Julian Assange at New Media Days 09 in Copenhagen (Image: New Media Days / Peter Erichsen Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 License)

Lifting the lid on the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks and its enigmatic hacker-turned-activist founder

Editorial: Will someone leak the leaker’s secrets?

“QUICK, you’ve got to come now or you’ll miss him,” says the press officer. I’m being ushered down a corridor in the back of the Randolph hotel, Oxford, UK, to meet Julian Assange, an Australian hacker and the founder of the whistle-blower’s website WikiLeaks.


I find Assange sitting on a red leather armchair surrounded by journalists and holding a makeshift press conference. He looks wary, like a man on the run, and speaks in a hushed, deep tone- his voice barely audible above the general hubbub- carefully choosing every word. He seems ill at ease, and I can’t work out whether he dislikes the press attention, is genuinely scared for his life, or is just a bit socially awkward.

Assange was thrust into the limelight in April after WikiLeaks posted a video of US forces killing civilians in Iraq in 2007. For three years the news agency Reuters had tried, fruitlessly, to get hold of the classified official documents and video describing these events using the US Freedom of Information Act. WikiLeaks- a tiny ad hoc organisation headed by Assange and run by an undisclosed number of volunteers- scored a coup, striking a goal for citizen journalism and invoking the US government’s ire in the process.

“Is there a threat to your security coming from the United States?” one journalist asks.

“There have been unreasonable statements made in private by certain officials in the US administration,” Assange replies.

“How would you define ‘unreasonable’?”

“Statements which suggest that they may not follow the rule of law.”

Assange says he hasn’t had any direct physical threats, but adds that he cancelled a recent trip to the US on the advice of an investigative journalist. It is classic cloak-and-dagger stuff, and it gets more so by the day.

Ten days after I met Assange at the press conference in July, his fame mushroomed overnight with the publication of the Afghan War Diary. This collection of over 91,000 documents chronicled virtually every battle and skirmish in the war in Afghanistan. Around 75,000 of them were released on WikiLeaks (the remainder were withheld for security reasons), with simultaneous coverage in The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times. Assange agreed to give all three newspapers access to the documents six weeks in advance of publication on his website, a new tactic for the previously little-known organisation. This advance access has proved to be a shrewd move, bringing Assange and WikiLeaks fame on an international scale. Then came the backlash, with several front-page stories in other newspapers echoing US government criticism that the leaks potentially endanger the lives of Afghans working with NATO forces.

Though the War Diary held crucial details about the war in Afghanistan, it didn’t alter our understanding of it. The real story revolved around the way the material had been leaked. Something fundamental about how information reaches the public arena has changed. “WikiLeaks underlines to government that simply stamping something as secret isn’t a solution, because it will come out,” says Ross Anderson, a computer security researcher at the University of Cambridge.

Simply stamping something as secret isn’t a solution, because it will come out

What, exactly, has changed? Whistle-blowers may always have chosen what to leak, but the big difference here is that WikiLeaks is able to publish and promote this information to a global audience on a system that makes correction, or post hoc removal, virtually impossible. How did such a system come about?

Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006. It offers a way for whistle-blowers to anonymously reveal sensitive material to the public. “WikiLeaks is a combined technical, legal and political tool,” he says. Since its inception it has published several high-profile leaks, including revelations of corruption in the Kenyan government, the membership list of the British National Party, and the operating procedures manual for Guantanamo Bay prison. But the leaks this year have truly marked its coming of age.

Assange was born in Australia 39 years ago, in Townsville, Queensland. He reportedly moved 37 times by the age of 14, and his schooling was largely done at home. In his teens he developed an interest in computers and became a keen hacker, breaking into several government and corporate servers. Australian police eventually caught up with him, and in his early 20s he stood trial for hacking. Around that time his marriage fell apart, and after a lengthy custody case over his son was concluded he made a trip through Vietnam. When he returned to Australia he wound up studying physics at the University of Melbourne. There his nascent interest in activism developed and the seeds for WikiLeaks were sown.

The site is hosted by Swedish internet provider PRQ. Sweden was seen as the ideal jurisdiction for WikiLeaks because of the country’s stringent laws protecting whistle-blowers. The content is mirrored on several other web servers around the globe, and on peer-to-peer networks- where content is virtually impossible to censor. To protect the identity of its sources, it uses a computer network based on a system called Tor. Tor is a successor to Onion Routing, developed by US naval intelligence as a way for its field operatives to communicate anonymously over the internet. All messages in the network are encrypted, so covert communications cannot be distinguished from ordinary messages. “It’s a delicious irony that a system first developed by the US government has now come back to haunt them,” says Anderson.

Once WikiLeaks receives a submission, Assange says there is a rigorous process to check that the information is genuine. This can involve contacting the subject of the leak, and- as in the case of the Iraq video footage- sending people to verify details on the ground. “As far as we know, we’ve never released false information,” he says.

What is less clear is who decides what information is released and when. In fact, Assange has refused to answer any questions about how his organisation works (it is yet another irony that the mission of such a secretive organisation is to enforce openness on others). However, someone I contacted via the WikiLeaks webserver, who claimed to be a WikiLeaks volunteer, told me that a core of five staff coordinate the analysis of content on the site, and that “to an extent” Assange has editorial veto over what gets published.

As New Scientist went to press, another twist emerged. A 1.4-gigabyte encrypted file labelled “insurance” appeared on WikiLeaks, prompting speculation that it contained the full, unedited War Diary, and that the pass code to access the files would be released if any action were taken against the site by US authorities. If true, Assange has dramatically upped the ante. Whether this helps in his mission to make the world a more transparent place remains to be seen.