Five months after this meeting and half a year after Domscheit-Berg’s expulsion from the Chaos Computer Club, his hacker credibility would be partially redeemed. A special meeting of the group in February 2012 reinstated Domscheit-Berg’s membership, and Andy Müller-Maguhn lost his board position in a reproach of his hasty and biased decision to expel the OpenLeaker. (“We decided that if we evicted people based only on suspicions and doubt, it would become very easy to destroy us with rumors,” one CCC member later told me.)
But at the time of my meeting Domscheit-Berg in his home, his reputation among his hacktivist cohorts has reached a nadir. I ask the obvious question: Doesn’t his role in WikiLeaks’ setbacks and crises bode ill for the future of OpenLeaks? When even many of his fellow hackers see him as a traitor, how does he expect leakers to trust him? “If this depends only on my reputation, it won’t work anyway,” he responds calmly. “We can only do this by proving the technology works and slowly building up trust.”
Domscheit-Berg seems to be in a chatty mood; we talk about his plan to turn the third floor of this house into a workshop for activists, about the concentration camp across the lake, and then about Domscheit-Berg’s early obsession with World War II and the Holocaust. As the conversation meanders, he brings up the White Rose movement, a resistance group that attempted to distribute underground newspapers during the Nazi era, and we discuss whether WikiLeaks-style megaleaks might have prevented Hitler’s rise to power—sitting so geographically close to the site of so many Nazi atrocities that remained secret for far too long, the question hangs in the air. Domscheit-Berg admits it’s probably impossible to answer.
Instead, he brings up a German-language book he recently read, titled Soldiers, cowritten by two professors who gained access to 150,000 pages of transcribed, secret recordings made of German prisoners of war in British and American camps. Domscheit-Berg was fascinated by the cavalier way the soldiers discussed killing civilians and raping women with professional dispassion in the book’s pages. The last chapter deals with WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder video, with its American helicopter gunners firing on Iraqi civilians as if in a video game.
Both wars’ recordings demonstrate the quintessential act of leaking, Domscheit-Berg says: They take an immoral act out of some special, secret culture where it seems acceptable and expose it to the world of normal human relationships, where it’s exposed as obviously horrific. “Within a certain frame of reference, what they’re doing seems professional or even cool,” he says. “But if you get rid of that secrecy, it seems crazy. If you make it all transparent, their own mothers would call them and ask, ‘What the hell are you doing? That’s not how I raised you!’”
Just as Domscheit-Berg is articulating that ultimate definition of a leak’s value, he receives a phone call and has a tense German conversation. He tells me he needs to get to Berlin. On the train a few minutes later, I ask him if he hopes OpenLeaks will spill entire wars’ histories and huge caches of diplomatic documents the way WikiLeaks has. He initially dodges the question, saying that the decision would fall to the group’s media partners. But after a pause, he answers.
“That stuff isn’t going to happen again,” he says, looking at the German countryside rolling by. Bradley Manning’s treatment and improved government security measures, he believes, have scared off any near-term megaleakers of high-level government secrets on the scale of the WikiLeaks 2010 releases.
But that doesn’t mean some sort of megaleak isn’t in the works, he warns. “Some leak will very harshly damage people’s privacy. Some large amount of health care data, perhaps. Something where the whole world will agree that it never should have happened.”
It all sounds like a very dark vision for a transparency advocate, I point out, and one that’s very different from that of Julian Assange. He nods. “Julian wrote this really lame piece of philosophy in 2006,” he continues, referring to the “Conspiracy as Governance” essay. “He sees everything as a conspiracy that must be taken down. I don’t see the world in these black-and-white terms. I think there’s a valid reason for some things to be secret. You can’t solve the entire Middle East’s problems in public.”
So what should be secret, then? “Every situation is different,” he answers. “Drawing the line is the toughest question in this field.”
