Part 6 (1/2)
10.
THE GENESIS OF WIKILEAKS.
Throughout his philosophical journey, Julian a.s.sange has come to believe that humans are not a left-wing idea against a right-wing one, or faith against reason, but rather individuals against inst.i.tutions.
After having read Kafka, Koestler and Solzhenitsyn, he believes that hierarchical inst.i.tutions have corrupted truth, creativity, art, love and compa.s.sion.16 His trips, his involvement in the Internet for all, his four years of study, as well as his political activities, all represent a sum of experiences pus.h.i.+ng him to envision the world in a new, more global way.
He mirrored the world between philosophy and the scientific mind, and wanted to share this vision, mixing personal thoughts with famous quotes.
Julian launched his blog in June 2006, which he amusingly called 'IQ' for Intellectual Quotient. Later on, he posted on the potential significance of this acronym. He particularly liked Infinite Quest, International Question and even Isaac's Quest, a reference to the Bible character in Genesis. In the Bible, G.o.d asks Abraham, Isaac's father, to sacrifice his only son. Abraham fears G.o.d and obeys him, but just before killing him, an angel stops him and saves Isaac. During the First and Second Crusades, Isaac was considered a martyr and an example to follow. He's the one we sacrifice out of fear, and the one G.o.d saves.
Julian started his first post with a quote by Douglas Adams, English author and dramatist who died in 2001. He used this quote, but omitted the author: ”The history of warfare is subdivided into three equal parts: Retribution: I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother.
Antic.i.p.ation: I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother.
Diplomacy: I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the pretext that your brother did it.”
His view of diplomacy and war was dominated by logic. Julian was increasingly interested in how governments work and a.n.a.lyzed them with his literary culture and scientific sensibility.
Julian weeded through research project reports tagged 'MDA904.' Reports with this code name were research doc.u.ments ordered by the Maryland Procurement Office, accused today of being an umbrella for the National Security Agency (NSA), one of the branches of the CIA.
In November 2006, Julian wrote his first article ent.i.tled 'State and Terrorist Conspiracies,' as if it were a research paper. In it, he described a report by mathematicians and applied the graph theory to a.n.a.lyze terrorist conspiracies.
In December 2006, Julian re-used the a.n.a.lysis applying it to state conspiracies and wrote his manifesto ent.i.tled 'Conspiracy as Governance.' He then expanded on ”this understanding of terrorist organizations and turns it on the likes of its creators, where it becomes a knife to dissect the power conspiracies used to maintain authoritarian government.”
Julian also explained what bad governance is by defining it as 'conspiratorial': Civil servants who secretly collaborate work to the detriment of populations. According to him, when internal lines of communication within organizations are interrupted, the flow of information among conspirators starts to disappear. When the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. That's when leaks become a weapon of information warfare.
Even though Julian kept working for a few years as a developer, network administrator and security advisor, he felt destined for something greater: exposing state secrets to the light of day to see the true workings of the world and its geopolitical interaction. He was convinced that the world would be revolutionized and felt he had a duty to history.
His IT knowledge and hacker past provided him with a certain kind of power. If major power implied great responsibilities, then Julian felt as though he needed to use his abilities for the greater good. Carrying out actions against conspiracies means carrying out a war against secrecy and tirelessly weakening bad governance, state or inst.i.tutional.
Julian was imbued with hacker ethics. He believed that sharing information was a powerful source of good and it was his duty as a hacker to share his expertise by offering free software and easy access to IT resources any time he could.
That was what he had started to do with Suburbia.
Most hackers and free and open-source software programmers adhere to this 'rule,' and many act accordingly by creating and giving away software. Some go even further and believe that any information must be free and any proprietary control is bad.
The similarity between these ethics and WikiLeaks' philosophy is fundamental: to be a tool for sharing information. The quality of information was seen as particularly defining. 'Bad information' has to be fought without question.
WikiLeaks main goal is to provide raw, quality information following the founding principles of Wikipedia: online encyclopedia (knowledge for all), a neutral point of view (information remains pure), free content (content can be re-used), interacting in a respectful and civil manner (ethics ensured by members), and not having firm rules (errors are self-regulated by the community).
However, the nature of the content aimed by WikiLeaks convergence with the world of journalism, which was also involved in sharing information had to be questioned.
In the beginning, Julian didn't see himself as a journalist, but did say he'd provide journalists with quality information. He felt a burning desire to bring some cla.s.s to said profession. He believed in freedom of the press (Suburbia mission) and easily understood that the press remained a choice as means of distribution.
Defined in theses terms: what was considered quality information? It was first and foremost relevant information that would touch readers: secret doc.u.ments that concerned the way the world was run, major corporations, banks and religions.
A journalist also needed 'trustworthy' information, which was verified, checked and regrouped. WikiLeaks must be provided with false leaks to be able to check their veracity.
Then it was up to journalists to select the information to be considered and regroup it if necessary, cross-reference it and use it. This information had to be complete and easily accessible.
WikiLeaks didn't want to replace journalism. Some members still thought that traditional journalism, in its current state, was in transformation and they had little confidence in mainstream media, which struggled with commercial and political pressure.
This was why their choice of broadcasting would first be done using alternative Internet media. WikiLeaks wanted to give birth to 'intensified' journalism, where competences and responsibilities would be divided along the way and where some people would take side roads to give the world something to think about.
Julian a.s.sange was looking for no less than the biggest collaboration with independent and organically modern media on the basis of correct information which had not been tampered with or cloaked by any kind of secrecy in order to be able to extract some sense and ideally, more truth. The people who partic.i.p.ated in the workings of war machines had to face their responsibilities, even cases of conscience, which were previously preserved by the nature of secrecy.
11.
THE ORGANIZATION.
Julian a.s.sange had been hatching his plan for a long time. Back in 2001, he had already started looking for a server to host critical content, and eventually called upon the Cypherpunk hacking network to host doc.u.ments and images. Under the name 'Proff', he shared his philosophical thoughts, security tips and program discoveries on the Cypherpunk mailing list. ”The content is legal for the moment, const.i.tutionally protected in the United States. If you're happy to host cryptome.org, then you'll perhaps be happy to host this material,” he wrote in his contact email to the network.
Cryptome is a website hosted in the United States that has been collecting thousands of doc.u.ments since 1996 that were either controversial or have been censured by various governments. John Young, a New York architect, is the owner of the site.
It was quite logical for Julian to ask him for help to launch WikiLeaks in October 2006. Here's his e-mail request: 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 you are not able to be involved.
The project is a ma.s.s doc.u.ment-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?
John Young accepted and created wikileaks.org, wikileaks.cn and wikileaks.info. He then received a pa.s.sword for the members' mailing list of the WikiLeaks project.
Every email sent has the following header: 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.
This mailing list was set up for members to collaborate on the project, give advice, share their views on the visual ident.i.ty of the site, the layout, realization, etc.
The goal was to stick to the look and feel of a wiki, a collaborative website known for its simple graphics and ease of use. The pages feature interconnected hyperlinks with content such as writing, ill.u.s.trations, etc. that can be modified by any of the pages' visitors.
Now they needed an ill.u.s.tration, a logo to establish WikiLeaks' ident.i.ty. The discussions were going well on the proposal sent in by someone called Ani Lovins; he drew the first WikiLeaks logo: the mole.