer
6) Euro businessman and security specialist/activist
7) Author of software than runs 40% of the world’s websites.
8) US pure mathematician with criminal law background
9) An infamous US ex-hacker
10) Pacific cryptographer/physicist and activist
11) US/euro cryptographer and activist/programmer
12) Pacific programmer
13) Pacific architect / foreign policy wonk 
 WikiLeaks 121

New technology and cryptographic ideas permit us to

not only encourage document leaking, but to facilitate it
directly on a mass scale. We intend to place a new star in
the political firmament of man.
We are building an uncensorizable branch of Wikipedia
for leaked documents and the civic institutions & social
perceptions necessary to defend and promote it. We have
received over 1 million documents from 13 countries,
despite not having publicly launched yet!
We have approached you now for two reasons.
Firstly, we have crossed over from ‘prospective’ to
‘projective’. The basic technology has been prototyped
and we have a view as how we must proceed politically
and legally. We need to move and inspire people, gain
volunteers, funding, further set up the necessary political-
legal defenses and deploy. Since you have thought about
leaking more than anyone we know, we would like you on
board. We’d like your advice and we’d like you to form
part of our political armor. The more armor we have,
particularly in the form of men and women sanctified by
age, history and class, the more we can act like brazen
young men and get away with it.(...)
Please tell us your thoughts. If you are happy, we will
add you to our internal mailing list, contacts, etc.
Solidarity!
WL 

The clout of someone like Ellsberg would be perfect for the

movement. It would ensure the credibility of the site and would
give them greater latitude to act as they please. This e-mail
showed that the entire structure was already well thought out.
They then needed public and political credibility as well as
122 Julian Assange

incentives to provide information. Their way of motivating their

informers would be to award Ellsberg prizes, which is in fact the
second reason invoked to contact this man. They also had the
idea of regionalizing the prizes in order to encourage patronage.
While waiting for a response from Daniel Ellsberg, they
continued to set up the site. The main preoccupation of the
original WikiLeaks members was to make sure people knew
about the organization. In December 2006, they were invited to
participate in the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, from
January 20th to the 25th of 2007. They saw it as a way to promote
themselves and decided to be present on every day of the forum.
On December 13, 2006, Julian wrote to a close friend to invite
him to join the WikiLeaks advisory board. He started by telling
him about his trip to Hanoi in 2005 and what he had seen. Imbued
with the lack of information issue, he linked it to his memories of
Hanoi. The travel story is then transformed into a long political
and lyrical analysis that is so powerful; he posted it on his blog,
entitled ‘Road to Hanoi.’

WikiLeaks members were not naive. They were waging war, and
to do so they needed money. They needed to find money, as it
would determine, along with the number of volunteers, the scope
of their actions.
One of the members told the story of a man who could have
asked for three million US dollars from George Soros for the
development of an online anonymity management system (a
competitor of Tor, used by WikiLeaks).
George Soros is an American-Hungarian billionaire, financier
and philanthropist who became famous for his speculative
activities on currency, which broke the Bank of England in 1992.
He also founded the Open Society Institute, which supports
democratic actions mainly in Central and Eastern Europe. Soros’
 WikiLeaks 123

detractors criticize the doings of his investment fund located in

the fiscal paradise of Curaçao, in the Dutch Antilles. Curaçao
was known as one of the most important places for drug money
laundering. By operating out of Curaçao, Soros could keep the
nature of his investors as well as the use of the investment fund’s
money a secret. Should a secretive man sponsor a movement
whose objective was to reveal hidden abuse?
The idea was controversial in the ranks of WikiLeaks, but
wasn’t rejected!

It was a tough start. WikiLeaks members were not yet very self-
assured when it came to editing the leaks. They liked getting
advice, and Daniel Ellsberg had yet to answer. They decided to
use the postal services.
Later on, they received an e-mail from a communications
expert who advised them on publishing a leak about Somalia.
The leak came from China. Young, who was usually very quiet
on the list, told the team to watch out for this leak. What if it were
false? They had to be more vigilant.
E-mailing was going well. One person analyzed the leak for
Young: content, local context in Somalia, translation and source
(Chinese diplomacy apparently). Young was reassured and gave
his advice on publishing the leaks.
Julian thanked him using lyrical and flattering terms:

John, you set an example to us humble rabble and lift

our spirits with your gentile tidings.
Keep up our hopes, our e-spirit de corpuscular; draw
forth our anger, our courage – and our fire – to lick
at the damp paper of uncivilization until it catches
and our hearts are warmed by the conflagration of
basement mendacities the world over. Let our smiles be
124 Julian Assange

woken by flowers of openness pushing through the ash

from below. We are compelled to act, as we are best
able, for a man who witnesses injustice but does not
act, becomes a party to a cascade of injustice, via the
iterative diminution and pacification of his character.

We noticed that Julian’s writing style was embellished with

images, drama and flowery words. All WikiLeaks members
took into account the considerations of setting up a website with
the risk of repercussions they knew to be huge, dangerous and
compromising for every one of them.
To read an e-mail that sounded like preaching made them
wonder. Julian suddenly seemed supernatural, almost mystical in
his fervent desire to expose lies.

It was Christmas of 2006 and WikiLeaks members felt up to their

first leak. However, they needed support, information relays and
knowledgeable people. Julian thought of partners he could use to
broadcast WikiLeaks reports, as he didn’t want to call upon the
mainstream press. He believed that the future of journalism was
on the Internet, and so he opted for CounterPunch. CounterPunch
was a bi-weekly newsletter published online and prided itself on
telling stories that the corporate press didn’t tell, and so exposed
scandals. They especially liked to provide information on fighting
against war machines and major corporations to their readership.
Julian didn’t stop at his first idea and asked all WikiLeaks
members to think of other alternatives to CounterPunch. They
came up with other suggestions like ‘znet,’ ‘zmag,’ ‘csmonitor,’
‘village voice,’ and ‘aljazeera,’ but no decision was made. They
were more preoccupied with problems of tracing documents
according to the format used (PDF, Word, etc.).
 WikiLeaks 125

WikiLeaks enjoyed support in China, which supplied them

with this information: on December 26, 2006, an e-mail came in
mentioning correspondence from Somalia to their ambassador in
China, forcing them to modify the document they had planned to
publish. They thoroughly discuss the content of the information
and one of them wrote: “I hope that this will bring help to the
poor Somalis. They really need it.”
The research of the advisory board continued using an e-mail
template sent to anyone likely to be part of the board:
Subject: advisory board inquiry [wikileaks]
xxxxxxx, please pass this around to the relevant
folks (is that just you?).
WikiLeaks is developing an uncensorable version
of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document-leaking
and discussion. Our primary targets are those highly
oppressive regimes in China, Russia and central
Eurasia, 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.
We aim for maximum political impact; this means
our technology is (like the Wikipedia) fast and usable
by non-technical people.
We have received over one million documents so far
(...)
 [http://www.wikileaks.org/]
We believe fostering a safe, easy, socially sanctified
way for uncensorable mass document leaking,
publishing and analysis is THE most cost effective
generator of good governance.
We seek good governance, because good
governance does more than run trains on time. Good
126 Julian Assange

governance responds to the sufferings of its people.

Good governance answers injustice.
We are looking for initial advisory board members
to advise us politically, since our strengths are in
building large technical projects such as the Wikipedia.
In particular we’d like your advice on:

1.  How can WikiLeaks help you as a journalist and

consumer of leaks?
2. How can WikiLeaks motivate, protect, and help your
sources or people like them?
3. Who are some other good people to approach, of
the figurehead variety and of the will-actually-do-work
variety?
4. What is your advice on political frame setting and
possible funding bodies?

We expect difficult state lashback unless WikiLeaks

can be given a sanctified frame (“center for human
rights, democracy, good government and apple pie
press freedom project” vs “hackers strike again”).
Our initial reputation is carried over from the
success of the Wikipedia, but we do not feel this
association is, by itself, enough to protect us. The public
support of organisations like FAS, who are in some
sense sanctified, is vital to our initial survival.
Advisory board positions will at least initially,
be unpaid, but we feel the role may be of significant
interest to you.

This email showed how important security issues were to

WikiLeaks members from the very start. They all knew that they
 WikiLeaks 127

were involved with highly explosive material. The information

they possessed was a time bomb, and they were very aware of it.
A few days later, they received an e-mail with questions about
their editorial guidelines. Were they publishing private data?
Their quick answer promised collaborative self-censorship like
Wikipedia did. WikiLeaks didn’t really have editorial guidelines,
but tried to maintain an ethical standard shared among all its
members who explain the need to communicate expansively as
quickly as possible.

On December 29 2006, when the first responses of the press

regarding the site and its first Somali leak appeared, WikiLeaks
only had a potential advisory board, so Julian proposed contacting
Soros. The members were open to the idea, but Young explained
to them that Soros would only join according to who was already
on the board. WikiLeaks was going around in circles, and at that
time, it could only confirm three people, including Young, as
Ellsberg still had yet to respond.
 12

The First Leaks

Documents arrived from a contact in China. The subject:

Somalia.
In June 2006, the East African country was subjected to a
series of battles between the Islamic Courts Union and the
members of the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and
Counter-Terrorism, an alliance between warlords and the Somali
government supported by Washington. The Islamic Courts Union
won the battle and took control of the capital, Mogadishu.
At the end of December 2006, the Ethiopian army intervened
and the Islamic Courts Union fled the capital. The army then
took control of the majority of the area and the transitional
government declared itself the national government in practice,
but not officially.

A WikiLeaks member wrote the first leak in an academic writing

style. He explained:

The document details strategies to undermine and

defeat rival factions and intervening powers, including
assassinations and cooperation with criminals. The
secrecy of the document is underlined by its final point:
‘Whosoever leaks this information and is found guilty
should be shot.’ The unscrupulousness of some of the
strategies advocated is presumably the reason for such
 WikiLeaks 129

extreme secrecy. But if it can be taken at face value as a

statement of strategy and policy, it throws doubt on US
claims that the Union of Islamic Courts is a terrorist
organization planning suicide bombings in Kenya
and Ethiopia, and demonstrates that the situation in
Somalia is more complicated than US, UN or Islamist
spokespeople would have us believe.

He was plagued by doubt when he wrote his article and admits to

it in a message to WikiLeaks members: “I found it quite difficult
to write this. I wasn’t sure what approach to use. I ended up
writing something long.” Actually, the article is fourteen-pages
long.
He found it difficult to deal with the information and hard facts,
and how to understand it in its context. “To discuss the document
thoroughly, I think you have to provide some background
beforehand. I also think people should be informed about the
entire matter. Unfortunately, this means we have to take a detour
and cannot directly relate to the information in our document.
There’s a point about the strategy of the Islamic Courts Union
since 2005 and they only became a military force as of 2006.”

The key idea of WikiLeaks was to broadcast the leak received.

The author of the article continued in the introduction:
We have to start with the document’s relevance, which
means going back and discussing the background, then
discuss the document and its significance, which means
that the structure is a bit unpleasant. I don’t know what
else to do.
The leaked document itself meant nothing without knowing
about the existing political interactions between Somalia and
allied and/or enemy countries. However, plunged into a political
reality, it suddenly became more difficult to form a point of
130 Julian Assange

view. The editor felt obliged to opt for a message like “it’s more
complicated than that,” because he couldn’t find a ‘friendly’
doctrine in this document. And reasonably so, as he didn’t want
to glorify a movement with an Islamic doctrine or denounce it as
a terrorist movement when that was not quite the case. It would
only throw fuel on the fire of American propaganda.

On December 19 2006, WikiLeaks members received a message

from a communications expert who advised them on publishing
the leak and its content. He advised them on captivating the
readers to make sure they read until the end: use a punchy style
and tone from the beginning, add any possible connections to
recent or landmark events, involve the readers with questions and
optimize legibility by avoiding obscure acronyms.

The choice of words became a delicate and probing one. “I

mentioned the part ‘should be shot,’ but only a few times. Should
it be used more to be sensational? Should we mention it less to
protect potential victims in Somalia? As we discussed, the time of
worrying about consequences has probably past no matter what
they are, but we need to consider it,” he said. WikiLeaks decided
that the moment of truth had arrived. Its members were well aware
of the risks resulting from these activities for the protagonists
linked to the document. The choice between protection and truth
was made.
How to write this document and who was going to read it? Of
course the goal was to provide quality information, but to whom?
To journalists or citizens? How to introduce the raw document?
Writing meant communicating and to communicate one needed
to have a style. But at that moment WikiLeaks did not yet know
 WikiLeaks 131

where to publish its documents, who the site was for and what
would happen to the hosted information.
When the author suggested his article to other WikiLeaks
members, he included footnotes, specifying that they help
members understand his references, but didn’t necessarily need
to appear in the published version. This would provide sources
for this article, except Wikipedia ones which were quite often
journalistic ones taken from other sources like the BBC, reputed
for its quality of journalism and investigations.

The gap was closing between WikiLeaks and journalism, as it

was indeed about an article, which to be understood in its entirety,
not only required references and understanding a context already
explained by journalists, but also a style of writing that took
readers into account.
The document was approved, and at the end of December,
WikiLeaks members sent their first document on Somalia to
selected partners: CounterPunch and the others. But not a single
one of them published the article.
Julian was surprised because he didn’t get an approval or a
rejection. The end of the year is always a bad time and the text is
just too long. Moreover, WikiLeaks is not recognized as a regular
supplier of articles, so Julian needed to find an intermediary.

However, on January 3 2007, the first article was posted on a

blog run by Steven Aftergood, the editor of the ‘Secrecy News’
newsletter since 1991 and the Director of the Federation of
American Scientists. Backed up by the First Amendment of the
United States Constitution, (a law that prohibits the making of
any law impeding the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech,
freedom of the press or the right to peaceable assembly), he fights
against the American government’s arbitrary classification of
132 Julian Assange

documents said to be secret. He published sensitive information

or supposedly secret information on his site. He claimed to
contribute in this way to the proper workings of democracy, all
while pointing out that he was not an enemy of the government.
He didn’t agree with WikiLeaks’ editorial policy and stated
this directly on his blog: “To me, transparency is a means to an
end, and that end is an invigorated political life, accountable
institutions, opportunities for public engagement. For them,
transparency and exposure seem to be ends in themselves.” He
declined getting involved in the advisory board by divulging
certain passages of e-mails sent to him from members of the
organization.
He did however support their actions by linking to this first
post about Somalia on his blog.

As of January 4 2007, WikiLeaks received e-mails from journalists

who had heard about the site. It was the start of a series of requests
for information from the press, mainly independent journalists
who worked for scientific papers, but also correspondents for the
Federal Times, Technology Daily and Wired News.
They noticed that the blog posting aroused a lot of interest
with the press and had to very quickly prepare answers to all these
questions. The requests mainly concerned them and WikiLeaks,
and very little on the information they’d made available.
Although they enjoyed the benefits that putting these
documents online brought them, especially for their visibility,
the risks that could ensue scared them: government surveillance
entailing possible prosecution that would require the help of
lawyers. In fact, they still didn’t have a sizeable advisory board
to respond to attacks. At the beginning, they decided to follow up
on questions case-by-case, but the task took too much time and
 WikiLeaks 133

the questions were often repetitive. They decided to prepare a

formatted e-mail listing all of WikiLeaks’ ambitions and opted to
write and send out a press release.

John Young was disappointed in Steven Aftergood’s attitude. He

shouldn’t have announced that the wikileaks.org site was active or
that the first document was freely accessible. Aftergood released
the information, followed by comments against WikiLeaks’ main
goal. In fact, he made dismissive comments about WikiLeaks
and suggested that his own activity was more honorable and
respectable. “Reporters are competitors of WikiLeaks as any
keepers of secrets and peddlers of inside information. They want
to appear to be ‘responsible’ arbiters of what information gets
published,” said John Young. He added: “Some will promise one
thing to get information and do the opposite for publication.” He
also provides raw information like WikiLeaks on his own site.
The disagreement was played out at the editorial level.
Young was really angry at Aftergood for having divulged
internal information to WikiLeaks while the organization
contacted him in good faith. In turn, Aftergood answered publicly
by accusing them of leaking unfiltered and, therefore, dangerous
information. On the other hand, in asking to join the advisory
board, the team referred to John Young and Daniel Ellsberg.
Aftergood had now become ‘dangerous’ with the information
he’d received. John Young warned the organization against using
private information as a means of recruitment.

The agents of government authorities examined the inside of

WikiLeaks through journalists, supporters, donors and members
of the advisory board, customary for people who wanted to
constitute an opposing force. They had to expect lies, piracy,
treachery and all other methods used to eliminate dissidents.
134 Julian Assange

They also had to expect mockery, insults, ridicule, admiration

and skepticism. John Young believed they had to be as discreet
as possible or else WikiLeaks would be doomed. Anonymity
had to be kept in terms of all communication with the press and
potential recruits.
Young was the one who registered the domain name
‘wikileaks.org.’ The site name was registered with the NSI
Network Solutions who managed domain names. As an owner,
his details were on the WHOIS lists (literally who is, a database
of existing sites accessible to anyone) of this private company.
The less information they had on WikiLeaks members, the better.

WikiLeaks members panicked faced with the sudden interest

of journalists, as they weren’t really ready for this. They
answered reporters by justifying themselves as being mostly
mathematicians.
They were asked whether the documents in their possession
were issued directly from Western governments – but that was
not the case. Were Western journalists looking for a scandal at
all costs?
They received replies from sites like POGO (Project On
Government Oversight, an independent American non-profit
organization that investigates and exposes corruption and other
misconduct on its site pogo.org in order to achieve a more
effective, accountable, open, and ethical federal government),
known for its critical views. They asked them for their support,
followed by a request to join the advisory board. Journalists sent
them their articles on WikiLeaks and were satisfied with the first
responses. However, they needed to try and be more careful in
their communication, as they had to monitor the use of their
 WikiLeaks 135

declaration. The proposed improvement was to answer questions

before they were asked.
On January 5 2007, they decided to publish a FAQ as quickly
as possible to answer questions not yet asked and set people
straight on some exaggerated and erroneous interpretations
already published.

At the same time, WikiLeaks members noticed that somebody

had registered the domain name wikileaks.net. In the beginning,
always very open, they thought that this person wanted to help
them and become a relay. It was Jimmy Wales, co-founder of
Wikipedia, who rushed to reserve this name in order to deliver a
commercial blow.
They also received an offer from a young start-up that
suggested creating an online comment tool. Although they had
enough expertise to create what they needed, they didn’t shoot
down the offer and remained very courteous. Any kind of help
was welcome because there was tons of work.
They got an answer to ‘Question advisory board’ from the
coordinator of the Freedom House site, a non-governmental
organization that supports the expansion of freedom around the
world. However, it was mainly funded by the NED17 and had
been accused of being a cover for the CIA.
Freedom House found the request interesting and said they
would think about it.
Julian sent the e-mail request without consulting the other
members with the idea of testing a foundation he considered
a bit ‘conspiratorial.’ They could very well end up a victim of
leaks on WikiLeaks! Knowing your enemies from the inside to
better fight them was a well-known manipulation technique used

17 The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a US private, non-profit

foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around
the world. Founded in 1983, it is primarily funded through an annual allocation from
the US Congress.
136 Julian Assange

by strategists. And Julian was one of them. The knowledge of

the world of organizations, their connections and sponsors were
needed to successfully carry out his actions. Who was lying?
Who was telling the truth? Who was transparent? Who was being
secretive in order to clog up the inner workings of government?
The links between power, foundations and organizations had to
be untangled to make the right choices.
Sometimes, the answers on joining the advisory board were
quite surprising. Julian informed the other WikiLeaks members
of the e-mail, then commented on their answer in these words:
“Disarming. FH along with NED are notorious US State/CIA
money launderers.  The goal is not to get them to accept, although
that might be rather interesting, but to make them feel we are on
the same “side” by the early approach and enemy of my enemy
is my friend.”
On January 7 2007, the members made the final touches to
the WikiLeaks site and asked again for help because they were
swamped. They prepared the launch by setting up a network of
phone correspondents throughout the world to answer the press.
On the same day, Julian sent around an e-mail that summed
up the WikiLeaks organization: “If it stays small like it is now (a
budget of USD 50,000 a year and volunteers), the result would
be interesting yet far from everyone’s ambitions. Ideally, the goal
should be to start with ‘heavy artillery’ and anticipate a budget of
USD 5 million before the end of July.”
John Young fiercely answered:
Announcing a 5 million fund-raising goal by July will
kill this effort. It makes WL 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.
 WikiLeaks 137

I’d say the same about the alleged 1.1 million documents
ready for leaking. Way too many to be believable
without evidence. I don’t believe the number. So far, one
document, of highly suspect provenance. [...]
At the moment there is no reason to believe WL can
deliver on its promises. Big talk no action, the skeptics
say.
BTW, the biggest crooks brag overmuch of how
ethical their operations are. Avoid ethical promises,
period, they’ve been used too often to fleece victims.
Demonstrate sustained ethical behavior, don’t preach/
peddle it.
The CIA would be the most likely 5M funder. Soros
is suspected of being a conduit for black money to
dissident groups racketeering for such payola.
Now it may be that that is the intention of WL because
its behavior so far fits the pattern.
If fleecing the CIA is the purpose, I urge setting a much
higher funding goal, in the $100M range and up. The
US intel agencies are awash in funds they cannot spend
fast enough to keep the Congressional spigot wide open.
Academics, dissidents, companies, spy contractors,
other nation’s spy agencies, whole countries, are falling
over themselves to tap into this bountiful flood. But
competition is fierce, and accusations of deception are
raging even as the fleecers work in concert.
In solidarity to fuck ’em all.

Right away John Young decided to publish on Cryptome all the

e-mails he’d received to unburden himself of the responsibility of
WikiLeaks’ future.
138 Julian Assange

There were internal secrets as well, since the members of the

mailing list couldn’t check the existence and number of leaks
received.
The curtain fell, and John Young left the stage. The team tried
to persuade him to stay on, but it was too late. Julian wrote him a
personal e-mail to bring him back into the fold, but he was lost to
WikiLeaks. Ambition is scary.
 13

Julian as seen by Élise

Assange and the ladies

Published on November 30, 2010 by sophox | Leave a comment |

Single for five months, I hesitated signing up for a dating site

like Emetic or more locally, Loveday.ch. Five years ago I thought
it was stupid, but now that I’m almost in my thirties and work is
taking up all my time, dates are getting scarce. It’s sad, so enough
about that.
In any case, just when I was asking myself this question, just
when I’d been spending many nights a week online studying
Julian Assange’s character, just when allegations have been made
against him by two young Swedish women, what do I read on
Mashable.com? Julian Assange is on OkCupid, an international
dating site.
He’s all smiles on his profile. Apparently, it’s a real profile,
too. He used famous science fiction author Harry Harrison as
a nickname. It’s entirely probable, as everyone uses nicknames
on these sites. [UPDATE: I saw that he quoted this nickname in
140 Julian Assange

examples of the Australian Labour Party in the WikiLeaks mailing

list in 2006; correlation?] The founder of the site was questioned
and the profile was apparently created in 2006, used for the last
time in December 2006. Technically, it’s quite unlikely that it was
created recently. Julian wasn’t well known in 2006, so it had to
be him that signed up to this dating site. Let’s have a closer look.
His summary description and the type of woman he wants are
interesting: “Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving. I
am not the droid you’re looking for. Save us both while you still
can. Passionate, and often pig-headed activist intellectual seeks
siren for love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy.
Such a woman should be spirited and playful, of high intelligence,
though not necessarily formally educated, have spunk, class &
inner strength and be able to think strategically about the world
and the people she cares about. I like women from countries that
have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge
women that are valueless and inane. OK. Although I am pretty
intellectually and physically pugnacious, I am very protective of
women and children. I am DANGER, ACHTUNG ??????????!”
But that’s me!!! Except for the country. In fact, what does he
mean by that? He likes Asian women? Or girls from the former
Eastern Bloc? As implied by a female dating expert (I had no
idea that was a job!), they are sad and so they’re more docile.
He consoles them, brings them comfort and voilà, it’s in the bag.
Creep!!!
He goes on to explain that he runs “a consuming, dangerous
human rights project.”
Finally, he has that savior soul for widows and orphans: save,
defend and fight the internal establishment. You’re my hero,
Julian, my Robin Hood.
Very smart. Adventurer seeks adventuress! It could work on
this type of site.
 WikiLeaks 141

On OkCupid he was seeking “A spirited, erotic, non-

conformist. Non-conformity is not the adoption of some pre-
existing alternative subculture. I seek innate perceptiveness and
spunk.” And further: “Do not write to me if you are timid. I am
too busy. Write to me if you are brave.”
That’s pretty direct!! He doesn’t want a long-term relationship,
apparently. It has to be quick. Not surprising when we know his
life like we do today. In fact, when travelling he said he preferred
to sleep over at sympathizers rather than in hotels. To do that, he
would need a lot of connections around the world. Did this profile
combine practical and fun considerations?
The expert, who analyzed the profile without knowing it was
about Julian, described him as a hurt and arrogant man with an
ego, while his profile dissuades ‘good quality’ women. Every
woman is the same to him. It’s someone who lives in his head.
He wants a woman who will have an opinion that he’ll probably
hate.
It seems to match the correspondence I found on Gawker,
which seems to reflect his touchiness.
In April 2004, he insistently courted a nineteen-year-old girl
in a bar. She accepted to answer the online media journalist’s
questions on the condition of being called Elizabeth.
Back then, Julian and Elizabeth were both students at the
University of Melbourne. Julian was thirty-three years old. The
young girl spotted him because he looked different. He was too
old for her, but his long white hair and confidence made him seem
different from the other men she had met in university.
She started talking to him. He seemed kind of quiet and nerdy.
She didn’t really think he was sexy, just strange and intriguing.
Julian flirted a moment with Elizabeth, showing off by explaining
complex equations and joking about her mathematical ignorance.
They talked until the bar closed. Julian walked her home where
142 Julian Assange

she lived with her parents. Before leaving Julian kissed her. She
wasn’t really happy about it, but didn’t push him away either.
He stayed calm and didn’t try anything weird. Before he left,
they swapped e-mail addresses. Julian gave her his card with his
details and the image of a lighthouse, possibly an early symbol of
his quest for transparency. They parted company.
A few days later, Julian sent an e-mail to the young girl,
inviting her on a date:

Dear Miss Elizabeth,

I found your company and kisses very appealing. I want
to explore them further. Are you busy Monday night?
Julian

Elizabeth didn’t remember how she answered him, but she had
turned him down. They’d only exchanged e-mail addresses, and
she didn’t think she’d hear from him again until Julian called
her up the next day at her parents’ place. Elizabeth was shocked
and Julian didn’t answer her when she coldly asked how he
got her number. The discussion went awry, but Julian wasn’t
discouraged. He sent another e-mail pointing out her coldness
and lack of courtesy on the phone:

Dear Elizabeth,
Your reaction to my phone call lacked dignity and has
stung. You seemed above such trivialities. It saddens
me to have misjudged you. I enjoyed our moonlit walk
and the easy intimacy in our interaction. I had hoped
that such an interaction would produce an interesting
friendship if nothing more.
Please respond.
Julian
 WikiLeaks 143

This message put Elizabeth more at ease, which she replied nicely.
The same day Julian sent her a message in his own unique style:

Here, Julian expressed his view on life. He doesn’t participate

in someone else’s reality; he doesn’t want that. He would rather
create his own world. He maintains a philosophical fervor in
expressing his view of his own experience with this young girl.

A few days later, he tried calling Elizabeth again. She tried to

pass herself off as somebody else, because she was scared of his
persistence.
After a few other e-mails without any answer from Elizabeth,
Julian decided to change his approach. Instead of calling Elizabeth,
he tried to get her to call him. However, she thought he picked a
really bad way to give her his phone number. He took the number
of her car’s license plate and made it into a riddle, which once
solved would reveal his phone number. He sent her an e-mail
144 Julian Assange

with the riddle. Elizabeth answered that she wouldn’t call him
because his weird riddle didn’t give her his phone number.
One more time Julian decided to call her, and later that day he
sent her a message asking what was the best time to call without
bothering her parents. It was April 12 2004, about ten days after
they first met at the bar.
Tired, Elizabeth said to stop calling her house. Julian, who
was humiliated by this affair, sent her this sentence: “If you’re
lucky you can also find me at http://iq.org/julian”. He signed with
a ‘– J.’
He eventually gave up, but before that, he sent one last nasty
e-mail:

His OkCupid profile reveals a Don Juan style with women and
this situation with Elizabeth shows to what extent he didn’t
appreciate being rejected. Elizabeth told Gawker that she never
felt threatened by Assange’s behavior, but thought he was socially
 WikiLeaks 145

awkward in his flirting: “I don’t think he’s a bad person,” she

said. “He’s just a funny bugger.”
There’s a man who evokes some sort of mystery.

The way he looked at the start of WikiLeaks with platinum hair,

made him look like something between a pop singer and a mad
scientist. Today he has a new look, field reporter meets modern
fighter with leather jacket (what a jacket!!), or politician with a
suit like a television news anchor. I also saw him in a tailor-made
Italian suit with sunglasses like James Bond. He has many styles
like a star in celebrity publications. In fact Rolling Stone Italy
declared him Rock Star of the Year in 2010!

The man has different facets: sometimes simple and accessible,

respectable like a good son-in-law, or a spy ready to score with
women. Whether he smiles or not on pictures, he still has a frank
and inquisitive look. I feel like he wants to understand, get to the
bottom of issues and break open mysteries.
He’s a major figure in the history of journalism and information.
What will people be saying about Julian in a few years? Julian
Assange, the man who redefined journalism in the twentieth
and twenty-first century. Will he be quoted like Gutenberg and
the invention of the printing press or Ed Bradley, the first black
television correspondent to the White House, and his twenty-six
years of reporting on CBS?

Julian Assange may be a hero, but he’ still a man with flaws, and
a personality that is still kind of monomaniac and he only thinks
of the secrets of authorities, an obsessive project on which he’s
focused like a laser ready to pierce hidden information.
146 Julian Assange

He can make girls fall for him like a rock star, so danger, achtung!,
as he had put it. He’s always the charmer. An article in The First
Post reported the following story:
“A journalist met with Julian in a restaurant in Sweden.
The journalist showed up with his girlfriend. After talking for a
moment, the girlfriend and Julian went outside to smoke. A few
minutes later, the journalist went outside to find out what they
were up to. He was surprised to see Assange whispering in his
girlfriend’s ear. While the journalist got upset, Julian put up his
dukes as if he were ready to fight. The young woman admitted
that Julian asked her to spend the night with him. The journalist
commented that Julian seemed to enjoy humiliating him.”
He likes to play with fire anytime he can. He’s convinced of
his superiority as well as of his intelligence, culture, charisma,
and slickness. Women all say they don’t like that kind of man, but
many women still fall for him.

As for me, I’m interested in his mysteriousness. The more I’m

interested in him, the more I think he has a loveable side. Julian
is like a gifted child bordering on autism. He sees the world the
way he sees it and tries to make the people he wants enter into it.
On his blog Iq.org, we see that he sometimes felt alone and
misunderstood. He quotes this sentence by Aldous Huxley about
Isaac Newton to which he seemed to identify: “Newton paid
for his supreme intelligence […] incapable of friendship, love,
fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a
failure; as a monster he was superb.”

And in another posting in June 2006, he wrote: “I have a special

fondness for women caught in thunderstorms,” again showing
his protective side. He has the ability to go very far for a woman.
In the same posting he explains that he was going out with a girl
 WikiLeaks 147

who was a coffee addict and who drank tons of coffee. He would
watch her drink coffee with such envy that he wanted to be in the
cup. He went as far as making a watery paste of finely ground
coffee to seduce her.

Julian is pathetic and poetic at the same time. Underneath his

Don Juan exterior he’ll talk to anything in a mini-skirt. I figure
this guy needs a ‘quality woman’!

I’m going to sign up to OkCupid!!

Part VI

First Ordeal
Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all
you see
– John Lennon
 14

A Chain of Leaks

The media coverage of WikiLeaks was cautious about its

launch and about going live with the first leak on Somalia at the
start of 2007. As one of the organization members anticipated,
press agencies didn’t know them and were not used to that type
of sources. A few websites related their press release or a few
passages from the site. The Washington Post pushed the analysis
a bit further. A journalist from the American newspaper e-mailed
the organizers who presented the site as follows: “WikiLeaks
is becoming, as planned, although unexpectedly early, an
international movement of people who facilitate ethical leaking
and open government.”
Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News was also questioned by
the newspaper and admitted that the members of WikiLeaks
“have the potential to make a difference.” He warned against
the fact that “indiscriminate disclosure can be as problematic as
indiscriminate secrecy.” He finished by saying, “I want to see
how they launch and what direction they go in.” WikiLeaks
organizers said that the site was self-policing. “WikiLeaks would
provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any
document relentlessly for credibility, plausibility, veracity and
falsification.”
The Washington Post ended with a few sentences on the first
leak whose Internet link was offered as a conclusion. On the other
152 Julian Assange

hand, Time magazine chose to comment on the launch of the site

by interviewing a professor of Rutgers University specialized in
African history. He declared that the article was well written, but
the events mentioned afterward were obsolete.
Not much effect for the launch of the site and their first leak.
The posting of e-mails online between the organization and John
Young by Cryptome had people talking about it and was better
covered. Wired magazine had an article entitled “WikiLeaks
spilled,” which ironically opened with “The first big leak has
come out of WikiLeaks – of the archive of their internal mailing
list,” while the first conspiratorial suspicions were suggested
on other sites. The very serious BBC also had some doubts,
expressed by Bill Thompson, independent journalist and digital
specialist. Not knowing their sources, this organization could not
verify the veracity of the documents received. He also admitted
to not trusting the people of the site, and even if the trust were
there, he doubted that the site was able to ensure the security,
anonymity and immunity that it promised.
WikiLeaks started off slowly during its first months, and the
leaks had a moderate impact. In August 2007, a report of the
international crisis analysis agency Kroll was published on the
site. This report was submitted in 2004 to the Kenyan government
who rejected it, judging it incomplete. Though it concerned the
corruption perpetrated by the former leader of the country, Daniel
Arap Moi, who had embezzled more than three billion dollars.
The report also provided the list of his riches spread throughout
the world. British newspaper The Guardian used the material
supplied to write an article on the former Kenyan president, but
didn’t make any reference to WikiLeaks.
Posted on the site three months before the presidential
elections in Kenya, this leak brought about tragic events,
causing 5,000 deaths and almost 600,000 displaced people.
 WikiLeaks 153

WikiLeaks was criticized and judged responsible, but Julian

defended himself in The Guardian: “One thousand three hundred
people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced.
That was a result of our leak,” says Assange. It’s a chilling
statistic: “On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right
to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria
in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of
Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased.”
Even though it had a little impact on public interest, these leaks
propelled WikiLeaks to the rank of world media.

In September 2007, WikiLeaks published a database listing

equipment purchases made by the American army for the war
in Afghanistan. This publication shed some light on the use of
the army budget, but beyond that, it also showed that chemical
equipment are used in this war.
The database was published on the site in its original SQL
format and can be read in an ordinary text editor, albeit not that
easily. It’s a list of codes and equipment names. To understand it
properly you need to be a specialist in military jargon.
The New York Sun analyzed the information as follows: “They
provide a completely objective window into the functioning of
various U.S. units, from psy-ops (psychological operations) to
Kabul headquarters. They indicate that America is using two
types of chemical weapons in that country, including 72 M7
grenade dischargers – gas grenade launchers – and eight FN303s,
‘which can fire pepper-spray impregnated projectiles,’ according
to the unsigned WikiLeaks article.”

November 2007. The leaking of a military manual detailing

the day-to-day operations of the U.S. military in Guantanamo
Bay finally got international attention. It stated for example:
154 Julian Assange

instructions on how to psychologically manipulate prisoners,

how detainees could be rewarded by receiving extra toilet paper,
or how to use military dogs to intimidate prisoners. As Lieutenant
General Ricardo A. Sanchez explained in 2005, “Arabs fear of
dogs!” In Wired magazine, Jamil Dakwar, advocacy director of
the ACLU’s Human Rights program, said: “That actually raises
a lot of concerns about the administration’s genuineness in terms
of allowing ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross)
full access, as was promised to the world.” Dakwar added, “They
are the only organization that has access to the detainees, and this
raises a lot of questions.”

Finally, at the end of a promising first year, WikiLeaks published

the first piece of information that would have legal repercussions.
In December 2007, Rudolf Elmer, former Chief Operations
Officer of the Cayman Islands branch of Swiss bank Julius Baer
Group, submitted evidence that the bank was watching him and
his family. Elmer tried to broadcast the details of client accounts
in 2002 and again in 2005, but without any major repercussions.
The Wall Street Journal covered the affair, but refused to disclose
personal data. Naturally, he then turned to WikiLeaks, which
published all the documents it received. The affair didn’t get
noticed until February 2008, when the bank sent an injunction
to the American domain name registrar Dynadot, which hosted
WikiLeaks.
Even if this trial were stressful for the organization, Julian
was able to joke about it a few months later. He told of the battle
between the bank’s lawyers, specialized in the entertainment
business (lawyers for Céline Dion and Arnold Schwarzenegger),
and a collective of defenders of freedom of expression including,
among others, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the
 WikiLeaks 155

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Project On

Government Oversight (POGO).
The injunction to the Dynadot host was rescinded because
within one month it caused enough traffic on the Internet that
it became obsolete after WikiLeaks’ data had been copied on
dozens of other servers.

In March 2008, with its visibility on the rise, WikiLeaks published

major documents subject to much controversy on the Internet
and in the world of secrecy from the Church of Scientology.
The release included notes from the Office of Special Affairs
and the complete manual of OT Levels, degrees of evolution
of the human mind according to the creator of the Church, Ron
Hubbard. This posting of the criteria of hierarchical evolution
within this organization highlights the perpetual debates of all
those who opposed the sect.
In the same month, the site added the publication of a
complete version of the international agreement ACTA (Anti-
Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). This project brought together
several countries working on intellectual property rights. It
would create a new body outside existing organizations like the
United Nations or World Intellectual Property Organization. The
part concerning download services like Pirate Bay sparked much
debate with Internet users.

But the site had to look for new means of financing to be able
to continue its mission. In August 2008, WikiLeaks tried to
propose bidding on leaks about Venezuela. The idea was to sell
the exclusivity of these documents to the highest bidder for a
certain period. The press organizations contacted were hesitant.
There’s no quality assurance on the information and an exclusive
in the current world of media doesn’t last long enough to really
156 Julian Assange

profit from any substantial spending. The offer was not taken up.
Julian declared however that the idea was not totally dead, but
that it needed a better structure and more resources to organize
this type of operation.
At that time, the leaks site was recognized throughout the
world as an interesting reference with a few nice publications,
but its visibility rarely went beyond the scope of the subject it
addressed and the impact was not yet really measurable.

However, in September 2008 the name of WikiLeaks made

more headlines as it moved into a more global dimension. The
organization aimed at a colorful public figure, one who didn’t
hesitate to make a scene and threats that were heard around the
world. In fact, the site published the Yahoo e-mails of Sarah Palin,
Republican vice-presidential candidate at the time.
The problem raised was that she used a personal e-mail
account to deal with affairs of the State. In the past, a similar
affair turned into a scandal when George W. Bush’s team
communicated outside government systems, as this is contrary
to the elementary American rules that require the recording of all
business communication of the State. To divert attention, Sarah
Palin cried invasion of privacy because the e-mails also contained
family photos.
Always looking for a stronger impact, WikiLeaks, in
January 2009, tried a new publishing experience with private
data. CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs’ medical record could be seen on
the site. The copy turned out to be fake and WikiLeaks’ credibility
was questioned.

February 2009 saw the issue of access to information of

American citizens come to the foreground. WikiLeaks published
the 6,780 reports of the US Congressional Research Services
 WikiLeaks 157

(CRS), considered to be the brain of Congress. Only members are

authorized to read the reports of this service, whose budget comes
close to 100 million dollars. Since 1998, a movement has been
fighting to free up access for every citizen, but governments are
still not ready to tell all. Their mode of operation doesn’t allow for
transparency. This showing of information makes them nervous.
It’s as if everything in your house were suddenly exposed to the
light of day, even your family conversations. You’d be weary as
well, and even if you had nothing to hide, you’d still be very
tense.

In March 2009, an event confronted Julian with his responsibilities

and the organization’s sources faced the danger of their actions.
Nairobi, Kenya. Two human rights activists were assassinated
right on the street after having handed over evidence of police
brutality to a United Nations investigator. These activists were
also involved in writing a report entitled ‘Cry of Freedom,’
denouncing the murders and tortures perpetrated by the Kenyan
government. WikiLeaks published this report in November 2008.
Public opinion used these murders to emphasize the
organization’s inability to protect its sources. Julian defended
the organization by revealing the lack of a direct link between
the publication and the assassination of these two people.
Nevertheless, he used these facts to argue the pressure placed on
his group.

WikiLeaks’ mission implied the denunciation of all forms of

censorship enforced by States. The year 2009 was marked by
several revelations to this effect, especially Internet censorship.
As a result, the site published a list of webpages blocked by
the Australian government in March and the Italian government in
June. These ‘black lists’ were supposed to act against pornography,
158 Julian Assange

pedophilia and extreme violence. Placing this information online

however, revealed that a number of these links didn’t match the
criteria and even included leaks from WikiLeaks. Once again a
wave of protests hid the activist message of the organization: the
action of exposing these forbidden links was labeled scandalous
by Australian child protection agencies.
In November 2009, the site weathered Thai censorship by
putting a video of the decadent birthday party in the honor of the
crown prince’s dog online. It showed the prince at a table with a
naked woman, surrounded by the luxurious decor of the villa and
his swimming pool. It did nothing to improve the image of this
future head of State. The video was published to fight a regime
that eliminated any criticism of the royal family using laws of
lèse-majesté.

