This article was taken from theOctoberissue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
Wikileaks claims it has toppled governments and exposed Swiss bank fraud. It has been targeted by libel lawyers around the world and is banned in three countries. How? By publishing confidential documents.
Wikileaks is an online evidence drop. It has created a technical and legal framework that uses web servers distributed across several jurisdictions to protect itself and its whistleblowers. It will publish any document as long as it appears on official paper (it is not a rumour mill, its creators say) and has not been previously published elsewhere. Why does it do this? Solely in the name of the historical record, it claims.
Earlier this year, Wikileaks embarrassed the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, when it published his government's list of banned websites, which incriminated 2,602 sites - including that of a Queensland dentist. In December 2007, it was cited as the source for a Guardian report on how government officials in Kenya allegedly stole up to $3 billion and is said to have helped swing the presidential elections. Closer to home, in November 2007, Wikileaks angered the UK government when a document relating to the controversial sale of the stricken bank Northern Rock proved impossible to have removed from the site.
But who is behind Wikileaks? The site claims to have been founded by a concerned group of journalists, political dissidents and hackers. Curious to learn more, Wired travelled across Europe to track down the people behind the organisation.
With a slow, lilting walk, weighed down by a laptop bag that is rarely out of his sight, Daniel "Schmitt" - he won't give his real surname - sits down at a table in the rear of a café in central Italy. He got involved with Wikileaks prior to its launch in December 2006, he says, giving up his career, and salary, to work for the group. Born Daniel, he adopted the nom de plume "Schmitt" after his cat, Mr Schmitt. His background is in computer security: he worked as a network engineer at an international technology-services company. He is cagey about his previous life and says it isn't relevant.
Dressed in his signature black shirt, combats and Doc Martens boots, he begins his explanation of what Wikileaks is. His words are guarded, almost rehearsed, and the more he talks, the more the syntax of his native German permeates his English. "When we started, we thought we'd become the 'Intelligence Agency of the People'," says Schmitt. "There would be thousands of people involved, digging out the dirt on their governments. It would create a revolutionary spirit." But the reality of Wikileaks has been far removed from the idealism of its optimistic roots.
Wikileaks has been surrounded by controversy since the start. When the site's first leak, a secret Islamic order allegedly written by Sheikh Hassan Aweys, one of the leaders of the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia, went live in December 2006, there was speculation that it was fake; Wikileaks' credibility was questioned in the press.
A few weeks later, in January 2007, John Young, a member of the Wikileaks advisory board and the founder of cryptome.org, an online depot for leaked documents, corporate rumours and government conspiracies, left Wikileaks, accusing the group of being a CIA conduit. After the split, he published over 150 pages of emails sent by members of Wikileaks on cryptome.org.
The emails charted the beginnings of Wikileaks; the group's attempts to create a profile for themselves; and the arguments over how to do so. The emails talk about political impact and positive reform. They are clouded by florid rhetoric while calling for clarity and transparency around the world. Young accused Wikileaks of being part of the CIA, but Wikileaks didn't actually seem to mind the accusation.
Schmitt says that Wikileaks has fed the speculation that it is CIA-funded. "There's nothing better than half of the world thinking we are CIA," says Schmitt. "As long as the right half believe this. It might encourage some people to submit material."
John Young has changed his opinion about Wikileaks. He is now supportive of its work, though has reservations about the project's "self-promotional aspect, and its secrecy, its love of authoritativeness, which are likely due to its being run by those trained in journalism wherein advertising and privileged access to information, and magnification of its importance, are taken to be essential to marketing success."
Young's main gripe is the anonymity of the site's operators, which he describes as leaving the group open to "being co-opted by spies. It is common spy tradecraft to do that, as in journalism, media, education, churches, government and so on."
In the spirit of transparency, or self-promotion, Wikileaks published its own secret donor list, which was submitted to the site as a leak: someone forgot to use the bcc line when sending out a message to Wikileaks' benefactors, thereby revealing all the addresses to all the recipients. "It proves that we are transparent and that we will publish anything," says Schmitt, proudly.
Its donor list was not too difficult for the team to verify. But Wikileaks receives content from all over the world about a range of topics, from Barnes & Nobles' anti-union administration manual to alleged corruption in Zambia, and it claims to verify every document published. "Wikileaks staff, who are investigative journalists," states the website, "forensically examine all documents and label any suspicions of inauthenticity." Wikileaks also passes documents to "the local dissident community, human-rights groups and regional experts" to gauge their opinion on a document's authenticity.
