4

SAVE THE WORLD

It was early 2007, and Julian Assange’s daughter, whom he’d had with his partner, Lisa, had recently celebrated her first birthday. But the relationship had hit turbulent times and Assange was no longer living with them. Lisa believed Assange was desperate for a stable family but he was ‘haunted by demons’ which revealed themselves by the fact he had ‘massive trouble sleeping’. As WikiLeaks struggled to get off the ground, he turned to the son he had from his earlier marriage for help in getting the organisation started. Having fought and lost a bitter custody battle for Daniel sixteen years earlier, to be reunited in such a labour of love now would make up for all the time they had spent apart.

According to Assange’s mother, Christine, one reason why he was so focused on forcing governments to be more open stemmed from that custody battle. Freedom of Information requests they carried out later unearthed a trail of decisions made by ‘radical feminists’, both in the Family Court and Legal Aid, whom she said opposed men having custody of children. Both Julian Assange and his mother were so concerned they set up the Parent Inquiry into Child Protection to investigate abuses and possible changes to the law. Assange even provided direct help to the Victorian Police Child Exploitation Unit in another area. His ‘technical advice’ and support assisted in the ‘prosecution of persons suspected of publishing and distributing child pornography on the Internet’. What’s never been revealed before is that as well as tracking down pornographers, according to Christine her son also put his technical expertise to use helping Victorian police ‘remove a book on the Internet about how to build a bomb’.

Assange and Daniel shared many interests, and Daniel was well aware how stimulating the venture would be. While he was growing up he had learned a lot from his father, who treated him as an equal. And he had no reason to think things would be any different if he joined him in WikiLeaks. They would be a good team: Daniel understood his father well and he had had similar troubles as Assange had growing up, problems that are often associated with high intelligence.

But after lengthy consideration Daniel, who had a gift for science like his father, decided not to take up Assange’s offer. He had too many serious doubts that the WikiLeaks project would ever work, later telling the online publication Crikey that at the time he thought the idea of leaking government documents ‘to the entire world’ was a ‘ridiculous concept’. Though Daniel was wrong about the impact that WikiLeaks would have, he did possess a deep understanding of what drove his father.

Assange had always been interested in political activism and had a huge interest in science, philosophy and mathematics. But he turned away from what he saw as the function of science in feeding the war machine, and put individual activity at the centre of his philosophy instead. The application of state power to silence and control the individual would be repeatedly resisted by Assange, as it had been from the beginning of his travels through the underground network of the Cypherpunks, to the birth of WikiLeaks. It was a journey that had driven him into the arms of anarchic liberalism.

But how to ‘save the world’ and put theory into practice was an altogether different issue. Writing in June 2007, just after WikiLeaks had gone live, he said that the world could be perceived as so vast that the individual could not envisage their actions making a meaningful difference. People tried to fool themselves into believing that one could ‘think globally and act locally’; however, to anyone with a sense of proportion, acting locally was a marginal activity. It was not setting the world right. The task was to create ideas or interventions that had a global impact. He hinted that maybe WikiLeaks was the answer. ‘Perhaps I have found one [an idea],’ he wrote. ‘I support similarly minded people, not because they are moral agents, but because they have common cause with my own feelings and dreams.’

Few others knew Assange’s weaknesses better than his son, Daniel. ‘He gets easily frustrated with people who aren’t capable of working up to his level and seeing ideas that he grasps very intuitively.’ They were attributes that would attract the best and brightest to work alongside Assange, but those qualities would eventually drive some of those same people away, turning them into enemies at a time when he would need all the friends he could get.

But 2007 was a time for embracing not only new friends but new ideas. If WikiLeaks was to raise its profile on the world stage it would have to do better than the Somalian document which, although having achieved a creditable mention in the New York Times, had hardly raised a blip elsewhere, apart from the savaging it received from Secrecy News. To give WikiLeaks a world presence, Assange needed an international stage. He found it at the World Social Forum, a gathering of activists and alternative thinkers, which was about to hold its annual conference in Nairobi. Scheduled to be held at the same time as the World Economic Forum in Davos, it was designed to draw attention to the gulf between rich and poor nations. More importantly it was expected to draw a crowd of more than 50 000. On the spur of the moment, Assange sent out an email to WikiLeaks supporters asking if anyone fancied a trip to Kenya. As the crowds made their way to the conference opening ceremony in the centre of Nairobi, they could not have been aware that they were about to witness the emergence of an organisation that would have a huge impact on human rights around the world, revealing acts of tyranny and oppression in Kenya which had been conceived just a few hundred metres from where they were standing at Parliament House. The motto, boldly emblazoned over the main entrance, read: ‘For a Just Society and the Fair Government of Men.’ WikiLeaks would reveal that nothing could have been further from the truth.

