Inside WikiLeaks Read online

For him, that was the end of the matter. The strategy worked. To create the impression of unassailability to the outside world, you only had to make the context as complicated and confusing as possible. To that end, I would make my explanations of technical issues to journalists as complex as I could. It was the same principle used by terrorists and bureaucrats. The adversary can’t attack as long as he has nothing to grab hold of. Modern-day customer relations works in a similar way. A customer who wants to complain but can never find anyone responsible to talk to ultimately has no choice but to swallow his anger.

  For us, the important thing was not how something really was, but how one sold it. Addressing a problem, to say nothing of taking a public stance toward it, would have meant making it a reality. For a long time, Julian had great success with his strategy of ignoring problems until they disappeared. In retrospect, it’s amazing how long this strategy worked.

  Over the course of time, we also learned which journalists to work with to ensure that our news attracted maximum attention. When in doubt, we prioritized newspapers or programs that could guarantee us a larger and more varied audience over those that were better informed and asked cleverer questions but were only read by people who were on our side to begin with.

  However, our interest in working with the largest mass media organs also had limits, as the case of Toll Collect was to prove. In late 2009, we published more than 10,000 pages of secret contracts between the German government and Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Telekom, and the French highway company Cofiroute—a joint venture called Toll Collect. In return for setting up an electronic toll system on Germany’s autobahn, the German government had guaranteed Toll Collect a utopian return of 19 percent. The sum in question was more than a billion euros, and there was no way revenues were going to live up to German government assurances. Taxpayers would inevitably be left footing the bill. Everyone involved agreed that the content of those contracts should not be made public.

  We decided to provide our material exclusively to two journalists, who would then analyze and summarize it. In our experience, complicated leaks—and the Toll Collect contract material was enormously complicated—had to be published by the traditional media in digestible chunks. No matter how explosive our revelations were, if no one presented them to the general public, they would languish, neglected, on our website. As partners we chose the IT journalist Detlef Borchers, who had already written a lot about the topic for a German publisher specializing in computing issues, and Hans-Martin Tillack, a reporter for the weekly magazine Stern and an experienced, prizewinning journalist. We hoped that working with Stern would allow us to reach the broadest possible audience. The magazine had more than seven million readers and was available at hair salons and in doctors’ offices throughout Germany.

  I met Tillack at his office at Berlin’s Hackescher Markt. The office was on the seventh or eighth floor, and from his windows there was a good view of this busy shopping and business square in the heart of the German capital. Tillack was sitting in front of his imposing bookshelves, his hands folded in front of his stomach. He was an impatient man of forty-nine who was fully absorbed in his role as the experienced star journalist. “Yeah, yeah,” he would often interject before I had the chance to finish my sentences. Still, while he may have treated me like a schoolboy, I could see the glimmer in his eyes the first time I took a copy of the Toll Collect contracts from my bag. Tillack assured me that WikiLeaks would have a prominent place in his article.

  “I’m convinced we’ll find a solution for how to properly acknowledge WL so that you’ll be satisfied,” he wrote me after our meeting.

  It was important to me for him to explain how WikiLeaks functioned as a platform and what the project was about. But when I called him later to ask whether he needed any additional information from me, he got irritated and I became concerned that WikiLeaks might not get a sufficient credit.

  Ultimately, the article he wrote was a great disappointment, as he implied that the story was primarily based on his own investigative research. There was no background information about WikiLeaks. We only came in for a mention late in the main body of the article:

  The contract material was transmitted to the proprietors of the website WikiLeaks, which specializes in secret documents and which plans to put the contracts online in their entirety.

  I tried to stay calm. What was I getting so upset about? We’d simply never work with Tillack again. The response he sent me after my first complaint about the article spoke volumes:

  It was the maximum I could get. My bosses asked me why we had [to] mention WikiLeaks at all. And since the documents in this case had dimensions far beyond some pharmaceutical company, you didn’t just get mentioned in WirtschaftsWoche, but in Stern, which has a circulation of one million and readership of seven million!

  Regards, Hans-Martin Tillack

  However, we also had lots of good experiences with the media. The business newspaper WirtschaftsWoche, for instance, honored all their agreements, and so did Zeit Online when we gave them the field report about the bombing of two hijacked tanker trucks in Kunduz a couple of hours before we posted them on WL. At the time, the report about possible mistakes by German colonel Georg Klein was already in the possession of a handful of well-connected German newspapers and magazines. But instead of making all the information available to the general public, they had smugly chosen to cite only small snippets. Zeit Online wrote about the report comprehensively and directed readers to the full version of it on WL so they could make up their minds for themselves.

  This was the role we were often to play in the future. We made source documents, from which the media cited only excerpts, available in their entirety. Other media either lacked the proper platforms to do this themselves or they feared legal consequences, or, what was probably more often the case, individual journalists simply did not want to share exclusive material with their colleagues.

