Messing with the Enemy

by Clint Watts

  Manning began basic training on October 2, 2007, before arriving in Fort Drum, New York. Manning had a difficult time in training, and she found herself sitting in Baghdad by October 2009. In January 2010, only three months after arriving in Iraq, she contacted WikiLeaks.

  WikiLeaks acted not as an outlet for Edward Snowden, but a shepherd. After Snowden departed for Hong Kong in May 2013, having stolen vast collections of highly sensitive U.S. intelligence, his next move was not to stand trial and be exonerated by the public for his breach, but to seek safe harbor. Snowden needed help, and WikiLeaks stepped in, dispatching Sarah Harrison, of WikiLeaks’ legal defense team, to Hong Kong, where she then traveled alongside Snowden as he made his way to Moscow.

  Snowden’s story prior to his breaches moves through professional peaks and valleys. An enlistment in the Special Forces in 2004 ended with injury and discharge later that year, due to broken legs, according to Snowden. Recruited into the CIA as an information technology specialist in 2006 and stationed in Geneva in 2007, Snowden, after some professional success, decided to leave the CIA in 2009. He claims his thinking and faith in the CIA changed while in Geneva. Or was it something else? The New York Times reported on October 10, 2013, that, “just as Edward J. Snowden was preparing to leave Geneva and a job as a C.I.A. technician in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man’s behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion.”23 Years later, a congressional report released findings of an investigation of Snowden’s hacking:

  Snowden was, and remains, a serial exaggerator and fabricator. . . . He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints. He claimed to have obtained a high school degree equivalent when in fact he never did. . . . He also doctored his performance evaluations and obtained new positions at NSA by exaggerating his résumé and stealing the answers to an employment test.24

  Did Snowden steal secrets in support of an ideology of transparency, to make Americans aware of government-authorized surveillance and the need for more accountability? Or was it revenge for disciplinary action, or an obsessive, ego-driven disclosure in pursuit of fame and acknowledgment? Or was it “all of the above”? If Snowden was so convinced that his actions were merited, why not stand trial in the United States and seek to be exonerated by those Americans he sought to protect?

  Others before Snowden have disclosed secret U.S. government documents in pursuit of the public good. The New York Times in 1971 published the Pentagon Papers, detailing secrets about the conduct of the Vietnam War, and exposed glaring discrepancies between the White House’s declared scale of the Vietnam conflict and the reality in Southeast Asia. Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND researcher who had worked on the study, served as the courier for the secrets. The U.S. government charged Ellsberg with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property, but these charges were later dismissed and he was exonerated.

  The confusing intentions of WikiLeaks’ leakers blend in with the contradictions of WikiLeaks’ methods. In 2010, Assange bragged about the rapid rate of disclosures landing in WikiLeaks inboxes, and yet not even a fraction of these leaks have appeared on its website. Assange and his team decide what’s published and what’s not, and in so doing set an agenda and show their intentions. Not only does WikiLeaks decide what’s released, but when and how much of each document dump. Assange’s complaints about journalists not using disclosures effectively land hypocritically when WikiLeaks releases stolen cables and emails to prioritize one narrative against another.

  Assange, as the controller of undisclosed secrets, has built an elitist information empire, can and does manipulate perceptions, and is now the governor of “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population,” as he wrote in his own manifesto.25 Assange is his own worst nightmare—he is “conspiracy as governance.” He’s become another version of what he claimed to have set out to destroy.

  Furthermore, WikiLeaks has a growing tendency to be both the source of leaks and their narrator. Assange voiced frustration when nothing came of the “Collateral Murder” video. “This was such a fucking fantastic leak: the Army’s force structure of Afghanistan and Iraq, down to the last chair, and nothing,” he said.26 The New Yorker’s Khatchadourian wrote that Assange told him “his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.”27

  A staple of WikiLeaks since its inception has been trying to convince the world of Assange’s philosophy and interpretation of facts, but that vision has become increasingly difficult to comprehend. Assange’s frustration with people not understanding his point of view has led him to add further commentary to WikiLeaks disclosures. Over the years, Assange has become an expert in everything he discloses—climate change, military operations, and the political processes and cultures of countries stretching from Africa to America. His celebrity has grown as he doles out his opinion; his influence has shaped debates.

  This dynamic has been further exacerbated by social media. Holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange advances narratives surrounding released information, but extraordinarily few who read his tweets examine the actual underlying leaked documents. Assange provides his context to the disclosures, which Twitter users routinely accept as truths when they are actually opinions. Furthermore, WikiLeaks and Assange don’t seek to avoid harming innocent bystanders in their disclosures. Assange called it “collateral damage, if you will,” claiming he doesn’t have time to weigh the importance of every detail in every document. This seems strange, given that his team seems to have plenty of time to determine which documents to publish and which to keep out of the public eye.

  Unlike WikiLeaks, no one really knows who the exact couriers of bin Laden’s secret archives were. But it’s no secret how the Harmony documents arrived in the database: airstrikes in Afghanistan and the raid on the Abbottabad compound were televised for all to see. The couriers may be unknown, but the method is not. Disclosures from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, like those from WikiLeaks, remain selective, centered around topics rather than massive caches of documents on a wide range of topics.

