[STATIC]
[INDISTINCT CHATTER ON TV]
NEWS ANCHOR 1: Anti-nuclear
groups go to court to try to
block Thursday's
scheduled lift-off
of the shuttle Atlantis with its
payload of radioactive plutonium.
NEWS ANCHOR 2: The shuttle
and legal challenges.
NASA lawyers must
go to court tomorrow
to help the shuttle Atlantis
and its Galileo spacecraft
escape from a unique
environmental challenge.
The mission could be
stalled on the launch pad.
At the center of the
controversy is Galileo,
a plutonium-powered
space probe
scheduled to be launched
from the shuttle's payload.
The argument's being made that
in the event of an accident,
cancer-causing plutonium
particles might be spread
over a wide area of Florida.
October 1989
JOHN McMAHON: It was a Monday morning,
a few days before launching Galileo.
My management grabbed me
as soon as I came in.
[BELL RINGING]
And they said that there was a
worm that had been detected
somewhere out
on the network.
A worm is
a self-replicating program.
It actually breaks into a computer
and jumps from system to system.
At the time, they still
were very uncommon.
We didn't know
what it would do.
We knew it was malicious.
If the worm got
into a machine,
it would change the announcement
message and spelled out,
in little lines
and little characters,
W-A-N-K,
WANK, Worms Against
Nuclear Killers.
And below that, "You talk
of times of peace for all,
"and then prepare for war."
Oh, my God,
what the hell is this?
Most people didn't know
what the word "WANK" meant.
The worm made a panic.
You would be logged into your
machine and you'd get a message,
"Someone is watching you...
Vote anarchist!"
And suddenly they'd see,
"Deleted file-1, deleted
file-2, deleted file-3, "
and just keep going
and going and going.
And it would change the passwords,
so you couldn't get in to stop it.
It scared the hell out
of a lot of people.
They were afraid that WANK
would cause a launch failure,
where this nuclear
battery was suddenly
flying away from
an exploding spacecraft.
MISSION CONTROL:
All systems are go.
Eleven, ten, nine...
McMAHON: How in the name of
hell are we going to stop it?
And how far has
it gone already?
MISSION CONTROL: We have a
go for main engine start.
Six, five, four,
three, two, one.
We have ignition
and lift-off of Atlantis,
and the Galileo spacecraft
bound for Jupiter!
NARRATOR: The shuttle
launched without incident.
But the WANK worm
continued to spread,
affecting over 300, 000 computer
terminals around the world.
Its purpose, as a warning, weapon, or
political prank, was never discovered.
Investigators traced the origins
of the WANK worm to Australia.
National police suspected
a small group of hackers
in the city of Melbourne,
and then the trail went cold.
But a key clue turned out
to be in the message itself.
There was a lyric from the
Australian band, Midnight Oil,
a favorite of the man
who would become the country's
most infamous hacker.
[BLOSSOM AND BLOOD PLAYING]
[SPEAKING]
Yeah.
There's never been
anything quite like it.
A mountain of secrets dumped into
the public domain by a website...
NEWS ANCHOR 1: Julian Assange.
Is he a hero to freedom
or is he a terrorist
who should be prosecuted?
NEWT GINGRICH: He's
an active enemy combatant
who's engaged in information warfare
against the United States...
Was it not once
considered patriotic
to stand up to our government
when it's wrong?
[BLOSSOM AND BLOOD
CONTINUES PLAYING]
NEWS ANCHOR 2: Should the United States
do something to stop Mr. Assange?
NEWS ANCHOR 3: I think Assange
should be assassinated, actually...
NEWS ANCHOR 4:
No, he's a hero...
NEWS ANCHOR 5: What he did
was extremely devastating...
NEWS ANCHOR 6: This guy's
going to strike again.
PROTESTERS: [CHANTING] Free Julian Assange!
Free Julian Assange!
What drives you?
Well, I like being creative.
I mean, I've been an inventor,
designing systems and
processes for a long time.
I also like
defending victims.
And I'm a combative person,
so I like crushing bastards.
And so this sort of profession
combines all those three things.
So it is personally
deeply satisfying to me.
INTERVIEWER: But is crushing bastards,
in its own right, a just cause?
Depends on the bastard.
[CHUCKLES]
I see the story entirely
as one man against the world.
One man against the world.
Julian is this very
radical visionary.
Julian was onto something
really extraordinary.
He's an extremely clever, brave,
dedicated, hard-working guy
with a brilliant idea
that he managed to execute.
NARRATOR: Julian Assange
was obsessed with secrets,
keeping his own and unlocking those
of governments and corporations.
The Internet is not
a good place for secrets.
Cyberspace is like
a galaxy of passageways,
constantly moving
streams of data.
With a simple computer,
anyone can enter and explore.
That's what Julian Assange
liked to do, explore.
He liked to use trap doors to enter
where he wasn't supposed to go,
to find secrets
and expose them.
He built a machine for leaking
secrets and called it "WikiLeaks."
The website boasted
an electronic drop box
that could receive
secrets sent by people
who didn't want to
reveal who they were.
Once WikiLeaks
had the secrets,
it would publish them across
servers, domain names, and networks
so numerous that the information
could never be taken down.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
So this is what you'll see if you go
to the front page of the website-
This is WikiLeaks, we help
you get the truth out.
We want to enable information
to go out to the public
that has the greatest
chance of achieving
positive political reform
in the world.
To get things to the public
you need to protect sources
who want to disclose,
and you also need to protect your ability
to publish in the face of attack.
ROBERT MANNE: His thinking is,
how can we destroy corruption?
It's the whistle-blower.
Julian Assange is neither a right-wing
libertarian nor a standard leftist.
I think he's
a humanitarian anarchist.
A kind of John Lennon-like
revolutionary,
dreaming of a better world.
If we are to produce a more civilized
society, a more just society,
it has to be based
upon the truth...
HEATHER BROOKE: When
I heard Julian speak,
I was struck by
his vaulting idealism
and forthrightness
about what he believed in.
Totally uncompromising
about freedom of speech.
I agreed almost entirely
with everything he said,
and I'd never experienced
that before.
So I thought he was amazing.
Every week
we achieve major victories
in bringing the unjust to
account and helping the just.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
NARRATOR: Before WikiLeaks
was front page news,
there were some
smaller successes.
The website published evidence
of a tax-evading Swiss bank,
government corruption
and murder in Kenya,
and a secret company report on
illegal toxic waste dumping.
[HELICOPTER HOVERING]
One early leak was from the
National Security Agency.
Frantic text messages
from desperate workers
trying to save lives
on 9/11.
9/11 turned out to be a watershed
moment for the world of secrets,
both for the leakers
and the secret keepers.
After 9/11 we were accused of not
being willing to share information
rapidly and facilely enough,
and we've pushed that
very far forward.
NARRATOR: Michael Hayden
is an expert on secrets.
He's been the director of the
National Security Agency and the CIA.
HAYDEN: In terms
of our focus,
the default option, in a practical
sense, has been to sharing
rather than caging information and
making it more difficult to flow.
NARRATOR: In the years after 9/11,
facing enemies it didn't understand,
the U.S. government started
sharing more information
between different agencies.
At the same time, the U.S. also started
to keep more secrets from its citizens.
In data centers that sprang
up all over the country,
NSA/CSS Cryptologic Center
the U.S. launched
a massive expansion
of its operations
to gather secrets.
The amount of classified documents per
year increased from eight million
Office of the Director of
National Intelligence
to 76 million.
The number of people with access
to classified information
NSA National Business Park
soared to more
than four million.
And the government began to
intercept phone calls and emails
at a rate of
60, 000 per second.
Nobody knows how
much money is involved,
it's a secret.
Not even Congress
knows the entire budget.
The classification system can be a
very effective national security tool
when it's used as intended,
when it's used with precision.
NARRATOR: During
the Bush Administration,
Bill Leonard was
the classification czar,
the man charged with overseeing
what information should be secret.
The whole information environment
has radically changed.
Just like we produce
more information
than we ever produced
in the history of mankind,
we produce more secrets than we've ever
produced in the history of mankind,
and yet we never
fundamentally reassessed
our ability to
control secrets.
NARRATOR: In this environment
of expanding secrecy,
Assange went fishing
for secrets to publish.
To bait whistle-blowers, he published
a list of the most wanted leaks.
Those of us who have been
in the business a long time
knew that this day
would come,
knew that because we'd removed all
the watertight doors on the ship,
once it started taking on water,
it would really be in trouble.
[STATIC]
[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]
NEWS ANCHOR: In Iceland,
winter is never easy,
but this year much
of the pain is manmade.
[PEOPLE SCREAMING]
Last October, all three of
Iceland's banks failed.
Normally stoic and proper
Icelanders have started protesting.
NARRATOR: In July 2009, WikiLeaks
fueled a growing popular rage
when it published a confidential
internal memo from Kaupthing,
the largest failed
bank in the country.
BROOKE: WikiLeaks had got hold
of the Kaupthing loan book,
which showed what was going on in
a lot of those Icelandic banks.
They had credit ratings
which were completely at odds
with their actual
credit worthiness.
It was all insiders,
they took out billions
of dollars out of this bank
and bankrupted the thing shortly
before it went bankrupt anyways.
NARRATOR: A German IT technician,
Daniel Domscheit-Berg,
became the second full-time
member of WikiLeaks.
DOMSCHEIT-BERG: We met online first, and
then we met personally in December 2007
at the Chaos Communication
Congress in Berlin.
He was not the stereotypical
hacker you would expect,
looked completely
differently,
he was interested in
completely different topics.
NARRATOR: For Daniel and Julian, the Kaupthing
leak was their biggest success to date.
SMARI MCCARTHY: The loan book came
out and took the country by storm.
RUV, the national broadcaster, was
going to do a big segment on it.
And they got slapped
with an injunction.
[SPEAKING ICELANDIC]
This evening, we had intended
on releasing a full report
regarding the enormous credit
facilities made available by Kaupthing
to the various companies of its shareholders.
However, we are prevented from
doing so this evening...
BIRGITTA JONSDOTTIR: It was
the first time in our history
that a gag order was placed on the
state TV not to produce that news
just before they were
supposed to produce it.
So instead of doing nothing they
decided to put the website up.
[SPEAKING ICELANDIC]
MCCARTHY:
Up pops WikiLeaks- org
with this Kaupthing
loan book front and center,
and everybody goes online
and checks it out.
The guys at WikiLeaks definitely get
massive props for that. [CHUCKLES]
NARRATOR: Later that year, a group of
young cyber-activists from Iceland
invited representatives
of the WikiLeaks organization
to come speak at
a conference in Reykjavik.
JONSDOTTIR: Iceland and
WikiLeaks really fit.
This is something we really need in
our society, the media failed us.
So I was excited
to meet them.
Up until the day
before the conference,
we didn't know
who was going to come.
It could be a massive organization
or it could be a tiny organization.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
Hello? Um...
Does that work? Okay.
DOMSCHEIT-BERG: In the beginning
we had no funding at all,
we were not set up with
manpower nor organizationally,
so there was
a lot to improvise.
WikiLeaks, we haven't mentioned
that what we are doing right now
is still a proof of concept.
So in technical terms, we are in
a beta stage, so it's just...
We're not in a beta stage.
Well...
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
We're not in a beta stage as far as...
We're in a Gmail beta stage.
[BOTH CHUCKLING]
So we 're not in a beta stage in terms
of our ability to protect people.
In terms of...
Um...
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
You could let me
finish my sentence.