Also in November 2009, the publication of some 561,300 text

messages sent on September 11, 2001 was again misinterpreted.
WikiLeaks published this information as a witness to history.
It didn’t reveal anything new, nor did it have any journalistic
objectives, and so was seen as voyeurism. However, Julian
pointed out that not a single family complained about it.

In 2010, WikiLeaks became notorious for the release of a series

of documents related to the world’s biggest superpower.
In March of 2010, the leak of a CIA report showed how the
American government could better manipulate public opinion in
Germany and France so that these countries would continue to
fight in Afghanistan. The idea was to use empathy, particularly
in France, on the condition of Afghan women as a motivation to
go to war. The report stated that President Obama had to make
use of his aura in these countries to sell the war. At the time,
Glenn Greenwald of salon.com talked to Julian who declared:
 WikiLeaks 159

“If you want to improve civilization, you have to remove some

of the basic constraints, which is the quality of information that
civilization has at its disposal to make decisions. Of course,
there’s a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards,
I like a good challenge, so do a lot of the other people involved in
WikiLeaks. We like the challenge.”

The challenge is the new policy of the organization. They had

to hit hard, come out of anonymity and get people to talk about
them or else the WikiLeaks team risked being stopped in their
tracks without any one paying attention. In fact, WikiLeaks had
real reasons to be worried.
In March 2010, the site released a report on the US Department
of Counterintelligence Analysis, dating back to 2008, concerning
WikiLeaks. It stated fears, risks, a detailed analysis of leaks and
declarations. In a chapter entitled ‘Is this freedom of expression or
illegal expression?’ the report mentioned that in some countries,
illegality didn’t only result in the delivery of the information to the
site, but also in consulting it. It also stated that the governments
of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam and Zimbabwe
had already sought to block or at least hinder access to the site.
It lists revelations credited to WikiLeaks. Apparently, according
to Glenn Greenwald, WikiLeaks had other similar reports yet
unpublished: information of the US Navy or an analysis of US
forces based in Germany.

The monitoring of WikiLeaks’ activities started the day it went live.

The clashes between WikiLeaks and the American government
were many and they would continue to have consequences. It was
at that moment that the debate arose: go back or go even further
than before to search for and expose the truth. All of this had
fed Julian’s determination to continue his quest. He then decided
160 Julian Assange

to branch out his battlefield: crushing conspiracies, stimulating

freedom of information, shaking up citizens and fighting against
injustice.
To properly carry out these challenges, he had to improve
WikiLeaks’ visibility all the while protecting it by declaring
himself a journalist. To do so, he had to stand out more often in the
mainstream press and collaborate with high-caliber journalists.
When he received unbelievably damning images in the
spring of 2010, he saw an opportunity for WikiLeaks to achieve
its world mission. He decided to edit the images as a film and
broadcast them on an Internet site created for the occasion. He put
everything in place for major media coverage. He launched the
film during a press conference in Washington. He let New Yorker
journalist Raffi Khatchadourian follow the team when they were
editing the video. The article, telling a brief history of Julian and
WikiLeaks, became a reference to many people. Khatchadourian
reports in many details, with dialogues, the editing of what was
later known as Project B.
 15

Project B18

Two cars drove slowly through the colorful city of Reykjavik.

They turned onto Grettisgata and parked in a lovely street that
sloped down to the sea. Even though it was springtime, it was still
snowing near the North Atlantic. A couple of men stepped out
of their cars to take a moment to admire the view over the cliff.
On that day, March 30 2010, the whistleblowers were walking
silently in the northern wind. They calmly approached a small
white century-old house.
Julian separated from the group and rang the doorbell to
announce himself to the owner of the place. It was time to put
on a show.
“Hello, we’re journalists and we’ve come to write about the
Eyjafjallajökull volcano that has just recently started erupting.”
Once the rental transactions were dealt with, the owner quickly
went away, seeing that these people weren’t very talkative. As
soon as the man left, Julian quickly closed the drapes. The house,
now locked day and night, had become the war room. A dozen
computers were quickly installed in the starkly decorated living
room.
Shortly after, Icelandic activists showed up. They started
working right away, more or less led by Julian. They almost all

18 No secrets, Julian Assange’s mission for a total transparency by Raffi

Khatchadourian on www.newyorker.com.
162 Julian Assange

knew what they had to do. A war against time had started, and it
was called Project B.

Project B was the code name Julian had given the thirty-eight-
minute video shot in 2007 from an Apache helicopter cockpit in
Iraq.
The news of this video was as if a bomb had been dropped
within the ranks of WikiLeaks. Aside from human error, the
images of the American soldier opening fire on eighteen people
in the streets of Baghdad were a highly guarded military secret
at the highest level of government. They flagrantly represented
today’s wars, which were as ambiguous and cruel as ever. Thanks
to these images, Julian and his team hoped to rekindle the global
debate on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Two Reuters’ journalists died along with Iraqi citizens during
this terrible blunder. Reuters had been trying for three years to
get a hold of the video from the army through the Freedom of
Information Act of 1966, which obliged federal agencies to hand
over their documents to anyone asking for it, regardless of their
nationality. To this day, the news agency has not been able to
obtain the compromising images from the American army. And
today, the virtual denouncers of wrongdoing have the means to
lift the veil on this secret dictatorship, with the natural support of
journalists.
It was up to Julian to make his move at the right moment.
Mastermind of the WikiLeaks movement, he planned to unveil
the images before a group of reporters did at the National Press
Club on April 5, 2010 in Washington.
To achieve the desired effect, Julian and the WikiLeaks
volunteers had to analyze the raw footage, make a quick edit,
create a website to broadcast it, prepare documentation and
launch a media campaign about the film, all in less than a week.
 WikiLeaks 163

The atmosphere was almost religious, as everyone understood

the impact this film would have. They wouldn’t get much sleep.

Julian was sitting at a small table, dressed in a snowsuit. Even

though he had been working for hours in a heated house, he was
still wearing it. Rop Gonggrijp, sitting in front of him, glanced
over at him kindly. Julian could stay focused for hours without
being bothered to sleep, barely eating or drinking. Ever since
Julian noticed he was being followed, Rop had become his
unofficial manager. If Julian’s fear of surveillance increased,
it would contaminate the others. WikiLeaks was a hive full of
individuals and everyone had their limits. Even Julian.
This was why Rop’s role was crucial: he had known Julian
for many years, and was immediately alerted when they received
the images. Julian didn’t reveal the source of the document
classified as a ‘defense secret,’ simply saying that the video came
from someone who was not pleased with this attack. The images
were encrypted and it took Julian three months to crack a code
he believes was moderately difficult. His cryptography skills are
exceptional: every code was a challenge for him, like a battle
with its maker. He could spend hours and even days on it. He
lived in the IT world.
Rop quickly noticed that Julian was spreading himself thin
and decided to do something sensible for him. He fronted 10,000
euro to WikiLeaks in order to finance operations. He became the
treasurer of Project B; he took care of everybody’s schedule and
made sure the kitchen was well stocked.

Around 3 p.m., Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir

showed up. A woman in her forties, she had long brown hair and
bangs, and she was dressed in black. She pulled out a WikiLeaks
T-shirt from her handbag and threw it to Julian.
164 Julian Assange

“Here, it’s for you, you could use a change of clothes!”

Julian caught the T-shirt, put it on the back of the chair and
continued working. He was typing on one of the only computers
not connected to the Internet; it actually contained a lot of
information they needed to keep for themselves until they went
live on the site. Birgitta took out her computer and asked Julian
how he intended to delegate the work on Project B.
“Someone should contact Google to make sure that YouTube
is OK with hosting the film.”
“Isn’t making sure caving under pressure?” she asked smiling.
“They have rules when it comes to gratuitous violence,”
Julian answered. “In this case, the violence is not gratuitous, but
nevertheless, they could consider it that way. It’s too important to
have to deal with this kind of problem when we go live.”

Birgitta was unemployed before becoming a parliamentarian.

She considered herself an artist, poet and activist. Her political
opinions were mostly anarchistic ones. As a blogger and Internet
pioneer, she proposed a bill this year to turn Iceland into a freedom
of the press haven, with the goal of achieving total transparency
and allowing journalists to reveal to the world the state of society.
She joined the WikiLeaks movement in a heartbeat.
“What can I ask N to do?”
Totally engrossed in what he was doing, Julian didn’t answer.
His phone rang, he answered with his deep voice and spoke
slowly. The Icelandic police were on the other end. Julian tried to
find out more about what happened a few days earlier.
A young volunteer of WikiLeaks Iceland was caught entering
into the system of a plant where his father worked. He was
stopped by the police and taken into custody. The police then
interrogated him at length about Project B. The young man
was seen on a picture in front of a restaurant in the company of
 WikiLeaks 165

Julian and other supporters. That day, Julian and his team were
actually preparing the operation of Project B in the restaurant
that had placed a private room at WikiLeaks’ disposal for the
meeting. The reasons why the young man tried to break into the
factory’s system were not very clear. Julian liked to understand
things, and he had a bad feeling about this. On March 26, 2010,
he wrote a heated e-mail, telling the story of the young man held
for more than twenty hours by the police. The subject line read:
“Something is rotten in the state of Iceland.”
Julian hung up.
“Our young friend talked to the cops. I was about to get some
details, but my battery died!”
He smiled and went to plug his phone in.
“We’re all paranoid schizophrenics,” said Birgitta watching
Julian walk away. “Look how he’s dressed.”
Julian had not yet taken off his snowsuit. Rop abruptly got up
and headed toward the window. He slowly pulled back the drapes
and took a good long look outside.
“Someone there?” Birgitta asked.
“Just the reporters’ truck,” he said. “Ready to corrupt minds,”
he added sarcastically.
He shrugged his shoulders and let go of the drapes. The
others hadn’t budged. It was their daily fate to be followed by
the media and suspected by the police. Some people had already
had to abandon the movement or get involved differently for fear
of reprisals. The choice had to be made every day. Spend a quiet
life hidden away or work to show the world as it really was. And
for what?
Everyone had his or her own answer and there was nothing
to discuss. If you were there, you work for the cause, that was it.
166 Julian Assange

Julian was so sure of himself that he incited others to concentrate

on the action.

Before viewing the video of the Apache helicopter for the first
time, he prepared everyone for a shock. He knew that this film
was crucial to WikiLeaks members and that it was impossible not
to be one hundred per cent committed after having seen it.
Everyone gathered in front of the computer to view the film.
Julian fired up the video, but quickly paused it to explain
something.
“In this video, you’ll see a certain number of people getting
killed. The film has three parts. In the first part, you’ll see an
attack based on a terribly misguided error. In the second part, the
error clearly turns into murder if looked at through the eyes of
an average person. And in the third part, you can see the killing
of many innocent civilians who became legitimate targets in the
soldiers’ operation.”
To the extent that WikiLeaks published all its material sources,
Julian felt that they were free to make their own analysis.
“This video shows what modern wars have become, and I
think that after having seen this, people will better understand
what it means when they hear about other cases of closed air
support battles.”
“For this project we’re producing an edit that will support
our own comments and analyses. We could call it Permission to
Engage, or maybe something a bit more shocking.”
Two minutes later, he said to Rop: “Let’s abuse the nice
euphemism of ‘collateral damage’ and call the film ‘Collateral
Murder.’”

At the beginning, the video was just some kind of puzzle, with
proof and images to be understood in their context. Julian and
 WikiLeaks 167

the entire team spent a lot of time rebuilding the whole story
by pointing out every detail. Every group worked on a specific
point: the structure of command, the rules of engagement, the
jargon used by the soldiers on the radio and most importantly, if
and how the Iraqis on the ground were armed.
“One of them has a weapon,” said Julian, looking at blurred
images of a man going down a street. “Look at all those people
standing there.”
“And there’s a boy with a RPG19 under his arm,” Rop added.
“I’m not sure,” Julian retorted. “It seems a bit small for a
RPG.”
They viewed the film together one more time.
“You know, it’s weird. If he has a RPG, then there’s only one.
So where are the other weapons? And all those guys there. It’s
weird.”
“It’s a really tricky job,” Rop sighed. “Maybe you should have
accepted the military officials’ invitation to clear some things up,
no?”
“Listen, I think they’d have done more harm than good.
Anyway, when it’s for WikiLeaks, they aren’t very cooperative.
Let’s look at it again.”

Julian set up Project B like a surprise attack. His war was waged
on another field, but like all wars, it remained a war of nerves:
quick decisions, swift action and a lot of uphill strategy.
He reinforced the rumors by saying that the video was shot
in Afghanistan in 2009, in the hope that the Department of
Defense would be caught off guard. Julian thought the military
was very suspicious of the media, and believed it was not fair for
institutions to know the story before the general public did.

19 Rocket-propelled grenade is a kind of bazooka.

168 Julian Assange

“Isn’t there a risk of you being thrown in jail if you go to the

United States?” asked an activist.
“It’ll be a lot riskier for me to go there after this. For now, it’s
still quite safe,” Julian explained.
“They say Gitmo20 is really nice this time of year,” Rop joked.
The conversation ended there and everybody went back to
their screens.
Julian never had long conversations while working. He even
talked to the team in a telegraphic manner.
While faith in their action gave WikiLeaks members an
increased ability to work, Julian simply had an exceptional ability
to concentrate. You could leave the house at night and find him
exactly in the same place the next morning.
To better manage who did what, Rop and another activist
organized the work using sticky notes on the kitchen counter.
Elsewhere in the house, people were translating the subtitles
in different languages, while others were making sure the servers
would be able to handle the traffic caused by the announcement
of the video.

Julian wanted the families of the Iraqis who died in this attack to
be contacted and warned of the unavoidable assault by the media
that would try to get as much additional information as possible.
In agreement with the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service,
he sent two Icelandic journalists to Baghdad to find them.
At the end of the week, the film was almost finished. By
examining it frame by frame, details were revealed that could not
be seen during a normal viewing.
The film editors were no longer smiling, having spent several
days watching the last living moments of these people on the

20 US Navy lingo for Guantanamo.

 WikiLeaks 169

streets of Baghdad. It eventually brought them down and it was

time for the group to finish their mission.
The film was eighteen minutes long and showed an obvious
lack of human dimension in the attack. It started with a quote by
George Orwell that fit the images perfectly; a quote that Julian
had been using for a long time: “Political language is designed to
make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
The film gave information about the two journalists who were
killed and the official explanations regarding the attack.
For the soundtrack, Julian worked with an editor and an
Icelandic activist, GG, who asked him permission to use the
dialogue between the helicopter pilots. “It’ll provide some
emotional appeal,” he said.
“It’s very choppy and difficult to understand,” Julian observed.
“I’d like to insist, it’s used all the time to incite emotion.”
“At the same time, we’re already portraying the soldiers as
monsters. Do we really need to make it worse?” the film editor
asked.
“But emotion is always real. I worked on the soundtrack of a
movie that was nominated for an Oscar, I know what I’m talking
about!” GG retorted.
“OK, what do you suggest?” asked Julian.
“Dialogues and helicopter noises interrupted by silence,” said
the activist.

The editor made the changes: he took out the voice of the soldiers
in the opening sequence, but kept the radio sounds, the noises and
a few distorted voices. Julian gave his final approval.
While the film was being edited, Julian was preoccupied with
one of his constant worries: security.
170 Julian Assange

Once the video went live, it had to be impossible to take offline.

The www.collateralmurder.com site had to be impregnable and
untraceable. Even though the issue of WikiLeaks’ security was
permanent, it was well managed thanks to some twenty servers
installed throughout the world, with mirror sites also online to
ensure that information couldn’t be traced. A government that
wanted to remove content from the WikiLeaks site would have
to practically dismantle the entire Internet. There had to be
maximum protection as much for those who sent information as
for all the volunteers working on it.

Late on Saturday night, shortly after the work was finally

finished, Julian received an e-mail from the two special Icelandic
correspondents in Baghdad: the soldiers who came to the scene
after the attack found two children in the truck. The children
lived in the neighborhood and were on their way to school with
their father that morning. The journalists also found the owner of
the building that had been attacked who said that several families
lived there and that seven residents died during the attack. The
owner, a retired English teacher, lost his wife and daughter.
In the war room, the discussion heated up. What to do with this
last-minute news? Was it important to provide this information
right away or was it better to just sit on it for now? If the military
justified firing hellfire missiles by arguing that there were no
civilian causalities, WikiLeaks could strike back by unveiling
this information. Sitting on this information made for a strong
ambush.
Suddenly, Birgitta turned to Rop and said:
“Are you crying?”
“Yes, I’m crying because they were just children and it’s sad,”
he answered.
 WikiLeaks 171

He quickly collected himself and continued the conversation.

“Ah, shit!”
“Yeah, that’s right, let’s leave them in the shit,” said one of
the activists.
“Now they’ll have to walk in it, that’s the logical conclusion,
isn’t it?” Rop asked.
“I want to re-edit the film and put in the hellfire attack,” Julian
said with conviction.
The eyes of the exhausted team were all on Julian. Many of
them were almost in tears, harassed and shocked. The silence that
ensued seemed to be hanging from the white ceiling of the little
Icelandic house.
“There were three families living in the back... we can’t just
give up.”
Then came the discussion of reason; re-editing the film was
impossible. The team couldn’t take it anymore, they did their
absolute best, and in a few hours, it would be Easter.
The sympathizers left the little white house silently with
mixed feelings. They firmly believed in the actions they executed,
but the latest information they received from the journalists that
were urgently sent to Baghdad left them confused. Why did they
do that? Would it change anything? What would the response of
the public be to the film? And what about American politicians?
What they did know for sure was that it was a minefield.
The site had already received more than a hundred threats of
legal action, but none of them had materialized.
This time, the images that would be placed on the site would
have an impact that even Julian could not yet imagine. He worked
day and night to show the partiality of the American government
in this matter, and put the average Joe and Jane at the heart of the
world’s state secrets.
172 Julian Assange

It was 10:30 a.m. the next morning. Rop opened the drapes
and let the light shine into the house. He was wearing a long
T-shirt and a freshly washed pair of black pants. He fought to
make sure that everyone met their deadlines. The final minutes
were dedicated to looking for one of their contacts that might
know a criminal defense lawyer in the United States.
Glued to his computer, Julian typed without stopping.
“Are we on time?” he asked in passing.
“We still have three hours,” Rop answered.
Worried, Julian turned back to his computer. He checked a
copy of the rules of engagement used in Iraq since 2006. It was
one of the American army documents classified ‘defense secret’
that he planned to post on the site with the video. WikiLeaks had
to make sure there were no digital traces that could reveal their
sources. Julian erased the documents as quickly as possible.

The streets of Reykjavik were empty, and the cathedral bells were
ringing. Julian was still at his computer.
Rop picked up all the sticky notes in the kitchen, removing
any trace of their work.
Just before noon, they would distance themselves from the
last traces of Project B and leave for the airport. Julian was not
quite ready to leave, he hadn’t shaved and his hair was a mess. It
was time to drop the bomb and he was writing to the press: the
detonator. Birgitta wanted to help. Julian asked her:
“Do you want to cut my hair while I’m doing this?”
“Of course not, I’m not going to cut your hair while you’re
working.”
She headed to the kitchen to make tea. Julian continued to
type quickly on his keyboard. After a few minutes, she started
 WikiLeaks 173

to cut his hair with some hesitation. She stopped a second and
asked:
“If you get arrested, keep in touch with me, OK?”
Julian nodded. In the mean time, Rop had collected Julian’s
things and placed them in a bag. He paid the owner for the house.
The dishes were washed, the furniture was put back the way it
originally was.
The team piled into a single car and drove off.

Increasingly important information came in from Julian’s sources.

He had won the respect of those who were forced to stay silent.
They were the witnesses of an invisible world so real that their
human integrity pushed them to act. He was finally ready to face
the enemies of the truth.
174 Julian Assange

Immediate shock

Published on 25 November 2010 by sophox | Leave a comment |

Now I know more about Julian Assange. Here’s the video that
has the United States scared and that has Mr. WikiLeaks at war
with American politics. And I understand why. It’s a real bomb.
It was hidden, but they uncovered it.
I really wonder what planet I’ve been living on these past few
months. I’ve just watched the Collateral Murder film edited by
WikiLeaks. It’s been online since April and many versions of it
can easily be found. The entire film lasts 18 minutes and it’s a
shocker.
This is a wakeup call for the inhabitants of the ‘another day,
another dollar’ planet. This video shows some American army
guys shooting Iraqis without even being sure if they’re armed or
not. And in the end, they just shoot at will.
I’m still in shock. They’re in the helicopter and the sound is
eerie, with lots of noise and limited dialogue. Sometimes it gets
choppy and we can hear the silence. It makes you think.
The images are quite blurry. In the beginning, I figured that
from up there, on screen it’s not easy to tell whether a civilian has
a weapon or not. But they’re trained to do this, right?
Once they start shooting, it’s as if they’ve crossed over into
another world, a world where killing humans is no big deal. These
guys are so cool, congratulating themselves, that for a moment
we think the civilians lying on the dusty ground will get up. But
this first shot kills eight people, including two journalists.
Some highlights for you: “Request permission to engage”…
After the shootout, one of them notices that there are “a bunch of
bodies layin’ there.” “Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards,” he
 WikiLeaks 175

adds. “Nice,” his teammate replies. The conversation ends with

“well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”
After they’ve shot civilians, a truck arrives to try and save
them. Two men get out and we can see that there is still someone
inside. Two children.
What kind of world do we live in where children become
victims just like that? What was the war in Iraq all about anyway?
Does anyone actually remember? I think this is as absurd as it
gets in this kind of situation.
There are days when I know why I live in a neutral country.
I’m seriously wondering about this. Was it possible for them
to detect a threat in this group of men? Sure, the big camera could
look like a weapon, but the group doesn’t look threatening. Am I
being naive? Tell me what you think.
The dialogues are even more powerful than the images. We
understand what these soldiers were trained to do. They don’t
hesitate; they cut straight to the chase. It probably seems like a
routine exercise to them.
At no time does the group of men in the street seem to be
afraid of this helicopter whirring above. They don’t hide or
run for cover behind walls. They appear quite calm, suspecting
nothing. The helicopter is either very far up in the sky or they’re
so used to this display that they no longer pay any attention to it.
For these men the fight is not whether to shoot or not, but
rather consists in showing that they are good little soldiers by
hitting their ‘target’ with a minimum of bullets or as quickly as
possible, I don’t know. And then there’s the humiliating, hurtful
vocabulary. I understand that you have to be straight to the point
when doing your job, but this sounds like they don’t even think
that they’re dealing with equals or even humans anymore.
One of the “bastards” isn’t dead, as he tries to get up. It’s one
of the members of the Reuters team. We see the gunsight of the
cannon hover over the injured body, and he doesn’t seem to be
carrying a weapon or scrambling to find one. Then we hear:
176 Julian Assange

“Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s something weird
about entrusting the military to keep the peace. These guys are
trained to shoot and they want to shoot. That’s all they want to do.
And what happens after the blunder?
This blunder cost the lives of some 15 people, all civilians,
including two members of the Reuters agency, a photographer
and his driver. I read that it’s highly likely that nobody would have
been interested in the affair if Reuters hadn’t tried everything it
could to find out what really happened.
WikiLeaks put the famous video online. Reuters had been
requesting it from incompetent authorities for years. Thanks to
a leak. Thumbs up to the person who had the courage to leak
these images! How can anyone cover up images like these and
sleep well at night? I think the people who have to cover this up
must have a tough time. And the soldiers? The entire hierarchy
is involved.
In fact, were they told that they had only killed civilians?
Were they tried, judged, sentenced, put into a psycho ward, or do
they truly believe in their ‘wonderful’ almighty army and were
just following orders?
Four million people have already seen this film. We have to
keep spreading it. I know a lot of people who haven’t seen it
or don’t talk about it. Here is the link to the main video: www.
collateralmurder.com
WikiLeaks, Assange, continue to show us the true face of
humans and of our governments. I’m following you…

This entry was published in Assange. You can bookmark it as a favorite with this permalink
 Part VII

Allies, enemies, dissidents

A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
– Oscar Wilde
 16

Iceland

Iceland could very well become Julian Assange’s new adoptive

country. In fact, the country’s history and Julian’s history have
been inexorably linked since the summer of 2009.
Iceland has been inhabited since the ninth century, and less
than a century later in the year AD 930, Icelanders claimed
their state was a free one, constituting the oldest parliament
in the world. This republic lasted until the thirteenth century
when Iceland was annexed to Norway, then Denmark, to which
the island remained linked until 1944 when Iceland became an
independent republic. Its economy is based on a mixed system
featuring many corporations and a strong public sector. According
to the human development index of 2006, Iceland was the second
most developed country in the world after Norway.
But in 2008, Iceland was hit by a major crisis, with the banks
on the brink of bankruptcy. In October of that year, Iceland’s
Financial Supervisory Authority took control of Kaupthing, the
country’s largest bank after having nationalized the two other
Icelandic banks, Glitnir and Landsbankinn. Iceland was then
potentially bankrupt with a fifteen per cent inflation rate and
a currency that lost sixty per cent of its value in one year. The
crisis wasn’t really visible, but when Icelanders heard about the
situation of their banks, they were flabbergasted.
180 Julian Assange

At end of July 2009 the Kaupthing bank was not declared

bankrupt, although it was given a moratorium on payments from
the District Court of Reykjavik. The State injected thousands of
millions of euro into the bank.
For one year, the financial crisis only got worse, and a legal
investigation was launched to find out whether the bank directors
responsible for the disaster broke the law to get rich.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, investigative journalist on Iceland’s RUV

public television, had received an anonymous message that
damning documents on bankrupt Icelandic bankers had popped
up on the Internet. The short message was followed by a link:
www.wikileaks.org, a site he’d never heard about before.
He clicked on the link and couldn’t believe what he saw.
Stunned, he discovered the book of accounts of the Kaupthing
bank as well as e-mails and minutes of secret meetings. Right
before his eyes an internal document of the bank appeared,
describing dubious loan contracts without coverage for
astronomical amounts of money, which had been approved for
the bank’s main shareholders and officers just a few days before
the nationalization.
Kristinn had evidence in front of him that the biggest
borrowers were the bank owners themselves who had vouched
for their own loans.
The journalist thought he was seeing things. After verifying
the authenticity of the documents, he prepared a series of
reports on the affair. At the same time, the Kaupthing bank sent
an injunction to WikiLeaks, demanding that the documents be
removed. This was their short response to the injunction:

No. We will not assist the remains of Kaupthing, or

its clients, to hide its dirty laundry from the global
 WikiLeaks 181

community. Attempts by Kaupthing or its agents to

discover the source of the document in question may be
a criminal violation of both Belgium source protections
laws and the Swedish constitution. Who is your US
counsel?

On August 2 2009, just before the news started, the RUV received
an injunction from the District Court of Reykjavik forbidding
the broadcast of one of the reports for violating banking secrecy.
Journalists elaborated on television what had just happened and
showed viewers the URL of the WikiLeaks website.
The bankruptcy of banks was a very sensitive subject and
Kristinn knew that the effect would be instantaneous. The entire
population rushed to go online to download the documents. Four
days later, the Citizens’ Movement had won over the power of
the mighty banks and the court lifted the injunction. As of that
moment WikiLeaks was elevated to the status of national hero.

Following this affair, Kristinn looked into the site whose goal
was to act as global haven for whistleblowers on the Internet,
where people could denounce illegal acts committed by their
bosses, superiors or politicians. If they possessed the documents
proving their accusations but wanted to remain anonymous for
fear of reprisals, they could send documents very easily by way
of a secure page on the website. All it took was a click.
The document then went on a long journey. “First it was
encrypted and extracted from its software format to be stored
on a server at the Internet access provider PRQ in Sweden in
order to benefit from Swedish law on freedom of the press where
journalists couldn’t be forced to reveal their sources, and if they
182 Julian Assange

decided to do so, the revealed source could take them to court.

Next, a copy of the documents was sent to a server in Belgium,
where the law on the protection of sources also applied to
technicians who handled documents. Finally, they were uploaded
onto a server located in a third country that WikiLeaks kept
secret, where it was then decrypted and published. WikiLeaks
had implemented an international network of anonymous relay
servers whose only function was to hide their tracks.”21

Kristinn then learned that the site already had a troubled past in its
two years of existence. Thousands of documents had already been
published denouncing corruption or misconduct: Swiss banks
in the Cayman Islands, compromising files from the Church of
Scientology or American documents classified as defense secrets
on the fate of prisoners at Guantanamo.
Kristinn realized that this website was a wealth of information
for an investigative journalist like himself. He then took a closer
look at the people who started the organization and met with
Julian. He started collaborating with WikiLeaks and it had been
an unwavering collaboration up until today, as he was considered
the spokesperson of the organization when Julian was unavailable.
Kristinn is a pleasant and easy-going person, we know, we
talked to him on the phone. Although he didn’t have much to
say about Julian’s personality, he was open with a good sense
of humor. Ever since the storm that hit Julian, Kristinn had
remained focused on the organization, explaining that they’d like
to emphasize the leaks rather than WikiLeaks and continue to
focus on the organization and less on its founder. He preferred
to believe that the impact of Julian’s arrest wouldn’t have the
impact many people thought it would have. “This isn’t a one-man
organization,” he said, “we’re continuing the work.”

21 Source : « contrebandiers de l’information de Jean Eudes » published in the French

newspaper Le Monde.
 WikiLeaks 183

Kristinn is a committed journalist. While he worked with

the entire WikiLeaks team on Collateral Murder, he asked the
television station to send him to Iraq to check the facts and
authenticate the damage described in the film. RUV accepted and
hurried him off to Baghdad. Nonetheless, the station refused to
broadcast the provocative film. Three months later, Kristinn was
dismissed and left the RUV. The reason invoked was personal
incompatibility with his superiors about the news segment.
Nothing seemed to prove this and the question remained
unanswered.

Back to 2009. The love story between WikiLeaks and Iceland had
just begun when Kristinn prepared his stories on Kaupthing for
the RUV.
In December, Smári McCarthy, who was in charge of the
university association Icelandic Digital Freedom Society, invited
the two figureheads of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Daniel
Domscheit-Berg, under the name Schmitt, for a conference in
Reykjavik: Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference.
Smári was a young activist and committed anarchist. In 2008,
he founded the association with a group of people linked to the
Internet. A first, a very voluntary and provocative conference took
place the same year on freedom within the scope of the Internet.
The following year, when Julian and Daniel were guests, they
brought the list of the laws that protect WikiLeaks in different
countries. But Julian brought more than that: “an ambitious project
that would make Iceland an inviolable sanctuary for the digital
documents threatened with censorship or destruction in other
countries. To get that far, one had to start by profoundly changing
national legislation regarding the freedom of expression.”22

22 Source : « contrebandiers de l’information de Jean Eudes » published by the Frensh

newspaper Le Monde.
184 Julian Assange

Julian’s proposals rang true with Smári McCarthy, as well as with

Birgitta Jónsdóttir.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir was a parliamentarian with character. She was

an Internet pioneer and a talented blogger, an artist yet more of
a poet. Some of her poems are on her blog where she can be
seen as a modern-day viking warrior. She was also a rebel. Since
2009 she has led a party called ‘The Movement,’ which has three
deputies in the Icelandic Parliament. She was attracted to the
project Julian proposed as much as to the man with the magnetic
charm. They started working right away with the volunteers.
They addressed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI),
a law that intended to make Iceland a haven for modern media.
“Their first task consisted of taking stock of the best laws
on the freedom of expression around the world. They retained
Swedish and Belgian laws on the protection of sources, an
Estonian law on the transparence of administration, a New York
state law that prohibits attacking media in a country not concerned
by a matter in court, a California law protecting the media against
unjustified lawsuits, as well as a French law on the regulations of
press offenses after a period of ninety days.”23
Besides legislative and technical work, the goal of the IMMI
was almost a philosophical one. They wanted to define the
freedom of information and expression today, taking into account
the set of new information and communication tools available.
The original idea was that Internet could be seen as a ‘distinct
country,’ the other, physical countries would then have the right
to control who crosses the border, but not to interfere in the
internal rules of ‘Internet country.’ The idea was to conceive that
what goes on in ‘real life’ is answerable to the states and possibly

23 Source : « contrebandiers de l’information de Jean Eudes » published by the French

newspaper Le Monde.
 WikiLeaks 185

to their courts, but that their representation on the Internet should

not be censured as such.
Smári gave as an example pedophile images spread over the
Internet. He estimated that what should be condemned was the act
committed, as spreading images on the Internet was not the root of
the problem and sometimes helped to track down the ringleader.
He warned about the points of view of censorship and political
control of the Internet that in turn curb freedom of expression.
They often demonstrated politicians’ lack of knowledge of the
Internet and of new means of communication.
Birgitta tried to convince politicians24 that Iceland must adopt
a series of laws inspired by these foreign examples. Moreover, a
work group was established “with lawyers, legal advisers, activists
in civil liberties and new technology. They had collaborated with
representatives of the Ministry of Education, of the Sciences and
Culture in order to be able to implement this program.”25
“The time was right. Since 2009 the country had been
governed by a coalition of Social Democrats and Green Leftists
who were open to this kind of adventure. Nineteen deputies,
belonging to five parties represented in Parliament, co-signed
a resolution aiming to order the government to drawn up the
necessary documents.
Icelanders hoped that many foreign media, harassed in their
own country, would come over and open branches of electronic
publishing.”26
However, there were still sizeable logistics problems, like the
absence of a warning and response center to computer attacks,
but nothing was insurmountable for the ultra-motivated Icelandic
team.

24 From Orsola Veille in Media.

25 From Orsola Veille in Media.
26 Source : « contrebandiers de l’information de Jean Eudes » published by the French
newspaper Le Monde
186 Julian Assange

It was as though Julian had given them an incredible boost

of energy to act in favor of freedom that Internet users wanted to
safeguard. As for Julian, he went over to put together his Icelandic
team to which he had given what they needed and which would
do the same for him when the time came. Actually, they had all
been there when Julian, David, Rop and the others came to edit
the Collateral Murder film.

It must be said that Julian’s choices weren’t always accepted.

Kristinn remained active in WikiLeaks, while Smári went over
to the anarchist movement Fab lab, which promoted sciences
to children by designing animated programs adapted for young
children. In fact, they closely follow the IMMI. As for Birgitta,
she ended up feeling that there wasn’t enough transparency in the
organization, particularly the decision-making, and not enough
communication either. To optimize the flow of communication,
one needed to have a good structure. According to her, after the
spring of 2010, the structure wasn’t very clear anymore. Birgitta
wanted to define the roles attributed to each person, and tried to
start a discussion many times, to no avail. So she took a step back
from the movement.27
However, one of the most virulent critical comments on
WikiLeaks, a website that fights for transparency, is its own lack
of financial transparency. Although Birgitta didn’t think that there
was any reason to suspect any wrongdoing, she believed that it
should simply be more transparent.28
Despite everything, even outside the WikiLeaks organization,
she had always supported Julian. Just that fact was enough for the
US government to want to access her Twitter messages in January

27 Source : interview with Birgitta Jónsdóttir in The National Post.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/01/15/qa-former-wikileaks-spokeswomanbirgittajónsdóttir/
28 Source : interview with Birgitta Jónsdóttir in The National Post.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/01/15/qa-former-wikileaks-spokeswomanbirgittajónsdóttir/
 WikiLeaks 187

2011. In fact, she’d been told that Twitter received a request from
the US government to examine Julian’s messages as well as
those of his close friends and collaborators. As a parliamentarian,
Birgitta had means to defend herself in the name of individual
freedom, her country and its adherence. She was legally protected
by her parliamentary immunity, and sounded the alarm as to the
terms used by people like Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, and
all those who had called for Julian’s assassination. Birgitta would
like people to understand the reach and strength of the words,
and that “if they use these words to call for the assassination of
Julian Assange, of her or of any WikiLeaks associate, they have
to live with the consequences of the possible death of one of these
people.”

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death

your right to say it.” These words, which refer to Voltaire, the
famous French writer and journalist, are reflected in the First
Amendment of the US constitution. They show utmost respect
for human expression that some people try to preserve today in
virtual media.
 17

A Fellow Traveler

“WikiLeaks will never have an actual office or headquarters.

Its existence is virtual and it’s going to stay that way.”
On the plane flying him to Stockholm, Julian let his thoughts
roam. He was a man of flesh and blood; a man who could dissolve
himself into computers.
His life had been floating around the Internet for more than
twenty years: Mendax, Harry Harrison, John Shipton – so many
different personalities. And he remembered every one of them.
Julian knew them all very well. He liked to take on a different
personality when he felt like it. He always felt real, but moved
forward with a mask. His life was the Internet, the conferences,
the interviews, the planes, the evenings with sympathizers,
volunteers, friends to some, at least for a time, governments,
‘leakers’… His life was one big Venetian ball where the game
consisted of unmasking the others before being recognized, and
he was really good at it.
Who really knew Julian Assange, the man made of flesh and
human needs?

Everyone who knew him always pointed out his ability to focus on
ideas so intensely that he forgot to eat, drink and even sleep. Very
few people could actually do the same. Now he had established a
personal guard and Rop Gonggrijp was part of it.
 WikiLeaks 189

Rop considered himself a friend of Julian’s. He had just spent

an extraordinary 2010 with him.
Although he had known Julian for over ten years, he traveled
with him more from October 2009 to November 2010 than he
had in the entire time knowing each other.
The real adventure started in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where
Julian and Rop were invited to speak at a conference organized
by Hack In The Box (HITB), a hacker movement that advocated
keeping knowledge free and sharing it. It organized conferences
several times a year around the world. Hackers, members of
organizations and Internet workers of every country would meet
up in the comfort of major hotels.
Everybody talked about his own activities. In front of the
audience, Rop demonstrated the non-reliability of electronic
voting systems and how they could be made more reliable. Some
countries had managed to build trustworthy systems like in Brazil,
while others had created the possibility of manipulating the direct
and democratic expression of citizens, like in India.
Julian came to present WikiLeaks. He had top billing at this
event: he was the last speaker at the conference and the most
awaited one. The room was filled to the brim to hear his presentation
entitled ‘Publishing the unpublishable.’ He developed his project
to allow newspapers, human rights organizations, investigators
and others to download information from the WikiLeaks site.
He also explained that he offers potential whistleblowers the
opportunity to broadcast sensitive documents using their secure
connection. The new arrivals on the site are subjected to an
embargo period during which the material was analyzed then
released to the public.
The conference was a huge success. In Kuala Lumpur, in this
world of hackers, Rop and Julian were stars. Rop was presented
like a world-renowned hacker and known activist. Julian came
across as a squadron leader ready to risk a lot to defend his cause.
190 Julian Assange

After this four-day event, they traveled together for a month

through Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia. They really bonded
as friends during this trip, sharing the same views. Rop was sold
on Julian’s ideas; the man had so much energy and passion for
his project. To him, everything was possible. He saw the pitfalls,
the road was long, but he was entirely capable of overcoming it,
improving his system again and again, shaking up public opinion.
Freeing people through access to knowledge: Julian said he’d
do it, and he had been working on it day after day without fail.
This determination deeply touched Rop, who followed him all
the way to Iceland in December 2009 for the Reykjavik Digital
Freedoms Conference. Daniel Domscheit-Berg spoke under the
name Daniel Schmitt. At that time, WikiLeaks was nothing more
than some obscure tech-oriented organization with an ambitious
journalistic project. Daniel and Julian were given standing
ovations when they walked on stage. The consecration of Julian’s
project was done on this small island of 300,000 inhabitants.
WikiLeaks helped out Icelanders with the Kaupthing Bank affair
and since then, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange have
been hailed as heroes.

Julian and Daniel responded to success quite differently. Daniel

stayed focused on the message, his lips tight and his eyes riveted
on the slides that appeared on his computer and the big screen
deployed on stage. He listened to the round of applause go by
with a serious look on his face. Julian was relaxed and smiling,
cracking jokes along the way.
When they explained that WikiLeaks could provide new
opportunities to protect the freedom of the press in Iceland, the
room gave up some thundering applause. Rop was taken aback
by this, as were Julian and all the others. However, Julian would
only stay a little while on this euphoric mood. He was already
 WikiLeaks 191

starting to think about the means Iceland had to become a haven

for reality informants. He had already built the premises of the
future law called IMMI, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative.
Rop wanted to participate in the adventure and would come back
to Reykjavik a few weeks after the conference to help draw up
this government bill.

