Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  At that time, I thought that we would be able to develop the project to a point where we could pay ourselves a modest salary. So quitting my job didn’t seem all that adventurous. Everything felt right.

  IN 2008, we began publishing Internet filter lists. They’re used to block websites, for instance, when parents want to protect their children from certain types of content. The first lists were from Thailand. In this case, it was clear that they were being deployed for political purposes. The regime was using the main filter to undermine criticism of the royal family. Websites with antigovernment content were being suppressed along with pornographic material.

  Soon we began receiving leaked filter lists from democratic countries as well, including Norway, Finland, Denmark, Italy, and Australia. These lists were primarily intended to restrict the flow of child pornography, and parents were able to install the filters on their own computers and those used by their children. This is, no doubt, a noble endeavor. It only became a measure of censorship when lawmakers tried to make the filters mandatory for all Internet users. Proponents argue that filters are the only effective means of combating child pornography, but that’s a fallacy that has been thoroughly disproven.

  Our leaks revealed that even the best filter list was wrong about two-thirds of the sites it identified as dangerous. Some of the lists were mistaken up to 90 percent of the time. With the Finnish list, only a very small percentage of the sites identified had anything to do with child pornography. The facts about the lists played a major role in the anticensorship protest movement.

  Not only were the systems poor; they could be easily misused for political purposes—and not just in dictatorships and monolithic states like China or North Korea. In Finland, Matti Nikki—one of the country’s best-known bloggers and a critic of Internet censorship—fell victim to the lists of prohibited content. After he had published the list of banned sites in Finland, he suddenly found his own IP address on it.

  The Australian lists contained a dentist’s business page and some antiabortion sites, as well as home pages created by homosexuals and religious minorities. Our leak coincided with elections in Australia. The Australian government was trying to make Internet filters mandatory, and initially the politicians tried to deny the list we had leaked was the same one upon which their proposed legislation was based. Ironically, we soon received another list that was very similar to the first one—but with corrections on those points that had come in for heavy public criticism.

  In late April 2009, Ursula von der Leyen, who was then Germany’s minister of Family Affairs, presented a first draft for what she called the Access Impediment Law. Even the scientific service of the German parliament criticized it as being probably unconstitutional. Nonetheless, I think the draft legislation would have been waved through if we hadn’t succeeded in focusing public attention on the topic.

  But as was so often the case, the name WikiLeaks wasn’t at the center of the public debate. For this to become a political issue, someone else needed to take up the cause as her own. In this case, and luckily for us, that person was a young woman from Berlin.

  Franziska Heine is an anticensorship activist who had stumbled over the censorship issue in a blog and immediately drafted an online petition that was to become the most successful of its kind ever in Germany. Within the space of days, Franziska had become a public figure, at least in those political and journalistic circles concerned with questions of censorship. Major German newspapers and TV shows wanted to interview her. Whenever we went out somewhere together, her cell phone wouldn’t stop ringing, and she talked to the press every lunch hour.

  I’d met Franziska via e-mail. After she drafted her petition, I wrote to her and asked her if we could cooperate. Her response was enthusiastic, concluding with the words “We should meet up.” A few days later, I was sitting on a train to Berlin.

  Franziska is a very open person. The first time we met, we took a three-hour-long walk along the Spree River, talking all the while. Most of the time, she had a very friendly, somewhat mischievous look on her face. What’s more, she had a talent for asking the right questions. It was fun conversing with her. I only wished I hadn’t brought along my messenger bag. For security reasons, I never left my two laptops and my cell phone unattended at home. They lay heavy in my bag and made every step a physical trial for my right shoulder.

  Later I went with her to a popular outdoor techno bar called the Club of the Visionaries. We sat on its wooden dock, rocked back and forth to the beats, and stared at the Spree. Other bloggers and Net activists joined us, and of course, a lively discussion ensued. Franziska was very committed, at least as much as I was, to our mutual cause.

  I don’t know whether she enjoyed being the center of attention. Along with her anticensorship work, she had a normal full-time job as a project manager with a telecommunications firm. She was the perfect spokeswoman—someone who hadn’t yet made a name for herself in the realm of Internet issues. She couldn’t be accused of having a political agenda or being tempted to misuse our cause to further her own career. Because she didn’t grasp all the details of many technical questions, she would seek my advice when she was invited to talk to the press. I was glad to help her, not only because I enjoyed providing the buzzwords and serving as a walking, talking technical dictionary, but because it gave me access to political decision makers.

  Together, we put up posters for the large antigovernment surveillance demonstration “Freedom, Not Fear” in Berlin in 2009, and she also attended the major hackers’ conference in the Netherlands, HAR (Hacking At Random). Nowadays, I don’t have that much contact with her. I think she’s probably glad to have more time to devote to her career and her private life. Back in 2009, quite a lot of people were interested in censorship questions, but it was hard to get them to work with us. I believe they thought that because they’d been involved longer, they owned the topic. A lot of the discussions revolved not around the issues, but around whose name would be at the bottom of what press release.

