Inside WikiLeaks Read online

  An answer, this time also in English, was quick to come:

  To: Sunshine Press Legal Office

 

  Date: Thu, Dec 18, 2008 5:59 P.M.

  Subject: Antwort: Re: WG: Classified Report of the

  Bundesnachrichtendienst

  Dear Mr. Lim,

  As of today you still provide the option of downloading a classified report of the BND under the following address: http://www.WikiLeaks.com/wiki/BND_Kosovo_intelligence-report,_22_Feb_2005.

  We kindly ask you again to remove the file immediately and all other files or reports related to the BND as well. Otherwise we will press for immediate criminal prosecution.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ernst Uhrlau

  President of the Bundesnachrichtendienst

  Messages like this were a great way of showing that a document was genuine. Whenever someone demanded that we remove a document as quickly as possible, we always asked, under the pretense of a friendly request for clarification, whether the person who complained could prove he held the copyright to the material in question. Some of the people we dealt with were nice enough to provide us with a screenshot as evidence of ownership. We would then post that screenshot as well, secretly grateful that our adversaries were doing our job for us.

  The leak in question concerned the BND’s involvement in fighting criminality in Kosovo and its cooperation with journalists. Someone had sent us an internal paper from the German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom, listing two dozen secret IP addresses used by the BND to surf the Internet. We played a little game with them. Using the WikiScanner, one can trace what changes have been made to Wikipedia entries from any given IP address. Employees of the BND had made changes to the entries about military aircraft, nuclear weapons, and the BND itself.

  Even more amusing were the “corrections” made to the entry on the Goethe Institute, the German government’s premier institution for promoting German language and culture around the world. Originally the entry had stated that many Goethe Institute offices were used as unofficial points of contact by the BND. BND employees had altered it to say the exact opposite: “Foreign branches of the Goethe Institute are not used as unofficial homes for the BND.” The entire sentence was later deleted from the entry.

  In addition, according to the IP addresses, the BND had also been in contact with a Berlin escort service. Had this been to set a trap using a femme fatale, as in the good old days of the Cold War? Or had someone at the BND been feeling lonely and ordered the women for himself?

  There were a couple of glitches in Julian’s lecture at the congress. Every time he grabbed hold of the microphone, he yanked out the video connection from the computer so that the screen went blank. But such bumbling only made us all the more sympathetic to our audience.

  After the lectures, I usually retreated to a sofa in the lounge to relax and watch the people flowing past. Julian tirelessly worked the other rooms in the Berliner Congress Center, always hoping to be discovered and approached.

  AFTER the CCC conference at the end of 2008, Julian came to Wiesbaden and lived with me for two months.

  This was typical of him. He didn’t have a fixed address, crashing instead at other people’s places. Usually, all he carried with him was his backpack with his two notebook computers and a bunch of cell-phone chargers—although he could seldom find the one he needed. He wore several layers of clothing. Even indoors, he wore two pairs of pants—though I’ve never understood why—and even several pairs of socks.

  In Berlin we had caught the “conference plague.” That’s what club members call the flu that spreads at this time of year when large numbers of people gather, breathe in the same conference air, and share the same keyboards. Ashen-faced, silent, and sick, we sped back to Wiesbaden in an overcrowded high-speed train on January 1, 2009. No sooner had we gotten back to my apartment, than the flu forced us to take to our beds. Or to be more precise, since I was feeling a bit better, I let Julian have my bed and withdrew to a mattress.

  Julian pulled on all the clothes he could find and even fished some ski pants out of his backpack. Dressed like this, he went to bed, wrapped himself in two more woolen blankets of mine, and sweated out his fever. He was healthy again when he got up two days later. An efficient solution to the problem.

  I lived in the Westend district of Wiesbaden. It’s quite a rough part of the city, an area where it’s wise to chain up your bike with an extra-heavy lock. The district had the advantage of having more cell-phone shops than supermarkets, and it was easy to purchase cheap handsets and cards.

  My apartment was a basement walk-down that faced out to the road. At first the fact that people could look into my apartment made Julian pretty nervous. We pulled down the blind—a transparent, yellow paper thing with a Tibetan flag I had pinned in the middle. It let through a fuzzy warm light. You might call it secondhand sunlight. I liked it.

  After getting over our bout of flu, we worked alongside each other peacefully and diligently. We would sit in my living room, typing away at our laptops. I worked at the desk in the corner by the window, while Julian was ensconced in front of me on the sofa with his computer on his lap. He usually wore his olive-green down jacket with the hood pulled up and a blanket wrapped around his legs. I was a bit worried about my sofa. He had turned the lovely brown velour Rolf Benz couch, which my parents had been intending to throw out and I had rescued from ending up on the garbage heap, into his preserve. Julian ate everything with his hands, and he always wiped his fingers on his pants. I have never seen pants as greasy as his in my whole life. The sofa had survived the last thirty years. It was older than I was. I was afraid that it would take Julian just a few weeks to ruin it completely.

