Anti-nuclear groups go to court to try to
block Thursday's scheduled lift-off
of the shuttle Atlantis with its payload of radioactive plutonium.
The shuttle and legal challenges.
NASA lawyers must go to court tomorrow
to help the shuttle Atlantis and its Galileo spacecraft
escape from a unique environmental challenge.
The mission could be stalled on the launch pad.
At the center of the controversy is Galileo,
a plutonium-powered space probe
scheduled to be launched from the shuttle's payload.
The argument's being made that in the event of an accident,
cancer-causing plutonium particles might be spread
over a wide area of Florida.
JOHN McMAHON: It was a Monday morning, a few days before launching Galileo.
My management grabbed me as soon as I came in.
And they said that there was a worm that had been detected
somewhere out on the network.
A worm is a self-replicating program.
It actually breaks into a computer and jumps from system to system.
At the time, they still were very uncommon.
We didn't know what it would do.
We knew it was malicious.
If the worm got into a machine,
it would change the announcement message and spelled out,
in little lines and little characters,
W-A-N-K,
WANK, Worms Against Nuclear Killers.
And below that, "You talk of times of peace for all,
"and then prepare for war."
Oh, my God, what the hell is this?
Most people didn't know what the word "WANK" meant.
The worm made a panic.
You would be logged into your machine and you'd get a message,
"Someone is watching you... Vote anarchist!"
And suddenly they'd see,
"Deleted file-1, deleted file-2, deleted file-3,"
and just keep going and going and going.
And it would change the passwords, so you couldn't get in to stop it.
It scared the hell out of a lot of people.
They were afraid that WANK would cause a launch failure,
where this nuclear battery was suddenly
flying away from an exploding spacecraft.
All systems are go.
Eleven, ten, nine...
How in the name of hell are we going to stop it?
And how far has it gone already?
We have a go for main engine start.
Six, five, four,
three, two, one.
We have ignition and lift-off of Atlantis,
and the Galileo spacecraft bound for Jupiter!
The shuttle launched without incident.
But the WANK worm continued to spread,
affecting over 300,000 computer terminals around the world.
Its purpose, as a warning, weapon, or political prank, was never discovered.
Investigators traced the origins of the WANK worm to Australia.
National police suspected a small group of hackers
in the city of Melbourne, and then the trail went cold.
But a key clue turned out to be in the message itself.
There was a lyric from the Australian band, Midnight Oil,
a favorite of the man
who would become the country's most infamous hacker.
Yeah.
There's never been anything quite like it.
A mountain of secrets dumped into the public domain by a website...
Julian Assange. Is he a hero to freedom
or is he a terrorist who should be prosecuted?
He's an active enemy combatant
who's engaged in information warfare against the United States...
Was it not once considered patriotic
to stand up to our government when it's wrong?
Should the United States do something to stop Mr. Assange?
I think Assange should be assassinated, actually...
No, he's a hero...
What he did was extremely devastating...
This guy's going to strike again.
Free Julian Assange! Free Julian Assange!
What drives you?
Well, I like being creative.
I mean, I've been an inventor,
designing systems and processes for a long time.
I also like defending victims.
And I'm a combative person, so I like crushing bastards.
And so this sort of profession combines all those three things.
So it is personally deeply satisfying to me.
But is crushing bastards, in its own right, a just cause?
Depends on the bastard.
I see the story entirely as one man against the world.
One man against the world.
Julian is this very radical visionary.
Julian was onto something really extraordinary.
He's an extremely clever, brave, dedicated, hard-working guy
with a brilliant idea that he managed to execute.
Julian Assange was obsessed with secrets,
keeping his own and unlocking those of governments and corporations.
The Internet is not a good place for secrets.
Cyberspace is like a galaxy of passageways,
constantly moving streams of data.
With a simple computer, anyone can enter and explore.
That's what Julian Assange liked to do, explore.
He liked to use trap doors to enter where he wasn't supposed to go,
to find secrets and expose them.
He built a machine for leaking secrets and called it "WikiLeaks."
The website boasted an electronic drop box
that could receive secrets sent by people
who didn't want to reveal who they were.
Once WikiLeaks had the secrets,
it would publish them across servers, domain names, and networks
so numerous that the information could never be taken down.
So this is what you'll see if you go to the front page of the website.
This is WikiLeaks, we help you get the truth out.
We want to enable information to go out to the public
that has the greatest chance of achieving
positive political reform in the world.
To get things to the public you need to protect sources
who want to disclose,
and you also need to protect your ability to publish in the face of attack.
His thinking is, how can we destroy corruption?
It's the whistle-blower.
Julian Assange is neither a right-wing libertarian nor a standard leftist.
I think he's a humanitarian anarchist.
A kind of John Lennon-like revolutionary,
dreaming of a better world.
If we are to produce a more civilized society, a more just society,
it has to be based upon the truth...
When I heard Julian speak,
I was struck by his vaulting idealism
and forthrightness about what he believed in.
Totally uncompromising about freedom of speech.
I agreed almost entirely with everything he said,
and I'd never experienced that before.
So I thought he was amazing.
Every week we achieve major victories
in bringing the unjust to account and helping the just.
Before WikiLeaks was front page news,
there were some smaller successes.
The website published evidence of a tax-evading Swiss bank,
government corruption and murder in Kenya,
and a secret company report on illegal toxic waste dumping.
One early leak was from the National Security Agency.
Frantic text messages from desperate workers
trying to save lives on 9/11.
9/11 turned out to be a watershed moment for the world of secrets,
both for the leakers and the secret keepers.
After 9/11 we were accused of not being willing to share information
rapidly and facilely enough,
and we've pushed that very far forward.
Michael Hayden is an expert on secrets.
He's been the director of the National Security Agency and the CIA.
In terms of our focus,
the default option, in a practical sense, has been to sharing
rather than caging information and making it more difficult to flow.
In the years after 9/11, facing enemies it didn't understand,
the U.S. government started sharing more information
between different agencies.
At the same time, the U.S. also started to keep more secrets from its citizens.
In data centers that sprang up all over the country,
the U.S. launched a massive expansion
of its operations to gather secrets.
The amount of classified documents per year increased from eight million
to 76 million.
The number of people with access to classified information
soared to more than four million.
And the government began to intercept phone calls and emails
at a rate of 60,000 per second.
Nobody knows how much money is involved,
it's a secret.
Not even Congress knows the entire budget.
The classification system can be a very effective national security tool
when it's used as intended, when it's used with precision.
During the Bush Administration,
Bill Leonard was the classification czar,
the man charged with overseeing what information should be secret.
The whole information environment has radically changed.
Just like we produce more information
than we ever produced in the history of mankind,
we produce more secrets than we've ever produced in the history of mankind,
and yet we never fundamentally reassessed
our ability to control secrets.
In this environment of expanding secrecy,
Assange went fishing for secrets to publish.
To bait whistle-blowers, he published a list of the most wanted leaks.
Those of us who have been in the business a long time
knew that this day would come,
knew that because we'd removed all the watertight doors on the ship,
once it started taking on water, it would really be in trouble.
In Iceland, winter is never easy,
but this year much of the pain is manmade.
Last October, all three of Iceland's banks failed.
Normally stoic and proper Icelanders have started protesting.
In July 2009, WikiLeaks fueled a growing popular rage
when it published a confidential internal memo from Kaupthing,
the largest failed bank in the country.
WikiLeaks had got hold of the Kaupthing loan book,
which showed what was going on in a lot of those Icelandic banks.
They had credit ratings which were completely at odds
with their actual credit worthiness.
It was all insiders,
they took out billions of dollars out of this bank
and bankrupted the thing shortly before it went bankrupt anyways.
A German IT technician, Daniel Domscheit-Berg,
became the second full-time member of WikiLeaks.
We met online first, and then we met personally in December 2007
at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
He was not the stereotypical hacker you would expect,
looked completely differently,
he was interested in completely different topics.
For Daniel and Julian, the Kaupthing leak was their biggest success to date.
The loan book came out and took the country by storm.
RÚV, the national broadcaster, was going to do a big segment on it.
And they got slapped with an injunction.
It was the first time in our history
that a gag order was placed on the state TV not to produce that news
just before they were supposed to produce it.
So instead of doing nothing they decided to put the website up.
Up pops WikiLeaks.org
with this Kaupthing loan book front and center,
and everybody goes online and checks it out.
The guys at WikiLeaks definitely get massive props for that.
Later that year, a group of young cyber-activists from Iceland
invited representatives of the WikiLeaks organization
to come speak at a conference in Reykjavík.
Iceland and WikiLeaks really fit.
This is something we really need in our society, the media failed us.
So I was excited to meet them.
Up until the day before the conference,
we didn't know who was going to come.
It could be a massive organization or it could be a tiny organization.
Hello? Um...
Does that work? Okay.
In the beginning we had no funding at all,
we were not set up with manpower nor organizationally,
so there was a lot to improvise.
WikiLeaks, we haven't mentioned that what we are doing right now
is still a proof of concept.
So in technical terms, we are in a beta stage, so it's just...