  Releases from the Harmony database were slow, and deliberately so, for a couple of reasons. The Department of Defense sought to ensure that the personal data of those innocently captured in the records didn’t cause undue harm. Most of all, much-needed context accompanied the release of the documents. Experts in the disciplines, topics, cultures, and countries covered in the records provided the public with a baseline of clarity for what was made available, what it might mean, flaws in the data and its collection. The narrative sought not to restrict further research but to provide a context that prevented harm to others and sought to quell poisonous false conspiracies pulled from kernels of truth merged with partisan conjecture.

  Above all, no one doubted or questioned the intentions of the Harmony effort. They were clear. The intention was to stop violence, to help others stop violence, not to pick a side or advance a narrative. The more that was disclosed, the more everyone benefited, the U.S. government included. If other researchers arrived at conclusions different from those of the Combating Terrorism Center, even better.

  Meanwhile, WikiLeaks inspired others oppressed in truly corrupt and criminal regimes to follow their methods. As terrorists moved to blogs and social media, those terrorized by oppressors tried their hand at transparency, to shine light where darkness had long prevailed. Some failed, and others succeeded, and while WikiLeaks went in a strange direction, others with similar intentions as those stated by Assange followed methods closer to those of the Harmony Project and achieved results neither WikiLeaks nor the Harmony Project could have anticipated.

  * * *

  Along Mexico’s northeastern border with the United States, residents remain trapped between a corrupt government and criminal drug cartels. Newspapers, in free societies, act as a traditional check on corrupt governments
and provide an accounting of violent behavior. But life in Mexico is anything but free, and newspapers with bylines and sources have frequently felt intimidation from drug cartels and the government. Those journalists pushing the envelope of accountability and challenging the strong rarely last long. Nearly one hundred Mexican journalists have been killed in the past two decades covering the life and times of Mexicans. Again, social media lowered the barrier to entry for the common man, and soon an alternative to traditional journalism emerged to account for the state of violence in Mexico. People lacking a way to defend themselves turned to blogs, forums, Facebook, and Twitter to reveal the secret lives, the real world, of Mexico’s drug cartels.

  Two blogs, Al Rojo Vivo and Blog del Narco, broadcast reports of violent incidents. Another site, Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, detailed the criminality and oppression, exposing what citizens in the region encounter every day trying to survive. Social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook shared updates from these blogs. The posts offered up transparency with regard to life in Mexico but also provided catharsis for those posting anonymously. Each revelation served as a small way for those without power to fight back against a world and a way of life they didn’t deserve.

  Awareness of the violent region grew throughout 2011, and comments and views increased on blogs documenting the violence. Those posting anonymously online felt secure, for a time. But the blogs’ popularity quickly drew the attention of those inclined to suppress them.

  In Nuevo Laredo, the drug cartels don’t fear the police—the police fear the drug cartels. While the American media ran endless coverage on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, citizens of Nuevo Laredo woke to a common grisly sight, with a new twist for the social media era.

  Hanging from a pedestrian bridge was a hogtied, disemboweled woman. Her nude torso, with protruding intestines, was displayed alongside a man dangling by his hands, with his arm nearly torn from his body. The fingers and ears of the man and woman were badly mutilated. “This is going to happen to all of those posting funny things on the Internet,” read a sign posted nearby. It was annotated with the letter Z, suggesting the murders were the handiwork of the locally dominant Zetas cartel.28

  Bloggers, commenters, and social media personas took to forums and called on the online resistance to rally. “Don’t be afraid to denounce. It’s very difficult for them to find out who denounced. They only want to scare society,” said an anonymous person on the Al Rojo Vivo forum.”29

  But it really wasn’t that difficult for the cartels to determine who the sources of dissent were in Nuevo Laredo. Less than two months later, another body turned up. “Hi, I’m Rascatripas and this happened to me because I didn’t understand I shouldn’t post things on social networks.” The message appeared on a blanket under a blood-soaked, decapitated body. The body was the fourth in Nuevo Laredo in three months, and bloggers on Nuevo Laredo en Vivo claimed that the decapitated man wasn’t part of their forums, that the death represented nothing more than a scare tactic. But in a world of anonymous sources and cartel intimidation, how would either side even know? The Mexican social media activists continue on, but for them, the consequences remain great, and the outcome is hard to measure. They’ve united online, but not on the streets, and the world has not come to help them.

  * * *

  The Panama Canal bridges the land gap between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the law firm Mossack Fonseca, its office in Panama, provides a bridge between open markets and dark money. The firm, started by the German Jurgen Mossack in 1977, had risen to become the world’s fourth-largest offshore law firm. By 2016 it was operating a global network of forty-two franchises, with significant subsidiaries scattered in the world’s most advantageous tax havens. The firm catered to the rich, the powerful, and those seeking to keep their transactions private. That is, until April 2016.

