In 2001, a friend told Berg about the Chaos Computer Club, and he attended a local meeting and then later the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. The twenty-three-year-old Berg had not only never met so many politically savvy hackers—he had never even been to the capital city. It was a life-altering experience. “The first conference blew me away,” he says. “It really got me out of my provincial thinking.”
Despite his budding hacktivist tendencies, Berg kept to the trajectory of technically skilled young men. When the heady days of the dot-com boom ended, he went to a technical university in Mannheim to study computer science and upon graduation got a job with the giant IT consultant EDS. Berg made a deal with his manager that he wouldn’t work for defense contractors or intelligence agencies, so instead spent his days setting up networks for car manufacturers and airlines.
It was uninspiring work that left Berg with plenty of extra brain matter for CCC-inspired daydreaming. He read and donated to Cryptome regularly and had been intrigued by its megaleaks of intelligence officers’ names over the previous decade. So when John Young posted his leak of WikiLeaks’ early mail list discussions, including Young’s paranoid implication that the site was a CIA front, it caught the German engineer’s attention. Berg, who had read Assange’s autobiographical Underground, was captivated by the twisted notion of a legendary hacker turned government informant creating an elaborate cryptographic honeypot.
Then, in November 2007, WikiLeaks leaked the official handbook of the Pentagon’s Guantánamo prison. And it became clear that the site was no honeypot.
Something about WikiLeaks pushed a button in Berg that made him yearn for a mission beyond his daily network admin’s grind. He wanted in. “I just didn’t want to waste my life helping GM produce more cars anymore,” he says. He posted a message on WikiLeaks’ IRC chat room, offering to help.
Two days later, he got a response from Julian Assange himself. “Still interested in a job?”
For much of his first year with WikiLeaks, as Daniel Domscheit-Berg tells it, the group functioned as a blowfish—a small piece of sushi puffed up to look as large and dangerous as possible. It claimed to have thousands of active volunteers around the globe, a team of Chinese dissidents among its founders, a legal representative named Jay Lim on retainer, and servers spread across Europe. In fact, it had one server, a fictitious lawyer, and two members responsible for most all of its activities: Julian Assange and Daniel Berg.
They made an odd couple. Assange, the radical, homeless guerrilla hacker and Berg, the quietly subversive engineer with a corporate job, a carefully arranged apartment, and a favorite local organic-foods grocery shop. Much of their interaction took place over instant messages, including the coordination of early bombshells like a collection of offshore account information from the Swiss bank Julius Baer and the secret documents of the Church of Scientology. But they would also attend three Chaos Communication Congresses together—each time with a higher profile talk as WikiLeaks’ representatives—embark on a fifteen-hundred-mile road trip across Europe to find safe data centers to house their collection of servers, and even spend two months living together in Berg’s Wiesbaden home.
Their personality contrasts occasionally flared into deeper conflicts over their idea of activism. One of the most representative, perhaps, was the issue of suits. Like Philip Zimmermann, Berg subscribed to the Ellsberg strategy of protest. “We had some public appointments where I was convinced we could achieve more in conservative attire than in the normal slacker stuff we wore,” he would write later. “Solid in appearance, subversive in performance, that was my motto.” Assange agreed in theory. But in practice, his wayward lifestyle as an international subversive meant he dressed in shabby, wrinkled clothes and dirty sneakers. The Australian was deeply annoyed by Berg’s occasional suggestions that he wear cleaner clothes or business attire, even when meeting with government officials.
The suit issue represented a fundamental disconnect between Berg’s and Assange’s vision for WikiLeaks. When donations to the nonprofit group started to trickle in, Berg dreamed of using the money to transform the group into a legitimate nonprofit with permanent infrastructure: state-of-the-art servers, a headquarters in a former military air-raid shelter with a WikiLeaks flag flying above it, a computer center with space for partners to host their own projects. But Assange said he wanted to remain an “insurgent operation.” Even in late 2010, he would describe WikiLeaks to me in the same terms as his wandering youth: “We’re like a traveling production company; everyone moves somewhere, and we put on a production.”
That nomadism, Assange believed, helped WikiLeaks to stay a step ahead of legal and political threats. And Assange saw those threats everywhere. He believed he was constantly being tailed by intelligence services or having his travel plans sabotaged by state agents. When he stayed at Berg’s apartment, he insisted they never enter or leave at the same time. He used a multitude of temporary SIM cards and avoided all payment forms other than cash.
Berg believed that Assange simply had a flair for spy-novel sensationalism that served as marketing for WikiLeaks. His greatest mistake, in retrospect, may have been underestimating Assange’s capacity for true paranoia, both justified and not.
Personal differences aside, they worked well as a team. They also became close friends—or so Berg believed. In 2009, he quit his job with EDS and went to work with WikiLeaks full-time.
Around the same period, a third central figure appeared within the group. He was an old acquaintance of Berg’s and a highly skilled network engineer, one whose caution regarding privacy dwarfed that of even Assange or Jacob Appelbaum. His name has never been publicly linked with WikiLeaks, and many within the group don’t know it either. To most, he is simply known as “the Architect.”