After a few other trips and conferences on electronic voting

systems, Rop wanted to spend a few weeks home in Amsterdam,
but his friend Julian needed his help. It wasn’t intended for Rop
to go back to Iceland to work on this project, which suddenly
became the team’s number one preoccupation. By reading
WikiLeaks’ Twitter messages, Rop figured that his friend needed
help. A few hours later, he showed up on Grettisgata to organize
the planning and administration of the Project B team with a
10,000-euro loan for WikiLeaks to start the works. That week in
Iceland was intense and restless. Rop played the role of guardian
angel to Julian, a driven man who forgets to sleep and eat.
As the co-producer of the film, Rop accompanied Julian to the
press conference they held in Washington. The video needed as
much visibility as possible, which was why Julian decided to hit
hard: release the video of the two America helicopters opening
fire on civilians and journalists in Baghdad and at the same time,
hold a press conference in Washington so that the media could
broadcast the information.
WikiLeaks had been in existence since the end of 2006, and in
2010 the organization had not yet fulfilled its mission: to change
the world, shake up public opinion and force governments to face
their actions. Over the years, Julian learnt that he couldn’t do
it without using the relays of the press. Now he had to expose
himself and Rop supported him in this move.
192 Julian Assange

They often talked about the fact that WikiLeaks wasn’t

making the difference it wanted to make. Leaks were published
on the site, but didn’t have the impact they wanted. Like a hacker,
he considered the organization a system to be improved and the
option he chose was to give WikiLeaks a human face.
The responses to the organization were very favorable at
the time. They received a warm, even triumphant welcome
at conferences. In 2008, The Economist awarded WikiLeaks
an ‘Index on Censorship Award,’ and in 2009 it received the
Amnesty International ‘Media Award.’ All this attention helped
Julian fine-tune his approach. He was on the right track. His pride
and pleasure were real, but as always, his mind was inclined to
take over his emotions and whisper to him, ‘Do more, go further,
do better.’
And finally, for the first time, beyond the IT world, a short
film would affect public opinion.

Rop remembers that morning. “Hey Julian, we’re off to the lion’s
den,” he said, while the taxi driving them to the National Press
Club was going down Massachusetts Avenue. The taxi drove
along rows of office buildings. “No feline stares then,” Julian
answered, smiling. The rest of the trip was quiet. A few minutes
later, Julian, who was only announced as one of the spokespersons
of an ‘information leaks’ movement, stood up in front of the room
of the National Press Club. He was ready to present Collateral
Murder to some forty-odd journalists. Stylish as usual, he was
wearing a brown blazer with a black shirt and a red tie.29
He showed the film, stopping here and there to give some
details. In doing so he exposed his implication, his knowledge
of the subject, and prepared and guided the emotions of the
journalistic audience. Once the projection was over, he showed

29 « No secrets, Julian Assange’s mission for a total transparency » by Raffi

Khatchadourian on www.newyorker.com.
 WikiLeaks 193

the film of the Hellfire attack that was not included in Collateral
Murder. A woman in the audience screamed when the first missile
blew up a building. Julian read the e-mail Kristinn had sent from
Iraq. You could feel the emotion in the auditorium.
Julian let a few seconds of silence go by. He cleared his throat
and spoke solemnly. In fact, he wished he’d disappeared and let
the message speak for itself: “This leak sends a message that the
armed forces doesn’t like.”30
He reiterated that a site was created especially for this film,
and that it could also be viewed on YouTube and many other
sites.
A few minutes after the press conference was over, Julian was
invited to Al Jazeera’s ‘headquarters’ in Washington where he
spent half the day giving interviews. This Qatar-based television
station, nicknamed the ‘Arabic CNN,’ became a popular world
media in a very short time. In the evening, the MSNBC news
channel did a long feature on the film. The press relayed the
information throughout the world, and on YouTube more than
7,000,000 people viewed the Collateral Murder film.31

His message, the work already accomplished by the organization,

and his particular style made Julian one of the major media
personalities of 2010. Forbes called him one of the most powerful
people on the planet, while Time magazine elected him Person
of the Year. The US government, very irritated by the film and
everything that ensued, made him Public Enemy No. 1: A cyber
terrorist!
For Rop, all the days spent around Collateral Murder are like
a storm that transformed into a cyclone. First the raw material,
the images, editing, and managing the team in a small Icelandic

30 « No secrets, Julian Assange’s mission for a total transparency » by Raffi

Khatchadourian on www.newyorker.com.
31 « No secrets, Julian Assange’s mission for a total transparency » by Raffi
Khatchadourian on www.newyorker.com.
194 Julian Assange

house. It then took courage to finish the job, face powerful

authorities, which all attracted lightning. Even as a close observer,
these were trying times for Rop. He had seen the crossing of the
threshold into the other world, but didn’t want to press on, and
went back to the reality of voting system. He remained available
for WikiLeaks if they needed him, but nobody called. In fact,
he was afraid of the future he saw before him. Courage wasn’t
always contagious! He didn’t want to permanently live out of a
backpack, traveling the world. Anyways, Julian’s style and soft
voice had more of a media impact. They were both in the same
fight, but Julian was more magnetic. He was made to be seen and
be part of the world’s great men. Julian had what it took to face
the gods of the world he had angered.

Prophet of journalism and truth, Julian was unmasked. Everything

had been there since the beginning in his blog, IQ Isaac Quest,
the one who was ready to be sacrificed for a greater cause. At the
end of 2010, that was actually the case.
For a long time now, the freedom of the Internet has worried
him. Governments have waited for a man to sacrifice in order
to regulate this Internet force that expresses individuality. Julian
came, and the fight began. The underworld has broken loose. The
Anonymous group, black belts of the IT world, carry out actions
in favor of WikiLeaks to safeguard the sharing of knowledge.
 18

A Friend Who Wishes You Well

In August 2010, the U.S. and Australian governments put

pressure on Moneybookers, an online fund transfer service similar
to PayPal, to block WikiLeaks as a client. Both governments
announced that they had placed the online service on a Watch
List to force it to comply, taking measures against the ‘leaking’
site.
In the past, WikiLeaks had often been faced with considerable
financial difficulties. In December 2009, victim of its own success,
the site saw its expenses go through the roof, while its income
was stagnating. The management decided to close the site down
temporarily, obliging militants to put more effort into collecting
donations. At the end of May 2010, WikiLeaks collected more
than EUR 570,000 (about USD 777,000) and the site opened
again.
The site operated entirely on funds from private donors and
quite often by accumulating small amounts from ordinary people.
Donations were made through secure sites like Moneybookers,
PayPal, Visa and MasterCard.

The barrage of blocked money transfers to WikiLeaks immediately

threatened the site’s survival. When Julian went to Switzerland
for the conference presentation at the UN in November 2010,
196 Julian Assange

he opened a Swiss PostFinance bank account. Back then he was

thinking of asking for political asylum in said country.
Mid-November 2010, Julian left Switzerland for Great Britain
to prepare the launch of the diplomatic cables and stayed there
for several months.
At the beginning of December, WikiLeaks explained that
Julian’s defense fund, created to pay for the lawyers handling the
Swedish charges against him as well as his personal assets, were
frozen by the Swiss PostFinance. PostFinance took said measure
when the bank discovered that Julian had given the address of his
lawyers living in Geneva because he didn’t have his own address
in Switzerland.
The online payment sites claimed that WikiLeaks violated
their terms and conditions by broadcasting stolen documents,
which could potentially put other people’s lives in danger.
Because of these measures, the existence of the site was very
quickly called into question.

As of December 7 2010, the Anonymous movement reacted by

launching a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the
PayPal and MasterCard websites. The sites were unavailable for
a few hours, although the underlying infrastructure for online
payments wasn’t affected.
Aside from physical demonstrations, Anonymous’ main
weapon was the DDoS: a coordinated attack aimed at crashing or
rendering a computer unavailable by bombarding it with useless
traffic. It was quite easy to download open-source software
like LOIC, which helped target a server and flood it. The sites
coordinated were passed on through Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
Anyone could join an IRC-based chat room, friend or foe.
The strength of the DDoS attack was in the amount of
computers sending disruptive connection demands to the target
 WikiLeaks 197

site. If numerous computers at once were causing this ‘distributed’

attack on a server, a subnet or other, it would crash. On the other
hand, this attack was hard to counter or avoid, given the number
of computers used, and so it would inevitably spread throughout
the world.

Since October  2010, and more specifically after Julian’s arrest

in December, Anonymous publicly declared its solidarity with
the WikiLeaks network to defend the freedom of information
and the spreading of leaks, as well as the existence and right
of the organization to finance itself. Anonymous then declared
‘Operation Payback’ open: several DDoS attacks were coordinated
on the different sites that had originally impeded WikiLeaks and
Julian.
Although Anonymous didn’t have any specific links to the
organization, their fight had a few similar points: Anonymous
was fighting for freedom of the Internet and the free information
found on it.
Anonymous  was playing with fire, as their actions were
considered illegal in some countries. Governments could quite
easily prove that they were heading toward becoming a danger to
national security.
That was why WikiLeaks had distanced itself from the
Anonymous movement, without actually approving or
condemning their actions. However, Anonymous had clearly
declared itself in favor of the WikiLeaks organization and of its
leader, Julian Assange.
 19

A Holographic Committee

Julian spent a lot of time searching for advisory board

members. For WikiLeaks to be recognized as a respectable and
structured global organization, they needed a board to advise the
management. It was even more of an issue when an organization
was unknown, its management anonymous and its mission
potentially subject to criticism and attacks. Julian was looking
for people to provide support and possibly advise, all the while
remaining within the strict perimeter of an advisory board without
being an authority on any action or content.
An ideal advisory board should combine expertise, notoriety,
experience, multiculturalism and respectability. Julian sent out
a lot of invitations and received some answers, although not all
positive ones. He had to have a list of names to launch the site.
Here are the names that were featured:

Julian Assange:
Most information on the WikiLeaks site is difficult to
verify or sometimes exaggerated like “he’s the most famous
‘ethical’ Australian hacker,” a quote from Underground, a
book he co-authored.

Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang:

 WikiLeaks 199

Tibetan dissident, originally exiled with the Dalai Lama

in 1960, has spent thirty-five years working for the Tibetan
government in exile.
Having fled Tibet at age five, he only went back
forty-five years later in 2005 to visit his family and other
dissidents. He’s the president of the Tibetan Association of
Washington. Tashi barely remembers receiving an e-mail
from WikiLeaks. He was never contacted for any advice
whatsoever.

Wang Youcai:
Born June 29, 1966, he’s an active dissident of the
Chinese democracy movement and was one of the student
leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He
was a graduate student of physics from Peking University
when he was arrested in 1989 and sentenced in 1991 for
“conspiring to overthrow the Chinese government.”
In 1998, he helped found the Chinese Democracy
Party, which was banned by the Chinese government who
sentenced him at the end of the same year to eleven years
in prison for subversion. He was exiled in 2004 under
international pressure, especially from the United States
where he now lives.

Xiao Qiang:
He’s the founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital
Times, a bilingual news website on China. He’s a professor
at the School of Journalism and School of Information,
University of California at Berkeley where he teaches
digital activism and blogging.
He also became a human rights activist following the
massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
200 Julian Assange

The China Digital Times is supported by NED (National

Endowment for Democracy), which is funded by the US
State Department.
He’s a commentator on Radio Free Asia, supported
by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which
describes itself as an organization that monitors American
media abroad to ensure the credibility of the United States.
Eight of the nine members of this board are appointed by
the President and confirmed by the US Senate. The ninth
member is the Secretary of State.

Wang Dan:
He’s one of the leaders of the Chinese democracy
movement after having been one of the most visible
students in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Wang
holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.
From August 2009 to February 2010 Wang taught
history at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He
also actively promotes democracy and freedom for China.
He travels the world to get support from overseas Chinese
communities as well as from the public at large.
He’s also part of the editorial board of Beijing Spring, a
magazine founded by the NED.

CJ Hinke:
In the 1970s, he helped organize the pacifist movement
opposed to the Vietnam War in the United States. He
was arrested more than thirty-five times during civil
disobedience demonstrations. He deserted and left for
Canada in 1976.
Today, he’s a translator, editor and bibliographer of
children’s books in Latin and Thai, and has been living
 WikiLeaks 201

in Thailand since 1989. In 2006, he founded the Freedom

Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) movement to
campaign against pervasive censorship in Thai society.
FACT is supported by American organizations and is
part of Privacy International, supported by the Fund for
Constitutional Government of Washington, whose member
includes Steven Aftergood, also invited to join WikiLeaks’
advisory board.

Chico Whitaker:
Born in Brazil in 1931, he’s an architect and social
activist in the Workers’ Party in Brazil. He’s one of the
organizers of World Social Forum in Porto Alegre and
executive secretary of the Brazilian Committee of Justice
and Peace, a body linked to the National Conference of
Bishops of Brazil. He has also been awarded the Right
Livelihood Award, often referred to as the Alternative
Nobel Prize.
He’s also a member of the World Future Council
and member of the sponsoring committee of the Russell
Tribunal on Palestine, founded in March 2009 to mobilize
public opinion so that Member States of the United Nations
may take necessary measures to arrive at a just and long-
lasting settlement for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ben Laurie:
He’s the Security Director at The Bunker Secure Hosting
and often a member or founder of different organizations
promoting open source.
Laurie laughs when telling Mother Jones magazine that,
“WikiLeaks allegedly has an advisory board, and allegedly
I’m a member of it.”
202 Julian Assange

He admitted having seen Julian a few times when he was

looking for advice on securing the sending of confidential
documents. “He’s a weird guy,” Laurie said. “He seems to
be quite nomadic, and I don’t know how he lives like that,
to be honest. He turns up with a rucksack, and I suspect
that’s all he’s got.”

Phillip Adams:
Australian writer, film producer, television host and
radio host of Late Night Live on ABC for 20 years. He’s
written more than thirty books and films for which he has
won many awards. He was named Australian Humanist
of the Year in 1987. He’s a member of many advisory
boards, including Centre of the Mind at the University of
Sydney and the Australia National University, created by
Allan Snyder, a professor of neurobiology. His goal is to
scientifically study the creativity and making of champions.
He’s also part of Australia’s Commission for the Future,
which makes social and political predictions.
He’s a politically and socially committed artist, and
a communications expert. He’s also held key posts in
the Australian governmental media administration. He’s
written for newspapers such as The Times, Financial Times
and The New York Times. He’s the representative of the
International Committee of Index on Censorship, from
which WikiLeaks received in 2008 the Economist Index on
Censorship Freedom of Expression ward.
The most surprising is that according to an article in The
Australian, Adams never met Julian and has never been to a
meeting of the WikiLeaks advisory board.
 WikiLeaks 203

The list on the site was the only one that boasts names of
real people. It’s obvious that when WikiLeaks started making
headlines, some journalists were curious or simply being
professional and so contacted these people. The responses from
the Mother Jones journalist were quite surprising. Since January
2011, the list disappeared and there has been no more talk of
an advisory board. Are we to assume that these people are no
longer (if they ever were) tied to WikiLeaks? Why announce a
list of people, if they’re not clearly committed and dedicated to
their role? Launching an endeavor like WikiLeaks has never been
done before. It was in fact experimental, and Julian Assange and
his young team had been gaining their experience on a daily basis.

In any case, WikiLeaks had to find covers other than these

figureheads. If they needed to close ranks in times of crisis, Julian
wouldn’t be able to do everything on his own. He could count
on his Icelandic ‘friends’ and a few others with whom he shared
the same view of the world and its realities that seem perfectly
utopian to novices. Jacob Appelbaum, who nobody knew until
now, appeared on center stage when the US government wanted
to examine his Twitter account as well as the accounts of Birgitta
Jónsdóttir and Rop Gonggrijp in January 2011. Appelbaum was
then said to be close to Julian Assange.
AFP / Photographer: AFP/Stringer

Icelandic Parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an advocate for the freedom

of information, gives an interview close to the Icelandic Parliament in
Reykjavik on August 3, 2010.
Getty Images News / Photographer: Oli Scarff

Christine Assange, mother of the WikiLeaks’ founder, arrives at the Royal

Courts of Justice in London. December 16, 2010.
Getty Images News / Photographer: Dan Kitwood

Julian Assange exits the High Court of London on December 16, 2010.
The High Court of London later releases him on bail.
 AFP / Photographer: Karen Bleier

Daniel Ellsberg, ex-military analyst famous for the Pentagon Papers,

photographed during an anti-war demonstration in front of the White
House. December 16, 2010.
 http://hebdo.ch

Christine Assange during the Bikini March demonstration in

Melbourne, Australia organized in response to a sexist discourse
by an Islamic leader. 2006.
Getty Images News / Photographer: Oli Scarff

Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, leaving the Belmarsh

Magistrates’ Court in London, shows his support for Julian Assange.
January 11, 2010.
Getty Images News é Photographer: Dan Kitwood

Julian Assange arrives at the Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court in London,

accompanied by his lawyer Jennifer Robinson and his spokesperson
Kristinn Hrafnsson. February 11, 2011.
 Julian Assange leaves the London court with one of his lawyers, Geoffrey
Robertson. February 11, 2011.

Collection: AFP / Photographer: Carl Court

Getty Images News / Photographer: Peter Macdiarmid

Mark Stephens, one of Julian Assange’s lawyers, talks to

journalists in front of the Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court in London.
February 24, 2011.
AFP / Photographer: Ben Stansall

Julian Assange and his lawyer Jennifer Robinson arrive at the

Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court in London. February 24, 2011.
Getty Images News / Photographer: Peter Macdiarmid

Police break up pro-Assange demonstrators in front of the Belmarsh

Magistrates’ Court in London. February 24, 2011.
Footage from the controversial WikiLeaks’ video, Collateral Murder.
http://photos.hackinthebox.org

Julian Assange, in good company, at the Hack In The Box (HITB)

conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 2009.
AFP / Photographer: Sven Nackstrand

Rickard Falkvinge, head of Sweden’s political Pirate Party.

Getty Images News / Photographer: Sean Gallup

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, former WikiLeaks/Assange collaborator, at

the Chaos Computer Club conference in Berlin. December 29, 2010.
 20

The Double32

Jacob Appelbaum was a passionate man. He was not the nerd

you’d picture in his basement, glued to his computer. He was a
hacker, photographer, activist and security specialist for NGOs.
He liked motorcycles, documentaries, traveling, robotics, scuba
diving, piloting and writing. He was interested in the world and
wanted to change it however he could.
Almost thirty years of age, he still has the air of a street kid:
anarchist, raised by an addict father, left by a schizophrenic
mother and molested by his entire family at a very young age.
Appelbaum dropped out of school, taught himself the finer
points of code and developed a healthy dose of paranoia along
the way. As a programmer and hacker he felt that the world as not
a lost place. The Internet was his reason to live.
He lived on very little. His San Francisco apartment had very
little furniture: a couch, a chair and a table. His travel pictures
covered the walls of his office and in a corner there were small
sandwich bags full of currency from the countries he had visited.
He was a global citizen.
Appelbaum was like Julian’s double. “I want to be left alone as
much as possible. I don’t want a data trail to tell a story that isn’t

32 http://www.wikileaksdocument.com/most-dangerous-man-jacob-appelbaumafter-
julian-assange-in-wikileaks-org-website.html.
222 Julian Assange

true.” He added: “You won’t find anything about my childhood

online.”

Appelbaum explained that they had transferred their most intimate

information like bank accounts, e-mails, photographs, phone
conversations, medical records to digital networks, trusting that
it was all locked away in some secret crypt. He knew that this
information wasn’t really protected, because he could find it.
An extremely talented hacker, he could potentially access
almost every computer network in the world. He had decided to
dedicate his life to protecting people’s private lives.
Appelbaum had traveled around the world to teach political
dissidents, human rights activists and other ‘ghosts’ how to use
the Tor program and become anonymous on the Internet to those
who would like to stop them from carrying out their actions.
Jacob considered himself an advocate of freedom of
expression: “The only way we’ll make progress in the human
race is if we have dialogue,” he said. “Everyone should honor the
United Nations human rights charter that says access to freedom
of speech is a universal right. Anonymous communication is a
good way for this to happen. Tor is just an implementation that
helps spread that idea.”
By distributing Tor around the world, Appelbaum didn’t
distinguish between good guys and bad guys: “I don’t know
the difference between one theocracy or another in Iran. What’s
important to me is that people have communication free from
surveillance. Tor shouldn’t be thought of as subversive. It should
be thought of as a necessity. Everyone everywhere should be able
to speak and read and form his or her own beliefs without being
monitored. It should get to a point where Tor is not a threat but is
relied upon by all levels of society. When that happens, we win.”
 WikiLeaks 223

Just like Julian, Jacob was a man who did exactly what he
said. Beyond nice words, he worked hard to make a difference in
the world. He chose to remain anonymous and knew to whom and
how to provide information about himself. If during his travels his
computer stayed out of his sight for too long, he would destroy it
and throw it away. Someone could have bugged it, so he couldn’t
be too careful. His measures were radical, but anonymity was
very difficult to keep when you were in this deep.

In July  2010, shortly before WikiLeaks released the classified

Afghanistan war documents, Julian was scheduled to give the
keynote speech at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in a major
New York hotel. Federal agents were spotted in the audience,
presumably waiting for Julian to appear. The lights of the
auditorium went out so that the speaker could come on stage. A
man entered, wearing a black hoodie. The drama was deliberate;
the lights were turned on just as the man uncovered his face. To
everyone’s surprise, it wasn’t Julian: it was Jacob Appelbaum.
“Hello to all my friends and fans in domestic and international
surveillance. I am here today because I believe we can make a
better world. Julian, unfortunately, can’t make it, because we
don’t live in that better world right now, because we haven’t
yet made it. I wanted to make a little declaration for the federal
agents that are standing in the back of the room and the ones that
are standing in the front of the room, and to be very clear about
this: I have, on me, in my pocket, some money, the Bill of Rights
and a driver’s license, and that’s it. I have no computer system, I
have no telephone, I have no keys, no access to anything. There’s
absolutely no reason that you should arrest me or bother me. And
just in case you were wondering, I’m an American, born and
raised, who’s unhappy. I’m unhappy with how things are going.”
224 Julian Assange

He paused, interrupted by thundering applause. “To quote from

Tron33, I fight for the user.”
He went on to talk about WikiLeaks, their need for volunteers
and the interest in the cause. When the lights went out, he put his
hoodie back on and left the auditorium, escorted by volunteers.
The group headed to the hotel lobby. The hooded man later
uncovered himself. It was not Jacob Appelbaum, but another
young man. The real Appelbaum had slipped away backstage and
left the hotel through a security door. He was already on his way
to the airport to catch a plane to Berlin!

Less than two weeks later, Appelbaum was arrested and detained
for several hours by the authorities at Newark airport, New Jersey.
In the meantime, newspapers were reporting that the documents
on the war in Afghanistan ‘leaked’ by WikiLeaks helped identify
dozens of Afghan informants and potential defectors who were
cooperating with US troops. The response of American politicians
came swiftly.
Appelbaum was questioned for a few hours on his relationship
with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, and on his thoughts about
Iraq and Afghanistan. They confiscated his computer and three of
his cell phones. Even though they threatened him with not being
able to enter his own country, the investigation led nowhere and
he was released.
Two days later, while he was expected to speak at a hackers
conference in Las Vegas, Appelbaum was approached by two
FBI agents: “We’d like to chat for a few minutes,” one of them
said. “We thought you might not want to. But sometimes it’s nice
to have a conversation to flesh things out.”
On January 10, 2011, in Seattle, coming back from Iceland,
he was arrested and, despite asking for his lawyer, he was then

33 Tron, American science fiction movie, directed by Steven Lisberger, en 1982. The
film’s hero is a hacker.
 WikiLeaks 225

searched without his consent. Next, he was interrogated on the

nature of his trip to Iceland. The authorities were obviously
disappointed with not having found a computer or cell phone.
Appelbaum informed his friends as quickly as possible about this
situation using Twitter.

According to the WikiLeaks site, Jacob Appelbaum had then

become the most dangerous man after Julian Assange. Although
he was the only known WikiLeaks activist, he was surely not
working alone on this sizable site. Targets were being unmasked
one after the other. How many more have succeeded in hiding
in order to continue their action thanks to such an intricate and
perfect knowledge of the Internet?
 21

Cryptome

Since 1996, cryptome.org had been broadcasting documents

prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on
freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies,
national security, intelligence, and secret governance – open,
secret and classified documents – but not limited to those34.
This American based site was structured with distant mirror
sites in order to deal with attacks and guarantee online availability.
The archive was accessible by donation as a DVD. The site was
free and financed by funds and donations, and was considered the
Godfather of whistleblower sites.
The site’s founder, John Young was respected by anyone
who deals with secrecy and confidentiality. He managed the site
himself, with the help of his wife, Deborah Natsios.
It was only logical that Julian Assange would contact Young
in 2006 to register the wikileaks.org domain name. WikiLeaks
needed to personify the holder of the name with a man known for
his integrity in the Internet world.

Assange and Young didn’t know each other personally, but they
were both members of the Cypherpunks mailing list. This high
place of sharing between all the fans and activists of cryptography

34 From website www.cryptome.org

 WikiLeaks 227

in the 1990s was created by John Gilmore, founder of the

Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that helped the
legal defense of court cases related to the digital world and rights
issues.
This forum helped make spectacular advances in encryption
technology and the liberalization of open-source software
for personal protection. It was the first time in the history of
the electronic age that private citizens had access to powerful
encryption software allowing them to communicate amongst
themselves without government agencies being able to listen in
on them. This was why in this list, suggested by John Young back
in 1994, he offered some personal Internet space so that some
members could publish confidential documents, sowing the seeds
for his site Cryptome.
Anonymity and using pseudonyms were major themes of the
mailing list and so John Young (JYA) happily accepted to support
this new adventure with Proff, aka Julian Assange. He saw in it an
opportunity to consolidate his commitment with a new dynamic
and innovative partner. The intention of WikiLeaks came very
close to that of Cryptome.

There were so many secrets to reveal, so many realities to clear

up. Young liked to remind people: “There are no secrets that
shouldn’t be published.” Young couldn’t stand the engineering of
intelligence agencies and threw spotlights on them as quickly as
he possibly could.
When Young published the contacts of 116 MI6 agents (British
secret services) in 1999 and 400 Japanese secret services agents
in 2000, the FBI paid him a visit every time. After a cordial chat,
he’d hurry up and publish the names and contacts of the agents
that left his house.
228 Julian Assange

John Young had a clear idea of confidentiality on the Internet:

it was non-existent. And publishing secret documents didn’t
endanger States, because their enemies had already had access to
these documents. It was merely a public service announcement.
He also refuted the complaints about the security of agents
when he stated their names. He had discussed this at length with
former agents (his stepfather worked for the CIA): “They lie so
much and run so many false operations and plant so many false
agents. They expose their own agents so much – there’s nothing
you can do that they haven’t already done. In fact, they hope you
will do it. To muddy the waters.”

Actually, he thought that the promises made by WikiLeaks about

protecting the identity of their sources were a bit utopian and
totally fraudulent: “They do have a lot of smoke blowing on
their site. Page after page after page about how they’re going to
protect you. And I say uh-oh. That’s over-promising. The very
over-promising is an indication that it doesn’t work. And we
know that from watching [...] how governments operate. When
they over-promise, you know they’re hiding something. People
who are really trustworthy do not go around broadcasting how
trustworthy they are.”

Today Cryptome stands across from WikiLeaks like an artist

faced with the industrialization of a concept. The site is very
rudimentary, listing leaks one under the other as hyperlinked
texts, classified by publication date. They also publish classified
information, but claim not to depend exclusively on leaks. The
biggest part of the Cryptome collection consists of documents
accessible elsewhere, open-source information and public
domain documents. John Young himself takes care of reposting
 WikiLeaks 229

the information he finds or receives from his network of friends

and sympathizers.
Every morning John Young reads the Federal Register35 and
the files on information requests to the FOIA agency (Freedom
of Information Act, a federal law of 1966 that allows the public’s
right to obtain information from federal agencies). Steven
Aftergood, who visits the site every day, said of him: “John
Young sees many things that others do not see, and posts things
others do not, or would not, post.”

For John Young, always active as a famous architect in New

York, it was a pastime: “It’s not a lot of work, it’s something I do
periodically. As long as there’s no personal intent behind it, my
business can’t fail. It just takes its course. The pastimes continue
on and on until one day they consume themselves.”
He was an amateur in the noblest sense of the term, at the
service of his cause and passion: “I’ve never had any desire to
overturn governments [...] or jack up journalism.”

It was because of this crucial difference that John Young

didn’t join Julian Assange. Although he was a member of the
original mailing list of WikiLeaks prior to launching the site in
January 2007, John Young responded brutally (he’s known for
being totally unpredictable) to a message from Julian Assange
who wanted to raise a budget of five million US dollars to launch
WikiLeaks into cyberspace. He estimated that hosting his site
didn’t cost him more than a hundred dollars a month and just
couldn’t agree with this highly suspicious ambition. He left the
organization on January 7, 2007 and deleted his JYA account
from the members list.

35 The Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed
rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive
orders and other presidential documents.
230 Julian Assange

However, John Young took care of creating another more

anonymous account and continued to follow the e-mail
circulating within the project. He regularly published messages
about financial and ethical questions on actions and even on the
divisions discussed among members. He made everyone who
opposed WikiLeaks very happy.
In any case, his position was more complex. He often repeated
that nobody should trust him and that you couldn’t trust anybody,
and even said, “I’m a member of WikiLeaks… I am critic of
WikiLeaks. My current shtick is to pretend that I am an opponent
of WikiLeaks. It’s called friendly opposition. Praising each other
is so insipid. Your parents praise you. Your friends never do. They
know it’s a con job, so praise is manipulation. Criticism is more
candid.” He added with some irony: “Assange hasn’t returned
the favor.”

According to John Young, the problem was what Julian had done
with WikiLeaks: “I have separated WikiLeaks from Julian. He
has now taken off on his own path... He’s on the verge of a career
of being Julian Assange. He’s used WikiLeaks to leverage that.
So now WikiLeaks is breaking away from him and other wikis
are being set up by other people disaffected by his monomania.”
In fact, he was always a bit suspicious of this ‘humorless’
character, poking fun at pretentious people. He recognized his
acting talent. He wasn’t at all surprised to see WikiLeaks picked
up by mainstream media: “The mainstream media have used
flattery, attention and bribery, all the usual ways that you bring
people in the fold because it’s irresistible if you have a narcissistic
streak.”

John Young felt that WikiLeaks had lost some of its original
simplicity and that the problem was on the inside. Members
 WikiLeaks 231

didn’t know how to manage Julian’s ambitions and their naive

amateurism was confronted with a tough business world.
As for their continuous need for money, Young said: “You
should never do it for money. Only because that contaminates the
credibility and it turns it into a business opportunity where there’s
great treachery and lying going on. And it will contaminate
WikiLeaks. They’re acting like a cult. They’re acting like a
religion. They’re acting like a government. They’re acting like a
bunch of spies. They’re hiding their identity. They don’t account
for the money. They promise all sorts of good things. They seldom
let you know what they’re really up to. They have rituals and all
sorts of wonderful stuff. So I admire them for their showmanship
and their entertainment value. But I certainly would not trust
them with information if it had any value, or if it put me at risk or
anyone that I cared about.”
If John Young continued to broadcast all the information he
received, found or discovered about WikiLeaks, it was always
with the goal of sharing knowledge and letting the public form its
own opinion. He didn’t hesitate to publish very critical e-mails
about Assange that he received from a strange WikiLeaks insider
without even checking their identity.
Young also didn’t hesitate to heavily criticize the attacks
directed at Julian or WikiLeaks by press giants or politicians.
Even though John Young could be seen as Julian’s rival, he
was still a great defender of the truth and would never let anyone
attack knights of transparency.
 22

DDoS: Daniel Domscheit-Berg Or

Schmitt

December 29, 2007: 24C3, Twenty-Fourth Chaos

Communication Congress

This Berlin congress, organized by the Chaos Computer

Club (CCC), has become Europe’s main hacker and hacktivist
gathering. The CCC was founded on September 12, 1981 in the
offices of independent newspaper Die Tageszeitung (aka Taz),
and one of its founders was Herwart Holland-Moritz, known to
people as Wau Holland, famous German hacker of the 1980s.
The Wau Holland Foundation is a tribute to this national hero of
hacktivism who died in 2001 at the age of forty-nine. It supports
several projects that the CCC holds dear: the social aspect of
technical evolution, and the history of technology and freedom
of information. In October 2009, CCC became WikiLeaks’s main
lender.
The Chaos Computer Congress (C3) has been growing
constantly since its launch. In a relaxed atmosphere, it welcomes
expert speakers in front of an impassioned audience among which
WikiLeaks members are regulars.

In 2006 at the 23C3, Jacob Appelbaum presented his method to

circumvent FileVault, Apple’s encrypted disk storage system.
 WikiLeaks 233

His co-speaker was Ralf-Philip Weinmann, former colleague of

Julian Assange on Rubberhose, freeware they created together in
1997.
In 2007 at the 24C3, Rop Gonggrijp gave a presentation on
electronic voting systems in the Netherlands. Another passionate
presentation was given by Annie Machon, former MI5 agent
(British FBI). She told her story of deceptions and life as a recluse
whistleblower in France. She was also invited by Julian Assange
in 2008 to the Hacking At Random event in the Netherlands.
The twenty-fourth congress featured four days of conferences.
The themes discussed ranged from electronic crime to freeware
and from cryptography to anonymity, with the Tor program being
featured four times.
Aside from these conferences, workshops were organized
on various emerging themes. On December 23, at 9:30 p.m. a
certain ‘Julian Assange,’ member of the advisory board of an
organization called WikiLeaks presented “Wikileaks – a place for
journalists, truth tellers and everybody else.”
German IT professional Daniel Berg attended the presentation.
He was a network engineer for the international company EDS,
which deals in electronic data. On the social professional network
LinkedIn his profile features the keywords: “realityanalyzer,
dreamshaper, freedomdefender, interestdetester, whalesaver,
bookeater, overflower, underminer, wardriver, packetizer, hacker,
assoffworker, motivator, creator.”
Julian Assange presented WikiLeaks, its mission, technical
challenges and the already realistic visibility of the project thanks
to articles published in The Guardian, The New York Times,
Washington Post, Die Welt and Der Spiegel. He finished his
presentation by asking the audience to join the movement.
After Julian and Daniel Berg met, Berg decided to join.
234 Julian Assange

Daniel was a technician, IT graduate from the University of

Cooperative Education of Mannheim, a university that gave in-
company training based on immersion practice. Daniel had been
working at EDS since 2002. He liked running, mountain biking,
David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and was a workaholic. He
once endured a 428-hour work marathon in four weeks to save a
project in danger in Moscow.
WikiLeaks was in full upswing, and so such a resource
was more than welcome. Daniel worked as an analyst for the
organization in his spare time.
His commitment was impassioned and his extraordinary
ability to work quickly brought him close to Julian Assange. The
Number One of the organization asked him to come along to the
25C3 to present a conference called ‘WikiLeaks vs. the World.’
Julian Assange, under his real name, presented himself as an
Investigative Editor of the organization, while Daniel Domscheit-
Berg was referred to as ‘Berger.’

By December 30 2008, WikiLeaks had already experienced a lot

of painful events linked to the increasing success of their actions.
At the beginning of 2008, they suffered through being sued
by the Julius Baer Group following the publication of a list of
1,600 fortunate clients who benefited from the bank’s expertise
in matters of fiscal evasion. They attracted the ire of Sarah Palin,
running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain,
following the publication of her personal Yahoo e-mails during
the presidential election campaign. They felt the aftershock of the
earthquake they caused in Great Britain after the publication of
a list of 10,000 members of the far-right British National Party,
which included policemen, clergy members and teachers.
Assange and Berger showed up quite tired in Berlin at 25C3
to relate these facts. The duo worked in harmony, each with their
 WikiLeaks 235

assigned tasks. Julian explained matters, the impact and lessons

to be learned, while Daniel presented some foundations and
technical needs. The audience was sold. Julian got a standing
ovation when he solemnly declared, making sure to let silence
wrap every word, “We have never had a source exposed. We have
never had a source prosecuted.”

Daniel Berg’s role started to crystallize. He quit his job and took
on the role of Daniel Schmitt, movement spokesperson. At the
end of December 2008, his name appeared in articles regarding
threats made to the site, following the publication of secret
documents of the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst, German secret
services). As of 2009, within a bit more than a year, Daniel would
give about one hundred interviews throughout the world.
Daniel was the public face of WikiLeaks, while Julian
continued to travel the world from conference to conference. He
talked about having published the 500,000 text messages from
mobile phones and pagers on September 11, 2001 during the
collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He took
the floor during the online release of 6,780 reports of the CRS
(Congressional Research Service), analytical reports on different
subjects of interest to the US Congress. It was with Julian that
he covered the Icelandic affair linked to the bankruptcy of the
Kaupthing bank.

Together they returned to the 26C3 on December 30, 2009, the

twenty-sixth Chaos Communication Congress. Their conference
first presented the WikiLeaks project in its original concept, in
its heyday. It specifically showed a dynamic duo of speakers and
brothers in arms.
In front of a few hundred people, the main stage of the
Berliner Congress Center had a lectern on the right-hand side of
236 Julian Assange

a big screen. It was 5:15 p.m., Daniel Schmitt was at the lectern

looking a bit glum and wearing black pants and a black shirt. On
stage there was Julian Assange standing casually in a white shirt
with silver hair, his hands in the pockets of his brown pants.
The presentation was entitled “WikiLeaks Release 1.0,”
referring to a numbering system used in programming to confirm
that the software was matured, was without bugs and was ready
to be used before a new updated version was released with
additional functionalities.
The conference started with a brief summary of WikiLeaks’
foundations and then Daniel Schmitt announced: “The National
[English-language newspaper of the United Arab Emirates]
wrote that we have probably produced more scoops in our short
life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years.” The
room applauded. And Daniel added: “Thanks, we’re just getting
warm.” While Daniel spoke, Julian contemplated this already
convinced audience and smiled.
Daniel wasn’t comfortable delivering speeches in front of large
audiences, as press relations were more his thing. Conferences
really intimidated him. He experienced shortness of breath and
his sweaty palms made him drop his notes when handing over
the floor to his partner. Julian, on the other hand, had world-class
experience: he didn’t have notes and didn’t look at the screen, and
eased the mood, or rather his co-speaker, with lines like: “When
we were putting this together earlier today...”
Julian Assange briefly introduced the events of 2009 by
joking that people could look it up on Wikipedia. Daniel then
very seriously summarized the description of the leaks published
that year: the murdering of Afghan civilians in Kunduz led by
the German armed forces supposedly engaged in a peace keeping
mission. Very focused, he talked about the reports of the European
 WikiLeaks 237

Institute for Security Studies (European think tank of security

experts).
Imagine watching a very balanced duo, like yin and yang,
the black solid on his positions, pragmatic and direct, with the
white lyrical in his explications, strolling on stage, joking here
and theorizing there.
Protected behind his lectern, his hands held close to his
laptop, people listened to him carefully. He commented on his
notes that envision a future police unit of Europe surrounded by a
virtual wall to block immigration. He said, “Do we give our silent
consent? Is that the world we want to live in the future?”
The two men presented the improvements they wanted to
make to the system: an opening to citizens and an access tunnel
to ‘good’ journalists to create more legibility from this mountain
of information they’d been publishing, and increase its impact.
Then they got into a long presentation of a project initiated
by Julian: a haven for information, based on the idea of offshore
fiscal paradises. They started off with the Icelandic affair. Julian
told of the misadventure of the public television station RUV. The
station wasn’t able to broadcast its report on the financial scandal
exposed by WikiLeaks, as it had received a legal injunction a
few minutes before the broadcast. Julian then said that instead
it would broadcast WikiLeaks’ homepage for several minutes,
which allowed them to point to the story they wanted to break.
The audience applauded enthusiastically. The reaction of the
two representatives in front of this ovation was typical of them:
Daniel hid behind the screen of his computer as to contain his
excitement while Julian, head held high, soaked up this beneficial
energy.
Julian explained his project, alone, arms crossed, like a
preacher in front of his flock. He knew what he was talking about.
It was his idea and he didn’t need anybody. At one point he tried
238 Julian Assange

to include Daniel who mumbled while putting back the bottle of

water he was drinking from. Julian took over. It was only after
ten minutes of monologue that Daniel concluded on a humoristic
note: “To convince those people in Iceland that did not understand
it yet – they have conservative parties too – that this is the way to
go.” There was laughter in the room.
The conference ended with a tribute given by Julian to
all the sources and their courage. He added, causing a slight
uncomfortable silence in the room that he wanted to thank
traditional media, as “There are some very, very good people.”
As usual, Daniel closed the show with a “Thanks for
your patience.” After a standing ovation that lasted minutes,
the questions were punctuated by a testimony from Jérémie
Zimmermann, spokesperson from La Quadrature du Net, a
French advocacy group that promotes the rights and freedoms of
citizens on the Internet: “First of all I want to tell you how much
I admire you. You’re my heroes.” One more time, Julian radiated
while Daniel got to the point by saying: “the project, please.”
At the beginning of 2010, aged thirty-two, Daniel had already
spent the last two years working for the organization. He quit his
job at the start of 2009 to fully commit himself: “I have invested a
considerable amount of time, money and energy into WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks grew totally exponentially, ‘too quickly.’”

The leaks came in every day, and Daniel thought that some
of them were very interesting at the local level. For him, the
platform mustn’t discriminate and truth is good, whether it had a
regional, national or global impact. But one project monopolized
most resources of this small organization.
In February 2010, they received a shocking video of an
army helicopter in Iraq attacking civilians. Julian saw the need
to leverage this in order to attract attention to the company. A
 WikiLeaks 239

video always says more than a report with hundreds of pages.