Okay.
It was a really awkward
experience in some way
because we were just
so famous over there.
You work
for WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks is now
very famous in Iceland
because of the big
Kaupthing leak.
We got this letter
from the Kaupthing lawyers,
telling us that under
Icelandic banking secrecy law
we deserved one year
in prison.
So we thought we'd
come to Iceland...
DOMSCHEIT-BERG:
And see for ourselves.
...and see for ourselves.
[CROWD CHEERING]
[ASSANGE SPEAKING]
The banksters need to be
put on public trial
and given the justice
they deserve.
More power to you, Iceland!
NARRATOR: Julian teamed up
with Birgitta Jonsdottir,
a poet turned politician,
to hatch a plan to turn Iceland into
a haven for freedom of information.
But Julian was also preoccupied
with a new source,
one with access to classified
U.S. government materials,
and a willingness
to leak them.
[APACHE GUNNER SPEAKING]
See all those people
standing down there...
There's more that keep walking
by and one of them has a weapon.
[APACHE GUNNER SPEAKING]
We have five to six
individuals with AK-47s.
Request permission to engage.
NARRATOR: It was an on board video of an
Apache helicopter gunship on patrol in Iraq.
[APACHE GUNNER SPEAKING]
I can't get 'em now because
they're behind that building.
NARRATOR: A half-mile above the ground, it
was invisible to the people down below.
[APACHE PILOT SPEAKING]
That's a weapon.
He's got an RPG.
We got a guy with an RPG.
I'm gonna fire.
SOLDIER:
You are free to engage, over.
[APACHE PILOT SPEAKING]
Light 'em all up.
[GUNFIRE]
Keep shooting.
[APACHE PILOT SPEAKING]
Keep shooting.
[GUNFIRE CONTINUES]
Keep shooting.
[APACHE GUNNER SPEAKING]
Oh yeah, look at those
dead bastards.
NARRATOR: Two of the men killed
worked for the Reuters news agency.
[APACHE GUNNER SPEAKING]
Nice.
NARRATOR: What had looked
like a weapon from the sky,
turned out to be
the long lens of a camera.
APACHE PILOT: Bushmaster.
We have a van that's approaching
and picking up the bodies.
[APACHE GUNNER SPEAKING]
Yeah, we're trying to get
permission to engage.
SOLDIER:
This is Bushmaster-Seven.
Roger, engage!
APACHE PILOT: One-Eight.
Engage. Clear.
APACHE GUNNER: Come on.
[GUNFIRE]
APACHE PILOT:
Clear.
[GUNFIRE]
Clear.
APACHE GUNNER:
We're engaging...
Oh, yeah, look at that.
Right through
the windshield!
[LAUGHS]
NARRATOR: Inside the van
were two children,
who were wounded in
the hail of cannon fire.
[APACHE GUNNER SPEAKING]
It's their fault for bringing
their kids to a battle.
APACHE PILOT:
That's right.
NARRATOR: In March 2010, Assange
and a team of Icelandic activists
holed up in a rented
house in Reykjavik
to edit and prepare
the video for publication.
We did most
of our work here.
This was
the operational table.
[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]
McCARTHY: It was chaotic and hectic and
all sorts of varyingly frayed nerves.
Eventually I went out and
bought a bunch of Post-its
[LAUGHS] and kind of tried to figure
out what it was we needed to do.
My horrific task was to go
through the entire movie
and pull out the stills
to put on the website.
And at the same time I was
learning who these people were
that I could see their flesh
being torn off their bodies.
Photographs taken by US soldier
NARRATOR: The Army
claimed it was engaged in
"combat operations
against a hostile force."
But it also began
a criminal investigation.
It turned out
that the driver of the van
had been a father taking
his children to school.
SOLDIER 1: I think I just
drove over a body.
SOLDIER 2: Really?
SOLDIER 1: Yeah.
[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]
JONSDOTTIR: The curtains
were drawn.
But I never had any sense that we
were being watched, not physically.
But we joked a lot about it.
We were becoming
super paranoid.
It wasn't really
cloak-and-dagger stuff,
it was just yet
another cool project.
Everybody thinks that we were sort
of huddled over the computers
and it was all very serious.
We actually had
an incredible time.
The second last night
we all went out
and we were all wearing the same
silver snowsuits. [LAUGHING]
MAN: WikiLeaks!
[ALL LAUGHING]
Lava-leaks!
JONSDOTTIR: It was
an incredibly intimate time,
because we were all working closely,
we were working on something
that we knew that could get us
all in very serious trouble.
And we were all willing
to take that consequence.
So my name
is Julian Assange.
I am the editor of WikiLeaks.
Could you spell your name?
Julian, with an A.
Assange.
MANNE: What's clear about him
is he became a public figure
extraordinarily quickly.
It was really April 2010
where he went from
relative obscurity
into an absolutely
central world figure.
And he did it deliberately.
He knew what he was doing.
He decides to take on the
American state, in public.
NARRATOR: The team posted the unedited
video on the WikiLeaks website.
They also posted
a shorter version
edited for maximum impact.
Julian titled it
"Collateral Murder. "
And no surprise, it's getting
reaction in Washington.
Our military will take
every precaution necessary
to ensure the safety
and security of civilians.
ASSANGE: The behavior of the pilots is
like they are playing a computer game.
Their desire
was simply to kill.
The Pentagon says that it sees no
reason to investigate this any further.
Its own inquiry found that
the journalists' cameras
were mistaken for weapons.
But the rules of engagement
were followed.
If those killings were lawful
under the rules of engagement,
then the rules of
engagement are wrong.
Deeply wrong.
HAYDEN: You've
got this scene.
Some may be ethically
troubled by the scene.
Frankly, I'm not.
But I can understand someone
who's troubled by that
and someone who wants the
American people to know that,
because the American
people need to know
what it is their government is doing for them.
I actually share that view.
When I was director of CIA, there
was some stuff we were doing
I wanted all 300 million
Americans to know.
But I never
figured out a way
without informing a whole
bunch of other people
who didn't have a right
to that information,
and who may actually
use that image or that fact
or that data or that message
to harm my countrymen.
LEONARD: From a national
security point of view,
there was absolutely no justification
for withholding that videotape.
Number one, gunship video
is like trading carols
amongst soldiers in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's freely exchanged
back and forth.
LEONARD: What's even
more disturbing is that
it was one in
a series of efforts
to withhold images
of facts that were known.
NARRATOR: Reuters knew
its employees had been killed.
The news agency requested the
video, but the Army refused,
claiming the video
was classified.
The fact that innocent people were
killed in that helicopter attack,
that was a known fact
that was not classified.
NARRATOR: A record
of the incident
and a word-for-word transcript
of the pilots' conversation
had already been published in a
book called The Good Soldiers
by a writer embedded
with the Army.
The Army later confirmed that the
information was not classified.
Yet the Army would
prosecute the man
who leaked the video
to WikiLeaks.
What kind of games
was the Army playing?
Why was a transcript less
secret than a moving image?
APACHE PILOT:
We won't shoot anymore.
LEONARD: Clearly the government
recognizes the power of images.
But the ultimate power of image
is it helps people understand
what it is this fact
is that we all know.
Flag-draped coffins
help us understand
the consequences of sending
our children off to war.
Pictures of detainee
abuse in Abu Ghraib
help us understand exactly
what was taking place.
Video of that unfortunate occurrence
where innocent people were killed,
helps us understand that this is
an inevitable consequence of war.
[FEMALE REPORTER SPEAKING]
How was the video obtained?
We can't discuss
our sourcing of the video.
NARRATOR: Adrian Lamo was known
as "the homeless hacker,"
a couch-surfing
computer infiltrator
who had been convicted of hacking
into The New York Times.
In 2010, not long after the release
of the Collateral Murder video,
Lamo used Twitter to urge his
followers to donate to WikiLeaks.
Only one day later he was contacted
by someone with the screen name
"bradass87."
LAMO: Frankly, I just didn't find what he
had to say all that interesting at first,
until he started making
references to spilling secrets.
LAMO: At that point, I knew that
this wasn't some kind of game.
It was for real and that I was going to
have to make some very hard choices.
In Star Trek, every prospective
commanding officer
is expected to pass a test
called the "Kobayashi Maru."
SAAVIK: Starship Enterprise
on training mission
to Gamma Hydra.
COMPUTER: Alert. Klingon
torpedoes activated. Alert.
Evasive action!
[BEEPING]
SAAVIK: Ah!
LAMO: The test
cannot be passed.
It is there to see how they
deal with a no-win situation.
A no-win situation's a possibility
every commander may face.
Has that never
occurred to you?
No, sir, it has not.
LAMO: In this case,
it was a no-win situation,
deciding what you're going to
do when no matter what you do,
you're going to screw
somebody over.
NARRATOR: Unsure what to do,
Adrian contacted Tim Webster,
a friend and former Army
counterintelligence agent
TIM WEBSTER: Adrian
called me and said,
"Hey, Tim, what would you do
if somebody had approached you
"and said, 'Hey,
I'm leaking secrets. "'
I thought it was
a pretty stupid question,
because of course Adrian knows exactly
what I would have done in that situation.
INTERVIEWER: What
would you have done?
Well, of course,
turned them in.
There's no... There's nothing else
you can do in that situation.
But Adrian was on the
fence about it ethically.
On one hand, here was this kid leaking
all this classified information,
could potentially cost lives.
On the other hand, here was this
kid who had reached out to Adrian
in confidence
and trusted him.
And Adrian took
that pretty seriously.
He indicated he didn't know
who this person was,
they were just a screen name.
So, very quickly, of course,
the first thing that
anybody would be interested
in is, who is this guy?
JASON EDWARDS: I first met Bradley
Manning at a New Year's Eve party.
It was a 1930s theme party.
I was the Prince of Wales.
And Brad showed up
without any kind of
costume or persona.
I looked at him
and he was small
and had this kind of ingnue
expression on his face.
This bright blond hair. And so
I said, "Oh, Jean Harlow. "
Wrote that on a name tag,
slapped it on his chest,
then we went on with
the rest of the evening.
When I met him at the party,
he made no mention to me
that he was in the Army.
This came as a surprise to me.
NARRATOR: To get
government money for college,
Bradley Manning
enlisted in the Army.
In 2007, Manning
began basic training.
He was 19 years old.
Just weeks after he started, he
was sent to a discharge unit
to determine if he
should stay in the Army.
My locker was next to his
and that's when I met him.
Nobody puts their sister's picture
with him posing next to his sister.
It was kind of weird,
but... Oh, well.
But we knew right away he was gay.
It was so obvious. But, so...
Not that I have
a problem with it.
He was small, a little bit
effeminate and that made him
public enemy number one for drill
sergeants to beat the macho into him.
We're talking professional
Army, 30-40-year-old people
that would pick on him
just to torment him.
INTERVIEWER: And what happened?
Did he get discharged?
No, the funny thing is, he was the
least Army material of anybody there.
And they all got
discharged and he didn't.
NARRATOR: Instead
of discharging Manning,
the Army decided to make him
an intelligence analyst.
INTEL ANALYST: There's
a lot of components
that go with Intel analyst.
US Army Intelligence
Recruitment Video
I'm in charge of the security,
document security,
physical security, personal
security, like people's clearances.
Does it make me feel like
James Bond a little bit?
Yeah, to some degree.
What would I like the public
to know about the Army'?
We love what we do.
JIHRLEAH SHOWMAN: He was
definitely what society
would label as
a computer nerd.
