Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  A WL trip was anything but a normal vacation taken by a couple of friends. We never cooked or watched a movie together. When we didn’t skip breakfast entirely, we sat at the table with our laptops, taking bites from our rolls and typing in silence. We weren’t far from me asking Julian via chat to pass the coffee. One time, however, we did go out in the evening to a club. There, too, everyone wanted to buy us drinks, to party and dance with us.

  Julian and I weren’t club-goers at all. In all the time we’d known each other, we’d gone out maybe fifteen times together. I remember one evening at a club in a former slaughterhouse in Wiesbaden. The others we were with nicknamed Julian “Disco King” or something like that for his unusual way of dancing. Julian took up a lot of space when he danced—almost like a tribesman performing some ritual. He’d spread his arms and gallop across the dance floor, taking huge steps. He didn’t look very rhythmic or coordinated, and he didn’t seem to have that much feeling for the music, but he did possess a certain cool. He didn’t care anyway what other people thought of him. You need space, he once told me, if you want your ego to flow. That statement fit well with his dance style.

  During the day, we mostly hung around on the sofas in Café Rot, a cozy little restaurant run by squatters in a house that had been scheduled for demolition. On Sunday, people danced to swing music, and the coffee only cost one euro. Refills were free, and you could work there the whole day.

  • • •

  Three days after our club outing was the FSFI conference, and that’s where we met Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She was a member of the Icelandic parliament and wanted to become informed about the data-haven idea. Birgitta belonged to the Movement—a new party that had been voted into parliament in the wake of the financial crisis and with the support of protesting citizens. She was a poet, and more a freethinker than a politician. She was also a big fan of Tibet, had taken part in countless demonstrations, and had traveled the world. After our lecture, she came up to us and we went for something to eat. The fact that she was a parliamentarian immediately awakened Julian’s interest.

  Julian could turn very polite whenever he thought he was in the presence of someone important. He shook Birgitta’s hand, bent forward slightly to ask her name again, and tried to pronounce it correctly after she had repeated it. Icelandic names were a nightmare for someone like him. He turned Birgitta into Brigitta, and that was the way it stayed, even though she accompanied us for months and soon became one of our closest confidantes.

  In Iceland, I also got a tattoo. I liked tattoos, and I was always in search of images with a special personal connection. New tattoos for me were mementos of special places that I could take back home. Iceland was one such special place.

  I mulled over for a long time what I wanted for an image. The idea to have the WL hourglass tattooed on my back was one I’d been carrying around with me for a while. I remember that I told Julian about it and he thought it was great. Later he always made fun of me, saying he found the idea pathetic.

  Some people from Karamba, a café where I sometimes drank Americanos while I worked, recommended the Icelandic Tattoo Corp. The tattoo studio was concealed behind a milk-glass window on a main road, and as I pushed open the door, causing a bell to ring, there was a young man in the place who spoke German. When I asked for an appointment, he just shook his head. No chance, not for months. He laughed as though I had asked him whether he believed in Santa Claus.

  I was about to turn around and go, when a second tattoo artist stuck his head out of a back room and recognized me.

  “Hey! I’ve seen you on TV, and I like what you do,” he said.

  Smiling, he approached me. We shook hands, and he said his name was Fjölnir. I showed him my image. He said he’d do it right then and there.

  Unfortunately, the tattoo only got half finished. Both the tattoo artist and I were too exhausted after four hours to press on. I needed two Tylenol with water and was constantly asking Fjölnir which country of the logo he was on.

  “Now doing Iceland.”

  I sighed

  “Morocco.”

  Oh my God.

  By the time we got to Cape Hope, hope was something I no longer had. We decided to adjourn the session.

  As a result, to this day I run around with half of a WL logo tattooed on my back. And that’s how it’s going to stay. It’s appropriate to me and my story—today even more so than back then.

  On one of our last days in Reykjavík—we were sitting in Café Rot—I grabbed Julian and we went for a walk. I wanted to talk to him. We set off toward the harbor, the snow falling on our winter hats.

  I wanted to find out what was wrong between us. I could only guess what was bothering him. Recently, he had become very concerned that he get at least 52 percent of the attention and me only 48 percent. Maybe he felt as though someone was now there with whom he would have to share. Someone who was grabbing his laurels, someone who also wanted to be praised and who was developing his own ideas about how to proceed with WL in the future. It was easy sharing a lack of success. But he was unwilling to allow our success to be credited to both of us. I tried to take account of and pacify his feelings. For me it was clear that he had founded WikiLeaks, and that no one was going to take away his baby. On the other hand, I was part of our success. I did my work well, and there was no reason for me not to say that.

  I returned to the guesthouse feeling as though our conversation had done us good. As I brushed the snow from my clothes in the entrance, I thought that maybe we’d just been under too much stress the past few weeks. Everything, I thought, would now go back to the way it had been before.

  JULIAN and I were the sole representatives of WL to the outside world, but our pretense of having a robust team in the background wasn’t a complete lie. By 2009, we already had two silent partners, in addition to our occasional helpers. We called them “the technician” and “the architect.”