He complained that citizens didn’t willfully read leaks, dreaming
of Impact Maximization (taken from a slide of the 26C3
presentation). He now had the means to carry out that kind of
impact. He recruited a team of communication and video experts
as well as video and sound editors for a real media project. They
produced the documentary Collateral Murder that had Julian
facing the world.
Daniel was moderately involved. Tired of traveling the
world, he took on his role as spokesperson by giving interviews
to newspapers, mainly German ones. He also had to deal with
stopping the site for lack of cash, which was tough for him. It
was a maneuver aimed at shaking up public opinion to motivate
fundraising that also hid a more pressing reality. The site’s
infrastructure with its multiple mirror installations needed to be
reviewed to switch to a more industrial model, which required
investments and resources. As an engineer and technician who
worked to save failing IT projects, he wanted this to be a priority.
Unfortunately, the attention was diverted to Project B and the
planetary launch of this video, as nothing else mattered to Julian.

The divorce was announced. Daniel showed up alone on April

22, at re:publica 2010, a German congress on new media. He
started his presentation by announcing Julian’s absence, ‘our
public representative,’ who was still in the United States after a
press conference he had given.
What was going through Daniel’s mind at the time? His role
was to answer to press, to represent the organization and be a
spokesperson. Now he found himself in the speaker’s role. While
Julian took on the public mask of the organization, as people talked
as much about the captivating, mysterious and magnetic man as
the organization, Daniel has always wanted to disappear behind
240 Julian Assange

the project, keep a discrete attitude and a pragmatic discourse as

to not attract attention and only be a voice for the team.
His presentation that day was quick and quite monotonous.
Daniel stated the list of major leaks of the last six months in
front of an attentive yet a lot less playful audience than at a C3.
He surprised himself having finished his presentation in thirty-
five minutes. The applause was still warm and the Q&A session
lasted almost fifteen minutes, allowing him to come back to the
infrastructure problems that were obviously bothering him. He
was also heckled about the video and questioned about the fine
line between publishing raw sources and a less objective editorial
line of the information. Someone grabbed the microphone and
shouted, “You’re hidding!”
Daniel stayed calm, but his eyes opened wide, his breath was
short, and he answered: “No, the names are clearly in there [in
the video]. And again, what I said before, I think it was from
my personal perspective, I think it was suboptimal that this line
was not drawn clearly enough. That there’s WikiLeaks who is
publishing an unedited raw video and that there is a journalist
piece, which is Collateral Murder.”
He left the stage thanking the audience and saying: “Have a
nice rest of re:publica. I hope there’s more important stuff to hear
about.”
Daniel appeared at this conference in a different state of mind
than usual. He felt like things were slipping away, and that reality
was going to be even crueler.

In April 2010, the organization had never had so much media

coverage, as the press was all over them. Questions came in from
everywhere, and they had to avoid taking attacks and smoking
theories about links with secret services too seriously. Daniel
continued to answer as the spokesperson.
 WikiLeaks 241

They were receiving almost twenty-five document submissions

a day, but in February they received, along with the video and a
set of American documents, such a huge quantity of explosive
information that there wasn’t enough time to go through it all.
Julian knew that they had to profit from the energy of the
video to bring WikiLeaks to the level he aspired to. He decided
to put aside all other documents they had received. They had to
focus on the American leaks and edit the Afghanistan War Logs,
known simply as the War Logs. The associates produced it while
bottling up their frustrations because nobody had time to argue.
It was a huge amount of work: review a database of 92,000
documents while trying to remove the names of Afghan informers
and collaborators who worked with the US armed forces during
the period covered by these notes from 2004 to 2009. The entire
world was working on it, volunteers and associates alike.

In June 2010, they found out about the arrest of the alleged
source of the February delivery. His name was Bradley Manning,
a young soldier of the US armed forces posted in Iraq. The shock
was big, it was the first time that a source was identified and
arrested. Daniel was reminded of Julian’s words during the 25C3,
the one that had got him so much applause: “We have never had a
source exposed. We have never had a source prosecuted.”
The Afghanistan War Logs finally came out on July 25.
They hadn’t been able to analyze all the documents and 15,000
were left aside for subsequent publication. The information was
immediately picked up by major names of the international press
such as The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel.
Daniel shared with Julian the idea that it was necessary to call
upon the traditional press for a better coverage of their actions.
However, Julian was furious when he saw that The New York Times
hadn’t inserted a link to the source of the information. Daniel
242 Julian Assange

wasn’t surprised; it was actually the system that they wanted to

automate in the future on the platform, a content management
method called ‘syndication.’
The tension started to rise in the ranks of WikiLeaks following
criticism from organizations like Reporters Without Borders and
even the Pentagon. They left a few names in the documents,
putting the lives of the people mentioned in danger. The team
was on edge. Everything was happening so quickly.
Daniel thought that he had to take some distance. Review
the infrastructure, consolidate the organization, work on the
communication of financing and publish local information.
Julian was less and less present. He was often in London,
participating in conferences, round table discussions, and
television shows. He appeared alone at TED, a program of
conferences broadcast in video on the Internet. His appearance
had changed, his hair was cut and he wore a quality gray suit.

The summer of 2010 was decisive for WikiLeaks. In August

when Julian was accused of having allegedly raped two women
in Sweden, the team panicked. What impact would that have
on WikiLeaks? He had just started bringing the project up to an
international level for a larger audience when these accusations
were confirmed. Daniel contained the press. Some journalists had
already forgotten this spokesperson. Karl Ritter of the Associated
Press introduced him as “A WikiLeaks spokesperson that says
he goes by the name of Daniel Schmitt in order to protect his
identity.” Daniel declared that these were “[E]xtremely serious
allegations.” He said that he didn’t know where Julian was and,
“that he’s smart enough to know what he has to do.”
But Daniel had had enough. The 15,000 Afghanistan War
Logs were ready, but Julian didn’t want to publish them. Why?
 WikiLeaks 243

Nobody knew. He had also just found out that Julian negotiated
a publishing date for the Iraq War Logs they had been preparing
for several weeks, but then again, he didn’t know anything more
about it. He thought that it was time Julian stayed out of the
spotlight and managed his personal affairs.
A Newsweek article dated August 26, 2010 got Julian extremely
angry. This article quoted ‘Someone close to WikiLeaks’ who
declared that a certain number of collaborators were worried
about the defense Julian used when speaking of defamation
and conspiracy against him without justification. These same
collaborators thought about how to persuade him to step away
from the movement during the Swedish affair.

Julian contacted Daniel electronically. Wired magazine
got a hold of the details of the discussion, and even if Daniel
Domscheit-Berg denied giving this document to the magazine, he
confirmed the content of the following discussion:

Daniel: What are the agreements re Iraq? I need

to understand what the plan is there, and what the
constraints are.

Julian answered with a copy of the transcript in Newsweek:

Julian: “A person in close contact with other
WikiLeaks activists around Europe, who asked for
anonymity when discussing a sensitive topic, says that
many of them were privately concerned that Assange
has continued to spread allegations of dirty tricks and
hint at conspiracies against him without justification.
Insiders say that some people affiliated with the website
are already brainstorming whether there might be some
244 Julian Assange

way to persuade their front man to step aside, or failing

that, even to oust him.”
Daniel: What does that have to do with me? And where
is this from?
Julian: Why do you think it has something to do with
you?
Daniel: Probably because you allege this was me
Daniel: As discussed yesterday, this is an ongoing
discussion that lots of people have voiced concern about
Daniel: You should face this, rather than trying to shoot
at the only person that even cares to be honest about it
towards you
Julian: Was this you?
Daniel: I didn’t speak to Newsweek or other media
representatives about this
Daniel:  I spoke to people we work with and that have
an interest in and care about this project
Daniel: And there is nothing wrong about this
Daniel: It’d actually be needed much more, and I can
still only recommend you to finally start listening to
such concerns
Julian: Who have you spoken to about this issue?
Daniel: I already told you up there
Julian: Those are the only persons?
Daniel: some folks from the club [CCC] have asked me
about it and I have issued that I think this would be the
best behaviour
Daniel: That’s my opinion
Daniel: Face the fact that you have not much trust on
the inside anymore
 WikiLeaks 245

Daniel: And that just denying it or putting it away as a

campaign against you will not change that it is solely a
consequence of your actions
Daniel: And not mine
Daniel: I don’t even wanna think about how many
people that used to respect you told me that they feel
disappointed by your reactions
Daniel: I tried to tell you all this, but in all your hybris
you don’t even care
Daniel: So I don’t care anymore either
Daniel: Other than that, I had questions first, and I need
answers
Daniel: Like what agreements we have made
Daniel: I need to understand this so we can continue
working
Daniel: You keep stalling other people’s work
Julian: How many people are represented by these
private chats? And what are there positions in the CCC?
Daniel: Start answering my questions, Julian
Julian: Are you refusing to answer?
Daniel: I have already told you again that I don’t see
why I should answer to you anymore just because you
want answers, but on the same hand refuse to answer
anything I am asking
Daniel: I am not a dog you can contain the way you
want to Julian
Julian: I am investigation a serious security breach.
Are you refusing to answer?
Daniel: I am investigating a serious breach in trust. Are
you refusing to answer
Julian: No you are not. I initiated this conversation.
Answer the question please.
246 Julian Assange

Daniel: Don’t play games with me.

Daniel: Likewise, and that doesn’t go just for me
Julian: If you do not answer the question, you will be
removed.
Daniel: You are not anyone’s king or god
Daniel: And you’re not even fulfilling your role as a
leader right now
Daniel: A leader communicates and cultivates trust in
himself
Daniel: or are doing the exact opposite
Daniel: You behave like some kind of emperor or slave
trader
Julian: You are suspended for one month, effective
immediately
Daniel: Haha
Daniel: Right, because of what?
Daniel: And who even says that?
Daniel: You? Another adhoc decision?
Julian: If you wish to appeal, you will be heard on
Tuesday

The appeal was never heard, and Daniel resigned the following
Saturday, sending shock waves through WikiLeaks.
Julian announced that he had agreed with the press to publish
the Iraq War Logs at the end of October. They weren’t ready and
didn’t want to have the same response as before.
Herbert Snorrason, a twenty-five-year-old Icelandic student
who participated in the security of WikiLeak’s chat room for
the volunteers, reacted harshly: “The release date which was
established was completely unrealistic. We found out that the
level of editing done on the Afghanistan documents was not
sufficient. I announced that if the next batch did not receive
 WikiLeaks 247

full attention, I would not be willing to cooperate.” His request

made it to Julian who answered: “I am the heart and soul of this
organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original
coder, organizer, financier and all the rest. If you have a problem
with me, piss off.”
Herbert Snorrason pissed off. He told wired.com: “I believe
that Julian has in fact pushed the capable people away. His
behavior is not of the sort that will keep independent-minded
people interested.”

Daniel gave a very quick interview to Der Spiegel and commented:

“We grew insanely fast in recent months and we urgently
need to become more professional and transparent in
all areas. This development is being blocked internally.
It is no longer clear even to me who is actually making
decisions and who is answerable to them.
I have tried again and again to push for that, but Julian
Assange reacted to any criticism with the allegation
that I was disobedient to him and disloyal to the project.
He suspended me – acting as the prosecutor, judge and
hangman in one person. Since then, for example, I have
had no access to my WikiLeaks mail. So a lot of work is
just sitting and other helpers are being blocked. I know
that no one in our core team agreed with the move. But
that doesn’t seem to matter. WikiLeaks has a structural
problem. I no longer want to take responsibility for it,
and that’s why I am leaving the project.”

What WikiLeaks was going through was typical of young start-up

companies that grow quickly. The founder originally surrounded
himself with skilled and committed lieutenants generally chosen
from his inner circle. Then, when there were enough resources,
248 Julian Assange

the young creator started expanding the business to meet new

people, present his company’s results and make promises,
convinced of his success and already picturing himself at the
head of a multinational in five years. At that moment, he had less
time to talk to his team left behind to handle productive tasks and
surrounded himself with people who would make him several
proposals. It was at that point that there was a break, when the
creator realized that he had moved to the next level, beyond his
original collaborators. He couldn’t explain everything to them,
they wouldn’t understand and he had to surround himself with
new, more competent people to climb even higher. He was
embarrassed, but that was what he wanted. He respected his
lieutenants, he had shared so much with them, they were his
friends, but he had to make some major decisions. It was for the
good of the company he told himself. It was often for the good
of his ego as well. And his friendships started to fray ever so
slightly that he didn’t even notice it. However, at the first sign of
internal crisis, he responded very violently, the words and images
of his advisors began to flood back, they were right, he couldn’t
continue on with these people, and it was without blinking that
he ejected them to continue onward with people that fed his
ambition.
For the lieutenant it was incomprehension, then trying to
remain confident, but arriving at inevitable situations that pushed
him into a crisis. And it was a major shock, he kind of expected
it, but didn’t want to believe it could happen. He couldn’t be mad
at his old friend because they shared so much together. If it were
up to him, he would have probably done the same thing. He also
had an entrepreneurial spirit, but never had the courage to start
up a business. He kind of envied him. He realized that he was a
 WikiLeaks 249

follower and that now it was time to muster up some courage and
become a creator.
Julian declared in August: “I enjoy creating systems on a
grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And
I enjoy crushing bastards.”
That was Daniel’s wake up call. It was time to move into the
spotlight. He was now known as Daniel Domscheit-Berg, his real
name, and he was also creating on a large scale.
In December, he was approached to write his book, just like
Julian was. Two men led WikiLeaks, now two men would wage
a war for transparence, both at the same level.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s project was simple: creating a system

in sync with his own convictions and ideas called OpenLeaks.
It had the same initial promise: allowing anonymous
whistleblowers to submit sensitive information to the media by
guaranteeing them total security from one end of the chain to the
other.
As an ideal organization, he already had ten people helping
him, including Herbert Snorrason and a few other WikiLeaks
dissidents and CCC supporters. The tasks weren’t segmented,
everyone had their place: “We are a foundation, registered as
such in Germany, not an underground organization. This means
that we have no political agenda, we have no motives to hide,
and we build our tools in order to be able to control it. We must
maintain control while remaining neutral.”
The concept was an evolution of WikiLeaks. The engineer was
able to think while Julian was mixing politics and communications.
He kept saying he was a technician. His mission was to offer
an efficient solution so that truth warriors could battle. He was
an intermediary, a facilitator and a partner. It was a collective
action for the collectivity: “We want to allow trade unions, NGOs
and media to work together and allow them to embed their own
250 Julian Assange

version of OpenLeaks, a kind of Privacybox [mail drop box] with

advanced features. The use is free of charge, but we have different
approaches and models. If you’re a major newspaper, you can
choose a dedicated system designed to meet your specific needs,
in case you need a greater computing power for instance. In all
cases, you have two accesses, one reserved for you and one that
allows you to access the network of collaborators.”
When WikiLeaks’ French technology partner questioned
him, he said: “At OWNI [French media group], for example, you
follow diligently HADOPI [French creation and Interne law] or
ACTA [Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement]. From our side,
we have interesting documents on this subject, submitted by an
informant who believes you are best placed to investigate. The
informant may choose to give you private access to documents
for two weeks – for example – after which you decide whether to
publish the documents in question.”
His approach was open-source because he wanted an open
organization. He accepted all partners and WikiLeaks could even
become one of them. There was no competition in his world. In
fact, he was not mad at Julian: “Julian is a really brilliant person
and he has a lot of very, very special talents. We’ve always
[thrived by] a diversity of qualities that different people bring in...
That works as long as you’re working in a team. But whenever
you lose that spirit, then one of the qualities just becomes too
dominant in some ways — such as taking solitary decisions and
thinking that you’re in a position to do that. We have to stand
together on the important issues that concerns everyone one of us
on the planet and the quality of all our lives.”
Like his alter ego, Daniel Domscheit-Berg quoted Alexander
Solzhenitsyn in his speech while accepting the Nobel Prize
in 1970: “Rescue of humankind is possible if everything is
everyone’s business. That’s what the real information society is.”
 23

David against Goliath

“Now, in many respects, information has never been so free.

There are more ways to spread more ideas to more people than at
any other moment in history. And even in authoritarian countries,
information networks are helping people discover new facts and
making governments more accountable.”
These words reflect the idea defended by Julian Assange:
information for all and an improvement of governance. They
are taken from a speech given by Hillary Clinton on January
21, 2010 at the Newseum, an interactive museum of news
and journalism in Washington. With force and conviction, she
expressed the importance of new technologies for the freedom of
the people. As a representative of the homeland of freedom, she
warned that, “Technologies, with the potential to open up access
to government and promote transparency, can also be hijacked
by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights.” She
then quoted President Barack Obama during his trip to China.
He said that the more freely information flows, the stronger a
society becomes. He spoke about “how access to information
could help citizens hold their own governments accountable,
generate new ideas, encourage creativity and entrepreneurship.
The United States believes in that fundamental truth.” America
the great intends to promote freedom thanks to the Internet. What
a marvelous speech.
252 Julian Assange

During his campaign, Barack Obama promised to return

the ‘Freedom of Information Act’ (FOIA) to its former glory.
This 1966 law was founded on the principle of the freedom
of information and obliges federal agencies to provide their
documents to anyone who asks for them. Throughout the history
of the United States, this free access has been subjected to various
restrictions. The future president promised to repress the secrecy
cult protected by his predecessor George W. Bush. When he
became president, Barack Obama asked the Minister of Justice to
publish new directives for the government and apply principles
of openness and transparency to the procedures for requesting
access to government documents. His memorandum read as
follows: “A democracy needs responsibility, and responsibility
needs transparency.” But transparency and its application have
not been seen the same way behind the scenes of power as they
have been elsewhere. Today some adversaries say that the Obama
government has been hiding more secrets than his predecessors
ever did.

On November 28 2010, WikiLeaks exposed the conversations

between Hillary Clinton and American diplomats from around the
world to the light of day. Suspicions concerning employees of the
Department of State spying on other diplomats had already been
expressed, but by publishing the American diplomatic cables,
WikiLeaks had written irrefutable proof forcing the government
to explain itself publicly.
 A dispatch from April 2009 signed by Hillary Clinton
demanded that state department officials collect the biometric
data, fingerprints, ID picture, DNA and retinal scans of African
leaders.
Another dispatch from July 2009 ordered American
diplomats, including those posted at the United Nations to obtain
 WikiLeaks 253

the passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers,

frequent flyer mile account numbers, as well as other data linked
to diplomats.
With the help of their embassies these cables show that the
United States can weave a web that is separate from the country’s
usual espionage network.
According to international treaties, the United Nations are
not supposed to harbor spies, but these revelations show that the
United States have been secretly ignoring those rules. In fact,
Hillary Clinton’s State Department specifically targeted officials
and diplomats of the United Nations, including Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon and the permanent members of the Security Council
from China, Russia, France and United Kingdom, as revealed in
the secret dispatch from July 2009.
The UN spokesperson denounced this major diplomatic
breach. Hillary Clinton diverted attention by getting angry. She
said the online posting of confidential documents by WikiLeaks
was ‘illegal’ and promised that the authors of the leaks would be
prosecuted. She confirmed that the organization was sabotaging
the pacific relations between nations, and endangering individuals.

The notion of transparency is relative. The vice is growing tighter

around Julian. Comments from journalists and politicians were
unleashed:
Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska at the time, compared him to
an Al-Qaeda terrorist and called on the American government to
hunt him down.
Political commentator Bob Beckel declared on FoxNews
(one of the country’s most popular network): “A dead man can’t
leak stuff! This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken
every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty,
so there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”
254 Julian Assange

Republican Peter King, Chairman-elect of the Committee on

Homeland Security, called on Mrs. Clinton to declare WikiLeaks
a foreign terrorist organization and asserted that appropriate
governmental measures be taken.
Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives from
1995 to 1999, said on FoxNews: “The WikiLeaks guy should be
in jail for the rest of his life. He is an enemy of the United States,
endangering people, and he will get folks killed. I think that’s a
despicable act and we should treat him as enemy combatant and
enemy of the United States.”
These comments had an impressive echo around the world as
well as on the Internet.
Articles concerning WikiLeaks and especially Julian Assange
appear every day on the Internet. Journalists were discovering
a mysterious and charming stranger who, in the space of a few
months, has become one of the most influential people on the
planet. After publishing the diplomatic memos, China blocked
access to WikiLeaks, while the American government suggested
students not talk about it on their blogs and forbade the Air Force
to read websites of newspapers affiliated with WikiLeaks.

“Assange implied that the diplomatic cables would reveal a bunch

of secrets and could destabilize states, specifically the United
States, claiming that they demonstrate a profound gap between
the United States’ public persona and what is said behind closed
doors. In the end, they show that U.S. diplomats pursue pretty
much the same goals in private as they do in public, albeit using
more caustic language,” said Anne Applebaum, according her
analysis in Slate.
American Defense Secretary Robert Gates evaluated the
importance of having published these documents a lot more
moderately: “Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our
 WikiLeaks 255

foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and

so on. I think – I think those descriptions are fairly significantly
overwrought. The fact is that governments deal with the United
States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not
because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep
secrets. Many governments – some governments deal with us
because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because
they need us. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes.
Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.”
Despite Robert Gates’ point of view, most American politicians
remain divided on WikiLeaks and on its main representative,
Julian Assange.
The Department of Justice announced that it would study
possible prosecution according to the Espionage Act of 1917,
considering WikiLeaks as a kind of terrorist cyber organization.
This is a Draconian law adopted shortly after Word War I, which
punishes people who spread prejudicial information about the
security of the United States by death or lengthy imprisonment.
They can only prosecute the sources that worked in bad
conscience, having leaked information to the organization in the
name of public interest at the risk of being accused of treason.
Government lawyers have been asked to be creative in
searching for legal options for Julian Assange and his organization.
The investigation of the Ministry of Justice is tedious, because
legally speaking WikiLeaks cannot be differentiated from other
online news organizations, making Julian the same as any other
journalist.
Searching for sources of information is the main goal of
journalism, along with inciting said sources to deliver their
secrets so they can be published.
The goal of the American government is to uncover evidence
that Julian Assange has ‘conspired,’ to quote Vice President Joe
256 Julian Assange

Biden. The goal is to effectively link the founder of WikiLeaks

to Bradley Manning, the young soldier suspected of leaking
confidential military documents to the organization. This would
allow prosecutors to charge Julian Assange for conspiracy. The
American administration would have the possibility of accusing
him for breaching national security without bringing his journalist
status protected by the First Amendment into it.
The Vice President was enraged that Julian compromised the
lives of people while they were doing their jobs and even more
so that he aggravated relations between the United States and its
allies.
When questioned about this by El País, the founder of
WikiLeaks simply said that Joe Biden associated truth about
the United States to terrorism. He then turned the accusation
against Biden’s administration arguing that if the use of violence
for political ends is considered terrorism, then the political and
violent scandal against WikiLeaks and the press could also be
akin to terrorism.
In December 2010, the United States was still searching
for a way to prosecute Julian now labeled a ‘cyber terrorist.’
Nevertheless, it is becoming more and more difficult to link Julian
to any illegal activity, but a threat is looming over the heads of
main figures of the American government.
In her speech on January 21, 2010 Hillary Clinton said:
“Governments and citizens must have confidence that the
networks at the core of their national security and economic
prosperity are safe and resilient. This is more than petty hackers
who deface websites. [...] We have to take steps as a government
and as a department to find diplomatic solutions to strengthen
global cyber security.”
It takes outlaws to reinforce security and Julian could very
well be evidence of the nation’s insecurity, which would allow
 WikiLeaks 257

the United States to monitor the exchange of information on

the Internet and ultimately reduce world communication among
Internet users.

Regardless of the comments made to the press, it’s interesting

to see that ten days after divulging the diplomatic documents,
many American and European politicians tried to exert pressure
on the Internet service providers that had WikiLeaks as a client.
For those who already mistrust governments, this action is more
than worrisome.
A discriminatory campaign against WikiLeaks and Julian
Assange incites them to radicalize either toward a type of
aggressive rebellion like attacking increasingly digital public
structures, which has consequences on the world economy, or by
joining a public group fighting for free Internet. Such a political
movement already exists under the flag of the Pirate Party. In
fact, many cells are active in Europe, advocating freedom on the
Internet and relaxing copyright law.
 24

Political Support

Interview in the chambers of the Swedish Pirate Party at the

European Parliament with Christian Engström, Parliamentarian
of the Pirate Party and his assistant, Henrik Alexandersson.

Élise: First I would like to talk about the party. What’s

the story? How did it start?

Christian: The Pirate Party was founded on January

1, 2006 by Rick Falkvinge in Sweden. At that time,
Rick Falkvinge was just an IT manager working at
a company, actually owned by Microsoft, basically
a regular IT guy. He sort of, half as a joke and half
seriously, put up a web page saying, ‘I’ve had enough.
I’m starting the Pirate Party.’ Within forty-eight hours,
his webpage got three million hits.

Henrik: It went viral around the world.

Christian: And then he thought that, ‘OK, I’m probably

onto something,’ and he also thought, ‘Now I have the
chance to try and do something, to make the world a
better place. If I don’t take it now, I can’t complain
 WikiLeaks 259

afterwards.’ The goal was then exactly what the party

is now: defend freedom on the Internet. We had general
elections in September the same year. It was quite
hectic to get everything organized, but we did take part
in those elections and we got 0.6 per cent of the vote.
In the next EU elections we got seven per cent of the
national vote in Sweden, which is how I ended up here.

Henrik: And it’s very important for members of

Parliament to have someone to talk to, because earlier
on it was just telecoms or record company lobbyists.
Now there is someone in the building that they can talk
to when it comes to copyright reform, etc. We have
answers to suggest for many of the questions that will
arise concerning the future. We’re also among those
who incite new ideas.

Christian: Many of the issues we work with are

directly related to WikiLeaks. For instance, in many
situations or proposals, or today in the ACTA (Anti-
Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), we have concerns
that Internet providers will have secondary liability.
That means they could one day be responsible for the
content of the traffic on their lines... As a comparison,
the Post Office is not responsible for whatever you send
through the mail.

Henrik: But there are strong powers trying to change

that, which would lead to all Internet service providers
to check what traffic goes through their infrastructure so
they don’t get sued. In a situation like that, for instance,
a site like WikiLeaks would be stopped immediately
260 Julian Assange

because Internet service providers don’t want to have to

deal with these problems.

Christian: Many efforts are being made to regulate the

Internet, regulate content on the Internet, make service
providers liable and use various means to check what
people are doing on the Internet and punish them if they
do things that the government doesn’t like.

Henrik: And, of course, politicians have three official

reasons for trying to limit the freedom on the Internet.
It’s file sharing, the war on terror and child pornography.
But often we come to suspect that there are many more
reasons, for instance the interest of trying to keep things
secret, to keep people out of the discussion. It could
also be to limit the freedom of citizen journalism and
stuff like that. Of course, they can’t say it officially,
because that would be disastrous. But we really have
the impression that that’s the case.

Christian: It’s very much all part of the same trend.

This morning I was at a seminar organized by the ALDE
(Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe). The
seminar was about Hungary, where they just introduced
a new media law where everybody, including bloggers,
must be registered before they’re allowed to express
themselves. Therefore, Hungarians will have a small
administrative body appointed by the ruling party that
can decide if somebody’s saying things that they don’t
want to be said and give them unlimited fines for it.
And, of course, that is not how it should be in a Western
democracy or in any democracy for that matter. I think
 WikiLeaks 261

this is the underlying problem in society. The Internet

and new information technology have opened up
fantastic possibilities for democracy, for transparency,
for citizen participation in the democratic process, as
well as fantastic opportunities for the spread of culture.
All the culture of the world is just one click away.
That’s something fantastic. If politicians had invented
it, they would be so proud of it. Now it sort of happened
by itself and instead the politicians are trying to stop
it. As with any change in society, the winners of the
last century will either be the new losers, or will have
to at least adapt their business to the established mode
of governance. Nobody wants to change, especially
if you’re the king of the hill, you want everything to
remain exactly as it is. That’s why conflicts are erupting
everywhere. In the end, I know we will win, ‘We’ being
the ones standing for openness, sharing, etc., because
the technology makes that a historical necessity. I know
full well how unpopular it makes you with more or less
everybody if you talk about historical necessities. I’m
sure that will happen, but whether it happens in five
years or fifty will depend on political decisions.

Henrik: It’s very interesting because in Parliament there

have been issues about Iran, Cuba and other countries
where the government muzzles the opposition. Iran and
Cuba are just using the technology that we have here,
because our governments have demanded the possibility
of monitoring them.

Christian: I think that these double standards are

very annoying, but very important. For example, take
262 Julian Assange

Swedish Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, member

of the Swedish Liberal party since the 1980s. When
she was a member of this Parliament, she was very
good at standing up for freedom of speech, freedom
of whatever, etc. She was the first person to criticize
China for censoring the Internet and blocking certain
sites, etc. That’s when she was a parliamentarian. Now
she’s a commissioner. One of the very first directives
she proposed was for the introduction of censorship
on the Internet and she’s using child pornography to
break open the doors. It’s very easy to criticize China
for censoring the Internet, but once this alleged liberal
person was in power, she tried to do the exact same thing.
You see this in most Member States. A lot of parties are
quite good as long as they are in opposition. It’s not
really a left/right issue. But then when they get into
government, they want more control, less transparency.
I think that is part of the way power corrupts. It’s a very
positive development for citizens to have access to a
technology that can be used as a counterforce. It’s even
more positive that some people, like the WikiLeaks
members, are taking advantage of that possibility. For
this reason, all of us in the Pirate Party see WikiLeaks
as real heroes.

Élise: What is the link between the Pirate Party and the
actions of Birgitta Jónsdóttir in Iceland? And between
Iceland and Sweden?

Christian: This IMMI thing is absolutely brilliant. If

we could transform that into European modern media
initiative, that would be really great. At least it’s a very
 WikiLeaks 263

good thing that Iceland is setting a positive example. It’s

exactly what the Pirate Party would want to see happen.
We feel that the openness of society is threatened. It’s
ironic because we have this marvelous technology
that’s opened up the possibility, but instead has led to
political repression.
Exactly the same thing happened five hundred years
ago with the printing press. Up until then, only scribes
in monasteries could copy books. Gutenberg came
along, it became much cheaper by the standards of
those days and pretty much the first thing that happened
was that various governments wanted to regulate it. The
Church wanted to regulate the printing press so that
heretics wouldn’t be allowed to use it to spread things
like Lutheranism or whatever they would consider
even worse. The word ‘copyright’ first appeared in the
U.K., under Henry the VII. I think it was one of his
daughters who wanted to make sure that only their side
and their political struggle got to print books. So they
gave a monopoly to the London Company of station the
guild for printers, and they got the copyright, the right
to make copies on provision that they could only print
the right kind of religious text.
When technology opens up a new possibility for ordinary
citizens, you would expect the old establishment to try
to do whatever they can to stop it and maintain its own
privilege. We can expect them to fail completely in
the long run, because we know what happened to the
printing press. My hope is that we’ll be able to make
that same transition to the Internet society and the
information society quicker and cheaper, especially in
terms of lives. That is the goal of the Pirate Party: avoid
264 Julian Assange

a large number of heretics being sent to the gallows

before society accepts the change.

Élise: What are your daily activities like here?

Henrik: I bury Christian in papers and act as anything

from political advisor to the guy who gets Christian
his sandwiches when he is in a meeting. Christian also
wants me to keep blogging, as I have one of the biggest
political blogs in Sweden, if not the biggest.

Christian: I blog as well. I think it’s a good indication

on how helpful the new technology is, because the job
of a parliamentarian, whether here in the European
Parliament or in national parliament, doesn’t really
have any power. The power is on a national level with
the government or at the European Commission level.

Henrik: Let’s not forget the Council.

Christian: True, but I would say primarily with the

Commission. But at least a parliamentarian has access
to some power; is closer to it and can find out more
about what’s going on. For me, both on the European
Union and national level the parliamentarian is the
link between ordinary citizens and the ones actually
in power. However, I think that a blog is very useful
both ways. Henrik and I blog about things happening
here. Some journalist might pick it up. There’s no blog
that can compete with mainstream media in terms of
reach. Still, for people who are interested, the blogs
have much more space to devote to one single issue at
 WikiLeaks 265

a time. If you’re very interested in something, you’ll

find more information on the blogs than in mainstream
media. But on the other hand, when some proposal
comes along, it comes as a white paper or green paper
or whatever color paper from the commission, often
very technical. It’s always like that in politics: the devil
is in the details… always. It can be very difficult to spot
the nasty things, if you just read it. To be able to take
that and put it on the blog and say ‘This is what the
commissioner is proposing. I’ll report on this. Do you
have any comments?’ People who are interested or are
specialized can give feedback. I find it extremely useful.

Henrik: It’s very interesting because much of this work

is actually intertwined with WikiLeaks. For instance,
the SWIFT agreement about transferring information
about European bank transactions to the terrorist
hunters in the United States. Parliament was opposed,
but national governments turned on parliamentarians
and the Parliament had to approve the agreement or
adjust its modifications. Afterward, we had found out,
thanks to the ‘Cablegate’ telegrams, that the Swedish
government was very much involved in the matter.
Just like for ACTA, which might infringe the liberty
on the Internet. This agreement was negotiated behind
closed doors. In the end, the Parliament will have to say
yes or no to it, but for a long time the only way to get
information on these documents was via WikiLeaks.

Christian: Even for me as a parliamentarian, I had to

rely on leaks to obtain information. It’s obviously an
266 Julian Assange

aspect of the European Union that I find completely

unacceptable. But sttill, it‘s the reality of it all.

Élise: What is the link between politics and what

WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, or other similar groups do?
You think that they have a political agenda?

Henrik: They have political consequences. Many

people say that Assange is a Leftist or that he hates the
U.S. or whatever. I don’t think that’s the case. I think
he’s just in it for the open information and transparency
mission. That, of course, it will have its consequences.
The video Collateral Murder was terrible for the
United States PR-wise. And now ‘Cablegate.’ All of
this has political consequences. But you can also see
the openness ideology behind WikiLeaks. I would say
it’s more philosophical than political. It’s some kind
of purity when it comes to democracy. The other day
I wrote on my blog and reminded people that the key
to this story that we must always remember is that it’s
WikiLeaks that is providing the truth. It might be an
inconvenient or embarrassing truth, but it’s WikiLeaks
who is providing it. It’s the politicians and their
functionaries who are lying and trying to cover things
up. It’s extremely important to have that single thought
in mind.

Élise: Do you think that Julian Assange is a ‘Warrior of

Truth’?
Henrik: Yes.
 WikiLeaks 267

Christian: At the moment, of course, Americans consider

him to be a Leftist. I don’t believe that myself. For
instance, if you take it from the green perspective, since
we’re in the Green Group, among the documents they
did publish, a lot of them were about an environmental
scandal in the Ivory Coast where big companies had
basically taken lots of really toxic stuff and just dumped
it somewhere. From a green perspective, that leak, when
it happened, would have been very popular politically,
because it highlighted green issues. But WikiLeaks
also published these ‘Climate-Gate’ e-mails that were
a lot less popular within the Green Group. To me, that
strongly indicates that Mr. Assange himself is just in it
for the truth. He doesn’t pick sides, instead he shows
everything and from all angles.

Henrik: A person with very strong integrity, I would

say.

Élise: Do you think he would make a good politician

and get into politics?

Christian: No. No.

Henrik: No. No. No.

Élise: Why not?

Christian: He’s a good speaker. He has interesting

political things to say. I don’t think he’d be at all
interested in the day-to-day compromising that they
maintain in politics. I see him as an activist by heart,
268 Julian Assange

representing certain ideas. I don’t think he’d enjoy

being a politician.
Henrik: If he should have such a carreer, it would be
as General Secretary of the UN with a responsibility to
the Internet and open communications, etc. That might
work, but the day-to-day work, it’s like swimming in
gelatin.

Élise: So do you think that WikiLeaks and other

movements like this must or should have an implication
in a traditional way in politics or not? Is it possible?

Henrik: It’d have huge implications.

Christian: Yes, every single release has huge

implications in that area. For instance, at the national
level, we had one telegram detailing how the Swedish
ministers went to the American Embassy, how they
talked in detail about how Sweden should introduce
certain laws to make the United States happy. It was
in one of the cables. That is in itself very interesting
political information. It confirmed what we in the Pirate
Party had been saying, ‘Look, the Swedish government,
they’re just a puppet on a string for the Americans.’
When we said it before, we sounded pretty much like
conspiracy theorists, at least to many people. But now
it’s confirmed in an official cable from the American
Embassy, so of course that has implications. But
hopefully, I think perhaps an even more interesting long-
term effect would be that if politicians all over start to
realize that they can’t really keep anything secret, that
 WikiLeaks 269

could, hopefully in the long run, mean that they become

honest out of necessity.

Henrik: But if they can’t get away with it, they have to.

Christian: We’re only at the beginning of the process.

Élise: Let’s talk about Julian Assange. Where did you
meet him?

Christian: I met him once in Brussels, in June 2010. He

came to speak at a seminar organized by the progressive
group. Afterwards, lots of people wanted to talk to him.
I wanted to talk to him as well. We wanted to tell him
that the Swedish Pirate Party was prepared to offer
assistance to WikiLeaks, technical assistance with
service, etc. I mentioned that very briefly, but then the
journalist did an interview with the two of us. That was
really all there was time for. He then went to Sweden
and visited the Swedish Pirate Party. We helped him.
I didn’t meet him then, he met Rick Falkvinge, who
was our party leader then, and Anna Troberg, who is
our party leader now. They had dinner together. This
was really mostly to confirm the fact that we, the Pirate
Party, would assist with some bandwidth.
We’re just one of many organizations and people
assisting WikiLeaks in this way. This was primarily
about the technical help we wanted to give. But, of
course, yes, we do support WikiLeaks in every way.
When people like you ask about WikiLeaks, I’m quite
happy to say that I like it.

Élise: What about Assange?

270 Julian Assange

Christian: You have to be really focused in order to

become a global icon. And he probably was not at
all particularly interested in all the social stuff that
surrounds whatever project he’s dealing with.

Henrik: You often see that in people who are very

focused on a specific project, it doesn’t have to be
connected with the Internet, but often they do not
have perfect social skills. To many people, that’s a bit
irritating. For me, working with Libertarians and Pirates,
I’m quite used to that and have learned to appreciate
even goofy people for what they do.

Christian: I supposed that I’d probably cross paths

with him again. The Pirate Party’s a political project, as
Henrik said, the political arm of the Internet.
 Part VIII

At the Heart of the Cave

I am responsible for everything except for my very re-
sponsibility, for I am the foundation of my being
– Jean-Paul Sartre
 25

Family heritage

Julian Assange hadn’t met his biological father before he was

twenty-five years of age, and since then, he’s only met him a few
times. John Shipton was a student activist of the 1960s whom
Christine Assange fell in love with during an anti-Vietnam War
demonstration in Sydney. Today, Shipton is an architect who
has been described by his son Julian as a rebel spirit with a high
logical and dispassionate intellect. A close friend described him
as ‘a mirror shining back at Julian.’

Paternity, maternity, and being in a relationship are values that

Julian has experienced in a particular manner: an absent father,
an artist/activist mother, a stepfather who treated him like an
adult, constantly moving, a failed relationship after two years, a
custody battle that lasted over five years and a lost son that was
found again.
All these experiences left their mark on him as the child he
was deep down inside. For The First Post, psychoanalyst Coline
Covington explained: “The only stable factor in Julian Assange’s
early life was his mother. Given this background, it would hardly
be surprising if mother and son did not have a strong connection,
especially during their years of hiding...” In December of 2010,
Christine decided to go to London to re-establish a connection
274 Julian Assange

with her son after she learned of his arrest. On the court steps
she declared: “I’m re-connected with him again. I’ve got the
connection.” Covington continued: “Without parents who were
able to set limits and recognize their son’s vulnerability, there
was no stopping Julian’s omnipotent behaviour. [...] When the
mother idolises her child, this early experience of omnipotence
remains unmediated and the child’s narcissistic bond to the
mother is not broken. Mother and son continue to harbour an
exclusive relationship from which the father is absent. This can
lead in [...] having fleeting relationships with women, as a way of
defending against being engulfed by the mother.”

Throughout his relationships, Julian has shown the importance

he gives to women in his life. He needs them to balance him
out, they are present on his path, but he refuses to get attached
to them. Here Covington sees a certain vengeance on his mother
who probably left him too young, compounded with the pain he
felt after the break up with his first wife.
The psychoanalyst also sees a paternal influence. First, in his
quest for truth as a desire to intrude in his parents’ room, getting
involved in a relationship that he’s never had, but also in his desire
to assume the role of the father and take exclusive possession
of the mother. But when it came to impregnation, Julian felt he
has some legitimacy. Covington concluded: “In his desire for
unprotected sex, Assange is asserting his right to impregnate
women - even against their will. But these are not women he has
a serious relationship with. Like his unknown father, he too will
presumably disappear.” Julian has a personal mission that cannot
be hampered by family constraints.

Rumors circulated about Julian having fathered many children.

On November 22 2006, he posted a picture on his blog showing
a little girl of one or two years old with the comment: “Those
 WikiLeaks 275

eyes - All the pink ribbons in the world can’t hide them.” It has
also been said that Julian had a liaison with a French woman
who gave birth to a child in 2010. If these rumors are true, these
mothers have stayed pretty discrete since Julian gained notoriety,
as they could have come out of the shadows. The media would
have thrown themselves onto information like this, calling for
retribution. Two scenarios seem plausible: they don’t have
anything to say about their ex-lover’s behavior or the resentment
isn’t worth the media circus they’d have to put up with if they
would have divulged their stories.

