It's been reported that WikiLeaks has released more classified documents
than the rest of the world's media combined. Can that possibly be true?
Yeah, "can it possibly be true", it's a worry isn't it ?
That the rest of the world's media is doing such a bad job
that a little group of activists is able to release
more of that type of information than the rest of the world has combined.
[Soldiers voices during the war in Irak]
Come on, fire !
Good evening, there's a secret file from the Irak war...
...the internet platform "Wikileaks"...
... the internet website "Wikileaks" published ...
WikiLeaks have made public the most extensive,
classified, military and diplomatic material ever.
What they've released is challenging and provoking governments
with skeletons in the cupboards all over the world.
We should condemn the disclosure of any classified information
by individuals and organizations.
The people who are in power will not give that power away freely,
that is just unfortunately a fact of nature.
The defense department demands that WikiLeaks return immediately
all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly
from the department of defense databases or records.
It's only now that the true story behind the development of this closed organization
is coming to light,
but while the world is discussing whether Assange is a rapist or a saint,
WikiLeaks continue to persue their own political agenda.
Every release we do of material has a second message and that is:
« we set examples. If you engage in immoral, in unjust behavior,
it will be found out, it will be revealed and you will suffer the consequences. ».
What we have here is a new breed of rebel, I.T. guerrillas without a national base,
student digs, coffee bars and server rooms, these are their command and control centers spread all over the world
and the battle has already started.
The general in charge of 120 advanced intelligence agency personnel
targeting this institution and its products.
- WikiRebels -
WikiLeaks have become a global force to be reckoned with in record time.
It may not be easy to grasp at first, but the release of classified information
n'est qu'un petit pas dans une bataille politique et idéologique à long terme.
and that leaking classified information is a weapon and not a means unto itself.
The public has a right to know materials
and the historical record has a right to have materials of diplomatic, political, ethnic or historical significance.
If something is interfering with that process, we will undo it.
He's been called The Scarlet Pimpernel of the computer age.
If one were to judge him on his looks alone, you could call him a chameleon given the frequency
of his change of hair styles during the six months we've been following WikiLeaks.
But if you look under the surface you'll soon discover that Julian Assange
has been revolting against the powers that be for a long time.
As a teenager in Australia he called himself "Mendax" and got a name for himself as a highly skilled hacker.
By the age of 21 he found himself in court pleading guilty to some 20 different charges of hacking.
Yeah, I mean we had a back door in the US military security coordination centre.
This is the peak security body controlling Milnet, the US military internet.
We had total control of this for two years.
The US space agency, NASA is one of the victims of the computer hacking syndicate.
American investigators including the FBI contacted Australian authorities with their suspicions.
The court was told the man even tampered with the police investigation into hacking of the ANU.
The judge seeing Assange as just an inquisitive young man,
fined him a symbolic sum and released him,
however the trial added further fuel to Assange's feelings
about the importance of unrestricted information.
Together with some friends he sets up one of Australia's first internet suppliers
and gives people with politically sensitive viewpoints a platform from which to publish their opinions.
But when one of his customers publishes secret Scientology manuals,
this prompts aggressive efforts to censor him.
one of the lawyers for scientology in California sent me letters trying to attack us
and they ended up hiring a private investigator to try and track me down,
who did manage to get hold of my silent telephone line
and called me up and just as a sort of threatening maneuver,
I ended up tracking down how they did that.
Those efforts to censor the site strengthen his conviction that something
has to be done against those withholding important information from the public at large.
What the problem was,
they needed to use more actions
that created positive reform effect,
more actions that would adjust and corrective
to injustice.
Assange sees disclosures as a preventative instrument,
it warns those involved in morally questionable or criminal acts that
they'll be found out and will have to face consequences.
I understood the significance of disclosures for quite some time,
I mean I registered [wiki]leaks.org in 1999.
In 2006, Assange and a group of like-minded people
start building up a special internet service WikiLeaks.org,
exclusively for people wishing to blow the whistle on abuse of power.
His fellow conspirators comprised of hackers and mathematicians,
they're located around the world
and communicate via a restricted mailing list.
From this platform they start defining their thoughts of building up a worldwide movement
to mass publicize classified information.
They affirm that this is the most cost effective political weapon
and that they intend to place a new star on the political firmament of man.
Any reform that is large scale must be based upon information because,
what else can spread other than viruses only information can spread
and achieve large scale reform.
Inspired by Wikipedia, WIkiLeaks distribute the leaked information
to anonymous volunteers to check its authenticity
and eliminate any traces of the senders identity.
