WikiLeaks: a True History

“They had been in so many sites they often couldn’t remember if they had actually hacked a particular computer. The places they could recall read like a Who’s Who of the American military-industrial complex. The US Airforce 7th Command Group Headquarters in the Pentagon. Stanford Research Institute in California. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia. Lockheed Martin’s Tactical Aircraft Systems Air Force Plant in Texas. Unisys Corporation in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA. Motorola Inc. in Illinois. TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, California. Alcoa in Pittsburgh. Panasonic Corp in New Jersey. US Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station. Siemens-Nixdorf Information Systems in Massachusetts. Securities Industry Automation Corp in New York. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Bell Communications Research, New Jersey. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, California.”

“Hackers should be anarchists, not hawks,” thought Mendax.

"He was not motivated by money. He was opposed to Big Brother, to the restriction of freedom of communication. His moral sense about breaking into computer systems was: 'I’m not going to do any harm, so what’s wrong with it?' But that’s a bit like a burglar saying: 'I’m just going to wander through your house, but I won’t touch anything.' It doesn’t quite cut it."

“We had just formed the computer-crimes team, and the government said, ‘Your charter is to establish a deterrent.’ Well, to get a deterrent you have to prosecute people, and we achieved that with Julian and his group.”

"Your honour, I feel a great misjustice has been done and I would like to record the fact that you have been misled by the prosecution.”

“I couldn’t ethically justify that. But as for others, such as people who prey on children or corporate spies, I am not concerned about using my skills there.”

“A few pointy heads in Canberra have been considering your moderator’s continued existence. Consequentially I’ve been called on to justify labour and resources spent on all projects under my control, particularly those that can’t easily be quantified such as IQ, BOS, LACC, IS, LEAKS …”

“The Church, via its manipulation of the legal system has had computer systems seized, system operators forced to reveal their users personal details, university accounts suspended and radio stations, such as RRR cut their programs. It has sued ex-cult members, newspapers, and many others for copyright infringements, loss of earnings and trade secret violation. Trade secret violation? Yes, the Church of Scientology claims its religious works are trade secrets.

“The fight against the Church is far more than the Net vs a bunch of wackos with too much money. It is about corporate suppression of the Internet and free speech. It is about intellectual property and the big and rich versus the small and smart. The precedents the Church sets today [are] the weapons of corporate tirany tomorrow.”

“I am stunned by the EFF’s position on this matter and they no longer have my support."

“Certain members of the EFF board seem to be politically naive. The rational, intelligent lobbyist will always see both sides of the argument. Presenting both sides of the argument to the world at large is another matter altogether. You should only present both sides of the argument to the inner policy tactics personnel only in order to formulate policy and create defences for the weaknesses in your position. The outside world only ever sees a united front. This is basic politics….

“Compromise is part of the legislative process, but it is something you do behind closed doors when the battle is concluded and each faction is counting the dead and starting to divide up territory. If you start the battle in a compromised position, expect to loose everything.”

“If anonymity is outlawed, it will take draconian measures to enforce it - citizen-unit ID cards, officially issued encryption keys, escrow, monitoring of communications, massive penalties to deter illegal use of encryption, and other police state measures.

“On the other hand, if enough degrees of freedom are left untouched, the result is a growing, expanding crypto anarchy. Government will find itself powerless to control commerce (handled via encrypted channels), will find it doesn’t know the True Names of various Net entities, and will end up being chased into an enclave of things it can control.

"My strong hunch is that no stable solutions lie between these two extremes. This is one of those "decision points" for modern society, with attractors pulling the solution to one side or another.”

Julian Assange, a cryptographer who moderates the online Australian discussion forum AUCRYPTO, found the new patent while investigating NSA capabilities.

"This patent should worry people. Everyone’s overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency," he said.

The technology, called "Semantic Forests", is a software program that analyses voice transcripts and other documents in order to allow intelligent searching for specific topics. The software could be used to analyse computer- transcribed telephone conversations. It is named for its use of an electronic dictionary to make a weighted "tree" of meanings for each word in a target document…​

Cryptographer Julian Assange, who moderates the online Australian discussion forum AUCRYPTO, discovered the department papers while investigating NSA capabilities. "This is not some theoretical exercise. The US has actually built and lab tested this technology, which is clearly aimed at telephone calls. You don’t make a wheel like this unless you have something to put it on," he said.

"Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot, and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html forms, placing these wonders where they belong; deep in unix heartland, as god-loving extensions to the shell."

Very quickly, within an hour, I saw what the counter-reaction would be, and that all the proposals that the military-industrial complex had to spy on everyone, to remove probable cause, to increase its funding, would be rushed forward again. That’s precisely what happened.

The creation of WikiLeaks was, in part, a response to Iraq. There were a number of whistle-blowers who came out in relation to Iraq, and it was clear to me that what the world was missing in the days of Iraq propaganda was a way for inside sources who knew what was really going on to communicate that information to the public. Quite a few who did ended up in very dire circumstances, including David Kelly, the British scientist who either committed suicide or was murdered over his revelations about weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.

"The final nail in the coffin was that I went to the hundredth anniversary of physics at the ANU (Australian National University). There were some 1500 visitors there - four Nobel prize winners - and every goddamn one of them was carting around, on their backs, a backpack given to them by the Defence Science Technology Organisation. At least it was an Australian defence science organisation."

“At the prize ceremony, the head of ANU physics motioned to us and said, ‘you are the cream of Australian physics.’ I looked around and thought, ‘Christ Almighty I hope he’s wrong.’”

"I painted every corner, floor, wall, and ceiling in the room I was in black, until there was only one corner left. I mean intellectually… To me, it was the forced move, when you have to do something or you’ll lose the game."

"That’s the way it feels to me, yes."

"I thought that I needed to share this wealth that I had discovered about the world with people, to give knowledge to people…​ This led me to using cryptography to protect human rights, in novel ways, and eventually as a result of what I was doing in mathematics and in physics and political activism, things seemed to come together and show that there was a limit to what I was doing — and what the rest of the world was doing. There was not enough information available in our common intellectual record to explain how the world really works."

"I am the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest."

"It took him months and months of hundred-hour weeks. The thing about Julian is that he is absolutely obsessively driven when he has a goal he wants to achieve. So he basically dropped everything, lived on the smell of an oily rag, enlisted a whole range of people from around the world and got them involved."

As we understood it, the way information circulates in our society, and around the world, is deeply problematic. In authoritarian societies, in undemocratic societies, information is controlled by coercion and force. In the democracies, the situation is different, but the result still bad: information is not so much controlled as constrained by economic and institutional forces within governments and corporations, by ideologies. It is more subtle, but we only need turn on the TV to see the results.

Either way, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. Either way, to put it in quintessentially Australian terms, the people of this world are treated like mushrooms: Kept in the dark, and fed shit. Wikileaks is a fundamentally anti-mushroom organisation.

Wikileaks proposed that the people reject their status as fungi – find out what their governments are doing, what corporations are doing, what the powerful are doing, what the 1% are doing. And to present it via facts, in true scientific fashion, by primary documents, by falsifiable data. Science and fact in the cause of justice.

Moreover, by presenting new and fresh information, Wikileaks would not only bring truth to the world, but new and newsworthy truths. We imagined that Wikileaks would be a force for the empowerment of the people of the world, for the people of the world to use facts, to use understanding, to use science to build a better world.

Or at least, not to be fucking mushrooms.

Dear John,

You knew me under another name from cypherpunk days. I am involved in a project that you may have feeling for. I will not mention its name yet in case you feel yu [sic] are not able to be involved.

The project is a mass document leaking project that requires someone with backbone to hold the .org domain registration. We would like that person to be someone who is not privy to the location of the master servers which are otherwise obscured by technical means.

We expect the domain to come under the usual political and legal pressure. The policy for .org requires that registrants details not be false or misleading. It would be an easy play to cancel the domain unless someone were willing to stand up and claim to be the registrant. This person does not need to claim any other knowledge or involvement.

Will you be that person?

Dear Mr. Ellsberg.