But what if, despite his mission, we were to find out that Julian
Assange assumed his role as a father?
Julian’s son Daniel thinks that his dad’s best quality is his
desire to share his knowledge and talk to him without treating
him like a child. In a long interview for the investigative site
crickey.com.au in September 2010, Daniel said: “The one thing I
found that I appreciated most was that he wouldn’t treat me like
a child when it came to intellectual concepts: he would speak to
me as though he were really trying to get me to grasp the fullness
of an idea.” Daniel continued, “I think that really helped me a lot
in realizing the nature of reality.”
Daniel Assange was born on January 26 1990. He’s a
programmer for a small marketing process company that handles
search engine optimization. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree from
the University of Melbourne in Genetics and finished his studies
in the same time as his father. No longer interested in genetics, he
got into IT. He loves New Age music, science fiction, animated
films and manga. He’s a well-read atheist and punctuates his
thoughts with humor on his blog lemma.org.
During his globetrotting phase, up until the launch of
WikiLeaks, Julian was not very present in Daniel’s life, as father-
276 Julian Assange

son relations were circumstantially strained during these years.

Only in 2007 did Julian contact his son to ask him to join the
organization. Daniel didn’t really believe in the concept and
so, he refused. Since then he hasn’t had any contact with his
father, but is proud of him and stands behind him. According
to Daniel, his father mainly wanted to protect him. “As for him
not contacting me following that, it’s probably at least in part an
attempt to protect me [...] If it was known that I was the son and
directly involved in some way, there was a likelihood of a direct
retaliation, and my father was quite concerned about such things.”
He believes Julian is very intelligent and is forced to face all kinds
of difficulties dealing with these kind of people and often feels
frustrated working with someone who isn’t capable of thinking
at his level and grasping concepts he seems to get intuitively. He
also believes that he’s always been interested in political activism
in general, but has always had more of an affinity for science and
philosophy, as well as the pursuit of higher knowledge and the
idea that this knowledge should be made accessible to everyone.
WikiLeaks is the culmination of all these concepts.

Daniel shared his thoughts on the Swedish affair. In August 2010,

on a friend’s Facebook page he said, “That man does have a way
of making a lot of female enemies.” The New York Post used this
message in one of its articles without personally meeting Daniel.
Confronted by the media’s behavior, he criticized the ethics of
the newspaper and would rather give his own opinion. “It looks
to me that it’s just some sort of cultural misunderstanding or
general social failure on the part of my father, or the women, that
has led to the situation.”
Today, as an adult observing his father’s work, Daniel says:
“His actions as a personal individual and his actions in a grand
 WikiLeaks 277

political sense are completely disconnected things, and they

should be considered in that sense.”
 26

Assange’s shadows

July 12, 2006: The truth inside and outside the page
The truth is not found on the page, but is a wayward sprite
that bursts forth from the readers’ mind for reasons of its own.

Julian Assange likes to philosophize on themes he holds dear.

In July 2006, on his blog IQ.ORG, he elaborated theories on the
subjective truth of Justice faced with the logical reality of an
axiom:

You could show irrefutably that (A=>B) and (B=>C)

and (C=>D) and Justice would agree, but then, when you
claimed coup de grace, A=>D irrevocably, Justice would
shake its head and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for
Justice will not be told. Transitivity is enabled when Justice
decides for emotional reasons A=>D *feels nice*.

He believes that truth is logical and must rely on these assumptions

otherwise it would become “a surging sea of smashed wood,
flotsam and drowning sailors.”
But it’s this same transitivity that is used many times by
all conspiracy theorists when it comes to Julian Assange and
WikiLeaks. Many of them elaborate possible links between the
organization and political, military and financial conspiracies.
 WikiLeaks 279

For example, the United States and Israel have been leading
a global campaign against Iran for years and want to sway world
opinion in any way possible. (A=>B). The diplomatic cables
released by WikiLeaks shake up world opinion and reveal truths
that some didn’t dare announce publicly about Iran’s nuclear tests.
(B=>C). Shouldn’t WikiLeaks be a way for the United States and
Israel to achieve their goals? (A=>C).

As well, the site of Wayne Madsen, former U.S. Navy officer,

now a journalist and commentator on national security issues,
assessed a CIA project of twenty million dollars whose goal was
to provide the means to Chinese dissidents to simulate attacks
on American IT systems coming from China to increase the
fear of risking an electronic war. (A=>B). And so WikiLeaks,
whose goal is to broadcast confidential information from states,
including the United States, bases its communication on the
majority representation of Chinese dissidents in its advisory
board. (B=>C). The vagueness surrounding this board and the
debates on national security weakened by the Internet could make
one believe that WikiLeaks is in fact part of a project sponsored
by the CIA aimed at justifying them having taken measures to
restrict freedom on the Internet. (A=>C).

This transitivity axiom gives way to all kinds of theories about

WikiLeaks. Aren’t they supposed to be the truth? If some theories
seem absurd, others will only be denied by history. One thing
is for sure: nothing is being done to diminish the mysteries
that weigh down on Julian so that overactive imaginations and
creativity can link facts freely.

The most documented assumption remains the relation between

WikiLeaks and George Soros, businessman and philanthropist
280 Julian Assange

at the head of the Open Society Institute (OSI), an organization

that promotes democracy around the world. Wayne Madsen
has established several coincidences linking the actions of this
American billionaire with those of WikiLeaks.
A leak revealing the campaign data of Republican Senator
Norm Coleman has been said to be largely beneficial to his
adversary Democrat Senator Al Franken, supported by Soros.
In May 2009, a member of the OSI participated at the
European conference on media and new communication services
together with the Icelandic Minister of Education, Science and
Culture. It’s only after this conference that the idea of the IMMI
(Icelandic Modern Media Initiative) came to Julian Assange.
The list of allegations is long: in January 2008, WikiLeaks
published the bank statements of 1,600 clients of the Julius Baer
Group, the biggest Swiss securities management bank. These
clients had accounts in a branch on the Cayman Islands. The bank
took legal action to retract its claim faced with the impossibility
of suppressing the information spread via mirror sites. This bad
situation at the Julius Baer Group was apparently an opportunity
for a takeover bid from the Goldman Sachs bank, which is linked
to the Quantum Fund of George Soros.

Even if the shortcuts seem quick, Julian’s sole defense would be

to say of Wayne Madsen: “He seems to be another case [the first
being John Young, author’s note] of someone who was fantastic
a few years ago, but recently has started to see conspiracies
everywhere. Both cases probably age related.” John Young is
seventy-four, while Wayne Madsen is fifty-seven. It’s surprising
to hear this from someone who has built a system of truth to fight
the conspiracies that he sees everywhere.
 WikiLeaks 281

Julian Assange hates being contradicted and prefers

brushing his opponents aside. He also hates justifying himself.
Psychoanalyst Coline Covington noticed, “while asserting his
innocence, Assange accuses others around him of abusing [their]
power. He refers to an ‘espionage indictment made secretly
against me’ and a ‘smear campaign’ launched against him. His
accusations show a paranoia, which only confirms his anxiety
that his own attacks are being turned against him. […] He can
then become the martyr son who was abused by his father – a
hero and a victim at the same time.”

This range of paranoia can be detected in Julian’s interviews. He

told the motherjones.com investigation site in June 2010 details
about how six men broke into the residence he was staying at
in Nairobi, Kenya and threw him to the ground. The residence’s
security heard him cry out and came to chase away the attackers.
He told the journalist that they had come for him without
explaining why.
Several times he reported the case of an ambush carried out in
2009 against one of his associates in Luxembourg. In a covered
parking lot, a man with an English accent dressed like ‘James
Bond’– and therefore supposed to be British secret services – had
apparently asked questions on the organization and pressed his
associate to divulge more ‘over coffee.’ There again, Julian kept
mysterious. Just like the time when he sensed two agents were
following him on a flight to Iceland or when he disguised himself
in London as an old lady to escape from ‘other agents.’
The problem with all these stories is that they can rarely be
verified and are sometimes muddy or contradictory once other
statements are made. By ensuring the communication of a business
as innovative and controversial as WikiLeaks on his own, Julian
has unfortunately not been a stranger to contradiction.
282 Julian Assange

Even in his choice of alliances, the leader of WikiLeaks

surprised people.
First, on his advisory board, most of the names mentioned
have had some sort of relations with U.S. government institutions
(NED, Radio Free Asia, etc.). Finally, these relations turned out
to be null and void following the vague declarations of the main
interested parties. So why boast these alliances at all?
The main goal of the advisory board was to boost the
respectability of the organization, but to attract whose
benevolence? Who is reassured by these kinds of relations?
Then there are the WikiLeaks members. A rumor,
confirmed afterward in an interview with Kristinn Hrafnsson in
December 2010, justified the involvement of Israel Shamir with
WikiLeaks a propos relations with the Russian press.
On numerous occasions, this freelance journalist was called
on his negativistic and anti-Semitic remarks. How can Julian
allow such an alliance? This is the same man who, during his
speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2010, denounced the United
States and touched lightly on the Nazis by comparing the slogans
at Auschwitz ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (‘Work will make you free’) to
Guantanamo Bay ‘Honor Bound To Defend Freedom.’
According to a survey by Swedish public radio, Israel Shamir
was responsible for selecting the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables
and distributing them to his contacts in the Russian press. How
could one uphold neutrality when entrusting the intermediation
to such controversial people?

Furthermore, Julian’s choice of press partners has often been

criticized by a certain opinion that regretted the Western orientation
of these major press groups and by the partners themselves who
have had a tough time understanding his changes in orientation,
 WikiLeaks 283

personal agreements with new partners, stormy responses and a

need to control everything.
The task wasn’t easy, Daniel Domscheit-Berg said when
leaving the organization: “It is too much work, too much
responsibility and ultimately too much power. It’s very hard to
argue against the notion that WikiLeaks has a certain measure of
political power at the moment.”

The foundations of WikiLeaks have indeed evolved in three years’

time. In 2006, the founding idea was based on a technological
initiative, whose functioning relied on the foundations of
Wikipedia and this famous ‘wisdom of crowds,’ described by
James Surowiecki in his eponymous best-selling book. Knowledge
that was totally decentralized, open, independent, with a shared
ethic and didn’t rely on any institution. The difficulties, pressure
and ambition very quickly lead to a centralization of decisions
that was more and more personalized, a unilateral review of
the content with an editorialized broadcast. Even though the
base remains the same, the core of WikiLeaks was to broadcast
information from sources as best as possible and to the greatest
possible number.
But who were these infamous sources?

Julian contacted whistleblowers. When he fought alongside his

mother for the custody of his son Daniel, he campaigned within
the management to find informers. Later, he rubbed shoulders
with a whistleblowers’ association, Whistleblowers Australia.
Assange knew people who, just like Ellsberg, realize one day
that his professional daily life, which fascinated him for so
long, was turning into an increasingly unbearable situation. He
created WikiLeaks for them, for a Rudolf Elmer at the brink of
284 Julian Assange

incomprehension at work who decided to denounce the fiscal

frauds orchestrated by his bank, the Julius Baer Group.
The system wanted to be open to all these informers by
guaranteeing them security and anonymity. And it has been on
these two points that WikiLeaks is subjected to the most attacks.

Open to all without any guarantees of where it came from. Just
like that, information could be rejected for objective or subjective
reasons. And information could even be submitted to WikiLeaks
with hidden motives. An interview on November 29 2010, on
the American television station PBS with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter,
revealed his expert point of view. By analyzing the content of the
leaks and the orientation of possible impacts, Brzezinski, who is
still one of the best informed men in the United States, declared:
“I have no doubt that WikiLeaks is getting a lot of the stuff from
sort of relatively unimportant sources, like the one that perhaps is
identified on the air. But it may be getting stuff at the same time
from interested intelligence parties who want to manipulate the
process and achieve certain very specific objectives.”
Moreover, this idea can be traced back in history. Former
U.S. Air Force colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty, known for his CIA
activities (he inspired the character Mr. X in the Oliver Stone
film, JFK), said about Daniel Ellsberg:
“There is another category of writers and self-proclaimed
authority on the subjects of secrecy, intelligence, and containment.
This man is the suave, professional parasite who gains a reputation
as a real reporter by disseminating the scraps and ‘Golden Apples’
thrown to him by the great men who use him. His writer seldom
knows and rarely cares that many of the scraps from which he
draws his material have been planted, that they are controlled
 WikiLeaks 285

leaks, and that he is being used, and glorified as he is being used,

by the inside secret intelligence community.”

By ensuring the security and anonymity of sources, John Young

defended the idea that there was no security on the Internet, and
Wayne Madsen went so far as saying that Tor, the anonymity
system used by WikiLeaks, had some flaws that did in fact reveal
personal information. However, government forces have not
identified the only sources revealed from the site’s leaks. Rudolf
Elmer made himself known in 2005 by handing over his files to the
Swiss press before contacting WikiLeaks in 2008, while Bradley
Manning was denounced by an Internet forum correspondent.

The only real thing Julian could be accused of was having taken
the reins of WikiLeaks’ destiny to satisfy his personal ambition
of managing his business, something many people agreed on: his
partners, his first supporters like John Young, some associates
like Daniel Domscheit-Berg and maybe others like the mysterious
WikiLeaks insider who denounced the internal actions of
WikiLeaks with e-mails sent to Cryptome.
His goal was to move up higher and faster by any means, a
man who blogged about a poem by the brothers Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg (executed on July 19, 1953 for espionage against the
United States):
“Even so, we did what we believed in:
Treason, yes, perhaps, but with good cause.
History will judge by its own laws.”
 27

Shockwaves

”I’ve been so isolated so long… I just wanted to be nice, and

live a normal life… but events keep forcing me to figure out ways
to survive… smart enough to know what’s going on, but helpless
to do anything… no one took any notice of me…”

These are the first words Bradley Manning wrote on May 22, 2010
to a hacker who became his confidant. It was Adrian Lamo who
went from confidant to denunciator by delivering Manning to the
authorities a few days later. When they talked, Manning was very
uncomfortable, tired, anxious and revolted. By then WikiLeaks
had already released the film, Collateral Murder, on April 5, to
the world.

Bradley Manning was born in 1987, and it was noticed early on

that he was peculiar. His father was in the Navy, a very strict man,
often away from home. His mother was Welsh and had difficulty
adjusting to life in the United States. After his parents’ divorce
in 2001, his mother left with him to the United Kingdom, where
Bradley continued his schooling at Tasker Milward in Wales.
Tom Dyer, one of his school friends said: “He’s always had this
sense that ‘I’m going to right a big wrong.’ He was like that at
school. If something went wrong, he would speak about it. If he
 WikiLeaks 287

didn’t agree with something, he said so. He would even have

altercations with teachers if he thought something was not right.”
After high school, his mother sent him to his father in the
United States, who, when he found out he was gay, threw him
out of the house. Out on the street, he lived in his car, doing odd
jobs where he was always getting into fights. At one point, he
had a short stint at a software company. His boss remembers this
young man with round cheeks and bright look being very good
at programming, but with “the personality of a bull in a china
shop.”
Following the advice of a friend, Bradley joined the army in
2007, hoping to find somewhere he would fit in. He was recognized
for his IT skills, and was posted in Iraq as an agent for the Intel
section. Manning had a hard time hiding his homosexuality while
expected to adhere to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. This law
was enforced as of 1993, but was repealed by President Barack
Obama in December 2010, allowing gay personnel to serve
their country regardless of their sexual orientation. Before then,
legislation stopped anyone serving in the army from disclosing
their homosexuality, bisexuality or from even talking about
marriage between two people of the same sex or gay parenting.
As for the army, it wasn’t authorized to do any research into
the private lives of its recruits, knowing that the law continued
to refuse anyone who “demonstrated a propensity or intent to
engage in homosexual acts” from serving in the armed forces
of the United States, because their presence would “create an
unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order
and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military
capability.”
At the barracks, Manning was the object of innuendo, mockery
and bullying. In April 2010, he was dismissed due to a brawl with
another soldier and was discharged from his duties with the Intel
288 Julian Assange

department. From that moment on, he felt very bad and wrote to
Adrian Lamo, saying:

Manning: I’m self-medicating like crazy when I’m not

toiling in the supply office (my new location, since I’m
being discharged, I’m not officially intel anymore)
Manning: I just want the material out there… I don’t
want to be a part of it
Manning: I can’t believe what I’m telling you :(

After releasing the video Collateral Murder online and after the
shockwave it caused, two former American soldiers of the Bravo
Company 2-16 wrote an open letter to the Iraqi people.
Ethan McCord was the soldier who got the children out of
the van. In April 2010, he spoke about what he had witnessed
in Iraq many times back in July 2007, following the helicopter
attack: “Myself and the team I was with were the first dismounted
soldiers to arrive on the scene. I saw what appeared to have been
three men in a corner. It was an extreme shock to my system.
They didn’t look human, I know they had to be at one time but the
destroyed carnage that I was looking at didn’t appear to be. Then
there was the smell. The smell was unlike anything I’ve smelled
before, a mixture of feces, urine, blood, smoke, and something
else indescribable. I saw an RPG next to the men and an AK-
47. Crying! I hear crying. Not cries of pain, but that of a small
child who had woken up from a horrible nightmare. I saw that
there was a minivan and the cries appeared to be coming from it.
Myself and another soldier, a twenty-year-old private, walked up
to the passenger side of the van. We looked inside, the private I
was with reeled back, began to vomit, and quickly ran away.
 WikiLeaks 289

What I saw was a small girl about four years old on the passenger
side of the bench seat. She had a severe belly wound and was
covered in glass.”
McCord also pulled a seven-year-old child out of the van that
he thought was dead at first glance. He ran toward the army truck
that would transport the little girl to the hospital, praying for it not
to take off. The boy fainted in his arms. He placed him as best as
he could in the truck, when the platoon leader screamed: “What
the fuck are you doing McCord? You need to quit worrying about
these fucking kids and pull security!” “Roger that, sir,” he said
immediately, and went to a rooftop to pull security.

Back at the base, alone in his room, Ethan tried to clean the child’s
blood from his uniform. He rubbed it vigorously, as if trying to
erase the images from his memory. It was impossible: the blood
had permanently stained his clothes. He was distraught. He went
to his sergeant to ask for mental health help.
Then he exposed the response of his superior in Wired, a San
Francisco magazine that focused on technological incidents in
the field of culture, economy and politics:
“I was called a pussy and that I needed to suck it up and a
lot of other horrible things. I was also told that there would be
repercussions if I were to go get mental health care.
They’re smoking you, they’re making you tired. I was told that
I needed to get the sand out of my vagina… So I just sucked it up
and tried to move on with everything. I’ve had nightmares. I was
diagnosed with chronic, severe post-traumatic stress disorder.”
His request for mental health was denied and that was when
he realized that he was part of a system he could no longer accept.
With his teammate Josh Stieber, he decided to write a letter to
the Iraqi people that was published on the site of Iraq veterans
against the war:
290 Julian Assange

To all of those who were injured or lost loved ones during the
July 2007 Baghdad shootings depicted in the “Collateral
Murder” WikiLeaks video:

We write to you, your family, and your community with

awareness that our words and actions can never restore
your losses.

We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for

14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son
from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own
children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company
but was not there that day, though he contributed to your
pain, and the pain of your community on many other
occasions.

There is no bringing back all that was lost. What we seek is

to learn from our mistakes and do everything we can to tell
others of our experiences and how the people of the United
States need to realize what we have done and are doing
to you and the people of your country. We humbly ask you
what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused.

[...]

We have asked our fellow veterans and service-members,

as well as civilians both in the United States and abroad,
to sign in support of this letter, and to offer their names as
a testimony to our common humanity, to distance ourselves
from the destructive policies of our nation’s leaders, and to
extend our hands to you.
 WikiLeaks 291

With such pain, friendship might be too much to ask.  Please

accept our apology, our sorrow, our care, and our dedication
to change from the inside out.

[…]

Solemnly and Sincerely,

Josh Stieber, former specialist, U.S. Army

Ethan McCord, former specialist, U.S. Army

Manning supplied the images of this tragedy to WikiLeaks in

February 2010. On May 25, he kept chatting with his new friend
Adrian:

Manning: Event occurs in 2007, I watch video in 2009

with no context, do research, forward information to
group of FOI activists, more research occurs, video
is released in 2010, those involved come forward to
discuss event, I witness those involved coming forward
to discuss publicly, even add them as friends on FB…
without them knowing who I am.

Manning: They touch my life, I touch their life, they

touch my life again… full circle

While Bradley Manning poured out his feelings, Adrian Lamo

satisfied his curiosity. Bradley trusted him and answered:
Lamo: *random* are you concerned about CID
(*Criminal Investigation Department) looking into
your Wiki stuff? I was always paranoid.
292 Julian Assange

Manning: CID has no open investigation. State

Department will be uber-pissed… but I don’t think
they’re capable of tracing everything… so, it was
publicly damaging, but didn’t increase attacks or
rhetoric…
Lamo: Why does your job afford you access? Except
for the UN
Manning: Because I have a workstation
Manning: I had two computers… one connected to
SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network,
where the cables are) the other to JWICS (Joint
Worldwide Intelligence Communications System used
by USDOD & US Dpt of State to transmit classified
info)…
Lamo: So you have these stored now?
Maninng: No, they’re government laptops
Manning: They’ve been zero-filled
Manning: Because of the pullout
Manning: Evidence was destroyed… by the system
itself
Manning: They were stored on a centralized server…
Lamo: What’s your endgame plan, then?
Manning: hopefully worldwide discussion, debates,
and reforms
Manning: If not… than [sic] we’re doomed
Manning: I will officially give up on the society we
live in if nothing happens
Manning: the reaction to the video gave me immense
hope
Manning: I want people to see the truth… regardless
of who they are… because without information, you
cannot make informed decisions as a public
 WikiLeaks 293

Manning: If I knew then, what I knew now… kind of

thing…
Manning: Or maybe I’m just young, naive, and
stupid…

Still on May 25, Manning came back to the fact that would
later push him to supply images to WikiLeaks:

Manning: Was watching fifteen detainees taken by

the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing “anti-Iraqi
literature”… the Iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate
with US forces, so I was instructed to investigate the
matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how
significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had
printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki… I had
an interpreter read it for me… and when I found out that
it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the
money go?” and following the corruption trail within
the PM’s cabinet… I immediately took that information
and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on…
he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut
up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding
*MORE* detainees…
Manning: Everything started slipping after that… I
saw things differently
Manning: I had always questioned the way things
worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that
was a point where I was a *part* of something… I was
actively involved in something that I was completely
against…
294 Julian Assange

It was with a different outlook on life that Bradley Manning

continued his work. It was very easy to get data outside the base.
Co-workers at his office would come with piles of music CDs.
You could just show up with a rewritable CD labeled ‘Lady Gaga’
for example, erase it and burn some data onto it. You wouldn’t
be searched. The door had a five-digit code, but you just needed
to knock for someone to open it. Most people sat down at their
desks to watch videos, car chases, build explosions and copy
them on CDs and DVDs.
The most difficult and most controversial part was copying
the secret data. Manning knew this, but he felt like he had no
other choice. He was emotionally bothered. Intel officers would
leave unprotected data on servers.
He was worried about possible reprisals and he “even asked
the NSA guy if he was able to find any suspicious activity coming
out of local networks... he shrugged and said ‘it’s not a priority.’”
Manning’s opinion on the security system was: “weak servers,
weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence,
inattentive signal analysis... a perfect storm.”
It was really easy for someone like him. He explained it to
Lamo: “If I were someone more malicious, I could have sold to
Russia or China and made bank.” When Lamo asked him why
he didn’t, he answered: “Because it’s public data […] I mean
the cables,” Manning specified. “It belongs in the public domain.
Information should be free.”
As for the helicopter images, at first he thought it was just
the usual, “but something struck me as odd with the van thing…
and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG (Judge Advocate
General) officer’s directory… so I looked into it… eventually
tracked down the date, and then the exact GPS co-ord… and I
was like… OK, so that’s what happened… cool… then I went to
the regular Internet… and it was still on my mind… so I typed
 WikiLeaks 295

into goog… the date, and the location… and then I see this http://
www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html”
He saw the article of The New York Times dated mid-July 2007
reporting the van explosion, with a photo to support it. The article
read: “The American military said in a statement late Thursday
that 11 people have been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians.
According to the statement, American troops were conducting a
raid when they were hit by a small-arms fire and rocket-propelled
grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and
attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the
two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.”
“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly
engaged in combat operations against hostile force,” said Lt. Col.
Scott R. Bleichwehl, a spokesman for multinational forces in
Baghdad.

Manning was still deeply bothered by this article, and so he

decided to send the images he had to WikiLeaks. Manning
eventually got rid of any original ‘material’: the images of the
helicopter attack in Baghdad, diplomatic cables, information
on prisoner detention in Guantanamo as well as the images of a
raid in Afghanistan referring to a military attack that killed one
hundred forty civilians.
What pushed Manning to tell all to Adrian Lamo? He
felt alone. He saw information go by that he couldn’t keep to
himself and his action, which could be judged as treason by the
government, was also a heavy burden to bear.
Lamo already knew a lot about Manning’s plans and how he
felt about it all. But after chatting for two days, had he already
contacted the authorities?
Lamo was very quickly interested in Manning’s relationship
with Assange. The young soldier told him that it took him four
296 Julian Assange

months to figure out that the person he was sharing information

with was Julian himself. His contact didn’t give up much about
himself. He said that he was being watched by a team of North
European diplomats. He was trying to figure out who was following
him and why. Manning asked him about this. His followers were
trying to discover how he had received a diplomatic telegram from
Reykjavik, which cost Icelandic ambassador to the United States
his position. It was in fact the first leak-test sent by Manning.

Adrian Lamo’s questions were more specific on May 25. He asked

Manning whether he knew about the army CID investigating
WikiLeaks. He responded that he didn’t have any evidence of
his activities and that everything was erased from his computer.
Lamo tried again to find out how Assange and the WikiLeaks
members communicated with the young soldier. After a lot of
questions, Manning ended up writing: “He *might* use the ccc.
dejabber server... but you didn’t heard that from me.”
Manning put the seriousness of his act in perspective: he
reported that journalist and author David Finkel had already been
in possession of the images delivered to Assange. David Finkel,
Pulitzer Prize winner in 2006 for his work at The Washington
Post, wrote about his stay in Baghdad for several months with the
battalion known as 2-16 Rangers in his book The Good Soldiers.
The 2-16 Rangers was the company Ethan McCord and Josh
Stieber were part of to stabilize a portion of the Iraqi capital.
Protecting his sources, David Finkel still hasn’t confirmed or
denied this statement.

The last sentences exchanged by the two men on May 25, 2010

were eloquent. Manning talked about himself. Lamo had a clear
idea of WikiLeaks:
Manning: I couldn’t be a spy…
 WikiLeaks 297

Manning: Spies don’t post things up for the world to

see
Lamo: Why? WikiLeaks would be the perfect cover
Lamo: They post what’s not useful
Lamo: And keep the rest

Adrian Lamo was a well-known hacker in the United States

where they called him the ‘homeless hacker.’ He would roam the
country sleeping at friends’ places, in cheap hotels or squatting
in abandoned buildings. He did most of his hacking from cyber
cafés. He gained his reputation by breaking into several high-
profile computer networks, including those of The New York
Times, Yahoo, Microsoft and the Bank of America.
In 2004, he pled guilty to charges made against him. He
was ordered to pay 65,000 dollars and assigned to live with his
parents for six months, coupled with two years of probation. He
was twenty-three years old at the time.

Following an article published on the Cryptome site, Lamo

contacted the authorities on May 22. As of this date, he was
working together with federal authorities to get Manning. Lamo
explained a few days later: “Informing on him was a very hard
decision for me, one of the hardest I have ever made. I was also
arrested [around] his age, so I know what it’s like”
At the same time, he was in contact with a Wired journalist
to whom he offered an exclusive on his chats, with the condition
that he would have to give the green light on the article about
him. Without Lamo and the journalist knowing it, Manning was
called out on May 26 2010.

At the start of July, Manning was accused of eight criminal

counts and four violations of the military code. He was accused
298 Julian Assange

of the ‘transfer of confidential data on his computer and the

download of the electronic program not allowed on a classified
secret information system’ and illegally obtaining ‘more than
150,000 diplomatic cables.’ If he is to be found guilty, he would
be looking at fifty-two years in jail.

In the following months, the American government tried to prove

that there had in fact been a link between Bradley Manning and
Julian Assange. In the mean time, the newspapers sifted through
the diplomatic cables, while the media extensively discussed
the American government’s embarrassment, and while other
countries laid low. The United States had Manning, and in the
name of world diplomacy, it wanted to use him to bring down
Julian Assange. Manning had become the Wikileaks’ collateral
damage.
On July 5 2010, the young man was incarcerated in Kuwait,
in the Theater Field Confinement Facility, a short-term detention
center. On July 29, he was transferred to the military base in
Quantico, Virginia.

Julian publicly maintained that WikiLeaks couldn’t know if the

source of the leaked documents that were received in those past
months came from Bradley Manning. “Our technology means
we don’t know who is submitting us materials. But the name
Bradley Manning was first heard by us when we read an article
about his arrest in Wired magazine,” Julian said. He qualified the
allegations that WikiLeaks conspired with Manning as nonsense.
Some media wrote that Assange and WikiLeaks left the young
twenty-three-year-old soldier to his own devices without giving
him any help for his defense while Assange’s defense costs
hundreds of thousands of euro, dollars or pounds. Help would
be to recognize the link between the two and guarantee a court
martial for the boy-faced soldier.
 WikiLeaks 299

Manning is currently suffering isolation twenty-three hours a day in

a cell. The prisoner was judged potentially suicidal, which helped
reinforce and exaggerate his detention conditions. David House,
researcher at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is one
of the rare persons to have met him since he was incarcerated
at Quantico. He sounded the alarm in mid-January 2011, after
having visited the prisoner again, accompanied by American
blogger and producer Jane Hamsher.

Bradley Manning was placed on suicide watch in order to

reinforce his detention conditions. Commander James Averhart,
who has authority over his conditions, admitted his mistake on
January 25 2011.
By putting him on suicide watch, Manning is fed
antidepressants, has to strip down to his underwear at night and
give his clothes to the guards before sleeping under an anti-
suicide blanket. He explained to David House that it was “similar
in weight and heft to lead aprons used in X-ray laboratories, and
similar in texture to coarse and stiff carpet.” Manning “expressed
concern that he had to lie very still at night to avoid receiving
carpet burns.”
Manning explained that he hasn’t seen daylight for four
weeks, and that he only had contact with other people a few
hours on the weekend. Jane Hamsher reported that the prisoner
“was beginning to exhibit some of the damaging symptoms
of prolonged isolation, including emotional withdrawal and
impaired cognitive function. He seemed slow to respond when
they spoke, and could not process information as quickly as he
normally did.”
This confinement may last until the end of the investigation
by authorities. Given the treatment inflicted to the soldier, Julian
declared that Manning could be considered a political prisoner.
300 Julian Assange

Despite the army’s efforts, no link has yet been found between
Assange and Manning.
At the start of 2011 Manning was called a victim in the war
on truth, while Julian continues his fight, like a knight in shining
armor on a crusade for freedom.
 28

An Unexpected Partnership36

Brussels, Thursday, January 13 2011: in a café down the

street from the European Parliament – meeting with Ian Traynor,
journalist and correspondent in Brussels for the Guardian.

Ian Traynor: Assange came here to attend a session

the European Parliament is holding a propos freedom
of expression. He was talking about the new Icelandic
legislation. Birgitta Jónsdóttir also came and they were
staying at Leopold. I went because I knew about the
Manning case, and I knew about Assange and I knew
about WikiLeaks. I thought it was interesting, so I
went to the there to listen to the session, organized by a
parliamentarian.

Élise: Yes, Dutch Parliamentarian Marietje Schaake.

Ian Traynor: Yes. I went to listen and I got to speaking

to them. But I already knew that Assange was coming

36 Chapters 28 to 30 inspired by
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/nytimes-and-assange/
New York Times: Assange Was a Source, Not Media Partner
By Kim Zetter
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/magazine/30Wikileaks-t.html
« Dealing With Assange and the Wikileaks Secrets »
By Bill Keller
302 Julian Assange

from Nick Davies who called me from London and told

me that it would be useful to talk to that guy. I wrote
the story that day. I interviewed him briefly. It was the
first time he appeared in public since Manning had been
arrested. He was just back from Iceland and stayed a
few days at the Leopold. Then I spoke to him. I told him
that we could be interested in collaborating.

Élise: So it was your initiative then.

Ian Traynor: To a degree, yes. He said he was

interested, so we took it from there. I informed my
bosses in London and the Editor-in-chief decided that
he wanted to proceed with it. So the next day, he sent
Davies here, and we both went to meet Assange and
have a longer conversation with him. We met him again
at the Leopold.

Monday, June 21 2010 in Brussels, headquarters of the European

Parliament.
June is usually a hot, sunny and dry month. That day, Julian
was in Brussels to speak at the conference ‘(Self) Censorship New
Challenges for Freedom of Expression in Europe’. He was invited
by German Parliamentarian Alexander Graf Lambsdorff and
Dutch Parliamentarian Marietje Schaake of the Group Alliance
of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. The other speakers that
day were Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Lars Vilks, Naema Tahir, Flemming
Rose and Alastair Mullis. The theme was “What happens in
Europe doesn’t just affect Europe. It’s used as justification for
even more extreme forms of abuse around the rest of the world.”
In this panel discussion, Swedish artist Lars Vilks, and Dutch
author Naema Tahir shared their personal experiences with
freedom of expression in Europe. Professor Alastair Mullis, UK
 WikiLeaks 303

Defamation Law expert, Julian Assange and Birgitta Jónsdóttir

spoke on the legal and political questions concerning freedom
of expression.

For the second part of the seminar, Birgitta explained the idea
behind the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative as well as the
collective and legal process that convinced Parliament to adopt
it. Julian described how abandoned alliances that guaranteed
the protection of values from the European enlightenment had
been disappearing since the end of the Cold War. He gave some
examples of British libel law cases that he called “realization of
Orwellian horrors” just like in the novel 1984, and explained how
secret state censorship blacklists, politically framed to combat
child pornography, are used to gag dissident voices.

Julian appeared for the first time in public since Manning was
arrested, and was just back from Iceland. He came in relaxed. He
sat down and adjusted the microphone, which was giving him
some trouble. He turned this incident into an introduction, joking
in order to ease the tension. He then slipped into his intervention.
In the hall of the European Parliament, among others, there were
Ian Traynor and Christian Engström, European Parliamentarian
of the Pirate Party and his assistant, Henrik Alexandersson.
Julian was very comfortable. He spoke with poise, arms
crossed and placed on the desk, sitting behind the console to the
right of Lambsdorff. Having flown in straight from the North, he
was still wearing a thick wool sweater with gray patterns.

Here’s a telegraphic style overview of his intervention:

Julian introduced his speech with a summary of his classic
subjects: IMMI, the Kaupthing Bank affair and the injunction of
the RUV in Iceland.
304 Julian Assange

He continued with a small allegory on authoritarianism

defeated by a historic alliance between liberals and democrats,
an alliance that no longer exists today. However, authoritarianism
still exists on the Internet.
Later, he explained how the Guardian was obliged to delete
articles from its archives because of a legal European loophole.
He pointed out the similarities it had to Orwell’s novel 1984
in which The Ministry of Truth changes the archives to meet its
needs. In fact, all you have to do is hire a big prestigious London
law firm to delete a part of its journalistic heritage. He explained
that during the manipulation of newspapers’ archives, the removal
as such is not clearly specified, but a ‘file not found’-type error
appears to quell any curiosity.
A collision between two ships in the night can inflect the
state of the sea. An interaction between states on the Internet can
create backwash in other states. If laws are created to regulate
the Internet, and the activity thereupon, and avoid this turmoil, it
will block the communication of newspapers with their readers,
parties with their partisans, as all exchanges will go through the
Internet.
In Australia, one of the first leaks from WikiLeaks published
the list of sites blocked by a national firewall. The justification
was to block pedophile sites, but in fact, there was only thirty-two
per cent of said sites, the rest were sites deemed inappropriate by
the government itself.
Parallel relative to the laws: the ones applied in Africa come
from the Commonwealth; every country has an influence on the
rest of the world.
“Can we do in Europe what we did in Iceland?” Julian doubted
it, but he asked the audience anyway.
 WikiLeaks 305

Brussels. Tuesday, January11 2011: European Parliament

– meeting with Christian Engström and his assistant Henrik
Alexandersson.
Christian: At the end of the conference, lots of people
wanted to talk to Julian, and I wanted to talk to him
as well. We wanted to tell him that the Swedish Pirate
Party was prepared to offer assistance to WikiLeaks,
technical assistance with services, etc. I mentioned that
very briefly, but then the journalist held an interview
with the two of us. That was really all there was time
for, because then afterward there was a queue of other
journalists who wanted to talk to Assange. […] I met
him briefly. I met other activists for freedom on the
Internet and the names you’ve heard about, they’re all
very special people. You have to be really focused in
order to become a global icon, of course.

Henrik: I would say he doesn’t really care if people

get upset when he talks. This conference, for instance,
how did he put it? Yes, that during the Cold War,
the conservatives and the liberals had a common
goal but now after the Soviet and the Communist
was gone it’s becoming more and more obvious
that the conservatives… How did he put it? That
there are different goals between the liberals and the
conservatives. The conservatives are a bit more ‘big-
business’ oriented, corporatist. Assange kind of warned
the liberals… That, of course, didn’t go down very well
with everyone. But he doesn’t blink. He says those
things and either takes it or leaves it. […] I admire
his style very much, because in some situations there
306 Julian Assange

are just time for so much bullshit and people will give
you as much bullshit as you can take. So it’s always
refreshing when someone just cuts to the core. If people
get annoyed, that’s their problem. Information should
be judged from the content and people should be judged
by what they are doing. Niceties are always nice, but
action is as important and I think Assange is a very
action-orientated individual.

Back to Monday, June 21 2010, back in the United Kingdom.

Nick Davies works in the UK. He knew that Julian was in
Brussels for this seminar. The next day he was taking the Eurostar
high-speed train from London to Brussels and within two hours
he would be meeting up with his colleague, Ian Traynor.
Nick Davies was a well-known investigative journalist in
the United Kingdom. He has been in the business since 1976,
as a freelancer, working regularly as a correspondent for The
Guardian. He was their star journalist. He was also an author and
documentary maker for television. He has been named Journalist
of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year for
his investigations on crime, drugs, poverty and other social ills.
Hundreds of journalists attend his master classes on investigative
techniques. He has also won a European Journalism Award for
his work on the politics of drugs. He has published four books,
including White Lies about a legal error based on racism in Texas
and Dark Heart on poverty in Great Britain. His latest book,
Flat Earth News is controversial. It exposes lies, distortion and
propaganda in news that is related by and through the media.
In November 2009, the University of Westminster made him an
honorary fellow for service to journalism.
 WikiLeaks 307

At the beginning of June 2010, Davies heard of the Pentagon

leaks that WikiLeaks had in their possession. At the same time,
he had also read an article in The Guardian on Bradley Manning’s
arrest. The star journalist was determined to find Julian. He then
contacted the Number One of the association to see what could
be published, but to no avail. The rumor was that Julian had
been arrested or attacked. He couldn’t be found. Finally, one of
Julian’s friends tipped Davies about his intervention in Brussels
at the European Parliament.
Nick called his colleague Ian Traynor, a political journalist
and correspondent of The Guardian in Brussels for four years.
Ian Traynor remained very humble and discreet about his
intervention that day. Following his colleague’s call, he went to
the conference of the European Parliament to listen to Julian and
speak to him. He found out that the founder of WikiLeaks had
two million documents.

On Tuesday, June 22 2010, Nick Davies arrived at Brussels-South

train station. He took a taxi that drove him directly to the Hotel
Leopold, a four-star hotel just down the street from the European
Parliament where the conference hosts were staying.
Davies arrived with a strange proposal in his suitcase. On the
train taking him to Brussels, he had already talked to Julian on the
phone. He claimed that the material WikiLeaks had possession
of would have more of an impact if it were well-researched and
made into stories by major players of the mainstream press.
It was around 2 p.m. Julian Assange, Nick Davies and Ian
Traynor were at the Leopold. The hotel was practically empty and
everything was calm at the beginning of the afternoon. They set
up in the Italian garden. The place was empty. Their conversation
lasted for six hours.
308 Julian Assange

Ian Traynor: I drank coffee. I think he had a soda. He

was very quiet; speaks very quietly. He’s quite difficult
to understand. He’s got an Australian accent and he
speaks... It’s difficult. He seems very... disorganized,
but he is, in fact, very organized. Very determined,
focused on his goal. Very intelligent. Very quick. Very
well informed and always careful. Very cautious.
Davies suggested to Julian that The Guardian and
The New York Times collaborate on the material. He
mentioned that even though British law could make
it easy for authorities to get a court order to stop The
Guardian from revealing secret documents, American
law would make it next to impossible for any authority
to shut down The New York Times.

Ian Traynor: At that stage, it was only the Afghan and

then the Iraqi stuff. It was not way before all the rest.
We knew that he had more material, but we didn’t know
what, so we started with the Afghan material and he
wanted other newspapers involved. I suggested Der
Spiegel because I speak German and used to work there.
It’s the biggest country, and it’s the Afghan material the
Germans have a big problem in Afghanistan with their
public opinion. And Der Spiegel is a good newspaper. It
has lots of money and lots of resources. In fact, it’s the
only paper in Germany that does investigative reporting.

