Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  THE day after the news broke of the first arrest warrant against Julian in Sweden, I flew back to Berlin and barricaded myself in our apartment. For a time, all I did was just sit in our living room, at the large table with the view of the construction site, with my laptop open, staring at the chat and occasionally contributing to it. I hardly ever went to the club in Berlin, although it had been my habit to do work there most days. It was obvious that something was getting me down, and I didn’t want anyone to ask me what it was.

  There was nothing Anke could do. No doubt she would have loved to have said “Let it go. It’s destroying you.” But she knew how much of my heart I had invested in WL and that I probably wouldn’t take kindly to any such suggestion—in part because I would have known myself that she was right.

  I also realized, though, that step-by-step I was mentally divorcing myself from WikiLeaks. Admittedly, the personal conflicts between Julian and me were a major catalyst, perhaps even the most important reason behind the rupture. But there were also a lot of substantive points that had concerned me for some time and that would become even more acute in the days to come. I had long had a problem with deceiving the public about our internal structure, concealing the fact that WL had initially consisted of two individuals and a single server. I was also very worried about our inadequate backup system. Ultimately I was the one who was responsible if it didn’t function correctly. More than once in the past two years, I had woken up in the middle of the night, panicked by the thought that something had gone wrong. I would leap out of bed with more adrenaline than blood in my veins and make additional backup copies.

  Another issue was our “authenticity checks”—a deceit I had forced myself to practice in hundreds of interviews. Until late 2009, no one except Julian and I checked the vast majority of documents that had been submitted. Strictly speaking, we weren’t lying when we said we had a pool of around eight hundred volunteer experts at our disposal. But we neglected to mention that we had no mechanism in place for integrating them into our workflow. None of them were able to access the material we received. Instead, Julian and I usually checked whether documents had been manipulated technologically and did a few Google searches to see whether they struck us as genuine. We could only hope that things would turn out all right. Apparently we developed a pretty good sense for what was authentic and what wasn’t; at least as far as I know, we didn’t make any major mistakes. But we could have.

  I could suppress these qualms as long as I was able to tell myself that we were just starting out, that we were working on a better system. But after almost three years, I no longer believed this myself. In the preceding months, we had had the opportunity to commit ourselves to the improvements we had always said we wanted to make. There was money and there were a couple of reliable assistants at our disposal. But we didn’t sufficiently tackle the problem. We were acting irresponsibly, playing a risky game with our sources’ trust and our supporters’ donations.

  In the old days, Julian was the only one with whom I could discuss such problems. After all, he was as aware as anyone of our internal shortcomings. But I was reticent to raise any concerns. I didn’t want to start any more conflicts. So I had taken to exchanging views with the architect and Birgitta, as well as with Herbert Snorrason and Harald Schumann at the Tagesspiegel newspaper. The chat room in which we discussed these issues, and became increasingly worried, had a very revealing name: Mission First.

  It had been clear for quite some time that WL was headed in the wrong direction and that we were going to have to change course. The architect had already started with the technical restructuring. But the more we discussed the problems, the more obvious it became that far more extensive restructuring was needed. In Iceland, Schumann had repeatedly asked who among us was making the decisions. He was very persistent, posing this question day in and day out at the Ministry of Ideas, never satisfied with our answers. We became evasive. We tried to avoid him or change the subject. That was precisely our problem.

  We had tried to come up with principles to resolve all the critical questions. For example, to ensure our neutrality we had pledged to simply publish everything we received in the order in which it was submitted. But by the end of 2009 at the latest, we could no longer adhere to this ideal. We were swamped by submissions. Choices had to be made.

  We had also conceived of ourselves as a neutral submission platform, pure technology, and not a political agitator with a Twitter account. But we had chosen specific media partners to work with and in so doing had placed ourselves in a position of dependency. At first, cooperating with newspapers and magazines had just been a trial balloon, but it soon became standard operating procedure. We enjoyed the limelight the media gave us and told ourselves that our new way of doing things made the content of our material much more easily accessible.

  The great advantage in not making qualitative distinctions between individual documents and publications was that, if things went wrong, no one was personally responsible. Instead, we wanted to rely on principles and automatic mechanisms. But that was wishful thinking. We had no choice but to make decisions, and we did so without defining any rules for the process. Schumann had hit the nail right on the head with his question: Who had the final say?

  Ultimately, of course, it was Julian who made the decisions. The rest of us were too indecisive and skittish or simply lacked the resolve to set any limits for him. Julian thus became the autocratic head of WL, accountable to no one and tolerating no challenges to his authority. This had emerged as a problem when Bradley Manning was arrested, and clearly it was going to be a problem in the weeks to come. The investigations in Sweden would prove to be the wedge that finally broke up our team.

