Inside WikiLeaks

by Daniel Domscheit-Berg

  Julian particularly hoped to keep the architect on the team; he needed him more than anyone else. The architect was central to our infrastructure. He was the one who had revised the submission system in late 2009. Previously it had been a simple upload formula embedded in the website. He had separated the various platforms of the server, the wiki, and the e-mail system so that hackers would not be able to penetrate the entire system. There are few people in the entire world who would have been able to do this.

  That made me understand all the less why Julian failed to sufficiently appreciate the architect’s work. And he drove the architect away, once and for all, with the chat meeting by portraying him as an unwitting stooge who had fallen under my pernicious influence.

  Julian must have suspected at this stage that the planned hearing could very easily have gone against him. Even if he had hand-picked the “panel of peers,” how could he have been sure that the panel wouldn’t have opposed my suspension and perhaps challenged his supreme authority at WikiLeaks?

  In hindsight, suspending me had the advantage of allowing Julian to claim that I was just a frustrated member of staff trying to get revenge by criticizing the project. I was indeed frustrated. By this point emotions had boiled over. But the origin of my criticism was not frustration at my suspension, and in the meantime, the others were also reaching the conclusion that something at WL was going drastically wrong.

  By suspending me, Julian ensured that I was shut out of various systems and restricted in my ability to communicate. In the past I had access to everything, theoretically, including Julian’s own e-mails. I never read them, though.

  Like many of us, I used my e-mail account to save appointments and contacts, so I no longer had access to my own commitments in the following weeks. I had agreed to give at least four or five lectures at various upcoming conferences. For instance, Thomas Leif, the chairman of the Hambach Castle Democracy Forum, had invited me to attend an event called “My Data Belongs to You.” I couldn’t even get in touch with him to cancel. My chair on the stage remained empty.

  I tried later to apologize to all of the people I inadvertently let down. Sometimes I still worry that there is someone who is really angry with me because I left him sitting alone on a podium somewhere.

  I WASN’T the only one Julian had barred from the e-mail server. He’d excluded everyone else, too. He alone had access. I was the one who laid the necessary groundwork for many of the tasks carried out by the technicians. That was bad enough. But combined with the fact that he had prevented everyone else from accessing the e-mail server, it meant no one could do their work. The Iraq publications needed to be processed. The domain administration also ran from the e-mail server, and we desperately needed to set up subdomains for the Iraq documents.

  We had agreed on a date of the publication with our media partners, Der Spiegel, the Guardian, and the New York Times. That date now had to be put back by a month—to October 23, 2010. Julian blamed it all on me.

  We were in a strange state of limbo. On the one hand, my “trial” still hadn’t taken place and I was officially “suspended.” On the other, we were still in contact via chat. Julian sent me endless complaints. He told me he was wasting all his time repairing damage that I had caused. It was a bit like having an ex-girlfriend spending an hour a day leaving messages on my answering machine, telling me that she didn’t ever want to have anything to do with me again. Of course, I wasn’t any more reasonable and kept sniping back at him.

  On the condition that no one reveal the password to me, under any circumstances, he offered to reinstate the techies’ access to the system. They refused. Neither of them agreed with my suspension. The architect clearly took my side. The young technician kept out of the fray. He was suffering because things weren’t moving forward. He just wanted us to carry on as before.

  Julian had said that he wanted to put together a “panel of peers.” We spent the next few days waiting for him to get in touch and name the tribunal. It was a mystery who these “peers” would be—Julian would only say that he needed the panel “so that the process was seen to be transparent and others would have confidence.”

  Birgitta had talked to a journalist from the Daily Beast, and the resulting article sparked the next controversy. She had said, among other things, that Julian had a “chauvinistic relationship” to women. And that she had advised him to step aside for a while. Julian freaked out. He felt betrayed.

  Birgitta had underestimated the trouble the article would unleash. Later she sent a message via Twitter to try to calm the speculation sparked by her statement: “I did NOT suggest Assange should resign, I think he should not be a spokesman right now. He still has my support for all his other work.” But she never apologized for talking to the press. She always spoke her mind and stood by it.

  Julian was convinced that I had manipulated Birgitta to say what she did in the Daily Beast article. He also believed that I was the source of the information about the internal squabbles at WikiLeaks. I hadn’t talked to any journalists, and I don’t know to this day where the journalist in question got his information. Perhaps he simply invented the quote he used about internal differences. With different opinions being aired in the press, it wasn’t too difficult to conclude that we were split internally. Birgitta had said that she thought it would be best if Julian stepped aside for a while, while he maintained that the women in Sweden had been working for the Pentagon and that he was the victim of a smear campaign. The rape allegations, he wrote, meant that he had just been through “the worst week in my life in the past 10 years.” As a result, he claimed, he had been unable to organize my hearing in front of the “panel of peers.”

