I fucking love the internets. For all the philosophical flaws and dubious doorways, I have no doubts that it enhanced my life. The main thing it did for me is that it confronted me to my writing skills. Internet showed me I was better at communicating and interacting with other people from a keyboard. It's kind of the Wild West, though. It's the Great Unregulated Space of the 21st Century. Not even the largest corporations or the most powerful governments have absolute control over what's happening online. The internet is a violently democratic entity that the editor-in-chief of whistleblowing website WikiLeaks Julian Assange embodies to perfection. Alex Gibney's documentary WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS tells the story of WikiLeaks' rise to prominence and its subsequent public debacle. Overall, it didn't manage to teach me much, except maybe that I should second guess every bit of information I'm beng exposed to.
So, according to WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS, the earliest manifestation of Julian Assange's hacktivism can be traced back to the WANK worm, a computer attack against the NASA, just as it was launching the Galileo spacecraft. The combative young Australian's strong desire to become a modern day Robin Hood lead him to create WikiLeaks in 2006, a safe and anonymous whistleblowing website that would allow people from every country to upload incriminating documents on their respective governments and large corporations. It's not before Bradley Manning started releasing documents and videos about the War on Terror to WikiLeaks that the site really integrated the cultural discourse. WikiLeaks changed things, but you can't expect to change the world without gaining a couple powerful ennemies and ultimately, without changing yourself.
A long segment of WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS focuses on Bradley Manning. What kind of man he was and what kind of circumstances lead him to release a video U.S Army soldiers slaughtering Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists. There is also (what seems to be) transcripts from his chat sessions with Adrian Lamo, who formed a friendship with Manning, but who ultimately reported him to American authorities. Manning is portrayed as a manic, depressed and profoundly self-loathing individual, who's been struggling with his own gender and sexuality for most of his life. The way he trusted and confessed to people online made it seem like this entire venture on WikiLeaks was just Manning wanting to get caught and punished for being who he was, rather than for what it had done.
That, I'm ready to believe. It's kind of dramatic, but the psychological aspect of the Bradley Manning argument in WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS makes sense. It takes someone profoundly perturbated to take reckless risks like that with classified documents. I'm ready to believe Manning had his own agenda hidden behind selfless motives. The way his relationship to Adrian Lamo is portrayed couldn't be any more nebulous, though. There is no way of knowing if the chat sessions are the real thing or just paraphrasing and there obviously are missing parts. WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS makes it seems like Lamo introduced Manning to WikiLeaks, only to inexplicably turn his back on him and report him to the authorities afterward. What a fucking strange thing to do. It's not clear what lead to Bradley Manning's arrest, but WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS doesn't exactly shed light on the issue.
Perhaps the strangest, most abstract part of WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS is the hour it spends discussing the sexual assault accusions against Julian Assange and te downfall of WikiLeaks. The movie goes into great lengths to expose all the information it can about the case, but it fails to make a compelling argument. All it achieved was to make me stupidly paranoid of everything it was saying.
My usual stance on sexual assault goes as follows: The guy probably did it. Men are pigs and are just looking for an opportunity to take control and be a pig about it. Even if WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS actually featured a testimony from one of the alleged victims of Julian Assange, I was still unconvinced. The man embarassed enough powerful poeple to have them wanting to discredit him and there is no better way to discredit a man than to accuse him of sexual assult. Plus, what is this bullshit convoluted story about tearing up a condom, putting it back and resume having sex? Who the fuck does that? I'm not saying Assange did it, I'm not saying he didn't. I'm saying it's impossible to know without empirical evidence and it's possible to debate everything WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS offers.
I am still unsure of what this documentary was seeking to achieve. WE STEALS SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS presents its subject as something passed, that blazed through the internet like a comet through the night sky, only to go down in flames. I thought that it critically lacked perspective about the precedent that WikiLeaks has created for our society. It's possible to fight giants and actually be Robin Hood in the information age. Julian Assange and the good people of WikiLeaks have created a whistleblowing process that might just make the world a little more honest. It didn't happen smoothly at all, but it gives us a reason to hope for a better future. Oh, and they created this awesome video of Julian Assange dancing, too.