He was constantly up all night
building specific computer programs.
INTERVIEWER: So he was
unusually adept at computers?
He's probably the first person
in the military that I had met
that is as talented as
he was with computers.
But I had to pull him aside several
times for his lack of sleep.
He was desperately
addicted to soda.
He drank approximately a liter
to two liters every night.
So he literally did
not sleep, ever.
[COMMANDER SHOUTING ORDERS]
SHOWMAN: One time he was
late for a formation
and he had a very public
display, physically.
He was jumping up and down,
flailing his arms,
screaming at the top
of his lungs.
And to me, I had never
seen a soldier do that before.
It had to be something else.
A seizure or
something like that
because it was very
radical body movement.
But it wasn't something else.
He didn't like messing up.
He had to have
everything perfect.
I actually recommended three
times that he not deploy.
[PHONE RINGING]
[ANSWERING MACHINE BEEPS]
Hi, you've reached Brad Manning
at my deployment phone number.
Please leave a message or call
me back later. Thank you.
[BEEPS]
NARRATOR: In October 2009, Bradley
Manning was sent to Iraq,
posted at Forward Operating Base
Hammer, just outside of Baghdad.
Baghdad
SHOWMAN: We were the furthest FOB east
that you could go around the Baghdad area.
FOB Hammer
It was definitely the best,
most uneventful place
you could have
been deployed to.
We never had any enemy fire.
We could walk around
without battle gear.
We had a full gym. There was pool tables.
There was a basketball court.
We had a little movie theater.
We had a Pizza Hut,
a Burger King.
A place to get your hair cut.
A place to get a massage.
We had air-conditioned
living quarters.
You could actually get cable
and Internet in your room.
It was literally just
a home away from home.
[GUNFIRE]
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
[ROCK MUSIC PLAYING]
When you receive intel in,
it's extremely raw.
A lot of the times
it's even in Iraqi,
so we have to actually get it
translated and build a product
so that the commander can
actually make military decisions.
NARRATOR: But much of the information
available to Manning's intelligence unit
had nothing to do with
day-to-day combat operations.
All of the analysts had access
to central computer networks
for the Armed Forces
and the State Department.
With a few key strokes, a
skilled user could gain access
to vast streams of
classified emails, memos
and reports from
around the world.
INTERVIEWER: Why was it that Private Manning
had access to all that information?
9/11. Very simple.
The mindset changed after 9/11 from
a need-to-know to a need-to-share.
And the database
that he had access to
was a representation of the need
for one entity of government
to share broadly information
about its activities
with another agency
of government.
How many people
had access?
It's a hard question
to answer.
NARRATOR: Manning was regarded
as one of the smartest
intelligence analysts
in the unit.
But more than others,
he became increasingly distressed
by the reports he was seeing.
SHOWMAN: He back-talked a lot.
He constantly wanted to debate.
He wanted to be the person
that disagreed with everybody.
We had a separate
little conference room.
It had a doorway but it didn't
have a door that you could close.
He'd go in there
and just scream.
[MARK DAVIS SPEAKING]
Testing 1, 2, 3...
this is, uh...
reverse shot, audio only...
for Assange.
DAVIS: I was trying to chase him
after the Collateral Murder video,
but he's
a pretty evasive guy.
He doesn't have a home, doesn't have
an office, so it was no easy task.
I'd been chasing him for weeks and
had one phone contact with him.
But I heard he was speaking in
Norway, so I jumped on a plane.
Turned up in Oslo
and sort of
shadowed him for a few days
until things started to click.
[ASSANGE SPEAKING]
This is not the liberal democracy
that we had all dreamed of.
This is an encroaching,
privatized censorship regime.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
[PEOPLE CHATTERING]
So embarrassing.
DAVIS: What's that?
ASSANGE: Goddamn camera in my face.
[DAVIS LAUGHING]
Congratulations. Thank you.
Very, great chat, great speech.
At that time, he had an underground
following, of which I was aware.
He's Australian,
he's from Melbourne.
But he had no
public profile really.
[BRAKES SCREECHING]
[DAVIS SPEAKING]
WikiLeaks is not
the first time
you've come to the attention
of the Australian public.
You had another
controversial period
when you were involved with
a group that was essentially
trying to penetrate
military computer systems.
What was the motivation there?
Well, it was two motivations.
One was just
intellectual exploration,
and the challenge to do this.
So if you're a teenager at this
time in a suburb of Melbourne,
and this was before there was
public access to the Internet,
this was an incredibly
intellectually liberating thing
to go out and explore
the world with your mind.
G'day, mate!
[INDISTINCT CHATTER ON PHONE]
No, a hacker's not someone
that kills their victim,
dismembers them, and cuts
them into small pieces.
Hackers do far more
damage than that.
Hackers, the mystery
operators of the Internet.
In the eyes of the law,
they're criminal.
But who are they?
It was a really interesting period
in Melbourne in the early '90s.
There was a few places
on earth
that really clicked into
the Internet, pre-internet.
There was also a sense
of rebelliousness,
sort of an alternative political
culture in Melbourne.
All those things converged.
And Julian was absolutely
the core part of...
It was almost the clich,
the teen hacker.
DAVID: Seventy-two million
people dead'?
Is this a game
or is it real?
[COMPUTER SPEAKING]
Oh, wow.
MANNE: Their struggle
was against the state.
And they thought that triumph
of intelligent individuals
over the possibility
of state surveillance,
that's the heart of
what they were doing.
And Julian Assange, who at
that point was a young hacker,
got into that world.
We're going to
show 'em, baby.
MANNE: And he became
a central figure.
NARRATOR: The group was called
the International Subversives.
Among them was
Julian Assange,
known by the online
name of Mendax,
short for a Latin phrase
meaning "noble liar. "
Hackers in Melbourne were also
suspects in the WANK worm attack,
though their involvement
was never proven.
Two years after
the WANK worm,
Assange was implicated
in another hack.
REPORTER: Julian Assange allegedly
accessed computer systems around the world
through weak links
in the Internet system,
meaning, "The whole computer
opened up to him
"and he could walk around
like God Almighty."
Hackers have this belief that
we are getting a police state,
that information is being hidden
from the broad community...
NARRATOR: Ken Day was an
Australian expert on hackers
and the first person to
investigate Julian Assange
as part of an undercover sting
called Operation Weather.
DAY: It was
a very difficult case
because it was only
the second time we'd done
an investigation in this particular
style, so we were still learning.
[MODEM CONNECTING]
What we did was capture the sound
going across the telephone line,
so we could see what was typed
and the signal coming back.
NARRATOR: The hackers had broken into the
U.S. Air Force, the Navy,
and the U.S. defense network
that had the power to block entire
countries from the Internet.
We had a back door in U.S. military
security coordination center.
This is the peak security...
It's for controlling the security of
MILNET, the U.S. military Internet.
We had total control
over this for two years.
DAY: The Internet was a new frontier for
people to go out and express themselves
that "I am there, I am the
first, lam the all-powerful."
This is the common theme
with people that are hackers.
It was all ego-driven,
"I am the best."
NARRATOR: Julian was charged with
29 counts of penetrating, altering,
and destroying
government data.
The defense asked
the court to be lenient
because Assange had
lived a difficult childhood,
continually moving
from city to city
with no lasting
relationships.
His only constant connection with
the outside world was the Internet.
NARRATOR: After a five year
investigation and trial,
Julian pied guilty
to 24 hacking offenses.
He was sentenced
to three years of probation.
DAY: He believes that what
he was doing was not wrong,
and probably rues the day
that he pied guilty-
Julian does not
like being judged.
His rationalization is, "Yeah, I've
been convicted, but it was unjust.
"It's unfair. I'm a martyr."
He didn't accept it.
DAVIS: Julian always had
quite a rigid political view.
He's always believed that there's these
secrets that need to be discovered.
At 17, 18, Julian was looking at stuff
that he couldn't quite understand.
It's all in acronyms, it's descriptions
of movements here and there,
of weapons or of troops.
He wasn't ready to
do anything with it.
Indeed, he waited
20 years to see it again.
And when he saw it again,
he knew what to do
with it this time.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
NARRATOR: Months before he
received the helicopter video,
Assange was trolling through hacker
conferences, looking for leaks.
Why am I talking
to you guys at all?
Um... Well,
you have a "capture the
flag" contest here.
We have our own
list of flags,
and we want you
to capture them.
And so if you Google for
"WikiLeaks Most Wanted 2009, "
you'll see a list
of documents.
If you are in a position or you
know someone who's in a position
to get this material, and get it,
give it to us, no questions asked,
you will help
change history.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
NARRATOR: One month
into Manning's deployment,
WikiLeaks published
the 9/11 pager messages.
Manning took notice.
Only days later,
he saved Julian Assange's contact
information to his computer.
Then taking a cue from the
WikiLeaks Most Wanted List,
Manning began searching for CIA
detainee interrogation videos
on the classified networks
that were cleared for his use.
Like other potential
whistle-blowers,
he began to wonder if he had
access to secret information
the public should know.
In the course of his work
he had already downloaded
thousands of military reports
from Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was there that
he captured his flags.
A lot of flags.
NARRATOR: While Manning was
playing with a new identity,
he was also imagining
a new role for himself.
He visited his
boyfriend in Boston
and went to a party at
a college hackerspace,
where he was
caught on camera.
During this period,
maybe even at this moment,
Manning had in his possession nearly
500, 000 classified documents
about the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
While on leave, he contacted
The Washington Post
and The New York Times.
When neither showed interest
Manning sent the so-called
"war logs" to WikiLeaks.
MEREDITH VIEIRA:
Good morning. Him?
How would an Army private
allegedly gain access
to top secret information?
The Army has detained
a U.S. soldier
in connection with the leak
of this classified video.
REPORTER 1: The prime suspect is 22-year-old
Army Private First Class Bradley Manning.
For allegedly leaking this
classified gun camera video
of an Apache helicopter
attacking civilians.
DOMSCHEIT-BERG: Really in the
first few days after we heard
about this problem
with Private Manning,
it felt like the worst
possible scenario.
At that time not really
understanding what it means for us,
and what the hell
was actually going on.
REPORTER 2: Private First
Class Bradley Manning,
he found a former computer
hacker in Sacramento, California
and that former computer hacker
was growing increasingly alarmed,
eventually turning him in.
LAMO: He needed a friend, and I wish
that I could have been that friend.
There was a responsibility
to the needs of the many
rather than simply
the needs of Bradley Manning.
NARRATOR: Lamo
met with federal agents
and gave them a copy of his
chats with Bradley Manning.
He also gave a copy
to Kevin Poulsen,
a friend and former
convicted hacker,
who is now an editor
at Wired. com.
KEVIN POULSEN: I had just done a story
about Adrian being institutionalized.
While he was institutionalized,
they had adjusted his medications.
I almost had kind
of a suspicion that
maybe his new medications
weren't agreeing with him
and this was A Beautiful Mind situation,
and he was imagining all this.
NARRATOR: Lamo gave Poulsen the
okay to publish the story,
and days later, Wired.com broke
the news of Manning's arrest.
WEBSTER: Nobody wanted
Adrian to go to the media,
but apparently
it was already done.
And, well, he ended up approaching
a lot of media after that.
It just sort of exploded.
Did it make you feel patriotic
when you turned Manning in?
It made me feel very sad
that I could not have
interdicted this leak...
I believed that his actions
were endangering lives...
POULSEN: Adrian lives his life as
though he's writing it like a novel.