I can forgive Domscheit-Berg for his reluctance to answer the impossible questions of the leaking movement. Unlike Assange, he is, and has only claimed to be, an engineer, not a philosopher. And for an engineer, things were clearer before 2010, during the period when WikiLeaks was engaged in smaller, targeted, high-frequency leaking. Before the megaleaks, the redactions, the risk of leaked leaks, the need to sort out good secrets from bad on a massive, terrifying scale. Back when WikiLeaks was, for the most part, two idealistic young men exposing wrongdoing from a steadier moral high ground.
As we arrive in Berlin, I ask him if he has any message he’d like me to pass on to Assange, given that the two haven’t spoken in nearly a year. “I guess tell him to stop lying about me,” he says quickly. “That’s the least I can ask from someone who talks about telling the truth so much.”
Then he thinks for a moment and brightens slightly, as if he’s remembering a different person altogether and another time. “And also tell him good luck.”
CONCLUSION
THE MACHINE
In New York’s Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of a global anticapitalist and anticorruption movement that began in the fall of 2011 under the name Occupy Wall Street, protesters adopt the same tactics of angry, confrontational nonviolence that Birgitta Jónsdóttir used in the Icelandic Revolution of 2009, that Daniel Ellsberg and Phil Zimmermann used in their Cold War protests for nuclear disarmament, that John Young used in the Columbia University Occupation of 1968. They chant slogans, acquiesce to arrest without resistance, and carry signs: “We are the 99%,” “Robin Hood Was Right,” “Free Assange,” and “Free Bradley Manning.”
And they also carry cell phones, almost all of which contain a video camera.
Video clips that have emerged from the protests on websites like YouTube and LiveLeak include one of police pushing into crowds of demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge, grabbing protesters seemingly at random, and dragging them out to be arrested as the crowd chants, “The whole world is watching.” Others show unresisting protesters violently thrown to the ground, and a group of young women surrounded with plastic mesh police barricades and then, after they’ve been penned in, doused with Mace and left blinded and screaming. (Based on videos of that last incident, the policeman responsible was later publicly identified by members of Anonymous as Anthony Bologna, and John Young posted a 2001 Indymedia report to Cryptome that described the senior officer as “notorious for his previous treatment of protesters.” Bologna was fined six thousand dollars by the department and faced a further inquiry by the Manhattan district attorney.)
The tiny cell phone cameras that filmed those incidents are the tools Rich Jones believes represent the next stage of the transparency movement. Jones, a gaunt twenty-three-year-old Boston software developer with hair that flops over his ears, is the creator of a suite of simple smartphone apps with names like OpenWatch and Cop Recorder. The programs run on Android and iPhone, and allow users to press a button and start invisibly recording audio and video. That content is uploaded to Jones’s servers, where Jones and his collaborators strip out any identifying information and post the file with a transcript. More than a hundred thousand users have already downloaded the apps, and they upload more than fifty videos a day. The goal, Jones says, is to create millions of “reverse surveillance cameras” that constantly keep tabs on authority figures.
“Since September eleventh, the government’s rhetoric has been that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,” says Jones with just a hint of righteous anger in his voice. “I say if those are the rules of the game, play t
hem across the board. Show us what goes on.”
A few of the recordings Jones has obtained are disturbing, if not quite explosive. One audio file uploaded to the site captures a cop calling a detained suspect in a Durham, North Carolina, courthouse an “old-school pimp,” denying his request to use the bathroom and asking that the detainee rap for him and flash gang signs. Another video file shows a San Diego policeman pull over a driver for a DUI check and then illegally search his car against the driver’s wishes, flipping through the driver’s wallet after he’s alone in the vehicle. The video sparked a minor scandal in San Diego and was aired on the local news station. When I spoke to Jones, he was looking for volunteers to help him listen to hours of recordings from the Occupy Wall Street protests, and he and his two developers had just been commissioned to build protest-focused apps for the National Lawyers Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union.
“I’d be surprised if we ever had our own Collateral Murder,” says Jones. “But we have a hundred thousand people who now see their phone as a weapon against corruption. It’s not spies versus spies, and megaleaks. It’s about giving everyone a way to be subversive.”
