Julian Assange's WikiLeaks has taken investigative journalism into the electronic age. But can he survive now that he has become the story?
Assange was pushed into the limelight earlier this year, on 5 April 2010, when WikiLeaks published film from a US Apache helicopter taken in 2007. The footage, which WikiLeaks titled Collateral Murder, shows 30mm cannon fire from two helicopters killing "about a dozen people, including two Reuters employees, in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad".
The US Government responded to the leak of the video by subjecting some of those connected to WikiLeaks to intense surveillance. US Private Bradley Manning has been arrested and charged with passing the video to Wikileaks, and could face a court martial.
In June of this year, after Collateral Murder but ahead of publication of the Afghan War Diary (see below), the Daily Beast website quoted a US official as saying: "We’d like to know where he is – we’d like his co-operation in this."
This touches on the contradiction at the heart of Assange's role as head of the whistleblowing website. His organisation exists, as he told the Centre for Investigative Journalism in August, to bring into the open "bits of information that are most likely to have an effect when they escape". Yet to survive the threats to his physical security that follow, he lives life of secrecy and subterfuge.
'International Subversive'
The Australian's name surfaces first in the 1990s, when he was working as a programmer, developing free and open source software. He also belonged to International Subversives, a hacker group. A report from May 1995 in Melbourne's The Age newspaper describes the start of committal proceedings against Assange, then 23 and charged with hacking offences, "including obtaining access to information, erasing data, alerting data and defrauding Telecom"
Two years later Assange and Suelette Dreyfus published Underground - Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. The book, which is still available online, features a character called Mendax, allegedly based on Assange.
He has acknowledged that in 1999 he registered the domain name leaks.org. And in 2006 the American political newssheet CounterPunch referred to him as "Australia's most infamous former hacker".
But Assange did not taste true international renown until 2007, shortly after the foundation of WikiLeaks - an organisation established, in his words, "to find a way to not be scared to publish anything".
Among the earliest WikiLeaks revelations was the publication of a confidential report by the risk consultancy Kroll, commissioned by the Kenyan government, into the theft of more than £1bn of government money by former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi and his entourage.
Other notable WikiLeaks coups have included postings of the US military's operating manual for its Guantanamo prison camp, Trafigura's super-injunction to stop the release of a report on toxic dumping off the Ivory Coast, and the British National Party's membership list.
In 2008 domain registrar Dynadot took down the WikiLeaks.org domain name after Swiss bank Julius Baer sued over publication of allegations of illegal activities on the Cayman Islands. The domain was subsequently reinstated.
In July of this year, WikiLeaks provoked a worldwide media storm when it published Afghan War Diary, a compendium of some 76,000 US military documents (15,000 more have yet to appear). At a press conference to coincide with the publication, Assange announced that the files could contain details of "thousands" of potential war crimes.
With the Afghan leak, the US military intensified its pursuit against of Assange. Reports say the Pentagon is contemplating prosecuting him for encouraging that theft of government property. Assange, who has been advised by sympathisers not to visit the United States, has said: "We have to avoid some countries, avoid travel, until we know where the political arrow is pointing."
Greater scrutiny
Public acclaim has also meant greater scrutiny of the financial and administrative structure of WikiLeaks. In December 2009 Assange estimated that Wikileaks running costs were 200,000 euros a year. The Germany-based Wau Holland Foundation, a charity named after the hacker founder of the Chaos Computer Club, has been the recipient – via the WikiLeaks website – of public donations to the whistleblower. The foundation’s charitable status means, according to Assange, that donors' money is protected from anti-WikiLeaks lawsuits.
WikiLeaks has used the eBay-owned PayPal online payments system as the channel for donations to Wau Holland. Another online money transfer service, the Investcorp-controlled Moneybookers, stopped collecting money for WikiLeaks in August 2010 in the wake of the Afghan War Diary leak, citing "recent publicity and the subsequent addition of the WikiLeaks entity to blacklists in Australia and watchlists in the USA".
WikiLeaks also uses Flattr.com, a Swedish online donation system set up by Peter Sunde, which effectively allows internet users to offer a financial tip in return for content they have enjoyed.
Peter Sunde is one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, the file-sharing website at the vanguard of the anti-copyright movement. Both WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay are hosted in Sweden by PRQ, formerly owned by Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij and Gottfried Svartholm. PRQ's current owner, Mikael Viborg, is a former board member (according to Wikipedia) of the anti-copyright, pro-transparency Pirate Party.
PRQ has courted controversy for its libertarian philosophy. Viborg – who says he has never met Julian Assange - told a French website his company is committed to protecting the anonymity of its clients and to defending freedom of expression. In the same interview Viborg confirmed PRQ would be hosting the WikiLeaks publication of documents relating to the war in Iraq.
Calls to step down
WikiLeaks' recent high profile appears not to have helped Julian Assange's relationships with his colleagues. Daniel Schmitt (real name: Daniel Domscheit-Berg), the organisation’s German spokesman and Wikileaks' most prominent face after Assange, announced in Der Spiegel in September that he was standing down because the organisation, in his view, was focusing on large projects to the detriment of smaller ones.
Schmitt had also argued that Assange should withdraw from the public eye while he fights allegations made in August 2010 that he raped one woman and sexually harassed another while in Sweden - allegations which Assange has denied, saying "The charges are without basis". The same argument has been made by Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of her country’s Modern Media Initiative with close associations to WikiLeaks.
In fact, Assange advised the Icelandic government before it passed new laws in June of this year strengthening freedom of expression and protection for sources and whistleblowers. Jonsdottir has said of the new legislation that it will "deal with the fact that information doesn’t have borders any more".
But last month she joined calls for Assange, whom she describes as her "friend", to step aside until after the criminal investigation into the rape allegations is over. "I am not angry with Julian," she told The Daily Beast, "but this is a situation that has clearly gotten out of hand."
She continued: "I have strongly urged him to focus on the legalities that he’s dealing with and let some other people carry the torch."
With the publication of the Iraq war logs, the immediate focus of interest will inevitably be on the content of the leaks themselves. But the spotlight may again turn on Assange, and he may again have to refute the accusation that he, and not WikiLeaks, has become the story.
Source: Channel 4