Berg asked the Architect to help with a specific technical problem, one that Domscheit-Berg wouldn’t even describe to me for fear of providing more information on the man’s specific abilities. The Architect handled the task with a degree of efficiency that deeply impressed the German WikiLeaker, who praises his skills as superior to any he had ever seen, including Assange’s. Birgitta Jónsdóttir calls the Architect “a genius.” Smári McCarthy, the Icelandic WikiLeaker who later helped draft the IMMI legislation, described him to me as “frighteningly skilled.”
When the newly recruited engineer took a look at WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, however, he was horrified. He saw it as a patchwork of hacked-together components with no thought put into its overarching structure. He soon demanded that the site be taken down and completely rebuilt, its tangled code and creaking servers replaced with a network of load-balanced hardware and efficient software with no loose ends that might offer security vulnerabilities. In a sign of both Assange’s and Berg’s respect for the Architect’s judgment, no one argued. The site would be off-line for the next six months.
Pinpointing the moment when Berg and Assange’s philosophical differences blossomed into full-out contempt and animosity isn’t easy: Perhaps it was after Berg exploded at Assange in a cramped, dark, and stuffy hotel room in Reykjavík. Or maybe it was when Berg began to use the group’s funds to pay for systems upgrades without asking Assange for his consent.
But only one event has been publicly cited by both men as a clear spark for their conflict. When I asked Jacob Appelbaum, he summarized it: “Basically, Daniel never should have gotten married.”
Berg met Anke Domscheit at a falafel joint in Berlin in February 2010. She was ten years his senior and had a young son. But they connected immediately—Domscheit was a consultant with Microsoft focused on “open government,” working on the same issues of transparency as Berg, and he was attracted to her unique style and idealism.
Just nine days later, they decided to wed. They planned to change both of their names to Domscheit-Berg.
Assange’s first reaction, when Berg told him about meeting Domscheit, was to sug
gest that Berg dig up “dirt” on her that would be useful when they separated, a piece of advice that deeply wounded Berg. When Berg moved into Domscheit’s apartment shortly after their relationship began, Assange chastised him for putting his full name on the door, a gross display of negligence in Assange’s unspoken rules of operational security.
In a written statement Assange would release eighteen months later explaining Domscheit-Berg’s expulsion from WikiLeaks, he would mark that violation as the first sign that Berg couldn’t be trusted with WikiLeaks’ resources and materials. In the same statement, he went on to write that the girlfriend of a Mossad agent attended the Domscheit-Bergs’ wedding, and to accuse Daniel Domscheit-Berg of having given “helpful” information to U.S. intelligence agencies. He added that Anke Domscheit-Berg worked with CIA agents during her time at the consulting firm McKinsey.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg flatly denies ever sharing any information with law enforcement or intelligence agents of any nation or hosting any at his wedding. He says he hasn’t even dared travel to the United States since his time with WikiLeaks to avoid the possibility of having to answer questions about the group.
For Anke Domscheit-Berg, Assange’s charges struck her as absurd and maddening on another level altogether. In a long phone conversation just a few weeks after the Chaos Communication Camp, she explained to me—slowly, with a certain amount of emotional reluctance—just why Assange’s words had irked her so deeply.
The older of the two Domscheit-Bergs spent the first twenty-one years of her life in East Germany before the fall of the Iron Curtain. One of her closest friends was a political dissident. In the year before the fall of Communism, he was imprisoned on charges of drinking while driving a motorcycle, but treated as a political prisoner, placed in solitary confinement and often shackled to a radiator. She posed as his fiancée in order to visit him in prison, but all but one of her visitation appointments were canceled by the warden. Domscheit sent letters to him, numbering them so that he could better track which ones were blocked. Eventually she received an anonymous letter saying that a letter-smuggling system her friend had set up had been discovered, and now none of her notes were reaching him. So instead, she began writing to the warden and to editors of local newspapers, demanding his release.
Domscheit was a student of textile art at a technical school in southeastern Germany, and later the same year she won a French language competition for art students with the prize of a three-month fellowship at a studio in Paris. “At the time, stuck behind the Wall, it’s hard to describe just what a paradise that sounded like,” she says.
Before she could go, however, Domscheit was called to a nearby town’s tourist office. Waiting for her was an officer in the East German secret police known as the Stasi. “Were you really so naïve as to think you could take the scholarship without our permission?” she remembers him asking.
“I tried to tell myself ‘so what’ as my big dream disappeared,” she says, her voice shaking with anger as she recounts the conversation. The agent explained that if she wanted to go to Paris, she would need to volunteer as a Stasi informant. She refused. He told her that it might cause problems for her father’s livelihood as a doctor if she didn’t cooperate. But Domscheit wouldn’t budge.
She was let go, but told to meet the same agent the next day in a parking lot. Early the next morning, he put her in a car and drove to a forest near the Czech border, still hung with fog in the early dawn daylight. Domscheit thought perhaps they were going to kill her and dump her body among the trees, as the Nazis had done with Communists in the previous regime. But still she refused his offer to work as an informant. The agent drove her back to town.
