Two days later, he and Domscheit-Berg spoke at the same Digital Freedom Society conference that Barlow had keynoted, fleshing out the idea with an even longer list of possible laws Iceland could cherry-pick and emulate. Jónsdóttir spoke at the same conference, and when she left the university building for a cigarette break, Assange introduced himself and said he would join her outside in a moment to smoke a cigar. When he came out the door, he was, instead, carrying a hard-boiled egg, which he ate without explanation. “That’s the strangest cigar I’ve ever seen,” Jónsdóttir deadpanned. They liked each other immediately.
Two days later, Jónsdóttir brought Assange and Domscheit-Berg to a late-night meeting with a group of activists at a Reykjavík tapas restaurant. Not to dream any longer about a transparency haven in Iceland, but to strategize about how to actually build one.
For the next months, IMMI commanded the activists’ lives. Rop Gonggrijp, an old Dutch cypherpunk friend of Assange’s and a longtime member of the Chaos Computer Club, flew in to help manage the research. Smári McCarthy, a half-Irish, half-Icelandic free-information advocate and hacker, taught himself to read the legal codes of countries across the Western world, culling and tweaking a list of laws the group had compiled. By February, the small group had a proposal ready, one that tasked the Althingi with researching and voting on a series of bills over the next years. One dark winter evening, Jónsdóttir read that call to action into the parliamentary record before a sparse crowd of legislators.
“It is hard to imagine a resurrection of our country from financial ruin and widespread corruption due to secrecy, but we intend to offer a business model based on transparency and justice,” she said. “We will be the first in the world to market ourselves as a country with a principled, holistic, and modern set of laws fit for the digital age.”
The proposal passed unanimously. IMMI had taken on a life of its own. But Julian Assange had other work left to do in Iceland.
A few weeks later, Jónsdóttir and Assange were sitting in the English Pub, a quiet café across a courtyard from the Althingi. Assange asked Jónsdóttir to watch a video, and he turned his laptop’s screen toward her. Typically unaware of his surroundings, he had left the volume on full blast without headphones, and a waiter walked over to shush him.
Jónsdóttir looked on as a helicopter circled a group of men on the streets of New Baghdad. Then as it showered the figures with bullets as they ran for cover. Then as it fired again on what remained of their bodies. Then again on the family of bystanders in a black van who tried to help them. And sitting in the middle of that Reykjavík café, Jónsdóttir openly wept.
Later, as WikiLeaks set about tearing two wars open for the world to see, she would think of the poem she had written before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
these are images we should
put in a frame
mount them in our homes
so we never forget
the true horror of war.
Zlatarov Street in Burgas is a quiet, tree-lined strip of cobblestones just a few blocks from Burgas Park and the beach. It takes its name from a Bulgarian chemist and novelist who famously worked to protect the country’s Jews during the Second World War. At seven P.M. on December 20, 2007, the sun had already set, and most of the street’s lampposts were in disrepair, leaving the sidewalks nearly dark.
Yordanov was walking to his apartment along that peaceful lane when a man in a black ski mask turned swiftly from a gated alleyway on his left, blocking Yordanov’s path. He barely saw the figure in time to jump backward instinctively. The man’s knife darted toward Yordanov’s chest, cutting through his coat, his sweater, and the skin of his torso. But Yordanov wrested the blade out of the man’s hand and punched him in his masked face while holding his shirt. He felt two broad lines of pain suddenly spread across his back. Two other men had come from around the other corner and were beating his torso, arms, legs, with steel bars—one blow struck the back of his head. He dropped the first man and started kicking back at the two others, but they quickly retreated into the dark—a fourth grabbed the incapacitated knife-wielder and dragged him off hastily. Yordanov was too injured to follow, and spent the next two days in the hospital, with dark internal hematomas covering his arms, legs, the top and back of his head, and spreading into violet wings on his shoulder blades.
