Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  Our lecture on Internet censorship, one of three we held at HAR, was our opportunity to call forth a new international movement. There was a podium discussion moderated by me, and with me onstage were Julian; Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch Net activist who would later help us with the “Collateral Murder” video; Franziska; a representative from the German data-protection association Foebud; and a whistle-blower formerly of MI6 in Great Britain. We all agreed in theory. Everywhere in the world politicians were coming up with censorship laws, and everywhere in the world people were protesting against them. It would be sensible to act globally and coordinate resistance centrally.

  After our lecture, many of the audience members came up to us and said they’d like to get involved. We created a mailing list for the global anticensorship movement. But that was as far as it went.

  I think what the movement lacked was a leader of the pack, an outstanding individual who could make the cause his own and get people to follow him. Initiatives like this always needed someone crazy enough to be the vanguard. Who could have known that better than me?

  Along with trying to found a global anticensorship movement, I had assigned myself another job, perhaps the toughest of my life. I had gotten T-shirts printed with the WL logo. Because I thought our logo stood out best that way and because I wanted to save two cents per T-shirt, I’d ordered them in white. That was idiotic. Who buys white T-shirts? Especially in a social clique where black T-shirts are something of a dress code. I myself had never worn a white T-shirt in my entire life!

  Now I was sitting on 250 shirts, the equivalent of almost four moving boxes’ full. Unpacked and piled up, they measured a frightening three meters. And I had to get rid of the pile. Nowadays, WL fans would no doubt rush to buy them for ten times what I was asking, but back then no one was interested. I literally had to stop people in their tracks as they were passing our stand and beg them to trade 5 euros from their wallets for a T-shirt. Unfortunately, my companions weren’t any better at this than I was. If we’d been forced to go into retail, we would have starved. My girlfriend was far too honest to convince someone that he absolutely had to have such an ugly article of clothing, and Julian preferred to engage potential customers in deep conversations about the state of the world. He stood there talking and talking, occasionally getting into an argument, until no one was thinking about T-shirts anymore.

  I narrowly avoided losing money on the shirts. One thing was clear: WL merchandising was not going to save us from our financial problems.

  • • •

  A year later we received a prize—an artistic award from Ars Electronica, a media festival that takes place every year in Linz, Austria. As far as I was concerned, this was ridiculous. And the story also began on a comic note.

  To win a prize at Ars Electronica, you actually have to apply, and every year thousands of artists do precisely that. With us, things worked the other way around. We received an e-mail from the organizers. At first, they just sent us some information about the prize. We deleted it. Art didn’t interest us in the slightest. What did these people want from us?

  As more and more e-mails appeared, we began to think, Maybe these people want to give us a prize. After all, the requests for us to apply had come far in advance of any jury meetings or selection decisions. We didn’t put much past the intellectual, high-tech art scene. We read through the description of the prizewinning works from the previous year. That confused us even more. The descriptions sounded like willfully nonsensical cabaret numbers or pieces of satire, but they were apparently written in complete seriousness. Little of it was socially relevant in the slightest. How did WL fit in here?

  But because the curators of Ars Electronica had been so persistent I submitted a few pages of general information about WL. And—surprise, surprise!—we received an invitation to the awards ceremony in Linz on September 4, 2009.

  Only one hotel room was provided, so Julian and I had to sleep in a double bed. But compared to the holes we usually slept in when we had public dates, the Hotel Wolfinger was like the Ritz. It had a rustic Austrian charm but was also totally stylish. I felt like I should be taking off my shoes whenever I trod on the parquet floor in our room—and tidying up before I left it. Whenever Julian and I spent five minutes anywhere, it looked as though a suitcase full of clothes had exploded, with some cables and telephones thrown in for decoration. But I consoled myself with the thought that the other artists invited to Linz probably weren’t any neater than we were.

  Upon our arrival, we had hoped to meet a couple of rich art mavens with whom we could network and who would give us money. We were living hand to mouth back then. I had to tape the battery of my laptop to its case because its holder was broken. And a fresh pair of shoes would have made a new man out of Julian.

