We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

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[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]

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