Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen – Reuters news agency employees accidentally killed by US army pilots in 2007
David Schlesinger – Reuters’ editor-in-chief
Kevin Poulsen – former hacker, senior editor at Wired
Gavin MacFadyen – City University professor and journalist, London host to Assange
Stephen Grey – freelance reporter
Iain Overton – former TV journalist, head of Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Heather Brooke – London-based American journalist and freedom of information activist
Bradley Manning
Bradley Manning – 23-year-old US army private and alleged WikiLeaks source
Rick McCombs – former principal at Crescent high school, Crescent, Oklahoma
Brian, Susan, Casey Manning – parents and sister
Tom Dyer – school friend
Kord Campbell – former manager at Zoto software company
Jeff Paterson – steering committee member of the Bradley Manning support network
Adrian Lamo – hacker and online confidant
Timothy Webster – former US army counter-intelligence special agent
Tyler Watkins – former boyfriend
David House – former hacker and supporter
David Coombs – lawyer
Julian Assange
Christine Hawkins – mother
John Shipton – father
Brett Assange – stepfather
Keith Hamilton – former partner of Christine
Daniel Assange – Julian’s son
Paul Galbally – Assange’s lawyer during his 1996 hacking trial
Stockholm allegations / extradition
“Sonja Braun” – plaintiff; member of Brotherhood movement
“Katrin Weiss” – plaintiff; museum worker
Claes Borgström – lawyer for both women, former Swedish equal opportunities ombudsman and prominent Social Democrat politician
Marianne Ny – Swedish chief prosecutor and sex crimes specialist
Mark Stephens – Assange lawyer
Geoffrey Robertson, QC – Assange lawyer
Jennifer Robinson – lawyer in Mark Stephens’ office
Gemma Lindfield – lawyer acting for the Swedish authorities
Howard Riddle – district judge, Westminster magistrates court
Mr Justice Ouseley – high court judge, London
Government
Hillary Clinton – US Secretary of State
Louis B Susman – US ambassador in London
PJ Crowley – US assistant secretary of state for public affairs
Harold Koh – US state department’s legal adviser
Robert Gates – US defence secretary
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles – former UK government special representative to Afghanistan and former ambassador to Kabul
INTRODUCTION
Alan Rusbridger
Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange. It was a memorable kind of name. All editors receive a daily mix of unsolicited tip-offs, letters, complaints and crank theories, but there was something about the periodic WikiLeaks emails which caught the attention.
Sometimes there would be a decent story attached to the emails. Or there might be a document which, on closer inspection, appeared rather underwhelming. One day there might arrive a diatribe against a particular journalist – or against the venal cowardice of mainstream media in general. Another day this Assange person would be pleased with something we’d done, or would perambulate about the life he was living in Nairobi.
In Britain the Guardian was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing. In August 2007, for instance, we splashed on a remarkable secret Kroll report which claimed to show that former President Daniel Arap Moi had been siphoning off hundreds of millions of pounds and hiding them away in foreign bank accounts in more than 30 different countries. It was, by any standards, a stonking story. This Assange, whoever he was, was one to watch.
Unnoticed by most of the world, Julian Assange was developing into a most interesting and unusual pioneer in using digital technologies to challenge corrupt and authoritarian states. It’s doubtful whether his name would have meant anything to Hillary Clinton at the time – or even in January 2010 when, as secretary of state, she made a rather good speech about the potential of what she termed “a new nervous system for our planet”.
She described a vision of semi-underground digital publishing – “the samizdat of our day” – that was beginning to champion transparency and challenge the autocratic, corrupt old order of the world. But she also warned that repressive governments would “target the independent thinkers who use the tools”. She had regimes like Iran in mind.
Her words about the brave samizdat publishing future could well have applied to the rather strange, unworldly Australian hacker quietly working out methods of publishing the world’s secrets in ways which were beyond any technological or legal attack.
Little can Clinton have imagined, as she made this much praised speech, that within a year she would be back making another statement about digital whistleblowers – this time roundly attacking people who used electronic media to champion transparency. It was, she told a hastily arranged state department press conference in November 2010, “not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community.” In the intervening 11 months Assange had gone viral. He had just helped to orchestrate the biggest leak in the history of the world – only this time the embarrassment was not to a poor east African nation, but to the most powerful country on earth.
It is that story, the transformation from anonymous hacker to one of the most discussed people in the world – at once reviled, celebrated and lionised; sought-after, imprisoned and shunned – that this book sets out to tell.
Within a few short years of starting out Assange had been catapulted from the obscurity of his life in Nairobi, dribbling out leaks that nobody much noticed, to publishing a flood of classified documents that went to the heart of America’s military and foreign policy operations. From being a marginal figure invited to join panels at geek conferences he was suddenly America’s public enemy number one. A new media messiah to some, he was a cyber-terrorist to others. As if this wasn’t dramatic enough, in the middle of it all two women in Sweden accused him of rape. To coin a phrase, you couldn’t make it up.
Since leaving Nairobi, Assange had grown his ambitions for the scale and potential of WikiLeaks. In the company of other hackers he had been developing a philosophy of transparency. He and his fellow technologists had already succeeded in one aim: he had made WikiLeaks virtually indestructible and thus beyond legal or cyber attack from any one jurisdiction or source. Lawyers who were paid exorbitant sums to protect the reputations of wealthy clients and corporations admitted – in tones tinged with both frustration and admiration – that WikiLeaks was the one publisher in the world they couldn’t gag. It was very bad for business.