Julian nixed the idea. We already had agreements with the other three periodicals, he told me, and there was no undermining them.
Today I think I made a mistake in not simply acting on my own. Categories like agreements and contracts meant little to Julian. He had told me on a number of occasions that the point was not to give in to other people’s preconceived ideas but to take an active part in constructing the truth by creating facts. He himself would later break his promises of exclusivity with our media partners anyway, for instance, by giving the Afghanistan documents to Channel4, the British TV station.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to damage WikiLeaks’s reputation by making myself look unreliable in our partners’ eyes. But I faced the double dilemma of someone who plays by the rules while having to work with someone else for whom rules were at most a rhetorical tool to be used when he saw fit.
Our own ideals of publishing material immediately and remaining independent in our decision making had become a joke. The media had us right where they wanted: WikiLeaks at their feet. They could market their exclusive stories while our hands were tied in terms of using the material as we would have liked.
Our technicians succeeded, within an amazingly short span of time, in creating a Web front end, a new user interface, so that volunteers could rid the remaining documents of compromising names. Every volunteer had access to a small package of work via the Web front end and only received an excerpt of the complete data. Hundreds of volunteers could view and edit the documents at the same time. There were at least two editors per document, and every change was protocolled. It worked like a charm. The volunteers were able to quickly redact the names from the remaining 14,000 documents.
The conflict between Julian and me continued to boil, even as we worked parallel to each other. Being fully in the dark as to what was going on in his head, I began to discuss our conflict in the chat room with Birgitta Jónsdóttir. As soon as Julian and I were on the same page, I thought, it would also be possible to put WL back on the right track.
In late June, Birgitta and I chatted about a conversation she’d had with Julian. She said that he had told her not to trust me and described me as his adversary.
D: makes no sense
B: no he thinks it is deeper. that you want to take over
D: deeper in what way? thats BS [bullshit]
B: money and credit
D: yes, right, hahaha. well, this is clarified with everyone else. and we all agree on this being BS
B: yes, good
D: the only one that doesnt get it is J, will be sorted out sometime. i know why he thinks that way
B: i hope so. why
D: few remarks that i made for example. re money for example we had a discussion once about me spending some of that money
B: he thinks you keep taking huge amounts of money
D: and i said that if he doesnt talk to me, i will spend money for necessary expenses, in part because the money here in .de is in large parts a consequence of my work
D: LOL [Laugh out Loud]. i took like 15-20k out of this account or so, maximum and all was spent for servers we needed, and stuff like this all 100% accounted for
B: and i kept asking him to just meet you and go over all of these things
At the same time we had to defend ourselves against growing external pressure. On July 30, 2010, WL posted a 1.4 gigabyte encrypted file on the domain of the Afghanistan documents as well as on several Internet exchange platforms. The file is named “insurance.aes256.”
I don’t know what it contains. The file has been encoded using the symmetrical encryption system AES256, which makes it relatively well protected against attempts to decode it. Still, I didn’t think it was a very good idea simply to post the file on the Internet. This security file was originally created to prevent anyone from destroying WL or trying to attack or take one of us out of commission in an attempt to hinder the publication of further documents. Just as other people leave their last will and testament with a lawyer, we deposited ours on the Web.
I had arduously copied the file onto USB sticks and sent them to dozens of people I trusted. Among them were Green Party politicians, journalists, and figures I knew I could rely upon.
For security reasons, I bought different types of sticks and different sorts of envelopes—brown and white, large and small. I took only a handful of them at any one time to the post office in order to prevent the entire cache from being intercepted. Some of the sticks I handed over personally. With each stick, I included a message, dated July 20:
Entrusting you with data
Dear friend,
We are contacting you today in a matter of trust. Enclosed with this letter you can find a USB stick containing information in an encrypted archive.
This information is being distributed to you and other trusted entities around the world in the light of challenges our project might face in the upcoming next weeks. Distribution will make sure that no matter what happens, this information will be disclosed to the media and consequently the general public. It will also serve as an insurance for the well being of our project and us.
If anything goes wrong, a second mechanism will make sure that the keys for this material will be distributed publicly, enabling you to decrypt the archive and help make sure it wasn’t all for nothing.
We are entrusting you to not disclose the fact of receiving this letter and the data to anyone. A lot might depend on it.
With the best regards and thank you,
WikiLeaks
In the meantime, our technicians came up with a solution for how the passwords could be made public, in case anything should happen. The method is called the “dead-man switch.” At the time, I was unaware that there was also a plan to publish the file on the Internet and distribute it on random download platforms. I would have been against that, if I had known. Even if it would take a huge amount of time and effort to decode the file, the possibility that it could happen can never be ruled out entirely.
We created the file to give ourselves some political leverage, and I imagine we caused the people from the State Department a few sleepless nights when they learned of its existence. An encrypted insurance file available to everyone on the Web? On a torrent exchange platform? That wasn’t one of the standard problems described in their handbooks. It was nothing you could solve by calling in an aircraft carrier.