And every novelist
wants to be read.
LAMO: It's my job to play the role that I'm
cast in to the very best of my ability,
the same as any other actor.
You can't possibly be
yourself in the public eye.
All of the little things
that make us human
don't stand up under the
scrutiny of the camera.
I'd like to also point out that
I think that this marks the end
of WikiLeaks's ability to say that
they have never had a source be outed.
[DAVIS SPEAKING]
So what's been the update
on Manning?
Gimme the news,
it's only two days old.
So he has been
charged with espionage.
The allegation being
that he has transferred
at least 50 classified
cables to another party.
The other party is not named.
DAVIS: After Bradley Manning
was arrested,
attention shifted very much to
Julian, it was no longer a secret.
The pressure through
this period was intense.
Julian won't say where
he got that material,
but he had the material, there
was no question about that.
ASSANGE: We try extremely hard to
never know who our sources are.
So, all our encryption
technology is designed
to prevent us knowing
who our sources are.
NARRATOR: Was it
really possible
that Julian didn't know that
Bradley Manning was his source?
Or was saying so
an old Mendax tactic,
telling a lie for
a noble cause?
STEPHEN GREY: Private First
Class Bradley Manning
is now said to
have confessed
to passing more than 260,000
documents to WikiLeaks.
That's not true.
If he's the one, then that implies
there's much more to be released.
Stephen Grey for
Channel 4 News.
Thanks, Stephen, thanks...
now I have every fucking gun
pointed at me.
NARRATOR: Julian knew
how much more there was.
But now that Manning was
arrested, the question became,
would WikiLeaks put Manning
in greater jeopardy
by continuing to
release his materials?
DOMSCHEIT-BERG: It's certainly
a very problematic situation.
This is about as
serious as it can get.
ASSANGE: We have a situation where
there's a young man, Bradley Manning,
who's alleged to be a source for
the Collateral Murder video.
We do not know whether Mr. Manning
is our source or not.
But what we do know is that
we promised the source
that we would publish everything
that they gave to us.
NARRATOR: Even though his potential
source had been arrested,
Assange was undeterred
from the WikiLeaks mission.
And the hundreds of thousands of leaked
U.S. government secrets he possessed
were burning a hole
in his pocket.
Julian traveled around Europe
plotting his next move,
and in Brussels he was tracked down by
investigative journalist Nick Davies.
DAVIES: My pitch
to Julian was,
instead of posting this secret
material on the WikiLeaks website,
he shared it with an alliance of The
Guardian and other media groups,
including The New York Times.
Who, A, have the impact of reaching
millions of people instantly
and also have natural political
connections in their own jurisdictions.
So we were trying to give him
a kind of political immunity
so that he could do
this clearly provocative
and somewhat dangerous thing
in relative safety and with
an assurance of success.
NARRATOR: Recognizing that WikiLeaks
could benefit from a louder megaphone,
Julian agreed to
Nick's proposal.
DAVIES: So, how am I going to get
the documents back to London?
There was a little
bit of a risk
that if the authorities were
monitoring his communications,
as they might well have been,
they would be aware
of my involvement with him,
they would arrest me as I came
back into the United Kingdom,
and take the material
if I had it on a laptop.
We thought about a memory stick,
maybe they won't spot that?
He came up with
a much better solution.
He said that
he would create a website.
In order to access the website,
I would need a password.
So he took a paper napkin that
was on the table in this caf
where we were talking
in Brussels
and he hooked together several of
the words in the commercial logo
and wrote,
"No capital letters. "
I stuffed it in my pocket.
In the event that I was
arrested, people would assume
that it was something I was
going to blow my nose on.
And so it was I traveled
back to the United Kingdom,
and, as it happened, nobody
stopped me so itwas all cool.
NARRATOR: Julian
would also team up
with the London-based Bureau
for Investigative Journalism.
In a prearranged drop point
in Central London,
Julian met lain Overton.
We turned up
and Julian was there
wearing a bullet-proof vest
and we had
a Middle Eastern meal.
And he revealed
that he had
the largest-ever military leak of
documents in the history of leaks.
NARRATOR: In the midst of this spy story
was thrust Iain's young colleague,
a computer whiz
named James Ball.
About 1:00 in the morning
I took delivery on a USB stick
of 390,000 secret
U.S. military records.
I make to leave and Julian
asks me where I'm going.
I said, "Well, I was
going to go home. "
He sort of pauses
and goes, "No, don't do that.
"I don't want your address
linked to this address-
"Can you find somewhere else to go
at least for four or five hours?"
I don't really think
I can go and hit a club.
I'd really hate having
to try and explain
losing 400,000 secret documents
because I got a bit drunk.
GAVIN MacFADYEN: Nobody had
ever done this before.
How do you have teams of intelligent
people to go through this stuff?
Nobody in my experience
as a journalist
had ever been confronted with a tenth
of the mass of material he was.
We're talking in a half
a million lines of data.
If in the old days you had to take
half a million lines of data out,
you'd have had 16 wheelbarrows out
of the front door of the Pentagon.
This was the biggest leak
of secret material
in the history of
this particular planet.
NARRATOR: Julian decided that
the first release of material
would be
the Afghan War Logs.
But he had to
understand them first.
In London, The Guardian
set up a secret operation
with key military reporters
from The New York Times and the
German magazine Der Spiegel,
veteran journalists
who could penetrate
the arcane language
of the military.
ASSANGE: You've got much more
information than you have in this.
But here's the key part...
DAVIES: During the four
or five weeks
when the reporters were working
on the Afghan War Logs,
all of us became concerned that
there was material in there
which, if published, could get people
hurt on the ground in Afghanistan.
ASSANGE: This huge attack goes
for 22 hours or something.
Starts here.
DAVIES: This particularly related
to ordinary Afghan civilians
who in one operation
or incident or another
had given information
to Coalition forces
and that was recorded in there in such a way
that those civilians were identifiable.
I raised this with Julian
and he said,
"if an Afghan civilian helps Coalition
forces, he deserves to die,"
and he went on to explain that they have the
status of a collaborator or an informer.
Now...
INTERVIEWER: Are you sure about that?
That's definitely what he said?
I have absolutely
no doubt about it at all.
This was just me and him talking through
the detail of how we handle this.
And this problem, potential
problem, had already come up.
A, it's a moral problem,
we are not here to publish
material that gets people killed.
B, if you publish information which
really does get people hurt,
or could conceivably
get people hurt,
you lose your
political immunity,
you're terribly vulnerable to the
most obvious propaganda attack
which is waiting for us
in the wings
that you are helping
the bad guys.
Julian's a computer hacker,
he comes from that ideology
that all information is good,
and everything
should be published.
HOST: I asked Julian if he would publish
information sent to his website
WNYC - "On The Media"
March 2009
that could lead to
the deaths of innocents,
such as how to release anthrax
into a town's water supply.
[ASSANGE SPEAKING]
OVERTON: This is a man whose primary
way of interacting with the world
is a digital one.
It is to some degree unsullied by
the limitations of human nature.
He does sometimes reduce human
activity to something formulaic,
and he doesn't see the human
heart beating in there.
He just reduced it to that
very, very simple formula.
"They speak to an occupying
force, they must be bad,
"the informer
deserves to die."
NARRATOR: The coalition
of journalists
weren't used to working with a
transparency radical like Assange,
and Assange was still learning
the ethics of journalism.
They could only agree
on one thing,
they were going to
release the documents.
In London, a deadline was
set for all the partners
to publish at the same time.
Julian finally agreed to redactions,
the blacking out of names,
and told his partners
he had a special process
which would eliminate the identity
of sources from the documents.
But with less than a week
before publication,
Assange had neglected to tell
Domscheit-Berg in Berlin.
DOMSCHEIT-BERG:
So, there we were,
four days before releasing
90,000 documents
and no redactions made.
ASSANGE ON COMPUTER: It is
effectively impossible for us
to notify some of these Afghanis in
their villages about this material.
It looks like we will have to
do a redaction of some of them.
INTERVIEWER ON COMPUTER:
Is that new for you?
You're effectively doing a
bit of censorship yourself.
Yeah, that would be new
for us, but remember...
NARRATOR: Time
was running out.
Just before the release,
Assange focused on a section
of 15,000 documents
that contained
the most names.
In desperation, he turned to
an unlikely source for help.
It was reported that WikiLeaks has
asked the Department of Defense
for help in reviewing approximately
15,000 classified documents
that WikiLeaks obtained
in an unauthorized
and inappropriate manner
before WikiLeaks releases those
classified documents to the public.
DOMSCHEIT-BERG: Julian urged The New York
Times to send a letter to the Pentagon
asking if they want to
help with redactions,
and they refused,
and that was 24 hours
before the release.
MORRELL: ...classified
and sensitive information...
This notion that he didn't care about
what was in that material is not true.
He was actually quite
tortured by this material
and with very few resources.
By himself, day and night,
he was consumed
with working out what to release
and what not to release.
WikiLeaks is a tiny organization
working on this huge scale.
It's going to make
some mistakes.
Is Spiegel "I-E"
or "E-l"?
MAN: I-E.
All right. Fuck that end
of the press release.
DAVIS: He was without
any support structure,
and he was about to
do a press conference.
So, I'd say to him, "Julian,
you need someone there.
"I mean, someone's got to
write a press release
"or at least answer
the phone."
[INDISTINCT]
DAVIS: So it was just in the
couple of days before that launch
that a couple of volunteer
students came in.
ASSANGE: I'm going to go now,
but I just want to give you
something to think about, which is,
we've got this press
conference on, tomorrow.
We're going to be
totally inundated.
Completely
totally inundated.
INTERVIEWER: Let's talk about
WikiLeaks as an organization.
Mmm-hmm. Is this Apple
or IBM, or is this...
[CHUCKLES] It's
a corner gas station,
with some extremely
bright attendants.
[LAUGHING]
it was true that he tried
to create an impression
that it was this very
large organization.
It was Julian Assange,
his $300 laptop,
10 SIM cards,
and a very cheap jacket
that he'd put on if he
had to do an interview.
[ALARM RINGING]
DAVIS: He woke up late,
of course.
I'm knocking on the door.
"Julian, come on, man."
He gets up.
Just his normal thing.
What's the time?
What's the time?
DAVIS: Twenty-five to.
I also need to prepare a little
list of things. All right.
[DAVIS SPEAKING]
I'll be two minutes.
How are you feeling?
Tired.
I haven't been to sleep.
But, good.
Fourteen pages in The
Guardian this morning.
"Massive leak of secret files
exposes true Afghan war."
We tell our sources
maximum political impact,
and I think
we got pretty close.
DAVIS: There's
10 trucks out there,
10 media trucks,
[CHUCKLING] 10 media trucks.
Yep.
It'll be a good outcome.
DAVIS: He walked out that door as
the sort of aging student hobo.
By the time he had made
this 50-yard walk,
he was a rock star.
He was one of the most
famous guys on the planet.
[PEOPLE CHATTERING]
[CAMERAS CLICKING]
Holy fuck.
ASSANGE: Most of you have read
some of the morning papers.
So, this is The Guardian
from this morning.
Fourteen pages
about this topic.
It's clear that it will
shape an understanding
of what the past six years
of war has been like,
and that the course of
the war needs to change.
NARRATOR: The war logs revealed a
conflict that was very different
from what citizens
had been told.
Civilian casualties were
much higher than reported.
America's supposed ally, Pakistan,
was playing a double game,
taking military aid
from the U.S.,
even while working with the Taliban
to plan attacks in Afghanistan.
