Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  Back then, I had a regular job. I was responsible for network design and security for a large American company that did IT work for civilian and military clients and had its German headquarters in the town of Rüsselsheim. My employer and I had a tacit agreement that I wouldn’t have to deal with any weapons companies, so I worked primarily for GM, Opel, and a number of airlines. Anyone who books an overseas flight these days will probably use the technology that I developed.

  I earned around 50,000 euros a year—too little for what I was doing, but I didn’t care. I was active in the open source community. I worked longer hours than the required forty a week and was always experimenting with new solutions. What I did was generally appreciated within the company.

  My coworkers and I constantly thought up the sort of pranks that technically gifted people use to keep up their spirits in companies like ours. To protest the quality of the coffee, we manipulated the menus of the supposedly economical coffee machines so that they needed constant maintenance. I would regularly send e-mails to a short-tempered colleague from an address on the company server called god@eds.de. I enjoyed watching him becoming ever more enraged and would send him follow-up e-mails with statements like “God says you shouldn’t get so excited.”

  I lived nearby in the small city of Wiesbaden, and my girlfriend at the time, a very beautiful young woman, worked as a secretary for the company. All in all, I was content with, but hardly euphoric about, my life. My days were full and varied, but there was room for something more.

  After our falling-out, Julian reportedly said that I would have been nothing without WikiLeaks—that I only got involved with WL because I had nothing better to do with my life.

  He was right. WL is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although I hardly suffered from extreme boredom before I joined it. I had a server in my kitchen that ate up 8,500 kilowatt hours of electricity annually, I was constantly tinkering around with networks, and I met up with people at the local branch of the Chaos Club. Still, my heart was only half in these things. Something was missing in my life in those years. A purpose. A task that would truly inspire me and make me give up everything else.

  The Chaos Computer Club was an important point of social connection for me, and the space where the club met in Berlin was always one of the first addresses I visited whenever I was in the German capital. How can I describe what I liked about the people there? All of them were complete curmudgeons. Very creative, clever, but somewhat gruff individuals who had no time for superficial social niceties. But what they lacked in grace, they compensated for ten times over in loyalty, once they had accepted you into their ranks. All of them were occupied with something round the clock, even if outsiders were often unable to understand precisely what it was and why they were doing it. And every club member was an expert in something, be it freeware, electronic music, visual art, hacking, IT security, data protection, or light shows. The spectrum of people’s interests was enormous.

  The club also had a decisive advantage compared with many other communities. It had a physical location. That’s something of inestimable importance for people who spend a lot of their time in digital spaces. In the club, you could sit together and talk over problems face-to-face. You could even, as I would discover later, spend the night on one of their many couches if you’d gotten yourself into a jam. The club made sure that its members met up at regular intervals, for example at the annual congress, which took place at the Berliner Congress Center (bcc) in the heart of the city.

  In early December 2007, Julian sent me a message in the chat room: “We’ll see each other in Berlin. I’m looking forward to the lecture.”

  My first thought was, Fuck. I hope it’s going to happen. It wasn’t clear until right before the start of the congress whether Julian’s address would even take place. I’d done my best to arrange it for him, but the deadline for submitting proposals had expired in August. On the other hand, I was afraid that I would have pulled all my strings in Berlin only to see no one from WL turn up.

  As was his habit, Julian was set to arrive last-minute, and it turned out that no lecture had been scheduled for him. To this day, I have no idea whether he’d sent them the draft they had asked him for. It’s possible that back then no one understood what WikiLeaks was and how significant it could be. It’s also possible that many of the club members viewed WL with a critical eye and decided not to include Julian in the main program. Early on in Germany, we had encountered a lot of resistance from data-protection activists. “Protect Private Data—Use Public Data”—that was the slogan. We operated in a gray area, and that provoked a lot of discussion.

  In any case, Julian was not part of the official program. The congress organizers had merely granted us permission to stage a small presentation in one of the workshop spaces. Julian had already started kicking up a fuss at reception because he refused to pay the entrance fee. He assumed he would be admitted free of charge because he was speaking, but the volunteer ticket takers saw things differently. And he wasn’t present on the official list of speakers, so they wanted him to pay 70 euros. Julian simply deposited his backpack in the pressroom and took over the space. Julian usually traveled with only a backpack, which contained all his worldly possessions.

  The pressroom was a modest-sized room with a dark tiled floor and a row of tables behind movable, separating walls. It was located on the second floor, all the way at the end of a hallway, and the blinds were usually drawn even in the daytime. Normally, journalists would use the room as a quiet space where they could work on their laptops in peace. Julian immediately commandeered it for his daily routine, sitting for hours at a time in front of his computer, typing loudly.

  If others asked if they could have the space for a quarter of an hour to conduct a radio interview or something, Julian flatly refused to make way—or even to type a bit more quietly.

  Although the congress organizers tried every evening to get rid of their stubborn guest, Julian insisted that he had booked the space, and that it was well within his rights to spend the nights there as well. And he did, presumably wrapped up in his jacket and sleeping atop one of the tables since the tiles were far too cold to doze off on.

