Inside WikiLeaks Read online

  What followed was a global storm of outrage. Our telephones were ringing off the hook. Journalists from a number of different countries wanted to talk to us, and it took days to answer all the e-mails. Because of the time differences involved, sleep was almost out of the question. The media produced countless articles and programs about the Julius Bär case.

  The journalists were clever enough to point out the approximately two hundred websites where WikiLeaks was still accessible. The New York Times devoted several articles to the case and published our IP address in one of them. The crowning moment was a headline on CBS News: FREEDOM OF SPEECH HAS A NUMBER. It was the WikiLeaks IP address: 88.80.13.160. We had hit the big time.

  That’s how we became so widely known within the space of just a few days in early 2008. Without Julius Bär, it never would have happened so quickly. In the aftermath, we received lots of encouragement, offers of help, and new documents. Never before in my life had things developed at such a breakneck pace.

  The icing on the cake, though, was that we were able to stand up to the arrogant attorneys. After ten days or so, the judge revised his decision, and the site was back online. One of the main reasons was public pressure. One week after that, Julius Bär dropped its legal complaint. Recently I read somewhere that by 2010, according to European investigations on tax evasion, the flow of money to the bank had declined drastically.

  Incidentally, there’s never been another lawsuit against WikiLeaks.

  We published the entire correspondence that went back and forth between us and the lawyers. The damage that Julius Bär suffered was significantly greater than what it would have been had the bank simply let the documents be published without complaint.

  There were apparently numerous people involved in this correspondence. But even at the best of times, never more than a handful of people at WL were charged with the most important tasks. To be honest, a lot of the time it was just Julian and me doing the lion’s share of the work. When “Thomas Bellman” or “Leon from the tech department” answered an e-mail and promised to forward a request on to our legal services, it was usually just me. Julian, too, used a host of pseudonyms. I am always asked to help people get in contact with other people who were involved in the project. I’m glad to pass on e-mail addresses, but even today I don’t know whether some of the names are real people or alter egos of Julian Assange. “Jay Lim,” for instance, is responsible for legal questions. Jay Lim? Someone Chinese, maybe? I’ve never met him. Nor did I ever have any contact with Chinese dissidents who, as rumor had it, were involved in setting up WikiLeaks.

  For too long, we had only a single server, even though Julian and I knew that we had to make it seem otherwise to the public. We had to give the impression that we had a broad infrastructure. When the server went down, people thought we’d been hit by a cyberattack or been censored. The truth was, our technology was junk. Or we’d been unprofessional or neglected something important. If our adversaries had known that WikiLeaks was just two loudmouthed young men working with an antiquated server, they might have had the chance to stop our meteoric rise. Or at least to slow us down.

  At the 26C3, the Chaos Communication Congress in December 2009, Julian and I attended a lecture about a new program for analyzing literature. The speakers described how easy it was to establish that various texts came from one and the same author. Like a form of handwriting, every individual is distinguished by recurrent stylistic elements, vocabulary, and syntax so that his authorship is unmistakable.

  I nudged Julian with my foot. We exchanged glances and started giggling. If someone had run WikiLeaks documents through such a program, he would have discovered that the same two people were behind all the various press releases, document summaries, and correspondence issued by the project. The official number of volunteers we had was also, to put it mildly, grotesquely exaggerated. Even in the early days, we claimed that several thousand volunteers and hundreds of assistants supported us. This wasn’t perhaps a direct falsehood, but that number included everyone who had signed up for our mailing list. These were people who had gotten in touch with us at some point with the vague promise of supporting the project. But they didn’t do anything at all. They were just names. Not even names, really, just numbers.

  Never during my first months of working for WikiLeaks did I realize this was the case. At most I asked myself why I so rarely met anyone besides Julian or heard about someone else taking care of this or that. These suspicions were reinforced by the fact that everyone who wrote e-mails had the same e-mail client as Julian. But I would never have confronted him about this. On the contrary, when I finally did realize how few people really were involved, my sense of being invaluable grew. And it motivated me to think that so few people could set such great things in motion.

  Leaking the Julius Bär documents brought a certain Ralf Schneider* into our lives, a German citizen whose name was among those of the big tax evaders identified by the whistle-blower. At some point, Schneider sent us an e-mail, writing that, while he would love to have a few million to deposit in secret accounts in Switzerland, this was a case of mistaken identity. I was shocked.

  The information about the individuals involved in the Julius Bär scandal came from our source. Whoever had provided us with the documents had wanted to help us categorize and understand them, so he had included some background information he had researched about the bank’s clients. In the case of Ralf Schneider, he’d made a mistake. He’d confused the German with a Swiss who had a similar name. So we published the information about a possible mistake just as we did with the material provided by our source. On the site we wrote, “According to three independent sources, this document, the summary and some of the commentary are false or misleading. WikiLeaks is investigating the matter.” Three independent sources? That sounded good. Unfortunately it was made up.

