On the morning of April 5, 2010, a tall, thin man with silver hair approached a lectern at the National Press Club in Washington. He had been running an obscure news site from Iceland for four years, trying unsuccessfully to find a scoop that would set the world on fire. Most of the 40 or so journalists (including myself) who showed up had barely heard of him.
Still, it was hard to ignore his argument. Three days earlier, we received an email promising a “new classified video” containing “spectacular evidence and new facts.”
But even that hype may not have been enough to account for what happened after Julian Assange pressed “play.” The nature of the evidence—the volume and granularity of digital evidence, as well as the pathways through which it is revealed—was about to change.
Previously, information disclosed by insiders to the general public was largely limited by the limitations of paper. In 1969, it took Daniel Ellsberg an entire night to secretly photocopy a secret study on the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers.
Now thousands of these documents—along with images, videos, spreadsheets, email spools, source code, and chat logs—could be slipped onto a USB stick and transmitted around the world in seconds. Find an insider with enough access or a hacker with enough talent, and any security system could be breached. Sources could be obscured. All that was missing was a middleman: a publisher who could find leaks, publish the content, and then take the heat after it went live.
Mr Assange’s video had an incendiary title: “Collateral Murder.” It started with a still photo of a son holding a photo of his deceased father, a driver for the Reuters news agency, followed by leaked footage of a 2007 airstrike showing a U.S. helicopter shooting and killing a Reuters photographer and driver on a Baghdad street.
The drawling voice of an American soldier could be heard speaking of a man hundreds of yards below – one of the Reuters employees killed in the attack – with an expletive. the video seems to contradict an account given by a Pentagon spokesman, who said the airstrike was part of “combat operations against a hostile force.” Within hours, the story was picked up by Al Jazeera, MSNBC and the New York Times.
What followed was a series of seismic revelations, some from Mr. Assange’s site, WikiLeaks, others from other media outlets. It continues today: a trove of State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in collaboration with The temperature (2010-11), Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency disclosures (2013), the Sony Pictures hack (2014), the Drone Papers (2015), the Panama Papers (2016), the hacked Democratic National Committee emails (2016), details of US offensive cyber programs (2017), Hunter Biden’s laptop (2020), and the Facebook files (2021), to name a few.
In retrospect, it is easy to regard Mr. Assange as the father of the digital revolution in terms of leaks. At the time, he was more like a talented promoter, who managed to position himself at the center of several currents that began to converge at the turn of the millennium.
“In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people were hacking systems and stealing documents, but those hackers were not ideologically inclined to hack and leak information,” said Gabriella Coleman, professor of anthropology at Harvard, whose new book, “Weapons of the Geek,” will include two chapters on the history of hacking and leaks.
Mr Assange was the first to figure out how to resonate with the broad audiences reached by traditional news media. Even as his legal saga draws to a close with his to plead guilty and back in Australia, it’s clear that its broader legacy – the volatile fusion of illicit hacking and leaking methods with the reach and credibility of established US publishers – is still unfolding.
On Wednesday, Assange pleaded guilty to conspiring with one of his sources, Chelsea Manning, to obtain and publish government secrets in violation of the Espionage Act. Ben Wizner, who directs the Free Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the conviction could have far-reaching consequences.
“This was the first time in modern American history that publishing truthful information was criminalized,” Mr. Wizner said. “The fact that this hadn’t happened before was not necessarily due to the law. It was probably because of custom. This custom depended on a relationship between the media and the government, the understanding that while they might have different ideas about what the public interest was, they both had a fundamentally American conception of what it was. was the public interest. Then WikiLeaks comes along. Their view is that American imperialism poses the greatest threat to world peace. This is a vision of the public interest radically different from that of the American state, which puts pressure on the old consensus.”
At a rudimentary level, Mr. Assange’s activities largely resembled those of the traditional news media. He gathered and published authentic and newsworthy information. His goals, however, were different.
Rather than claiming neutrality or objectivity, Mr. Assange presented himself as a warrior, committed to the cause of radical transparency. He refused to accept that even democratic governments need a certain amount of secrecy to function. Instead, he sought, in his words, to “change the behavior of the regime” by making secrecy itself untenable. In its place would arise “the people’s will for truth, love and self-realization.”
It was a utopian vision, more an excuse than an argument. One of the contradictions in Mr. Assange’s criminal record is the extent to which his freedom depended precisely about the type of behind-the-scenes diplomatic dealings that he had spent years exposing and denouncing.
As director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama, James R. Clapper Jr. dealt with the fallout from numerous hacking and leak episodes. In an email interview, he rejected the idea that Mr. Assange’s revelations had changed minds about the morality of the American intelligence apparatus. Instead, he said, WikiLeaks only reinforced preexisting views of the faction that already believed that American spy agencies were “evil.”
“I don’t think it moved the needle one way or the other,” he said.
Still, Ms. Coleman said, the story of the leaks is still being written, in part by organizations like Distributed denial of secrets And Xnet Leaks. Like WikiLeaks, these sites solicit and publish numerous digital leaks. But they have higher standards when it comes to reporting information and verifying sources.
As for Mr. Assange, he was “engaging in a very bold experiment,” Ms. Coleman said. “Experiments are bound to have successes and failures. But someone had to be bold and take the plunge.