  My first thought upon seeing him was: Cool guy. He was wearing olive-green cargo pants, a white shirt, and a green woolen vest from a suit—attire that distinguished him from the rest of the congress participants. The way he walked was both energetic and carefree, and he took huge strides. When he went up the stairs, the floorboards would vibrate. Occasionally, he would take a running start and glide across the freshly waxed floor in his well-worn boots. Or he’d slide down the banister, almost falling head over heels when he got to the bottom. It was fun watching him.

  We met for the first time face-to-face by the spiral staircase on the second floor of the bcc. The congress was really full that day. Latecomers were fruitlessly begging for admission downstairs at reception, and the previous attendance record of 3,000 had been shattered. Masses of people were pushing their way, chatting all the while, through the hallways. Sometimes there were logjams of a quarter of an hour just to advance twenty meters. On the second floor, things were somewhat more relaxed. There was a leather sofa with a view of Alexanderplatz, eastern Berlin’s main city square. This was to become our meeting point for the next couple of days. Whenever one of us had to go to the bathroom or get something to eat, the other would guard our things. If one of the congress visitors seemed to be eyeing our possessions, I’d bare my teeth at him.

  We talked for hours. Then we would simply sit side by side, saying nothing, Julian absently working away at his computer.

  I don’t know what Julian was expecting when he came to Berlin. I wasn’t particularly happy with the basement room we had been allocated for his presentation, but it turned out we were lucky it was small. Fewer than twenty people showed up at the lecture, and none of the more familiar faces within the club, as I noted to my dismay. I couldn’t understand why no one seemed interested in t
his topic.

  I sat up front on the right and observed Julian as he talked about WL in his friendly Australian accent. He wore the same clothes every day. The gleaming white shirt that had so impressed me when we first met lost some of its shine as time went on. If Julian was disappointed by the small number of listeners he attracted, he didn’t let it show. He spoke for forty-five minutes, and afterward, when three people in the audience wanted to know more, he patiently answered their questions.

  I felt a bit sorry for him that so few people had wanted to hear his lecture. He had paid for the trip out of his own pocket. When I turned around to look at the audience, I saw bewilderment in some of the faces. Later, his lectures would become much easier to follow, with a lot more examples. At the time, though, he still spoke very theoretically. Julian was truly tireless in his attempts to get audiences excited about his ideas.

  Yet even though most people didn’t know what to make of WL, in the months that followed, Julian and I would keep talking about the project to anyone who was prepared to listen for a few minutes. Even if there were only three of them. Today, the whole world knows us. Back then, every individual counted.

  When the three people had asked their questions, Julian gathered his things, went back to the couch on the second floor, and reimmersed himself in his work.

  I learned after the fact that there’d been a lot of trouble with the organizers, and Julian had quarreled with many of my acquaintances. For months after Julian’s appearance, the club—my second home—remained skeptical about WikiLeaks. I always asked myself why that was.

  In any case, Julian had made a huge impression on me.

  This lanky Australian was someone who didn’t let anyone boss him around or stop him from pursuing his work. He was also well read and had strong opinions about a number of topics. For example, he had a completely different view of the hacker community that I held in such regard. He thought they were “useless” idiots. That was typical of him. He was always judging people on their “usefulness,” however he defined that category in a given situation. In his eyes, even particularly gifted hackers were idiots if they didn’t apply their talents toward a larger goal.

  Even back then I thought that his uncompromising personality and extreme opinions, which he would simply spit out undiplomatically, would put him at odds with a lot of people.

  There was so much to plan and discuss, though, that I didn’t have the time to keep analyzing the character of my new acquaintance. I didn’t ask myself back then whether his behavior was normal or not. I didn’t ask myself whether I could trust Julian or whether he might get me in trouble. On the contrary, I was somewhat flattered that he was interested in working with me. For me, Julian Assange was not only the founder of WL but also the hacker known as Mendax, a member of the famous International Subversives, one of the greatest hackers in the world, and the coauthor/researcher (with Suelette Dreyfus) of Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier—a highly respected book among connoisseurs. We hit it off right from the start.

  He asked me very few personal questions. I think he respected me as someone who had said straightaway that he’d like to help and then showed commitment. That was probably more than what he had gotten from most other people at that point.

  Soon I was able to experience this phenomenon for myself. Every time we published something, a few more volunteers would appear, saying, “We’d like to support WikiLeaks.” But even when we gave them something concrete to do, only one out of a hundred, if even that, would ever get back in touch. I handed out the same tasks and wrote the same explanations hundreds of times, but it never amounted to anything. I think Julian had already been through this. And that’s why he was glad to find an ally.

  What’s more, WikiLeaks quickly established a bond between us. We believed in the same ideals. We were equals—at least, that’s the way I felt. Julian may have founded WikiLeaks, and he may have had more experience than I did, but right from the start I had the feeling that we were a pretty awesome team.

