We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks Page #5

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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.

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