A further Assange experiment in media manipulation in 2008 saw him try to auction a cache of what were claimed to be thousands of emails from a speechwriter to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. The winning bidder was to get exclusive access, for a time, to the documents. The auction was based on his theory that nobody took material seriously if it was provided free of charge. He pointed out: “People magazine notoriously paid over $10 [million] for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby photos.” Bafflingly, the minutiae of Venezuelan politics did not prove as saleable as celebrities’ baby pics: nobody bid.
Assange had by now discovered, to his chagrin, that simply posting long lists of raw and random documents on to a website failed to change the world. He brooded about the collapse of his original “crowd-sourcing” notion: “Our initial idea was, ‘Look at all those people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that they’re working on … Surely all those people that are busy working on articles about history and mathematics and so on, and all those bloggers that are busy pontificating about … human rights disasters … surely those people will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something?’ No. It’s all bullshit. It’s all bullshit. In fact, people write about things, in general (if it’s not part of their career), because they want to display their values to their peers, who are already in the same group. Actually, they don’t give a fuck about the material.”
He carried on hunting vainly for a WikiLeaks model that could both bring in working revenue and gain global political attention. His published musings from that period are revealing: they show he saw the problem from the outside, but could not yet crack it:
“The big issue for WikiLeaks is first-rate source material going to waste, because we make supply unlimited, so news organisations, wrongly or rightly, refuse to ‘invest’ in analysis without additional incentives. The economics are counter-intuitive – temporarily restrict supply to increase uptake … a known paradox in economics. Given that WikiLeaks needs to restrict supply for a period to increase perceived value to the point that journalists will invest time to produce quality stories, the question arises as to which method should be employed to apportion material to those who are most likely to invest in it.”
There was only one, relatively limited, way in which the Assange model was beginning to gain the interest of the mainstream media: and that was by behaving not as the originally envisaged anonymous document dump, but as what he called “the publisher of last resort”. A fascinating clash between WikiLeaks and a Swiss bank demonstrated that at least one of the key claims for Assange’s new stateless cyberstructure was true – it could laugh at lawyers.
Rudolf Elmer ran the Cayman Islands branch of the Julius Baer bank for eight years. After moving to Mauritius, and vainly trying to interest authorities in what he said was outrageous tax-dodging by some of his former employer’s clients, he contacted Assange to post his documents: “We built up contact over encrypted software and I received instructions on how to proceed … I wasn’t looking for anonymity.”
The fuming Zurich bankers then went to court in California to force WikiLeaks to take down the files, claiming “unlawful dissemination of stolen bank records and personal account information of its customers”. The bank won a preliminary skirmish when California-based domain name hosters Dynadot were ordered to disable access to the name “wikileaks.org”. But Baer very quickly lost the entire war: WikiLeaks retained access to other sites hosted in Belgium and elsewhere; many “mirror sites” sprang up carrying the offending documents; and the court ruling was reversed as a stream of US organisations rallied behind WikiLeaks in the name of free speech. They included the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a journalistic alliance which included the Associated Press, Gannett News Service, and the Los Angeles Times.
The Swiss bank and its corrupt customers merely managed to shine more light on themselves, while WikiLeaks demonstrated that it was genuinely injunction-proof. It was WikiLeaks one, Julius Baer nil. Assange picked up another award in London from the free speech group Index on Censorship. One of the judges, poet Lemn Sissay, blogged about a typical piece of showmanship: “We did not know whether Julian Assange … was to turn up to accept. Thankfully he came, a tall, studious man with shock-blonde hair and pale skin. Seconds before stepping on stage he whispered, ‘Someone may lunge at the stage to present me with a subpoena. I cannot allow them to do this, and shall leave if I see them.’”
The Guardian in London now saw the value in having its own sensitive documents posted on WikiLeaks. Lawyers for Barclays Bank had woken up a judge one morning at 2am to force the takedown of the Guardian’s leaked files detailing the bank’s tax-avoidance schemes. But the files were promptly posted in full by Assange, rendering the gag futile. (In an entertaining blend of old and new anti-censorship techniques, the Guardian and all other British media were also at first legally gagged from saying that the files were available on WikiLeaks. It took a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, speaking under the ancient device of parliamentary privilege, to blow that nonsense away.)
Similarly, WikiLeaks functioned as an online back-up, along with Dutch Greenpeace and Norwegian state TV, in posting in full a damning report on toxic waste dumped by the oil traders Trafigura. Trafigura’s lawyers had gagged the Guardian in the UK from running the leaked report: their draconian moves were thus proved to be a waste of time in a digitally globalised world.
Yet Assange himself was still striving for a way to be more than a niche player. At the outset, in 2006, he had incurred the ire of John Young, of the parallel intelligence-material site Cryptome. Young deplored Assange’s approaches to billionaire George Soros, who funded a variety of mostly eastern European media projects, and he broke off relations angrily when Assange talked of raising $5 million. “Announcing a $5 million fund-raising goal by July [2007] will kill this effort,” he wrote. “It makes WikiLeaks appear to be a Wall Street scam. This amount could not be needed so soon except for suspect purposes. Soros will kick you out of the office with such over-reaching. Foundations are flooded with big talkers making big requests flaunting famous names and promising spectacular results.”
Now, two years on from that false start, Assange made another attempt to raise a substantial sum. He and his lieutenant, Domscheit-Berg, approached the Knight Foundation in the US, which was running “a media innovation contest that aims to advance the future of news by funding new ways to digitally inform communities”. Domscheit-Berg asked for $532,000 to equip a network of regional newspapers with what were, in effect, “WikiLeaks buttons”. The idea, developed and elaborated by Domscheit-Berg, was that local leakers could make contact through these news sites, and thus generate a regular flow of documents. A rival project, Documentcloud, designed to set up a public database of the full documents behind conventional news stories, was backed by staff at the New York Times and the nonprofit investigative journalism initiative ProPublica. They got $719,500. Assange got nothing. As 2009 ended, WikiLeaks was still struggling to make a name for itself.
CHAPTER 5