  Julian aspired to type completely blind. It was almost meditative. When he replied to e-mails, for instance, he typed at a furious pace, moving through the various text fields without glancing at the screen once. He filled out the individual fields in his mind’s eye and jumped from one dialog box to the next using shortcut keys. The connections were infuriatingly slow because our communication with the outside world was encrypted and rendered anonymous by a number of mechanisms, and because our e-mails were sent via a remote computer rather than by our own laptops. If you typed something, it would take ages for it to appear on the screen. Julian was nevertheless determined to do work at double speed—with his eyes closed, you might say. He told me that working without optical feedback was a form of perfection, a victory over time. He finished what he was doing long before his computer did.

  We were already getting a few donations to our PayPal account and had gotten into the habit of sending out thank-you e-mails at regular intervals. In the e-mails we showed our appreciation, telling our supporters how important their contributions were and that they were investing in the freedom of information. We took turns doing this job. This time it was Julian’s turn to write the e-mail and paste in the names of all our current donors.

  So there he was, sitting on my sofa in the yellow light, wrapped in two blankets, rhythmically click-clacking away next to me, writing his e-mails. But the aria came to an abrupt halt with a quiet “Goddamn!” Julian had made a mistake. Because we were sending the e-mails to several recipients, he had to change the “to” line into a “bcc” so that the recipients could not see the names of the other donors. And there was precisely where Julian had slipped up. He had already pressed the Send button—thanks to his perfect way of working.

  This mistake bestowed on us our first and only homegrown leak in February 2009. The reaction to this thank-you e-mail did not take long in coming: “Please use the Blind Carbon Copy [bcc] to send e-mails of this kind” and “Unless you intended to leak the 106 e-mail addresses of your supporters, bcc would be better.” One person offered us some remedial help: “If you don’t know the difference, don’t hesitate to contact me. I will be happy to guide you through the process.”

  Julian wrote an apology. Julian? No, “
Jay Lim,” our legal expert from the “WikiLeaks Donor Relations Department,” the person in charge of donations.

  As chance would have it, one of the donors whom we had thanked on this occasion was a certain Adrian Lamo. He was the semi-famous ex-hacker responsible for the arrest of US Army private Bradley Manning, who has been accused of being one of our sources.

  “Look at that,” Julian said when he discovered Lamo’s contribution. “What an idiot!”

  I clicked our mailbox and yes, there it was: a new secret document. Someone had sent us our own donor list as an official leak, along with a relatively unfriendly comment. Normally, we don’t know who our sources are. But Lamo would later confess that he was the one who had confronted us with our own blunder. For good or for evil, we were going to have to reveal it.

  It was interesting because we had spent some time philosophizing about what would happen if we were compelled to publish something about our own organization. We agreed that we had to release things that were bad as well as good publicity. In fact, our internal leak went down well with the press. At least we were consistent and none of the donors complained.

  Julian often behaved as though he had been raised by wolves rather than by other human beings. Whenever I cooked, the food would not, for instance, end up being shared equally between us. What mattered was who was quicker off the mark. If there were four slices of SPAM, he would eat three and leave one for me if I was too slow. I wondered if I was being small-minded when things my mother used to say would pop into my mind occasionally. Things like “You could at least ask.”

  We both liked raw meat—steak tartare with onions. The fact that I took longer to eat my share was because I ate it with whole-grain bread and butter, while Julian preferred to eat his food without any accompaniments. He would eat meat or cheese or chocolate or bread. If he thought that citrus fruit would do him good, he would suck one lemon after another. And sometimes food would occur to him in the middle of the night after he hadn’t consumed a single bite all day.

  It was not that he had never learned any manners. Julian could be very polite when he wanted to. For example, he frequently accompanied my visitors—even when he didn’t know them—out the door, into the lobby, and onto the street. It was as if he wanted to make sure that they were safe.

  Julian was very paranoid. He was convinced that someone was watching my house, so he decided we should avoid ever being seen leaving or returning to the apartment together. I used to wonder what difference that made. If someone had gone to the trouble of shadowing my apartment, he would have seen us together anyway.

  If we’d been in town together, Julian always insisted that we take separate routes home. He went the left way around while I went right. As a result, I often ended up waiting for him because he had gotten lost. I have never met anyone with such a bad sense of direction. Julian could walk into a telephone booth and forget which direction he had come from when he came out again. He regularly managed to walk past the door to my apartment building. You couldn’t have behaved more conspicuously than Julian did. He used to walk up and down the street, looking left and right, trying to identify my front door, until at some point I came and collected him.

  Perpetually concerned with finding a new look and the perfect disguise, he had borrowed a blue East German sweatshirt from me and teamed it with a brown baseball cap. I laughed to myself at his childlike urge to play. He didn’t look any less conspicuous as a result, but his obvious disguise was somewhat touching. The next time that I went to look for him, he came around the corner dressed like this, with a wooden pallet on his shoulder. The pallet had come from a building site. I wasn’t convinced that this was a very professional disguise.

  Sometimes I think Julian had been overly influenced by certain books, which, mixed with his own imagination, had resulted in a special set of Julian Assange rules of conduct. This reminded me of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who had started off as a science-fiction writer and then began believing his own stories.