- We're not in a beta stage. - Well...
We're not in a beta stage as far as... We're in a Gmail beta stage.
So we're not in a beta stage in terms of our ability to protect people.
In terms of...
Um...
You could let me finish my sentence.
Okay.
It was a really awkward experience in some way
because we were just so famous over there.
You work for WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks is now very famous in Iceland
because of the big Kaupthing leak.
We got this letter from the Kaupthing lawyers,
telling us that under Icelandic banking secrecy law
we deserved one year in prison.
So we thought we'd come to Iceland...
And see for ourselves.
...and see for ourselves.
Julian teamed up with Birgitta Jónsdóttir,
a poet turned politician,
to hatch a plan to turn Iceland into a haven for freedom of information.
But Julian was also preoccupied with a new source,
one with access to classified U.S. government materials,
and a willingness to leak them.
It was an onboard video of an Apache helicopter gunship on patrol in Iraq.
A half-mile above the ground, it was invisible to the people down below.
Keep shooting.
Two of the men killed worked for the Reuters news agency.
What had looked like a weapon from the sky,
turned out to be the long lens of a camera.
Bushmaster.
This is Bushmaster-Seven.
One-Eight. Engage. Clear.
Come on.
Clear.
We're engaging...
Oh, yeah, look at that.
Inside the van were two children,
who were wounded in the hail of cannon fire.
That's right.
In March 2010, Assange and a team of Icelandic activists
holed up in a rented house in Reykjavík
to edit and prepare the video for publication.
We did most of our work here.
This was the operational table.
It was chaotic and hectic and all sorts of varyingly frayed nerves.
Eventually I went out and bought a bunch of Post-its
and kind of tried to figure out what it was we needed to do.
My horrific task was to go through the entire movie
and pull out the stills to put on the website.
And at the same time I was learning who these people were
that I could see their flesh being torn off their bodies.
The Army claimed it was engaged in
"combat operations against a hostile force."
But it also began a criminal investigation.
It turned out that the driver of the van
had been a father taking his children to school.
The curtains were drawn.
But I never had any sense that we were being watched, not physically.
But we joked a lot about it.
We were becoming super paranoid.
It wasn't really cloak-and-dagger stuff,
it was just yet another cool project.
Everybody thinks that we were sort of huddled over the computers
and it was all very serious.
We actually had an incredible time.
The second last night we all went out
and we were all wearing the same silver snowsuits.
WikiLeaks!
It was an incredibly intimate time,
because we were all working closely, we were working on something
that we knew that could get us all in very serious trouble.
And we were all willing to take that consequence.
So my name is Julian Assange.
I am the editor of WikiLeaks.
Julian, with an A.
Assange.
What's clear about him is he became a public figure
extraordinarily quickly.
It was really April 2010
where he went from relative obscurity
into an absolutely central world figure.
And he did it deliberately. He knew what he was doing.
He decides to take on the American state, in public.
The team posted the unedited video on the WikiLeaks website.
They also posted a shorter version
edited for maximum impact.
Julian titled it "Collateral Murder."
And no surprise, it's getting reaction in Washington.
Our military will take every precaution necessary
to ensure the safety and security of civilians.
The behavior of the pilots is like they are playing a computer game.
Their desire was simply to kill.
The Pentagon says that it sees no reason to investigate this any further.
Its own inquiry found that the journalists' cameras
were mistaken for weapons.
But the rules of engagement were followed.
If those killings were lawful under the rules of engagement,
then the rules of engagement are wrong.
Deeply wrong.
You've got this scene.
Some may be ethically troubled by the scene.
Frankly, I'm not.
But I can understand someone who's troubled by that
and someone who wants the American people to know that,
because the American people need to know
what it is their government is doing for them. I actually share that view.
When I was director of CIA, there was some stuff we were doing
I wanted all 300 million Americans to know.
But I never figured out a way
without informing a whole bunch of other people
who didn't have a right to that information,
and who may actually use that image or that fact
or that data or that message to harm my countrymen.
From a national security point of view,
there was absolutely no justification for withholding that videotape.
Number one, gunship video is like trading cards
amongst soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's freely exchanged back and forth.
What's even more disturbing is that
it was one in a series of efforts
to withhold images of facts that were known.
Reuters knew its employees had been killed.
The news agency requested the video, but the Army refused,
claiming the video was classified.
The fact that innocent people were killed in that helicopter attack,
that was a known fact that was not classified.
A record of the incident
and a word-for-word transcript of the pilots' conversation
had already been published in a book called The Good Soldiers
by a writer embedded with the Army.
The Army later confirmed that the information was not classified.
Yet the Army would prosecute the man
who leaked the video to WikiLeaks.
What kind of games was the Army playing?
Why was a transcript less secret than a moving image?
We won't shoot anymore.
Clearly the government recognizes the power of images.
But the ultimate power of image is it helps people understand
what it is this fact is that we all know.
Flag-draped coffins help us understand
the consequences of sending our children off to war.
Pictures of detainee abuse in Abu Ghraib
help us understand exactly what was taking place.
Video of that unfortunate occurrence where innocent people were killed,
helps us understand that this is an inevitable consequence of war.
We can't discuss our sourcing of the video.
Adrian Lamo was known as "the homeless hacker,"
a couch-surfing computer infiltrator
who had been convicted of hacking into The New York Times.
In 2010, not long after the release of the Collateral Murder video,
Lamo used Twitter to urge his followers to donate to WikiLeaks.
Only one day later he was contacted by someone with the screen name
"bradass87."
Frankly, I just didn't find what he had to say all that interesting at first,
until he started making references to spilling secrets.
At that point, I knew that this wasn't some kind of game.
It was for real and that I was going to have to make some very hard choices.
In Star Trek, every prospective commanding officer
is expected to pass a test called the "Kobayashi Maru."
Starship Enterprise on training mission
to Gamma Hydra.
Alert. Klingon torpedoes activated. Alert.
Evasive action!
Ah!
The test cannot be passed.
It is there to see how they deal with a no-win situation.
A no-win situation's a possibility every commander may face.
Has that never occurred to you?
No, sir, it has not.
In this case, it was a no-win situation,
deciding what you're going to do when no matter what you do,
you're going to screw somebody over.
Unsure what to do, Adrian contacted Tim Webster,
a friend and former Army counterintelligence agent.
Adrian called me and said,
"Hey, Tim, what would you do if somebody had approached you
"and said, 'Hey, I'm leaking secrets.'"
I thought it was a pretty stupid question,
because of course Adrian knows exactly what I would have done in that situation.
What would you have done?
Well, of course, turned them in.
There's no... There's nothing else you can do in that situation.
But Adrian was on the fence about it ethically.
On one hand, here was this kid leaking all this classified information,
could potentially cost lives.
On the other hand, here was this kid who had reached out to Adrian
in confidence and trusted him.
And Adrian took that pretty seriously.
He indicated he didn't know who this person was,
they were just a screen name.
So, very quickly, of course, the first thing that
anybody would be interested in is, who is this guy?
I first met Bradley Manning at a New Year's Eve party.
It was a 1930s theme party.
I was the Prince of Wales.
And Brad showed up without any kind of
costume or persona.
I looked at him and he was small
and had this kind of ingénue expression on his face.
This bright blond hair. And so I said, "Oh, Jean Harlow."
Wrote that on a name tag, slapped it on his chest,
then we went on with the rest of the evening.
When I met him at the party,
he made no mention to me that he was in the Army.
This came as a surprise to me.
To get government money for college,
Bradley Manning enlisted in the Army.
In 2007, Manning began basic training.
He was 19 years old.
Just weeks after he started, he was sent to a discharge unit
to determine if he should stay in the Army.
My locker was next to his and that's when I met him.
Nobody puts their sister's picture with him posing next to his sister.
It was kind of weird, but... Oh, well.
But we knew right away he was gay. It was so obvious. But, so...
Not that I have a problem with it.
He was small, a little bit effeminate and that made him
public enemy number one for drill sergeants to beat the macho into him.
We're talking professional Army, 30-40-year-old people
that would pick on him just to torment him.
And what happened? Did he get discharged?
No, the funny thing is, he was the least Army material of anybody there.
And they all got discharged and he didn't.
Instead of discharging Manning,
the Army decided to make him an intelligence analyst.
There's a lot of components
that go with intel analyst.
I'm in charge of the security, document security,
physical security, personal security, like people's clearances.
Does it make me feel like James Bond a little bit?
Yeah, to some degree.
What would I like the public to know about the Army?
We love what we do.
He was definitely what society
would label as a computer nerd.
He was constantly up all night building specific computer programs.
So he was unusually adept at computers?
He's probably the first person in the military that I had met
that is as talented as he was with computers.
But I had to pull him aside several times for his lack of sleep.
He was desperately addicted to soda.
He drank approximately a liter to two liters every night.
So he literally did not sleep, ever.
One time he was late for a formation
and he had a very public display, physically.
He was jumping up and down, flailing his arms,
screaming at the top of his lungs.
And to me, I had never seen a soldier do that before.
It had to be something else.