Within a few weeks, Assange’s appearance at the forum in Kenya bore fruit for WikiLeaks, taking the organisation from being a maverick online publisher to being entangled with mainstream journalism. Assange knew that while the purity of his WikiLeaks model gave readers the chance to view original documents, the editorial reach of their online publication was severely limited. Assange was moving inexorably towards collaboration with mainstream newspapers, beginning with the UK’s Guardian. This would be a benefit to both parties, giving the newspaper scoops and providing WikiLeaks with a huge platform to reach a wider and more influential audience—something the Internet itself could not deliver.

In August 2007, the Guardian published an exposé, based on a WikiLeaks document, revealing that the former Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi had siphoned off more than a billion dollars of government money and shifted it overseas into nearly thirty countries. The Guardian reported that it had seen a 110-page report by the international risk consultancy company Kroll, which revealed that Moi had illegally acquired multi-million pound properties in London, New York and South Africa, as well as a 10 000-hectare ranch in Australia and bank accounts containing hundreds of millions of pounds. The Guardian said Moi’s associates colluded with Italian drug barons and printed counterfeit money; his clique owned a bank in Belgium, and their fear of losing wealth prompted threats of violence between Moi’s family and his political aides.

The Kroll investigation into the former regime was commissioned by President Mwai Kibaki shortly after he came to power on an anti-corruption platform in 2003, supposedly the first step towards recovering some of the money stolen during Moi’s 24-year rule, which earned Kenya the reputation as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Political pressure forced Kibaki not to act on the report, which was believed to have been leaked to WikiLeaks by a senior government official upset about Kibaki’s weakness.

The Kenyan leak established a partnership between WikiLeaks and the Guardian and produced a model for how it planned to do business with other mainstream media organisations. It would be a difficult journey for an organisation that was contemptuous of how lacklustre many of the world’s newspapers were in holding those in power accountable. WikiLeaks would choose who it did business with carefully. The UK’s Guardian newspaper, with its liberal-Left reporting history, was an obvious choice, and others with a similar political pedigree would follow, such as Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais. The arrangement would involve a great degree of trust on the part of WikiLeaks that the newspaper would not ‘steal’ the story and publish without attribution. For its part, the newspaper had to trust that WikiLeaks wouldn’t give the story to someone else after all the hard legwork had been done. Whatever the flaws with this system of operation it was far superior to another arrangement WikiLeaks also tried: the auctioning of its documents to the highest bidder as a way of funding the group’s operations. That had been a spectacular failure with few takers. It was also an odd fit for an organisation whose stated goal was to hold the rich and powerful accountable for the deeds they would prefer weren’t made public.

In November 2007, WikiLeaks published the first document that directly related to US foreign policy: an instruction manual, Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, one of the detention camps used to hold prisoners in the United State’s Cuban enclave at Guantánamo Bay.

The document focused heavily on how best to restrict and control access of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) to those often being held in solitary confinement. The degree of nervousness expressed by the US Government in its dealing with the ICRC can best be understood by the fact that the organisation received 148 mentions in the document. US soldiers at Camp Delta were warned repeatedly to be guarded when dealing with the ICRC. They were given directions that ICRC officials were not allowed to ask long questions of detainees and that if an inmate’s mail was censored the ICRC would be told, but they would not be allowed to see the contents. More importantly, the ICRC would not be allowed to visit a prisoner for the first thirty days of their confinement at Camp Delta. The US military had always denied that certain prisoners were off-limits to the Red Cross until the WikiLeaks document exposed the lie. More followed, including a report that revealed instructions on how to use military dogs to intimidate prisoners. ‘MWD (Military Working Dogs) will walk “Main Street” in Camp Delta during shifts to demonstrate physical presence to detainees,’ according to a directive in the ‘Psychological Deterrence’ section.

The document was signed by Major General Geoffrey Miller. According to media reports, Miller introduced harsh interrogation methods to Guantánamo, such as shackling detainees into stress positions and using guard dogs to exploit what the former head commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, referred to as ‘Arab fear of dogs’. The story had been posted on WikiLeaks and written by Julian Assange and others. This time, there appeared to have been no relationship with the existing media organisation. It seemed that WikiLeaks was feeling its way—exploring the parameters for what was to come. In the anarchy of the editorial process and the eventual direction of WikiLeaks it was a kind of trailer for the main events to follow. No one knew what was going to happen next, including, it seems, WikiLeaks itself. In February 2008, WikiLeaks delivered a bombshell of a story. It had its epicentre just 300 kilometres south of Guantánamo Bay.