Jones has no intention of rebuilding WikiLeaks. But he does say he was directly inspired by Julian Assange. He sees himself as part of the next generation of Assange’s Bourbaki media movement, enabling “scientific journalism” that uncovers complete primary source materials for the audience and brings the public inside private, corrupt worlds.
“The idea is to create a more active WikiLeaks, one that isn’t just receiving these documents, but actively capturing new data from secret places,” he says. “Here’s a technology you already have. Here’s a way to apply it to create a transparent society by force. I want to build technologies that make it possible for everyone to be part of leaking information.”
In 1999, a nineteen-year-old named Shawn Fanning, working in the office of his uncle’s Internet start-up Chess.net, launched a music file-sharing service called Napster. Using the service, practically any MP3 file could be downloaded from another user’s computer, and music, in its new, discless form, became essentially free. At its peak, more than twenty-six million people used the service, at a time when only about five hundred million people had access to the Internet.
By late 2001, Napster had been effectively shut down. The company ran afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was hit with a twenty-billion-dollar lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America, and went bankrupt in 2002. Aside from blatantly ignoring intellectual property law, Napster had made the mistake of running its peer-to-peer file-sharing index on a single central collection of servers—every search for a song required that central hub to connect the uploading user and the downloading user. The service that made enemies of some of the world’s most powerful industries had a single point of failure.
Around the same time Napster was being legally dismantled, however, a twenty-six-year-old coding savant and former contributor to the Cypherpunk Mailing List named Bram Cohen released a new peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol called BitTorrent. BitTorrent assembled downloads piecemeal from hundreds of users at once, and kept its index of which user had which file available for upload on multiple “tracker” servers. Anyone could run a tracker server, making them far harder to shut down. More fundamentally, BitTorrent was a protocol, not a company. It couldn’t be sued.
Today, thanks in part to outlaw index sites like the Pirate Bay, BitTorrent now accounts for somewhere between a quarter and a third of the entire traffic volume of the global Internet. Due largely to the free file-sharing BitTorrent makes possible, the RIAA claims, music industry revenue has been cut in half since 1999, from $14.6 billion to $7.6 billion.
For a pair of Italian hackers hoping to reshape the future of leaking, there are worse models for changing the world.
Fabio Pietrosanti and Arturo Filastò, the cofounders of GlobaLeaks, say they aim to create the BitTorrent to WikiLeaks’ Napster. Where WikiLeaks was a single, vulnerable target, GlobaLeaks aims to create what they’ve called a “worldwide, distributed leak amplification network.”
Pietrosanti is a thirty-year-old security engineer who looks like a twenty-one-year-old actor, small, with big eyes and Tom Cruise hair. Filastò, on the other hand, is an actual twenty-one-year-old former actor, who spent two years playing the gangly, long-haired teen geek heartthrob on a popular Italian soap opera before leaving the TV industry to study mathematics and become a Tor developer.
The software the two Italians and a few other coders have been working on—and the group merely aims to offer software, not run an active leaking service like WikiLeaks or OpenLeaks—is designed to allow anyone to set up a leaking conduit in minutes, using Tor’s Hidden Services to offer a submissions system that’s both secure and untraceable. Unlike OpenLeaks, GlobaLeaks won’t limit who uses its software, and has posted its source code online for all to see, tweak, and use. Although the pair’s work had yet to produce a leak when I spoke with them, they were busy meeting with any group who might consider deploying their software to host a niche whistleblower site: two left-wing Italian political parties, a Serbian newspaper, an Italian energy utility that wants to facilitate internal whistleblowing, a British leak site called BritiLeaks, and even Atanas Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov at BalkanLeaks.