  He also accused us in general of not being sufficiently worried about him. Three days later, on September 7, he sent us a whole list of things that, in his opinion, we had failed to consider adequately:

  Awareness comes from motivation. Ensured my legal support? Housing? Money supply? Intelligence about the case? Details about why it is happening? My support network in Sweden? Political approaches to stop the smear? Articles? Tipoffs? Safehouses? False papers? Diplomatic invites so I won’t be shipped off to the US? Rally supports? Raise money for my case? Done any of that? Why not? I do all of that when one of us goes down.

  For my part, I had at least helped him get two good lawyers in Sweden. I did that the very day I heard about the charges, while I was still on vacation.

  • • •

  Suddenly the mail server crashed, and Julian was locked out too. I don’t know if he was responsible. Maybe the thing just gave up the ghost. The piece of junk was old enough. It was the only server we hadn’t updated.

  In any case, a discussion commenced about whether I should go and repair it, something I had done on quite a few occasions in the past. The trip, I thought, would give me an opportunity to access my e-mails so at least I would know whom to apologize to for not showing up.

  On September 10 or 11, I got on a train. It was a very hot late-summer day. The train wasn’t particularly full, and luckily, the few people in my open-seating compartment were all preoccupied with their own affairs. I spent the whole time typing in the chat window of my computer and tapping on the floor with my feet. I continued the discussion in the chat room, unsure of whether I was doing the right thing. Should I in fact access the server without Julian’s knowledge? It was a matter of conscience: should we mutiny?

  The server was located in a nondescript town in the Ruhr region of western Germany. It was a long journey, and I had plenty of time to think things over. After three hours I decided to turn around. I can’t remember the name of the station, but as we pulled in I grabbed my backpack, pressed a button to open the train door, and jumped out onto the platform. It was like when you spot a police car in your rearview mirror and suddenly get the irrational feeling that you’ve done something wrong. That was the way I felt. I went back to Berlin.

  After my suspension, the architect had put away his keyboard and refused
to write a single line for WL—either in the form of programming code or in conversation with Julian. It was a kind of solidarity strike. The architect is a pragmatic person who usually doesn’t let himself get worked up about anything. But he does get angry when someone wastes his time. One time, after Julian had failed to respond to the architect’s repeated queries about why he was no longer getting any feedback, the architect had warned him, “If things continue like this, I’m out of here.” When the situation continued to escalate, he made good on his threat.

  Julian got in touch with me and asked why the architect had gone AWOL. What was I supposed to say?

  I had discussed with a few of the others whether it would make sense for us to take over the project. We spent ages considering whether we should turn the whole hierarchy on its head, seize the rudder, and suspend Julian. We were the majority. Theoretically, we all had the same rights. A lot of people advised us: “Why don’t you take over technical control and make sure that he can’t create any more trouble?” But we didn’t want to do anything that major against Julian’s will.

  On September 14, I set off for the computer center again. I switched off my cell phone and computer for the duration of the journey and did my best to read a book. I wanted to force myself to remain firm.

  I had tried to contact the person who had registered the server for us but hadn’t managed to get in touch with him. He didn’t know a lot about what had been going on recently, but he had reacted very skeptically when I had told him about my first trip. To him, it sounded as if we were doing something behind Julian’s back. It didn’t matter how many times I told him that I just wanted to get the server back up to speed again so we could continue our work.

  I stared out the train window, letting the trees, the houses, and the landscape rush past. This time I wasn’t going to turn around. I just blanked out the negative thoughts and hoped that everything would be OK.

  Computer centers are often located in inconspicuous office buildings, unidentifiable from the outside. I walked through a few soulless gray corridors, took an elevator to the second floor, said hello to whomever was there, and headed for our server. No one stopped me. A computer center of that kind houses servers for many disparate companies. Security is tight. But because I had repaired things there on several occasions, people knew me and didn’t ask questions.

  I waited impatiently for the server to boot up. My laptop was next to me. I was online, of course, and in touch with the others. I didn’t feel very comfortable. It was much too hot in the data center, and I was sweating. The air-conditioning unit was humming loudly, but pumping out far too little cool air. It was no wonder our ancient machine broke down.

  One of the guys from the center came into the room. I said hello and he nodded back. He checked a setting and disappeared again.

  When I looked up again about fifteen minutes later, he was suddenly standing in front of me. I jumped. I hadn’t even heard him coming into the room. He looked as if he was about to say something. I had already prepared my explanation. But maybe he just wanted to look me straight in the eye to make sure that he really recognized me. He nodded again and left the room.

  The computer finally rebooted. I stared at my screen. Someone new had popped up in the chat room, and I knew immediately who it was. The contact who had rented the server for us.

  “What are you doing?” he asked without saying hello.

  “I’m here at the server,” I wrote back.

  “I know. The center informed me. What on earth are you up to?”

  “Listen, I’m just carrying out repairs. I’m not doing anything that anyone should have a problem with.”

  “I’ve been in contact with Julian. He freaked out.”

  “He has no reason to.”

  “He says he’s going to call the police.”