Long sandy beaches and aqua seas attract hundreds of thousands of tourists every year to the Cayman Islands. They arrive by huge ocean liners the size of apartment blocks, in motorboats and yachts, all drawn to the beauty of this coral island paradise. As the tour boats arrive and weigh anchor in Cayman Bay, the first view for those on board is the palm-fringed beauty of Seven Mile Beach and the colonial style, low-rise buildings gleaming white in the brilliant sun.

The Caymans have much to offer, but some of the visitors are drawn here by what’s not so apparent. The people who live and work on the Caymans pay no tax. Among the boat tour operators and travel agencies that jostle for space along the waterfront are the pick of the world’s banks, including HSBC and Barclays. They provide a service that has made the Caymans one of the most significant financial centres in the world.

It’s a long way from the mountains of Switzerland, but the Julius Bäer bank headquartered in Zurich occupies one of the best pieces of real estate on this island haven. Since 1994, Rudolf Elmer, one of the bank’s senior accountants, had headed up the Cayman branch. He had a well-appointed office with sweeping views of the azure Caribbean Sea. But whether it was the stress of dealing with billions of dollars of other people’s money, the office politics or a personal issue, something snapped in Elmer. When a number of the bank’s documents went missing, the bank subjected staff to a lie detector test. Heavily medicated with painkillers for a bad hip, Elmer failed to complete the test. When the bank fired him, Elmer decided to blow the whistle on its activities.

As an accountant, Elmer knew the power of documentary evidence. So when he left the bank he took with him a full inventory of the bank’s server, containing thousands of account details, names, addresses and transaction information. Elmer claimed he had it with him because during the hurricane season he had to leave the island, taking a copy of the server with him. The bank didn’t believe him. They called it theft. It wasn’t long before Elmer began using the ammunition to attack his old employer. He said he had witnessed ‘practices used by the Julius Bäer bank to evade or reduce its own tax payments’. Elmer accused the bank of ‘double bookkeeping’ practices. He said the bank administered billions of dollars worth of investments in the Caymans, yet reaped the profits tax-free in Switzerland. The bankers ‘pretend that management in the Cayman Islands makes the decisions’ while the main bank in Zurich actually controls all the transactions.

Elmer pointed out that an ‘in-house pseudo insurance company’ in the Caribbean sent out exorbitant premium invoices ‘that reduce the amount of taxes owed in Switzerland and other countries’. He also alleged faked loans to customers were used to reduce tax bills by deducting bogus interest expenses. Elmer used his data as a lever in the bitter dispute with his former employer. He had sent anonymous emails to Bäer customers, threatening to disclose that their accounts contained unreported taxable income. ‘I did it to protect myself and my family,’ he said.

The conflict dramatically escalated when a Swiss financial newspaper anonymously received a computer disk with customer records dating from 1997 to 2002. The US Internal Revenue Service also got a copy just in case they missed another huge tranche of records uploaded from Elmer’s hard drive on to a far more public area—the WikiLeaks’ website.

Rocked by the exposure, the bank’s lawyers demanded that WikiLeaks take down what they called the offending documents. When WikiLeaks refused, the bank launched a court challenge—not in the Caymans, but thousands of kilometres away in San Francisco, where the WikiLeaks domain name had been registered two years earlier by John Young.

There, in the towering glass building on Golden Gate Avenue that houses the US District Court, Julius Bäer’s lawyers successfully persuaded Judge Jeffrey White that WikiLeaks had published confidential documents that violated their client’s right to privacy. Judge White’s decision had immediate effect. Three kilometres away, Dynadot, a California-based Internet company, was ordered to pull the plug on WikiLeaks.org’s domain name server (DNS). Angry Internet activists had already set up mirror sites, allowing access through other domain name servers. And WikiLeaks itself had gone to great lengths to decentralise its website operations so opponents could not easily shut them down. More than half a dozen domain names, including WikiLeaks.org, WikiLeaks.be and WikiLeaks.cx, all led to the same site, providing alternatives if one of them was disabled. In the future WikiLeaks would have to take more extreme security precautions using a disused underground bunker built in central Stockholm during the Cold War. The facility, owned by Swedish broadband provider Bahnhoff, offered the ultimate in protection: its own fibre optic cables had not been tapped into by the Swedish intelligence agencies at the time, according to the company. Bahnhoff boasted that the facility, cut out of solid rock thirty metres underground and protected by a half-metre-thick door, was bomb-proof. As if that wasn’t enough protection, several old diesel engines from German submarines were on standby to supply backup power.