At the end of the afternoon, the men were still at the table at the
Leopold, on the brightly lit half-open terrace under a blue sky.
The glass roof above their heads was entirely open and let in
lots of sunlight. Davies and Assange launched the premises of
 WikiLeaks 309

their collaboration. Traynor observed and listened. The two men

prepared a secret password and wrote it down on a paper napkin.

Nick Davies explained: “Julian hooked together various words in

the commercial logo on the napkin to create one long password.
He also wrote the letters GPG in the top left-hand corner – that’s
some kind of encryption program. The technical people at The
Guardian needed to know that in order to decrypt the material. I
won’t tell you the exact password, because Julian asked me not
to, in case it assisted any police inquiry.”

Élise: Did Julian talk about anything else during this

discussion?

Ian Traynor: Just this matter and politics in general,

and the United States.

Élise: What did he say about America?

Ian Traynor: He speaks generally about politics,

but he’s discussing material and it was all related to
America that we were dealing with. It was Afghanistan.
It was Iraq. It was American diplomacy. It was all to do
with America. He wanted The New York Times involved
because he felt that would give him protection in
America, like an insurance policy. If he just did it with
foreign media then it might be easier for the Americans
to prosecute him for foreign espionage, but if you give
it to The New York Times, they can’t.
310 Julian Assange

At the beginning of the evening, a gentlemen’s agreement was

concluded: Davies convinced the Number One of WikiLeaks that
sharing raw data with a news organization would increase the
leaks’ visibility more than just publishing them on the WikiLeaks
site.
In London, Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian
phoned Bill Keller of The New York Times and asked him
mysteriously if he knew how to arrange a secure communication.
“Not really,” he admitted. He explained that his paper didn’t have
encrypted phone lines. Keller then tried to speak to Rusbridger in
an indirect, awkward way:
“In a roundabout way, he laid out an unusual
proposition: an organization called WikiLeaks, a
secretive cadre of anti-secrecy vigilantes, had come into
possession of a substantial amount of classified United
States government communications. WikiLeaks’s leader,
Julian Assange, an eccentric former computer hacker
of Australian birth and no fixed residence, offered
The Guardian half a million military dispatches from
the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might
be more after that, including an immense bundle of
confidential diplomatic cables. The Guardian suggested
— to increase the impact as well as to share the labor
of handling such a trove — that The New York Times
be invited to share this exclusive bounty. The source
agreed. Was I interested? I was interested.”

Two days later, in London, the team of The Guardian downloaded

the first installment of U.S. government secrets, which consisted
of more than 90,000 field reports produced by U.S. military units
fighting in Afghanistan from the WikiLeaks site. This site would
 WikiLeaks 311

only exist for a few hours, enough time to download documents

before disappearing into cyberspace.
American journalist Eric Schmitt of The New York Times in
Washington hopped on a plane and flew to London to see the
material for himself. Keller admitted:
“His main assignment is to get a sense of the material.
Was it genuine? Was it of public interest? […] Schmitt
would also meet the WikiLeaks leader, who was known
to a few Guardian journalists but not to us. Schmitt’s
first call back to The Times was encouraging. There
was no question in his mind that the Afghanistan
dispatches were genuine. They were fascinating – a
diary of a troubled war from the ground up. And there
were intimations of more to come, especially classified
cables from the entire constellation of American
diplomatic outposts. WikiLeaks was holding those back
for now, presumably to see how this venture with the
establishment media worked out.”
The material was in fact authentic. It was decided then, The
New York Times was on board. Julian, flexing his proprietary
rights, contacted Marcel Rosenbach, Editor-in-chief of German
publication Der Spiegel. Like Davies predicted, the leaks would
have an enormous impact. Here is what he said in the Huffington
Post, an American news site published exclusively online, on
December 30 2010:

“I was the journalist who took it on himself back in June

to track down Julian Assange and to persuade him not
to post his latest collection of secrets on the WikiLeaks
website but to hand them over to The Guardian and other
news organizations. The publication of the Afghan and
312 Julian Assange

Iraqi war logs and then the diplomatic cables all flowed
from that initiative. I did that because I think journalists
should tell the truth about important things without
being frightened, for example, by the government of the
most powerful state on the planet.”
 29

Revolution

The world of media is in the middle of a massive revolution!

WikiLeaks allied itself with three major names in journalism:
Britain’s Guardian, America’s New York Times and Germany’s
Der Spiegel, and they made an agreement vis-a-vis the biggest
document leak in history. Julian Assange brought together these
three heavy weights of the international press to give them the
exclusive on his confidential documents.
Julian compared this leak – the most important in recent
military history – to “opening the Stasi archives.” The Stasi
was the official state security service of the German Democratic
Republic, regarded as one of the most repressive secret police in
the world.
In July 2010, with the 92,000 reports received on the War in
Afghanistan, the three newspapers were faced with a dilemma:
publish without checking the origin of these reports (as they would
have done had they found them on their own) or let WikiLeaks
release the documents on their site. In the end, they decided to
play along. WikiLeaks’ interest was clear: Julian surrounded
himself with these three big players in order to create a buzz.

WikiLeaks’ new partners have the human means to verify all

the data and even give them some added value. Nick Davies
explained to the French Télérama: “Our competencies in data
314 Julian Assange

journalism have been essential in properly handling the subject.

I think the reputation of honesty and independence of The
Guardian is what helped. We chose the information we felt was
the most interesting after verification. Moreover, it can’t cause
injury to anyone posted in Afghanistan.”
But according to Julian, this big media group created a
magnetic effect for the site, which received significantly more
submissions after the broadcast of Collateral Murder.
From the onset, this association of digital media experts
and traditional journalists turned out to be more efficient than
a normal editorial board. Nick Davies agrees: “There are good
points for both methods. Without WikiLeaks, we wouldn’t have
any material. Without traditional news outlets, WikiLeaks could
not make sense of its information and offer it a platform that
would attract enough attention. Every one of us needs the other
and everyone sees the benefits of working together.”

The alliance started in July 2010 and continued over the next few
months. From July to November, an impressive number of secret
documents were revealed. On July 25, the first phase kicked off
with strategically leaking 92,000 confidential reports from the
U.S. army on the war in Afghanistan, the Afghanistan War Logs.
The three media players presented the results of their respective
investigations of the documents supplied by WikiLeaks, but they
didn’t work the same way: The Guardian chose cartography to
highlight the most important facts, The New York Times opted to
write a very long article, stating the entirety of the main points,
while Der Spiegel went with a slideshow.

London – Tuesday, January 18 2011. Kings Place, 90 York Way:

Meeting with Ian Katz.
 WikiLeaks 315

Ian Katz is the Deputy Editor of the Guardian, which he

joined in 1990. He also worked as a reporter for said newspaper.

Ian Katz: There were lots of small train crashes, one could
say. On the day before publication, Der Spiegel accidentally
distributed about forty or fifty copies to Basel, and they went on
sale at the Basel train station. A local radio station bought one and
started reading it on air, and then a freelance journalist got one and
started Tweeting it. So we were all sitting here watching Twitter
as he was tweeting through Der Spiegel magazine thinking, ‘Do
we need to publish early? Do we need to bring it forward?’
We were having conference calls every hour saying, ‘He’s
got a hundred followers on Twitter now. Is anyone else following
him?’ All of us were obsessively reading the German Twitter-
sphere, and in the end, we had to publish slightly early because
of that. We had a number of quite tricky things around documents
that would pop up somewhere else because some of the cables
found their way into the public domain through different routes.
WikiLeaks published one or two themselves. A cable we
wanted to publish the next day has just popped up and we would
have to suddenly publish now. Then we’d have a frantic ringing
round. We’d have The New York Times saying: ‘No, you can’t do
that now because we’re doing it tomorrow,’ and Le Monde would
say: ‘We have to do it now because it’s out there.’
So we had a few of those incidents, but nothing huge. One of
the trickiest aspects of the collaboration was that, as you know, we
wrote all the cables to protect sources very carefully, so we had a
very complex process where each reporter who was working on a
story wrote their own cables. Then it went through a person who
was just looking at cables, a senior production editor here, and he
did it again.
316 Julian Assange

Then he spoke with his opposite members at the other papers

such as Der Spiegel and The New York Times to say: ‘How are
you writing this document? We’re taking this, this and this out.’
Then they would compare notes and settle on a final version,
which we would give to WikiLeaks, which they would publish.
That was an unbelievably labor-intensive process.
You can imagine. We did seven hundred seventy documents.
The New York Times did a hundred and something. Each paper
did several hundred, and each one of those, they had a discussion
about. It was very labor intensive, but broadly, I think that was
quite successful in that it meant we couldn’t slip anything out that
was dangerous.
I just had that sort of story up till publication, really, and then
you would have seen kind of what happened next in terms of what
we all printed. We had a grid for two weeks when we started and
I think we produced a grid for another—I’m trying to remember
now. No, we didn’t produce a grid for another week, but what we
agreed after the two weeks was that we would notify each other
forty-eight hours before publication.
So if we found a story that we wanted to run, we would say
that we were planning on running it on Thursday. Then if any of
the others were interested we would share the cable information.
In the third week, we all went in slightly different directions, but
the agreement was still in place.

Élise: Was this kind of agreement set up with lawyers?

Ian: No.

Élise: No?
 WikiLeaks 317

Ian: I mean- the agreement with Assange was handled

by his lawyer.

Élise: Who had the contact with Assange at The

Guardian?

Ian: Initially Nick [Davies], then David [Leigh,

investigations executive editor of The Guardian] and
then me.

Élise: So you still talk to him sometimes?

Ian: In an encrypted chatroom.

Élise: No phone contact?

Ian: As you know, he doesn’t take phone calls, but you

can call some people that have some sort of contact
with WikiLeaks people.

Élise: In Sweden, in Iceland or here?

Ian: Well, Kristinn, you can get on the phone.

Élise: Kristinn Hrafnsson? So he’s involved?

Ian: Yes, he was, particularly when Julian was in jail.

We were dealing with three or four different people.

Élise: Who else?

318 Julian Assange

Ian: I’m reluctant to identify them because I think

they may not wish to be identified, but there were two
younger volunteers at WikiLeaks who were looking
after the production process. So there was a system that
they built where we uploaded our redacted documents
and then automatically published them onto WikiLeaks,
and that’s how we ensured that the versions they used
were the versions that we had passed.
Obviously, the people who ran that process we had to
talk to the whole time to say, ‘Ignore that version. We’re
sending a new version,’ and there’s another young
journalist there who we talked to, plus Stephens [Mark
Stephens, Assange’s British lawyer]. There were four or
five people that we were talking to. Obviously, Assange
himself was out of the picture for quite a while.

Élise: Did Assange come here? How many times?

Ian: Well, he came to two big meetings with the partners

and he was in and out of the office quite a bit over the
last year, four or five times.

Élise: Just by himself or with someone else?

Ian: It depends. For these big meetings—the one

meeting that Sarah Ellison wrote about, he came with his
lawyers and his sort of lieutenant, Kristinn. Other times
he came by himself. It was a very relaxed collaboration
really.

Élise: Could you talk to me about him, the man?

 WikiLeaks 319

Ian: He’s a very charismatic figure. He does have a way

of sort of very quietly becoming the center of attention
in the room. He’s a very quiet, magnetic presence.
He is clearly highly intelligent but quite emotionally
unintelligent. I think he doesn’t always read situations
brilliantly. His analytical mind is extraordinary. He’s
very sharp.
You feel like you’re sitting with a chess player. He’s
three moves ahead and very good at gaming a situation
and trying to work out where he’s trying to end up. He’s
quite thin-skinned. He doesn’t deal with criticism well.
He tends to be sort of slightly paranoid about what lies
behind things, which may be completely innocent, but
he’s a very admirable figure in many ways.
He is not remotely materialistic. He has no possessions
that I know of at all beyond a few laptops. He barely
owns any clothes. He is really motivated by getting his
material out there and through most of our conversations
that was the primary drive for him, how best to get this
material into the public domain and make the most
impact with it. Not just dumping it, but getting it noticed.

Élise: Did you talk about other things?

Ian: I don’t think he’s ever asked me anything. He’s not

a great question asker. He is very focused. You feel he’s
absolutely sort of laser-like.
He is a monomaniac in that sense. I think he sees an
organization like The Guardian and asks very much in
terms of what use we are to him and how we can suit
his grander purpose.
320 Julian Assange

The partnership continued in October 2010, with a second wave.

This time WikiLeaks and its British, American and German
partners revealed secret documents on the war in Iraq: the Iraq
War Logs, which began to leak on October 22 of the same year.
The big media buzz started in November. After having
experimented with their alliance and after the first two deliveries,
Julian dealt a big blow: 250,000 American diplomatic cables.
Operation ‘Cablegate’ was launched on November 28 2010 and
it made a lot of noise.
At that moment WikiLeaks’ leader wanted to expand their
impact. “He wanted something bigger with more options,” Ian
Traynor said. French daily Le Monde and Spanish magazine El
País joined in.
The alliance, now with five partners, exposed 250,000 secret
documents from American embassies, revealing the underside of
American diplomacy.
While the first leaks on Afghanistan contained few significant
revelations and those from Iraq mostly focused on exactions
committed between different Iraqi factions, the third and final hit
would leave permanent traces.
Since May of 2010 Washington has been worried. Strengthened
by the actions of five  partners, WikiLeaks dropped a bomb by
revealing information concerning Iran, terrorism, Israel and
Guantanamo, among others. The viewpoint of the United States
was partially revealed, and chaos ensued on the international
scene. Diplomats had probably realized that they could no
longer do their jobs the same way anymore. The White House
responded immediately by condemning the release as a ‘reckless
and dangerous act,’ risking lives of thousands of diplomats and
officials and endangering its relationship with friends and allies.
 WikiLeaks 321

Bryan Whitman, spokesperson for the Pentagon, said that

the Department of Defense had taken a series of measures to
stop these kinds of incidents from happening in the future. The
Pentagon condemned these reckless releases and announced a
strengthening of network security of secret communications of
the U.S. army.
The five newspapers “exchanged a lot of information, analyses
and expertise,” said Sylvie Kauffmann, Executive Editor of Le
Monde.
One hundred twenty-five people of the five editorial boards
worked inconspicuously day and night for several weeks. The
publication of the memos started on Sunday night, November 28
2010 but due to the sheer amount of information, it was spread
out over several days. The partners had agreed on a publishing
schedule and how to post the memos online. They were very
careful in crossing out names or indications to protect people’s
identity.
As for the veracity of the documents, Ms. Kauffmann said:
“We have no specific reason to doubt their authenticity or believe
that some of them are false. The U.S. State Department hasn’t
denied anything and hasn’t claimed anything was false, so we
have used our judgment as well: the memos we couldn’t guarantee
the validity of their content we put aside.”
All the memos supplied were reviewed by the partners and
then put online by WikiLeaks. The organization accepted to work
this way. And for the third time, it supplied the material for free.
What could we actually learn from these leaked documents?
Randomly going through them we could learn that, for example,
Saudi donors are still the main backers of radical organizations
like Al-Qaeda. In fact, several countries in the region like Qatar
have only made minimal efforts to combat terrorism. We could
322 Julian Assange

also learn that since 2007 the United States has being trying to
verify the illegal production of nuclear fuel in Pakistan. Efforts to
check the activity of several reactors didn’t produce any results.
Pakistani officials rejected the visits of American experts, fearing
a negative reaction of the public opinion; a public that is afraid
of Washington controlling the national nuclear capacities. As for
Guantanamo, emptying the prison is not an easy job. Washington
wanted to put pressure on smaller countries so that they would
welcome some liberated prisoners. It can still be read that U.S.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates thought attacking Iran would
only delay their nuclear capabilities for one to three years.

WikiLeaks continued to gradually drop its ‘bombs,’ a “real

9/11 of world diplomacy,” according to the Iranian government.
American authorities have tried to suppress the devastating
effects of world diplomacy by contacting its strategic allies,
especially Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel, Turkey and
France.
Javier Moreno at El País said, “[N]ewspapers are not liable.”
The U.S. State Department and government acted like the
main victims of these leaks. The Spanish Editor-in-chief believes
that “the main victims are the hundreds of people who went to
the American embassies in the many countries over the past
years and who have had breakfast and dinner with diplomats and
American ambassadors. These people gave their opinions freely,
and more importantly, they fed important information to the
American diplomacy machine.”

Moreno believes that the press has a great responsibility to

citizens and society of transmitting truthful and important
information so that they are able to make educated judgments
 WikiLeaks 323

on their government’s policies. He feels that newspapers aren’t

around to hamper or avoid governments or authorities in general
to be exposed to embarrassing situations like those caused by
‘Cablegate.’

“The fruitful alliance of new media with traditional media in

operation War Logs shows that we’re not witnessing a ‘revolution
of journalism,’ which should replace a regime crushed by
another, as gurus of the ‘Internet revolution’ are claiming. It’s
a hybridization of a young growth of new journalism, a mutant
variation on the old tree trunk of traditional journalism. As Julian
Assange said himself, the War Logs are a partnership.”

In November 2010, militant libertarian news site WikiLeaks made

its way into the flow of mainstream press: Julian’s revelation of
the world’s greatest secrets is the only thing they talked about,
quoted by all major international media and picked up by every
television station in the world.
 30

A 180-Degree Turn

In an alliance, people still fight over rational problems and

compatibility issues because collaboration comes with its fair
share of trouble. During the last six months of 2010, the relations
between Julian Assange, and the five  mainstream media,
experienced some stigmatized turbulence mostly between the
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and The Guardian, and between
Julian and The New York Times.

Journalist Sarah Ellison echoed this story in the February 2011

edition of Vanity Fair. After having met many parties involved
in the matter, the American journalist revealed the story behind
the headlines. In her article, The Man Who Spilled the Secrets1,
she presented the confrontation between the traditional media
that follows established principles and journalistic ethics, and
a bunch of libertarians of a new type of information. A conflict
between two cultures, Ellison provided an outsider’s look at the

1 Inspired by
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102, par Sarah Ellison
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/jan/06/wikileaks-julian-assange,
par Roy Greenslade
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110106/ts_yblog_thecutline/
wikileaksassange-
threatened-to-sue-guardian-and-other-revelations, par Michael Calderone
 WikiLeaks 325

rocky relationship between Julian Assange and the partners of

the alliance. A detailed report revealed a few new elements of an
already strained partnership.
The first problem encountered in the alliance happened at
the start of summer 2010, when Assange went solo to approach
German magazine Der Spiegel to include it in the partnership.
During the collaboration it also appeared that the ethical
approaches of the two groups were very different. Traditional
media wanted to provide a context to what they published, while
WikiLeaks wanted a more raw approach. David Leigh witnessed
this style difference: “We were starting from: ‘Here’s a document.
How much of it shall we print? Whereas Julian’s ideology was, ‘I
shall dump everything out and then you have to try and persuade
me to cross a few things out.’ We were coming at it from opposite
poles.”
WikiLeaks colleagues had noticed that Julian became
“increasingly autocratic and dismissive.” The Guardian had
noticed it as well.
The surprises continued when Julian wanted the Bureau
of Investigative Journalism, a British not-for-profit initiative
backed by many journalists, to have access to the Iraq War Logs,
which meant a delay in publishing the cables. Leigh accepted
on condition that Julian would provide them with a new bunch
of documents; package three containing the famous U.S. cables.
Assange answered “You can have package three tonight, but you
have to give me a letter signed by The Guardian’s editor saying
you won’t publish package three until I say so.” Julian got the
letter.
Then a new episode started, the one where The Guardian
discovered that a former WikiLeaks volunteer leaked the content
of package three to Heather Brooke, an independent journalist
326 Julian Assange

and author who is currently fighting for freedom of information.

And so David Leigh invited Brooke to join the Guardian team.
He realized that by obtaining the database from a different source
than Julian, the media partners didn’t have to wait for the green
light from Julian to publish. They shared the documents with
The New York Times and Der Spiegel, and agreed to publish on
November 8, 2010.
Seven days before that date, a furious Julian went to the
London offices of The Guardian with his lawyer Mark Stephens.
Julian burst in like a storm to the office of Editor-in-chief Alan
Rusbridger, and threatened him with a lawsuit.
A meeting marathon was quickly improvised. At the table,
the main protagonists: Rusbridger and Leigh of The Guardian,
managers of Der Spiegel and along with Mark Stephens and
Julian Assange, Kristin Hrafnsson was there. The atmosphere
was tense. Ellison wrote in detail about this high-tension
meeting: “Assange was pallid and sweaty, his thin frame racked
by a cough that had been plaguing him for weeks. He was also
angry, and his message was simple: he would sue the newspaper
if it went ahead and published stories based on the quarter of a
million documents that he had handed over to the Guardian just
three months earlier...Rusbridger somehow kept all parties at the
table — a process involving a great deal of coffee followed by
a great deal of wine. Ultimately, he agreed to a further delay,
allowing Assange time to bring in other media partners, this time
France’s Le Monde and Spain’s El País.”
Le Monde and El País joined in at the end of November 2010,
to launch the third wave, the one that would make the most noise,
divulging 250,000 telegrams of the U.S. diplomacy network.
The road was rough, but Rusbridger didn’t regret any of it:
“I think given the complexity of it all, touch wood, as I speak at
 WikiLeaks 327

the moment, it is remarkable it has gone so well. Given all the

tensions that were built into it, it would have been surprising to
get out of it without some friction, but we negotiated it all quite
well.”

Ian Katz, Deputy Editor of The Guardian recalls this rough patch.

Ian: When we started this collaboration, Julian and

WikiLeaks were much more inclined to dump data
raw onto the Internet. That was his instinct and that’s
why the Afghan war logs he published caused so much
trouble about exposing informers and so on. I think
through the process, we increasingly convinced him.
I’m not taking credit for this. I think he would agree,
but it was worth mediating the material more, and that
although it didn’t allow you to get everything onto the
Internet, it allowed you to publish in a more responsible
way. That was the gist of it. She also made a big deal of
the dispute that we had back in November, but that was a
storm in a teacup. We had an eight-month collaboration
during which we had one slightly testy encounter and
we resolved it so I don’t think it was a big deal.

Élise: What’s the situation like today?

Ian: He was very angry about the piece we ran about

the Swedish sex allegations. He felt that was a sort of
smear operation but these documents fell into our lap.
They came to us. Imagine if we had not run the story
based on them, what people would say. Imagine, all our
credibility in reporting terms, would have been out the
328 Julian Assange

door, and people would say The Guardian just sat on

these documents because it was in bed with Assange
and didn’t want to upset him.
The truth was, we had to run it and we gave them every
opportunity to respond. We held onto that story for
more than four days and his lawyers gave us written
assurance that he would respond the next day if we
held one more day, one more day, one more day and he
didn’t, and they didn’t. So I feel very confident that we
behaved in the most decent way we could.
Julian, I think, feels that in a number of different ways,
we have been hostile towards him. There really is no
hostility there. It’s just that he didn’t like that piece. He
didn’t like the fact that our book title accidentally got
listed as ‘The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks.’ He didn’t
like the Vanity Fair piece but we didn’t write that. So my
view is that this has been a long and extremely stressful
marriage. Like all marriages it has its bumpy patches,
but I certainly have huge respect for him and feel that
what we did together was very significant in terms of
journalism, and I know that he does too, because we’ve
talked about it. I think this sort of stuff will come out in
the wash over time.

Élise: How is the marriage today?

Ian: It’s bumpy but I wouldn’t say it’s terminal. To a

certain extent it’s inevitable that when you communicate
mostly by encrypted chat and you just pick up things
on Twitter or you get the wrong end of the stick—
something happens and you just assume that there’s a
 WikiLeaks 329

negative motive behind it, but in fact, the broad position

of the newspaper about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks
is very positive, if you look at everything we’ve written
about him, everything we’ve said in our editorials.
We think he plays a positive role and we’re very
supportive of what he’s done, and we will continue to
support him going forward in terms of the stuff that
he’s done that relates to us. We have to draw the line
between, for instance, his Swedish legal problems and
his involvement in the U.S. cable and war log leaks, in
which we support him a hundred percent.

At the start of 2011, The Guardian was not working on any

project in particular. Like his American and German colleagues,
Ian Katz felt that their alliance was a force. They would continue
to collaborate on other projects that had nothing to do with
WikiLeaks. The possibility of organizing other operations with
him and the ‘five’ remained open, depending on what he could
provide and his will to collaborate in the future.

In the ranks of the journalists involved in these three major

operations, some saw Julian as a hero, albeit an imperfect one.
Through their involvement, they saw in him a major historical
figure that we will probably assimilate some day to a particular
moment in the history of information, a man who defined his
era and played a positive role. Julian is not without faults or
weaknesses, but they believe he meant well.
Nick Davies was the first of these journalists to conclude an
agreement with Julian. A privileged relationship was born from
their meeting in June 2010. Davies thought he had concluded a
gentlemen’s agreement, but Assange welshed on it. Frustrated,
330 Julian Assange

Nick had had enough, as he had the impression that the Australian
was playing him.
Nick Davies agreed to tell us his story:
“When we were working together, we got on well.
I liked him. I thought he was clever and brave and
interesting and funny. He came to stay at my home. The
problem that arose was that he broke the very serious
agreement, which we made in Brussels. That agreement
was for WikiLeaks to provide The Guardian and The
New York Times (and, added a little later, Der Spiegel)
with a sequence of four packages of information -
Afghan war logs, Iraq war logs, diplomatic cables,
Guantanamo Bay prisoner files. Based on that
agreement, the three news organisations invested big
resources in this project - and Julian understood very
well that they were doing that only because they had
been guaranteed by him that they would publish first.
Based on that agreement, we all did our best to keep
the project secret, in order to protect it from any kind
of American attack, and this involved lying to friends,
family and colleagues about what we were doing. Based
on that agreement, the reporters and editors who were
involved trusted each other and trusted Julian. All of us
were extremely shocked to discover that 48 hours before
we were due to publish the Afghan war logs, he went
off secretly, behind our backs, and provided the entire
Afghan database to CNN, Al Jazeera and Channel 4. He
also handed over information about some of the stories,
which we had uncovered. This was a very serious breach
of our agreement. It meant that there was a clear risk
that one of these other news organisations might break
 WikiLeaks 331

the story first - and Channel 4 certainly tried to do so.

It meant that there was a massive breach of security,
with a whole lot of new people informed of the project
at a point when it was still vulnerable to an American
attack. And, at a personal level, it was a very surprising
breach of the trust, which we had placed in him. When
we discovered that he had done this, we were all angry
and shocked. I spoke to the investigations editor at The
Guardian about how we should react. We agreed that
we had to do something to register our disapproval.
I was under pressure to leave the project so that I
could go back to working on another very big story and
so I suggested that I would cut all contact with him in
order to show our disapproval for what he had done. I
finished the work I was doing on detainee abuse in Iraq
and left the project to concentrate on other work. David
Leigh took over the role of liaising with him. Julian then
broke the agreement again, by bringing in Al Jazeera
and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism to make
TV programs of the Iraq database. David later also
cut off contact with him. I think it is fair to say that he
taught us all that we could not trust him. He seems to
have alienated the media organizations who were most
willing to support the WikiLeaks project.”

On the five editorial boards, very few journalists changed course.

Everyone preciously kept the view they shared from the beginning
of their alliance with Julian. They still adhered to the man’s views
of attacking the culture of secrecy, having information flow freely,
fighting bad governance and despotism, corruption and the abuse
of power.
332 Julian Assange

Ian: My broader sense is that he thinks that there

are lots of injustices out there: killing of civilians in
Afghanistan to spying by U.S. diplomats to Russian
corruption, which the dissemination of information will
help to combat. I think that is what fires him.

As for The New York Times, journalists there didn’t hesitate

talking about its tumultuous relationship with Julian. When
Executive Editor Bill Keller remembers the end of June 2010,
he described a hacker who looked like a homeless guy. “I was
interested. As if that were not complicated enough, the project
also entailed a source who was elusive, manipulative and volatile
(and ultimately openly hostile.)” When the journalist Eric Schmitt
arrived in London to verify the veracity of the documents, his first
impressions were promising, but the comments quickly became
less flattering regarding Julian. During their first meeting, the
Australian was disguised as a woman for fear of being followed:
“A bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-
colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up
sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles.
He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”
The three of the alliance built a database to perform targeted
searches in order to better handle the documents they received
from WikiLeaks. They used codes to communicate discretely
on how the work was progressing. Keller explained: “Assange
was always ‘the source’. The latest data drop was ‘the package.’”
For the American, the most important thing was handling
the documents. The journalistic work required making the
protagonists anonymous when necessary and scrambling the data
that could provide strategic information to American enemies in
Afghanistan. The New York Times wanted to have a maximum
of freedom in dealing with Julian who favored ‘scientific’
 WikiLeaks 333

journalism so that the audience could form an opinion based on

raw information.
The anger and the breakdown started showing between the
two parties in October 2010, as Julian was annoyed by this
journalistic freedom. The situation got worse when the American
newspaper published a profile of Bradley Manning. “He criticized
us for having psychologized Manning to the detriment of his
political awakening,” Bill Keller wrote.
The reprisals came very quickly. Julian no longer wanted
to share his information with The New York Times, but with the
Washington Post. In November, when he provided new documents
to The Guardian, the editorial board chose to continue its
collaboration with Bill Keller. Julian was furious. The breakdown
had started. “The Guardian seemed to have joined WikiLeaks’
enemy list,” said Keller. “First for having shared documents with
us, then for having taken into account the accusations of rape that
Assange is facing in Sweden.”
Finally, the Editor-in-chief of The New York Times ensured
that he was ready to oppose any attempt to prosecute Julian or
the publication of these documents in the name of the freedom of
expression: “We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as
a partner or collaborator, and I would hesitate to describe what
WikiLeaks does as journalism, but it is chilling to think that the
government could prosecute WikiLeaks for disclosing secrets.”
Six months after the start of an unheard partnership, Bill
Keller deplored that the founder of WikiLeaks had gone deeper
into exile, between delirious paranoia and high on stardom. Julian
took up position regarding this barrage of criticism. WikiLeaks
tweeted: “NYTimes does another self-serving smear. Facts
wrong, top to bottom. Dark day for U.S. journalism.”
The breakdown had been completed.
 31

Transparency

The ‘Streisand effect’ is an online phenomenon that occurs

when an attempt to hide or remove information has the unintended
result of substantially increasing its publicity.
In 2003, Barbra Streisand tried to sue photographer Kenneth
Adelman and the site pictopia.com, a site that posted an aerial
photograph of her house. Adelman stated that he had photographed
beachfront properties to document coastal erosion as part of a
project. Following the court case, public knowledge of the picture
increased substantially with more than 420,000 visits to the site
during the following month. From that point on, the phenomenon
has been called the ‘Streisand effect.’
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks had experienced the ‘Streisand
effect’ many times: with the Julius Baer Group affair, for example.
WikiLeaks leaked the names of 1,600 clients who had accounts
in the Cayman Islands. The Julius Baer Group fought back by
suing them and demanding that they remove the list from their
website. Julian charged back and pointed fingers at those who
look to encourage their secret fraud. As a result, hundreds of
people relayed the information on sites and blogs to such a point
that it became absurd to pull the documents from the WikiLeaks
site, and so the Julius Baer Group dropped its lawsuit.
 WikiLeaks 335

When Icelandic television wanted to broadcast a report on

the Kaupthing bank explaining that they had documents to prove
that the bank committed serious fraud, the station received an
injunction forbidding it to broadcast the report. Instead, the station
showed the WikiLeaks’ website address on screen. Icelanders
rushed to their computers and downloaded the compromising
documents.
Assange gave talks on different shows until November 2010,
claiming that he was being followed and threatened by the
American government. Then the Swedish police arrested
him. He cried bloody murder. Julian attracted huge amounts
of interest with the media and the general public. The impact
was at a maximum. He became a highly mediatized figure. He
skillfully eluded the Swedish affair to deliver his message on
transparency, truth, liberalization of the Internet, and his theory
of conspiratorial governance, and how he proposed exposing
them thanks to the technical means available to all. Citizens
would control governments.
His theory on truth goes right back to the question of
diplomacy missions. Since November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks has
been progressively exposing its collection of 250,000 American
diplomatic cables.
Handling problems without violence by properly leading
negotiations between people, groups or nations was diplomacy’s
job. It was mediation that required keeping in mind global human
values.
Journalists and politicians participated in creating a fear of
rhetoric to their speeches by writing two words that didn’t mix
well at all: dictatorship and transparency.
336 Julian Assange

How could transparency bring about any kind of dictatorship?

By realizing that governments often place themselves above the
law.
Secrecy was regularly presented as an essential component
of governance, which was such a widely accepted principle that
many journalists felt that WikiLeaks’ work really went too far. A
journalist’s job is in fact to reveal the hidden workings of states
and provide a view of reality that allows everyone to form his or
her own opinion.
According to Romain Bertrand: “The efficiency of secrecy
as a mode of persuasion or legitimization requires its existence
to be recognized, but its content ignored.”2 If there was one
point that WikiLeaks kept repeating, it was that secrecy exists.
Julian’s goal was to reveal its content, but in doing so, he warned
governments that they should review how they protected their
most important findings. He played the court jester who warned
the king of what his subjects thought when he didn’t even honor
his rank appropriately.
If the heads of States were the star dancers of politics,
diplomats were their ballet troop. People whispered in the
backstage of power, and Julian, like a little devil, tripped up those
who felt divinely blessed before they went on stage. And this
brought them back down to earth like the rest of us!
Here are a few diplomatic cable rumors published by
Le Monde
US diplomats said that the Russian president Dimitri
Medvedev “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman.”
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is seen as
“vain and ineffective as a modern European leader.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is “susceptible and
authoritarian.”
2 Bertrand, Romain, Sorcery and Politics. About the Occult Dimension of Public
Sphere in Indonesia, Politix, volume 14, No. 54, July 2001, pp. 43-73.
 WikiLeaks 337

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is described as “weak”

and “easily swayed.”
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe is a “crazy old
man.”
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, always travels
accompanied by a “voluptuous blonde” that he presents
as his “Ukrainian nurse.”
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia thinks that the Pakistani
President is “rotten.”
French diplomatic adviser describes Iran as a “fascist
state.”
Governor of the Bank of England thinks that his Prime
Minister is “shallow.”

All while classifying these half-secret correspondences, Anne

Appelbaum of Washington Post/Stale column said that people
fall from high above, they will be shocked, scandalized and even
horrified with such ‘assessments,’ describing their Head of States
and realizing that diplomats ‘judge’ their interlocutors in a very
common language like we judge our colleagues and superiors.
Who was actually uncomfortable with all of this? The authors
of words like these who were supposed to be the last defenders
of a chaste language and who obviously weren’t anymore? The
men targeted who had to face a carnival mirror? The truth hurts!
All it took to have these comments published was having
them appear to be shouting the truth, which matched what we
already suspected!
The leaks of WikiLeaks would probably not make a dent
in American foreign policy, but they would have an impact on
how diplomats worked in their respective embassies. In the past,
ambassadors were the best connoisseurs of the country in which
338 Julian Assange

they were posted, to such a point that they created the foreign
policy of their government toward the State they were in.
In 1946 George Kennan, American advisor and diplomat in
Moscow, formulated in his ‘long telegram’ of 8,000 words the
principle of ‘containment,’ which inspired American foreign
policy towards the Soviet Union during the entire Cold War. The
goal of containment was to maintain the Soviet zone of influence
at the level it had achieved in 1947 and stop any other States from
adopting communism.
But in an era when information circulates in real time on the
Internet, the role of embassies and diplomats was destined to
decline. At a time when the threat of WikiLeaks is defined by an
avalanche of documents classified as confidential or noforn (not
for release to foreign nationals), the risk is that State departments
can no longer have an honest conversation with their allies or a
secret negotiation with an enemy. It will become more difficult to
discuss sensitive subjects within governments.
Secrecy exists, and WikiLeaks has updated its existence.
The knowledge of its content, classified top secret will be in
an even smaller circle with the danger that the most important
elements are no longer even re-transcribed. A former American
ambassador to the Middle East explains: “If there are less and
less written reports and communication, which is catastrophic
when you want to reconstitute what happened, the consequences
will be dramatic and a situation that was already not great will
deteriorate. Everyone will start passing on information verbally
to realize in the end that it will arrive completely deformed.”

Many commentators claim that the memos revealed by WikiLeaks

didn’t contain anything new. However, amid the writing of
American diplomats published to this day, there were some
beauties.
 WikiLeaks 339

In Nigeria, oil giant Shell bragged about having “inserted staff

into all the main ministries.” Pharmaceutical firm Pfizer hired
investigators to find evidence of corruption against the attorney
general responsible for the court case of the clinical trials of the
antibiotic Trovan in Kano, Nigeria, which caused the death of
several children.
By announcing to the American ambassador in Paris his
intention to run for president, Nicolas Sarkozy evoked the need
for France to have a term “similar to that of Reagan or Thatcher.”
Socialists also marched into the offices of the embassy. Hillary
Clinton was worried about the debt the US owes to Beijing:
“How do you deal toughly with your banker?” In 2009, New
Zealand had “totally re-established” its espionage relations with
the United States, exposed in 1985 by the anti-nuclear policy of
David Lange’s government.

Here’s a worldview of newspapers following the release of the

diplomatic cables:

The Independent, Robert Fisk – London

“Vast amounts of diplomatic literature prove that
the mainstay of Washington’s Middle East policy
is alignment with Israel, that its principal aim is to
encourage the Arabs to join the American-Israeli
alliance against Iran, that the compass point of US
policy over years and years is the need to tame/bully/
crush/oppress/ ultimately destroy the power of Iran.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda – Moscow

“Even in their worst nightmares diplomats couldn’t have
imagined that the whole world would read their secret
dispatches.”
340 Julian Assange

La Repubblica – Massimo Razzi – Rome

“November 28, 2010 will be remembered as the day when:
1. Information became dependent on the Internet.
2. Citizens, for the first time, had access to these types of
secrets that until now only history dispensed when and how
it was decided by the authorities.
3. These same citizens have for the first time the opportunity
to dissect numerous recent events and discover the lies of
those in power.
4.As well, professional information was faced with a huge
challenge and the possibility of emerging victorious.”

Süddeutsche Zeitung – Nicolas Richter – Munich

“It is a betrayal of state secrets without precedent, whose
consequences are unpredictable. The Americans will see
the relations they had with many countries will suffer,
compromised by the arrogant judgment they made on their
politicians.”

Yediot Aharonot – Sever Plocker – Tel Aviv

“It is doubtful whether in recent years Israel’s foreign
and defense policy received such significant backing and
reinforcement as happened Sunday [November 28, 2010].”

Milliyet – Can Dündar – Istanbul

“And what will go through the mind of the Minister
of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoglu when he will be
confronted with Americans who consider him a “very
dangerous Islamist”? WikiLeaks allows us to realize the
dream of a “transparent state”... Thanks, WikiLeaks.”
 WikiLeaks 341

Kayhan – Teheran
“It is important to note that without the complicity of the
Western media WikiLeaks would have never been able to
attract the attention of internal public opinion and even
less being taken seriously. Why was this information also
printed in The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian,
El País and Der Spiegel if the goal wasn’t to convince
public opinion of the “danger” of Iran?”

Al-Quds Al-Arabi – Independent pan-Arab daily published

in London
“Didn’t the Saudi King think of the dramatic consequences
of an attack? These revelations will surely not please Iran...
Strong tension can be expected in the relations between
Iran and its neighbors, Saudi Arabia first.”

La Repubblica – Giuseppe D’avanzo – Rome

“Here’s a summary of what the confidential documents
reveal about American diplomacy broadcast on WikiLeaks:
it’s the Berlusconi we know, but half of the country
stubbornly refused to “recognize” because most media,
controlled or influenced by the Cavaliere, cannot or will
not divulge anything.”

The Telegraph – K.P. Nayar – Calcutta

“Over the next months, when the last telegrams published
by WikiLeaks will have been analyzed, it is quite certain
that the offices of the Indian prime minister will issue a
“top secret” message telling Indian diplomats to be prudent
when dealing with their American counterparts.”

El País – José Ignacio Torreblanca – Madrid

342 Julian Assange

“Most likely, WikiLeaks has hammered the final nail in the

coffin of classic diplomacy”.

One must realize that every newspaper emphasized their

choice and interpreted it in their own way. A new party
to the truth didn’t cover up the necessary filter of the
traditional world press, a filter subjected to government
pressure, as it was the case for the French paper Le Monde,
which censored a diplomatic cable exposing prominent
French politicians.3
The diplomatic cable revealed that in June 2009, four
days after the death of Gabonese President Omar Bongo,
a high-ranking official of the Banque des États d’Afrique
Centrale (BEAC) claimed that the Bongo clan had funneled
funds close to thirty million euro to their advantage and to
the advantage of French political parties. The scoop was
immediately picked up by El País, but not by Le Monde,
which preferred to say that the information was not sure
enough because of a comment at the end of the cable, signed
by the American ambassador to Cameroon, Janet Garvey:
“The US embassy was unable to assess the veracity of the
allegation that French politicians benefited from BEAC’s
loss.”
However, Le Monde ‘forgot’ a cable addressed to the US
Secretary of State by the American Embassy in Paris (cable
07PARIS306). This document provided an instructive
point of view of the American Embassy in Paris on French
media4, among others:

3 Source : http://www.forum-algerie.com/actualite-internationale/42140-bongo-lecable-
wikileaks-que-le-monde-ignoe.html
4 http://jacques.tourteaux.over-blog-.com/article-le-monde-oublie-un-documentwikileaks-
sur-les-medias-vous-avez-dit-bizarre-6299576.html
 WikiLeaks 343

“17. Top French journalists are often products of the same

elite schools as many French government leaders. These
journalists do not necessarily regard their primary role as
that of checking the power of government. Rather, many
see themselves more as intellectuals, preferring to analyze
events and influence readers rather than reporting events.
18. The private sector media in France - print and
broadcast - continues to be dominated by a small number
of conglomerates, and all French media are more regulated
and subjected to political and commercial pressure than
are their American counterparts. The Higher Audio-Visual
Council, created in 1989, appoints the CEOs of all French
public broadcasting channels and monitors their political
content.
19. Internet access is growing steadily in France, especially
among the younger generation, rapidly replacing traditional
media. All the important television and radio channels
in France have their own websites, as do the major print
media. Blogs are an increasingly popular method of
communication for minorities and NGOs, who use them
to express opinions they do not feel are reflected in the
traditional media.”