  “That’s silly, listen …”

  “I’d like you to keep your hands off it, Daniel, OK? Get out of there before anything happens. Julian is saying that he’ll have you arrested.”

  “Wait …”

  But there was no point discussing things. I wasn’t sure whether Julian would really call the police. Even if the police took away our server, it was encrypted, and they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. But the server would have been gone. And a visit from the police might have created difficulties for our contact.

  I was well acquainted with Julian’s exaggerated threats. But out of respect for the person who had taken a risk on our behalf and registered the server in his name, I decided to back off.

  I had only repaired the server. I hadn’t manipulated it or even copied my own e-mails. Julian and the others could access their e-mails again.

  The reaction was devastating. Julian went on a rampage. He refused to type in the code to put the server back in service and wrote to me: “Try that again and I’ll have you locked up.” He said that the server would have to be sent to “forensics” because it had been manipulated, either by me or by the secret service. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Did he mean that the server would have to be taken to the police, or to a special laboratory where he would have it examined? One way or another, it would have been complete nonsense.

  Julian popped up in the chat room, even though there was a meeting planned there for the following day. “The talk is now because the crime was today,” he wrote. Birgitta and Herbert were logged on, and suddenly the architect appeared as well. The discussion had arisen spontaneously. It was September 14. I was really glad that we were finally talking to one another. I didn’t suspect that this conversation would be our last.

  I didn’t know how often I had sat in the past few days, staring at the screen for hours, my eyes not really focused, just waiting for a small button to appear and indicate that Julian was present. I barely left our apartment—only when it was absolutely necessary. And no matter what I did, whether I popped out for some milk or went to the dentist, I always hoped that I would see something on the screen the next time that I looked at it. A message from Julian to me.

  I carried my laptop with me wherever I went: into the kitchen, the living room, even to the bathtub. When I went to bed, it was there at my side. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have better things to do, but I couldn’t help myself. At some stage, I started seeing green letters regardless of what I was looking at. The world had turned into one big chat window. And because I had been waiting so long for a message, my imagination began to dream them up out of the blue.

  “Hey Daniel, i have to talk to you.”

  “I’ve been thinking. Maybe I misunderstood things. Let’s talk about the future of WL.”

  “Maybe we should meet and clear up the misunderstandings. Hey, you know we really had a great time together with those artsy-fartsies in Linz, or the bears, do you remember?!”

  I was an incorrigible dreamer. A starry-eyed idealist. It was time to wake up and smell the coffee. What Julian actually wrote was “If you threaten this organization again, you will be attended to.”

  And: “Daniel has a disease, it’s some kind of borderline paranoid schizophrenia.” And: “You are a criminal.”

  Julian was once again acting as if he alone had all the say at WL. Julian wrote that he had composed 99 percent of the summaries and editorials and all the tweets, and that the entire philosophy of the project was his doing. “So what you are saying Julian,” Birgitta responded, “is that YOU are wl and everyone else just your servants whom you allocate trust to.”

  The architect was also having none of this and made it clear that it was best for everyone if we went our separate ways. He was prepared to return control over the system, but he would return it in the state in which he had found it a year before.

  Julian responded, “Our duties are bigger than this idiocy,” adding that the architect was only “a shadow of the man you were.”

  He also demanded an apology from Birgitta for going behind his back and speaking to the journalist from the Daily Beast. “Listen to me very careful
ly. It was backstabbing and it was disgraceful and you should apologise. Do you apologise?”

  Instead, Birgitta reiterated her criticism of Julian’s response to the Swedish charges. She wrote, “You have mixed wl with this in a very bad way.”

  Julian replied, “No. WL has sabotaged my private life.”

  Julian then suggested that he and the architect withdraw to a parallel chat room for a private talk. That was the last straw.

  The architect wrote: “Well you had 5 minutes time … you blew it. have fun. dont waste my time (how many times do i have to tell you that?).”

  And then the architect did the same thing Julian himself had done a hundred times before. He simply disappeared.

  Julian also went quiet. What more could he say? He didn’t want to talk to us anymore. And we didn’t want to talk to him, either.

  That was the end. Not the end of WikiLeaks, but the end of the team that had worked so hard for the project in the years and months past. From that point on, we would only communicate with one another indirectly, via the media or go-betweens.

  We gave up and began handing over responsibility for the technology. The architect helped the technician, who remained with the project to rebuild the old system. Initially, we had agreed on a transitional phase of two weeks. Ultimately, we extended it to three.

  Why did the architect and I decide in the early morning hours of September 15, 2010, to quit WikiLeaks? The real question is Why didn’t we make that decision much, much earlier? Perhaps we had already done so without admitting it to ourselves.

  On September 17, two days after our final conversation with Julian, we registered the name of our new project: OpenLeaks. The idea, however, was considerably older than forty-eight hours. We’d been batting it around for quite some time, in fact, and maybe it had been in the back of our minds the previous few weeks as the tone between us and Julian deteriorated. But the final decision came on September 17.