The number of people involved in the verification process, as with the rest of Wikileaks, is unclear. But Wikileaks claims to have published 1.2 million documents in three years. This means its - presumably extensive - team of volunteers receives, verifies and publishes over 1,000 documents every day.
There is fake content on Wikileaks. A whistleblower, who asked to remain anonymous, admitted to submitting fabricated documents to Wikileaks to see what it would do. The documents were flagged as potential fakes, but the whistleblower felt that the decision to publish the documents had "an impact on their credibility". When challenged on fake content, Schmitt twists the potential criticism into a positive. "A fake document is a story in itself," he says. Wikileaks publishes documents for the coverage that it will generate and the political reform that it hopes will follow. But who at Wikileaks maps and controls this reform trajectory? It seems to be the site's cofounder, Julian Assange. "We want to focus on spreading and keeping before the public the kind of information that we know from experience has particular political impact," says Assange. Wired met him in a noisy Pret A Manger in Liverpool Street station, London. We had spoken for over an hour when, without warning, our meeting was suddenly over. Assange jumped on a train to Stansted airport. He wouldn't say where he was going.
The beginnings of Wikileaks lie with Assange. Now in his late thirties, he was a teenage hacker in Melbourne in the 80s. In the 90s he teamed up with journalist Suelette Dreyfus, now a member of the Wikileaks advisory board, to write Underground, a book recounting the exploits of a group of British, Australian and American black-hat hackers. Similarities between Assange and "Mendax", a character in the book, suggest that Assange lent more than his technical knowledge to the project.
In the early days of Wikileaks, he formed an advisory board and filled it with prominent journalists, political activists and computer specialists. The advisory board was intended to lend credibility to and provide exposure for Wikileaks.
But most of the members of the advisory board to whom Wired spoke admitted that they had little involvement with Wikileaks, and have not done much "advising". "I'm not really sure what the advisory board means," says Ben Laurie, a computer- security expert and member of the board "since before the beginning". "It's as mysterious as the rest of Wikileaks."
Phillip Adams, an Australian journalist, is listed as an advisor. But he told Wired that he had "resigned early on because of workload and health issues".
Another member of the advisory board, CJ Hinke, the founder of Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT), has been more involved and says he is regularly consulted by Wikileaks "on such issues as credibility and importance of leaked materials". He admits that he was initially concerned by "Wikileaks' Secret Squirrel approach" but that he has since developed "great regard and trust for their mission".
Hinke points out that Wikileaks, "like a real activist, takes a stand and doesn't back down". Activism seems to be central to the mission, even though it calls itself a media organisation, with an "editorial team". "I am a journalist in this context," says Schmitt.
So, what is Wikileaks? The future of investigative journalism for the online era? Political activists with a long to-do list? Or anarcho-journalists just making mischief? Assange's rhetoric suggests all three. "The secrecy reveals the potential for reform if the information is made public," he says. "The amount of effort put into suppressing information is an economic signal. That effort signals the potential reform impact once the information is released. Otherwise why spend the money restricting it? If you can selectively target this restricted information, then you will selectively produce positive reform."
Assange's political theories are presented with a tone of revolutionary idealism. But who defines "positive reform"? Who does the "selecting"? And what about the innocent people who find their private data leaked? Assange says that Wikileaks seeks to "minimise the risk to people who are associated with information" it publishes by sending out "courtesy emails". But when Assange sent an email to "notify" one man that his details were about to be released and cautioning him to "take whatever precautions you need", he received a less than thankful response. The reply questioned Wikileaks' "journalistic achievement", described its actions as "reptilian" and concluded by saying: "Less charitable people might think only that you are a geek weenie with hang-ups." Assange's answer is short: "Your treatise is, with respect, as insane as it is long."
Wikileaks legally protects itself, and its sources, by spreading itself across multiple jurisdictions. It is hosted by Sweden-based PRQ and uploads most of it documents through a Swedish server. Under a clause in the Swedish Press Freedom Act it is a criminal offence to breach source-journalist confidentiality, and Wikileaks says it uses this law to protect itself and its sources. It claims to have never failed a source.
