The first time either of us had said out loud that perhaps we weren’t going to beat our heads against a wall at WL forever was in summer 2010. What frustrated us most were Julian’s Twitter messages and the fact that we were always trying to catch up with publishing the big leaks while a lot of good documents were simply left lying around with no one to attend to them. Julian was continually announcing the next big leak, only to turn around and say he wouldn’t be making any more announcements, while launching all sorts of senseless attacks on journalists in the meantime. If I recall correctly, it was immediately after Julian had heaped abuse upon the Mother Jones article that the architect broached the topic of us leaving. It had been a long time since a statement had filled me with such a sense of relief as the architect’s casual and typically succinct message: “If thing keep going this way at WL, we’ll just have to fork.”
By “fork,” he meant go off on our own path. Just leave. I was glad I wasn’t the only one who’d had this idea. Although I knew that the architect was closer to me than to Julian, I hadn’t known for sure whether, if things came to a head, he might choose to stay with WL. And the architect was crucial. Without him, it would have been virtually impossible to build up anything new.
Naturally, we encountered considerable skepticism when we began sharing our thoughts with some of the others. Harald Schumann and Birgitta were concerned that we might destroy the idea of WL itself if we split the organization. WikiLeaks, after all, was an established brand name. They urged us to resolve the problem internally, with Julian and fight to the end for WL. But the architect and I saw things more pragmatically. And no matter how much we may have hemmed and hawed, once the ice had been broken and the decisive words had been said, nothing could hold us back.
The idea fired the imaginations of Herbert, the architect, and me. At first, all we had were just vague fantasies of what a better version of WikiLeaks might be like. But soon we were mulling over names and developing ideas about how the new organization could avoid going down the same path as WL if it started attracting money and publicity. That was around July or August 2010.
We formulated the first concepts that would serve as the foundation of the new project. Some of my ideas stemmed from the time when I applied for the grant from the Knight Foundation. One of them would probably appear laughable in the eyes of more professional founders of any comparable organization. Our chief concern was how a group could make decisions without any one person imposing his will on others. Our goal was a maximum of consensus, and we preferred to discuss things for days on end rather than force everyone involved to submit to the opinion of any one person. We also wanted to avoid putting ourselves under time pressure. But if worse came to worst and no consensus could be reached, we agreed to decide issues by playing rock, paper, scissors. That would be our way of preventing situations in which any one individual would be tempted to lay down the law.
It wasn’t easy to put the rock-paper-scissors principle down on paper in a way that sounded even vaguely serious. In the end, we ourselves had to laugh and deleted it from our official concept. But we did stick to the basic idea that we would create a neutral service and avoid the trap of becoming political lobbyists or pop stars. When it became clear in that final chat that we were going to leave WL, work on OpenLeaks sped up dramatically. It was a liberating experience, even if I was very sad that my time at WL was now over forever.
I also decided to go public with the news that I had left WL. It was just before the Iraq leak, and I was the one charged with keeping in touch with the journalists from Der Spiegel. At our next meeting I told them that, unfortunately, I was no longer their point person because I was no longer part of the WikiLeaks team.
Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark wanted to interview me immediately. They said that they would be able to include our conversation in their next edition. I asked for a week to think things over. I wanted to consider very carefully what to say, how much to reveal. I was aware of just how frustrated and emotional I was at that point. At all costs, I wanted to avoid letting my frustration develop into a campaign for personal revenge. I wanted my only motivation to be relativizing the credibility I had lent the project and inform people who wanted to work for WL or donate money or upload documents. In the past, I had stood up and vouched for WikiLeaks as a reliable organization. I now wanted to publicly qualify that position.
This was a new situation. For the past three years I had never told anyone what was going on inside the organization. On the contrary, I had always tried to portray WikiLeaks in the best possible light. When necessary, that involved dispelling concerns and refuting criticism. Along the way, I had indulged in a bit of spin, sometimes straddling the line between truth and propaganda. I had never, however, told a blatant lie.
I saw the two journalists from Der Spiegel primarily as witnesses who could attest to the legitimacy of my reservations. Whenever I met Rosenbach and Stark, they listened very attentively. During previous conversations, Stark had repeatedly pulled out his notebook. At some point I asked him why he was writing everything down. He said he wanted to be able to remember what I had said. I told him I would prefer him not to. And I reminded them of their promise not to use our internal discussions anywhere.
At one of our next meetings, Stark again had placed his notebook on the table. Maybe I’d become overly cautious, but that irritated me. There had been too many misunderstandings over the previous few weeks, too many internal details that had been made public. That’s why, when I did finally give Der Spiegel an official interview, I was very reserved and didn’t criticize Julian heavily at all.