In Paris, Tchobanov was working occasionally with Reporters Without Borders when he learned of the attack. He interviewed Yordanov by phone on behalf of the group, and the two became friends. They would later discover that Tchobanov’s grandparents had lived in the same neighborhood of Burgas as Yordanov’s. Their grandfathers had once been in the same prisoner camp, and Tchobanov’s family had been one of the only ones to acknowledge Yordanov’s grandmother’s existence and visit her after Yordanov’s grandfather’s murder.
Yordanov told Tchobanov he had no intention of caving to the thugs who had nearly killed him. In fact, he intended to take his journalistic independence even further: He wanted to launch his own news website, free of any corporate or government ties. And he wanted Tchobanov, a computer-savvy reporter with a convenient geographic remove, to help him.
They called it Bivol. And in its first months, the site had immediate impact. Rumiana Jeleva, Bulgaria’s foreign minister, was set to be confirmed as a representative of the European Commission. Yordanov and Tchobanov uncovered financial ties she had failed to disclose, showing that she continued to own a consulting company long after she had claimed to have no interests in it. The story kicked off an investigation of Jeleva that was picked up in foreign media and finally led to her resignation from not only the EU post, but also her ministry position.
Despite their early success, Tchobanov could sense that Yordanov’s traditional breed of muckraking was endangered: In September 2008, the journalist Ognyan Stefanov had been stopped outside a Sofia restaurant one night and brutally beaten with hammers and steel bars, left for dead with broken arms and legs and a severe concussion that he barely survived. In this case, the attack had a new twist: The victim had attempted—and failed—to remain anonymous.
Stefanov was secretly the editor of the blog Opasnite Novini—“Dangerous News”—that ten days before had published a story based on a leak that showed officials in the new intelligence agency DANS were involved in a smuggling ring. DANS, whose name translates to “National Security Agency,” had been formed the same year, supposedly to fight organized crime. Somehow it had identified Stefanov.
In a government investigation that followed Stefanov’s beating and through more anonymous leaks to the press, DANS was revealed to be engaged in mass wiretapping of journalists and government officials. (By 2010, the Bulgarian government would perform around fifteen thousand wiretaps annually, close to two hundred times the number per capita reported in the United States that year.) The mass surveillance and intimidation tactics of the Communist era Darzhavna Sigurnost were alive and thriving.
Tchobanov knew that Bivol needed new ways to protect itself and its sources. So he simply typed “anonymous submissions” into Google. Soon he began to discover the cypherpunks’ many gifts to journalists: PGP, Off-The-Record messaging, Tor. And WikiLeaks.
The Bulgarian technophile was immediately fascinated by the site’s technical methods and utter fearlessness. He began to monitor its leaks closely, and even experimented with uploading an unverified document that a source had sent him, in the hopes that this mysterious group might be able to authenticate it and publish it to a global audience. The document, written in Bulgarian, never surfaced on the site.
It was only after the Cablegate release that Tchobanov began to consider the full power of WikiLeaks’ model—not just to protect journalism, but potentially to advance it. In a Skype chat with a few other journalists and technologists who worked on and off with Bivol, they proposed the idea of a leaking site that would publish locally focused documents that
WikiLeaks wouldn’t, a leaking syringe targeted at the Balkans and its neighbors rather than a hose aimed at the world at large. Within days, they had registered the URL and set up an SSL-protected site and a Tor Hidden Service in an OVH data center in the French city of Roubaix, the same one that briefly housed WikiLeaks’ publications until they migrated to Sweden.
To Tchobanov and Yordanov’s delight, the documents flowed in immediately, from the nuclear power agreement to the judicial bribery tapes: solid, irrefutable primary-source evidence obtained with cryptographic anonymity.
But Tchobanov was no Tim May, and BalkanLeaks wasn’t BlackNet. The Bulgarian wasn’t merely seeking to prove the power of cryptography and anonymity to slice through institutional secrecy; like all good journalists, he and his colleagues were on the scent of the biggest possible stories—and they smelled them hidden deep in the still-unpublished majority of the WikiLeaks cables, a trove of documents that, as Bradley Manning had promised, affected every country in the world.