  But we did our best to get dressed up for the art scene. I had a pair of black leather shoes on that were in pretty good shape. Julian wore a tailored cotton overcoat. It was a bit too small and was probably meant for a woman, but it did lend him a sophisticated touch. He looked a bit like Phantomias, Donald Duck’s superhero alter ego in the German comic books, getting ready to fly, but he also made a worldly impression.

  A short time before the awards ceremony, which was held in Linz’s Bucknerhaus, we got separated. Perhaps Julian had decided to take a walk along the river or had gone back to the hotel, because he didn’t like the scene at Bucknerhaus.

  He didn’t miss much. To my eyes, the projects that were given awards were completely senseless, and the moderator who eventually announced that we had taken second place didn’t even mention us by name. The giant ballroom where the ceremony was held was full of gentlemen in suits and ladies in evening gowns, and the first row was occupied by sponsors, taking up at least twenty seats, with the artists in their required idiosyncratic attire between them. The whole thing was a waste of time for us because no one learned who we were. So much for the art mavens who were supposed to stuff our pockets with large-denomination bills.

  The accompanying exhibit also struck me as being completely over the top. I did buy a watch that ran on bio-energy from a plant, but that was the only project I liked. Otherwise, people just ran around, pompously talking about their banal works and praising themselves to the skies. In the cellar there was a presentation with a couple of photos and some stand-up posters from us. I had tinkered with the surrounding Internet terminals so that the browsers only called up the WikiLeaks page. But even that didn’t attract anyone’s attention.

  I caught a plane the following day, earlier than planned, because the entire event got on my nerves so much. Julian stayed until Monday. The prizewinners were supposed to be given a chance to present their projects and talk to one another. Around noon there was a press conference, in the same auditorium as the night before, but with a far smaller audience. Every prize recipient was allotted five minutes to speak. The organizers made the mistake of giving Julian the microphone first.

  “Are there any representatives from the media in the room?” Julian asked.

  A few people, roughly half of the audience, raised their hands.

  “What luck,” Julian said. “I was afraid I was going to get stuck with a bunch of art wankers again.”

  Around half of the audience, the same half that had raised their hands, laughed. Julian then got going, explaining to the giggling journalists and the insulted artists how WikiLeaks—and the entire world—functioned. It was forty-five minutes before he wound up.

  IN the summer of 2009, with the global financial crisis still in full swing, someone sent us material from the Kaupthing Bank, at the time the largest bank in Iceland. The document, which we published on August 1 of that year, showed that the bank’s partners and close associates had been given credit on extremely favorable terms just before the bank had filed for insolvency. The media would subsequently speak of the bank being “plundered” by its owners. The recipients of the loans hadn’t put down much in the way of security, if anything at all, but had received sums i
n the high millions.

  The revelations made people in Iceland take to the streets, and there was outrage in England and the Netherlands, too, where many of the debtors were located. Icelanders realized that they had been systematically exploited. Their state and their social security system had gone bankrupt while financial third parties had gleefully filled their pockets.

  A short time later, a group of Icelanders got in touch with us. One of them was a student named Herbert Snorrason. Together with a group at his university called FSFI, he was planning a conference on digital liberties and asked whether we’d like to attend. I immediately said yes.

  Julian initially hesitated. He always agreed to attend events only at the last minute, after I’d planned and organized everything. Maybe he was convinced when I mentioned that Iceland, statistically, has the highest proportion of attractive women in the world. I had read that somewhere.

  I was glad to go with him to the conference in Iceland. We always had a lot of fun whenever we were together. What was beginning to irritate me, though, was his way of playing the boss. He always shook hands with people first, for instance, saying, “I’m Julian Assange, and this is my colleague.” I would have never done that. It would have never occurred to me to say of Julian: “This is my colleague.”