“Transparency and discernment are not incompatible,” wrote

Sylvie Kauffmann, Executive Director of Le Monde. Apparently,
Le Monde chose discernment and kept the transparency for
another cable. It was independent bloggers and journalists who
had accused the newspaper of omissions. And the question
came back: Could we consider what Julian did as journalism?
Is journalism the release of information that’s rawer than the
information of the mainstream press?
344 Julian Assange

Jack Shafer of Slate magazine wrote, “Assange bedevils the

journalists who work with him because he refuses to conform to
any of the roles they expect him to play. He acts like a leaking
source when it suits him. He masquerades as publisher or
newspaper syndicate when that’s advantageous. Like a PR agent,
he manipulates news organizations to maximize publicity for his
‘clients,’ or when moved to, he threatens to throw info-bombs
like an agent provocateur. He’s a wily shape-shifter who won’t
sit still, an unpredictable negotiator who is forever changing the
terms of the deal.”
Journalists were backing away from Julian despite their
continued interest in publishing stories based on the cables posted
by WikiLeaks.
The freedom of the press committee of the Overseas Press
Club of America has declared him “not one of us.” The Associated
Press, which once filed legal actions on Julian’s behalf, refused to
comment on him.
And the National Press Club in Washington, the venue less
than a year ago for a Julian Assange news conference, had decided
not to speak out on his behalf.
According to Lucy Dalglish, Executive Director of the
Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press, the problem
with speaking up for WikiLeaks is that she didn’t consider Julian
Assange to be a journalist.
She said that though Julian “has done some things that
journalists do... I would argue that what The New York Times does
is more journalism. They vet the information... They consider
outside sources. They take responsibility. They publicly identify
themselves... They do some value added. They do something
original to it.”
But Joel Simon, Executive Director of the New York-based
Committee to Protect Journalists, believes that if Julian were
prosecuted, “it would be because he is a journalist.”
 WikiLeaks 345

WikiLeaks represented an unconventional newcomer that

offered material for anyone to analyze, while circumventing
the classic flows of information with all its ethical, political and
commercial filters.
With WikiLeaks, journalists were again circumventing the
classic path of the information between the sources and the
public. WikiLeaks was wedged in between. Already pushed aside
by the new way in which the public could acquire information, by
speaking out, confronted with a double crisis of legitimacy and
confidence from the rest of the population. Journalists didn’t like
it at all.
A year ago, there was talk of a journalistic crisis (lack of
credibility, lack of means for investigative journalists, editors
fighting with industrial groups and political pressure), which saw
the creation of alternative editorial boards made up of bloggers
and freelance journalists who wanted to remain independent.
WikiLeaks showed up and gave even more means to these new
types of journalism.

“Traditional communication media are no longer alone, now

there’s the Internet.” – El País
“While journalists often stay behind doors waiting for an
official press release, this time they are at the heart of diplomatic
and political conversations.” – Le Monde

The journalism WikiLeaks proposed is called ‘data journalism.’

This mountain of data represents a rich source for investigative
journalists who could now do their jobs the way they should:
searching for nuggets of information and expose them to the
light of day. For those who claim that WikiLeaks’ articles were
not great revelations, they were at the very least confirmations.
Julian’s gift was to know how to shine the spotlight on them,
explain the power of the truth, and by doing so he advocated the
transparency of any governance.
Open secrets appeared like new ideas and suddenly touched the
greatest number. Julian shook up opinions and created buzz.

Part IX
Final Test
The past is of no importance. The present is of no
importance.
It is with the future that we have to deal.
– Oscar Wilde
 32

A Man and His Opposite

The facts recounted here are real. This is the information

that was told and shared by the different parties involved in the
sensitive Swedish affair in which everyone had their own story,
points of view and versions of the truth.
Here is one part of the truth. It’s one version… only one of the
many possibilities.5

It was almost 11 a.m., and the auditorium of LO-borgen building

in downtown Stockholm was still filling up. The hall seated forty
people and was almost full for Julian Assange’s conference.
There was so much interest in this seminar that it was broadcast
live on the Internet as well. A few people stayed standing, mainly
technicians. On the side near the open door, photographers with
their cameras were waiting. The camera was on a tripod at the

5 The Swedish affaire :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/17/julian-assange-sweden, by Nick Davies
http://coto2.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/13182/, by Guy Rundle Crikey
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/rape-investigation-into-
wikileakschief-
reopens-2068162.html, byr Jerome Taylor
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/world/europe/19assange.
html?pagewanted=1&_r=1, by John F. Burns and Ravi Somaiya
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336291/Wikileaks-Julian-Assanges-2-
night-stands-spark-worldwide-hunt.html?ito=feeds-newsxml, by Richard Pendlebury
350 Julian Assange

end of the room and was ready to film; the audience eventually
sat down and went quiet.

Julian was invited to Sweden by the Christian wing of the Social

Democratic Party, called Broderskap in Swedish. The following
days, he had various meetings with political organizations and
journalists scheduled.
He had arrived in Stockholm three days earlier on Wednesday,
August 11, 2010. While Julian was in Sweden, he stayed with the
political secretary of the Broderskap, Anna Ardin. He had never
met this young thirty-one-year-old woman: until then they had
only had phone and e-mail contact. Anna suggested he stay at
her place as she’d be out of town until the day of the conference.

Since Sweden represented an interesting territory for Julian and

WikiLeaks, Julian had to benefit from his visit in order to figure
out how to implement his organization. Sweden has many laws
that protect the media, although Iceland was the first basis of
the organization and still boasts one of WikiLeaks’ management
companies, Sunshine Press.

The day after his arrival on Thursday, August 12, 2010, Julian
had dinner with committed militants in favor of open governance,
as well as with an American journalist who wanted to discuss
his upcoming book on the Bush clan. They both ended up at the
Beirut Café. The journalist in question was American Dexter
Filkins of The New York Times. (He joined The New Yorker in
December 2010.) He’s also the author of The Forever War, which
relates his experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Anna, the lovely blonde, was supposed to come back on
Saturday, August 14, 2010, but came back a day earlier. Julian
 WikiLeaks 351

was at her place when she arrived. They talked, got acquainted
and decided that they could get along.
The young woman’s blog profile read: “Political scientist,
communicator, entrepreneur and freelance writer with specific
knowledge in faith & politics, gender issues, feminism and Latin
America.” She got her major from the Department of Government
at Uppsala University in Sweden where she did her thesis on the
Cuban Government.

That night they had dinner in a restaurant close to her place. Anna
told The Guardian how the rest of the evening went once they got
back to her apartment:
“When they sat and drank tea, Assange began caressing
her leg before breaking her necklace and ripping off
her clothes. She tried to put some clothes back on
again because things were going too fast and it felt
uncomfortable, Assange immediately took her clothes
off again. She actually didn’t want to go any further but
it was too late to say ‘stop’ to Assange when she’d gone
along with it this far, so she let Assange fully undress
her.”
Then she realized that Julian wanted to sleep with her without
using protection. She tried several times to reach for a condom,
but he stopped her by holding her arms and grabbing her legs. He
finally let her go and agreed to use a condom, but Anna didn’t feel
safe. While they had sex, the condom tore and Julian ejaculated
without pulling out. Anna was angry with him for not having
stopped at that point.

The next day at LO-borgen, Julian was the main speaker of the
War and the Role of the Media seminar. After a brief introduction
352 Julian Assange

from Peter Weiderud, President of the Broderskap, the founder of

WikiLeaks walked over to the lectern.
The president said, “The floor is yours.”
Julian settled in, adjusted the microphone and joked, “The
floor is mine, but what about the screen?”
A young woman in the first row looked at him very attentively.
She was fascinated and couldn’t stop staring at the Number One
of WikiLeaks. She was wearing a fuchsia cashmere sweater that
couldn’t go unnoticed. She seemed tall and sleek, her long, light
brown hair was in a ponytail held by a turquoise elastic and she
wore black glasses. Sofia Wilén was twenty-seven. She observed
and listened, as did the rest of the room.
Everyone was taken by Julian’s words. The president was
sitting in front of a big screen, facing the audience, with a console
separating the two men. Anna Ardin was on the left, with her
laptop in front of her. Julian was behind the lectern to the right
of Weiderud, and addressed the audience from the side. Wilén
repeatedly shot pictures of Julian with her camera during the
entire conference, which lasted an hour and a half.

A few weeks prior to the conference, Sofia Wilén discovered Julian

on television in a report concerning WikiLeaks. She was fascinated
by the man right off and was intrigued by his organization. She
had told her friends she thought he was “interesting, brave and
admirable.” From that day on, she continued to follow his career
very closely and become a fervent admirer of WikiLeaks.
One night she searched on Google and found out he was
supposed to go to Stockholm. Without delay Sofia told the
Broderskap, which was organizing the conference, that she
wanted to participate in the event, but unfortunately for her,
she never got a reply. Later, she found the announcement about
 WikiLeaks 353

the seminar and decided to take a day off that Saturday to go to

Stockholm to hear Julian speak.
“I was there on time and was able to meet Assange. He came
to me and asked if I could help him find a cable for his laptop.”
The young woman immediately jumped into a taxi and ran to
buy a cable. She came back just in time for the conference.

Julian spoke for an hour and a half, his audience was captivated
and focused. He spoke calmly, while projecting data onto the big
screen. There were a few technical glitches, but he laughed them
off. Anna, who had spent the previous night with him, was there
to help him like an improvised press agent for the cause.

The conference ended around 2 p.m. with a Q&A session and the
president thanked the audience as well as Julian for the successful
seminar. The meeting finished on a humorous note when Peter
Weiderud asked his guest: “Will you come back to Sweden
soon?” Julian said how much he liked Sweden, but smiling that
“Sweden is very nice in the summer, but in the winter, it’s a whole
different story.”
Everyone laughed and applauded warmly. A few journalists
were there to interview Julian. The crowd dispersed, but a young
woman stayed behind. “She was bit strange, wanting to get
Julian’s attention. Nobody really knew who she was,” one of the
participants said afterward. “When everyone was gone, she was
still there.”
Julian, a couple of friends, and a few Christian Democrats
went to have lunch at Bistro Bohème on Drottninggatan Street,
and Sofia was there as well. During lunch, Julian sat close to
her. He put his arm around her shoulder and asked her if she
could buy him a charger for his computer. Sofia was flattered
354 Julian Assange

and by then it was obvious that Julian was coming on to her. The
attraction was indeed mutual.
They left the bistro together and went to see the movie Deep
Sea at the Cosmonova, a 3D movie theater in Stockholm. They
sat in the back row of the movie theater and made out during
the film. They even held hands. Julian thought she was very
attractive. He kissed her and groped her under her clothes.

In the mean time, Anna had finished organizing the kräftskiva

(‘crayfish party’) in Julian’s honor, a traditional Swedish party
usually held in August, which is all about eating crayfish and
drinking.

When they left the movie theater, Sofia and Julian took the
subway again up to Zinkensdamm station. From there, Julian
left the young woman and took a taxi to get to the kräftskiva
organized by Anna. Before he took off, Sofia asked, “Will we see
each other again?” To which Julian answered, “Of course.”
Sofia went home by train to Enköping, a small town of thirty-
eight thousand inhabitants in Uppsala county, located eighty
thousand kilometers North West of Stockholm. It took her an
hour to get home. Once at her apartment, Sofia received a text
message from Julian. She called him; he was still at the party.
They talked for a long while and sent each other text messages
throughout the entire evening.

On Sunday, August 15, 2010 Sofia talked to her colleagues about

the fabulous time she had had with “the most popular journalist
in the world.” According to them, the ball was now in her court
as to whether she would see him again or not. She tried to call
him, but didn’t get an answer; his phone was turned off. That day
 WikiLeaks 355

he didn’t answer any calls because he was with Rick Falkvinge

and Anna Troberg of the Pirate Party for a photo shoot organized
through their connection and in support of WikiLeaks.
The young woman tried contacting Julian again on Monday,
August 16. He answered her call. He had a meeting the same
evening, but he agreed to meet up with her at 8:30 p.m. She
jumped at the opportunity and traipsed downtown Stockholm
waiting around for him. Around 9 p.m., he hadn’t called her
back, so she decided to call him. Julian was on Hornsgatan Street,
where his meeting had just ended. He asked her to meet him there
and Sofia came running.
The couple finally met up and headed for Old Town. They
sat down on a park bench in Munkbron Square. They had a
nice long conversation then took the train back to Sofia’s place
in Enköping. She bought two train tickets for one hundred and
seven kronor (about seventeen dollars), as he didn’t have any
money on him and didn’t want to use his credit card for fear of
it being traced. Julian spent most of the train trip focused on his
laptop and ignoring Sofia.
At the apartment, Julian and Sofia climbed into bed together.
They started having sex, but Julian didn’t want to use a condom.
Sofia pulled back because she didn’t want to have unprotected
sex. Julian lost interest in her and fell asleep. Later on, they woke
up during the night and had sex, as Julian reluctantly accepted to
wear a condom.
In the morning, she went out to buy breakfast then went back
to bed and fell asleep next to Julian. She woke up with him trying
to have sex with her and asked him to put on a condom, which he
refused. She quipped that he’d better not have AIDS. He reassured
her that he obviously did not. She was annoyed with again having
to ask him to wear a condom, because she had spent the whole
356 Julian Assange

night asking him to do so. Sofia had never had unprotected sex
before and so, was understandably very upset with Julian.
When they got out of bed she offered him a bowl of cereal
and some fruit juice. They made jokes that she could be pregnant.
Sofia didn’t like the stress of the situation and made a few sarcastic
remarks in a positive way to cut the tension.
On Sofia’s bicycle, they went back to the train station. Julian
had to get back to Stockholm to meet with Agneta Lindblom
Hulthén, President of the Swedish Union of Journalists. Julian
pushed back his meeting with her at 4 p.m. Sofia dropped him
off at the station and bought him another train ticket. He was still
broke. He promised to call her again.

On Wednesday, August 18 2010, the mood darkened. Sofia

contacted Anna to tell her that she had had unprotected sex with
Julian and was very angry that he didn’t use a condom. She
was afraid of having been infected with an STD or potentially
contracting AIDS or being pregnant. Anna then told her that
she’d also had sex with Julian the night before his conference at
LO-borgen and that Julian had sexually assaulted her.
The same day Anna told Julian that he was no longer welcome
at her place, but he refused to leave. After calling Sofia, Anna
called a close collaborator of WikiLeaks in Sweden to tell him
that she wanted Julian out of her place. She pointed out that
Julian refused to leave and had even been sleeping in her bed
even though they were not sleeping together. It was true, Julian
kept staying at her place, but he spent most of his nights in front
of the computer. The friend called to ask Julian why he wouldn’t
leave. The man was surprised that Anna was asking him to leave.
However, Anna said that Julian had sexually harassed her. That
 WikiLeaks 357

same night he had walked toward her naked from the waist down
and started rubbing up against her.
The very next day and the day after, the momentum of the
events picked up. The two women sent each other text messages
and decided to meet to compare notes. As for Julian, he was still
staying in Anna’s apartment, refusing to leave.
Anna asked the collaborator to convince Julian to take an
STD test to reassure Sofia. Julian refused. Anna then threatened
him by saying that Sofia would go to the police. He refused to
comply with the blackmail.

On Friday, August 20, 2010, it had been a week since the founder
of WikiLeaks was sleeping at Anna’s place, except for the night
he spent in Enköping with Sofia. Julian finally left. He claimed
that Anna had in fact never asked him to leave before that day.
The two women met that afternoon at 2 p.m. They went to a
police station in the center of Stockholm to ask for advice. They
wanted to know whether they could force Julian to take an STD
test. Six days had gone by since Julian spoke at the conference
held in LO-borgen.
 33

Reprisals

“I immediately believed her account because I had an

experience similar to hers.”

The nights Julian Assange spent in Sweden ended up having

some serious repercussions. When Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén
showed up at the Klara police station in downtown Stockholm on
Friday, August 20 2010, they basically turned Julian’s life upside
down.
How did Sofia find Anna in the first place? And why did
she contact her? The two women claim they met on Facebook.
However, they both attended the same seminar at LO-borgen, the
one where Anna played the role of improvised press agent after
having spent the night with the founder of WikiLeaks and where
Sofia did everything she could to attract the same man’s attention.
That afternoon the two women met and compared stories.
They arrived together at the police station at 2 p.m. Their first
intention was to ask for some advice. Anna accompanied Sofia
for moral support and helped her with her statement.

They talked to a female police officer. Sofia’s statement read as

follows:
“I was raped in my home on the morning of Tuesday, August
17, 2010 by a man who had sex with me against my will.”
 WikiLeaks 359

She wanted to know if it were possible to force Julian to take

an STD test. Anna, who had only gone along for moral support,
said that she had sex with the same man, and that in her case the
man in question had torn the condom on purpose.
Anna didn’t realize that the police officer wanted her to report
her case whether she wanted to or not. She had good reason to
believe that Anna had been raped. The officer listened to them
separately and submitted a report of rape. The officer concluded
that both women were victims: Sofia had been raped and Anna
had been sexually assaulted. Their stories confirmed that in
Sofia’s case Julian refused to wear a condom and in Anna’s case
he sabotaged the condom.
The female police officer ended her report with the following:
“Everyone I spoke to was in earnest agreement that this
was a case of rape.”

That same Friday night, Maria Kjellstrand, the on-call prosecutor

was contacted. She confirmed that Julian had to be considered
as a rape suspect. At 5 p.m., she accused Julian in absentia: even
though he was absent, he was suspected of raping Sofia Wilén
and not having respected the freedom and will of Anna Ardin. In
Swedish, the prosecutor qualified the mistake made as ‘ofredande,’
which best translates as ‘denying someone’s freedom,’ as English
law has no equivalent.

The report on the two young women was completed around

6:40 p.m. A Swedish collaborator of WikiLeaks later said that
Julian had accepted to take an STD test the same night, but all the
clinics were in fact closed for the weekend.

That night, journalist Niklas Svensson of the tabloid Expressen

was covering proceedings on the budget of the elected coalition in
Sweden. He was at Harpsund, the secondary residence of Swedish
360 Julian Assange

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. The second he caught wind of

Julian being suspected of rape he raced back to Stockholm.
“I shifted my attention towards that case pretty quickly,
so to speak. One and a half hour later I was back at my
office in Stockholm. My colleague Diamant Salihu managed
to get the prosecutor to confirm the case and I was working
separately on my own sources.”

Niklas Svensson, age thirty-eight, was a well-known political

journalist in Sweden. He was controversial and aggressive, and
many Swedes didn’t like him. According to sources in Stockholm,
he worked for one of the most widely read newspapers in the
country. He commonly wrote about crimes or celebrities, but in
the past few years he’s been increasingly interested in politics.
His approach has been likened to that of the paparazzi. He has
never done any deep analysis; he loves sensationalism, and
enjoys alluding to it. He would even sometimes bend the truth to
create a story.
In 2006, Svensson was fired from Expressen for illegally
hacking into the database of the Social Democratic Party. In
reality, all he did was use a password he wasn’t supposed to
have. He then went freelance and ran the blog Politikerbloggen
(literally, The blog of politicians, which posts dirt on politicians)
for some time. In 2007, the blog was bought up by a television
channel and Svensson eventually went back to work for Expressen
in February 2010.

The next day, Saturday, August 21 2010 at 9:15 a.m., Julian

tweeted: “We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks.’ Now we have
the first one.”
 WikiLeaks 361

As for Anna, she was interrogated again by the police and

confirmed the allegations of sexual abuse against Julian.

The journalists at the Expressen finished a story that would soon

explode throughout the Western press. A bit later that day, a
storm hit the office of the Swedish prosecutor. Karine Rosander,
Director of Communications, then tried to explain the arrest
warrant against Julian Assange.
Chief Prosecutor for the Stockholm region Eva Finné was
alerted by the media at the same time as she received the file at
her place. Right away she rejected the accusations of rape, but
didn’t say anything about the sexual assault. She didn’t refute
Sofia’s testimony, but didn’t consider it to be a confirmation of
rape.
In other words, at 4:48 p.m., Eva Finné decided to rescind the
arrest warrant against Julian Assange, who had yet to contact the
police to find out whether he was suspected of sexual assault.

From New York to London, journalists were wondering how a

rape charge could be dropped in less than a day. Rosander was
very uncomfortable when she tried to explain the strange turn
of events to a host on television channel Al Jazeera. The host
couldn’t understand how such a mistake could be made. She
answered succinctly.
“You can’t call it a mistake because the prosecutor in
question has to make a decision based on the information
available at the moment of the decision.”
The young woman, known to be intelligent, elegant and
educated, defended her office in the interview by saying that
the on-call prosecutor followed standard procedure and had to
make a decision very quickly. She pointed out that Eva Finné,
who rejected the rape charge, had access to more information
362 Julian Assange

on Saturday than the on-call prosecutor had on Friday. If false

rumors were spread on the subject, it was probably because the
accused was a hyped up celebrity. And so, Rosander refused to
provide any more details.
The same night, police investigators searched nightclubs of
the Stureplan district to see if the founder of WikiLeaks was
perhaps out partying, but they couldn’t find him.

On Sunday, August 22, 2010, the story broke in Expressen with a

sensationalist title: “Julian Assange accused in absentia of rape
and sexual assault.” The article appeared both in the printed
edition and online as early as 5 a.m. Svensson was pleased with
it:
“When I went home around 2:30 a.m. I realized this
would become one of the largest scoops we’ve ever
had.”

Julian immediate responded to it on Twitter:

“Reminder: US intelligence planned to destroy
WikiLeaks as far back as 2008.”

All the details of the charges made against Assange were revealed
in Expressen, a newspaper that can be compared to the Herald
Sun in Great Britain: same style, same politics. Founded in 1944,
it’s Sweden’s center-right newspaper, and its editorial line can be
described as ‘liberal and independent.’ It’s also highly criticized
and its reputation is a little spotty.

The leaks had to come from the plaintiffs or the police. Had the
two women called up a tabloid to embarrass Julian even further?
Svensson denied it.
 WikiLeaks 363

“If it was Anna who tipped me off? I can firmly deny

that I have had any contact with her. We haven’t talked
to each other at all.”

The shock wave was imminent. Within a few hours, the

international press had landed in Sweden. Julian, however,
denied all the accusations made against him. Suspected, Julian
affirmed that he did nothing wrong and that the sex he had with
both women was consensual.

As for Anna, she gave an anonymous interview to the newspaper

Aftonbladet (which translates to: ‘evening paper’), the most
widely read daily in all of Scandinavia. Anna confirmed that
Julian was not violent or intimidating. Here’s a selection of
affirmations.
“I don’t feel threatened.”
“It’s completely wrong that we are afraid of Assange and
therefore unwilling to report him, he is not violent and I
don’t feel threatened by him.”
“The other woman wanted to report a rape. I gave my
story as testimony to her story and to support her. We are
completely behind the accuracy of the information we have
given.”
“The accusations are not staged.”
“In both case, the sex had been consensual from the start
but had eventually turned into abuse.”

In the same article Anna refuted the accusations of an international

plot to trap Assange.
“The charges against Assange are of course not
orchestrated by either the Pentagon or anyone else. The
responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl is
364 Julian Assange

with a man with a warped attitude to women and a problem

with taking no for an answer.”
The Aftonbladet got in touch with Julian and asked him if he
had had sex with his two accusers. His answer was clear:
“Their identities have been made anonymous so even I
have no idea who they are. We have been warned that the
Pentagon, for example, is thinking of deploying dirty tricks
to ruin us.”

That evening the two women hired, or more precisely accepted

the services of Sweden’s most famous and most expensive
lawyer, Claes Borgström. He was a mediator for sexual equality
in the previous Social Democratic government before going back
to practicing law in 2008. In fact, this pro-feminist lawyer was
chosen to represent the two plaintiffs even before the preliminary
inquiry was complete. But who was he exactly? And more
specifically, who was paying for this case? It was clear that
neither Anna nor Sofia could afford him.
Claes Borgström was the associate of former justice minister
Thomas Bodström, who, among others, was the author of an
editorial for the Aftonbladet in which he pled for an extension
of the legal definition of rape. As a pro-feminist lawyer, Claes
Borgström has been credited with several controversial proposals.
In 2006, he got attention by suggesting that Sweden boycotted the
World Cup, which was organized in Germany to protest against
the presumed rumor of an intensified trafficking of women during
the event.

Swedish rape legislation is exemplary in Europe, and has been

stricter than its neighboring countries since 2005. The law has
three types of legal gradations for rape: rape, punished by six
years in prison, aggravated rape good for ten years in prison, and
lesser rape that involves four years in prison and consists of sex
 WikiLeaks 365

with a person who is unconscious, drunk, ill or asleep. Many

cases revealed that this last type has led to many convictions.
Swedish law is in fact very strict with men who do not respect
the word ‘no,’ particularly if the victim is not in a position (or of
sound mind or sober state) to be giving their consent for sex. This
also holds true if sex is already underway, as a woman always has
the right to say ‘no’ and a man who doesn’t respect this can be
accused. Extending the law has tripled the amount of complaints
in Sweden because what was formerly called ‘sexual assault’ is
now classified as ‘rape.’
Sweden holds the European record for the number of rape
complaints: 53 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010, which is twice as
much as in Great Britain and four times as much than in France.
Swedish law has made it easier to bring up charges. The police
listen to victims without prejudice. Society has freed women of
guilt to give them the power to say ‘no,’ no matter what they wear
or how many drinks they’ve had.
Nevertheless, only five to ten per cent of people accused of
rape are actually condemned. A rape without any trace of violence
is difficult to prove, as it falls under a he-said/she-said situation.
Reforming the law has given so much weight to women’s voices
that some Swedish critics have joked that soon people won’t have
sex without first getting written consent from their partners!
 34

The Prosecutors’ Stories

“Why these accusations are coming at this point in time is an

interesting question. I haven’t been contacted by the police. The
allegations are false and extremely disturbing.”

This question came up in the last week of August 2010.

Was destabilizing the founder of WikiLeaks, whose website
embarrassed so many governments, the point of all this? The day
after he was accused of rape, the charges against Julian Assange
were dropped.

“We were forewarned by Australian intelligence on

August 11, 2010 that we had to expect a campaign
against me. We were worried that something likes this
would happen,” Julian said in an interview given to
television station Al Jazeera.
“We can have some suspicions about who would benefit,
but without direct evidence I would not be willing to
make a direct allegation,” he added.
 WikiLeaks 367

Excerpts of press release of the

prosecutors’ office1

• Statement of Prosecutor Eva Finné on August 23, 2010

That day, she said she was expecting to make a decision
in the near future, but pointed out that all the facts of the
case must be carefully considered.
“I will now go through the matter in detail and assess
the legal aspects in order to decide the future direction
of the investigation. I expect to give an informed opinion
this week, possibly as early as tomorrow, Tuesday.”
I have not had any contact with Julian Assange and I
do not know if the reports are true that he would have a
Swedish lawyer.
Julian Assange is not suspected of rape. I’ll go through
the matter further in the section to assess whether any
other offenses may be present or not. With regards to
the initial suspicion of molestation, I still don’t have a
decision.
My decision to cancel the request on the grounds that I
do not think he can be accused of rape does not imply
any criticism of the on-call prosecutor’s decision. I had
access to more information for my decision on Saturday
than the on-call prosecutor had on Friday.”

• Statement of Prosecutor Anders Perklev on issues of transparency

and confidentiality on August 23, 2010
“The pressure exerted on the authorities has been great
the last few days due to the decision to arrest Julian
Assange. The prosecution communications director has

1 Excerpts of press release of the prosecutors’ office :

www.aklagare.se
368 Julian Assange

been on-call for the entire weekend and has answered

questions from news organizations both in Sweden and
abroad.
The decision to arrest and other decisions are made by a
single prosecutor under his/her own responsibility and
not by the court as such. This limits the possibilities for
people other than the prosecutor to step in and provide
information or comment on a decision. Moreover, the
confidentiality required in the investigation in order to
not hinder its course must be taken into account.
However, it is very important that information that can
be disclosed be revealed as soon as possible, quickly
and properly. We will also make sure that the authorities
are better prepared in order to be able to satisfy the
great interest for information concerning major cases.”

Chronology of the Assange affair

• Events of Friday, August 20, 2010 to Saturday, August 21, 2010

Around 5 p.m. on Friday, August 20, the on-call
prosecutor in Stockholm decided that Julian Assange
had to be arrested in absentia on suspicion of rape and
molestation. The prosecutor based her decision on
the information from the case that the police gave her
over the phone, which was standard procedure. The
prosecutor also understood that it concerned a foreign
national ready to leave the country. One of the motives
for his arrest in absentia was therefore the risk that Julian
would leave the country before he could be questioned.
 WikiLeaks 369

However, the information concerning his arrest came

from an unknown source, a Swedish news service. The
editorial staff of this news source contacted the on-call
prosecutor that Friday evening. When the prosecutor
realized that the editorial staff knew all the details of
the case, the existence of a file on Julian Assange was
confirmed.
Yet the prosecutor did not provide any details concerning
the case. This is very important, especially for sexual
offenses, because data on the people involved must be
protected, as stipulated by the laws on confidentiality.
When the news came out in the media on Saturday, the
on-call prosecutor in Stockholm felt attacked. It was
clear that the case had to be taken away from the on-
call prosecutor so that he could continue to perform his
regular work. This is when Prosecutor Eva Finné was
called in to lead the investigation as of Saturday.

Once appointed to lead the investigation, Eva Finné

studied the file. Around 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, she
decided to cancel the arrest of Julian Assange, because
she felt that he could not be accused of rape. The elements
that supported her decision were more extensive than
those the on-call prosecutor had access to on Friday.
The exact details of the case could not be revealed, as
the investigation was ongoing and therefore, had to be
kept confidential.
Normally, after a weekend, all the cases are redistributed
to various prosecutors, but an ordinary prosecutor may
sometimes be designated before the weekend is over.
This is the case for serious or high-profile matters
370 Julian Assange

like Julian’s since the on-call prosecutor cannot be

monopolized for a single case and needs to be able to
function normally.

• Evolution of Saturday, August 21, 2010

Eva Finné decided that Julian Assange could no longer
be suspected of rape, yet she didn’t rule on the penal
qualification of this, which was still considered rape.
She also didn’t rule on the molestation complaint.
The investigation was therefore still ongoing and the
suspicions against Julian Assange were not retracted.

• No additional decisions in the Assange case on Tuesday, August

24, 2010
Prosecutor Eva Finné finally said she would not decide
the matter on Tuesday, August 24, 2010. Additional
information would be published as soon as it was made
available.

• Decision of Prosecutor Eva Finné on Wednesday, August 25,

2010
There are two complaints in the case from two different
women. The first was initially described as rape and the
second as molestation.

Complaint No. 1 K246314-10

“The information obtained while questioning the victim
is, as previously announced, such that the suspicion of
rape has been eliminated. This does not mean that I have
discredited this information. I have studied the content
of the interview to see if the suspicion of another crime
 WikiLeaks 371

may be presumed, either molestation or sexual assault,

but according to my analysis, this is not the case.
The investigation is therefore finished as concerns this
complaint as they is no suspicion of offense.”
Complaint No. 2, K246336-10
“The suspicion of molestation has been retained. I will
issue instructions to the investigators to interview the
suspect.”

• Evolution of the case on Monday, August 30, 2010

Claes Borgström contacted Marianne Ny, Chief
Prosecutor of the Prosecution Development Centre in
Gothenburg, in charge of supervising legal evolutions
on sexual offenses. Ms. Ny leads a special unit on
the development of crime and is specialized in the
elaboration of laws concerning sexual assault.

The last day of August caused upheaval in the case’s

procedure. That day, Julian was questioned at the
Kungsholmen police station in Stockholm, where he
admitted that he stayed at Ms. Anna Ardin’s place for a
week and that he had sexual relations with her, although
denying any rape or aggression. While Anna thought
that he purposely tore the condom, he said he did not.
He didn’t tear the condom and had no idea there was
something wrong with it. The Australian continued
by declaring that he had slept in Anna’s bed the entire
week after their sexual relations and that she had never
mentioned any torn condom.
Later, Julian admitted on Swedish television that he
had denied all the accusations against him. He did not
have any non-consensual sex and refused to answer any
372 Julian Assange

other additional question on his relationships with the

plaintiffs, whom he didn’t criticize at all.

During his interrogation about his sexual relationship

with Ms. Ardin he said: “I had no reason to suspect that
I would be accused of something like this.” He added
that the complaints made against him to the police, and
repeated in the Swedish press, included “a bunch of
incredible lies.”

• No decision of penal review on Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The civil parties, represented by lawyer Claes Borgström,
requested on Friday, August 27, 2010, the review of the
decision of Prosecutor Eva Finné according to which
Assange could not be suspected of rape. This request
was handled by the Prosecution Development Centre in
Gothenburg. A decision was expected in the following
days.

However, the Prosecution Development Centre in

Gothenburg did not make a decision concerning the
review of the Assange case before Tuesday, August
31, as new information had emerged that very day.
Prosecutor Marianne Ny said:
“On Tuesday, new information emerged in the
investigation. We received it late Tuesday afternoon
and we cannot make any decision today.
The decision is expected around 11 a.m. on
Wednesday, September 1.”
 WikiLeaks 373

The case took an unexpected turn on Wednesday, September 1,

2010, when Marianne Ny, Chief Prosecutor, decided to reopen
the investigation.

• Decision of penal review in the Assange case on Wednesday,

September 1, 2010
Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny decided that the rape
investigation must resume. She also decided that the
investigation of molestation should be extended to
include all the events of the complaint.
“Based on the new decision of the prosecutor on August
25, 2010, I order the investigation concerning the
complaint K246314-10 to be resumed.
The investigation relative to complaint K246336-10
concerning a matter qualified as molestation is extended
to determine other events stated in the complaint and
qualified as sexual coercion and sexual assault.
We have studied the case and I believe that on the one
hand, there is reason to think that an offense subject
to public prosecution has been committed. As well,
there are also reasons to undertake more investigative
procedures. On the other hand, I have another
evaluation of the qualification.”

Marianne Ny was the lead investigator in this case,

assisted by Deputy Chief Prosecutor Erika Leijnefors
in West Stockholm. Erika Leijnefors was in constant
contact with police investigators in charge of the
investigation. All the important matters such as
decisions on possible coercion as well as completing
the investigation were to be decided by Marianne Ny.
374 Julian Assange

The plaintiffs’ lawyer Claes Borgström claimed that it wasn’t the

first time a man who had forced a woman to have unprotected sex
had to face this type of accusation, which conforms to Swedish
law on rape.

Julian Assange didn’t respond directly to this turn of affairs,

but his Swedish lawyer, Leif Silbersky, known for defending the
most controversial cases, expressed his views in Expressen:
“Now I’m really surprised. I thought that Eva [Finné]
is a skilled and competent prosecutor who draws the
correct conclusions from the material that is available
to her. Now another prosecutor says that she has not
done that. We are back to square one – the circus
continues.”
The lawyer added that Mr. Assange was still in Sweden,
“angry and disappointed” by the country’s legal system.

Honey trap or not, the case was quickly qualified as controversial.

Assange and WikiLeaks sympathizers were convinced that he
was the victim and that the two women were accomplices in an
American vendetta. The United States was indeed looking for a
way to punish WikiLeaks for leaking hundreds of thousands of
secret American documents on the Internet.
This possible conspiracy against Julian is at the very least a
strange coincidence, as it happened at the same time as Julian
Assange started to arise worry in the American government. This
could also mean that the Swedish prosecutors’ office was under
some political pressure.

Borgström described the vendetta in these words:

“Mr. Assange and his legal team were misrepresenting
a justice system that required approval from Sweden’s
 WikiLeaks 375

highest appeals court before the extradition warrant

was approved. Those who say that the judges in our
court of appeal were influenced by pressure from the
United States don’t know what they’re talking about.
It’s absurd.”
Mr. Borgström added that by presenting the allegations against
him as part of a political conspiracy, Julian had made ‘victims’
of the two women who now face vilification on the Internet and
regular death threats. Only Julian and the two plaintiffs were in
fact in a position to know that it was not a CIA plot or something
cooked up by Obama’s administration.
 35

Clashing truths

The two Swedish women’s accusation against Julian Assange

was full of inconsistencies. His lawyers were even convinced that
he was the victim of a ‘honeytrap,’ which Julian confirmed by
openly accusing the Pentagon in the pages of the Aftonbladet.
Aside from his lawyer, few people dared to say anything in
Sweden, not even the members of the Pirate Party who had
been hosting WikiLeaks servers and who continue to defend the
website. In a press release dated August 21, 2010 Deputy Leader
of the party Anna Troberg said:
“As little as we want to throw Assange to the wolves,
just as little would we like to question the integrity of
the two women who have filed charges.”

The WikiLeaks group coordinator in Stockholm, a close colleague

of Julian said:
“This is a normal police investigation. Let the police
find out what actually happened. Of course, the enemies
of WikiLeaks may try to use this, but it begins with the
two women and Julian. It is not the CIA sending a
woman in a short skirt.”

Is it coincidence or are people just being relentlessness? One

thing is for sure: the complexity of Swedish rape law is the focus
 WikiLeaks 377

of these allegations. Now back to the facts. Depositions have

crossed paths and revealed many blatant inconsistencies.

Julian and Anna had sex, but the condom tore. Anna was upset
with Julian for not stopping at that point. However, despite this,
and for the entire week afterward, Anna never asked Julian to
leave. She let him stay in her flat a few more days and even
organized a kräftskiva (‘crayfish party’) in his honor, during
which she tweeted that she was having a great time with some
of the coolest people on the planet. She later tried to delete her
tweet. When the police questioned Julian about it, he admitted to
having had sex with Anna Ardin, but he said he hadn’t torn the
condom or even noticed it was ripped.

The day of the conference, Sofia Wilén was sitting in the first
row. She was invited to the lunch given in Julian’s honor. In
reality, there are different versions of these events: one said that
the twenty-seven-year-old woman just showed up, the other was
that Julian invited her himself. In any case, it was clear that she
was able to attract his attention.
Nick Davies confirmed in The Guardian that both Sofia and
Anna were present at this lunch. In fact, the first called the second
to find out if she could attend the seminar. Weird.

Moving right along. Early the following morning, in her

apartment in Enköping, Julian and Sofia had sex again, but this
time, according to the young woman’s statement, she fell asleep
and Julian proceeded to have sex with her and didn’t want to
use a condom. Their disagreement didn’t stop them from having
breakfast together, though. Sofia even took Julian to the train
station on her bicycle and paid for his train ticket a second time.
However, the incident of not wearing a condom was important
378 Julian Assange

for Ms. Wilén as she had never had unprotected sex before. When
questioned by the police, her ex-boyfriend told them that in the
two and a half years that they were together they had never had
sex without a condom, because that was ‘unthinkable’ for her.

It was very surprising that after having sexual relations the

women described in their statements, they both continued to be
in contact with their presumed rapist.
In fact, from August 13 to 20 2010, nothing happened. Neither
of the two women said anything, nor did they decide to press
charges. It took several days for Anna and Sofia, who claimed
that they didn’t know each other, to show up together at the police
station to report the rape – only after having discovered that they
both had had sexual relations with the same man and shared a
similar experience.

For Julian’s lawyers the situation was crystal clear:

“We understand that both complainants admit to having

initiated consensual sexual relations with Mr Assange.
They do not complain of any physical injury. The first
complainant did not make a complaint for six days in
which she hosted the respondent in her flat [actually
her bed] and spoke in the warmest terms about him
to her friends. The second complainant, too, failed to
complain for several days until she found out about the
first complainant: she claimed that after several acts of
consensual sexual intercourse, she fell half asleep and
thinks that he ejaculated without using a condom – a
possibility about which she says they joked afterwards.”
 WikiLeaks 379

Both complainants say they did not report him to the

police for prosecution but only to require him to have
an STD test. However, his Swedish lawyer has been
shown evidence of their text messages which indicate
that they were concerned to obtain money by going to a
tabloid newspaper and were motivated by other matters
including a desire for revenge.”

There was another revelation from a girlfriend to the police.

During the kräftskiva, Anna told a girlfriend about the ripped
condom and the unprotected sex she had had with her guest.
During this dinner at her place, she told another friend that she
had had the worst sex ever with Assange.
“Not only had it been the world’s worst screw, it had also
been violent.”
If it were that bad, then why did she throw the man a party?
Anna Ardin said in her statement that Julian had torn the condom
on purpose. She told a girlfriend that he was still staying at her
flat, but they weren’t having sex because he had “exceeded the
limits of what she felt she could accept” and so she no longer felt
safe.