But Adam Weissbach, a lawyer at the Vinge law firm in Sweden, claims that Wikileaks is "simplifying things by saying that Swedish laws will protect all sources". There are exceptions to the source-journalist clause, mostly related to national security. All media organisations operating in Sweden that want to enjoy the protection of the act need a "publishing certificate" and a named person as the legally responsible publisher of the material. No one at Wikileaks could confirm if it had either.
Ben Laurie, a British computer security expert and member of the Wikileaks advisory board, says he wouldn't trust Wikileaks to protect him if he were a whistleblower. "If you're up against governments, they have a lot of resources at hand," says Laurie. "And the things that Wikileaks relies on are not sufficiently strong to defend against those kind of resources. "If I contributed to Wikileaks, I wouldn't submit the documents myself," he adds.
Furthermore, Wikileaks can't protect journalists who use its material. When Wired looked into particular UK-based claims sourced to documents on Wikileaks, a partner at Schillings law firm said that, while Wikileaks was protected by its multijurisdictional structure, Wired was not, and any mention of an injuncted document would spell trouble.
Despite Wikileaks' claim that it has had 12 consecutive legal victories, the team was shaken by the Swiss bank Julius Baer (BJB) in January 2008. The bank had the wikileaks.org domain taken offline after Wikileaks published a number of documents that allegedly demonstrated the bank's clients' involvement in offshore tax evasion, asset hiding and money-laundering.
The BJB documents were submitted to Wikileaks by ex-employee Rudolf Elmer. Elmer approached newspapers in his native Switzerland and tried to alert the Swiss tax authorities and the police to what he described as serious tax evasion. But no one was interested. On January 9, 2008, Elmer published the documents on Wikileaks. "Wikileaks was the only tool I had to raise my voice," says Elmer, speaking to Wired from his Mauritius home.
Six days after Elmer's documents appeared on the site, BJB launched legal proceedings in the US against it. The case went against Wikileaks and federal district judge Jeffrey White ordered wikileaks.org to close. Two weeks later, the judge was forced to dissolve his injunction after free-speech groups protested that the ruling violated the US First Amendment.
BJB's case against Wikileaks generated considerable negative publicity for the bank and ultimately failed. Other organisations appear to have learnt that one of Wikileaks' strongest weapons is the publicity hazard it creates. In 2008, the site published what it said was the core doctrine of the Church of Scientology. Past attempts to circulate the document had been quelled by aggressive legal action. But the Scientologists haven't yet sued Wikileaks, and they won't say why not. "By now there is a learning curve and we perceive some institutions have learned from mistakes of others," says Schmitt.
The publicity that Wikileaks received through such high-profile cases prompted journalists to try to discover who is behind the site. Assange became frustrated that most of the media coverage was speculation about them, and not the documents they were publishing. "It doesn't matter who Wikileaks is, what matters is what Wikileaks does," he says.
In the emails that Young leaked it appears that Wikileaks tried to use a collective pseudonym to publish stories in the media about the content on Wikileaks, in order to spark more stories. In the emails there are repeated references to the "Bourbaki" articles: Bourbaki was a pseudonym used by a group of mainly French 20th-century mathematicians. In one of the emails the author points out that "We need a mini bio (pick truths from all of us) for Bourbaki and a less obvious name, though 'Jack Bourbaki' sure is kind to the tongue. I have a Washington voicemail service I'll set up with the identity."
Whether Bourbaki was ever brought into being no one could confirm.
Latterly, Wikileaks has refocused its energies and started producing press releases. "We are an activist organisation," says Assange. "Our goal is to have maximum reform impact. In order to have impact we had to write press releases."
The press release, according to Assange, is a cheap form of journalism on which today's media rely. The concept of the press release dates from 1791 when Thomas Paine offered his book The Rights of Manto publishers royalty-free, says Assange. "It went on to have enormous political impact as everyone printed it because it was so profitable to print." Wikileaks has thus sought to recreate Paine's relationship with his printers with today's media. "We reduce the input costs for journalists in that we provide high-quality material," says Assange. "We reduce their output costs in the sense that we take most of the risks associated with publishing the material. You bring the cost of investigative journalism down closer to that of journalism from press releases."
That is the theory. But, as Wikileaks has learnt, dumping material onto the information market, with no exclusivity, diminishes its perceived value. In August 2008, to sustain Assange's press-release theory, Wikileaks tried to auction a leak containing over 7,000 emails from the Venezuelan ambassador to Argentina, Freddy Balzan. The emails charted Balzan's split with Hugo Chavez, recall to Venezuela and demotion. The venture failed because of the logistical problems. "There were then 50 stories about the fact we were auctioning the material," says Assange. "But none about the Venezuelan documents in hand."