The interview appeared on September 25. All that Monday, the day the magazine always hits newsstands, I felt nervous. I kept waiting for a reaction from Julian. But none came. The only people who contacted me were other journalists. But by that point I had no desire to talk any further about WikiLeaks and my departure from it.
I gave one or two journalists a few details about how I had quit in order to get the picture straight. Then I needed some peace and quiet.
Desperately.
ON October 22, 2010, WikiLeaks published 391,832 documents about the Iraq War. These were US military files dating from 2004 to 2009.
As had been the case with the Afghan War Diaries, the Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel once again enjoyed the privileged position of being able to examine the material weeks in advance and write their articles. They had been in possession of the documents since Julian had set up shop in London. The material was also posted on the WikiLeaks site on October 22, making it available to everyone. Although Julian had told me that exclusivity deals made it impossible to involve the Washington Post or freelance journalists, there were in fact other partners onboard this time around, including the TV stations Al Jazeera and Channel4.
With the Afghanistan leak, David Leigh of the Guardian had been our main man. In the case of the Iraq release it was Gavin MacFadyen. MacFadyen is the head of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) in London, a nonprofit organization chiefly concerned with training investigative journalists and promoting the benefits of this particularly expensive form of journalistic work.
MacFadyen also sits on the advisory board of the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, a journalists’ initiative set up in 2009 that attempts, you might say, to put theory into practice. It produces four or five reports every year on particularly important topics that, in the Bureau’s opinion, aren’t receiving sufficient attention. The reports are not commissioned by the media industry; the Bureau itself funds the painstaking research. The Bureau is also based in London and the Centre for Investigative Journalism provides it with expert advice and reporters.
MacFadyen is both one of Julian’s biggest fans and a close colleague of Iain Overton, a documentary filmmaker and the editor in chief of the Bureau. That is probably how the contact with Julian came about—and the idea to work more closely together in the run-up to the Iraq leak. Part of the idea was for the Bure
au to pre-produce five-minute videos and sell the rights to them to TV stations.
In 2009 the Bureau received 2 million pounds from the Potter Foundation. Thus, it was financially independent. Its journalists were presumably interested in working together with WikiLeaks for the sake of a good story and perhaps the publicity that any association with WikiLeaks might generate.
The question of rights had already arisen with the “Collateral Murder” video. That had given Julian the idea of using the videos to tap a further source of income.
I’ve heard from a former Newsweek reporter as well as two other sources that Al Jazeera and Channel4 were among those who had paid for the five-minute clips. My sources mentioned sums of about 110,000 pounds from Al Jazeera and 50,000 pounds from Channel4. Meanwhile, Iain Overton and the Bureau, the producers of the videos, have come under fire. A number of critics have questioned whether these deals were completely kosher. They want to know whether by buying the videos the broadcasters also purchased the right to take an advance look at the documents. Overton denies this. He says the money only went toward funding his substantial production costs, and that the Bureau ended up with a loss from the deal. I have the feeling that Overton is now paying the price for dealing with a nontransparent organization.
Pre-produced videos were apparently also offered to other TV stations. Some of them, ABC for example, were suspicious about the offer and surprised by the amounts of money being asked for—100,000 pounds for five-minute TV reports. The public—including WL reporters and donors—was also left in the dark about these video sales. That is definitely a point for criticism. It remains unclear to this day who paid what and what they were promised in return. Overton has assured me that he will publicize all the background details of the deals and can show that everything was aboveboard, as far as the Bureau was concerned.
Julian would later fall out with the Guardian, when the paper wanted to publish some of the diplomatic cables without consulting him. According to an article by Sarah Ellison in Vanity Fair, Julian and his attorney stormed into the Guardian’s offices, claiming that the information in the documents was personal property, and that any publication would affect him financially. That raises the question: if Julian can apparently be so open about his financial interests with his media partners, why can’t he make them transparent to the general public?
The media deals weren’t the only new thing about the Iraq leaks. Technologically, the Iraq release also marked a departure from previous practice. The publications were hosted by an Amazon server in the United States and in Ireland, as well as on servers in France. Julian and the technician had clearly not been able to get the organization’s own infrastructure back up and running to the point where it could cope with a publication of that kind. As of this writing, it is still impossible to send documents directly to WikiLeaks. The submission system is offline.
There is a page that explains what kinds of submissions WL is interested in and the technical details of the uploading procedure. The path to the site is not encrypted. Anyone reading the instructions about potential submissions can easily be monitored. Conversely, anyone who intercepts traffic between a user’s computer and the Amazon server in the United States can see what information the user has accessed on the WikiLeaks site. All Internet traffic across North America can potentially be monitored by the National Security Agency. In the case of WikiLeaks, it probably is.
Upon his departure, the architect took with him almost everything he had set up and developed during his year at WikiLeaks. The software and configurations are the architect’s own intellectual property. The remaining team faced the problem of how to continue without his expertise. From my perspective today, I would call the technical level of WL before the architect’s arrival irresponsible—even if I did live with it myself for the first two years.