As Judge White made his way home that night, he probably had no idea of the fury that was about to be unleashed against his decision to shut WikiLeaks down. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a strongly committed and heavily organised group dedicated to the defence of freedom of speech, filed a motion to the court protesting against what it called the censorship of WikiLeaks. They were joined by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), bringing together an extraordinary array of opposition to what they saw was a clear case of a First Amendment argument in favour of free speech. The RCFP understood only too well what was at stake. Established in 1970 to provide legal support to reporters needing help, one of the founding members of the committee that established RCFP was Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor who also published the Pentagon Papers and what was at the time the world’s greatest journalistic scoop, Watergate.

The RCFP drew together representatives from almost all the major US newspaper publishers, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Associated Press, the Hearst Corporation, the Los Angeles Times, the National Newspaper Association, the Newspaper Association of America, the Radio-Television News Directors Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. On the grounds that WikiLeaks had not appeared in court to defend itself and no First Amendment issues had yet been raised, the media coalition requested to be heard as a friend of the court to call attention to relevant points of law that the court had apparently overlooked.

They argued that it was unlawful to dramatically curtail access to WikiLeaks simply because of a complaint involving a few documents. It violated the bedrock principle that an injunction involving one set of documents could not be extended to all others. More significantly, the RCFP cited the case of the Pentagon Papers in which the Nixon Administration had tried to prevent publication. In that case, it had been argued that the First Amendment prohibited preventing publication even when national security may be at risk, and the press’ source was alleged to have obtained the documents unlawfully. The privacy and commercial interests cited by Julius Bäer’s lawyers were simply not important enough to have their publication prevented.

Faced with such concerted and well-argued opposition from this highly regarded expert group, Judge White not only dissolved the injunction requiring Dynadot to suppress Wikileaks’ DNS entries, but also denied the bank’s request for an order prohibiting the website’s publication of the bank’s documents. As RCFP Executive Director Lucy Dalglish said, ‘It’s not very often a federal judge does a 180-degree turn in a case and dissolves an order’. On 17 January 2011, Rudolf Elmer appeared at London’s Frontline Club, alongside Julian Assange who was making his first public appearance since being bailed on allegations of sex crimes in Sweden. In a staged ceremony, Elmer handed Assange some computer disks which he said contained details of tax avoidance by 2000 very wealthy individuals. He said he had tried to interest the Swiss police but they had taken no action, except to try to extradite him to face charges of breaking Swiss banking secrecy laws. His last chance, he said, was WikiLeaks.

If WikiLeaks hadn’t been on the US military’s radar as a possible threat before, the court decision seemed to galvanise its intelligence arm into action. Three weeks after Judge White handed down his decision, the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Centre issued a special report focused entirely on WikiLeaks, which Assange got his hands on and leaked.

Classified ‘Secret’, it also carried the restriction ‘Nofor’—no foreigners were to be given access to it. Without a hint of irony the document pointed out that the governments of China, Israel, Russia, Thailand and Zimbabwe had all blocked access to WikiLeaks. The document came to the conclusion that WikiLeaks posed what it called an information security threat to the US army. Without specifying what the threats were, it stated that the WikiLeaks site had provided foreign terrorist groups, insurgents and other potential adversaries with potentially actionable information for targeting US forces. It said the possibility that current employees or moles within the Department of Defense, or elsewhere in the US government, were providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org could not be ruled out.

Ominously, the US military even provided a blueprint to shut WikiLeaks down. It pointed out that the organisation used trust as a centre of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers and whistleblowers who pass information to its personnel or post information to the website that they will remain anonymous, adding pointedly, ‘The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this centre of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public’. It amounted to a declaration of covert war on WikiLeaks. The organisation wouldn’t find out about the military’s plans until much later but Julian Assange was already preparing for an assault.

In the wake of the court victory he began carefully examining what lessons WikiLeaks could learn from the adversary it had just beaten. As he told me: ‘We looked at banks that we had been exposing in the Cayman Islands and those offshore jurisdictions, and tried to understand what it is that these offshore jurisdictions are really doing.’ Assange identified that offshore banking arrangements had a number of significant characteristics. They were mainly based on small islands with only a few thousand population and they were capable of producing a package of laws that were attractive to a particular type of investor. For Assange, the appeal was how the financial security of this kind of jurisdiction could be used for the benefit of journalism and his WikiLeaks venture. It was just a nascent idea forming in his mind, but in the not-too-distant future it would be part of a radical alternative to protect his journalism. Assange says he thought to himself: ‘What if we can turn this on its head?’ As he conceived it, the impregnable fortress that was often used to protect the assets of the rich could be subverted for Wikileaks’ whistleblowing.