  Within twenty-four hours of the affair becoming public, the Swedish prosecutor had withdrawn the arrest warrant against Julian and reduced the charges from rape to sexual harassment. But in November 2010, the attorney for the two women in question succeeded in getting the rape accusation reinstated.

  In the wake of our crisis meeting in the sculpture garden, Kristinn reported back to Julian that I had tried to manipulate Birgitta. Or at least Julian later claimed Kristinn had said that. Debates about who had said what to whom were to become one of our main activities in the days and weeks that followed.

  We had started making transcripts of our chats and swapping them among ourselves. It was our way of combating Julian’s “symmetrical” understanding of the truth. We only wanted there to be something approaching genuine documents, evidence of what had been discussed. No one would have had any objections, either, to Kristinn and Ingi participating in our discussions, although I did not consider them members of the core team. If there’s one thing I learned from my time at WL it’s that important questions should always be discussed by the group, and that no one should be excluded from the discussion.

  A copy of the chat in which Julian announced my suspension was published in Wired magazine. To this day, I don’t know who passed it on, but I think there are good reasons for letting other people have a look at the transcript. It does not deal with private issues, but with the culture of communication within WikiLeaks, a project whose battle cry was, more than any other organization, transparency. The chat transcripts reveal the state the project was in at the time, and the tone of voice and arguments that were used. They provide the sorts of insights I can neither explain nor make a case for with subjective descriptions. I can claim a hundred times over that Julian became a dictator. Instead, everyone should make up his or her own mind by reading the chats.

  Only a few days had passed since the charges in Sweden had been issued, when, on a Wednesday evening, the infighting resumed on the daily WL staff chat. Julian emphasized that he had no time to fill us in on the logic behind his decisions because he had “high level discussions with around 20 people a day now.” I have no idea who he meant. Perhaps Julian’s so-called assistants were traveling around with him, attending meetings, or accompanying him to interview shoots. I don�
�t know. At the time, Julian was still in Sweden. As far as I know, he had contact there with some people from the Pirate Party and some journalists at the Swedish daily Aftonbladet, for which he was supposed to begin writing a column. There’s no doubt that it would have been important to get more reliable people involved in WL and take the pressure off the core team.

  At the time, we were fighting a lot about an article in the Wall Street Journal. The journalists had asked me and Julian independently about our finances. I had told them how transparently and regularly our donations were recorded in Germany. Julian had told them the exact opposite, saying that WL accounts were skillfully and explicitly managed to prevent them from being attacked by anyone on the outside. In the article, he portrayed our nontransparent bookkeeping as a clever method for preventing our enemies from shutting off our cash flow.

  That, of course, only attracted a host of other curious journalists who wanted to know why we were concealing our finances. Above all, it meant that the Wau Holland Foundation had a lot of explaining to do. Julian would later claim he had been misquoted.

  In the chat room, we again asked him to step back and to stop talking to the press and sending out tweets describing the charges as a Pentagon smear campaign. When our questions got too critical, though, Julian would simply log himself out.

  I think that he was taken aback that we had stood up to him so forcefully and that, in particular, the architect refused to budge an inch from his critical position. I thought it was important to hear what our other main techie had to say on this issue. But he preferred to stay out of the fight.

  The two techies and I were almost at our wits’ end. I had spent three hours in the chat room, and we were further away from a solution than ever. The debate had been going on for weeks. We wanted to make Julian talk to us. In the end we resorted to a fairly draconian measure, a shot in the dark. Perhaps it wasn’t the best way to tackle the problem. But we wanted to make clear to him that WikiLeaks was heading toward a mutiny. So we used the one small advantage we possessed—as technicians—and just let a few systems go down. Nothing major, nothing nasty. Just a symbolic act of protest.

  On August 25, 2010, the architect and technician switched the system onto maintenance mode. The submission system, the e-mail system, and the chat room remained online. Only the wiki was down. We tweeted to say there was temporary maintenance work going on. We also changed the password for accessing the Twitter and e-mail accounts. We were trying to shake Julian up.

  In response, Julian shut down the whole system. We caved in almost immediately, restored the wiki, and gave him the passwords.

  The next day, an article appeared in Newsweek about infighting at WikiLeaks. I hadn’t heard anything about it until Julian mentioned it to me via the chat. Julian assumed that I was the source of the news. He was wrong. I had never talked to Newsweek. I didn’t even know the reporter. Originally, I had wanted to ask about our arrangements for the upcoming Iraq leak. But the chat took a different turn.

  D: what are the agreements re iraq? i need to understand what the plan is there, and what the constraints are

  J: “A person in close contact with other WikiLeaks activists around Europe, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive topic, says that many of them were privately concerned that Assange has continued to spread allegations of dirty tricks and hint at conspiracies against him without justification. Insiders say that some people affiliated with the website are already brainstorming whether there might be some way to persuade their front man to step aside, or failing that, even to oust him.”