The war logs also revealed the existence
of a secret American assassination squad,
with a terrible record of wounding
and killing women and children.
[GUNFIRE]
LEONARD: There is nothing that will have
greater consequences for our nation
than the unleashing
of the brutality of war.
To have those types
of decisions,
those types of deliberations,
done in secrecy
is a tremendous disservice
to the American people,
because these are things that
are being done in their names.
And whether you agree
with it or not,
to have a free back-and-forth
airing of these is essential.
All the material is
over seven months old,
so it's of no current
operational consequence.
Now, in what circumstances
wouldn't you publish information,
or are there any circumstances in
which you wouldn't publish it?
We have a harm
minimization process.
Our goal is just reform,
our method is transparency.
But we do not put
the method before the goal.
[REPORTERS CLAMORING]
Sorry.
DAVIES: To my amazement,
Julian announced to the world,
"WikiLeaks always conducts
a harm minimization process."
Julian had no harm minimization
process in place at all.
INTERVIEWER: So, on the WikiLeaks
side, were the redactions made?
No.
There were 15,000 documents
in the end got held back.
But 75,000 documents
were published,
and they contained
about 100 names.
NARRATOR: The newspapers
published articles,
accompanied by only a few
hundred redacted documents.
But even after the holdbacks,
and despite Julian's promises,
WikiLeaks published 75,000
documents on its website
without redactions.
ROBERT GATES: The battlefield consequences
of the release of these documents
are potentially
severe and dangerous
for our troops, our allies
and Afghan partners.
[GUNFIRE]
DAVIES: I do not know whether
anybody subsequently did get hurt-
The fact that
the material was there
and identifiable as
potentially dangerous
did the political damage.
When the material
was first published,
the world was indeed talking about
civilian casualties in Afghanistan,
and about the existence of a squad that
was going out and killing Taliban.
But the White House
managed the news,
and the story became "WikiLeaks
has got blood on their hands."
ADM. MICHAEL MULLEN: Mr. Assange
can say whatever he likes
about the greater good
he thinks he and
his source are doing,
but the truth is they might
already have on their hands
the blood of some young solider
or that of an Afghan family.
The people at WikiLeaks could
have blood on their hands.
He does clearly have
blood on his hands.
The blood is on their hands.
BROOKE: This is where we get
into the information war.
That speculative blood became more
important than the actual blood.
OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM
Coalition troop deaths: 3,936 Afghan
civilian deaths: 15,500 - 17,400
Taliban deaths:
15,000 - 25,000
We already can see
all that terrible stuff.
We know about that.
Let's focus on
your nightmares.
How all these people
might die
because the government's
secrets have been unleashed.
DAVIES: As soon as
they pick up this line
about who's got
blood on their hands,
it's WikiLeaks
being isolated,
and that, from
a political point of view,
was a clever move
by the White House.
They stepped all around
any kind of argument
with these big news
organizations
and isolated Julian.
NARRATOR: By creating a distinction
between Assange and the newspapers,
the government avoided a war
with the mainstream media
and invented a perfect enemy,
the guy Bradley Manning called
"the crazy,
white-haired Aussie. "
What was your name?
[ASSANGE SPEAKING]
I don't know what it was,
I know what it is.
What is your name?
Julian.
DAVIS: Is this taking
some getting used to?
You've been pretty
much in the shadows
as far as the media's
concerned until recently.
We've grown a bit, so this is
now a time for me to do it.
WikiLeaks needs a face?
Yeah, the public demands
that it has a face.
And actually we'd much
sort of prefer,
I'd prefer, if it didn't
have to have a face.
And we tried to do
that for a while.
Urn...
And people...
Just the demand was sort of so great,
people just started inventing faces.
INTERVIEWER 1:
Some call him a hero,
some see him as a threat
to national security.
Julian, thank you
for joining us...
This afternoon I talked to
the man behind the leaks...
LARRY KING: Julian Assange.
INTERVIEWER 2: Julian Assange.
VIEIRA: Mr. Assange,
good morning to you.
INTERVIEWER 3: What
have the leaks achieved?
We have published
more classified documents
than the rest of the
world press combined.
INTERVIEWER 4:
So it's journalistic.
I'm fond of the phrase,
"Lights on, rats out."
Do you feel you have
accomplished what you wanted to
with the release
of these documents?
Not yet.
You.
What?
Jesus Christ.
So, two with you
on the front.
My God, look...
Another double
page spread.
JOSEPH FARRELL: I think
that's the best photo.
That's not a bad photo.
I think
it's really good.
And then you've got...
You've got your own banner
at the top here for three
pages, in The Times.
I'm untouchable now
in this country.
DAVIS: Untouchable?
ASSANGE: Untouchable.
DAVIS: That's
a bit of hubris.
Huh?
[DAVIS SPEAKING]
That's a bit of hubris.
Well, for a couple of days.
It can wear off. But the
next few days, untouchable.
The founder of WikiLeaks found
himself making news again today.
Sweden issued a warrant for
the arrest of Julian Assange.
NEWS ANCHOR: Right now
Swedish authorities are
looking to question WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange.
Swedish authorities have issued
a warrant for his arrest
on suspicion of molestation and
rape in two separate cases.
DAVIES: Saturday,
August the 21st, I woke up.
Another journalist
had sent an email
with a link to the website of the
Swedish newspaper Expressen.
I went to this website and I
thought, "Well, this is a joke,
"this is like
a spoof newspaper."
These huge headlines,
including one which claims
that Julian Assange has
sexually assaulted two women.
"What is this about?"
So, I phoned a guy
in Stockholm
who is the main coordinator
for WikiLeaks in that city.
So I came up to this guy and I
said, "What on earth is going on?"
NARRATOR: The man in
Sweden was Donald Bostrom,
[CLICKING TONGUE]
an investigative
journalist
who had agreed to help Julian Assange
while he was in the country.
It was...
kind of the new Mick Jagger.
Yeah. I mean,
really, really.
Groupies, stalkers, media...
everyone had a big interest
in Julian at the time.
And he liked it.
INTERVIEWER: He liked it?
Mmm-hmm. Of course.
[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Assange had thought
of moving his base to Sweden,
where WikiLeaks
kept its servers.
Laws were more favorable
to press freedoms
and Assange had
a growing fan base.
Fame offered Assange
a platform,
but it also made him
a visible target.
[BOSTROM SPEAKING]
I said to Julian, "I think
you are on the list..."
"of undesirable people
for some governments."
"Recently, in Russia"
"some journalists
were compromised"
"by girls in short skirts."
"it's a very easy trick."
"So please, take it easy."
That was exactly one week
before everything happened.
REPORTER 1: Breaking news... REPORTER
2: Internet platform WikiLeaks...
REPORTER 3: The Australian
has denied the allegations
saying that
they are without basis...
[REPORTER SPEAKING SPANISH]
Julian Assange denied having
had non-consensual relations
with the two women of
35 and 25 years of age.
[REPORTER SPEAKING MAN DARIN]
She described Assange
as violent
and said she tried to
refuse his advances.
She only consented
to having sex
after he agreed to
wear a condom.
But the condom somehow broke.
NARRATOR: An unknown source leaked
the police report to the press.
It included the
testimony of Assange,
the two women,
and, surprisingly,
a picture of a torn condom.
There were other
peculiar things going on.
The case of one woman was
dropped, and then reopened.
The general sense was, it's awful
curious that these charges would emerge
just after a very embarrassing
and damaging leak.
There were various
possibilities here.
One was that some women
who wanted to sell a story
to the newspapers
had set him up.
Another was that a really nasty
right-wing group in Sweden
had conspired to set him up.
Maybe some dark agency from the
United States has done this.
And way out on the extreme
ranges of possibility,
well, maybe he did it,
I don't know!
Did anything happen between
you and these two women
that could be construed
as sexual coercion or rape?
No words, no actions,
no violence.
There is nothing that could
be construed as rape.
Nothing at all.
Or sexual coercion?
Well, I don't know
what the hell that means.
There's no doubt that this
organization is under siege...
It was clearly
a smear campaign...
[ASSANGE SPEAKING]
ASSANGE: We were warned
by Australian intelligence
we would receive
such an attack.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
is calling it a "smear campaign."
His supporters claim that the
warrant is a way of silencing him.
You're telling me this isn't a witch
hunt, this isn't a smear job? Come on.
One accuser apparently
worked with Cuban exiles
and there's a story around
that she's a CIA operative?
MICHAEL MOORE: This whole thing stinks
to the high heavens, I gotta tell ya.
I've seen this
enough times,
where governments
and corporations,
they go after people with
this kind of lie and smear.
This is all a bunch of hooey
as far as I'm concerned.
Well, it's certainly a
surreal Swedish fairy tale.
The only thing that hasn't walked
onto stage yet are the trolls.
And I'm waiting
for them to arrive.
ASSANGE: It is my role
to be the lightning rod,
to attract the attacks against
the organization for our work.
One aspect of that has been the legal
situation for yourself in Sweden.
I'm not going to talk about
that in relation to this.
But it does
affect WikiLeaks.
I will have to
walk if you're...
Do you still...
You had once talked...
If you're going to contaminate
this extremely serious interview
with questions about
my personal life...
[CLEARS THROAT]
I'm not, what I'm asking is,
if you feel that it's
an attack on WikiLeaks.
Okay, sorry.
Julian, I'm happy to go
onto the next question.
All I'm asking is...
Sorry.
You blew it.
NARRATOR: The case in Sweden
was still unresolved.
While the investigation
continued,
prosecutors permitted Assange
to leave Sweden
with the understanding
that he would reappear.
But Assange never went back.
Convinced Sweden was a trap,
he went underground in London.
DAVIS: Julian has
a certain paranoia,
but in the time
I was with him
I think that high security
awareness was actually relevant,
it was appropriate.
Mind you, he'd been
living like that
for the past, you know,
five or ten years
when it probably
wasn't appropriate.
REPORTER: Will there be anything
more coming from WikiLeaks
in the next two
or three weeks?
ASSANGE: You never have a
good reason to be paranoid.
You have good reason
to be careful.
Stakes are high so you need to be
meticulously careful every day.
DAVIS: He'd been trained for
this moment, in evasive tactics,
and changing phones and taking out
batteries and changing computers.
May have been
a fantasy before,
but it served him well
because it became real.
He was the focus
of intense enemies.
REPORTER: Right now the Pentagon
reportedly searching for Julian Assange,
potentially on the verge
of releasing
a huge new stash
of confidential documents.
He was putting his head
above the parapet.
He was putting himself
in a dangerous position.
And I think, on the whole, he
handled the dangers pretty well.
There is a side to
this guy which is great,
and then there's this hidden side
which has been so destructive.
MANNE: He's a natural
fabulist and storyteller
and lives intensely
in his imagination,
and to some extent that imaginary
world that he inhabits
becomes more real than the, as it were,
often mundane reality that we all live in.
Yes.
[REPORTER SPEAKING]
You talked about an aggressive
surveillance operation
against you and some
WikiLeaks employees?
We certainly were under
surveillance in Iceland.
I, personally,
had chased people
who were surveilling me
with video cameras.
DOMSCHEIT-BERG: He traveled
to a conference in Oslo
and then made
these allegations that
two State Department officials had
been on the airplane to follow him,
but there is no proof.
And this is what got tiring
to a lot of us over time.
Julian was constantly propagating
how much we're in danger
and all of these things.
And this was just lies
and propaganda.