  Once Franziska was invited to debate the issue with Ursula von der Leyen. The event was moderated by Kai Biermann and Heinrich Wefing—an online journalist and a print editor, respectively, for the highbrow weekly newspaper Die Zeit. Franziska asked me to come along. The journalists agreed to this, but they insisted that my answers be ascribed to her.

  My impression was that the journalists thought I was a bit of a nuisance. While they did ask me if I wanted a coffee or some water, and I was given a chair, both men were clearly focused on Franziska. Whenever she said anything, they would nod and smile in her direction.

  They wanted to know how she had come to start her petition. Every time I would interject with something technology-specific, they would say, “Too much detail; too technical.” I asked myself how people were supposed to understand the overarching issues if they weren’t prepared to get a grip on the technical details. But the journalists were primarily interested in getting the personal story behind the issue.

  Normally, I have no interest in confirming quotes. I even mentioned to Wefing that I thought this practice was a blight upon German journalists—a sentiment for which other journalists, I think, would have stood up and given me a spontaneous hug. But Wefing said he thought that it was a specifically German virtue, and that no one would talk to journalists anymore if the practice were not followed.

  In retrospect, we made a mistake when we gave Die Zeit the OK to print the first transcript of the discussion as it was sent to us. While we were agreeing that it was a balanced representation of the debate, the transcript was also being sent to the other side, and von der Leyen’s press spokesman demanded a number of ex post facto changes. What was ultimately printed was a distortion of the debate, to our disadvantage. That was very irritating.

  Later, we had a second appointment with the minister. Ursula von der Leyen’s office is located in a massive, gray concrete building not far from Alexanderplatz. Franziska and I took the elevator up, and someone collecte
d us and took us to a conference room. The space was about half the size of a school classroom; in the middle there was a cluster of tables and chairs. The minister was waiting there, along with some others: Annette Niederfranke, ministerial director and director of Division 6: Child and Youth Aid; one of her assistants; and Jens Flossdorf, von der Leyen’s press spokesman. We already knew him from the Zeit interview. But there was also someone else in attendance, with whom we definitely hadn’t reckoned. An eight-year-old girl named Lisa*.

  We took our seats at one end of the ensemble of tables, directly across from the little brown-haired girl, who was concentrating on drawing things with wax crayons on white sheets of paper. Lisa, we were told, was the daughter of Annette Niederfranke’s assistant. The father was on a business trip and so after school, there was no choice but to bring Lisa to her mother at the office. No one else at the ministry was available to mind her, so she would have to sit there at the table while we discussed child pornography.

  “That won’t be a problem, will it?” Ursula von der Leyen said in an overly friendly tone, assuring us, as though we had said anything to the contrary, that Lisa was a well-behaved child. “She’s only drawing some funny, colorful pictures.”

  Since there was no choice but for her to be sitting there, we were not supposed to use the “C-word,” by which she meant “child pornography.” We didn’t have to use this “terrible word,” von der Leyen said, repeating, “this terrible, terrible, word.” She shot us a look of dismay and added, “We all know what this is about.”

  Then she nodded gravely. The discussion could begin.

  It lasted at least two hours. The whole time, Ursula von der Leyen talked about the “C-word”—unlike the woman to her right, the young assistant to the director of Division 6. She simply spat out the phrase “child pornography.” But she was only Lisa’s mother. The whole thing was like a cabaret sketch.

  Then it was time for Lisa to go to bed. The appointment was over. “Thank you,” the minister said. “It was a pleasure. Can you see yourselves out?”

  For the duration of the meeting, von der Leyen’s tone was very calm and measured, and every word and gesture seemed aimed at demonstrating how cheerful and nice she found herself. For our part, we were concerned not to scare little Lisa. There was no chance for either of us to pound our fist on the table and say, “Sorry, but all the bullshit you guys are planning won’t do a thing to stop a single pedophile!”

  Whether or not this was some clever PR strategy, afterward we felt we had been morally blackmailed and kicked ourselves for not having simply broken off the discussion.

  But at least we understood a bit better how Ursula von der Leyen ticked. She had told us how awful it was for her when people asked her at international conferences why Germany wasn’t taking sufficient steps against child pornography. That was her main concern. It seemed to me that she only wanted to do something to prove that she was doing something. What, exactly, she did seemed to be of secondary importance.

  Our opposition to this nonsensical piece of legislation was nonetheless one of the most politically effective actions of my time with WL. It was a perfect example of the speed with which political pressure can be brought to bear. We had the facts and, in Franziska, a charismatic activist. Four weeks later we were sitting at a table with Germany’s minister of Family Affairs.

  Of the two sorts of political activism, this was the one I preferred. You could criticize after the fact, as we had done with Toll Collect and the German pharmaceutical company, that something had gone wrong. Or you could make your influence felt in an ongoing process, as was the case here. We also learned from this experience that you have to overcome a certain hurdle of media attention in order to get things moving.

  At HAR in Vierhouten in 2009, we tried to transfer the political momentum we felt we had built up in Germany to a larger forum. Our goal was to found a global political movement against Internet censorship.