  One might ask here why we didn’t simply delete the man’s name. We decided against that because it was common for people connected to something negative to demand that we immediately remove their names. We wanted to investigate these cases before making any corrections.

  Schneider had legitimate reason for being upset. When people Googled “Ralf Schneider,” the first hit they saw was about him being involved in the tax evasion scandal. He was able to show, however, that other details from the documents didn’t match him at all. “I do not have, nor did I ever have an account with the Julius Bär bank,” he wrote to us. “I don’t own a house on Mallorca, nor do I maintain a bank account on the Cayman Islands, and I don’t live abroad. I have already instructed my attorney to file a charge of slander with the public prosecutor’s office.”

  We didn’t want to change the original documents provided by our source, but preferred instead to use commentary and footnotes. But a year later, when Schneider again complained that a Google search of his name still directed users to us, I made sure that the pages in the search engine’s archive were updated.

  Schneider was wrongly blamed, and to my knowledge he’s the only person this has happened to in the entire history of WikiLeaks. Personally, I felt sorry for him. But all the other complaints, threats, and demands we received before and after ultimately proved to be attempts by people to conceal their own wrongdoing. People would Google themselves and see a link to WL. Outraged, they would then contact us, and no form of threat, demand, or attempt at bribery was too stupid for them to try out. It was fun messing around with them.

  One good example was a set of leaks surrounding a complaint filed by Rudolf Elmer. Elmer was, up until 2003, Julius Bär’s vice president on the Cayman Islands, but in 2008 he filed testimony with the European Court of Justice about various human rights violations. (As was reported shortly before this book went to press, Elmer was the source behind the Julius Bär leaks.) In part of one sentence in his complaint, he wrote that a certain John Reilley* had consulted with the bank about how he could avoid paying taxes. Asking for such a consultation alone is a crime. Reilley is a well-known inves
tor, whose homepage celebrates him as a major financer of social projects and a “philanthropist.” A good guy, you’d think.

  A couple of days after we published Elmer’s letter of complaint, a man named Richard Cohen* contacted us. He began by heaping praise upon WikiLeaks and ended up offering to make a donation. PayPal wasn’t working, so he suggested organizing a fund-raising event for us in Manhattan. In a seemingly off-the-cuff remark, he mentioned that he had “accidentally” searched for his broker’s name on the WL site, and lo and behold, there was John Reilley, mentioned in connection with tax evasion. But Reilley’s integrity was beyond doubt, he said. Perhaps this was a result of a mistake in our translation?

  His tone got a lot less friendly when we wrote back briefly, saying that our translation was perfectly fine and the case was, as far as we were concerned, closed. He threatened with attorneys, lawsuits, and other legal measures. He said he was going to inform everyone from Transparency International to God himself. For more than a page, Cohen went on about how we were going to get blown out of the sky, crushed like an insect, and scraped from the bottom of his boot. Our next answer was even more succinct: “Stop wasting our time and yours with this idiocy.”

  I admit I enjoyed imagining our adversaries chewing up the leather on their armchairs in rage. It wasn’t as if a few people in this life hadn’t gotten my own blood boiling.

  We began developing a sixth sense for the true agendas behind such requests. E-mails that began by singing our praises were highly suspicious. They always ended badly when we failed to do as the sender had asked. Our response was to publish the e-mails with all the hymns and curses on our page. That was the best way of putting an immediate end to the tirades.

  Publishing everything we received was part of our concept of transparency. What else could we do if we didn’t want to open ourselves up to accusations of playing favorites? Whether the material affected the political right or the left, the good guys or the idiots, we published it. We only filtered out what was irrelevant. Admittedly, some of our publications went pretty far, containing private e-mails that carried implications for the lives of uninvolved third parties. One leak we published, for example, was the e-mail correspondence of the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving. In doing so, we indirectly ruined a reading tour he was planning for the United States. Once the places he was scheduled to appear became public knowledge, none of the organizers wanted to deal with protests by Irving’s detractors. On the other hand, the e-mails also revealed the bullying way the controversial historian treated his own assistant. One would imagine that this was unpleasant for the woman in question. Who enjoys being revealed as a bully’s victim? But in order to remain impartial, our desire for transparency had to become an ironclad principle. Otherwise, we could have been accused of being subjective or emotional in our choice of what to publish.

  For Julian in particular, principles were more important than anything else. When one of our sources discovered a misconfiguration on the website of Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota and sent us the publicly visible data, Julian wanted to publish not only the names of Coleman’s campaign supporters but their exact credit card details, including security codes, as well. We sent out e-mails to all the people concerned, telling them to block their accounts. (Their data had been going around the Internet exchange forums for a couple of weeks anyway.) But I thought the risks were too great and served no purpose. What was the point of knowing the exact account details of all of Coleman’s contributors?