A seizure or something like that
because it was very radical body movement.
But it wasn't something else. He didn't like messing up.
He had to have everything perfect.
I actually recommended three times that he not deploy.
Hi, you've reached Brad Manning at my deployment phone number.
Please leave a message or call me back later. Thank you.
In October 2009, Bradley Manning was sent to Iraq,
posted at Forward Operating Base Hammer, just outside of Baghdad.
We were the furthest FOB east that you could go around the Baghdad area.
It was definitely the best, most uneventful place
you could have been deployed to.
We never had any enemy fire.
We could walk around without battle gear.
We had a full gym. There was pool tables. There was a basketball court.
We had a little movie theater.
We had a Pizza Hut, a Burger King.
A place to get your hair cut. A place to get a massage.
We had air-conditioned living quarters.
You could actually get cable and Internet in your room.
It was literally just a home away from home.
When you receive intel in, it's extremely raw.
A lot of the times it's even in Iraqi,
so we have to actually get it translated and build a product
so that the commander can actually make military decisions.
But much of the information available to Manning's intelligence unit
had nothing to do with day-to-day combat operations.
All of the analysts had access to central computer networks
for the Armed Forces and the State Department.
With a few key strokes, a skilled user could gain access
to vast streams of classified emails, memos
and reports from around the world.
Why was it that Private Manning had access to all that information?
9/11. Very simple.
The mindset changed after 9/11 from a need-to-know to a need-to-share.
And the database that he had access to
was a representation of the need for one entity of government
to share broadly information about its activities
with another agency of government.
How many people had access?
It's a hard question to answer.
Manning was regarded as one of the smartest
intelligence analysts in the unit.
But more than others,
he became increasingly distressed by the reports he was seeing.
He back-talked a lot. He constantly wanted to debate.
He wanted to be the person that disagreed with everybody.
We had a separate little conference room.
It had a doorway but it didn't have a door that you could close.
He'd go in there and just scream.
I was trying to chase him after the Collateral Murder video,
but he's a pretty evasive guy.
He doesn't have a home, doesn't have an office, so it was no easy task.
I'd been chasing him for weeks and had one phone contact with him.
But I heard he was speaking in Norway, so I jumped on a plane.
Turned up in Oslo and sort of
shadowed him for a few days until things started to click.
Congratulations. Thank you. Very, great chat, great speech.
At that time, he had an underground following, of which I was aware.
He's Australian, he's from Melbourne.
But he had no public profile really.
Well, it was two motivations.
One was just intellectual exploration,
and the challenge to do this.
So if you're a teenager at this time in a suburb of Melbourne,
and this was before there was public access to the Internet,
this was an incredibly intellectually liberating thing
to go out and explore the world with your mind.
G'day, mate!
No, a hacker's not someone that kills their victim,
dismembers them, and cuts them into small pieces.
Hackers do far more damage than that.
Hackers, the mystery operators of the Internet.
In the eyes of the law, they're criminal.
But who are they?
It was a really interesting period in Melbourne in the early '90s.
There was a few places on earth
that really clicked into the Internet, pre-Internet.
There was also a sense of rebelliousness,
sort of an alternative political culture in Melbourne.
All those things converged.
And Julian was absolutely the core part of...
It was almost the cliché, the teen hacker.
Seventy-two million people dead?
Is this a game
or is it real?
Oh, wow.
Their struggle was against the state.
And they thought that triumph of intelligent individuals
over the possibility of state surveillance,
that's the heart of what they were doing.
And Julian Assange, who at that point was a young hacker,
got into that world.
We're going to show 'em, baby.
And he became a central figure.
The group was called the International Subversives.
Among them was Julian Assange,
known by the online name of Mendax,
short for a Latin phrase meaning "noble liar."
Hackers in Melbourne were also suspects in the WANK worm attack,
though their involvement was never proven.
Two years after the WANK worm,
Assange was implicated in another hack.
Julian Assange allegedly accessed computer systems around the world
through weak links in the Internet system,
meaning, "The whole computer opened up to him
"and he could walk around like God Almighty."
Hackers have this belief that we are getting a police state,
that information is being hidden from the broad community...
Ken Day was an Australian expert on hackers
and the first person to investigate Julian Assange
as part of an undercover sting called Operation Weather.
It was a very difficult case
because it was only the second time we'd done
an investigation in this particular style, so we were still learning.
What we did was capture the sound going across the telephone line,
so we could see what was typed and the signal coming back.
The hackers had broken into the U.S. Air Force, the Navy,
and the U.S. defense network
that had the power to block entire countries from the Internet.
We had a back door in U.S. military security coordination center.
This is the peak security...
It's for controlling the security of MILNET, the U.S. military Internet.
We had total control over this for two years.
The Internet was a new frontier for people to go out and express themselves
that "I am there, I am the first, I am the all-powerful."
This is the common theme with people that are hackers.
It was all ego-driven, "I am the best."
Julian was charged with 29 counts of penetrating, altering,
and destroying government data.
The defense asked the court to be lenient
because Assange had lived a difficult childhood,
continually moving from city to city
with no lasting relationships.
His only constant connection with the outside world was the Internet.
After a five year investigation and trial,
Julian pled guilty to 24 hacking offenses.
He was sentenced to three years of probation.
He believes that what he was doing was not wrong,
and probably rues the day that he pled guilty.
Julian does not like being judged.
His rationalization is, "Yeah, I've been convicted, but it was unjust.
"It's unfair. I'm a martyr."
He didn't accept it.
Julian always had quite a rigid political view.
He's always believed that there's these secrets that need to be discovered.
At 17, 18, Julian was looking at stuff that he couldn't quite understand.
It's all in acronyms, it's descriptions of movements here and there,
of weapons or of troops.
He wasn't ready to do anything with it.
Indeed, he waited 20 years to see it again.
And when he saw it again,
he knew what to do with it this time.
Months before he received the helicopter video,
Assange was trolling through hacker conferences, looking for leaks.
Why am I talking to you guys at all?
Um... Well,
you have a "capture the flag" contest here.
We have our own list of flags,
and we want you to capture them.
And so if you Google for "WikiLeaks Most Wanted 2009,"
you'll see a list of documents.
If you are in a position or you know someone who's in a position
to get this material, and get it, give it to us, no questions asked,
you will help change history.
One month into Manning's deployment,
WikiLeaks published the 9/11 pager messages.
Manning took notice.
Only days later,
he saved Julian Assange's contact information to his computer.
Then taking a cue from the WikiLeaks Most Wanted List,
Manning began searching for CIA detainee interrogation videos
on the classified networks that were cleared for his use.
Like other potential whistle-blowers,
he began to wonder if he had access to secret information
the public should know.
In the course of his work
he had already downloaded thousands of military reports
from Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was there that he captured his flags.
A lot of flags.
While Manning was playing with a new identity,
he was also imagining a new role for himself.
He visited his boyfriend in Boston
and went to a party at a college hackerspace,
where he was caught on camera.
During this period, maybe even at this moment,
Manning had in his possession nearly 500,000 classified documents
about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While on leave, he contacted The Washington Post
and The New York Times.
When neither showed interest
Manning sent the so-called "war logs" to WikiLeaks.
Good morning. Him?
How would an Army private allegedly gain access
to top secret information?
The Army has detained a U.S. soldier
in connection with the leak of this classified video.
The prime suspect is 22-year-old Army Private First Class Bradley Manning.
For allegedly leaking this classified gun camera video
of an Apache helicopter attacking civilians.
Really in the first few days after we heard
about this problem with Private Manning,
it felt like the worst possible scenario.
At that time not really understanding what it means for us,
and what the hell was actually going on.
- Private First Class - Bradley Manning,
he found a former computer hacker in Sacramento, California
and that former computer hacker was growing increasingly alarmed,
eventually turning him in.
He needed a friend, and I wish that I could have been that friend.
There was a responsibility to the needs of the many
rather than simply the needs of Bradley Manning.
Lamo met with federal agents
and gave them a copy of his chats with Bradley Manning.
He also gave a copy to Kevin Poulsen,
a friend and former convicted hacker,
who is now an editor at Wired.com.
I had just done a story about Adrian being institutionalized.
While he was institutionalized, they had adjusted his medications.
I almost had kind of a suspicion that
maybe his new medications weren't agreeing with him
and this was A Beautiful Mind situation, and he was imagining all this.
Lamo gave Poulsen the okay to publish the story,
and days later, Wired.com broke the news of Manning's arrest.
Nobody wanted Adrian to go to the media,
but apparently it was already done.
And, well, he ended up approaching a lot of media after that.
It just sort of exploded.
Did it make you feel patriotic when you turned Manning in?
It made me feel very sad
that I could not have interdicted this leak...
I believed that his actions were endangering lives...
Adrian lives his life as though he's writing it like a novel.
And every novelist wants to be read.
It's my job to play the role that I'm cast in to the very best of my ability,
the same as any other actor.
You can't possibly be yourself in the public eye.
All of the little things that make us human
don't stand up under the scrutiny of the camera.
I'd like to also point out that I think that this marks the end
of WikiLeaks's ability to say that they have never had a source be outed.
