Assange...

Julian Assange, in or before 2006


Wikileaks: We don't know source of leaked data

Back in London, Assange agreed that the files offered insight into U.S. tactics.

But he said that was none of his concern, and he noted that his Web site already carried a copy of the U.S. Special Forces' 2006 Southern Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Manual, among other sensitive U.S. military documents.

"We put out that stuff all the time," he said.

He seemed irritated when a member of the audience pressed him on whether he believed there were ever any legitimate national security concerns that would prevent him from publishing a leaked document.

"It is not our role to play sides for states. States have national security concerns, we do not have national security concerns," he said.

"You often hear ... that something may be a threat to U.S. national security," he went on. "This must be shot down whenever this statement is made. A threat to U.S. national security? Is anyone serious? The security of the entire nation of the United States? It is ridiculous!"

He said he wasn't interested in the safety of states, only the safety of individual human beings.

The Afghan papers mark the biggest case in the short history of Wikileaks, which he set up in 2006. But for Mr Assange, it was the latest stage in a life of action against vested interests.

His parents met at an anti-Vietnam demonstration. His mother believed that a formal education would instil an unhealthy respect for authority on her son and he moved 37 times before he was aged 14. During one of the moves, he lived opposite an electronics shop and went there to write programmes on an early home computer, quickly learning to crack into programmes. "The austerity of one's interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me," he told last month's New Yorker magazine.

With his sharp mind, growing computer skills and outsider mentality, he entered the nascent world of hacking, setting up a group that came to be known as International Subversives. He is said to have broken into the US Defence Department and other supposedly secure sites.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

The Pentagon Papers were high-level, top-secret documents of decisionmaking estimates. They were alternative strategies. They were being debated, and they were presidential decisions of various kinds. It was a more revealing set of documents about the way in which the country was being deceived into continuing a hopeless war. So, you could say that the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan remain to be revealed, and I hope someone does that. And, for that matter, the Pentagon Papers of Iraq we have yet to see. But this is a very good start. The drama of such a huge volume being released is giving the public media attention and the public attention that President Nixon’s injunctions gave to the Pentagon Papers. So, I’m glad to see the press really is taking the content of these documents seriously so far and not focusing solely on the question of the leak itself or the process.