  The largest leak of confidential information ever hit the presses on April 3, 2016, when 2.6 terabytes of data, containing 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The leak, referred to internationally as the Panama Papers, dwarfed any previous disclosure by WikiLeaks. The data dump differed from WikiLeaks not only in size but in approach. Rather than post the raw data without context or with Julian Assange’s narrative, ICIJ shared the data with dozens of news outlets around the world familiar with the characters appearing in the documents and how the contents made sense in each country. In just the first eight months after their release, the Panama Papers generated more than 4,000 stories from media outlets and more than 6,500 investigations into companies and people potentially seeking to skirt laws and avoid taxes.30 Not only did the Panama Papers achieve far more transparency than WikiLeaks, but they exposed an authoritarian regime that WikiLeaks initially set out to challenge but mysteriously never touched: Russia.

  The Panama Papers revealed the dark money dealings of 143 politicians and twelve national leaders. Twenty-three individuals sanctioned for supporting regimes in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran, and Syria surfaced in the records. Above all, the Guardian noted, “a $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s best friend—a cellist called Sergei Roldugin—is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore.”31 Deeper analysis of the records suggests that the law firm represented one step in a shell game of financial maneuvers and false deals by which money moved out of Russia and then back into the hands of Putin’s close friends and family—money and transactions that never bore Putin’s name.32 The Panama Papers shared one thing with the disclosures of Edward Snowden: the organization whose information was stolen wasn’t breaking the law. Mossack Fonseca provided fully legal services.

  The ICIJ followed up in 2017 with another bombshell, the Paradise Papers. This time, 13.4 million documents focused on the Bermudan law firm Appleby. Again ICIJ received documents and then siphoned them to “more than 380 journalists from over 90 media organizations in 67 countries,” who spent months analyzing the documents before release.33 The Paradise Papers showed how Appleby had helped “clients reduce their tax burden; obscure their ownership of assets like companies, private aircraft, real estate and yachts; and set up huge offshore trusts that in some cases hold billions of dollars.” Whereas the Panama Papers implicated global players, the Paradise Papers struck closer to the United States. ICIJ repeated its formula, revealing significant Kremlin funding to an investor with stakes in both Twitter and a real estate technology company founded by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Wilbur Ross, President Trump’s commerce secretary, was shown to have investments in a company called Navigator Holdings, which had ties to Russian oligarchs.

  The Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers revealed the power of leaks, but they also demonstrated the importance of context and analysis when communicating findings to the public. The disclosures were also different from WikiLeaks’ because they targeted regimes that would fight back. Assange, who likes to think of himself and his colleagues as vigilantes for justice, struck only the easiest targets: Western democracies. Assange and his associates claim persecution and victimhood, but none of them have suffered the fate of some of those who covered the Panama Papers.

  Politico described Daphne Caruana Galizia as a “one-woman WikiLeaks, crusading against untransparency and corruption in Malta, an island famous for both.”34 Galizia led the Panama Papers investigation in Malta, exposing corruption tied to the country’s government. In 2017, she linked Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat and his aides to offshore companies and payments from the government of Azerbaijan.35 Her blog gathered up to “400,000 readers, more than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers” on a good day.36 She chased everyone reeking of corruption: the government, the gaming industry, and the Mafia. That is, until Monday, October 16, 2017. Less than an hour after publishing a blog post, G
alizia arrived at her car, a Peugeot, and a short time later, a powerful explosion tore through the vehicle, killing her instantly.

  ***

  More than a decade after WikiLeaks’ inception, the outcomes and consequences of its efforts seem unclear. Those originally designated as targets have benefited the most and, rather than transparency, the organization has sown confusion.

  The Harmony Project wasn’t perfect, but it was an example of how to provide context with content, how to make secrets digestible for the public and not fodder for fake news. Ultimately, the Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers created far more transparency and accountability than any of WikiLeaks’ data dumps. One can argue about the ethics of disclosing a breach of personal information obtained by someone breaking the law, but the method by which the ICIJ conducted its disclosures through knowledgeable filters informing the public rather than confusing it has brought more accurate transparency to the public. The Harmony Program did the same, empowering citizens of every nation to disrupt the violence of jihadis and striking fear in the mind of bin Laden.

  WikiLeaks’ increasingly partisan information bombs designed to harm Western democracies lack context and instead play into the hands of manipulators, those increasingly empowered by social media. WikiLeaks’ caches regarding climate change and the Bilderberg Group have created an outlandish string of false information and social media conspiracies. To be fair, WikiLeaks has won some awards and provided some perspective, and, by extension, its assistance to Snowden has raised awareness of government surveillance—the National Security Agency years later abandoned one of the programs Snowden had disclosed. But have the gains outweighed the costs? Snowden’s leaks and the exaggerated claims of his accomplices, who pushed a narrative as false as it was true, have created high levels of distrust among Americans for their government, eroded confidence in elected officials, and damaged Western alliances. These transparency initiatives haven’t strengthened democracy but tarnished it. They’ve not helped Americans or the West understand complex issues, but they have helped authoritarians rise as free societies decline.