Maybe it's the fame,
maybe it's the attention,
maybe it's the pressures of working
in this kind of environment,
but somehow this
idealist that I met
became something else
somewhere through the story.
DOMSCHEIT-BERG: This whole topic just
headed into a really bad direction.
There was this
article in Newsweek.
That's what Julian took as a proof
that I had been speaking to the press.
From that day on
I was a traitor,
I was trying to
stab him in the back.
It boiled down to me being
suspended for, as Julian put it,
"disloyalty, insubordination and
destabilization in times of crisis."
INTERVIEWER: Where did that
language come from?
I think, as much as I can tell, that's
from the Espionage Act of 1917.
NARRATOR: That was
a cruel irony.
Across the Atlantic, the United
States Department of Justice
was investigating whether it
could use the Espionage Act
to put Julian Assange in jail.
LEONARD: The Espionage Act is primarily
intended to address situations
where individuals pass national
defense information over to the enemy
in order to allow
the enemy to harm us.
It would be unprecedented if the
Espionage Act was being used
to attack individuals
who did not do anything more
than The New York Times or The
Washington Post does every day.
[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]
WOMAN: Do you want
to let them in first?
NARRATOR: The next big releases
were the Iraq War Logs.
This time WikiLeaks had
worked with volunteers
to devise a computer program to
solve the redaction problems.
There were almost
400,000 documents
detailing that the U.S. military
had purposefully hidden information
about civilian casualties
and systematic torture.
President Obama sanctioned
the mass handover
of Iraqi prisoners of war
from the American troops over
to the Iraqi authorities.
And one of the things that is
against the Geneva Conventions
is you cannot hand over
a prisoner of war
to another authority who
you know commits torture.
But let me just say with
regards to the allegations
of not intervening when
coming across detainee abuse,
not true.
They had 1,300 allegations,
with medical evidence,
of quite horrific torture
by Iraqi army and police
against detainees.
OVERTON: We're talking
about sodomy,
we're talking about abuse
using rubber hoses
and beating people,
we're talking about murder.
The sort of torture that supposedly
we were "liberating" Iraq from.
The U.S. Administration
under Bush and under Obama
continued turning over prisoners
despite knowing this.
That is against
the Geneva Convention.
The Obama administration appears
to have committed war crimes.
Who knew that before?
- Bradley Manning's
letter to WikiLeaks
NARRATOR: What
had Manning done?
Was his leak, as the Army had
said, a reckless data dump?
Or was this
the act of a man
who had peeked behind the
curtain of a superpower
and decided that
what it was doing was wrong?
After the leaks, and just
before he was arrested,
Manning was trying to reckon
with what he had done
and where he was going.
There was never
even a possibility
that anyone could assume that
he had a female personality.
INTERVIEW: You mean that he
wanted to become a woman?
Well, we knew that he was at least
considering hormone therapy,
but no one cared.
It wasn't like,
"Okay, he's going to have to start
showering with the females."
Literally, nobody cared.
EDWARDS: He would
call me and cry.
Very loud sobbing
like a child just in
a state of just utter loss,
and he kept saying,
"I won't make it,
"I can't make it,
I can't do this."
[GUNSHOT]
I constantly asked him,
"Do you have someone?
"Do you have
anyone to talk to,
"that's there, that you can
see on a daily basis?"
And he assured me
that he did not.
NARRATOR: Manning did reach
out for help at least once,
in an email to
his master sergeant.
Manning attached to the email a picture
of himself dressed as a woman.
Several weeks later,
around dinnertime,
Manning was discovered
lying on the ground.
With a knife, he had scrawled
on a chair the words,
"I want. "
Later that same evening, Manning
tried to go back to work.
SHOWMAN:
I was off-shift,
and I had to come in
to find something
that he should have
been able to find.
And he was pacing back and forth
saying smart comments to me.
And I blatantly said,
"Manning, how 'bout you fix your
shit before you try to fix mine?"
And he screamed and
punched me in the face
while I was sitting down.
My adrenaline immediately
hit overload.
I stood up,
pushed my chair back.
He continued to
try to fight me,
but I put him in, you know,
what UFC would call a"guillotine"
and pulled him on the floor,
and laid on top of him and
pinned his arms beside his head.
At that time, I can't
believe he messed with me,
I literally had
15-inch biceps.
I was the last person he
probably should have punched.
My superiors decided that
it was just escalating too
much and he had to be removed
and have his weapon
taken away from him.
At that point he never
came back in the office.
He had to go work with the first
sergeant in the mailroom.
NARRATOR: In the mailroom, Manning
still had an Internet connection
to military networks.
His gun had
been taken away,
but he still had access to
millions of classified documents.
HAYDEN: We have personnel
security programs.
We try to take a look at the folks
to whom we give security clearances.
Should this young man have
been given that clearance?
In retrospect, certainly not.
In prospect, who knows'?
These are the kinds of decisions
that are difficult to make.
But let me put it
to you this way,
the American Army has had
incredibly stupid PFCs
for more than two centuries,
[CHUCKLING]
and PFCs occasionally
do incredibly stupid things.
SHOWMAN: I didn't
see him get arrested.
But I saw him
walk down the hall
with about four MPs.
He had a grin on his face,
like, "I'm on top
of the world."
EDWARDS: The last communication
I received from him
was that I was going to hear something
that would shock the world.
[TELEPHONE PLAYING]
HAYDEN: It was
a pretty simple process,
dropping CDs into your tower
and downloading large
volumes of information.
It wasn't incredibly
sophisticated.
NARRATOR: That's
not quite true.
Manning turned his computers into
efficient exfiltration machines.
Over several months, Manning
made over 794,000 connections
with the State Department's
server.
He downloaded hundreds of
thousands of documents
without anyone noticing.
When he hit a snag,
he reached out to another hacker for
advice on how to crack passwords.
Later, Manning talked to him about
the progress of the uploads.
In Manning's buddy list, the address
was listed under a familiar name,
Julian Assange.
[TELEPHONE CONTINUES PLAYING]
NARRATOR:
On November 28th, 2010,
WikiLeaks and
its media partners
began to publish a small
fraction, carefully redacted,
of the State Department cables
supplied by Bradley Manning.
The day-to-day memos
of American diplomats
revealed a surprising honesty about
how the world really worked.
BROOKE: It was that whole
Wizard of Oz moment.
We all look at these politicians,
"Oh, wow, they're so powerful!"
And then it was the little dog
[LAUGHING] pulling the curtain away.
NARRATOR: The cables exposed
criminal behavior and corruption
by tyrants in Egypt,
Tunisia, and Libya.
That in turn helped to fuel
an exploding popular anger
against repression,
the so-called Arab Spring.
They also told the truth
about the faults of
America's so-called allies
in ways that were
bound to reveal
that their power and legitimacy
were a kind of fraud.
This leak is
industrial scale.
It touches every relationship
the United States has
with other countries
around the world.
Even as the United States and others
try to manage the impact of this,
it will be a wound that just keeps
opening up on a recurring basis.
NARRATOR: The behavior of the
United States was also exposed,
as the cables revealed
criminal cover-ups
and a systematic policy of using
diplomats to spy on foreign governments.
HAYDEN: Look,
everyone has secrets.
Some of the activities
that nation-states conduct
in order to keep their
people safe and free
need to be secret
in order to be successful.
If they are broadly known,
you cannot accomplish
your work.
Now look, let me be
very candid, all right.
We steal secrets.
We steal other
nation's secrets.
One cannot do
that aboveboard
and be very successful for a
very long period of time.
HILLARY CLINTON: Disclosures
like these tear at the fabric
of the proper function
of responsible government.
People of good faith
understand the need for sensitive
diplomatic communications,
both to protect
the national interest
and the global
common interest.
BROOKE: For the previous leaks,
the American government,
they were obviously angry,
but they suddenly decided,
"Right, now it's time to
get Draconian on their ass."
It's time that the Obama administration
treats WikiLeaks for what it is,
a terrorist organization.
What we should do is treat
Assange as an enemy combatant,
who's engaged in information
warfare against the United States.
He's a blackmail,
extortionist, terrorist.
...crackpot,
alleged sex offender...
He's a criminal and he
ought to be hunted down,
and grabbed,
and put on trial.
We have a very serious criminal
investigation that's underway
and we're looking at all of
the things that we can do
to stern the flow
of this information.
He needs to be prosecuted to
the fullest extent of the law,
and if that becomes a problem,
we need to change the law.
We've got special ops forces.
A dead man can't leak stuff...
...illegally shoot
the son of a... [BLEEP]
This little punk...
Now I stand up for Obama.
Obama, if you're listening today,
you should take this guy out.
I think Obama should put out a contract
and maybe use a drone or something.
That's what I'd like to see, a
little drone hit Assange, right.
NARRATOR: All the threats
were aimed at Assange.
No one called for attacks on The
Guardian or The New York Times.
DAVIS: I found
that astounding.
If Julian Assange
should be charged
with some offense
under American law,
then absolutely
The New York Times editor
should be in
the slammer with him.
NARRATOR: Suddenly, only
two days after the release
of the first batch of
State Department cables,
Interpol issued a demand
for Assange's arrest,
for his failure to
return to Sweden
to answer questions
about sex charges.
MARK STEPHENS: I'm really rather
worried by the political motivations
that appear to
be behind this.
Sweden was one of
those lickspittle states
which used its resources
and its facilities
for rendition flights
and torture.
INTERVIEWER: You think if he goes to
Sweden, he may be sent to the States?
Certainly my mind is
very open about that.
And you may fight it on that basis?
Certainly.
NARRATOR: There were rumors of a
sealed indictment against Assange.
In secret, a U.S. grand jury served
subpoenas targeting WikiLeaks supporters.
Under political pressure,
VISA and MasterCard stopped
processing donations to the website.
VISA and MasterCard
will happily process payments
for the Ku Klux Klan,
for all kinds of organizations
around the world,
and yet this one,
with no charges,
no warrants, no nothing,
they've not only blocked it themselves,
they won't let any intermediaries do it.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks' founder is
still hiding from the police,
but today he did
speak out, online.
REPORTER: What happens to WikiLeaks
if Julian Assange is arrested?
This is carrying on, this is huge
material that is really important,
and everyone working on it
is getting it out there.
BALL: WikiLeaks' principal
spokesman always has been Julian,
but with Julian
being in hiding,
I essentially filled
in the gap.
Where is Julian Assange,
this mythic character'?
Honestly can't remember
where I last saw him.
I ended up doing
a lot of their television,
looking pretty
much about 16.
You really did feel
a David and Goliath moment.
Do you consider your organization and
your website to be under attack?
Yes, all week it's
been under attack.
NARRATOR: The WikiLeaks website
came under cyber attack
and kept falling offline.
In response, WikiLeaks supporters
began to mirror the site
on over 1,000 servers
around the globe.
It was impossible to remove
WikiLeaks from the Internet.
The Internet
in a digital era
lets governments get more
information and more power
and more communication
than they've ever had before.
But, it lets citizens
do the same.
Governments are more powerful
and more vulnerable
at exactly the same time.
The fight on our hands is
who gets to control the Internet,
who gets to control information.
ELECTRONIC VOICE: Hello. This is a
classified message from Anonymous.
After numerous attacks on the
truth-spilling platform of WikiLeaks,
ANONYMOUS hacker
collective video
including the shutdown
of its financing,
we have already
made it very clear
that we will fight for freedom
of speech and the free press.
We are Anonymous.