Despite Wikileaks' calls for transparency in governments and organisations across the world, it remains opaque. The conflicting information available on the web about Wikileaks is cited by members as being a "good thing": "It would be stupid to assume that a powerful adversary couldn't find out that stuff, but there's no need to make their life easy," says Ben Laurie.
What is known is that Wikileaks has over 300 mirror domain names that have been donated by supporters. Theodor Reppe owns wikileaks.de. "When I heard about the project, I thought, 'I'll register the domain before someone else gets it, and donate it to Wikileaks'," he says. In March 2009 the German police raided Reppe's home shortly after Wikileaks published the Australian internet filter list. "I think the police thought I had more control over the content of Wikileaks," says Reppe, who had not had any personal contact with Wikileaks until the police raid. But this is as far as the collaborative nature of Wikileaks goes. At the start, the site was often described as Wikipedia for whistleblowers, but Wikileaks is not living up to the "wiki" in its name.
When it was launched, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikia and co-creator of Wikipedia, made it clear he didn't want Wikileaks to be linked with any of his ventures. Despite his apparent lack of interest in the project, someone at Wikia registered wikileaks.com and wikileaks.net. It took Wikileaks six months to get Wikia to direct the domains to Wikileaks and not to themselves. Wales denies there was a motive behind registering the names. When asked what he thought of Wikileaks, he said, "I have nothing to do with Wikileaks, know nothing about it, and have no interest in it really."
Other organisations have taken more interest. Ben Laurie recently submitted a Freedom of Information request to the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) to discover what it knew about Wikileaks. In reply, he received a series of emails, sent internally within the MoD, expressing concern, bordering on panic, that Wikileaks had been publishing restricted MoD documents.
The first email, sent on November 5, 2008, points its recipient towards a Wikileaks page containing MoD documents saying "this may be of as much (if not more) concern". A reply came a few hours later: "There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands. Not just UK MoD but other places as well. Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was restricted which then had links within that and then links again and so on. It is huge."
When wired approached the MoD for a comment, a ministry spokesperson responded, "While we would not choose to disclose voluntarily some of the information on Wikileaks, much of it is already available in open sources. Its publication on the website does not therefore raise significant concerns." Wired asked the MoD whether the comment was strictly true, but the MoD chose to stand by it. Despite the MoD spokesperson's nonchalant reply to Wired, it has internally blocked wikileaks.org. The official reason was it "adds no value to our business".
Sitting outside the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin, at a later meeting with Wired, Schmitt describes with amusement the reaction of the MoD. But, despite his disparaging attitude towards the secret services of various countries, both he and Assange display a degree of paranoia over being followed and "found". Assange arrived three hours late for the Amnesty International Media Awards in June 2009 after he took multiple flights to get from Nairobi to London. In a roundabout and unspecific fashion, Assange implied that the reason for his convoluted journey was that he didn't want to give his passport details to the airline until the last possible moment. However, he was always on the guest list for the Amnesty International Media Awards, where Wired awaited him.
Both Schmitt and Assange claim to have been followed on a number of occasions. Schmitt says a woman once tailed him in Berlin, though his description of her made her sound like a very clumsy stalker. And although Schmitt's assailant doesn't seem to fit the description of the subtle private investigator or agent, Assange's story fits the cliché perfectly. He says that in April 2009, a friend who has no connections with Wikileaks was stopped in a Luxembourg car park by a man in a dark suit and a clipped British accent. The suited man asked questions about Assange's whereabouts, and, he claims, said, "I think it is in your best interest to have coffee with me."
So are Schmitt's and Assange's caution justified? Both are at the very heart of Wikileaks, and they weren't exactly easy for Wired to find. But is Wikileaks the target that they think, or hope, that it is? Ben Laurie says that one of the reasons he became less involved with Wikileaks was because he "likes to stay at home" rather than living the life of a spy. Yet much of the secrecy appears entirely self-imposed.
Furthermore, can Wikileaks continue with its mission to publish all in the name of the public record? "Wikileaks depends on the enthusiasm of a small number of people, and particularly on Assange," says Laurie. "If he met with a nasty accident, maybe Wikileaks would fizzle out."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
