On the morning of April 5, 2010, a tall, thin man with a shock of silver hair walked up to a lectern at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He had been running an obscure news website out of Iceland for four years. The attempt to find a scoop that would set the world on fire fails. Many of the 40 or so journalists who showed up (including me) had barely heard of him.
Still, his pitch was hard to ignore. Three days earlier, we received an email promising a “previously unreleased secret video” with “dramatic evidence and new facts.”
But even that little hype might have underestimated what happened after the man, Julian Assange, pressed play. The nature of evidence – the volume and granularity of digital evidence and the ways in which it comes to light – should change.
Until now, information leaked to the public by insiders has been largely limited by the paper’s restrictions. In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg spent an entire night secretly photocopying a secret study on the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers.
Now thousands of such documents – along with images, videos, spreadsheets, email spools, source code and chat logs – could be pulled onto a USB stick and transmitted around the globe in seconds. Find an insider with enough access or a hacker with enough talent and any security system could be broken. Sources could be obscured. All that was missing was a middleman – a publisher who could find leaks, post the content, and then take responsibility after it went live.
Mr Assange’s video had the inflammatory title “Collateral Murder”. It began with a still image of a son holding a picture of his dead father, a Reuters news agency driver, followed by leaked footage from a 2007 airstrike showing an American helicopter crashing on a Baghdad street Reuters photographer and driver shot and killed.
There was the drawl of a U.S. soldier using a profanity to refer to a man lying hundreds of feet below him – one of the Reuters employees killed in the attack. The video appeared to contradict an account by a Pentagon spokesman who had claimed the airstrike was part of “combat operations against an enemy force.” Within hours, the story was picked up by Al Jazeera, MSNBC and the New York Times.
What followed was a chain of seismic revelations, some from Mr. Assange’s website WikiLeaks, others from other media outlets. It continues to this day: a trove of State Department cables released by WikiLeaks in conjunction with The Times (2010-11), Edward Snowden’s revelations from the National Security Agency (2013), the Sony Pictures hack (2014), the Drone Papers (2015), the Panama Papers (2016), 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 just a few.
Looking back, it is easy to see Mr. Assange as the father of the digital leaking revolution. At the time, he was more of a talented promoter who managed to position himself at the center of several trends that began to converge at the turn of the millennium.
“In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people hacked into systems and captured documents, but these hackers had no ideological inclination to hack and leak,” said Gabriella Coleman, a Harvard anthropology professor whose new book, “Weapons of the Geek ” will contain two chapters on the history of hacking and leaks.
Mr. Assange was the first to figure out how to bring its fruits to the large audience reached by the traditional news media. Even as his legal saga comes to an end with his admission of guilt and his return to Australia, it is clear that his larger legacy – the volatile fusion of illegal hack-and-leak methods with the reach and credibility of established US publishers – still endures.
On Wednesday, Mr. 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, director of 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. “It wasn’t necessarily because of the law that it didn’t happen before. It was probably custom. This custom depended on a relationship between the media and the government, on the understanding that while they had different ideas about what the public interest was, both had a fundamentally American understanding of what the public interest was. Then comes WikiLeaks. In their view, American imperialism is the greatest threat to world peace. It is a view of the public interest that is radically different from that of the US federal government and puts pressure on the old consensus.”
At a rudimentary level, Mr. Assange’s activities largely resembled those of the traditional news media. He collected and published authentic, up-to-date information. However, his goals 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 required a certain level of secrecy to function. Instead, he sought, in his words, to “change the regime’s behavior” by making the secrecy itself untenable. In its place would arise the “will of the people for truth, love and self-realization.”
It was a utopian vision, more of an excuse than an argument. One of the contradictions in Mr. Assange’s criminal case is how much his freedom depended on the very kind of backroom diplomatic dealings that he had worked for years to lampoon and expose.
As director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama, James R. Clapper Jr. dealt with the fallout from numerous hack-and-leak incidents. In an email interview, he rejected the idea that Mr. Assange’s revelations had changed anyone’s opinion about the morality of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Instead, he said, WikiLeaks merely served to reinforce the pre-existing views of the faction that already believed that U.S. 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 leak is still being written, in part by organizations like Distributed Denial of Secrets and XnetLeaks. Like WikiLeaks, these websites claim and publish digital leaks on a large scale. However, they have higher standards when it comes to redacting information and verifying sources.
As for Mr. Assange, he “embarked on a very bold experiment,” Ms. Coleman said. “Experiments inevitably have successes and failures. But you needed someone to be brave and do it.”
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2024-06-29 16:30:49
www.nytimes.com