  We flew to Iceland in November 2009. I took a plane from Berlin; Julian arrived from somewhere else. I had booked us into the Baldursbra, a cozy, completely untrendy guesthouse in downtown Reykjavík that was run by a Frenchwoman. Julian and I shared a corner room on the third floor.

  After my arrival, I immediately went out into the streets and found a restaurant. Herbert joined me, together with a friend of his named Smári. I don’t recall the name of the restaurant, but the fish soup was excellent. I also learned you can get a malt beer, and a tasty one at that, wherever you go in Iceland.

  I knew Herbert through the chat room. He appeared there shortly after the Kaupthing leak and had soon taken over the task of answering questions from newcomers. Herbert is a thoughtful, pleasant guy with a fine sense of humor. He’s in his midtwenties, wears a funny-looking, often overgrown beard, and studies history and Russian at the University of Iceland. One of his favorite quotes is “Property is theft” from the nineteenth-century French economist and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. To characterize himself, he also quotes the German anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker: “I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.”

  Herbert knew the anarchist classics that are also on my unofficial list of favorite works of world literature, and I was excited to find a kindred spirit in such a faraway place. I think Proudhon’s What Is Property? is the most important book ever written, and I’d brought a new edition of the author’s works, containing previously unpublished letters, with me to Iceland. They had been on my nightstand since Christmas, along with Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater, P. W. Singer’s Corporate Warriors, and Gustav Landauer’s The Revolution, and I was hoping to find a bit of time to make a dent in them. I could philosophize for hours with Herbert. As a historian, he knew a lot of things that I, as a computer scientist, didn’t have a clue about, and he was mightily impressed when I showed him my new Proudhon edition.

  Smári was new to me. He studied information technology and was co-organizing the conference with Herbert. He had disheveled blond hair and was very sociable and educated, but unfortunately also a little scatterbrained and unreliable at times. He was half Irish and had the coolest name imaginable: Smári McCarthy. Smári means “shamrock” in Icelandic. His parents had played a bit of a joke on him. He took it with humor as he did everything in life.

  We talked until the owner of the restaurant came up to our table and said he wanted to close. Julian arrived on the last plane in and joined us in the guesthouse. It was on this evening that the idea of making Iceland into a free-press haven was born.

  Officially we were there for the conference only, but news of our arrival had gotten around. Iceland is a small country. We had become something like folk heroes for leaking the machinations at the Kaupthing Bank. The Icelandic TV station RUV had wanted to report on the leak on August 1, but five minutes before airtime, a legal injunction arrived, prohibiting the report from being broadcast. The editors at the station refused to be silenced and broadcast our Web address in large letters instead. Afterward, practically every Icelander knew WikiLeaks, and a lot of them looked at the original documents on our page.

  The following day, we received an invitation from Iceland’s most famous talk-show host, Egill Helgason. He wanted us to be guests on his afternoon show on November 28. We told him about our idea of making Iceland into a safe haven for freedom of the press, with the most progressive media laws in the world, and asked him if we could announce it on his show.

  In truth, neither is the idea new nor did it come from us. It originated in science-fiction literature, in Neal Stephenson’s 1999 novel Cryptonomicon, among other places. The establishment of a data haven plays a central role in the story, which revolves around an attempt to make the fictional Asian island of Kinakuta into a place where avenues of communication are beyond the control of any authority in the world. The novel features, among other things, a deciphered encryption system used by the German army, Nazi gold, and clandestine military operations. Along with the works of Solzhenitsyn, Cryptonomicon is one of Julian’s favorite books, and he has adopted a number of words from it. For example, the word “honing”—a technical term in engineering. It describes a process whereby one continually works on and fine-tunes a seemingly objective conclusion. If he wanted to improve a phrase, he would talk about it needing to be honed, like a piece of metal.

  He also swapped his hacker nickname Mendax for “Proff,” possibly in homage to the character Prof from the novel. That character is based on a real-life figure, the British mathematician Alan Turing. In computer circles, he’s considered one of the leading minds of the twentieth century because he wrote the software for one of the first computers, and was instrumental in cracking the Nazis Enigma Code.