So he has been charged with espionage.
The allegation being that he has transferred
at least 50 classified cables to another party.
The other party is not named.
After Bradley Manning was arrested,
attention shifted very much to Julian, it was no longer a secret.
The pressure through this period was intense.
Julian won't say where he got that material,
but he had the material, there was no question about that.
We try extremely hard to never know who our sources are.
So, all our encryption technology is designed
to prevent us knowing who our sources are.
Was it really possible
that Julian didn't know that Bradley Manning was his source?
Or was saying so an old Mendax tactic,
telling a lie for a noble cause?
- Private First Class - Bradley Manning
is now said to have confessed
to passing more than 260,000 documents to WikiLeaks.
If he's the one, then that implies there's much more to be released.
Stephen Grey for Channel 4 News.
Julian knew how much more there was.
But now that Manning was arrested, the question became,
would WikiLeaks put Manning in greater jeopardy
by continuing to release his materials?
It's certainly a very problematic situation.
This is about as serious as it can get.
We have a situation where there's a young man, Bradley Manning,
who's alleged to be a source for the Collateral Murder video.
We do not know whether Mr. Manning is our source or not.
But what we do know is that we promised the source
that we would publish everything that they gave to us.
Even though his potential source had been arrested,
Assange was undeterred from the WikiLeaks mission.
And the hundreds of thousands of leaked U.S. government secrets he possessed
were burning a hole in his pocket.
Julian traveled around Europe plotting his next move,
and in Brussels he was tracked down by investigative journalist Nick Davies.
My pitch to Julian was,
instead of posting this secret material on the WikiLeaks website,
he shared it with an alliance of The Guardian and other media groups,
including The New York Times.
Who, A, have the impact of reaching millions of people instantly
and also have natural political connections in their own jurisdictions.
So we were trying to give him a kind of political immunity
so that he could do this clearly provocative
and somewhat dangerous thing
in relative safety and with an assurance of success.
Recognizing that WikiLeaks could benefit from a louder megaphone,
Julian agreed to Nick's proposal.
So, how am I going to get the documents back to London?
There was a little bit of a risk
that if the authorities were monitoring his communications,
as they might well have been,
they would be aware of my involvement with him,
they would arrest me as I came back into the United Kingdom,
and take the material if I had it on a laptop.
We thought about a memory stick, maybe they won't spot that?
He came up with a much better solution.
He said that he would create a website.
In order to access the website, I would need a password.
So he took a paper napkin that was on the table in this café
where we were talking in Brussels
and he hooked together several of the words in the commercial logo
and wrote, "No capital letters."
I stuffed it in my pocket.
In the event that I was arrested, people would assume
that it was something I was going to blow my nose on.
And so it was I traveled back to the United Kingdom,
and, as it happened, nobody stopped me so it was all cool.
Julian would also team up
with the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
In a prearranged drop point in Central London,
Julian met Iain Overton.
We turned up and Julian was there
wearing a bullet-proof vest
and we had a Middle Eastern meal.
And he revealed that he had
the largest-ever military leak of documents in the history of leaks.
In the midst of this spy story was thrust Iain's young colleague,
a computer whiz named James Ball.
About 1:00 in the morning I took delivery on a USB stick
of 390,000 secret U.S. military records.
I make to leave and Julian asks me where I'm going.
I said, "Well, I was going to go home."
He sort of pauses and goes, "No, don't do that.
"I don't want your address linked to this address.
"Can you find somewhere else to go at least for four or five hours?"
I don't really think I can go and hit a club.
I'd really hate having to try and explain
losing 400,000 secret documents because I got a bit drunk.
Nobody had ever done this before.
How do you have teams of intelligent people to go through this stuff?
Nobody in my experience as a journalist
had ever been confronted with a tenth of the mass of material he was.
We're talking in a half a million lines of data.
If in the old days you had to take half a million lines of data out,
you'd have had 16 wheelbarrows out of the front door of the Pentagon.
This was the biggest leak of secret material
in the history of this particular planet.
Julian decided that the first release of material
would be the Afghan War Logs.
But he had to understand them first.
In London, The Guardian set up a secret operation
with key military reporters
from The New York Times and the German magazine Der Spiegel,
veteran journalists who could penetrate
the arcane language of the military.
You've got much more information than you have in this.
But here's the key part...
During the four or five weeks
when the reporters were working on the Afghan War Logs,
all of us became concerned that there was material in there
which, if published, could get people hurt on the ground in Afghanistan.
This huge attack goes for 22 hours or something.
Starts here.
This particularly related to ordinary Afghan civilians
who in one operation or incident or another
had given information to Coalition forces
and that was recorded in there in such a way that those civilians were identifiable.
I raised this with Julian and he said,
"If an Afghan civilian helps Coalition forces, he deserves to die,"
and he went on to explain that they have the status of a collaborator or an informer.
Now...
Are you sure about that? That's definitely what he said?
I have absolutely no doubt about it at all.
This was just me and him talking through the detail of how we handle this.
And this problem, potential problem, had already come up.
A, it's a moral problem,
we are not here to publish material that gets people killed.
B, if you publish information which really does get people hurt,
or could conceivably get people hurt,
you lose your political immunity,
you're terribly vulnerable to the most obvious propaganda attack
which is waiting for us in the wings
that you are helping the bad guys.
Julian's a computer hacker,
he comes from that ideology that all information is good,
and everything should be published.
I asked Julian if he would publish
information sent to his website
that could lead to the deaths of innocents,
such as how to release anthrax into a town's water supply.
This is a man whose primary way of interacting with the world
is a digital one.
It is to some degree unsullied by the limitations of human nature.
He does sometimes reduce human activity to something formulaic,
and he doesn't see the human heart beating in there.
He just reduced it to that very, very simple formula.
"They speak to an occupying force, they must be bad,
"the informer deserves to die."
The coalition of journalists
weren't used to working with a transparency radical like Assange,
and Assange was still learning the ethics of journalism.
They could only agree on one thing,
they were going to release the documents.
In London, a deadline was set for all the partners
to publish at the same time.
Julian finally agreed to redactions, the blacking out of names,
and told his partners he had a special process
which would eliminate the identity of sources from the documents.
But with less than a week before publication,
Assange had neglected to tell Domscheit-Berg in Berlin.
So, there we were,
four days before releasing 90,000 documents
and no redactions made.
It is effectively impossible for us
to notify some of these Afghanis in their villages about this material.
It looks like we will have to do a redaction of some of them.
Is that new for you?
You're effectively doing a bit of censorship yourself.
Yeah, that would be new for us, but remember...
Time was running out.
Just before the release,
Assange focused on a section of 15,000 documents
that contained the most names.
In desperation, he turned to an unlikely source for help.
It was reported that WikiLeaks has asked the Department of Defense
for help in reviewing approximately 15,000 classified documents
that WikiLeaks obtained
in an unauthorized and inappropriate manner
before WikiLeaks releases those classified documents to the public.
Julian urged The New York Times to send a letter to the Pentagon
asking if they want to help with redactions,
and they refused,
and that was 24 hours before the release.
...classified and sensitive information...
This notion that he didn't care about what was in that material is not true.
He was actually quite tortured by this material
and with very few resources.
By himself, day and night, he was consumed
with working out what to release and what not to release.
WikiLeaks is a tiny organization working on this huge scale.
It's going to make some mistakes.
Is Spiegel "I-E" or "E-I"?
I-E.
All right. Fuck that end of the press release.
He was without any support structure,
and he was about to do a press conference.
So, I'd say to him, "Julian, you need someone there.
"I mean, someone's got to write a press release
"or at least answer the phone."
So it was just in the couple of days before that launch
that a couple of volunteer students came in.
I'm going to go now,
but I just want to give you something to think about, which is,
we've got this press conference on, tomorrow.
We're going to be totally inundated.
Completely totally inundated.
Let's talk about WikiLeaks as an organization.
- Mmm-hmm. - Is this Apple or IBM, or is this...
It's a corner gas station,
with some extremely bright attendants.
It was true that he tried to create an impression
that it was this very large organization.
It was Julian Assange, his $300 laptop,
10 SIM cards,
and a very cheap jacket
that he'd put on if he had to do an interview.
He woke up late, of course.
I'm knocking on the door. "Julian, come on, man."
He gets up. Just his normal thing.
What's the time? What's the time?
Twenty-five to.
- I also need to prepare a little list of things. - All right.
Tired. I haven't been to sleep.
But, good.
Fourteen pages in The Guardian this morning.
"Massive leak of secret files exposes true Afghan war."
We tell our sources maximum political impact,
and I think we got pretty close.
There's 10 trucks out there,
10 media trucks, 10 media trucks.
Yep.
It'll be a good outcome.
He walked out that door as the sort of aging student hobo.
By the time he had made this 50-yard walk,
he was a rock star.
He was one of the most famous guys on the planet.
Holy fuck.
Most of you have read some of the morning papers.
So, this is The Guardian from this morning.
Fourteen pages about this topic.