It turns out that the majority of the general public has neither the time,
interest or resources to analyze WikiLeaks' material
but there are professionals to turn to.
In 2006 we hoped that the general public would write analysis articles,
collaboratively,
and ... this was not at all true.
WikiLeaks had come to the conclusion that media are the only channels
that have the resources and motivation required to create a real impact.
In 2007, WikiLeaks in association with the British daily newspaper, The Guardian,
published evidence of former president Daniel rap Moi
having embezzled massive sums from Kenyan state funds.
Shortly after that they release a report about the Kenyan police's use of death patrols.
This disclosure causes a great stir,
but as an organization, WikiLeaks continue to remain unknown to the general public,
however the word spreads among activists far and wide on the net,
eventually reaching the german "Chaos Computer Club",
the biggest and oldest club for hackers in the world.
I heard about it in late 2007 from a couple of friends.
I started reading a bit more
but I started to understand the value of such a project to society.
The political engaged chaos computer club has been fighting a long-term battle for free access to information.
One of its members, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, is quick to recognize
the common ground between his view of society and that of Wikileaks.
He quits his job as a computer consultant
so as to devote all of his to the new organization.
The question is the attitude.
What attitude do you have to society ?
Do you, do you look at what there is
and you accept that as god given,
or do you see society as something
where you identify a problem and you find a creative solution for that problem.
So it is a matter of are you a spectator
or are you actively participating in ... in society.
The computer club has put the skills of some of the sharpest hacking talents in the world at Wikileaks disposal.
What's needed now is a physical haven.
Hackers linked to the swedish file-sharing site Pirate Bay have what they need.
Considerable technical skills in a place where freedom of speech is unusually free.
A lot of the countries of today's world do not have really strong laws for the media anymore.
But.. a few countries like for instance Belgium, also the United States with the 1st amendement,
and especially for example Sweden have very strong laws protecting the media
and the work of investigative or general journalists.
So, from our perspective this is something, if there's any Swedes here, you have to make sure that your country
is really one the strongholds of freedom of information.
Sweden has an enviable, although far from perfect record in protecting publications.
It has a practical record within the past few years
of protecting internet publications against censorship.
And it's precisely Sweden's unique freedom of speech laws that prompts Wikileaks
to locate their main site in this unpretentious basement, in one of Stockolms inner suburbs.
At first they wanted to tunnel traffic through us,
to bypass IP bans in places that don't like Wikileaks. But later they put a server here.
PRQ offer their customers total secrecy.
Their systems prevent anyone from eavesdropping either Wikileaks chat pages or finding out who send what to who.
We provide anonymity services, VPN tunnels.
A client connects to our server and downloads information.
If anyone at the information's source tries to trace them,
they can only get to us, and we don't disclose who was using that IP number.
PRQ have a track record of being the hardest ISP you can find in the world.
There's just no one else that bothers less about lawyers
harassing them about content they're hosting.
And it's just the attitute that, let's say, works very well with what Wikileaks was set out to do.
One reason why Wikileaks need PRQ
is that their operations are protected by Swedens strict freedom of expression laws.
Laws which PRQ exploit to the full.
We accept anything that is legal under Swedish law,
regardless of how objectionable it is.
We don't make moral judgements.
This is a ticking information bomb, instead of conventional weapons.
Hopefully this information can somehow
stop some conventional weapons.
And we aren't talking about any old information.
It's from these servers, at PRQ, that Wikileaks has, for example, made public
a manual from the United States Guantanamo bay detention center.
A military manual leaked on the Internet, is revealing details of the way terror suspects
are being treated at the US naval base at Guantanamo bay in Cuba.
It tells of the use of solitary confinement and humiliation to break down the detainees mentally.
Human Rights Groups have for years been asking the US administration
for access to this manual.
If you censor important material of this type, we're not just gonna criticize you.
We're gonna take the material you're trying to censor,
and we're going to spray it all over the world.
And we're gonna stick in our archives in a way that it's never going to disappear,
encourage everyone to get copies of it.
Wikileaks battle against censorship knows no geographical frontiers.
The next step is to publish an internal report commissioned by the multinational trading company Trafigura,
who are alleged to have dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast
that caused tens of thousands of people to seek medical care.
The Guardian newspaper was going to produce a big story on this.
And as a result, they were gagged.
The company obtained a secret order, in court, to gag all the press in UK
from reporting anything related to the content of that report and ... the fact that they had been gagged.
In the US, hackers discover that the republican presidential candidate "Sarah Palin"
is apparently bypassing US transparency laws by using a private email account
to conduct government business.