The technician could have returned WikiLeaks to the state it was at before the architect came along. The wiki could have also remained online. The architect was not responsible for programming that tool.
The architect took time to show the technician the ropes. During the handover, he led him by the hand and explained how the whole thing had to be configured. The young techie is, in fact, a really good programmer, and, as he knows, he’d be more than welcome to join our new project whenever he wants. But the rebuilding of the system was probably too much for him on his own.
Julian never seems to have taken sufficient interest in this task or given him any support. He just kept on complaining. I don’t know exactly why, as of January 2011, four months after our departure, the system is still not really back up on its feet. But I have my ideas.
We’re still waiting for Julian to restore security so that we can give him back the material that was on the submission platform. At present it is being stored safely. We have no interest in the material and will not use it for OpenLeaks. But we will only give it back to Julian when he can show us that he is able to store it securely and deal with it carefully and responsibly.
This is the first time that we’ve told anyone about this. We were afraid that doing so could lose us public sympathy, and perhaps that will be the result now. But I stand by this decision absolutely. We were and are primarily bound to our duty vis-à-vis our sources’ security.
Even after our final conversation, Julian still tried to get in touch with the architect, telling him they simply had to resume working together. He said the architect should “act like a man” and “let bygones be bygones.” The architect laughed at him and said, “You’ve missed the boat.”
Julian bragged to us about his host of new staff members, his hundred new horses in the stable. But none of them have been able to get the system up and running. In Sweden, Julian allegedly had thirty or thirty-five supporters helping him for two or three weeks. I’ve heard they have all left because they found Julian simply too difficult.
I had been gone for a while and was already working on OpenLeaks, but I still possessed operator status. You could say that breakups in the digital world take a lot more time than in real life. If you get kicked off a sports team, you have to go play somewhere else, but I was still present in the WikiLeaks public chat room and could read all the conversations. Moreover, because I was still the operator, I could stay in the chat room without being thrown out after ten minutes of inactivity the way normal guests are. This was a precaution we had taken so that no one could listen in unnoticed.
So I saw how a personnel situation meant that the seventeen-year-old from Iceland was appointed captain of the chat. “PenguinX” was the first point of contact for anyone appearing in the chat room with a question. This is a delicate area because this is where many people who want to submit material contact the organization—all the more so because the WL e-mail hasn’t worked properly since Julian refused to enter the codes to release it. Potential whistleblowers need to be warned in this situation. They should not provide any information that could identify them or do harm to others. Anyone logged on, from a curiosity seeker to a secret service agent, has access to the public chat rooms.
Moreover, after I had left, Julian assigned PenguinX to write a press release portraying me as an evil deserter of the cause. But the seventeen-year-old wasn’t up to the task. He’s not capable of writing a proper sentence, and he didn’t know the background to the story. So he passed the job on to another volunteer, who was active in the chat room and who had offered to help.
This eager volunteer then asked me if I could help. He said he didn’t understand the whole situation and would be grateful for a bit of input. My first thought was, Oh God, things really have gotten desperate. And this is the crack team that has its hands on documents that Julian’s lawyer has described as a “thermonuclear device”?
• • •
When the nanny got in touch with me for the first time after my departure, I had to agree not to log our conversation and store it as a file. That wasn’t a big problem. I typed up the transcript as best I remembered it.
; I don’t truly think that the nanny is an evil person, but when she told me that she only wanted to “make everyone happy,” I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. Our conversation was like something from a bad spy thriller. She offered to ensure that my name wasn’t damaged if I agreed to stop making critical comments in public about Julian and the project. All I had to do was say yes, and in return there would be no attempts to publicly portray me in a negative light. I told her that I found her wording a little menacing. No, said the nanny, I had misunderstood. When she made threats, they were never so subtle. That wasn’t her style. The nanny had tried to win back the architect with promises of a regular salary. After Birgitta left, WL tried to make her sign a confidentiality agreement.
Moreover, Julian explicitly threatened that he had some compromising material on me and that he was planning to publish e-mails in which I showed my true self. He should go ahead and do that. I have nothing to hide. Perhaps I’m just too normal a guy for that.
Julian once wrote in a chat conversation, “I’m running out of options that don’t destroy people.” These were the words with which he ordered Birgitta to bring us into line after our departure. That was shortly after the architect and I had left. Julian’s tone was horrid, but his statement was exaggerated. I didn’t feel afraid at all. It reminded me a bit of the Pentagon spokesman who appealed to us following the Afghanistan leak to “Do the right thing!” He did not reveal what exactly that was or what kind of consequences we would otherwise face. Empty threats sound serious, but in the end they’re still empty.
Inside WikiLeaks Page 21