  In our idea of a free-media haven, Iceland would serve as an “offshore” island—akin to those offshore locales that offer particularly favorable conditions to businesses—with laws favoring media companies and information-service providers. In many countries, there is no freedom of the media. Even in democratic nations, journalists are warned, punished, and even forced to name their sources. In our concept, media and providers would be able to move their headquarters, if only virtually, to Iceland and enjoy the protection of especially progressive laws.

  Iceland was already dramatically expanding its computer centers and was extending its information feelers out into the world via massive underwater cables. There was also an ample supply of green energy, thanks to the island’s thermal power plants. We had already seen a number of things happen that one would previously have only thought possible in novels. So why not give our freedom-of-the-media idea a shot?

  At a pre-interview breakfast, Egill Helgason, a veteran TV presenter, did a double take, his coffee cup suspended halfway to his mouth, when Julian proposed the idea. I saw a gleam in Helgason’s eyes. I knew that meant we would be able to propose the suggestion on his Sunday talk show.

  On the way back to our small corner room with its floral pattern curtains, beige plastic wastebasket, and toilet down the hall, we jabbered away, full of self-confidence. We were to mix up Icelandic politics a bit. Wouldn’t it be a gas if we could lead this likable little island out of its current crisis? Our next adventure was about to commence!

  On the Sunday in question, a driver picked us up at our guesthouse and drove us out to the station, which was located atop a small hill just outside the city. Reykjavík was a bizarre place, both magical and inhospitable. The landscape was covered with snow and ice, and a cutting wind was blowing. The snow-flakes that came flying at the windshield made it seem as if we weren’t moving a meter. It probably wasn’t much colder than it wa
s in Germany, but I could have stayed inside that car forever. The world outside looked like the Antarctic. The sun dragged itself above the horizon, shone for a few scant hours a day, and then sank back out of view, exhausted. I felt tired all day and a bit depressed. As much as Iceland quickly won a place in my heart, I could almost have suspected that it wasn’t only going to bring me good. Maybe I should have foreseen that there would be trouble with Julian, should we ever return here for an extended period. I had noticed a change between us that was increasingly giving me food for thought. Julian seemed unduly irritated with everything I said. Sometimes he didn’t answer my questions, as if I weren’t even there. Or he’d correct my choice of words like a pedantic schoolteacher. I hated the pedantry. He was a native speaker of English. Of course he expressed himself better than I did. I had to speak a foreign language the entire time—and even give interviews in it. But that wasn’t the real problem. We were fighting about superficialities to avoid having to address the true conflict.

  Something was wrong with my eyes. My eyelids felt far too heavy. I scanned people’s faces for signs that my face looked strange. I was also constantly running to the supermarket to buy fresh orange juice. I think it was my way of combating light deprivation. Pictured on the bottles of orange juice I bought every day was a friendly, glowing orange ball that looked a bit like the absent sun. It made me feel as though even if I couldn’t see the sun, I could still drink it.

  Despite my sun-deprived fatigue, the talk show was a huge success. Helgason, with his blond locks, asked all the right questions, and after talking about WL and the Kaupthing Bank, we outlined our proposal to turn Iceland into a data haven. After our appearance on TV, the entire island knew who we were.

  People would say hello on the street, give us hugs in the supermarket, and buy us drinks in bars. It was crazy. We were stars. I was almost ashamed at how much I enjoyed it. To play the hero for once felt good—I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel that way. In the beginning, we had to try so hard just to introduce people to WL. Journalists wouldn’t return our calls for weeks. We held lectures attended by only a handful of people. We had been called rats, weirdos, and criminals. Now, for the first time, people simply loved us for our work. I was on cloud nine. I didn’t notice any change in Julian. He assumed he would be treated like royalty, and took extreme care that he was the recipient of a few additional hymns whenever people sang our praises.