  IT was in January 2008—I’d only been onboard at WikiLeaks for a few months—that the first publications I’d been directly involved in appeared. Someone had uploaded a massive jumble of figures and calculations, organigrams, workflow documents, and contracts onto our digital mailbox. What significance did they have? It took Julian and me a couple of days to get an overview of the material. Hundreds of pages contained internal correspondence from the Julius Bär Bank, one of the largest private financial institutions in Switzerland. Now, as everyone knows, people don’t always deposit money with Swiss bank accounts because of the quality of the clean Alpine air. From the documents, it was apparent that enormous amounts of money had been shielded from tax authorities. The material was full of concrete examples. We were talking about sums between $5 million and $100 million per client. The tax revenues not paid by dozens of exorbitantly wealthy individuals would have probably been enough to fund a dozen social programs.

  The sinister elegance was shocking, especially because it was legal. A complex system of subsidiaries and financial transactions ensured that the money was well hidden on the Cayman Islands. I was impressed by the intelligence of the people who had thought this up.

  We continued to do background research, wrote a summary, and posted everything in unadulterated form on the Internet. Then we issued a press release. Julian and I were really curious what the reaction would be. It was Monday, January 14, 2008.

  Tuesday was staff-meeting day for me at my job. That entailed sitting with fifteen to twenty others in a claustrophobic conference room, breathing in stale air, and staring at Excel charts. The minute hand on the clock seemed as though it had been glued in place. Every five minutes, I stole a glance at my cell phone to see whether there was anything about WikiLeaks on Google News. I knew something was going to happen. What I didn’t know was when.

  Normally, the operators of websites want to know who is surfing their pages and what buttons get clicked. But we didn’t have the technical setup for that. It would have contradicted WikiLeaks’s principle of anonymity. So we never knew if anyone had looked at our material or not.

  When my boss finally ended the meeting, I packed my things and sprinted out of the building. On my way home, I bought some meat, potatoes, and cauliflower in the organic grocery around the corner. Back in my apartment, a one-bedroom garden apartment with all the rooms branching off from a single gloomy hallway, I tossed my groceries on the kitchen counter and started my two laptops. There it was: the first reaction to our revelations about Julius Bär. The initial salvo in our battle against the powerful. Our trial by fire. It arrived on January 15, 2008, at 8:30 p.m. It was time to buckle our seat belts. The ride was about to commence.

  The sender was an attorney from a law firm based in California. Normally, the firm represents Hollywood stars. In an arrogant tone, the lawyer demanded that we name the source of our documents and remove them from the site.

  “Holy fuck,” Julian wrote. “Look at that.”

  “We’ll destroy them,” I typed back.

  Julian and I always chatted. We never phoned. The messages that went back and forth in the next few hours between somewhere in the world and Wiesbaden, between Julian and me, were full of exclamation points and profanity.

  While I peeled the potatoes, boiled the cauliflower, and braised the meat, Julian and I brainstormed about how to proceed. I wasn’t worried that something bad could happen, that we might be arrested or that the material could be confiscated. We were out to stir up trouble. Official letters from courts and government authorities are always written as if their sole goal is to elicit maximum feelings of powerlessness and frustration in the addressee. This time we’d see who would come out on the short end. It was our first test of whether the system we’d invented, so brilliant in theory, would prove itself in practice.

  We replied, asking the lawyer to be more specific. When we knew which client he was talking about, we would appoint the
best lawyer in our legal arsenal to handle the case.

  In reality, of course, we were light-years away from having a pool of attorneys at our beck and call. To be precise, we were in contact with one female attorney who had offered us her services for free. Her name was Julie Turner. She was from Texas, and it was a few days before we could get in touch with her. But to the outside world, we always pretended to have a huge legal department. My pseudonym was Daniel Schmitt. That wasn’t particularly creative—it was the name of my cat. But I hoped it would be good enough to keep the private detectives at bay. We had heard from other people that big banking houses didn’t shy away from hiring a detective agency to shadow anyone who made their lives uncomfortable. I had no desire to be spied upon.

  Since the Julius Bär leak, I’ve been stuck with my pseudonym. The press knew me only as Daniel Schmitt.

  In the next couple of days, I tried to work as much as possible from home. Around noon, I’d grab an old laptop, hastily wave to the boss, and mutter something about “trial runs” before heading back to my apartment. Whenever my cell phone would ring at work, I’d flee to the storeroom on the ninth floor.

  It wasn’t long before further e-mails arrived. A number of American civil rights groups had visited our site. What we had done spoke to their core interests: protecting informants and freedom of the press. One of the most common and hotly debated problems was that employees who wanted to reveal wrongdoing in their companies were often prevented from doing so by restrictive contracts with confidentiality agreements. The whistle-blower debate was much more advanced in the United States than in Germany, where people tended to see those who revealed company secrets as snitches rather than heroes in the cause of freedom of information.

  In the beginning, it looked as though our adversaries would win. The opposition’s lawyers succeeded in getting an emergency injunction from a California court. The suit was filed in California because that was where the WikiLeaks.org domain was then registered. They had argued that “company secrets” had been “stolen by a former employee” who had violated a “written confidentiality agreement.” The judge ruled in their favor. The WikiLeaks.org page was taken offline. They had deleted us, or so they thought. But they weren’t aware of another part of the WikiLeaks principle: When you took down one page from the Internet, twenty more would pop up in different locations to take its place. It was virtually impossible to take us off the Internet.