  D: what does that have to do with me?

  D: and where is this from?

  J: Why do you think it has something to do with you?

  D: probably because you alleg this was me

  D: but other than that just about nothing

  D: as discussed yesterday, this is an ongoing discussion that lots of people have voiced concern about

  D: you should face this, rather than trying to shoot at the only person that even cares to be honest about it towards you

  J: No, three people have “relayed” your messages already.

  D: what messages?

  D: and what three people?

  D: this issue was discussed

  D: A [Architect] and i talked about it, Hans* talked about it, B talked it, Peter* talked about it

  D: lots of people that care for this project have issued that precise suggestion

  D: its not me that is spreading this message

  D: it would just be the natural step to take

  D: and thats what pretty much anyone says

  J: Was this you?

  D: i didnt speak to newsweek or other media representatives about this

  D: i spoke to people we work with and that have an interest in and care about this project

  D: and there is nothing wrong about this

  D: it’d actually be needed much more, and i can still only recommend you to finally start listening to such concerns

  D: especially when one fuckup is happening after the other

  J: who, exactly?

  D: who exactly what?

  J: Who have you spoken to about this issue?

  D: i already told you up there

  J: those are the only persons?

  D: some folks from the club have asked me about it and i have issued that i think this would be the best behaviour

  D: thats my opinion

  D: and this is also in light to calm down the anger there […]

  J: how many people at the club?

  D: i dont have to answer to you on this j

  D: this debate is fuckin all over the place, and no one understands why you go into denial […]

  J: How many people at the club?

  J: In what venue?

  D: in private chats

  D: but i will not answer anymore of these questions

  D: face the fact that you have not much trust on the inside anymore

  D: and that just denying it or putting it away as a campaign against you will not change that it is solely a consequence of your actions

  D: and not mine

  J: How many people are represented by these private chats? And what are there positions in the CCC?

  D: go figure

  D: i dont even wanna think about how many people that used to respect you told me that they feel disappointed by your reactions

  D: i tried to tell you all this, but in all your hybris you dont even care

  D: so i dont care anymore either

  D: other than that, i had questions first, and i need answers

  D: like what agreements we have made

  D: i need to understand this so we can continue working

  D: you keep stalling other peoples work

  J: How many people are represented by these private chats? And what are there positions in the CCC?

  D: start answering my questions j

  J: This is not a quid-pro-quo.

  J: Are you refusing to answer?

  D: i have already told you again that i dont see why i should answer to you anymore just because you want answers, but on the same hand refuse to answer anything i am asking

  D: i am not a dog you can contain the way you want to j

  J: i am investigation a serious security breach. Are you refusing to answer?

  D: i am investigating a serious breach in trust. are you refusing to answer?

  J: No you are not. I initiated this conversation. Answer the question please.

  D: i initiated it

  D: if you look above

  D: twice already

  D: i want to know what the agreements are in respect to iraq

  J: That is a procedural issue. Don’t play games with me.

  D: stop shooting at messengers

  J: I’ve had it.

  D: likewise, and that doesnt go just for me

  J: If you do not answer the question, you will be removed.

  D: you are not anyones kin
g or god

  D: and you’re not even fulfilling your role as a leader right now

  D: a leader communicates and cultivates trust in himself

  D: you are doing the exact opposite

  D: you behave like some kind of emporer or slave trader

  J: You are suspended for one month, effective immediately.

  D: haha

  D: right

  D: because of what?

  D: and who even says that?

  D: you? another adhoc decision?

  J: If you wish to appeal, you will be heard on Tuesday.

  D: BAHAHAHA

  D: maybe everyone was right, and you really have gone mental j

  D: you should get some help

  J: You will be heard by a panel of peers.

  J: You are suspend for disloyalty, insubordination and destabalization in a time of crisis.

  A few hours after my suspension, on the evening of August 26, Julian called a meeting. The architect, the technician, and I were barred from participating. The nanny, Birgitta, and Kristinn were among those who did take part. A friend of mine had logged in under the name of Resa*, as well as several other people whom Julian had mobilized. Herbert Snorrason, my anarchist friend from Iceland, also took part and sent me the transcript of the chat afterward. The architect and I later added our comments and forwarded the transcript to all those concerned.

  The topic of the meeting was our act of mutiny and my suspension. “Daniel is problematic, and, frankly, delusional,” Julian wrote, “an illmotivated, but he can be kept in a box if he has other people telling him what is wrong and right and what he can do and can not do. when he is left in his germanic bubble he floats.”

  Julian was clearly trying to win over the others, but they weren’t easily convinced. They kept asking questions and criticizing Julian for deciding things on his own rather than discussing them with the team. For me, the eighty-nine-page transcript had all the suspense of a good detective story. It made clear, to me and probably also to Julian, that while the others would not rebel openly, he also didn’t have a majority of them on his side.