Read Julian Assange - WikiLeaks Online
Authors: Sophie Radermecker
Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (12 page)
Dear Mr. Ellsberg,
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. (â¦)
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. (â¦)
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
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 âprospective' to âprojective'. 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
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 20
th
to the 25
th
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 âRoad 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'
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 â and our fire â 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
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 âznet,' âzmag,' âcsmonitor,' âvillage voice,' and âaljazeera,' but no decision was made. They were more preoccupied with problems of tracing documents according to the format used (PDF, Word, etc.).
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 (...)
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
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
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.
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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: âWhosoever leaks this information and is found guilty should be shot.' The unscrupulousness of some of the strategies advocated is presumably the reason for such
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.