Moreover, the text messages the two young women sent to each
other the last week of August 2010 seemed favorable to Julian’s
defense. Björn Hurtig, his Swedish lawyer was allowed to read
some of these messages between Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén.
He was not authorized to copy them or make a note of them.
However, he did read that Wilén thought about contacting the
Expressen, as a friend suggested she could get a lot of money for
telling her story. Prosecutor Marianne Ny didn’t divulge all of
the documents linked to the affair, in particular the text messages
between the two accusers. But before there is a decision to
380 Julian Assange

prosecute someone, the law authorizes the examination of all

available documents as soon as the prosecution procedure was
to start.
Julian is probably a man with a big sexual appetite, and is
exploiting his newfound fame with women. But who are these
two women accusing him of rape and sexual assault? Not much
information can be found online about Sofia Wilén, while
suspicions focus directly on Anna Ardin. The blogosphere
exploded. She’s the instigator of a conspiracy to help bring Julian
down!

Anna Ardin is a left-wing militant. She is the political secretary

of the Fraternity Movement, a controversial group close to the
Social Democratic Party. As a radical feminist, Anna Ardin wrote
a manual called Seven Steps to Legal Revenge, which has been
published on her blog. In September, she erased all the traces of
this guide. It was a humorous posting for women who wanted to
get revenge on their ex-lovers. In seven steps, one could use legal
means and make sure the victim suffered a lot.
There have been all kinds of arguments flying around about
this article and Ardin’s militant past. Articles on CounterPunch, an
American newsletter that writes about politics in a controversial
and provocative manner, have greatly contributed in playing up
the idea that the main accuser of Julian Assange in Sweden has a
serious past collaborating with anti-Castro groups.
The following comments are those on CounterPunch, picked
up by a large number of blogs, which endlessly propagate the
idea that Anna Ardin is in fact a CIA agent.
“Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often
described by the media as a ‘leftist.’ She has ties to the
US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups.
She published her anti-Castro diatribes in the Swedish-
language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas
 WikiLeaks 381

put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor

Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the
product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in
Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected
with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto
Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here. Note that
Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities.
In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro
group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This
group receives US government funds and the convicted
anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is
a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de
Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza
de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White
defend the terrorism of the United States.”

“In addition to her anti-Castro, pro-CIA streak, Anna

Ardin apparently indulges in her favorite sport of
male bashing. A Swedish forum reports that she is an
expert on sexual harassment and the male ‘master
suppression techniques.’ Once, as she was lecturing, a
male student in the audience looked at his notes instead
of staring at her. Anna Ardin reported him for sexual
harassment because he discriminated against her for
being a woman and because she claimed he made use
of the male ‘master suppression technique’ in trying to
make her feel invisible. As soon as the student learned
about her complaint, he contacted her to apologize and
explain himself. Anna Ardin’s response was to once
again report him for sexual harassment, again because
he was using the ‘master suppression technique,’ this
time to belittle her feelings.”
382 Julian Assange

These passages were written by Israel Shamir, known journalist,

anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, who also wrote under the
names of Adam Ermash and Jöran Jermas.

It’s interesting to hear what is being said in Stockholm. By

listening one can hear so many things…
It’s important to know that though currently not in power, the
social democratic party is the largest political party in Sweden
since a long time. It has its roots in socialism – but has always also
been a democratic party, as opposed to various leftist communist
movements and parties. As a part of its heritage, social democratic
party members tend to be very suspicious towards communism.
This is also reflected in the common Swedish social democratic
view on Cuba and Castro. For a Swedish social democrat it is
perfectly normal to be anti Castro.
Also, in recent years, feminism has been embraced as a part
of social democracy (and, for that matter, most political parties).
Being a feminist is not at all considered extreme in a Swedish
political context. It simply means that one acknowledges that
women are paid less than men for doing the same kind of job
and that women are under represented in leading positions in the
society –something should be done to correct this. Hardly radical
or extremist.
There are those in Sweden to the left of the social democratic
party that have a more positive view on the Castro regime in Cuba
and considers the current Cuban government as legit. They are
however a marginalized minority in Sweden. There are also some
conservatives and libertarians that doesn’t embrace the feminist
analysis. But they too are few.
 WikiLeaks 383

Based on that, Ms. Ardin is to be considered as a pretty

mainstream Swedish social democrat – although it is also fair to
say that she has shown a clear passion for these two issues. The
rumor that Ms. Ardin would have accused Mr. Assange of sexual
assault as a part of a CIA initiated honey pot seems simply absurd.
Based on some conspiratorial web sites, the rumor is based on her
visiting Damas de Blanco – an opposition movement in Cuba
consisting of wives and other female relatives of jailed dissidents,
and writing about Cuba in various papers. According to some
sources, Damas de Blanco and these papers are CIA funded.”
A friend of Ms. Ardin told us:
“I have no idea how – if at all – the CIA tries to
undermine the Castro regime. But it seems very far-
fetched that they would hope to accomplish anything by
supporting Ms. Ardin’s meetings with Cuban dissidents
or writing about Cuba. She is simply not that important.
The Anna Ardin I know is an intelligent and politically
passionate person. Her being a strong supporter of
the ideals behind WikiLeaks fits her ‘profile’ far better
than wanting to hurt it or its course. That being said, I
don’t think she would keep quiet if she felt that she or
someone she knew had been subjected to any kind of
wrongdoing.
In Sweden we have an expression of the importance
of keeping two thoughts in one’s head at the same time.
In this case, I would say it is perfectly possible that Ms.
Ardin is a strong supporter of WikiLeaks and admires
Mr. Assange’s work – but is equally determined to get
justice for what she feels is an assault from him.
384 Julian Assange

When in doubt, it is often best to rely on the law of

Occam’s razor; the simplest explanation is most likely
the correct one. It seems far more likely that – due to
cultural differences, misunderstandings, intoxication
etc. – Mr. Assange acted in unwanted sexual way
towards two Swedish women than that they were setting
him up as a part of a CIA trap.”
 36

Heading to Surrender

“This case will go down in history as the case of the condom.”

That was how Julian Assange’s former Australian lawyer,
James Catlin, summed up his ‘rape’ case, which was way more
complex than it seemed.

In fact, Julian’s suspicions of a political intervention were

confirmed when Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny made a decision
on September 1, 2010. Setting aside a decision made by Eva
Finné, she restored the initial allegations stating that rape was the
appropriate charge.
As for Mark Stephens, Julian’s lawyer in London, he claimed
that without any other detail, a ‘higher political authority’ had
initiated the reopening of the case. He was basically referring to
the influence Claes Borgström, the lawyer of the two plaintiffs,
may have exerted.
Swedish legal experts believe that this decision was not
exceptional, especially since over the last thirty years the feminist
movement had been helping reform laws on sexual aggression,
which better protect women. It must be said that Chief Prosecutor
Ny, in charge of the Assange case, has been fighting for a reform
of Swedish rape laws, specifically extending them to include the
refusal to wear a condom. She reopened the investigation for rape
386 Julian Assange

and sexual assault, and Julian is facing a sentence of four years

in prison.

However, as of September 2010, Julian asked to be represented

by another lawyer in Sweden, Björn Hurtig, as he felt that
Leif Silbersky didn’t defend him with enough verve. Hurtig
had previously collaborated with the American Embassy in
Stockholm. Born in 1965, this lawyer became a member of the
Swedish bar association in 2002 and has claimed several high-
profile cases to his name.

As for Borgström, the lawyer of the two plaintiffs, he says he has

evidence of rape in both cases. He’s even asked to have the case
reviewed by a prosecutor of the Prosecution Development Centre
in Gothenburg.

• Evolution of the Assange case Friday, September 3 2010

No new information can be provided on the case.
“I cannot provide any new information on this case.
No information will be provided over the weekend,”
said Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny, leading the
investigation.

• An exclusive interview with Julian Assange on Tuesday, September

7 2010
Assange tells his story on Swedish television NV4 in
an exclusive interview. He refused to invoke his private
life or the private lives of others. He also denied ever
having forced anyone to do anything. On the other
hand, he said he didn’t think the young women were
 WikiLeaks 387

under the influence of the CIA or that they had been

pushed to accuse him.
The Australian said he was also worried, as he submitted
a request for a work permit two days earlier. He was
wondering if, because he was being accused of rape,
he could be arrested at the airport if he tried leaving the
country.

• The next morning, there was more protest from Julian

On Wednesday, September 8 2010, Julian said:
“This entire rape investigation has been conducted
without my input. No one has asked me any questions
regarding the rape case. The police refuse to say if there
is a warrant out for me or not. I found out everything in
the press. It’s been two weeks now.”

• Evolution of the Assange case Thursday, September 9 2010

“Work on the investigation progresses, but right now
and within the next few weeks, I cannot provide any
new information on this case,” said Chief Prosecutor
Marianne Ny, leading the investigation.

• Evolution of the Assange case on Friday, September 24 2010

Work on the investigation continues and is relatively
well advanced. A number of additional investigative
steps remain before a decision can be taken in this case.

On September 27 2010, Assange left Sweden.

388 Julian Assange

• Evolution of the Assange case on Wednesday, September 29

2010
“It is still impossible to say anything at the moment
about when a decision will be made. Considering the
confidentiality of the investigation and the persons
concerned, no more detailed information concerning
the investigation can be provided for now,” said Chief
Prosecutor Marianne Ny on that day.

• Evolution of the Assange case on Friday, October 22 2010

Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny gives a brief description
of the situation:
“The investigation has progressed, but there are still
some steps to take before making any decision. It is
impossible to say at the moment when a decision will
be made. A decision may lie in the near future, but it
may also take some time.”

The same day, secret documents, (Iraq War Logs), were

broadcasted by The Guardian, The New York Times and Der
Spiegel.

On Saturday, October 30 2010, Julian’s request for work and

residence permits in Sweden was refused.

• Evolution of the Assange case on Thursday, November 4 2010

The case is in progress, but Chief Prosecutor Marianne
Ny says that it is still impossible to make a decision or
provide more details due to the legal confidentiality she
must respect. 
 WikiLeaks 389

Julian Assange was in Switzerland, where he said during a live

interview on Switzerland’s TSR that he planned to ask for political
asylum there. From there, Julian flew to the United Kingdom to
work on the launch of the American diplomatic cables.

• On Monday, October 18 2010, a missing person notice is issued

for Assange
Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny submitted a request
to the District Court of Stockholm in order for Julian
Assange to be detained in his absence.
The District Court decided in his absence to place
Assange in detention on suspicion of rape, sexual
assault and coercion.
As a result of this decision, a search is launched for
Assange abroad.
For the sake of the investigation and the parties
involved, the Chief Prosecutor cannot provide any
more details of the suspected crimes or the investigative
measures taken so far.
“I request that the District Court detain Assange in
his absence, for the charges of rape, sexual assault and
coercion, based on the need to interrogate him within
the scope of the investigation that could not be carried
out,” said Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny, leading the
investigation.
However, the hearing for issuing an arrest warrant
for Julian Assange has to take place the same day at
2 p.m. at the District Court of Stockholm, after which
additional information will be published on the site
www.aklagare.se. Marianne Ny will then also be
available by phone.
390 Julian Assange

The response from every party was immediate.

Hurtig, Julian’s lawyer, went first:
“Of course [Julian Assange] denies the allegations
[…], we do not think it is proportional to demand his
arrest just to interrogate him. An interrogation can be
organized in many ways.”
He was angry when claiming that his client did everything to
help the Swedish prosecution.
As for Chief Prosecutor Ny, she felt she had, “exhausted
all the procedures to set up an interrogation.” And Borgström
claimed, “Finally, that [the arrest warrant] could have been done
earlier.” Mark Stephens didn’t mince words either. He accused
the Swedish court of treating Julian’s case as a “persecution and
not a prosecution.”
Julian, who was then in Great Britain, was prepared to answer
questions from the Swedish prosecutor, but not at her beck and
call, as “he had his own agenda and lots of work,” according to
Hurtig. Stephens concluded: “All of these offers have been flatly
refused by a prosecutor who is abusing her powers.”

As of November 22, 2010, on behalf of his client, Hurtig appealed

the decision and demanded that the arrest warrant be cancelled.
The Swedish Court of Appeal was informed of this decision.
Monday afternoon the Court of Appeal demanded the advice of
the prosecutor.
Ny refused to cooperate with Julian’s Swedish lawyer
Hurtig, who tried several times to make his client available for
interrogation while he was still in Sweden. Ny refused Julian’s
proposal to answer her questions by phone or any other means of
proper communication during his stay in England.
 WikiLeaks 391

• On Wednesday, November 24, 2010, the Court of Appeal

confirmed the decision to detain Assange.
The decision of the Swedish Court of Appeal
concerning Assange’s detention means that he’s still
being searched for abroad.
The Court of Appeal reviewed the appeal and decided
that Assange should remain in custody on suspicion of
rape, sexual assault in two cases, and coercion. The
missing person notice and international arrest warrant
will be modified accordingly.
For the sake of the investigation and the parties
involved, the prosecutor was unable to provide details
of the suspected crimes or investigative measures taken
so far.

• Evolution of the situation at the end of November 2010

On Sunday, November 28, 2010, the first American
diplomatic cables were revealed, first through the five
media of the alliance and then broadcasted around the
world.
On Tuesday, November 30, 2010, Interpol launched
a red notice for Julian Assange, based on the Swedish
arrest warrant. This meant arresting the person no
matter where they were in the world, in view of their
extradition.

The website of Interpol states:

“An Interpol red notice is not an international arrest warrant.
These Interpol ‘Red Notices’ represent only a tiny fraction of the
number of red notices issued by Interpol. The persons concerned
are wanted by national jurisdictions (or the International Criminal
Tribunals, where appropriate) and Interpol’s role is to assist the
392 Julian Assange

national police forces in identifying or locating those persons

with a view to their arrest and extradition. These red notices allow
the warrant to be circulated worldwide with the request that the
wanted person be arrested with a view to extradition. The person
should be considered innocent until proven guilty.”

Hurtig judged that “other motives, linked to WikiLeaks, are

behind this decision.” Meanwhile Mark Stephens said:
“The honey trap has been sprung... After what we’ve
seen so far you can reasonably conclude this is part of
a greater plan.”
The lawyer qualified the allegations against Julian as ‘dark
forces at work.’ Assange continued to insist on the fact that he
hadn’t done anything inappropriate and had consensual sex with
both women.

British journalist Nick Davies also had an opinion on the subject:

“The Guardian understands that the recent Swedish decision
to apply for an international arrest warrant followed a decision
by Assange to leave Sweden in late September and not return for
a scheduled meeting when he was due to be interviewed by the
prosecutor. Assange’s supporters have denied this, but Assange
himself told friends in London that he was supposed to return
to Stockholm for a police interview during the week beginning
October 11, and that he had decided to stay away. Prosecution
documents seen by The Guardian record that he was due to be
interviewed on October 14, 2010.”

• European arrest warrant issued for Assange on Thursday, December

2 2010
Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny confirmed today that
a European arrest warrant was issued for Julian Assange.
 WikiLeaks 393

She cannot currently provide additional information on

this matter, with regard to confidentiality.
The Supreme Court has decided not to grant leave
to Julian Assange to appeal. Additional information will
be sent to the British police.
Julian Assange has been subjected to an arrest
warrant in his absence for rape, sexual assault and
coercion. Assange has appealed this decision at the
Court of Appeal.
For the Supreme Court to grant leave for an appeal,
it needs authorization. It may be granted if the case is
expected to have significant impact on law enforcement,
or if there are other important reasons.
The arrest warrant is based on the decision to arrest,
which has now been validated by the three instances.
The additional information required by the British police
concern the charges linked to the other offences besides
rape for which Julian Assange is being prosecuted. The
information required will be provided as quickly as
possible. The previous arrest warrants remain in effect.

Julian Assange was then one of the most wanted men in the
world. At that time, he was in the south of England. “When you
get that many death threats, it’s better to be discrete,” Kristinn
Hrafnsson, spokesperson of WikiLeaks, admitted. According to
the Icelander, Julian was not trying to flee Swedish prosecution,
but feared his own safety.

• Progress report on the European arrest warrant,

Monday, December 6, 2010
Marianne Ny submitted the additional information
requested by the British police. The case is being
394 Julian Assange

handled by the competent judicial authorities according

to European regulatory framework. For now the Chief
Prosecutor will not provide any additional information
concerning the execution of the arrest warrant.

• Statement of Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny on Tuesday,

December 7, 2010
The British police have arrested Julian Assange.
Following the day’s events, Marianne Ny said:
“Besides the arrest, nothing new happened in the
investigation, but the arrest was a prerequisite so that
we could move on. I cannot provide any information on
what happens next in the investigation. Currently the
case is in the hands of the British authorities.
I would like to point out that I have not been subjected
to any political pressure or other kinds of pressure. I act
as a prosecutor because of suspicions of sexual crimes
committed in Sweden in August. Swedish prosecutors
are fully autonomous in their decision.”

On December 7 2010 in front of a British court, Gemma Lindfield,

representative of the Swedish authorities, detailed the four charges
against Julian Assange, which are ‘coercion’ and ‘sexual assault’
of Ms. Ardin on the night of August 14, 2010, first by firmly
holding her arms, then by forcing her to have unprotected sex.
Julian Assange was also accused of the ‘voluntary aggression’ of
Ms. Ardin. Finally, on August 17 2010 he was accused of having
‘abusively exploited’ the fact that Ms. Wilén was sleeping in
order to have unprotected sex with her.
Lindfield added that bail should be refused to Assange
because of his ‘nomadic ways,’ the contacts he has around the
 WikiLeaks 395

world and the money at his disposal thanks to his many donors,
but also because has already refused to take a DNA test or provide
his fingerprints. Lindfield also pointed out that this would help
ensure the protection of the accused, should unstable people try
to seriously harm him.

On December 7, 2010, Julian Assange was behind bars. He

voluntarily gave himself up to the authorities in the morning and
was heard at 2 p.m. in front of a Westminster court, which was
swarming with journalists.
After having highlighted ‘the extreme gravity of the
accusations’ made against him, Judge Howard Riddle refused his
request for release on bail, as the accused had ‘the means and
ability to flee.’ Julian Assange was detained awaiting a new court
appearance on December 14, 2010.

In the mean time, the WikiLeaks organization faced problems

from all sides: cyber attacks, domains closings and banking bans.
However, Julian said he took all the necessary precautions to
guarantee continuing the leaks regardless of what were to happen
to him.
James Ball, a British journalist collaborating with WikiLeaks
said: “Everything is planned, all this will continue as ever.”

That night Julian slept in a cell. He’s looking at four years in

prison.
 37

Behind Bars

Published on December 20, 2010 by sophox | Leave a comment |

Julian got out of prison this Thursday evening, December

16, 2010. He was incarcerated on December 7, in Great
Britain following a European arrest warrant issued by Swedish
authorities. He’s being prosecuted for rape, sexual assault and
constraint, and could be extradited to Sweden over the next few
weeks. Assange has always denied these accusations, claiming
there’s a smear campaign against him since WikiLeaks revealed
thousands of confidential, diplomatic American documents. “I
don’t like to see the word ‘rape’ next to my name. I have never
had a sexual relationship with a woman without her consent,”
he affirms strongly. He still risks four years in prison for ‘minor
rape.’

“It’s great to feel the fresh air of London again,” Julian said
about his forced stay in “solitary confinement at the bottom of a
Victorian prison.”
 WikiLeaks 397

He got out of prison after posting 240,000 pounds (USD 390,000)

on bail, collected by friends and sympathizers. It wasn’t easy to
find that kind of money, which is why his release was delayed by
at least two days. That meant dishing out 390,000 dollars, with
200,000 that had to be paid in cash. Many celebrities like British
filmmaker and left-wing English figure, Ken Loach helped him
out. Some of the other bail providers were the lovely Jemima
Khan, ex-wife of Pakistani cricket star Imran Khan, ambassador
for UNICEF and fortunate aristocrat close to Lady Diana, and
American documentary maker Michael Moore.
“It’s a considerable amount and what is sad, is that he can’t
use Visa or MasterCard to help collect these funds,” lawyer Mark
Stephens said jokingly. He alludes here to the fact that both
American credit card companies have blocked money transfers
to the WikiLeaks site.
Julian therefore came out of prison ‘believing in the British
justice system.’ “I hope to continue my work,” said the founder
of WikiLeaks on the steps of the building of the High Court, after
nine days of detention. He wants to prove his innocence, and
that’s why he gave himself up to the police on December 7, 2010.

In the mean time, after a prison cell, it’s time for ‘mansion arrest.’
Julian is staying at Ellingham Hall, a manor two hours away from
London, in Norfolk.
Vaughan Smith, the owner of London’s Frontline Club for
journalists, is playing host to Julian in his ancestral manor,
located in a wooded area, at the side of a lake. His host, former
officer turned war correspondent, did say that that he had a good
Internet connection.
It’s a gilded cage, really, because his parole has strict
instructions to be followed: electronic tag, curfew and reporting
398 Julian Assange

to a police station every day. He has to show up every day

between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. at the Beccles police station. In the
county of Suffolk, Beccles is a small town located a few hundred
yards from the coast of the North Sea, about fifteen minutes from
Ellingham Hall.

Julian cannot give interviews at his residence, as his lawyer

forbids it. He also cannot talk about the case, as only his legal
representatives are now allowed to do so. However, he can be
approached in his small black car when he goes to the Beccles
police station.
“He is settling down in the house,” said Vaughan Smith. “He
works, I don’t spend my time looking over his shoulder, I am his
host, not his jailer,” added the estate owner.
For Mr. Smith, the innocence of his guest is not in question.
He believes in his fight. “He initiated developments that will
change our world. There is an opportunity for governments to
change. We would have a better world as a result,” he explained.

Julian has settled in the residence with a few friends, including

WikiLeaks spokesperson, Kristinn Hrafnsson.
Although his passport was taken away, he remains available
to the Swedish authorities, as he believes that this entire matter is
simply and purely something the Americans cooked up.
A French intelligence expert came up with this hypothesis:
“The Swedish are trying to set him up. They want to break him
and make an example of him so he’ll stop making noise in the
media in the future.” It’s true that he’ll have less time to provoke
Western governments if he has to fight with lawyers to ensure his
defense.

In the beginning, there were two young Swedes, Anna Ardin and
Sofia Wilén.
 WikiLeaks 399

What Julian did wrong: refused to use condoms when they

had sexual relations. That was mid-August of last year, during a
seminar in Stockholm, Sweden. They are Julian’s main accusers.
What troubles me is that they waited several days to go to the
police, which in fact fueled the wildest online rumors. From the
very beginning, he’s always claimed that the two Swedes were
recruited to trap him. I even read that one of the two plaintiffs
has a cousin posted in Afghanistan. Or maybe they’re in it for the
money, unless they want to get revenge on a man who deceived
them, or better yet, men in general, as Anna is apparently a
fundamentalist-feminist.
Last we heard Anna left Stockholm to go to the West Bank in
the Palestinian Territories, as part of a Christian outreach group.
She’s no longer cooperating with prosecutors or even her lawyer.
We’ve read everything on these two girls, all on the Internet.
I found a few troubling coincidences: how these women
persisted in meeting Julian, and after having had sexual relations
with him, they continued to be in contact with their presumed
rapist. That’s very strange.
What really bothers me is how fiercely people are attacking
them online. They’ve said next to nothing since the end of August.

We know very little about Sofia Wilén. She was said to have
worked part-time in a museum and that her boyfriend was an
American artist named Seth Benson.
Neither one of them give interviews. Since their accusation of
sexual crimes, qualified by Julian many times as a set up to discredit
WikiLeaks, the young women live far from the media’s attention.
Sofia has even cut off her phone. On December 17, Anna wrote
on her blog that she was “taking a break,” but announced she
would express herself soon on the site prataomdet.se (Prata om
det means ‘to talk about it’). This forum was created in December
of 2010, where you can read testimonials published since the
400 Julian Assange

beginning of the affair on Twitter or in Swedish newspapers of

women who claim they’ve been victims of comparable sexual
aggression.
On Twitter, Ardin says she’s happy to write that she’s ‘the
real’ Anna Ardin. Finally, on December 8, she tweeted a weird
allusion to the affair: “CIA agent, rabid feminist / Muslim lover, a
Christian fundamentalist, frigid & fatally in love with a man, can
you be all that at the same time...”
I read that according to Granma, the daily of the Cuban
Communist Party, Anna is a militant feminist, an Anti-Castrist,
and according to American magazine CounterPunch, she’s linked
to the CIA, and is said to have worked for the American Embassy
in Sweden.
I talked to some Swedes on Facebook, particularly Lars who
knows a thing or two about politics. He knows Anna Ardin. We
e-mailed each other. He thought that linking her to the CIA was
a bit of an exaggeration. It’s not unusual in Sweden for a social
democrat to be anti-communist, even anti-Castro. Lars told me
that Anna has often criticized U.S. foreign policy as regards the
embargo on the commerce against Cuba for example, or their
lack of criticism against the Israeli agreement on the occupied
territories, and U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rape or no rape? I think that this matter has taken on epic

proportions. The matter has to be heard, then judged. Turning it
into a media circus for six months is not the way to go about it,
it messes with the references and with whatever facts there are.

Julian Assange is first and foremost a man, who’s young and single.
He seems to be a man with a very strong libido, like a rock star.
Women find him fascinating, or found him fascinating before the
 WikiLeaks 401

Swedish incident, because what he does is incredibly attractive

and exciting. He laughs at the international establishment, all
alone, like a kind of Robin Hood. That’s very attractive.
Alone he’s stronger than some leaders of the most powerful
countries in the world. All that is very seductive. He’s magnetic,
which is why many women find him very attractive. Sofia Wilén
was definitely one of them. Like many others, he knows how to
work it. He surely hasn’t been in this position for most of his life
and all of a sudden he is. I think he meets lots of women and that
the Swedish accusations underline his sex addiction. If the report
of the women is true, I don’t think he’ll be accused of rape. The
arguments are a bit weak, but they are pretty nauseating.

The story is quite disgusting. Meeting with these two young girls
didn’t sound very respectful. As a woman, I feel that ‘no’ must
mean ‘no.’ I think that if a woman says ‘put on a condom,’ that
should be respected.
One thing makes me smile ironically: how did Julian rape
Sofia Wilén when she was asleep or half asleep? It says this in
Swedish law: unconscious, OK; drunk, OK; sick, I get it, but
asleep? How much of a deep sleep do you have to be in or how
many sleeping pills or other drugs do you need to take before you
wake up and realize that a man is trying to have sex with you?

Rape or not? From what I read there’s no rape, but there was
violence. I see some sort of abuse and lack of respect. The girls
were right to go down to the police station. Unfortunately for them,
the matter got out of hand afterward. They were overwhelmed by
the events, no matter what their intentions were. Much higher
instances, more intelligent and more manipulative ones, took
over the matter.
402 Julian Assange

The opportunity is too nice to attack the messenger. There’s

obvious confusion as to the references between the man and his
action.
But the fight is already lost. The message was launched on the
quickest and sharpest tool known to this day: Internet. It’s viral
and exponential. Nothing will stop it.

As for Julian, he continues his odyssey: “Now that I am back to

assist the directing of our ship, our work will proceed in a faster
manner. But as we have seen with my absence, things are well set
up to proceed even without my direct involvement.”

Assange alluded to his prison conditions. It sends chills down my

spine.
During his ten days in prison, Julian said that he was transferred
three times: “First I was in the introductory cells. Unlike other
prisoners, my cell stayed closed for the entire period. Then I was
transferred to Onslaw wing, which has about 350 prisoners and
those are the ones who have a physical danger to other prisoners
or guards, people who have been convicted of sexual offenses,
murder of children … I could not leave my cell.”
Every cell had a camera. Every prisoner was isolated. He
even mentioned a ‘Soviet-style’ jail system. “I couldn’t leave my
cell, but prisoners wrote notes that they slipped under my door
because people were curious about me.”

His lawyer also expressed himself on Sky News, a London

news television: “He is in isolation. He doesn’t have access to
newspapers or television or other news devices. He is not getting
mail, he is subject to the pettiest forms of censorship.”
 WikiLeaks 403

Julian Assange evokes a ‘very bureaucratic’ system with

procedures that last ‘an eternity’ just to make phone calls. He was
only able to call four times, and none his lawyer.
I’m wondering if during his stay in prison, Julian thought
of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of his favorite writers. Russian
dissident, author of Gulag Archipelago, he was imprisoned in
1945. He was sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp
for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda.’ Did Julian remember the detention
conditions in the gulag? You know, the constant terror and tension
between prisoners? Rationing food to keep people hungry?
Destroying any physical or moral resistance?

Are Bradley Manning’s detention conditions inspired by the

gulag? Did Julian even think about that during his nine days in
jail? He says he doesn’t know him.
I don’t know him either, but I cannot stop thinking about him.
What’s happening to Bradley Manning, the twenty-three-year-
old solider?
I’m absolutely revolted by this. The case of this young
American-British soldier with blue eyes and boyish face has
been largely glossed over these past few months, contrary to the
media hype of anything Julian does. Detained since July 29 2010,
Bradley stays alone in his cell twenty-two hours a day, has an
hour walk per day and another hour to watch television. He is
cuffed at the hands and feet during visits. He’s not allowed to
work in prison. Five months he’s been in maximum isolation,
with a guard asking him if he’s OK every five minutes. At night,
if the guard doesn’t see him, he wakes him up to make sure he’s
OK. He’s not allowed to have a pillow or sheets. Books and
magazines he reads during the day are taken away from him at
404 Julian Assange

night. He also has to hand over his clothes at night when he goes
to sleep. What are they waiting for to complain?
His detention conditions are much worse than need be and
he seems to be inhumanely treated by the American authorities.
Bradley was supposed to be heard at the beginning of 2011 for
a preliminary hearing, before appearing in front of court martial
sometime in the spring.
I think that the United States doesn’t respect the principle of
having to presume innocence. And the military authorities seem
to be using all the means they have to sanction him during his
detention.

In the meantime Julian remembered that, “detention conditions

were more and more difficult in each prison.” When he came
out, he said: “It’s wonderful to have left the confinement and
solitude. I am very determined, as I saw that we have received
support from around the world, particularly from Latin America
and Australia.” In fact, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, President of
Brazil, declared that incarcerating the founder of WikiLeaks
undermined the freedom of expression. As for Ecuador, it was
ready to welcome him before going back on its offer. Through its
foreign ministry, the country suggested political asylum to Julian.
But Mr. Correa went back on this proposal, even accusing the
WikiLeaks site of breaking the law. According to the President
of Ecuador Rafael Correa WikiLeaks “broke the law by releasing
U.S. documents.”

Julian’s setbacks will probably continue. The British authorities

still have to examine his extradition to Sweden, without forgetting
the instructions stated by the American authorities that are trying
 WikiLeaks 405

to put together all the necessary evidence to indict him for

conspiracy.
The Australian, who claims to have received death threats,
just like his lawyer and his children, said that in prison, he had
the support of fifty per cent of the guards: “I was handed a card
by one of my black prison guards. It said, “I only have two heroes
in the world: Dr. (Martin Luther) King, and you.”

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 Conclusion

Just like an actor who doesn’t stop being a man when he’s
in costume, Julian Assange doesn’t stop being a man when he’s
wearing his armor as the Number One of WikiLeaks.

We wanted to write this book to discover the deeper meaning

in the life of a man seeking to reveal the truth, nothing but the
truth. An unshakeable faith motivates his quest: the trials of the
actions of men and shady institutions alone help us understand
how they work and open up the canals of human knowledge.
Julian Assange has a fervent desire to wake up our consciousness
and be a spokesperson as pioneer in the war for truth.

Little by little Julian Assange reveals himself by going through

trials imposed upon him. He still has a lifetime of experiences to
embark on. The trials intensify the question that has already been
asked while crossing the threshold: where does his ego fit into the
desire to act on an international level? Should he expose himself
or not? Should he let the media turn him into a celebrity or not?

Ever since the beginning of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange has

wanted to become a great man and have his work echo at high
volumes. As Joseph Campbell wrote, “The original departure
into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long
and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of
408 Julian Assange

illumination.” This book retraces the journey of Julian Assange

with the launch of leaks, the precious help of sources and the
recognition of journalists. We mentioned the difficulties, the
responses of States, the summary of agreements with major
newspapers and the legal affairs that still preoccupy Julian
Assange at the end of writing this book. “Meanwhile there will
be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies
and momentary glimpse of the wonderful land,” Campbell wrote
in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. We realized this with the
new laws on information in Iceland, timely support from the
‘Anonymous’ group or the various citizens’ movements popping
up as a response to the leaks.

In an interview given to Mediapart on January 31 2011, Julian

Assange explained the role played by WikiLeaks in the Tunisian
revolution. He paid tribute to the population without which the
revolution and change could not have happened. Then he saluted
the satellite media, particularly Al Jazeera for broadcasting the
riots.
As for the significant role played by WikiLeaks, he maintained
that the diplomatic cables on the subject were handled and
translated into Arabic by Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. “These
cables showed that the United States was ready to support the
army against the government if it were destabilized.” The army
then got involved confidently, and with the support of the army,
the people dared oppose the regime of Tunisian President Ben
Ali.
Assange then said: “There’s no doubt that Tunisia was the
example for Egypt and Yemen and Jordan, and all the protests
that have happened there.”
 WikiLeaks 409

WikiLeaks may only be the instigator of the current movement,

but is indeed an obvious supporter. And in these countries, the
youthful populations well versed in the Internet have already
elevated Julian Assange to the rank of hero.

The most precious value this man can offer us is his faith in the
truth. He had to make his determination known to the public at
large, to which many media have contributed. Julian Assange talks
of courage, as it’s much needed to confront the truths that scare
us. Today, he courageously raises this notion to State level. He
suggested re-appropriating citizens’ commitment. He demanded
that politicians take on their responsibilities. We also support him
for the democratic vitality in the actions of WikiLeaks, the goal
being to regain confidence in political actions for the good of
everyone.
Assange began a crusade against the forces of manipulation
and its web of lies. He led the battle with his WikiLeaks team. His
weapons are sources of information and the Internet. Today, he’s
counting on himself to confront the last legal battle.

Whether a god, mythical character, or man, a hero discovers his

own duality during his journey. Julian is a being of light and dark
who, “has to submit and accept that his person and his opposite
are not different, but make up a single body.”
The man can be judged, even be condemnable, if the actions
he’s committed at the personal level turn out to be wrongful.
However, in the event he’s found guilty, we can’t deny what
his actions can offer the world: an idea of the truth, a belief that
freedom of expression frees people from enslavement.
410 Julian Assange

Politicians talk to us about courage when referring to the

sacrifices we have to make to confront crises affecting our
societies. Julian Assange talks to us about courage in our thoughts
in order to build a better world; courage in our actions to maintain
our freedom and in our thinking to face reality head on; even
courage in our own humanity to face our position in the society
we’ve created. Finding our individual truth as a part of the truth
that he’s suggesting we can undress.

Many people simply say he’s not a better man than any other. The
tabloid press and vindictive collaborators describe him as a “cat
teaser who likes pretty young girls.” We refuse to believe that these
voices will be heard any louder over the sound of his ideology,
as others also carry the torches of freedom of information. We
refuse to believe that only the twists and turns of the ‘Swedish
affair’ are what people want to hear, which is why we chose to
finish our writing about his time in prison in December 2010.

Finally, it’s up to each individual to choose which echo of Julian’s

story he or she wants to hear.
 Epilogue

“I would also like to say that our work with WikiLeaks

continues unabated and we are stepping up our publishing
for matters relating to ‘Cablegate’ and other materials.”

This is what Julian Assange said when he left Belmarsh court in

London on January 11 2011. Journalists from around the world
had crammed into the room to attend this preliminary hearing,
which lasted a whole ten minutes, common in such cases. Over
the next few weeks, the British court was to decide whether the
founder of WikiLeaks should be extradited to Sweden or not
within the scope of rape and sexual aggression allegations made
against him.
A two-day hearing about this extradition request was held on
February 7 and 8 2011, conform to the European arrest warrant.
A last hearing was held on February 11 2011, so that both parties
had time to submit their conclusions.
The legal saga continued. Judge Howard Riddle was charged
to examine the case. Julian firmly denied the allegations made
against him and fought to avoid being tried in Sweden.
The group of lawyers Finers Stephens Innocent LLP began
asking for donations. A page was created to this end on Facebook.
The money raised would cover the legal fees, while any money
left over would be given to charities that promote freedom of
expression.
Australian-born British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson joined
Julian’s defense team, a legal eagle chosen by Julian to represent
him once he was out of prison in December 2010. A human rights
defender, Robertson is known for having defended hyped up
cases like those of Salman Rushdie, a British author of Indian
origin at the forefront of freedom of expression.
The strategy of Julian Assange’s defense team was aggressive
and audacious. Using some fifteen different arguments, the
members tried to convince the judge not to send their client in
front of a Swedish court. They first attacked the hypothetical
link between Stockholm and Washington. Sweden might intend
to deliver Julian to the United States in a plan to silence him.
He also feared being killed if he were to end up in an American
prison.
According to the defense, his extradition to Sweden would
open the door to sending their client to the United States, where
he risks imprisonment at Guantanamo or a death sentence for
treason. However, always according to his lawyers, a penal
investigation has been open since the summer of 2010 and the
Obama administration is currently looking for a legal angle
in American law to bring up charges against the founder of
WikiLeaks.
Australia, Julian’s home country and an ally of the United
States, has remained discrete, diplomatically speaking, while
public opinion is clearly on his side. In December 2010, Prime
Minister Julia Gillard said that WikiLeaks’ actions were illegal
without actually being able to prove it. Today the Australian
government has completely distanced itself from their citizen, as
no diplomatic protest exists to this day, either in Sweden or in the
United States.
 Julian’s mother deplores that the Minister of Foreign Affairs
didn’t respect its promise of offering diplomatic assistance to her
son as an Australian citizen. However, Julian is impatient to get
back to Melbourne. He has asked his country to take measures
for his repatriation in order to protect him and his team. Victim
of political maneuvers, Julian is convinced that Ms. Gillard
is secretly providing information about him to the American
authorities.
The defense continued its arguments of invalidity regarding
the rape accusations. Since the beginning of the affair in August,
Julian has kept insisting that both women had consensual sex
with him. Moreover, in Great Britain, the facts blamed on Julian
are not at all defined in the same way as they are in Sweden.
The defense team continued to insist on the fact that a trial there
would be prejudicial to their client, because rape cases are heard
behind closed doors, therefore Julian could not possibly get a fair
trial.
Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny was highly criticized during
these proceedings. According to the defense, the European arrest
warrant is invalid and the judge was not authorized to honor it.
Furthermore, Björn Hurtig accused the police and the
Swedish court of leaking information to the media since August
of 2010. Sven-Erik Alhem, former Swedish prosecutor was
astonished that Julian Assange’s name was put on public display
before being accused of anything. Extradition is unnecessary, as
Swedish justice only wanted to question him.
Smart tactic by Mr. Robertson to avoid extradition: quoting the
comments made by Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt
that are prejudicial to his client. The lawyer spoke of a toxic
atmosphere in Sweden where Julian Assange is seen today as
Public Enemy Number One. It’s that kind of shameful behavior
that ruins any chances of their client getting a fair trial if he were
414 Julian Assange

to be extradited to Sweden. In every country the legal realm is

separated from the political realm, but apparently that’s not the
case in Sweden, the defense argues.
The Swedish Prime Minister deplored the defense lawyers
taking so little consideration of women’s rights in their arguments
and points of view. Annoyed, he answered sharply to the
suggestion of a plot with the United States. Mr. Reinfeldt regrets
the way in which Julian’s defense presents his country’s justice
system, as the legal system is in fact independent. He disagreed
with the insinuations that Julian’s rights would be ignored if
he were extradited. According to him it’s a lawyer tactic to be
condescending towards the legal system of another country in
order to defend their client.
Julian appeared relaxed throughout the three days of his
hearings. He thought that the arguments shed some light on the
unjust character of the European arrest warrants system and the
Swedish police and justice methods. He complained that he never
had a chance to tell his version of the facts and that the arguments
were limited to procedural ones. For ages it has been announced
that he’d reveal a new barrage of secret documents if his site were
to close permanently.
The hearing was adjourned until February 24 2011 at which
time Judge Riddle had to hand his verdict on the extradition of
Julian to Sweden. That day, the green light was given: the judge
ordered the extradition of the Australian to Sweden. At the end of
a short hearing, Riddle felt that the allegations of sexual assault
and rape were serious enough to justify extradition. According
to him, the procedure followed by the Swedish authorities was
standard and no errors were made in issuing the arrest warrant.
Riddle confirmed that Julian would have a fair trial in Sweden,
emphasizing the mutual respect and confidence of the British
 WikiLeaks 415

court toward other European courts. The verdict ordered the

extradition of Assange to Sweden within the next ten days.
After three months of procedures since released from prison,
Julian, dressed in a dark suit and tie, didn’t flinch when he heard
the verdict. The defense team led by Mr. Robertson has appealed
the verdict in front of the High Court in London.
Their client has again formally denied any accusations. The
judge did however state that Julian deliberately had sex with one
of the two Swedish women while she was asleep, which in Great
Britain is akin to rape.
All kinds of recourses are still possible. The Assange team
has seven days, as of February 24 2011, to file an appeal. Public
Enemy Number One will then appear in front of Appellate Court,
Supreme Court, and finally, the European Court of Human Rights.
There are many months of procedures to come, as there’s a
long legal battle ahead.