The secret police’s intimidation tactics had failed, and the hated wall fell just months later. Her friend was released from prison under an amnesty program. But Domscheit wouldn’t make it to Paris until years later. “In the end no one got the scholarship. It was too late to give it to someone else,” she says bitterly. “What a waste.”
Her experiences in that dark last chapter of the Soviet Union, she says, left her with a deep hatred for intelligence agencies and the closed, secretive surveillance society they represented. “I had to deal with the secret police in East Germany, and I’m happy to have survived that,” she says, her voice still trembling slightly. “So when Julian Assange tells me that I worked with the secret services, it’s like a punch in the face.”
One day after OpenLeaks’ test launch belatedly comes online, an OpenLeaks staffer at the Chaos Communication Camp who has asked me not to name or even describe him is giving a workshop on anonymous leaking in the group’s sand-colored military tent. OpenLeaks’ temporary headquarters has filled with a dozen hackers who are volunteering to probe a handful of willing WikiLeaks copycats for security flaws—StateLeaks, KHLeaks, FrenchLeaks, QuebecLeaks, and OpenLeaks itself, among others.
The OpenLeaker is laying down some ground rules: “Be responsible. Break, don’t abuse,” he says. “And only test the sites we have the OK for. If you start hacking Cryptome or something, John Young will be pretty pissed at us.”
Then the hackers get to work, each team of two assigned to audit a different site. “Some music?” the workshop leader offers, pacing around the room as they bury their heads in laptops. “Death metal?” He puts on an instrumental groove album instead.
To my right sits Daniel Meredith, a developer recently hired by Al Jazeera to revamp the news network’s own leaking site after its mockery by most of the computer security community. He’s a solidly built blond American, with cheeks tinged red by the summer sun of Qatar, the Arab emirate where Al Jazeera has stationed him.
Meredith has taken on the task of testing StateLeaks.org, and he walks me through his reconnaissance. The audit starts simple: a search in the “Whois” database, which publicly tracks ownership of domain names. Domains can be registered with pseudonyms or anonymity services, but this one wasn’t. It’s registered to an organization called “Geeks Paradox,” and specifically to someone named Travis McCrea.
His phone number, e-mail address, and postal address in Chevak, Alaska, are all listed. “If this guy is making an attempt to be anonymous, he’s making a very shoddy attempt,” says Meredith.
The Al Jazeera developer runs a publicly available test from the computer security firm Qualys on the SSL setup of the site’s submission system, and the result is a grade of C. The page doesn’t use the latest version of SSL and allows weak encryption schemes.
Next Meredith runs Nmap and Firebug, two scanning tools that can help identify the software StateLeaks is using and vulnerabilities in its code. The servers’ visibility to these tools can be obscured with the right settings, but McCrae hasn’t bothered. He’s running an Apache server application on the Linux operating system. At this point Meredith says he would perform some timing analyses to see if the site is hosted on a single server or rotating among several computers for stability. But the Camp’s wireless connection likely isn’t steady enough for the test, and he says he’s already found plenty of loose ends to work with.
“At this point I could probably take this information, run a simple exploit kit, and own his box,” he says. “Luckily I’m a journalist, not a hacker.”
It’s only then that Meredith takes the usual first step of a reporter and googles Travis McCrea. He immediately finds his MySpace page, complete with a photo of a very young, very sincere-looking shaggy-haired boy in an ill-fitting black suit and a gold tie. “That’s him?” Meredith asks himself. “I’m getting the feeling we’ve been wasting our time looking at some teenager’s website.”
When the hackers reconvene and start presenting their findings, StateLeaks is hardly the worst off. One site runs its public website on the same server as its submissions system, opening it to attacks that could spill source data. One failed to load at all. They’ve found flaws in OpenLeaks too: The unprotected informational
site at OpenLeaks.org includes contact information without warning leakers not to send sensitive material to the group there. And the site’s SSL setup is missing an intermediate certificate, part of the chain of signatures that certify that an encrypted site is not only scrambled but comes from the source it appears to. The oversight might have let an impostor site posing as OpenLeaks lure and identify its leakers.
After the copycat review, the OpenLeaker leading the session starts to ask tricky questions without easy answers. Should you advise leakers to upload from an Internet café or even hand their encrypted data to someone else to upload? Is it acceptable to link to your submissions page from a nonencrypted site, given that hacker tools like “SSL Strip” can remove a Web page’s encryption when the user clicks on it? Should you host a chat room on your site, or does it merely open you to criminal accusations of “soliciting” leaks? Is Sweden a good country for hosting a submissions site, or does the 2009 law expanding the surveillance powers of the country’s intelligence services mean leakers should move elsewhere?
“Everyone is saying that they have these secure submissions systems, and it means nothing. We need some kind of public standard,” he says. “Right now it’s like the 1930s on airplanes and everyone is smoking and partying and there are no rules.”
When the workshop ends and the hackers file out, I approach the unnamed OpenLeaker and ask why he didn’t focus more on Tor and similar anonymity tools to protect whistleblowers. OpenLeaks’ test site, I point out, even lets users upload documents without using its Hidden Service, potentially with none of Tor’s multilayered identity protection.
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