I have no idea whether anyone was ultimately interested in our security mechanism or whether it prevented the Powers That Be from arresting us. We all, in any case, believed that it did. Later in 2010, when Julian was sitting in protective custody after the Swedish accusations made against him, he purportedly told his lawyer that we would consider using the “thermonuclear device”—that is, publicizing the key to the insurance file—if he were extradited to Sweden.
That was not what the insurance file was intended for. It was supposed to protect WL collaborators and our documents, not to ensure Julian avoided investigation in a democratic country, where the investigations concern a private matter. Still, it made complete sense to store away some especially explosive material. We should have done it earlier, albeit perhaps with a bit less self-importance.
Our need for such a protective mechanism was confirmed, at the latest, when our colleague Jacob Appelbaum was detained and interrogated while trying to reenter the United States. All he had done wrong was to speak in Julian’s stead at a conference about WikiLeaks—presumably because he thought it was important for WL to be represented there. That was enough for US border authorities to confiscate his laptop, subject him to a search, and hold him for several hours. Afterward, we cracked a bunch of black-humored jokes about how now all of the contacts saved in his cell phone were going to have problems entering the United States.
The incident was very serious for Jacob. By comparison, Julian’s tales of being pursued appear harmless. In May, when Julian’s passport was confiscated as he tried to enter Australia, the alleged scandal was passed on by ne
ws agencies around the world. Julian gave a number of interviews on Australian TV, claiming that there was no longer anywhere that he was safe. But I’ve seen that passport with my own eyes. It was totally mangled. The most likely story is some border-control official simply wanted to convince himself that it was indeed a form of identification and not a bit of paper fished from the trash. And the officials involved returned the passport after a few minutes.
The next thing Julian claimed was how dangerous it was for him to leave Australia. At the time, I had been scheduled to address a session of the European Parliament on the topic of Internet censorship. Julian arranged to hold the address himself, in my stead. His argument was that intelligence services would only leave him in peace if he traveled under the protection of the European Parliament. If politicians were expecting him to show up, went his reasoning, no one would dare kidnap or assassinate him. “I need political cover,” he told me. I have always believed the worst we had to fear was getting beaten up by some frat boys or far-right skinheads. No one would hijack an Australian airplane to get rid of Julian Assange.
Around the same time, Julian began to increasingly involve the seventeen-year-old from Iceland in WikiLeaks. He was always warning us about the young man. He was a liar and not to be trusted, Julian said. Julian definitely wanted to prevent us from talking to him. So I was all the more astonished when the guy got his very own WL e-mail address. Very few people, fewer than twenty, had one. Julian also bought him two laptops and gave him one of the coveted Cryptophones.
In addition, Julian was becoming very careless about our security measures. E-mails to the seventeen-year-old as well as WL’s spokesman Kristinn were automatically forwarded to their Gmail addresses. It was more convenient for them. I asked myself why we had to make it so easy for the Americans to snoop on our internal correspondence. And if this were really OK, why we couldn’t then do without the expensive Cryptophones?
This lackadaisical approach also applied to looking after secret documents when they arrived on our server. An example was the diplomatic cables. Julian simply handed them over to one of the Icelanders, who should never have been given sensitive tasks, so that the guy could “think about how they could be worked up graphically.” This guy, in turn, passed the cables on to the press—among others, to the reporter Heather Brooke from the Guardian. He later justified his action by saying he had asked himself how best to optimize the political effect of the material and had no choice but to “talk it over with a couple of people.”
We were all acquainted with this sort of human factor, the desire to share one’s secret knowledge and bolster one’s own self-esteem, if need be, with the help of the press. We were supposed to be very careful about passing on information. Hadn’t we already learned this lesson?
Julian, who was very paranoid about his own security, was suddenly letting the reins hang astonishingly loose. When he learned about the slipup, he sent our Icelandic journalist friends Kristinn and Ingi to confront the person concerned. But what was the use? The information was out in the world. The Icelanders made him sign a declaration saying that the documents had been taken from him illegally. It was very dangerous to have your name connected with these documents.
The seventeen-year-old also represented a growing security risk. Julian tweeted that he had been detained multiple times by the Icelandic police and told us that he had been questioned about WL. That he was shown surveillance photos and asked to identify the other individuals pictured. But those facts were never confirmed. The Icelandic police denied that anything of the sort had happened. Such tales of detention and surveillance only added to the WL mystique.
By the second half of 2010, Julian was increasingly traveling in the presence of bodyguards. What an elevation in status! At some point, I began to think that the worst of all scenarios for him would be for me to get arrested before he did. Maybe that’s why he got so upset by my real name being on my doorbell.