  Julian, too, had a very free and easy relationship with the truth. I had the impression that he often tested out how far he could go. For example, he had served me up a story about how his hair had gone white. He told me that when he was fourteen, he had built a reactor at home in his basement and got the poles reversed. From that day on, his hair had grown in white as a result of the gamma radiation. Yeah, sure, I thought. I believe he wanted to see what he could get away with before I would say “Stop! I don’t believe you.” I thought that this was no way to treat other people. Mostly I said nothing.

  Julian was constantly losing his way, getting onto the wrong train and walking in the wrong direction. Whenever he flew from A to B, or traveled by boat or train, a few receipts or documents would go astray. He was always waiting “really urgently” for a letter that would get him out of the next jam: the signature for an account, a new credit card, or a license for a contract. It was always beyond question that this letter would arrive by “tomorrow at the latest.” If you asked him what had become of something that he had promised, he never said that he hadn’t managed to get something done, or that something had slipped his mind, or that he had messed up. Instead he’d say, “I’m just waiting for John Doe or Joe Schmo to respond. He hasn’t gotten back to me yet.” If the admonition “Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today” hadn’t been around for ages, it would have been coined especially for Julian. Rarely was anything his fault. Instead he blamed banks, airport staff, urban planners, and, failing that, the State Department. No doubt it was the State Department that was responsible for dropping the cups that got broken while he was staying with me in Wiesbaden.

  For all his flaws, Julian could concentrate in a way like no one else I’ve ever seen. He could commune with his computer screen for days on end, becoming one with it, forming a single, immovable entity. When I went to bed late, he’d often be sitting there like a thin Buddha on the sofa. When I woke up the next day, Julian would be sitting in a hooded sweatshirt in exactly the same position in front of the computer. Sometimes, when I went to bed the next night, he would still be sitting there.

  You usually couldn’t speak to him when he was working. He sat in deep meditation, programming or reading something or other. At most he used to leap up briefly without any warning and do some strange kung fu exercises. Some media reports said that Julian was at least the equivalent of a black belt in all known international martial arts. In fact, his improvised shadowboxing lasted a maximum of twenty seconds, looked extremely silly, and was probably intended to stretch his joints and tendons after all that sitting.

  Julian could work for days on end and then suddenly fall asleep. He would lie down in all his pants, socks, and sweatshirts, pull the blanket over his head, and drop off. When he woke up, he snapped back into the world just as instantaneously. He would jump up, usually bumping into something. I had a dumbbell bench in the apartment, and I don’t know how many times he leaped up from the mattress where he slept and rammed into the iron bars. There was always a huge crash-bang-wallop, and I would think, “Great. Julian has woken up.”

  One of his amusing quirks was his desire to wear clothes to match his current state of mind. Or perhaps he thought he could only get into the right mood by wearing the right clothes.

  “Daniel, I need a jacket. Do you have one?” he would say.

  “Do you want to go out?”

  “I have to write a very important statement today.”

  “You what?”

  Even though he usually sat at the kitchen table in hooded sweatshirt and cap, I suddenly had to lend him a jacket so that he could write a press release. He wouldn’t take off the jacket the whole day, wearing a serious face the whole time he composed his text. Afterward, he would also go to bed in the jacket.

  In the two months he lived with me, I got to know someone utterly unlike the guys I usually spent my time with. I was used to strong characters; that wasn’t the point. On the one hand, I found Julian unbearable and,
on the other, unbelievably special and lovable. I had the feeling that something must have gone very wrong in his life. He could have been a great person, and I was proud to have a friend who had such fire in his belly, who was so utterly committed to ideas and principles and changing the world for the better. Someone who just got up and did things without concern for what other people said. In certain respects I tried to copy this attitude. But he also had a dark side, and this increasingly gained the upper hand in the months to come.

  Some friends asked me how I was able to put up with Julian for so long. I think that everyone has a difficult side. It is not easy to get along with anyone. In the hacker scene, in particular, there are quite a few extreme characters. Many seem slightly autistic. I’m probably more tolerant than most when it comes to others’ eccentricities and quirks. That’s why I put up with Julian for so long—probably longer than anyone else.

  On February 17, 2009, I was invited to be a guest on the podcast program Küchenradio. Julian wrote the following e-mail to our supporters:

  Daniel Schmitt on Berlin’s Keutchenradio [sic]: A two-hour video and audio interview session with our German correspondent, Daniel Schmitt, will be broadcast on Berlin’s well-regarded Kuechenradio at 21:00 tonight.

  Reading that today makes me gulp a bit. I had almost forgotten what a good time we had together. He wrote “well regarded”—Küchenradio is really a niche podcast for techies, but Julian was nonetheless proud of us. There are, of course, brief moments when I ask myself whether everything necessarily had to go sour. And whether we would still have been friends today if WikiLeaks hadn’t been such a runaway success, if the money and the attention and the international pressure hadn’t followed.

  “Keutchenradio”—that was so Julian! He couldn’t remember non-English words very well. He used to call Der Spiegel “The Speigel” even months after the German newsmagazine had become our closest media partner.