It's clear that it will shape an understanding
of what the past six years of war has been like,
and that the course of the war needs to change.
The war logs revealed a conflict that was very different
from what citizens had been told.
Civilian casualties were much higher than reported.
America's supposed ally, Pakistan, was playing a double game,
taking military aid from the U.S.,
even while working with the Taliban to plan attacks in Afghanistan.
The war logs also revealed the existence of a secret American assassination squad,
with a terrible record of wounding and killing women and children.
There is nothing that will have greater consequences for our nation
than the unleashing of the brutality of war.
To have those types of decisions,
those types of deliberations, done in secrecy
is a tremendous disservice to the American people,
because these are things that are being done in their names.
And whether you agree with it or not,
to have a free back-and-forth airing of these is essential.
All the material is over seven months old,
so it's of no current operational consequence.
Now, in what circumstances wouldn't you publish information,
or are there any circumstances in which you wouldn't publish it?
We have a harm minimization process.
Our goal is just reform, our method is transparency.
But we do not put the method before the goal.
Sorry.
To my amazement, Julian announced to the world,
"WikiLeaks always conducts a harm minimization process."
Julian had no harm minimization process in place at all.
So, on the WikiLeaks side, were the redactions made?
No.
There were 15,000 documents in the end got held back.
But 75,000 documents were published,
and they contained about 100 names.
The newspapers published articles,
accompanied by only a few hundred redacted documents.
But even after the holdbacks, and despite Julian's promises,
WikiLeaks published 75,000 documents on its website
without redactions.
The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents
are potentially severe and dangerous
for our troops, our allies
and Afghan partners.
I do not know whether anybody subsequently did get hurt.
The fact that the material was there
and identifiable as potentially dangerous
did the political damage.
When the material was first published,
the world was indeed talking about civilian casualties in Afghanistan,
and about the existence of a squad that was going out and killing Taliban.
But the White House managed the news,
and the story became "WikiLeaks has got blood on their hands."
Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes
about the greater good
he thinks he and his source are doing,
but the truth is they might already have on their hands
the blood of some young solider or that of an Afghan family.
The people at WikiLeaks could have blood on their hands.
He does clearly have blood on his hands.
The blood is on their hands.
This is where we get into the information war.
That speculative blood became more important than the actual blood.
We already can see all that terrible stuff.
We know about that.
Let's focus on your nightmares.
How all these people might die
because the government's secrets have been unleashed.
As soon as they pick up this line
about who's got blood on their hands,
it's WikiLeaks being isolated,
and that, from a political point of view,
was a clever move by the White House.
They stepped all around any kind of argument
with these big news organizations
and isolated Julian.
By creating a distinction between Assange and the newspapers,
the government avoided a war with the mainstream media
and invented a perfect enemy,
the guy Bradley Manning called
"the crazy, white-haired Aussie."
Julian.
Is this taking some getting used to?
You've been pretty much in the shadows
as far as the media's concerned until recently.
We've grown a bit, so this is now a time for me to do it.
WikiLeaks needs a face?
Yeah, the public demands that it has a face.
And actually we'd much sort of prefer,
I'd prefer, if it didn't have to have a face.
And we tried to do that for a while.
Um...
And people...
Just the demand was sort of so great, people just started inventing faces.
Some call him a hero,
some see him as a threat to national security.
Julian, thank you for joining us...
This afternoon I talked to the man behind the leaks...
- Julian Assange. - Julian Assange.
Mr. Assange, good morning to you.
What have the leaks achieved?
We have published more classified documents
than the rest of the world press combined.
So it's journalistic.
I'm fond of the phrase,
"Lights on, rats out."
Do you feel you have accomplished what you wanted to
with the release of these documents?
Not yet.
- You. - What?
Jesus Christ.
So, two with you on the front.
My God, look...
Another double page spread.
I think that's the best photo.
That's not a bad photo.
I think it's really good.
And then you've got... You've got your own banner
at the top here for three pages, in The Times.
That's a bit of hubris.
Huh?
Well, for a couple of days.
It can wear off. But the next few days, untouchable.
The founder of WikiLeaks found himself making news again today.
Sweden issued a warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange.
Right now Swedish authorities are
looking to question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Swedish authorities have issued a warrant for his arrest
on suspicion of molestation and rape in two separate cases.
Saturday, August the 21st, I woke up.
Another journalist had sent an email
with a link to the website of the Swedish newspaper Expressen.
I went to this website and I thought, "Well, this is a joke,
"this is like a spoof newspaper."
These huge headlines, including one which claims
that Julian Assange has sexually assaulted two women.
"What is this about?"
So, I phoned a guy in Stockholm
who is the main coordinator for WikiLeaks in that city.
So I came up to this guy and I said, "What on earth is going on?"
The man in Sweden was Donald Boström,
an investigative journalist
who had agreed to help Julian Assange while he was in the country.
Yeah. I mean, really, really.
And he liked it.
- He liked it? - Mmm-hmm. Of course.
Assange had thought of moving his base to Sweden,
where WikiLeaks kept its servers.
Laws were more favorable to press freedoms
and Assange had a growing fan base.
Fame offered Assange a platform,
but it also made him a visible target.
- Breaking news... - Internet platform WikiLeaks...
The Australian has denied the allegations
saying that they are without basis...
An unknown source leaked the police report to the press.
It included the testimony of Assange,
the two women, and, surprisingly,
a picture of a torn condom.
There were other peculiar things going on.
The case of one woman was dropped, and then reopened.
The general sense was, it's awful curious that these charges would emerge
just after a very embarrassing and damaging leak.
There were various possibilities here.
One was that some women who wanted to sell a story
to the newspapers had set him up.
Another was that a really nasty right-wing group in Sweden
had conspired to set him up.
Maybe some dark agency from the United States has done this.
And way out on the extreme ranges of possibility,
well, maybe he did it, I don't know!
Did anything happen between you and these two women
that could be construed as sexual coercion or rape?
No words, no actions, no violence.
There is nothing that could be construed as rape.
Nothing at all.
Or sexual coercion?
Well, I don't know what the hell that means.
There's no doubt that this organization is under siege...
It was clearly a smear campaign...
We were warned by Australian intelligence
we would receive such an attack.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is calling it a "smear campaign."
His supporters claim that the warrant is a way of silencing him.
You're telling me this isn't a witch hunt, this isn't a smear job? Come on.
One accuser apparently worked with Cuban exiles
and there's a story around that she's a CIA operative?
This whole thing stinks to the high heavens, I gotta tell ya.
I've seen this enough times,
where governments and corporations,
they go after people with this kind of lie and smear.
This is all a bunch of hooey as far as I'm concerned.
Well, it's certainly a surreal Swedish fairy tale.
The only thing that hasn't walked onto stage yet are the trolls.
And I'm waiting for them to arrive.
It is my role to be the lightning rod,
to attract the attacks against the organization for our work.
One aspect of that has been the legal situation for yourself in Sweden.
I'm not going to talk about that in relation to this.
But it does affect WikiLeaks.
I will have to walk if you're...
Do you still... You had once talked...
If you're going to contaminate this extremely serious interview
with questions about my personal life...
I'm not, what I'm asking is,
if you feel that it's an attack on WikiLeaks.
Okay, sorry.
Julian, I'm happy to go onto the next question.
All I'm asking is...
Sorry.
The case in Sweden was still unresolved.
While the investigation continued,
prosecutors permitted Assange to leave Sweden
with the understanding that he would reappear.
But Assange never went back.
Convinced Sweden was a trap, he went underground in London.
Julian has a certain paranoia,
but in the time I was with him
I think that high security awareness was actually relevant,
it was appropriate.
Mind you, he'd been living like that
for the past, you know, five or ten years
when it probably wasn't appropriate.
Will there be anything more coming from WikiLeaks
in the next two or three weeks?
You never have a good reason to be paranoid.
You have good reason to be careful.
Stakes are high so you need to be meticulously careful every day.
He'd been trained for this moment, in evasive tactics,
and changing phones and taking out batteries and changing computers.
May have been a fantasy before,
but it served him well because it became real.
He was the focus of intense enemies.
Right now the Pentagon reportedly searching for Julian Assange,
potentially on the verge of releasing
a huge new stash of confidential documents.
He was putting his head above the parapet.
He was putting himself in a dangerous position.
And I think, on the whole, he handled the dangers pretty well.
There is a side to this guy which is great,
and then there's this hidden side which has been so destructive.
He's a natural fabulist and storyteller
and lives intensely in his imagination,
and to some extent that imaginary world that he inhabits
becomes more real than the, as it were, often mundane reality that we all live in.
Yes.
We certainly were under surveillance in Iceland.
I, personally, had chased people
who were surveilling me with video cameras.
He traveled to a conference in Oslo
and then made these allegations that
two State Department officials had been on the airplane to follow him,
but there is no proof.
And this is what got tiring to a lot of us over time.
Julian was constantly propagating how much we're in danger
and all of these things.
And this was just lies and propaganda.
Maybe it's the fame, maybe it's the attention,
maybe it's the pressures of working in this kind of environment,
but somehow this idealist that I met
became something else somewhere through the story.