  There were two reasons for the secrecy surrounding this pair of collaborators. Neither of them particularly wanted to be identified as a WL principal. They were reticent types of guys. And truth be told, it was probably more important to protect them than to protect Julian or me. Slowly but surely, they had taken over responsibility for all our technology. If our adversaries wanted to do permanent damage to WL, they would have been best advised to go after one of them and coax out their secrets.

  The most noticeable thing about both of these technical specialists was how inconspicuous they were. It wouldn’t be easy to describe them so that someone could pick them out of a group of twenty people. Techie number one had been with us since 2008. He was the first to arrive, which was why he was simply called the technician. It’s hard to say exactly when he started at WL. Cautious as we were about new people, Julian to the point of paranoia, they were gradually accepted into the project, step-by-step. The technician was relatively young, but that wasn’t a problem. We could both see that he was a solid, reliable worker. He was a quick study, and when we gave him something to do, he always did a good job. He wasn’t interested in getting involved in our internal affairs. It was almost embarrassing for him when he witnessed one of our quarrels or we asked him for his opinion.

  The technician felt more at home in an all-weather jacket and hiking boots than in the aggressive attire of the IT scene. He was haggard and often looked a bit pale, and he talked very quietly. I know little about his private life. Did he have a girlfriend? I have no idea. Someone called him constantly when we were at HAR, but he never answered the calls. He just looked at the display and put his phone aside.

  The hackers’ conference in Vierhouten was a really big deal for him. It took him a while to feel at ease, but after he had observed the proceedings for a couple of days from his chair, he began to get to know some of the others. Soon he was gleefully swapping action films.

  Strangely enough, he subsisted exclusively on yogurt. One time, at HAR, I wanted to do something nice for him and returned from the supermarket with a broad as
sortment of yogurts. He wouldn’t touch most of them. He only wanted the ones from Danone. I pray for him that he’ll live to see a ripe old age.

  The architect, as we called our second technician and in-house genius, got fully onboard with WL early in 2009. He came via a distant contact of mine. He had been volunteering his services for a while, and in late 2008, we gave him his first concrete task. Within a couple of hours, he had carried out an urgently needed modification of our system, delivering a perfect, elegant solution. I’m not a particularly gifted programmer myself, but I can see when someone has done his job well. And the architect was brilliant. Extremely quick and extremely smart, he was never satisfied with anything less than perfection. To my mind, he’s one of the best programmers in the world. In addition, he’s also a good designer.

  Julian kept the architect waiting for a number of weeks, refusing to implement his solution. That’s a true test of patience for a programmer of this person’s quality. Any company boss with half a brain would have immediately offered him a steady job at a top salary. It was a miracle that the architect stuck with us. That was due in part to my powers of persuasion. It pained Julian deep in his soul to allow anyone else access to the server. The very thought made him squirm. In fact, he had never given our other technician full access, something that often made the technician’s job unnecessarily difficult.

  The architect couldn’t believe his eyes when he was finally allowed a look at our system. Amid all the threats and little fights that would later envelop WL, the real scandal in the eyes of the architect was the jungle of extraneous lines in our programs and the dilapidated state of our infrastructure. What he saw was a chaos of insufficient resources and overly vulnerable, dilletantishly improvised stuff that showed no sign of clearly defined processes or proper workflows. The architect got down to work.

  The first thing he did was to establish clear roles. The two technicians would standardize the formats and forward the material on to us. The division of labor was now clear: The technician and the architect took care of the technology; Julian and I, the content. When everything was cleaned up, we sent servers to various parts of the world, using standard mail delivery. Volunteer helpers received them and arranged for the hosting. That was their way of making a donation. So finally our resources were divided up between various legal jurisdictions, and we concealed the network that connected the various servers. In a commercial company, you could have assigned a whole team, working full-time, to this mess for half a year, but the architect was even more diligent than we were. By a long shot.

  What was the architect’s motivation? What drove him on and sucked him in? I think he was intrigued by his job for its own sake. What we had built up was, from a technical standpoint, unlike anything else in the world. This was pioneering work, a new frontier. It offered him the chance to become the Columbus of whistle-blower platforms, the Thomas Edison of submission architecture. The project was challenging in a host of ways related to both the architecture and the underlying structural considerations. Then there were the security aspects and the whole range of legal constructions. Our servers were located in countries with the most favorable laws and the best protection of sources.

  The architect had no more desire to grab the spotlight than the young technician. But he did have strong opinions, and he made no bones about them. People who didn’t know him found his tone difficult to get used to. He had no time for polite phrases and friendly clichés. Whatever he said was extremely short and to-the-point. He never accepted half-truths or well-intentioned reassurances. An answer like “Just trust me” made his blood boil. “That means either someone doesn’t have a clue or he’s trying to fuck me over,” he once remarked. The architect demanded arguments, not rhetoric.

