On the morning of April 5, 2010, a tall, thin man with a shock of silver hair approached a lectern at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He had been running an obscure news website from Iceland for four years, trying unsuccessfully to find a scoop that would revolutionize the world. Many of the 40 or so journalists (myself included) who turned up had barely heard of him.
Still, it was difficult to ignore his speech. Three days earlier, we had received an email promising a “never-before-seen classified video” with “dramatic evidence and new facts.”
But even this little hype might have understated what happened after the man, Julian Assange, pressed the play button. The nature of evidence—the volume and granularity of digital evidence, along with the pathways through which it comes to light—was about to change.
Previously, the information that experts leaked to the public was largely circumscribed by the limitations of paper. In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg needed an entire night to surreptitiously photocopy a secret study on the Vietnam War that would become known as the Pentagon Papers.
Now, thousands of those documents — along with images, videos, spreadsheets, emails, source code and chat logs — could be dragged onto a USB stick and beamed around the world in seconds. Find an insider with enough access or a hacker with enough talent and any security system could be breached. Sources could be hidden. All that was missing was a middleman — an editor who could find leaks, publish the material, and then withstand the pressure after it was published.
Assange’s video had an incendiary title: “Collateral Murder.” It began with a still photo of a son holding a photograph of his dead father, a driver for the Reuters news agency, followed by leaked images of a 2007 airstrike showing a US helicopter shooting and killing a photographer and his driver. from Reuters on a street in Baghdad.
The slurred voice of a US soldier could be heard referring to a man hundreds of feet below – one of the Reuters staffers killed in the attack – with an expletive. The video appeared to contradict the account of a Pentagon spokesman, who had claimed that the airstrike was part of “combat operations against a hostile force”. Within hours, the story was picked up by Al Jazeera, MSNBC and The New York Times.
What followed was a chain of seismic revelations, some by Assange’s site, WikiLeaks, others by other means. It continues to this day: a trove of State Department cables published by WikiLeaks alongside The Times (2010-11), Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (2013), the Sony Pictures hack (2014), the Drone Papers (2015), the Panama Papers (2016), hacked Democratic National Committee emails (2016), details of offensive US cyber programs (2017), Hunter Biden’s laptop (2020) and the Facebook Archives (2021), to name a few.
Looking back, it’s easy to see Assange as the father of the digital leak revolution. At the time, he was something closer to a talented promoter, one who managed to position himself at the center of several currents that began to converge at the turn of the millennium.
“In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people were hacking into systems and taking documents, but those hackers weren’t ideologically inclined to hack and leak,” said Gabriella Coleman, a professor of anthropology at Harvard whose new book, “Weapons of the Geek,” will include two chapters on the history of hacking and leaking.
Assange was the first to discover how to make its fruits reach the large audiences reached by traditional media. Although his legal saga is coming to an end with his guilty plea and return to Australia, it is clear that his broader legacy – the volatile fusion of illicit methods of hacking and information leaks with the reach and credibility of American publishers established – is still in development.
On Wednesday, Assange pleaded guilty to conspiring with one of his sources, Chelsea Manning, to obtain and publish government secrets in violation of the Espionage Act. Ben Wizner, who directs the free speech, privacy and technology project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the conviction could have far-reaching consequences.
“This was the first time in modern American history that we saw the publication of truthful information being criminalized,” Wizner said. “The fact that it hadn’t happened before was not necessarily due to law, but probably due to custom. That custom depended on a relationship between the media and the government, on an understanding that while they might have different ideas about what the public interest was, they both had a fundamentally American idea of what the public interest was. Then WikiLeaks came along. Its view is that American imperialism is the greatest threat to world peace. It’s a view of the public interest that is radically different from that of the American state, and that puts pressure on the old consensus.”
At a rudimentary level, Assange’s activities largely resembled those of traditional media outlets: he gathered and published authentic, newsworthy information. However, her goals were different.
Instead of claiming neutrality or objectivity, Assange presented himself as a warrior, sworn to the cause of radical transparency. He refused to accept that even democratic governments required a degree of secrecy to function. Instead, he sought, in his words, to “change the behavior of the regime” by making secrecy itself unsustainable. In its place would emerge the “people’s will for truth, love and self-realization.”
It was a utopian vision, more excuse than argument. One of the contradictions of Assange’s criminal case is the extent to which his freedom depended on precisely the kind of secret diplomatic dealings he had worked for years to ridicule and expose.
As director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama, James R. Clapper Jr. faced the consequences of many hacking and leak episodes. In an email interview, he rejected the idea that Assange’s revelations had changed anyone’s opinion about the morality of the American intelligence apparatus. Instead, he said, WikiLeaks simply served to reinforce the preexisting opinions of the faction that already believed that American spy agencies were “evil.”
“I don’t think it moved the needle one way or the other,” he said.
But, Coleman said, the history of leaks is still being written, in part by organizations like Distributed Denial of Secrets and XnetLeaks. Like WikiLeaks, these sites solicit and publish high-volume digital leaks, but they have higher standards when it comes to redacting information and verifying sources.
As for Assange, he said he was “undertaking a very bold experiment.” “Experiments have successes and failures, but it took someone to be bold and try it.”