After the criticism WikiLeaks faced over its dump of the Afghanistan documents, the group had adopted a “harm minimization policy” that sought to redact the names of potential State Department informants or other sensitive individuals who might be endangered by exposure. That meant the small group was dependent on its relationships with media partners like The Guardian and The New York Times to dig through the immense collection of text and carefully redact names before the cables could be published.
That painstaking process meant the leaks were flowing like molasses. By March, nearly four months after Cablegate began, only five thousand of the quarter million cables had appeared. WikiLeaks had put out a call on its Twitter feed for more media organizations to participate. Tchobanov e-mailed a plea to a WikiLeaks contact to give the 978 cables from the embassy in Sofia to Bivol. No response.
One released cable in particular had tantalized and galled Tchobanov and Yordanov: It was a 2005 briefing by U.S. Ambassador James Pardew on the state of organized crime in Bulgaria and its extraordinarily cozy ties to government. But after the memo’s redactions by WikiLeaks’ partners at The Guardian, it contained no specific names of Bulgarians. The Guardian had used the cable to construct a story on Russian influence in Bulgaria’s mafia world, but hadn’t been able to confirm any of the allegations against Bulgarians themselves. So the paper simply snipped huge portions of the text, mostly from a section titled “Who’s Who in Bulgarian Organized Crime.” Of the cable’s original 5,226 words, all but 1,406 were missing.
Luckily for Tchobanov and Yordanov, WikiLeaks’ control of the cables was itself beginning to spring leaks. One of the group’s erstwhile partners, a freelance journalist and controversial Holocaust denier named Israel Shamir, had obtained a portion of the unredacted cables and was using them to write stories for the Moscow magazine Russian Reporter. Tchobanov wrote him an e-mail in March asking about the contents of the Bulgarian cable. To his surprise, Shamir immediately responded with the full text. A few days after The Guardian’s Bulgaria story, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten announced that it had also inexplicably gained access to the full set of cables. So Tchobanov wrote to Aftenposten, asking the papers’ editors to verify the text that Shamir had sent him. They wrote back, confirming that Shamir’s slice of the megaleak was the real deal.
The unredacted cable was an encyclopedia of Bulgarian organized crime, with entries for every major group: gangs with names like Multigroup, Intergroup, TIM, the Union of Former Commandos, and the Amigos. It cataloged their involvement in all flavors of crime from tax fraud to smuggling, extortion to sexual slavery. It followed the flow of money to every major political party, and named government officials who openly consorted with the groups or had made the transition from mafioso to politician. The cable named towns like Svilengrad and Velingrad that were controlled entirely by mafia-cum-government.
Bivol published a story on the report, titled simply “Bulgarian Organized Crime, Uncensored.” Other Bulgarian newspapers picked up on the story. One, the paper Capital, headlined it simply “Black and White”; the cable had confirmed in stark terms all the corruption that had been suspected for years. As usual, no one was indicted, perhaps the strongest evidence of all of the government’s symbiosis with criminals.
For Bivol, the most important reaction came from WikiLeaks itself. The group published the unredacted version of the cable on its site rather than the version of the cable that had been gutted by The Guardian, and accused the newspaper on its Twitter feed of “cable cooking.” Tchobanov wrote to WikiLeaks again, suggesting that instead of The Guardian, the group hand all of its Bulgarian cables to Bivol. This time WikiLeaks’ staff wrote back, asking for time to look into Bivol’s background and to learn more about Tchobanov and Yordanov.
Two months later, Tchobanov received an e-mail from his contact at WikiLeaks. He and Yordanov were invited to Ellingham Hall for a meeting with Julian Assange.
Tchobanov and Yordanov’s first hours in England went badly. Yordanov left his laptop in an overhead bin on the airplane and they spent hours trying to retrieve it from the airline. The Bulgarian pair got lost on the drive from London to Norfolk after Tchobanov’s GPS stopped working. And on one of the roundabouts, Tchobanov forgot to drive on the left and caused a minor collision with an oncoming car.