  That was what I thought. After a lot of argument, we agreed to publish the data with the last digits of the credit card numbers blacked out. Julian seemed to delight in provoking people as much as possible. He was of the opinion that people liked to get upset. He thought, for instance, that spam was a welcome evil because it gave people an excuse to complain. You were doing them a favor by spamming them. As it happened, he had himself pressed the wrong button on our mailing list at one point so that 350,000 people received repeated e-mails with the message “At the moment, Julian Assange has no time for interviews.” Our mailing address was put on a number of spam lists, and it wasn’t easy to get off them. Nonetheless, Julian succeeded in putting a positive spin on the mishap by claiming that people were happy when you gave them the chance to get pissed off.

  Another important rule of ours was to process documents in the order in which they had arrived. Our aim was to publish everything, as long as it had a modicum of relevance. We stuck by this principle until late 2009. By then, however, Julian in particular was demanding that we blow through the documents likely to attract the most media coverage first, and under extreme time pressure. This change in procedure was to cause considerable conflict between him and me. But back in the days of Julius Bär, the idea of us fighting was unthinkable. We rarely saw each other. Mostly we just chatted. But when we did meet up, he was very friendly. He always said “hoi” instead of hello and asked “How goes?” when he wanted to know how I was doing. Julian wasn’t a particularly warm person, but he did have a talent for communicating a sense of mutual regard.

  Often we were unable to meet in normal places. Julian worried about us being watched and thought it was dangerous for us to be seen together. I never picked him up from the airport or the train station. He would mostly just suddenly appear, knocking on my door late at night or telling me to go to some hastily arranged meeting point.

  In the summer of 2008, after we hadn’t seen each other in a long while, I picked him up at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz subway station in Berlin. He approached me, and we hugged.

  “It’s nice to see you,” he said.

  “I think so too,” I answered.

  I rarely meant those words more. It was simply great having him around. Because I knew he was fighting for the same cause I was. Because I knew he cared as little as I did that we could have earned far more money selling our talents to businesses. Because I knew his aim too was to shake up society. To knock the bastards on the head, as he once put it.

  We rented a car, a silver Mercedes C-Class station wagon, and packed the trunk full of small servers we had purchased with our first donations. Then we went on a whirlwind tour of Europe. This was long overdue. Our infrastructure was already straining under the growing levels of submissions and hits. In the beginning, it was all right just to pretend that we were bigger than we actually were. But our technical infrastructure was pretty much a joke. And irresponsible. If someone back then had found out where our server was located, he could have easily shut down WL permanently.

  I had pieced together a map of locations both within and outside Germany—inconspicuous places that were nonetheless safe. The locations had to be kept top secret because, among other reasons, we didn’t want the people who rented space for our servers to be put in danger.

  We had a lot of driving ahead of us that weekend. By the time we returned the rental car twenty-four hours later, the employees at the drop-off would do a double take. There would be 2,100 additional kilometers on the odometer. I put the pedal to the metal, constantly monitoring the cars in my rearview mirror in case someone was shadowing our clandestine undertaking. Julian sat beside me, bitching. He was a terrible backseat driver. He complained the entire time that I was driving too fast, and to him as an Australian, the German roads seemed far too narrow and full of traffic. What’s more, he never quite got over the feeling that I was driving on the wrong side of the road.

  In one of the many computing centers where we installed our servers, Julian would casually grab a power cord from the room next door and cut it in two. After a bit of tinkering he had a new power source for his laptop—the power cord and adapter he had brought with him were never long enough to reach the nearest outlet. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that computing centers usually have surveillance cameras, or that the employees there usually don’t take kindly to people simply cutting through cables.

  When we reached Switzerland, I spent all my remaining money on Ovaltine. I love the Swiss chocolate drink
, and for the rest of our tour, I couldn’t wait to get back home and make myself a huge cup of cocoa. But when we arrived back in Wiesbaden, the cocoa powder would be all gone. Julian had at some point torn open the packages and poured the contents straight into his mouth.

  In Switzerland we briefly considered taking a photo of ourselves, posing as conquering heroes, in front of the Julius Bär building. If we’d had more time, we certainly would have. Bär is the German word for bear, and that became a running gag in our conversations. We no longer talked about David versus Goliath, but David versus the bears.

  In the coming months, we would have more significant leaks in terms of their global political relevance—revelations that would earn spots on twenty-minute nightly national news broadcasts. But we never enjoyed any of our triumphs more than the victory we’d achieved over the bears. Julius Bär was a banking house with unlimited resources that had been represented by a powerful and aggressive law firm, and they had been powerless against us and our cleverly constructed system.

  The alpha bears were no doubt accustomed to making others hold their tongues with a single takedown letter. But they burned their paws on us. That made us proud. After all, where would you expect to find the most powerful and devious people if not there, where sums in the billions were bandied about? These people were adept at finding loopholes to secure deals. But they never came up with a lever to move us. We were just two guys with an out-of-date, tiny server. For the first time, I realized that we could stand up to anyone in the world.