We are legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
NARRATOR: In response to the
financial blockade on WikiLeaks,
the hacker collective Anonymous
launched cyber attacks,
taking down the websites of
VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal.
Free Julian Assange!
Free Bradley Manning!
End the war.
Off the road, please!
Off the road.
[OFFICER CONTINUES SHOUTING]
[PROTESTER 1 SHOUTING]
Political prisoner!
OFFICER: You've been
warned already!
[PROTESTER 2 SHOUTING]
We love you!
[PROTESTER 3 SHOUTING]
Free speech!
NARRATOR: One week after the
arrest warrant was issued,
Assange surrendered
to police in London.
Deemed a flight risk,
he was ordered held in jail,
pending a bail hearing.
STEPHENS: Many people believe
Mr. Assange to be innocent,
and many people believe that this
prosecution is politically motivated.
[PROTESTERS CLAMORING]
NARRATOR: Assange's arrest
had become a mythic moment,
but what was really going on?
Was Sweden acting as an
agent of the United States?
Would extradition to Sweden mean
a one-way ticket to Guantanamo?
Or had the mission of
WikiLeaks become confused
with a private matter
between one man and two women?
INTERVIEWER: Talk about why
we're altering your appearance
and filming you in this way.
AN NA: The reason I felt it
was important to be obscured
is mainly because of all
the threats I've received.
And I know that different
media have published my face
without my consent.
And a lot of online
communities
started to have wild
speculations about who I was
and who the other girl was.
I feel that the less
my face is shown
and the less people
can recognize me,
the safer I will be.
NARRATOR: Anna has been
advised not to talk
about any of the details of her
sexual encounter with Assange
until the legal case
has been resolved.
But there are a few facts
on which everyone agrees.
An organizer for a WikiLeaks
seminar in Stockholm,
Anna invited Julian to stay at her
apartment while she was out of town.
Then she decided
to come back early.
[CAMERAS CLICKING]
The following day
at the seminar,
Julian was approached by
another WikiLeaks volunteer.
Her name was Sofia.
[BOSTROM SPEAKING]
Sofia wanted to see Julian,
wanted to touch Julian
wanted to be close to Julian.
Honestly, I think
he was a rock star
and he was picking the fruit.
The truth is the
first casualty of war.
One week after the seminar
Anna called me
and said, "Donald..."
"I was very proud to have
the hottest man on the planet"
"in my apartment,
in my bed even."
"But then something happened
I didn't like."
"He tore the condom."
"I feel very uncomfortable
about it."
And then she told me
Sofia called her
about the same thing.
She was very concerned
she's pregnant or catch HIV
because Julian had sex
with her without a condom.
They said if Julian
takes an HIV test
we won't go to the police.
I tried actually
to tell his friends
that we can get this over
with fast and with no fuss
because I really didn't want
this to be in the papers.
But he chose to make
a big deal out of it.
DAVIES: Julian had repeatedly
refused to have the test.
When he had finally changed his mind
and agreed to, it was too late.
By that time, the women had
already got too frustrated
and too angry with
Julian's refusals,
and they'd gone
to the police.
ASSANGE: They found out that
they were mutual lovers of mine,
they had had unprotected sex,
and they got into a tizzy
about whether there was possibility
of sexually transmitted diseases.
Ridiculous thing to go
to the police about.
NARRATOR: When the women went to the police
to try to force Assange to take an HIV test,
their testimony raised questions
about possible criminal charges.
The police, on their own,
decided to investigate further.
The refusal to use a condom
took center stage.
If Assange had HIV and knew it,
it could be a case for assault.
...Assange...[was] firmly holding [Anna's]
arms and prying her legs open...
Anna is convinced that Assange...
broke the condom...
...and...continued having sex with
a subsequent ejaculation.
The testimony of the women
raised another issue.
Did Assange refuse
to use a condom
because he wanted to
make the women pregnant?
Some pointed to the fact that he
had already fathered four children
with four different women
around the world.
This is a man
who's elusive,
he's always flying around the
place, he doesn't have any roots.
And he's got a number
of kids.
There might be some sort
of primary impulse in him
to want to just reproduce,
to want to have some sort
of bedrock in his life.
This is the ultimate
digital man,
and actually you can't just
live in a digital world.
"...[Sofia] was woken by the feeling
of [Assange] penetrating her."
"He was already inside of her
and she let him continue."
"She immediately asked 'Are you wearing
anything' and he replied 'You."'
ASSANGE: I have never said
that this is a honey trap.
I have never said that
it is not a honey trap.
He was claiming that he
didn't know who we were,
and that's not true.
He knew very well
who we were,
and he knew we were going
to the police before we went.
ASSANGE: There are
powerful interests
that have incentives
to promote these smears.
DAVIES: What Julian did was to start
the little snowball rolling downhill,
that this was some
kind of a conspiracy.
And that was all he
had to do at that stage.
It rolled and it
picked up speed.
AN NA: A lot of rumors were
made up and pure fantasies.
The wildest story of all
was that I was a CIA agent.
And I was like,
I couldn't really believe
that anyone would believe
such a weird story.
[BOSTROM SPEAKING]
From outside I can understand
it must be a conspiracy.
But, I was in
the middle of it.
Sorry to say it was not
two girls in short skirts
sent in from
the CIA or whatever.
They were just ordinary,
nice girls
admiring Julian and WikiLeaks.
INTERVIEWER: You've been very
careful not to say anything.
Why?
Because this is a legal case,
and not a public debate.
PROTESTERS: Sweden!
Shame on you!
Sweden! Shame on you!
BALL: The way Julian's private affairs
have been conflated with WikiLeaks,
I find quite troubling.
There was at one point an effort to
try and separate the two issues.
That was reversed
and the decision was made to
push the two causes together.
And so it just...
INTERVIEWER: How was that reversed?
Was there a meeting?
Was there... Or it just
slid into that direction?
Julian reversed it.
Explicitly.
He very much wanted
what happened in Sweden
to be seen as part of
the transparency agenda.
And it worked.
I'm here because the U.S. government
and the Swedish authorities
are trying to gag the truth.
These charges are completely
politically motivated
and have nothing whatsoever
to do with the prosecution.
It's a persecution,
not a prosecution.
DAVIES: What is so extraordinary
is the way in which the two women
have been either
completely forgotten,
as though they had
no rights here at all,
or caricatured, vilified.
Web post by Assange supporter
AN NA: I've been through
two years
of different kinds
of abuses.
People coming to my house,
people threatening,
or questioning
or following my friends
and family.
Some death threats,
but mostly sexual threats
that I deserve to get raped.
A lot of Twitter
accounts and blogs
that are very close
to WikiLeaks
have been publishing things that
I know Julian knows is not true.
They admire him very much, and he
could have easily stopped that.
DAVIES: There was an enormous
amount of hype and misinformation
and bullshit that came out of
Julian Assange's supporters.
And the more that
people realize
that they were lied
to by Julian,
the less moral and
political authority he has.
He's supposed to
be about truth.
PROTESTERS ON LOUDSPEAKER:
Information should be free!
PROTESTERS: This
is not democracy!
We want free speech!
Hands off WikiLeaks!
We want free speech!
Hands off WikiLeaks!
What do we want?
Free speech!
When do we want it?
Now!
[CROWD CHEERING]
ALL: Free Julian Assange!
Free Julian Assange!
[CLINKING]
Good evening, and welcome
to this fundraising dinner
for freedom of speech.
While I cannot be with
you in person this evening
because I am under
house arrest,
I can at least be
with you in spirit.
NARRATOR: After nine days, Assange
was released from prison,
his supporters putting up
over $300, 000 in bail.
While Julian appealed
his extradition to Sweden,
a local journalist named Vaughan Smith
offered Julian a place to stay.
VAUGHAN SMITH: Ellingham Hall is
125 miles northeast of London.
It's a house that's been in my
family for 250 years or so.
We've got livestock, we've
got cattle, we've got sheep.
We've got game, obviously,
pheasant, partridge.
We shoot them and eat them.
BALL: Ellingham Hall
is a lovely place,
but it's right in
the middle of nowhere,
and we'd packed it with
about 15-20 people.
It's a sort of cross between Big
Brother and a spy thriller.
Part of Vaughan's plan
to keep the thing civilized
was setting strict rules
around meals,
and so Vaughan's very lovely housekeeper
would cook for us three times a day.
Even port served at dinner,
which was passed to the left, of course.
[CHUCKLES]
And now we are
in a position
WikiLeaks fundraising video
where we are being
most aggressively censored
by the Washington establishment
of the United States.
NARRATOR: To raise money
for his legal defense,
Assange began selling
a compelling package:
Dinner with Julian.
In exchange for a donation,
WikiLeaks would provide a
link to a video of Julian
to be played at home
on a laptop,
placed on a tablemat set
for the absent hacker.
And together, we make the world into a
place where all our dreams can play.
BALL: This
Dinner for Free Speech
was in fact dinner for Julian's
sex offense defense fund.
No one knows now whether
money given to WikiLeaks
is going to Julian
or elsewhere.
NARRATOR: Julian's legal troubles
made him more famous than ever,
but they also intensified his differences
with his former media partners.
They defended his
right to publish
but began to turn
on Assange himself.
I've been close enough
to see the
wasps around the jam here.
He stirred the nest
and they've come to sting him rather
more than perhaps he expected.
JACK SHAFER: In a January
piece, you described Assange as
"eccentric, " "elusive, "
"manipulative, " "volatile, "
"openly hostile, " "coy, "
an "office geek,"
a "derelict, " "arrogant,"
"thin-skinned, " "conspiratorial, "
and "oddly credulous. "
Um, is that any way for a journalist
to talk about his sources?
He looked like
a bag lady coming in.
He was wearing kind of
a dingy khaki sports coat,
old tennis shoes,
with socks that were kind of
collapsing around his ankles.
And he clearly hadn't
bathed in several days.
DAVIS: The New York Times...
The hypocrisy of this act.
They wanted the material.
They were fully complicit in the
publication of the material.
But as soon as the heat came on,
they wanted to wash their hands.
NARRATOR: I tried over many months to get
an on-camera interview with Assange.
After meetings and emails,
I was finally summoned
to the Norfolk mansion
for a six-hour negotiation.
Julian wanted money.
He said that the market rate
for an interview with him
was one million dollars.
When I declined,
he offered an alternative,
perhaps I would spy on my other
interviews and report back to him.
I couldn't do that either.
During his time under house arrest, he
had become more secretive and paranoid.
He railed against
his enemies,
and I knew that he had tried
to get all his followers
to sign a non-disclosure
agreement.
The penalty for leaking,
$ 19 million.
BALL: I'd found this
a little bit awkward,
being asked by
a transparency organization
to sign exactly
the kind of document
used to silence whistle-blowers
around the world.
Seemed pretty troubling.
And so I refused.
ASSANGE: All organizations
face two possible paths.
They can be open,
honest, just,
or they can be closed, unjust,
and therefore not successful.
NARRATOR: Had the secret-leaker
become the secret-keeper?
More and more fond
of mysteries.
The biggest mystery of all was
the role of the United States.
Over two years
after the first leak,
no charges have been
filed by the U.S.
Assange claimed that the U.
S. was biding its time,
waiting for him
to go to Sweden.
But there was no proof.
In fact, members of
Assange's legal team
admitted that
it would be easier
for the U.S. to extradite
Assange from Britain.
HELENA A. KENNEDY: Britain is the
one that's done this special deal
with the United States
on extradition.