The message he had sent me back in April—“If you fuck up, i will hunt you down and kill you”—hadn’t done a lot to improve our relationship. But he had said this to me in a situation of stress, and often he said things to me that sounded as if they were really addressed to himself. On other occasions, he said I was a security risk because I wouldn’t hold up if interrogated. I had to ask myself which planet Julian was living on. Perhaps he pictured a German policeman applying the thumbscrews while I wrote out pages and pages of a confession that were tantamount to Julian’s own death sentence.
Julian once told me about regularly driving out to the woods, into the absolute middle of nowhere, to be alone for a bit and to recharge his batteries. Recalibrating, he called it. He wouldn’t speak to anyone and would just pass the day without any particular goal. He said he needed to do this once every couple of months at the very least. Suddenly, two years had gone by in which he’d hardly had a day to get out into nature or even to take a stroll through a park.
A lot of people who saw him at conferences or during visits told me they thought he looked bad or seemed to be completely exhausted.
I didn’t understand why we were putting ourselves under this sort of immense time pressure. Something was driving him, and I didn’t know what. In 2010, we would pump out one massive release after another, as if the Grim Reaper himself were hot on our heels. Perhaps it was all the new material people were sending us.
Julian had announced in advance that we wouldn’t have as much time as previously to discuss every detail. We had gotten too big, and our cause too serious, to take everything easy. He was addicted to states of emergency. Everything had to be as extreme, disruptive, and important as possible.
I saw things exactly the opposite way. Precisely because we were getting better known, and the documents more explosive, we needed to consider all the more carefully everything we did. We should have extended the self-imposed break we took in late 2009 to further develop our internal structures and we should have focused on smaller leaks until our infrastructure was on a solid footing.
I’ve sometimes asked myself whether Julian was afraid of anything. Whether he had any worries deep down inside and whether the new documents might not have been too hot for him. He was always saying we had to get rid of material. Once he said he was concerned that we’d get “squashed” for it. On the other hand, I never noticed any concrete signs of fear. Fear was something he simply didn’t seem to feel. So there was little for him to overcome.
The result of the pressure was that we made more and more mistakes and could no longer live up to the immense responsibility we had piled upon ourselves. For Julian, this was an opportunity to spout his new favorite slogan: “Do not challenge leadership in times of crisis.”
It was almost funny. Julian Assange, chief revealer of secrets and unshakable military critic on his global peace mission, had adopted the language of the powermongers he claimed to be combating. The extremely curt, soulless language of our documents, with their absurd acronyms and code words, increasingly appealed to him.
For some time, he had begun describing people as “assets,” not unlike a businessman talking about “human resources” or a military man referring to his troops. Julian did not mean the word in a nice way. It showed that he saw our people as mere cannon fodder.
Later, when he tried to kick me out of WikiLeaks he said the reason was “Disloyalty, Insubordination and Destabilization in Times of Crisis.” These were concepts taken from the Espionage Act of 1917, which came into force just after the United States entered World War I. They were military designations for the word “traitor.”
• • •
Coded language is common in the military, and jargon is an intrinsic part of most specialized environments. Even the texts of laws that have undergone multiple revisions are often little more than gibberish. The same is true in business and finance. And the language of Scientology is even more coded than that of the military. Their handbooks are full of acronyms.
Language like this is perfectly suite
d to preventing outsiders from getting any insight into what is really going on. There are entire professions that justify their existence only in terms of fluency in a self-referential system. A person’s actions might be completely banal in reality, but a description of them using these specialized terms would make them sound like high science. It’s no wonder Julian likes jargon. Jargon is a fraudulent form of significance, in which the person who is speaking automatically seems to know what he’s doing.
This is another realization I owe to working for WikiLeaks. Whether one is talking about the military, intelligence services, or strategy commissions, people are people. Some of the papers we published seemed to me, upon closer inspection, to be hair-raisingly naïve. One example was a CIA document from the Red Cell Intelligence Group, a think tank created after 9/11 to analyze problems and find creative solutions. The Red Cell paper in question concerned what kind of PR strategies America could employ to boost declining German and French support for the war in Afghanistan.
Hans-Jürgen Kleinsteuber, professor of politics in Hamburg, would describe the document as a “sophomore paper.” The strategy of telling the Germans that the war was about protecting economic interests and the French that it was about the rights of women was as simpleminded as it was pernicious. It was hardly the work of especially gifted strategists. Composed in the portentous tone of the CIA, the paper may have sounded incredibly significant, but the content could have come from a junior-high-school student.
Of course, we ourselves were hardly free of this sort of self-referentiality: WikiLeaks was WL, Julian was J, I was S (for my alias last name, Schmitt), and others on the team were also referred to by individual letters. There was an internal logic to the abbreviations. The more important someone was within WL, the shorter his nickname. If you came across someone with a single initial in the WL chat room, you could be almost certain it was one of the project’s official representatives.
Inside WikiLeaks Page 17