WikiRebels: The Documentary Page #2

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However, the word spreads

among activists far and wide on the Net,

eventually reaching the German Chaos Computer Club,

the biggest and oldest club

for hackers in the world.

I heard about it in late 2007

from a couple of friends.

I started reading a bit more,

but I started to understand

the value of such a project to society.

The politically engaged Chaos Computer Club

has been fighting a long-term battle

for free access to information.

One of its members, Daniel Domscheit-Berg,

is quick to recognise the common ground

between his view of society and that of WikiLeaks'.

He quits his job as a computer consultant

so as to devote all of his time to the new organisation.

The question is the attitude.

What attitude do you have to society?

Do you look at what there is

and you accept that as God given?

Or do you see society

as something where you identify a problem

and then you find a

creative solution for that problem?

So it is a matter of, are you a spectator

or are you actively participating in society?

The computer club has put the skills of some of

the sharpest hacking talents

in the world at WikiLeaks' disposal.

What's needed now is a physical haven.

Hackers linked to the Swedish file

sharing site Pirate Bay

have what they need -

considerable technical skills

in a place where

freedom of speech is unusually free.

A lot of the countries in today's world

do not have really strong laws for the media anymore.

But a few countries -

like, for instance, Belgium,

also the United States with the First Amendment,

and especially, for example, Sweden -

have very strong laws protecting the media

and the work of investigative or general journalists.

So, from our perspective, this is something.

If there are any Swedes here,

you have to make sure that your country

is really one of the strongholds of freedom of information.

Sweden has an enviable,

although far-from-perfect record

in protecting publications.

It has a practical record within the past few years

of protecting internet publications

against censorship.

And it's precisely Sweden's

unique freedom of speech law

that prompts WikiLeaks

to locate their main site

in this unpretentious basement

in one of Stockholm's inner suburbs.

PRQ offer their customers total secrecy.

Their systems prevent anyone

from eavesdropping

either WikiLeaks chat pages

or finding out who sent what to who.

PRQ have a track record of

been uh...the hardest ISP you can find in the world.

There's just no-one else

that bothers less about lawyers harassing them,

about content they are hosting.

And it's just the attitude that, let's say,

works very well with

what WikiLeaks was set out to do.

One reason why WikiLeaks need PRQ is

that their operations

are protected by Sweden's strict freedom of expression laws -

laws which PRQ exploit to the full.

And we aren't talking about any old information.

It's from these servers at PRQ

that WikiLeaks has,

for example, made public a manual

from the United States Guantanamo Bay detention centre.

A military manual leaked on the internet

is revealing details of the way

terror suspects are being treated

at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

It tells of the use of solitary

confinement and humiliation

to break down the detainees mentally.

Human rights groups have for years

been asking the US administration

for access to this manual.

If you censor

important material of this type,

we're not just gonna criticise you,

we're going to take the material

that you try to censor

and we're going to spray it all over the world.

And we're gonna stick it in our archives

in a way that it's never gonna disappear,

and encourage everyone to get copies of it.

WikiLeaks' battle against censorship

knows no geographical frontiers.

Their next step is to publish an internal report

commissioned by the multinational trading company Trafigura,

who are alleged to have dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast

that caused tens of thousands of people to seek medical care.

'The Guardian' newspaper

was going to produce a big story on this,

and, as a result, they were gagged.

The company obtained a secret order in court

to gag all the press in the UK

from reporting anything related to the content of that report

and the fact that they had been gagged.

In the US, hackers discover

that the Republican presidential

candidate Sarah Palin

is apparently bypassing US transparency laws

by using a private email account to conduct government business.

WikiLeaks publishes her messages.

After just two years

the site's made public

over a million secret documents.

But WikiLeaks, as an organisation,

continues to be largely shrouded in secrecy.

Only Julian Assange and

Daniel Domscheit-Berg appear in public -

the latter under the pseudonym 'Schmidt'.

OK. Hello, everybody.

My name is Daniel Schmidt. This is Julian Assange.

We're here to make a short presentation

about the WikiLeaks project.

According to 'The National',

which is something we are kind of proud,

it's one of the last quotes we had,

so 'The National' has said that we have produced

more scoops in our short existence

than the 'The Washington Post' in the last 30 years.

Their publication activities

soon lead to counterattacks.

When WikiLeaks released lists of censored websites,

internet service providers in a number of countries,

including Thailand, China

and Iran, shut them down.

The more sensitive the material they publish,

the more often WikiLeaks

become the object of lawsuits and threats.

WikiLeaks now attracts the attention

of the US intelligence,

who, in a classified report,

claimed that the site is a threat to national security

and suggest ways of shutting it down.

Priority is put on finding

the individuals leaking the information.

The US intelligence, however,

only manage to keep the report secret a short while

before it's leaked to WikiLeaks.

It now becomes obvious that

WikiLeaks need to find more and safer havens

from which they can publish their information.

A sequence of events now starts

on an island in the middle of the North Atlantic,

which, while it leads to more censorship efforts,

will also create new opportunities for WikiLeaks.

October came, October 2008,

and the Icelandic banking system imploded.

It lost seventeen-eighteenths of its mass

over the course of about a week or two.

It was essentially one bank per week went bankrupt.

WikiLeaks obtain material that show

how Iceland's catastrophic bank collapses

were partly due to

cronyism, or favouritism,

carelessness and secretiveness.

When this highly detailed

document is put out on the Net,

the bank launches a counterattack.

Well, the first time I ever heard of WikiLeaks

was in the beginning of August 2009.

I was working as a reporter for the state television

when I got a tip that this website

had an important document just posted online.

The document was the high exposure loan book

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