This whole topic just headed into a really bad direction.
There was this article in Newsweek.
That's what Julian took as a proof that I had been speaking to the press.
From that day on I was a traitor,
I was trying to stab him in the back.
It boiled down to me being suspended for, as Julian put it,
"disloyalty, insubordination and destabilization in times of crisis."
Where did that language come from?
I think, as much as I can tell, that's from the Espionage Act of 1917.
That was a cruel irony.
Across the Atlantic, the United States Department of Justice
was investigating whether it could use the Espionage Act
to put Julian Assange in jail.
The Espionage Act is primarily intended to address situations
where individuals pass national defense information over to the enemy
in order to allow the enemy to harm us.
It would be unprecedented if the Espionage Act was being used
to attack individuals who did not do anything more
than The New York Times or The Washington Post does every day.
Do you want to let them in first?
The next big releases were the Iraq War Logs.
This time WikiLeaks had worked with volunteers
to devise a computer program to solve the redaction problems.
There were almost 400,000 documents
detailing that the U.S. military had purposefully hidden information
about civilian casualties and systematic torture.
President Obama sanctioned the mass handover
of Iraqi prisoners of war
from the American troops over to the Iraqi authorities.
And one of the things that is against the Geneva Conventions
is you cannot hand over a prisoner of war
to another authority who you know commits torture.
But let me just say with regards to the allegations
of not intervening when coming across detainee abuse,
not true.
They had 1,300 allegations,
with medical evidence, of quite horrific torture
by Iraqi army and police against detainees.
We're talking about sodomy,
we're talking about abuse using rubber hoses
and beating people, we're talking about murder.
The sort of torture that supposedly we were "liberating" Iraq from.
The U.S. Administration under Bush and under Obama
continued turning over prisoners despite knowing this.
That is against the Geneva Convention.
The Obama administration appears to have committed war crimes.
Who knew that before?
What had Manning done?
Was his leak, as the Army had said, a reckless data dump?
Or was this the act of a man
who had peeked behind the curtain of a superpower
and decided that what it was doing was wrong?
After the leaks, and just before he was arrested,
Manning was trying to reckon
with what he had done and where he was going.
There was never even a possibility
that anyone could assume that he had a female personality.
You mean that he wanted to become a woman?
We knew that he was at least considering hormone therapy,
but no one cared.
It wasn't like,
"Okay, he's going to have to start showering with the females."
Literally, nobody cared.
He would call me and cry.
Very loud sobbing
like a child just in a state of just utter loss,
and he kept saying, "I won't make it,
"I can't make it, I can't do this."
I constantly asked him, "Do you have someone?
"Do you have anyone to talk to,
"that's there, that you can see on a daily basis?"
And he assured me that he did not.
Manning did reach out for help at least once,
in an email to his master sergeant.
Manning attached to the email a picture of himself dressed as a woman.
Several weeks later, around dinnertime,
Manning was discovered lying on the ground.
With a knife, he had scrawled on a chair the words,
"I want."
Later that same evening, Manning tried to go back to work.
I was off-shift,
and I had to come in to find something
that he should have been able to find.
And he was pacing back and forth saying smart comments to me.
And I blatantly said,
"Manning, how 'bout you fix your shit before you try to fix mine?"
And he screamed and punched me in the face
while I was sitting down.
My adrenaline immediately hit overload.
I stood up, pushed my chair back.
He continued to try to fight me,
but I put him in, you know, what UFC would call a "guillotine,"
and pulled him on the floor,
and laid on top of him and pinned his arms beside his head.
At that time, I can't believe he messed with me,
I literally had 15-inch biceps.
I was the last person he probably should have punched.
My superiors decided that
it was just escalating too much and he had to be removed
and have his weapon taken away from him.
At that point he never came back in the office.
He had to go work with the first sergeant in the mailroom.
In the mailroom, Manning still had an Internet connection
to military networks.
His gun had been taken away,
but he still had access to millions of classified documents.
We have personnel security programs.
We try to take a look at the folks to whom we give security clearances.
Should this young man have been given that clearance?
In retrospect, certainly not. In prospect, who knows?
These are the kinds of decisions that are difficult to make.
But let me put it to you this way,
the American Army has had incredibly stupid PFCs
for more than two centuries,
and PFCs occasionally do incredibly stupid things.
I didn't see him get arrested.
But I saw him walk down the hall
with about four MPs.
He had a grin on his face,
like, "I'm on top of the world."
The last communication I received from him
was that I was going to hear something that would shock the world.
It was a pretty simple process,
dropping CDs into your tower
and downloading large volumes of information.
It wasn't incredibly sophisticated.
That's not quite true.
Manning turned his computers into efficient exfiltration machines.
Over several months, Manning made over 794,000 connections
with the State Department's server.
He downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents
without anyone noticing.
When he hit a snag,
he reached out to another hacker for advice on how to crack passwords.
Later, Manning talked to him about the progress of the uploads.
In Manning's buddy list, the address was listed under a familiar name,
Julian Assange.
On November 28th, 2010,
WikiLeaks and its media partners
began to publish a small fraction, carefully redacted,
of the State Department cables supplied by Bradley Manning.
The day-to-day memos of American diplomats
revealed a surprising honesty about how the world really worked.
It was that whole Wizard of Oz moment.
We all look at these politicians, "Oh, wow, they're so powerful!"
And then it was the little dog pulling the curtain away.
The cables exposed criminal behavior and corruption
by tyrants in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.
That in turn helped to fuel
an exploding popular anger against repression,
the so-called Arab Spring.
They also told the truth
about the faults of America's so-called allies
in ways that were bound to reveal
that their power and legitimacy were a kind of fraud.
This leak is industrial scale.
It touches every relationship the United States has
with other countries around the world.
Even as the United States and others try to manage the impact of this,
it will be a wound that just keeps opening up on a recurring basis.
The behavior of the United States was also exposed,
as the cables revealed criminal cover-ups
and a systematic policy of using diplomats to spy on foreign governments.
Look, everyone has secrets.
Some of the activities that nation-states conduct
in order to keep their people safe and free
need to be secret in order to be successful.
If they are broadly known,
you cannot accomplish your work.
Now look, let me be very candid, all right.
We steal secrets.
We steal other nation's secrets.
One cannot do that aboveboard
and be very successful for a very long period of time.
Disclosures like these tear at the fabric
of the proper function of responsible government.
People of good faith
understand the need for sensitive diplomatic communications,
both to protect the national interest
and the global common interest.
For the previous leaks, the American government,
they were obviously angry,
but they suddenly decided,
"Right, now it's time to get Draconian on their ass."
It's time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is,
a terrorist organization.
What we should do is treat Assange as an enemy combatant,
who's engaged in information warfare against the United States.
He's a blackmail, extortionist, terrorist.
...crackpot, alleged sex offender...
He's a criminal and he ought to be hunted down,
and grabbed, and put on trial.
We have a very serious criminal investigation that's underway
and we're looking at all of the things that we can do
to stem the flow of this information.
He needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,
and if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law.
We've got special ops forces.
A dead man can't leak stuff...
...illegally shoot the son of a...
This little punk... Now I stand up for Obama.
Obama, if you're listening today, you should take this guy out.
I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.
That's what I'd like to see, a little drone hit Assange, right.
All the threats were aimed at Assange.
No one called for attacks on The Guardian or The New York Times.
I found that astounding.
If Julian Assange should be charged
with some offense under American law,
then absolutely The New York Times editor
should be in the slammer with him.
Suddenly, only two days after the release
of the first batch of State Department cables,
Interpol issued a demand for Assange's arrest,
for his failure to return to Sweden
to answer questions about sex charges.
I'm really rather worried by the political motivations
that appear to be behind this.
Sweden was one of those lickspittle states
which used its resources and its facilities
for rendition flights and torture.
You think if he goes to Sweden, he may be sent to the States?
Certainly my mind is very open about that.
- And you may fight it on that basis? - Certainly.
There were rumors of a sealed indictment against Assange.
In secret, a U.S. grand jury served subpoenas targeting WikiLeaks supporters.
Under political pressure,
VISA and MasterCard stopped processing donations to the website.
VISA and MasterCard will happily process payments
for the Ku Klux Klan,
for all kinds of organizations around the world,
and yet this one,
with no charges, no warrants, no nothing,
they've not only blocked it themselves, they won't let any intermediaries do it.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks' founder is still hiding from the police,
but today he did speak out, online.
What happens to WikiLeaks if Julian Assange is arrested?
This is carrying on, this is huge material that is really important,
and everyone working on it is getting it out there.
WikiLeaks' principal spokesman always has been Julian,
but with Julian being in hiding,
I essentially filled in the gap.
Where is Julian Assange, this mythic character?
Honestly can't remember where I last saw him.
I ended up doing a lot of their television,
looking pretty much about 16.
You really did feel a David and Goliath moment.
Do you consider your organization and your website to be under attack?
Yes, all week it's been under attack.
The WikiLeaks website came under cyber attack
and kept falling offline.