  The Hacking At Random conference is like a Woodstock for hackers—a giant campsite festival that takes place every four years at different locations in the Netherlands. HAR is a good place to make new contacts and launch new topics. In addition, there are lots of panel discussions and debates. Julian and I were scheduled to hold three lectures, and one of them was on censorship.

  My girlfriend, one of our technicians, and I arrived in Vierhouten in a large white Mercedes van a week before the official start of camp on August 13. We had a lot of stuff with us, but I was most proud of the light-blue flag with the WL logo I had ordered over the Internet. It was two meters long and was hoisted atop a six-meter flagpole. We also had two party tents, my mobile solar battery unit, a bunch of lights, and a mirrored disco ball—along with a refrigerator, a hammock, an inflatable armchair, and a mattress.

  The conference grounds were located in a woodsy area normally used as a campsite for vacationing families. We all pitched in to get things ready, distributing extension cords for power, setting up the data network, putting up the lecture tents, and rolling out miles of conventional and fiber-optic cables and threading them through the trees so that people wouldn’t trip over them. In ten days, we built a complete tent city with everything we needed, including a ten-gigabyte Internet connection that would divert most of the entire digital traffic of Europe to Vierhouten. Setting up camps like this was more fun for me than practically anything else. It was great to get some fresh air and exercise and to deal with real people and objects.

  The weather was generally splendid, but one night there was a brief cloudburst. The rain got into the batteries attached to the solar unit, causing a short circuit, and our facilities almost burned to the ground. We only noticed it the following morning.

  Julian arrived two days before his first lecture. He set up his tent in a remote corner of the grounds and then proceeded to meander about. Lending a hand with preparations wasn’t his thing.

  At HAR, everyone runs around with DECT telephones connected to their own network. You can call anyone anywhere in the world, but you can also use them to make contact with all the other conference participants and call up friends you’ve lost in the masses of people.

  I was reminded of a lecture we had held in Berlin in 2008. Someone from the audience had recognized Julian onstage and called out, “Hey, Mendax!” You could see from Julian’s face how glad he was that someone had remembered his former hacker pseudonym. At the Berlin congress in December 2007, too, he had probably been the biggest hacker by far, and he paraded around in keeping with his status. I think he was a bit disappointed that year that no one at that event had recognized him.

  You could reserve a four-digit code for the DECT telephones, and for Julian I had selected 6639: MNDX. I think that made him really happy. My code was 5325: LEAK. Unfortunately, his phone never rang. But he also never charged its battery, and he didn’t seem to pay it any attention.

  Amidst all the official events at HAR, there was always a party going on somewhere. We had the disco ball and music in our tent, and every evening we’d cook together. There were never fewer than twenty people, if only because we were so well equipped. My girlfriend found HAR relaxing. She was glad we could be together for a few days and lounged around in the hammock, painting her toenails in rainbow colors.

  She was also a big help. She collected money for shopping and helped with the cooking. Everyone liked her. But someone who was even happier about our field trip was our technician. He enjoyed being out in the fresh air, and he struck up new friendships and was taking things easy. I remember thinking that we should all get together and do things more often instead of sitting in front of our computers all the time. And how nice it was to look at trees.

  Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence expert who was one of the first to advance the thesis that our brains would someday be directly connected to our computers, was once asked when we would be living in an entirely virtual world. He answered to the effect that this would never happen as long as we looked up after two hours in fron
t of a computer, saw a tree, and admired what a wonderfully detailed thing it is.

  Julian then decided he wanted to hold a new lecture, and he didn’t want to agree on everything in advance with me, even though we staged our presentations in tandem. He went to a hotel to better prepare, going through every minute detail with a female acquaintance. It was difficult to reach him there.

  On the one hand, I was glad he’d shown up two days in advance, and not two minutes, as was his wont. On the other, I wouldn’t have minded consulting with him. The constant spontaneously kamikaze performances onstage were beginning to fray my nerves, although they did force me to develop a talent for improvisation. Today, I often go into speaking dates unprepared. I can talk about some topics in my sleep. Afterward, people tell me I was easy to listen to because everything sounded so fresh.

  I have Julian to thank for that. Ever since we started holding joint lectures, I’ve lost my fear that something will go wrong, that the projector will catch fire or the stage will collapse. Everything that can happen already has. Sometimes, if there was no room on the official program for us but we thought we needed to be part of an event, we would just hijack a stage. That was what we did, for instance, at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest in 2008. Global Voices is an international network of bloggers who translate, defend, and report on blog journalism and blogs. The conference was an exciting platform for us, since members of Global Voices could have helped further spread our leaks. So we simply created our own slot on the program, distributing flyers in advance and then grabbing the podium immediately after an official lecture was over.

  Following the conference, we were approached by someone from George Soros’s Open Society Institute. He had found our lecture interesting, and we talked about possibly financing our project through the OSI. Julian once told me that the OSI had asked us for a wish list and that we shouldn’t be too modest in drawing it up. As far as I know, nothing ever came of this.