But Sweden is
particularly strong
in seeing as sacrosanct that
business about handing people over.
They would hold to that perhaps
stronger than Britain would.
We think we've got a special
relationship with the United States.
NARRATOR: Despite that
special relationship,
Assange desperately
fought extradition to Sweden
and lost every appeal.
PROTESTER: Julian,
we are with you!
NARRATOR: His legal battle
drained his finances
and trapped him in a family
farm for over a year.
Hoped for funding didn't come, and
WikiLeaks suspended operations.
His international organization
had blown apart.
In Berlin, Daniel Domscheit-Berg
quit the organization.
So did the mysterious figure who had
built the secret submission system.
Assange no longer had
a drop box for new leaks.
In London, journalist Heather
Brooke was leaked unredacted copies
of all of the State Department
cables by a WikiLeaks insider.
BROOKE: There was the initial people
that Julian gave the information to
and then, how many people
did they give it to,
and then how many people
did they give it to?
NARRATOR: Some of the cables also
leaked to a European dictator
who used them to target dissidents
and suppress free speech.
This is at the core
of where things went wrong,
and where ultimately
WikiLeaks has lost control
over the spread of
these documents.
NARRATOR: In the end, all of the
cables leaked across the Internet
on mirrored versions
of WikiLeaks. org.
All Julian had left
was his celebrity.
[BEEPING]
How you doing,
Mr. Assange?
That's my personal
information
and you have no right
to know about it!
NARRATOR: Julian extended his brand by hosting
a chat show for Russian state television.
Where are you?
In England?
lam in England, under house
arrest now for 500 days.
Five hundred days.
NARRATOR: One of his guests was Rafael
Correa, the president of Ecuador.
[SPEAKING SPANISH]
Welcome to the club
of the persecuted!
Thank you, President Correa.
NARRATOR: A month after
the program aired,
Assange sought asylum
from his former TV guest.
[CROWD CHEERING]
ASSANGE: This morning the sun
came up on a different world,
and a courageous Latin American
nation took a stand for justice.
Embassy of Ecuador
London, England
NARRATOR: It was
an ironic choice.
Ecuador had a record of
putting journalists in prison
and had been charged with
corruption in a WikiLeaks cable.
The United States must renounce
its witch hunt against WikiLeaks.
NARRATOR: Despite no proof
of a US-Sweden plot,
Ecuador granted him asylum.
The British government pledged to arrest him
if he left the tight confines of the embassy,
so Assange prepared
for a long stay.
[CROWD CHEERING]
ANNA: I saw the signs
"Free Bradley Manning"
and "Free Julian Assange, "
and I think it's ridiculous.
These two cases have nothing
to do with each other.
Julian, he's not
even imprisoned.
He has locked himself up
to avoid coming to Sweden
to answer a few pretty
simple questions.
BALL: There is a phenomenon
called Noble Cause Corruption.
Essentially,
you do things which
if anyone else did you would
recognize aren't okay, aren't right.
But because you know
you're a good guy,
it's different for you.
I suppose you can't
accuse Julian
of not setting out from
the beginning what he may do.
Mendax by name,
Mendax by nature.
DAVIES: The same
extraordinary personality
which conceived of
and created WikiLeaks
is also the same personality
that has effectively
destroyed WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks has become
what it detests
and what it actually tried
to rid the world of.
We must get away from this understanding
that we see Julian as a savior,
as some new guru,
some new hero,
some new pop star
or whatever,
that's going to
change all of it.
The credit is undue.
Everybody celebrating Julian
as a whistle-blower.
He's not.
Bradley Manning might
have been a whistle-blower,
and, if he was,
he is the courageous guy.
He is the one
that took all the risk
and in the end now has...
ls suffering.
[PROTESTERS CHANTING]
Free Bradley Manning!
NARRATOR: After his arrest, Manning
had been held for two months
in an eight-by-eight
foot cage in Kuwait.
Then he was transferred to the Marine
Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia.
Though Manning had not been
tried for any crime,
he was kept in solitary
confinement for nearly a year.
Shame! Sit yo' ass down!
PANELIST: Bradley Manning, the alleged
leaker is currently sitting in prison
2010 Hackers on
Planet Earth conference
and he could be locked up
for the rest of his life.
How do you feel about that?
[AUDIENCE MEMBER SPEAKING]
He could be tortured.
I think that it's
a little bit ludicrous
to say that Bradley Manning's
going to be tortured.
We don't do that
to our citizens.
[CROWD JEERING]
PROTESTERS:
Free Bradley Manning!
NARRATOR:
A high-ranking general
authorized Manning's placement in
solitary confinement on suicide watch
against the protest
of prison doctors.
His clothes and blankets
were taken from him.
Lights in his cell
were always on.
When he questioned his treatment,
guards took away his glasses
and forced him to stand naked
during morning roll call.
At night, guards kept him
cold and woke him frequently,
a practice that recalled the sleep
deprivation program at Guantanamo.
Manning's supporters
speculated
that the U.S. government
was trying to push Manning
to turn on Assange
and implicate him in a crime.
INTERVIEWER: What was
your reaction about
Bradley Manning's
treatment at Quantico?
It seemed to me that
sleep deprivation and nudity,
these were what I would call
"enhanced interrogation techniques."
They were being practiced on an individual.
[LAUGHS] No.
Look, I don't know
the specifics.
I don't know the rules
of confinement
for the Marine brig
at Quantico.
But Bob Gates is an
incredibly honorable man.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike
Mullen is an incredibly honorable man.
I defer very much
to their judgment
that whatever was done
was appropriate.
[PROTESTERS CHANTING]
CROWLEY: The treatment that
he was receiving at Quantico,
the level of solitary
confinement,
the fact that his clothes
were taken away at night,
it was inconsistent with our
values and our interests.
It was making Bradley Manning
a far more sympathetic figure
than I see him.
When I was asked about it
in a forum at MIT,
I gave a candid answer.
JAKE TAPPER: State Department
spokesman P.J. Crowley
said the treatment of Bradley
Manning by the Pentagon
is "ridiculous and
counterproductive and stupid,"
and I'm wondering
if you agree with that.
Uh...
I have actually
asked the Pentagon
whether or not the procedures
that have been taken
in terms of his confinement
are appropriate
and are meeting
our basic standards.
They assure me
that they are.
I was appalled at that.
I was appalled at that with respect
to the President's responsibility
as Commander-in-Chief.
Any commander...
Any commander knows
that first and foremost
he or she is responsible
for the well-being
of each and every one
of their soldiers,
to include the ones
sitting in the brig.
I can't go into details
about some of their concerns,
but some of this has to do with
Private Manning's safety as well.
[REPORTER SPEAKING]
Do you disagree
with P.J. Crowley?
I think I gave you an answer
to the substantive issue.
CROWLEY: Once my comments were brought
to the President of the United States,
I felt the only thing
I should do is resign.
I stand by what I said.
NARRATOR: What was unsaid
was any consideration of holding
Manning's supervisors accountable
for permitting the greatest security
breach in American history.
NARRATOR: Manning's commanding officer
only received a minor demotion.
The Army brought 22 charges
against Manning.
They included
"aiding the enemy,"
without naming just
who the enemy was.
For these charges,
Manning faced life in prison,
and a possible death sentence.
DAVIES: People who
don't like the leak
try to say that it was
damaging national security.
Have you ever seen
any evidence
that American national security has
been damaged in any way by this?
And if you look at what the whistle-blower
is saying in that online chat,
and look at what
he doesn't say.
He doesn't say,
"I want money. "
He doesn't say, "I'm going
to go to Russia or China.
"I'm going to go to al-Qaeda
and give them this stuff."
It doesn't happen.
He says, "This is the material that the
people of the world need to have."
And it was naive to
dump the whole lot
without thinking ahead about how
that was going to be handled.
But you don't have to
lock this guy up for decades
and effectively put him
through forms of torture.
That's a politically motivated
act of vengeance
on somebody who hasn't
damaged national security,
he's caused embarrassment.
CLINTON: Let's be clear.
This disclosure is not just an attack
on America's foreign policy interests,
it is an attack on the
international community.
BROOKE: The American government
said, "You can't publish this.
"It's dangerous. It's going to damage
world affairs, diplomacy, etc."
But then you
publish it anyway,
and it's for the greater good,
telling people
what they needed to know.
BALL: The question becomes, does
it matter and what changes?
I think really we have to say
that something has started,
and it's not going to be
about WikiLeaks.
It's going to be about
transparency and accountability,
and keeping power in check,
keeping governments
responsible,
and who cares who does it
as long as someone does.
LEONARD: Information by its
very nature needs to flow.
In some regards, withholding information
is trying to repeal the laws of gravity.
You may succeed for
a short period of time,
but sooner or later
it's going to break free.
INTERVIEWER: Now you're
talking just like a hacker.
[LAUGHING]
[AUDIENCE MEMBER SPEAKING]
I think Manning did
the right thing
and what you did
you have to live with!
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
I think you belong
in Guantanamo!
PANELIST: Whoa! Okay.
LAMO: I care more about Bradley
than many of his supporters do.
We had a chance to be friends,
however briefly, and...
He opened up
in a lot of ways
about his life,
his personal life,
and
he did it in a way
that someone only would do
to someone they
felt they could trust.
And I had to
betray that trust
for the sake of
all of the people
that he put in danger.
And I wish to hell
that it had never happened.
[SNIFFLES]
WEBSTER: It's going to be
a question for the ages,
why Bradley Manning reached out
to somebody he really didn't know
and entrusted him with such
a life-altering secret.
The only thing I can come up with is that
once he saw the results of the leak,
the need just to share that,
just probably grew and grew.
He just needed
to tell anybody,
and he thought Adrian was
the right person to tell.
Whistle-blowing is
a really isolating act.
It's a courageous
and phenomenal thing to do,
but you are essentially
doing something
that your colleagues
and your friends
would not want you to do
and not understand.
It alienates you
further from them.
A source who needs
to talk to someone
and explain what they've done and
think through what they've done
needs someone safe
to do that to.
BALL: In the logs, Manning says,
he couldn't talk to WikiLeaks,
that's not how they work.
Does that protect
whistle-blowers
or does it protect WikiLeaks?
DOMSCHEIT-BERG: In the end,
everybody's just human.
If you're leaking
material to someone,
if you're telling
a reporter a good story,
something that really
makes a difference,
then I think just from
a human perspective,
it's really difficult not
to get any credit for it.
Because no one can tap you on the
shoulder and say, "Good job.
"Courageous thing you did."
And this is really the
complicated part about it.
How do you make sure that your source
doesn't compromise themselves?
NARRATOR: In the chats, Manning
sent a link to "Pale Blue Dot,"
a famous photo
of Earth he saw
while reading an essay
by the astronomer Carl Sagan.
"That's home," said Sagan.
"That's us.
"Every saint and sinner in the
history of our species lived there,
"on a mote of dust,
"suspended on a sunbeam.
"In our obscurity,
in all this vastness,
"there is no hint that help
will come from elsewhere
"to save us from ourselves.
"It is up to us."
After international outcry,
the US Army moved Bradley Manning
out of solitary confinement.
In February 2013, Manning pled guilty
to leaking documents to WikiLeaks.
The Army continued to prosecute
him for "aiding the enemy."
Bradley Manning was held without
trial for more than 3 years.
As of March 2013, Julian Assange
remained confined to a small room
in the Ecuadorian Embassy
in London.
He promised to publish
more documents
and announced his campaign
to run for Senate in Australia.