In response, WikiLeaks supporters began to mirror the site
on over 1,000 servers around the globe.
It was impossible to remove WikiLeaks from the Internet.
The Internet in a digital era
lets governments get more information and more power
and more communication than they've ever had before.
But, it lets citizens do the same.
Governments are more powerful and more vulnerable
at exactly the same time.
The fight on our hands is
who gets to control the Internet, who gets to control information.
Hello. This is a classified message from Anonymous.
After numerous attacks on the truth-spilling platform of WikiLeaks,
including the shutdown of its financing,
we have already made it very clear
that we will fight for freedom of speech and the free press.
We are Anonymous.
We are legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
In response to the financial blockade on WikiLeaks,
the hacker collective Anonymous launched cyber attacks,
taking down the websites of VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal.
Free Julian Assange!
Free Bradley Manning!
End the war.
Off the road, please!
Off the road.
You've been warned already!
One week after the arrest warrant was issued,
Assange surrendered to police in London.
Deemed a flight risk,
he was ordered held in jail, pending a bail hearing.
Many people believe Mr. Assange to be innocent,
and many people believe that this prosecution is politically motivated.
Assange's arrest had become a mythic moment,
but what was really going on?
Was Sweden acting as an agent of the United States?
Would extradition to Sweden mean a one-way ticket to Guantanamo?
Or had the mission of WikiLeaks become confused
with a private matter between one man and two women?
Talk about why we're altering your appearance
and filming you in this way.
The reason I felt it was important to be obscured
is mainly because of all the threats I've received.
And I know that different media have published my face
without my consent.
And a lot of online communities
started to have wild speculations about who I was
and who the other girl was.
I feel that the less my face is shown
and the less people can recognize me,
the safer I will be.
Anna has been advised not to talk
about any of the details of her sexual encounter with Assange
until the legal case has been resolved.
But there are a few facts on which everyone agrees.
An organizer for a WikiLeaks seminar in Stockholm,
Anna invited Julian to stay at her apartment while she was out of town.
Then she decided to come back early.
The following day at the seminar,
Julian was approached by another WikiLeaks volunteer.
Her name was Sofia.
The truth is the first casualty of war.
I tried actually to tell his friends
that we can get this over with fast and with no fuss
because I really didn't want this to be in the papers.
But he chose to make a big deal out of it.
Julian had repeatedly refused to have the test.
When he had finally changed his mind and agreed to, it was too late.
By that time, the women had already got too frustrated
and too angry with Julian's refusals,
and they'd gone to the police.
They found out that they were mutual lovers of mine,
they had had unprotected sex, and they got into a tizzy
about whether there was possibility of sexually transmitted diseases.
Ridiculous thing to go to the police about.
When the women went to the police to try to force Assange to take an HIV test,
their testimony raised questions about possible criminal charges.
The police, on their own, decided to investigate further.
The refusal to use a condom took center stage.
If Assange had HIV and knew it, it could be a case for assault.
The testimony of the women raised another issue.
Did Assange refuse to use a condom
because he wanted to make the women pregnant?
Some pointed to the fact that he had already fathered four children
with four different women around the world.
This is a man who's elusive,
he's always flying around the place, he doesn't have any roots.
And he's got a number of kids.
There might be some sort of primary impulse in him
to want to just reproduce,
to want to have some sort of bedrock in his life.
This is the ultimate digital man,
and actually you can't just live in a digital world.
I have never said that this is a honey trap.
I have never said that it is not a honey trap.
He was claiming that he didn't know who we were,
and that's not true.
He knew very well who we were,
and he knew we were going to the police before we went.
There are powerful interests
that have incentives to promote these smears.
What Julian did was to start the little snowball rolling downhill,
that this was some kind of a conspiracy.
And that was all he had to do at that stage.
It rolled and it picked up speed.
A lot of rumors were made up and pure fantasies.
The wildest story of all was that I was a CIA agent.
And I was like, I couldn't really believe
that anyone would believe such a weird story.
You've been very careful not to say anything.
Why?
Because this is a legal case, and not a public debate.
Sweden! Shame on you!
The way Julian's private affairs have been conflated with WikiLeaks,
I find quite troubling.
There was at one point an effort to try and separate the two issues.
That was reversed
and the decision was made to push the two causes together.
And so it just...
How was that reversed? Was there a meeting?
Was there... Or it just slid into that direction?
Julian reversed it.
Explicitly.
He very much wanted what happened in Sweden
to be seen as part of the transparency agenda.
And it worked.
I'm here because the U.S. government and the Swedish authorities
are trying to gag the truth.
These charges are completely politically motivated
and have nothing whatsoever to do with the prosecution.
It's a persecution, not a prosecution.
What is so extraordinary is the way in which the two women
have been either completely forgotten,
as though they had no rights here at all,
or caricatured, vilified.
I've been through two years
of different kinds of abuses.
People coming to my house,
people threatening, or questioning
or following my friends and family.
Some death threats,
but mostly sexual threats that I deserve to get raped.
A lot of Twitter accounts and blogs
that are very close to WikiLeaks
have been publishing things that I know Julian knows is not true.
They admire him very much, and he could have easily stopped that.
There was an enormous amount of hype and misinformation
and bullshit that came out of Julian Assange's supporters.
And the more that people realize
that they were lied to by Julian,
the less moral and political authority he has.
He's supposed to be about truth.
Information should be free!
This is not democracy!
We want free speech!
Hands off WikiLeaks!
We want free speech!
Hands off WikiLeaks!
- What do we want? - Free speech!
- When do we want it? - Now!
Free Julian Assange!
Good evening, and welcome to this fundraising dinner
for freedom of speech.
While I cannot be with you in person this evening
because I am under house arrest,
I can at least be with you in spirit.
After nine days, Assange was released from prison,
his supporters putting up over $300,000 in bail.
While Julian appealed his extradition to Sweden,
a local journalist named Vaughan Smith offered Julian a place to stay.
Ellingham Hall is 125 miles northeast of London.
It's a house that's been in my family for 250 years or so.
We've got livestock, we've got cattle, we've got sheep.
We've got game, obviously, pheasant, partridge.
We shoot them and eat them.
Ellingham Hall is a lovely place,
but it's right in the middle of nowhere,
and we'd packed it with about 15-20 people.
It's a sort of cross between Big Brother and a spy thriller.
Part of Vaughan's plan to keep the thing civilized
was setting strict rules around meals,
and so Vaughan's very lovely housekeeper would cook for us three times a day.
Even port served at dinner,
which was passed to the left, of course.
And now we are in a position
where we are being most aggressively censored
by the Washington establishment of the United States.
To raise money for his legal defense,
Assange began selling a compelling package:
Dinner with Julian.
In exchange for a donation,
WikiLeaks would provide a link to a video of Julian
to be played at home on a laptop,
placed on a tablemat set for the absent hacker.
And together, we make the world into a place where all our dreams can play.
This Dinner for Free Speech
was in fact dinner for Julian's sex offense defense fund.
No one knows now whether money given to WikiLeaks
is going to Julian or elsewhere.
Julian's legal troubles made him more famous than ever,
but they also intensified his differences with his former media partners.
They defended his right to publish
but began to turn on Assange himself.
I've been close enough to see the
wasps around the jam here.
He stirred the nest
and they've come to sting him rather more than perhaps he expected.
In a January piece, you described Assange as
"eccentric," "elusive," "manipulative," "volatile,"
"openly hostile," "coy," an "office geek,"
a "derelict," "arrogant," "thin-skinned," "conspiratorial,"
and "oddly credulous."
Um, is that any way for a journalist to talk about his sources?
He looked like a bag lady coming in.
He was wearing kind of a dingy khaki sports coat,
old tennis shoes,
with socks that were kind of collapsing around his ankles.
And he clearly hadn't bathed in several days.
The New York Times... The hypocrisy of this act.
They wanted the material.
They were fully complicit in the publication of the material.
But as soon as the heat came on, they wanted to wash their hands.
I tried over many months to get an on-camera interview with Assange.
After meetings and emails,
I was finally summoned to the Norfolk mansion
for a six-hour negotiation.
Julian wanted money.
He said that the market rate for an interview with him
was one million dollars.
When I declined, he offered an alternative,
perhaps I would spy on my other interviews and report back to him.
I couldn't do that either.
During his time under house arrest, he had become more secretive and paranoid.
He railed against his enemies,
and I knew that he had tried to get all his followers
to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
The penalty for leaking,
$19 million.
I'd found this a little bit awkward,
being asked by a transparency organization
to sign exactly the kind of document
used to silence whistle-blowers around the world.
Seemed pretty troubling. And so I refused.
All organizations face two possible paths.
They can be open, honest, just,
or they can be closed, unjust,
and therefore not successful.
Had the secret-leaker become the secret-keeper?
More and more fond of mysteries.
The biggest mystery of all was the role of the United States.
Over two years after the first leak,
no charges have been filed by the U.S.
Assange claimed that the U.S. was biding its time,
waiting for him to go to Sweden.
But there was no proof.
In fact, members of Assange's legal team
admitted that it would be easier
for the U.S. to extradite Assange from Britain.