Their end goal, Pietrosanti says, is to expand the leaking movement from the current fifty or so WikiLeaks copycats to a network of hundreds or thousands of “leak nodes,” run by everyone from U.S. corporations that are legally mandated to run an internal whistleblowing outlet to radical activists that hope to pass their materials on to publishers while using Tor to remain completely anonymous. Like BitTorrent, GlobaLeaks aims to disperse the risk of handling sensitive material over an army of individuals rather than one vulnerable group of intermediaries. “Some people may be like Assange, and say, OK, we’ll publish and fight and whatever,” says Pietrosanti. “But lots of people want to fight corruption without taking that much responsibility. If the risk profile of everyone who runs a leak node is reduced, there will be a lot more leak nodes.”
“WikiLeaks taught us something. And it brought the word whistleblower back into the awareness of the public,” adds Filastò. “But GlobaLeaks is the next logical step.”
My time in the orbit of WikiLeaks and the inchoate movement it represents began with Assange’s challenge to the American financial system in November 2010: a promise to “take down a bank or two.” Less than a year later—and just five years after Assange had vowed in a letter to Daniel Ellsberg that he would “place a new star in the political firmament of man”—the finance giants had taken their revenge, and seemingly dragged WikiLeaks down to earth.
In a halting statement at the Frontline Club in London in October 2011, Assange explained that Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Bank of America had successfully starved WikiLeaks of the cash it needed to survive. The financial embargo on the group had reduced the group’s funding from donations of more than three hundred thousand dollars in the twenty-four hours before the embargo to a trickle of less than ten thousand dollars a month. “If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade, we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the New Year,” he told the crowd.
Money, of course, was only one of the growing number of forces paralyzing WikiLeaks. Assange himself remained chained by an electronic manacle to Ellingham Hall, the mansion where he had already spent 322 days under house arrest while appealing extradition to Sweden for questioning regarding his alleged sex crimes. Meanwhile, an American grand jury secretly debated whether he should be charged in the United States and extradited for trial. Many of his most ardent supporters had abandoned his cause after WikiLeaks’ publication of the entire unredacted cables. And the group’s defectors within OpenLeaks had—with whatever intentions—critically damaged both WikiLeaks and the reputation of the system they had hoped would replace it.
The young engineer was, understandably, demoralized. “I think WikiLeaks is at an all-time low,” he wrote, calling the group “stagnant” and “broke.” “It’s not the WikiLeaks that came out with Collateral Murder. It’s like a decaying New York City metro station.”
“I feel like an old-timer talking about the good old days when I remember what WikiLeaks was. It was fucking amazing a year or two years ago. It was the most beautiful thing ever,” he wrote, unloading his feelings without my prompting. Assange, he said, had wasted WikiLeaks’ enormous political capital and substantial donations. “I love him. He’s awesome. But I just wish he hadn’t thrown it all away.”
But then his tone changed. And he expressed the message that has kept the ideals behind WikiLeaks progressing for generations.
“Maybe one day, in a couple decades, when I’m forty, I’ll have my own go,” he wrote. “And maybe I won’t fail.”
The cypherpunk drive to destroy institutional secrecy hasn’t ended, any more than it ended when Tim May shut down his BlackNet experiment, when Julf Helsingius caved to the Scientologists and killed Penet, when Mendax and the International Subversives were arrested by the Australian Federal Police, when Bradley Manning was thrown into a military brig, or when the Anonymous hackers allegedly connected to the HBGary hack were arrested. Today, the leaking movement is no longer WikiLeaks, or even OpenLeaks, Anonymous, or any one of the copycat experiments that are sprouting up around the world. As Jónsdóttir had predicted, WikiLeaks has morphed into “two things or ten,” and then again into the “thousand WikiLeaks” that Domscheit-Berg had once demanded. With all their variation in goals and means, OpenLeaks, IMMI, BalkanLeaks, GlobaLeaks, and even Jones’s OpenWatch smartphone apps are all stepchildren of a movement that stretches back to the cypherpunks two decades earlier and the Pentagon Papers two decades before that. And with its greatest successes in just the last few of those forty years, its work is only starting.
This Machine Kills Secrets Page 36