  We were forced to learn which topics would make a splash in the media and which would attract less interest. The two-page Stern article on Toll Collect, for instance, had been followed by a much-longer, meandering report about alternative religion and was most notable for its illustrations: photos of naked women smoking cigars.

  We had to accept that the most significant leaks were not always the ones that attracted public attention. What captivated people’s imaginations were leaks that could be easily understood and discussed by the masses. People were immensely interested, for example, in Sarah Palin’s hacked e-mail account. What was leaked there was hardly scandalous. At the most, Palin could have been criticized for having used her private account to send internal party messages. Her account also contained a family portrait and some private photos of her children. But the media never tired of talking over the leak.

  I thought the leak of Palin’s hacked e-mail was weak and of questionable relevance. But releasing the material was in keeping with our philosophy of publishing all documents uncensored. It was also part of our larger strategy. With every leak, we tried to extend the frontiers of what we could do into previously unknown terrain. Then we would push ahead in the same direction with our next leak.

  What is public, and what is private? We were trying to stir up controversy about this very question. And it was better for the debate to center on Sarah Palin’s e-mail account than on the data of private consumers. We were convinced that we were strengthening the project by pushing the limits of what was acceptable, and getting our way in the end. We became increasingly brazen. No one could shut us down.

  In comparison with the stir caused by Palin’s e-mail account, the public didn’t take much interest in the files we published in November 2009 concerning a German pharmaceutical company. If I had to name my favorite leaks from that year, these files would definitely be among them. They read like a case study in corruption and can be easily understood by laymen.

  The files concerned payments made by pharmaceutical representatives to doctors so that they would prescribe more of the
company’s medications. We published ninety-six pages of investigations carried out by police and prosecutors. They detailed the practices used by some pharmaceutical company representatives. If doctors prescribed their patients those products, they received a cut of the additional profits. Moreover, there were direct payments. In an internal e-mail, one of the company’s regional directors had written, “If a doctor wants money, call me and we’ll find a way.” Another means of encouraging physicians to prescribe more of the company’s products was to give them coupons for expensive seminars.

  But because an internal judicial inquiry had concluded that licensed doctors could not be charged with corruption in this case, the investigations had largely been suspended by the time of the leak. Public interest in the files was scant.

  I also recall an interesting encounter I had on a program with a woman named Katrin Bauerfeind. She had begun her career with a German Internet program and had moved on to host a show of her own on the German-Swiss-Austrian network 3sat. I was invited as a guest on the program and drove to Cologne for the interview. When taping was over, her editor said she was struck by how optimistic I was and how much I believed other people were capable of.

  I do indeed have a basically positive view of human nature. I think that people have an innate interest in being informed but are kept in a state of ignorance by the media, the politicians, and their bosses. If you provide people sufficient background information, they are capable of behaving correctly and making the right decisions, I told the editor.

  Things were very different in her experience, she replied. She didn’t think people were interested in complex issues. When I watched the show afterward, I had to ponder the age-old question of the chicken and the egg. The program was thirty minutes long, of which ten were devoted to me. The other parts of the show were titled things like “The Wall Fell and Berlin Dances to Techno” and “Miss Platinum—The Real Lady Gaga.” I’m not saying the world would be a better place if they had spent all thirty minutes reporting on WL. But the show did make me ask which came first: bad programming or a bad audience. Perhaps all one had to do was put the audience back in a position to demand better programming.

  Other leaks attracted little immediate interest but went on to inspire long-term analyses and scientific publications in expert journals. One example was our publication of all the text messages sent on September 11, 2001, before, during, and after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Researchers examined the messages, searching for key terms indicating sadness, fear, and anger. They concluded that the predominant emotion was anger and that, compared to words like sadness or fear, expressions of aggression increased in the days following the terrorist attacks.

  Others were interested in our publications about the Human Terrain System, which entails anthropologists helping the US military to adapt their propaganda to specific countries and cultures and steer relations with local populaces. The academic world was also fascinated by the Congressional Research Service, or CRS, reports. The American Congress has its own scientific intelligence service, which any congressman can use to obtain information. The reports issued by the service are painstaking and high-quality, covering topics from the cotton industry in Mexico to weapons of mass destruction in China. Scientists would love to have access to these reports, which are paid for with taxpayer money. But the congressmen themselves decide on whether a given report gets published or not. Most of the time, they refuse permission.

