We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks Page #7

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There was a little

bit of a risk

that if the authorities were

monitoring his communications,

as they might well have been,

they would be aware

of my involvement with him,

they would arrest me as I came

back into the United Kingdom,

and take the material

if I had it on a laptop.

We thought about a memory stick,

maybe they won't spot that?

He came up with

a much better solution.

He said that

he would create a website.

In order to access the website,

I would need a password.

So he took a paper napkin that

was on the table in this caf

where we were talking

in Brussels

and he hooked together several of

the words in the commercial logo

and wrote,

"No capital letters. "

I stuffed it in my pocket.

In the event that I was

arrested, people would assume

that it was something I was

going to blow my nose on.

And so it was I traveled

back to the United Kingdom,

and, as it happened, nobody

stopped me so itwas all cool.

NARRATOR:
Julian

would also team up

with the London-based Bureau

for Investigative Journalism.

In a prearranged drop point

in Central London,

Julian met lain Overton.

We turned up

and Julian was there

wearing a bullet-proof vest

and we had

a Middle Eastern meal.

And he revealed

that he had

the largest-ever military leak of

documents in the history of leaks.

NARRATOR:
In the midst of this spy story

was thrust Iain's young colleague,

a computer whiz

named James Ball.

About 1:
00 in the morning

I took delivery on a USB stick

of 390,000 secret

U.S. military records.

I make to leave and Julian

asks me where I'm going.

I said, "Well, I was

going to go home. "

He sort of pauses

and goes, "No, don't do that.

"I don't want your address

linked to this address-

"Can you find somewhere else to go

at least for four or five hours?"

I don't really think

I can go and hit a club.

I'd really hate having

to try and explain

losing 400,000 secret documents

because I got a bit drunk.

GAVIN MacFADYEN:
Nobody had

ever done this before.

How do you have teams of intelligent

people to go through this stuff?

Nobody in my experience

as a journalist

had ever been confronted with a tenth

of the mass of material he was.

We're talking in a half

a million lines of data.

If in the old days you had to take

half a million lines of data out,

you'd have had 16 wheelbarrows out

of the front door of the Pentagon.

This was the biggest leak

of secret material

in the history of

this particular planet.

NARRATOR:
Julian decided that

the first release of material

would be

the Afghan War Logs.

But he had to

understand them first.

In London, The Guardian

set up a secret operation

with key military reporters

from The New York Times and the

German magazine Der Spiegel,

veteran journalists

who could penetrate

the arcane language

of the military.

ASSANGE:
You've got much more

information than you have in this.

But here's the key part...

DAVIES:
During the four

or five weeks

when the reporters were working

on the Afghan War Logs,

all of us became concerned that

there was material in there

which, if published, could get people

hurt on the ground in Afghanistan.

ASSANGE:
This huge attack goes

for 22 hours or something.

Starts here.

DAVIES:
This particularly related

to ordinary Afghan civilians

who in one operation

or incident or another

had given information

to Coalition forces

and that was recorded in there in such a way

that those civilians were identifiable.

I raised this with Julian

and he said,

"if an Afghan civilian helps Coalition

forces, he deserves to die,"

and he went on to explain that they have the

status of a collaborator or an informer.

Now...

INTERVIEWER:
Are you sure about that?

That's definitely what he said?

I have absolutely

no doubt about it at all.

This was just me and him talking through

the detail of how we handle this.

And this problem, potential

problem, had already come up.

A, it's a moral problem,

we are not here to publish

material that gets people killed.

B, if you publish information which

really does get people hurt,

or could conceivably

get people hurt,

you lose your

political immunity,

you're terribly vulnerable to the

most obvious propaganda attack

which is waiting for us

in the wings

that you are helping

the bad guys.

Julian's a computer hacker,

he comes from that ideology

that all information is good,

and everything

should be published.

HOST:
I asked Julian if he would publish

information sent to his website

WNYC - "On The Media"

March 2009

that could lead to

the deaths of innocents,

such as how to release anthrax

into a town's water supply.

[ASSANGE SPEAKING]

OVERTON:
This is a man whose primary

way of interacting with the world

is a digital one.

It is to some degree unsullied by

the limitations of human nature.

He does sometimes reduce human

activity to something formulaic,

and he doesn't see the human

heart beating in there.

He just reduced it to that

very, very simple formula.

"They speak to an occupying

force, they must be bad,

"the informer

deserves to die."

NARRATOR:
The coalition

of journalists

weren't used to working with a

transparency radical like Assange,

and Assange was still learning

the ethics of journalism.

They could only agree

on one thing,

they were going to

release the documents.

In London, a deadline was

set for all the partners

to publish at the same time.

Julian finally agreed to redactions,

the blacking out of names,

and told his partners

he had a special process

which would eliminate the identity

of sources from the documents.

But with less than a week

before publication,

Assange had neglected to tell

Domscheit-Berg in Berlin.

DOMSCHEIT-BERG:

So, there we were,

four days before releasing

90,000 documents

and no redactions made.

ASSANGE ON COMPUTER: It is

effectively impossible for us

to notify some of these Afghanis in

their villages about this material.

It looks like we will have to

do a redaction of some of them.

INTERVIEWER ON COMPUTER:

Is that new for you?

You're effectively doing a

bit of censorship yourself.

Yeah, that would be new

for us, but remember...

NARRATOR:
Time

was running out.

Just before the release,

Assange focused on a section

of 15,000 documents

that contained

the most names.

In desperation, he turned to

an unlikely source for help.

It was reported that WikiLeaks has

asked the Department of Defense

for help in reviewing approximately

15,000 classified documents

that WikiLeaks obtained

in an unauthorized

and inappropriate manner

before WikiLeaks releases those

classified documents to the public.

DOMSCHEIT-BERG:
Julian urged The New York

Times to send a letter to the Pentagon

asking if they want to

help with redactions,

and they refused,

and that was 24 hours

before the release.

MORRELL:
...classified

and sensitive information...

This notion that he didn't care about

what was in that material is not true.

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