We have followed with interest and delight your recent statements on document leaking. We have come to the conclusion that fomenting a world wide movement of mass leaking is the most cost effective political intervention available to us* We believe that injustice is answered by good governance and for there to be good governance there must be open governance. Governance by stealth is governance by conspiracy and fear. Fear, because without it, secrecy does not last for long. Retired generals and diplomats are vociferous, but those in active service hold their tune.

Lord Action said, "Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity".

This degeneration comes about because when injustice is concealed, including plans for future injustice, it cannot be addressed. When governance is closed, man’s eyes become cataracts. When governance is open, man can see and so act to move the world towards a more just state; for instance see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders which shows a striking correlation between press freedom and countries known for their quality of life.

us*: some attributes may have been swapped to protect selected identities, no particular order.

1) Retired new york architect and notorious intelligence leak facilitator 2) Euro cryptographer/programmer 3) Pacific physicist and illustrator 4) A pacific author and economic policy lecturer 5) Euro, Ex-Cambridge mathematician/cryptographer/programmer 6) Euro businessman and security specialist/activist 7) Author of software than runs 40% of the world’s websites. 8) US pure mathematician with criminal law background 9) An infamous US ex-hacker 10) Pacific cryptographer/physicist and activist 11) US/euro cryptographer and activist/programmer 12) Pacific programmer 13) Pacific architect / foreign policy wonk

New technology and cryptographic ideas permit us to not only encourage document leaking, but to facilitate it directly on a mass scale. We intend to place a new star in the political firmament of man. We are building an uncensorizable branch of Wikipedia for leaked documents and the civic institutions & social perceptions necessary to defend and promote it. We have received over 1 million documents from 13 countries, despite not having publicly launched yet!

We have approached you now for two reasons. Firstly, we have crossed over from `prospective' to `projective'. The basic technology has been prototyped and we have a view as how we must proceed politically and legally. We need to move and inspire people, gain volunteers, funding, further set up the necessary political-legal defenses and deploy. Since you have thought about leaking more than anyone we know, we would like you on board. We’d like your advice and we’d like you to form part of our political armor. The more armor we have, particularly in the form of men and women sanctified by age, history and class, the more we can act like brazen young men and get away with it.

Secondly, we would like to award "The Ellsburg Prize for Courageous Action" and "The Ellsburg Prize for Courageous Action (USA)", for the two leaks submitted in the past year which most assist humanity. The regionalization of the second prize is to encourage patrons of similar awards in other countries. Although it is premature to go into detail, we have designed a scheme were this can be meaningfully awarded to anonymous leakers. We have been pledged substantial initial funding.

Please tell us your thoughts. If you are happy, we will add you to our internal mailinglist, contacts, etc. Solidarity! WL.

“Your concept is terrific and I wish you the best of luck with it.”

"This is a restricted internal development mailing list for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g. Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to 'WL'. This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer and plenty of backbone."

To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.

We must understand the key generative structure of bad governance.

We must develop a way of thinking about this structure that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of competing political moralities and into a position of clarity. Most importantly, we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling and effective action to replace the structures that lead to bad governance with something better.

First take some nails (“conspirators”) and hammer them into a board at random. Then take twine (“communication”) and loop it from nail to nail without breaking. Call the twine connecting two nails a link. Unbroken twine means it is possible to travel from any nail to any other nail via twine and intermediary nails. Mathematicians say that this type of graph is connected.

Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy, others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between important sections or groupings of the conspiracy…​

Imagine a thick heavy cord between some nails and fine light thread between others. Call the importance, thickness or heaviness of a link its weight. Between conspirators that never communicate the weight is zero. The “importance” of communication passing through a link is difficult to evaluate a priori, since its true value depends on the outcome of the conspiracy. We simply say that the “importance” of communication contributes to the weight of a link in the most obvious way; the weight of a link is proportional to the amount of important communication flowing across it.

“The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.

“Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

“Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.”

In relation to timing; We intend to go live with a reduced system in the next month. Untill then we are publishing selected analysis in convential venues to get some material out and encourage assistance. We’re gradually scaling up. At the moment we have certain asymmetries- e.g more leaks than we can store or index. It’s just a matter of gradually inspiring increasing commitment and resources from generous people.