When they finally reached Ellingham, they found the WikiLeaks founder dressed in a gray suit and in a dour mood. He seemed preoccupied, Tchobanov and Yordanov remember, with his legal fate and the financial industry’s ongoing blockade choking donations to WikiLeaks. Assange also worried that the pair, like WikiLeaks’ rogue partner Israel Shamir, might redistribute the cables willy-nilly, and had prepared a contract that held them responsible for redacting names of sensitive State Department sources before publishing the cables. It also stipulated that they only access the unredacted files from a computer with no Internet connection.
But Assange also praised BalkanLeaks, Yordanov and Tchobanov told me. He said he had looked over the submission site’s security and approved of its simple rigor. And he seemed to enjoy the homemade rakija that Yordanov had presented him as a gift. “By the time we opened the second bottle, I knew that he would give us the documents,” says Yordanov with a grin. They made arrangements to hand over the Bulgarian embassy files securely, and returned home.
When they accessed the full documents a month later, they found the wealth of scandals they had hoped for. One cable showed that Bulgarian officials in the United States had accumulated parking tickets totaling more than four hundred thousand dollars, so many that the United States had threatened to withhold nearly half a million dollars in aid until they were paid. One cable listed all the Bulgarian banks that engaged in money laundering and corrupt loans.
And then they came upon the greatest prize of all, a cable that dealt with the same subject Yordanov had first tackled sixteen years earlier: Boyko Borisov, Bulgaria’s prime minister.
It was a 2006 memo from the U.S. ambassador in Sofia, John Beyrle, on the subject of Borisov, predicting his run for the prime minister post and titled “Bulgaria’s Most Popular Politician: Great Hopes, Murky Ties.”
The cable began by describing Borisov as “implicated in serious criminal activity” and maintaining “close ties to Lukoil and the Russian Embassy.” It then tells Borisov’s entire life story, starting with his youth as a “neighborhood tough” in a gang on the edges of Sofia, how he founded a private security firm “and built it into one of the biggest in the country at a time when ‘private security’ was synonymous with extortion and strong-arm tactics,” as the cable reads. As chief secretary, he reportedly paid cash for positive press coverage and threatened journalists who criticized him.
Then the cable comes to another section labeled “The Dirt.”
Accusations in years past have linked Borisov to oil-siphoning scandals, illegal deals involving LUKoil and major traffic in methamphetamines. . . . Borisov
is alleged to have used his former position as head of Bulgarian law enforcement to arrange cover for criminal deals, and his common-law wife, Tsvetelina Borislavova, manages a large Bulgarian bank that has been accused of laundering money for organized criminal groups, as well as for Borisov’s own illegal transactions. Borisov is said to have close social and business ties to influential Mafia figures, including Mladen Mihalev (AKA “Madzho”), and is a former business partner of [organized crime] figure Roumen Nikolov (AKA “the Pasha”).
“We should continue to push him in the right direction,” the cable concludes. “But never forget who we’re dealing with.”
If a single document could ever be Bulgaria’s Watergate, this was it. And two journalists from a news website that no one had ever heard of were about to publish it.
A year after WikiLeaks released its Collateral Murder video, the first fruits of IMMI appeared. Inspired by Jónsdóttir’s lobbying, the Icelandic parliament passed a new media law that legally protected the anonymity of journalists’ sources just as strongly as in Sweden. Under the law, Icelandic reporters aren’t simply exempt from investigations that might reveal their sources. They’re legally forbidden from identifying them.
But even as IMMI’s information fortifications rose, Jónsdóttir discovered just how tough it’s become to escape the long reach of the American government’s war on anonymity. In early 2011, Jónsdóttir received a letter from Twitter, Inc., informing her that a government investigation had requested access to all of her data from the service—both public and private.
This Machine Kills Secrets Page 30