  The reasons vary. One is that the reports show when a particular congressman knew about a specific topic and make his interests in general transparent. In other cases, the reports don’t yield the results a congressman would have liked. There was a similar case in Germany with a government study on private health insurance. When the researchers came to the conclusion that private insurers did not yield the sort of social benefits that had always been propagated, Germany’s economics minister, Rainer Brüderle, who had commissioned the study, simply had it filed away under lock and key. In exactly the same sense, if published, a CRS report can show that legislation sponsored by a congressman is misguided, or that his positions are wrong and his administrative activities poorly organized. In any case, the reports had long occupied the top spot on the most wanted list of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a prominent American civil-rights organization specializing in technology and politics.

  We posted thousands of CRS reports on our page. In terms of the tax money that went into producing them, they were worth more than a billion dollars. Demand was correspondingly high.

  After a bit of time, we used Google to check where the reports had ended up. We found them, among other places, on government servers. That was an ironic triumph, and the open-data movement, which was becoming increasingly recognized at the time, was delighted. It’s interesting to note that Senator John McCain had also demanded that the reports be published during his presidential campaign. McCain was a far more vigorous proponent of open government data than Barack Obama, even if Obama got more credit for his open government initiatives.

  At the time, we considered whether to put a watermark on our documents to prevent journalists from using our material without referencing us. Quite often, stories would suddenly appear in the media without WL being named as a source just after we had published similar leaks. Whenever I inquired, I was usually told that the journalists in question had “gotten the material from someone else” or “had been holding it back for quite some time.” If we had put watermarks on our documents, it would have been easier to catch the journalists. A request from an original document would have revealed whether someone was using our source. But watermarks would have been too difficult technically.

  Without question, people could have accused us of demanding the sort of intellectual property protection that we ourselves criticized in other areas. I myself often wear T-shirts with the Pirate Bay logo and support progressive concepts of copyright. But there was more to our considerations than pure copyright interests. In some cases, we were concerned about being able to supplement documents with vital additional information or to prevent media sources from linking to documents that create false impressions if read without commentary. That was why we wrote summaries and occasionally offered judgments about the quality of our material.

  A good example of what could happen with directly linked documents was the leak of the Memorandum of Understanding. This was an agreement reached between the Kenyan politician Raila Odinga and Kenya’s National Muslim Leaders Forum, which concluded with the approving knowledge of then presidential candidate Obama. Among other things, the agreement had the moderate Christian Odinga making concessions to Kenya’s Muslim minority, including the promise to represent the interests of Muslim Kenyans detained at Guantánamo Bay.

  Two documents, a genuine one and a fake one, were contained in the memorandum. The fake one suggested that Obama supported the introduction of Sharia law in Kenya, which was absurd. It was interesting to see which publications linked to which document, since one was clearly aimed at portraying Obama as a covert African Muslim and thereby depicting him as unfit to become president of the American people. The fake appeared in the New York Sun and various publications of the far right. All that the other document revealed was that Obama knew about the memorandum. If the documents had only existed as a complete package with watermarks and commentary, we would have been able to stop others in the media from using them to manipulate public opinion.

  In December 2008, we were once again attending the Chaos Communication Congress. Unlike the previous year, Julian’s lecture at the CCC was part of the official program, and it was very well attended. This time, Julian and I sat together onstage, and we’d risen in the world from the tiny space in the cellar. Indeed, our ascent had been meteoric, which of course meant a larger audience. Nine hundred people, and not just twenty, now wanted to hear Julian speak. More than once, a cracking voice came across the hall loudspeakers, asking people to please not block the emergency exits.<
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  The requests were in vain. People were crowding the stairs and the hallway leading to the conference room. I found myself asking whether anyone except me noticed that Julian was wearing exactly the same clothes as the year before: a white shirt and olive-green cargo pants. But that was nonsense. None of the people now in attendance could have remembered us.

  We got a few laughs when we read an e-mail of complaint we had received a few days previously from the German Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND. The head of the BND, Ernst Uhrlau, had gotten in touch personally—something he later denied, since it was quite unprofessional. The e-mail was written in German. It read [translated] :

  To: [email protected]

  From: Directorial Staff IVBB-BND-BIZ/BIZDOM

  Date: Tue, Dec 16, 2008 1:15 P.M.

  Subject: WG: Classified Report of the

  Bundesnachrichtendienst

  Dear Sir or Madam:

  On your homepage you enable the download of a classified report of the Bundesnachrichtendienst. I hereby demand that you immediately block this ability. I have already ordered a review of possible criminal consequences.

  Sincerely,

  Ernst Uhrlau

  President, Bundesnachrichtendienst

  We responded in English:

  From: Sunshine Press Legal

  Office

  To: [email protected]

  Cc: [email protected],

  [email protected],

  [email protected]

  Date: Thu, Dec 18, 2008 9:35 A.M.

  Subject: Re: WG: Classified Report of the

  Bundesnachrichtendienst

  Dear Mr. Uhrlau,

  We have several BND-related reports. Could you be more precise?

  Thank you.

  Jay Lim