  Later on, when major conflicts broke out within the team, emotions came to a head, and mutual accusations took on irrational proportions, the architect was always the voice of reason. I think he felt his primary loyalty lay with the idea of WikiLeaks, not with any one person, including Julian or me. He is a truly independent spirit, bound only to the quality of his work. But because he also applied the same high standards to his own behavior, you could always rely on him. Even though we quarreled a lot, I always knew he wouldn’t react irrationally, play with loaded dice, or follow a secret agenda of his own. He was entirely devoid of avarice, envy, and cowardice.

  Throughout 2009, the two technicians, Julian, and I had given everything we had. But by year’s end, eleven months after I had quit my job, our war chest was emptier than ever before. The publication of the material from September 11, 2001, had exhausted our resources. The 500,000 text messages had created a minor media hype, and our website almost collapsed under the demand of people wanting to view them. Processing the messages, putting them in the form of easily readable documents, was also a huge amount of work.

  We had decided not to publish all the messages at once but to release them gradually so as to mirror the sequence of events on the day of the attacks. The idea was to re-create the passage of time realistically and not swamp readers with masses of information. That also had the indirect advantage of allowing us to better manage requests for access to our site—or so we’d hoped.

  The WikiLeaks.org page was still run from a single, battle-worn computer. For the text messages, we had created a specially dedicated website, which was run simultaneously via various servers. This was only possible thanks to volunteers who provided capacity and placed their servers at our disposal. Even still, our infrastructure was bursting at every seam. For a year, we had been running around trying to repair everything ourselves. But as soon as we fixed one thing, something else would break. The hard drive was constantly full of newly received documents, hardware had to be replaced, and we had massive problems with our operating system, which was in dire need of an update. We didn’t know where to start. The architect was working day and night on a general overhaul. The system had grown enormously over the years, and the program code was a tangle of Dadaistic formations. No one had an overview anymore. Least of all Julian. For quite some time, he’d felt no need to bother himself with technical details.

  Our decision to go offline was unanimous. We wanted to send a message to the world. If you want us to continue, you’ve got to give us a bit of support. It was like a kind of strike. Our stance was nonnegotiable. We took the site offline on December 23, 2009. For the first time in a long while, we finally had some peace and quiet. And it felt good, admitting that things simply could not continue the way they had.

  For two years, an invisible force had drawn me to my computer, sucking me into the chat room or onto the Internet. Every day, some new problem would arise, and there was never time to take a breather. Shortly before Christmas, WL having released me from its clutches, the feeling was unbelievable. I regained my sense of perspective. It was relaxing. But also somewhat unaccustomed. Something was definitely missing.

  I drove to see my family. I put my feet up and did nothing but eat and unpack presents. I spent time again with my girlfriend. When we had seen each other in the months before, which wasn’t all that often, she always said I did little more than take up space with her. I would work, and she would sit behind me on the bed, her legs crossed, and look on in concern over my shoulder. At some point she’d say, “I’m going to sleep.”

  I’d keep on working. “Do that,” I’d say.

  She’d wait half an hour and then get up slowly, come to me at my desk, kiss me from behind on the cheek, and go to bed. I would hardly react. I’d just tilt my desktop lamp down to the floor a bit and keep on working.

  I felt no desire to fall asleep at her side. I would climb into bed in the wee hours of the night and instantly plunge into a deep slumber. I had nothing to complain about actually. The only thing that plagued me was a bad conscience, and it was gradually getting worse. She must have felt pushed to one side.

  Then in December 2009 came the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3). The congress was always the highlight of t
he year for me, but this time around—there’s no other way to put it—it was the ultimate mood enhancer. I suddenly knew what it must feel like to get endorphins injected directly into your brain.

  Julian and I were the keynote speakers, the main event in the best time slot in the middle of the day. To accommodate everyone who wanted to hear us, they would have had to install another floor halfway up the walls.

  We had distributed pieces of paper with numbers on them to the audience. I then told them that we’d been approached in Iceland by the “Christmas Gang,” who had given us a leak: a leak of all the people who probably weren’t going to get any Christmas presents next year because they hadn’t done their duty toward society. Everyone with a number had a year’s time to fulfill his obligations. In return, we’d put in a good word for them with Santa Claus. In the months to come, we were constantly receiving donations and offers of help connected with these numbers.

  Next we gave our audience an account of Iceland, our idea for setting up a safe haven for the press there, and the appearance on Egill Helgason’s talk show, where we had made our proposal public. Then we asked an open question: Were those in the audience at the bcc capable of truly comprehending why the freedom of the Internet was so vital?

  It was the greatest moment of my entire life. We hadn’t given a pop concert or promised to hand out a thousand free drinks. All we’d done was give a lecture about international media law. But people clapped like crazy. First one member of the audience, then two, then three stood up, and suddenly they were giving us a standing ovation. The noise was deafening. I felt waves of enthusiasm floating up to us like a cloud from the masses down below. That was an awesome feeling. Truly awesome.