Britain is the one that's done this special deal
with the United States on extradition.
But Sweden is particularly strong
in seeing as sacrosanct that business about handing people over.
They would hold to that perhaps stronger than Britain would.
We think we've got a special relationship with the United States.
Despite that special relationship,
Assange desperately fought extradition to Sweden
and lost every appeal.
Julian, we are with you!
His legal battle drained his finances
and trapped him in a family farm for over a year.
Hoped for funding didn't come, and WikiLeaks suspended operations.
His international organization had blown apart.
In Berlin, Daniel Domscheit-Berg quit the organization.
So did the mysterious figure who had built the secret submission system.
Assange no longer had a drop box for new leaks.
In London, journalist Heather Brooke was leaked unredacted copies
of all of the State Department cables by a WikiLeaks insider.
There was the initial people that Julian gave the information to
and then, how many people did they give it to,
and then how many people did they give it to?
Some of the cables also leaked to a European dictator
who used them to target dissidents and suppress free speech.
This is at the core of where things went wrong,
and where ultimately WikiLeaks has lost control
over the spread of these documents.
In the end, all of the cables leaked across the Internet
on mirrored versions of WikiLeaks.org.
All Julian had left was his celebrity.
How you doing, Mr. Assange?
That's my personal information
and you have no right to know about it!
Julian extended his brand by hosting a chat show for Russian state television.
Where are you? In England?
I am in England, under house arrest now for 500 days.
Five hundred days.
One of his guests was Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador.
Thank you, President Correa.
A month after the program aired,
Assange sought asylum from his former TV guest.
This morning the sun came up on a different world,
and a courageous Latin American nation took a stand for justice.
It was an ironic choice.
Ecuador had a record of putting journalists in prison
and had been charged with corruption in a WikiLeaks cable.
The United States must renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks.
Despite no proof of a US-Sweden plot,
Ecuador granted him asylum.
The British government pledged to arrest him if he left the tight confines of the embassy,
so Assange prepared for a long stay.
I saw the signs
"Free Bradley Manning" and "Free Julian Assange,"
and I think it's ridiculous.
These two cases have nothing to do with each other.
Julian, he's not even imprisoned.
He has locked himself up to avoid coming to Sweden
to answer a few pretty simple questions.
There is a phenomenon called Noble Cause Corruption.
Essentially, you do things which
if anyone else did you would recognize aren't okay, aren't right.
But because you know you're a good guy,
it's different for you.
I suppose you can't accuse Julian
of not setting out from the beginning what he may do.
Mendax by name,
Mendax by nature.
The same extraordinary personality
which conceived of and created WikiLeaks
is also the same personality
that has effectively destroyed WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks has become what it detests
and what it actually tried to rid the world of.
We must get away from this understanding that we see Julian as a savior,
as some new guru, some new hero,
some new pop star or whatever,
that's going to change all of it.
The credit is undue.
Everybody celebrating Julian as a whistle-blower.
He's not.
Bradley Manning might have been a whistle-blower,
and, if he was, he is the courageous guy.
He is the one that took all the risk
and in the end now has... Is suffering.
Free Bradley Manning!
After his arrest, Manning had been held for two months
in an eight-by-eight foot cage in Kuwait.
Then he was transferred to the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia.
Though Manning had not been tried for any crime,
he was kept in solitary confinement for nearly a year.
Shame! Sit yo' ass down!
Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker is currently sitting in prison
and he could be locked up for the rest of his life.
How do you feel about that?
I think that it's a little bit ludicrous
to say that Bradley Manning's going to be tortured.
We don't do that to our citizens.
Free Bradley Manning!
A high-ranking general
authorized Manning's placement in solitary confinement on suicide watch
against the protest of prison doctors.
His clothes and blankets were taken from him.
Lights in his cell were always on.
When he questioned his treatment, guards took away his glasses
and forced him to stand naked during morning roll call.
At night, guards kept him cold and woke him frequently,
a practice that recalled the sleep deprivation program at Guantanamo.
Manning's supporters speculated
that the U.S. government was trying to push Manning
to turn on Assange and implicate him in a crime.
What was your reaction about
Bradley Manning's treatment at Quantico?
It seemed to me that sleep deprivation and nudity,
these were what I would call "enhanced interrogation techniques."
- They were being practiced on an individual. - No.
Look, I don't know the specifics.
I don't know the rules of confinement
for the Marine brig at Quantico.
But Bob Gates is an incredibly honorable man.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen is an incredibly honorable man.
I defer very much to their judgment
that whatever was done was appropriate.
The treatment that he was receiving at Quantico,
the level of solitary confinement,
the fact that his clothes were taken away at night,
it was inconsistent with our values and our interests.
It was making Bradley Manning a far more sympathetic figure
than I see him.
When I was asked about it in a forum at MIT,
I gave a candid answer.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley
said the treatment of Bradley Manning by the Pentagon
is "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid,"
and I'm wondering if you agree with that.
Uh...
I have actually asked the Pentagon
whether or not the procedures that have been taken
in terms of his confinement are appropriate
and are meeting our basic standards.
They assure me that they are.
I was appalled at that.
I was appalled at that with respect to the President's responsibility
as Commander-in-Chief.
Any commander...
Any commander knows that first and foremost
he or she is responsible for the well-being
of each and every one of their soldiers,
to include the ones sitting in the brig.
I can't go into details about some of their concerns,
but some of this has to do with Private Manning's safety as well.
I think I gave you an answer to the substantive issue.
Once my comments were brought to the President of the United States,
I felt the only thing I should do is resign.
I stand by what I said.
What was unsaid
was any consideration of holding Manning's supervisors accountable
for permitting the greatest security breach in American history.
Manning's commanding officer only received a minor demotion.
The Army brought 22 charges against Manning.
They included "aiding the enemy,"
without naming just who the enemy was.
For these charges, Manning faced life in prison,
and a possible death sentence.
People who don't like the leak
try to say that it was damaging national security.
Have you ever seen any evidence
that American national security has been damaged in any way by this?
And if you look at what the whistle-blower is saying in that online chat,
and look at what he doesn't say.
He doesn't say, "I want money."
He doesn't say, "I'm going to go to Russia or China.
"I'm going to go to al-Qaeda and give them this stuff."
It doesn't happen.
He says, "This is the material that the people of the world need to have."
And it was naïve to dump the whole lot
without thinking ahead about how that was going to be handled.
But you don't have to lock this guy up for decades
and effectively put him through forms of torture.
That's a politically motivated act of vengeance
on somebody who hasn't damaged national security,
he's caused embarrassment.
Let's be clear.
This disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests,
it is an attack on the international community.
The American government said, "You can't publish this.
"It's dangerous. It's going to damage world affairs, diplomacy, etc."
But then you publish it anyway,
and it's for the greater good,
telling people what they needed to know.
The question becomes, does it matter and what changes?
I think really we have to say that something has started,
and it's not going to be about WikiLeaks.
It's going to be about transparency and accountability,
and keeping power in check,
keeping governments responsible,
and who cares who does it as long as someone does.
Information by its very nature needs to flow.
In some regards, withholding information is trying to repeal the laws of gravity.
You may succeed for a short period of time,
but sooner or later it's going to break free.
Now you're talking just like a hacker.
Whoa! Okay.
I care more about Bradley than many of his supporters do.
We had a chance to be friends, however briefly, and...
He opened up in a lot of ways
about his life, his personal life,
and
he did it in a way that someone only would do
to someone they felt they could trust.
And I had to betray that trust
for the sake of
all of the people that he put in danger.
And I wish to hell that it had never happened.
It's going to be a question for the ages,
why Bradley Manning reached out to somebody he really didn't know
and entrusted him with such a life-altering secret.
The only thing I can come up with is that once he saw the results of the leak,
the need just to share that, just probably grew and grew.
He just needed to tell anybody,
and he thought Adrian was the right person to tell.
Whistle-blowing is a really isolating act.
It's a courageous and phenomenal thing to do,
but you are essentially doing something
that your colleagues and your friends
would not want you to do and not understand.
It alienates you further from them.
A source who needs to talk to someone
and explain what they've done and think through what they've done
needs someone safe to do that to.
In the logs, Manning says, he couldn't talk to WikiLeaks,
that's not how they work.
Does that protect whistle-blowers
or does it protect WikiLeaks?
In the end, everybody's just human.
If you're leaking material to someone,
if you're telling a reporter a good story,
something that really makes a difference,
then I think just from a human perspective,
it's really difficult not to get any credit for it.
Because no one can tap you on the shoulder and say, "Good job.
"Courageous thing you did."
And this is really the complicated part about it.
How do you make sure that your source doesn't compromise themselves?
In the chats, Manning sent a link to "Pale Blue Dot,"
a famous photo of Earth he saw
while reading an essay by the astronomer Carl Sagan.
"That's home," said Sagan. "That's us.
"Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there,
"on a mote of dust,
"suspended on a sunbeam.
"In our obscurity, in all this vastness,
"there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere
"to save us from ourselves.
"It is up to us."