Before those elaborate arrangements were made, Assange had some old scores to settle first. He would take on Scientology, one of the most litigious organisations in the world. The organisation that all those years earlier had managed to silence criticism with threats of legal action was next in the firing line, and this time WikiLeaks had planned strong defences before it posted a host of Church of Scientology documents. They involved the work of a person identified as Frank Oliver who had signed what must be the most extraordinary employment contract the world has ever seen, with a branch of Scientology called the Sea Organisation, or SeaOrg. In it, he said he was of sound mind and agreed to contract himself to the organisation ‘for the next billion years’. WikiLeaks’ Scientology package contained memos and other documents Oliver received while working in the Office of Special Affairs, which performs public relations damage control for the Church. As the Register online newspaper pointed out: ‘They read like a cross between Sun Tzu’s Art of War and a Richard Nixon strategy memo on dealing with a hostile press.’

‘Never treat a war like a skirmish,’ the documents advise. ‘Treat all skirmishes like wars.’

According to a ‘Manual of Justice’, purportedly written by Scientology founder, L Ron Hubbard, Church officials responding to negative magazine articles should ‘hire a private detective of a national-type firm to investigate the writer, not the magazine, and get any criminal or communist background the man has’. The officials should then use the information to ‘write a very tantalising letter’ and ask the reporter to come in for a meeting. In what must be one of the most bizarre public relations directives ever, the manual suggests that if the reporter agrees to the meeting, ask them ‘to sign a confession of collusion and slander—people at that level often will, just to commit suicide—and publish it in a paid ad in a paper if you get it’. The manual states: ‘Chances are he won’t arrive. But he’ll sure shudder into silence.’

On a more practical level the documents suggest ways investigators could discover personal details about the movements of those opposed to them, getting airline frequent flyer numbers and then calling the airline to discover a person’s itinerary. The documents also name 7000 organisations and individuals who are ‘suppressive persons and suppressive groups’. The purpose of the Department of Special Affairs was to accomplish ‘total acceptance of Scientology and its Founder’, the documents say, and to take ‘responsibility for cleaning up the rotten spots of society’ in order to create a ‘safer and saner environment for Scientology expansion and for all mankind’.

Within days of the documents being posted on the WikiLeaks site, Scientology’s lawyers in Los Angeles ran the same argument their counterparts in Melbourne had used, accusing WikiLeaks of violating US copyright law. It was unlawful to ‘reproduce or distribute someone else’s copyrighted work without that person’s authorisation’, a letter from the attorneys read. It threatened that courts had entered ‘numerous permanent injunctions and [been] awarded statutory damages’ for infringing the copyright of Scientology’s works. The documents were ‘unpublished, copyrighted works. Please be advised that your customer’s action in this regard violates United States copyright law. Accordingly, we ask for your help in removing these works immediately from your service’.

Instead of buckling, WikiLeaks continued the assault, saying that after reviewing documentation on Scientology’s ‘attacks, legal and illegal’, on critics ‘ranging from Time Magazine and CNN’ (which it said had spent more than $3 million defending against just one of their suits), to investigative freelance journalists whose books had been pulped by publishers rather than face litigation costs, WikiLeaks had come to the conclusion that Scientology was ‘not only an abusive cult, but that it aids and abets a general climate of western media self-censorship, due to the fear of litigation costs’. WikiLeaks added that if the West could not defend its cultural values of free speech and press freedoms against a money-making cult like Scientology, it could hardly lecture China and other state abusers of these same values.

In an attempt to discover who had leaked the material, the Scientology lawyers asked for the ‘release of the logs of the uploader’. If it was designed to intimidate, it had just the opposite effect—WikiLeaks acted. ‘In response to the attempted suppression, WikiLeaks will release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week.’ And it did.

Nothing further was heard from the LA lawyers. One of the biggest and most vexatious litigants had been silenced and defeated. It was a sweet revenge for Julian Assange who had failed so spectacularly in Melbourne all those years ago to inflict any damage on the Church of Scientology, defeated by a legal muzzle which had silenced everyone else too, until now.

Exactly who leaked the Scientology documents has never been discovered, though the Church tried to find out. The system that WikiLeaks used to protect a whistleblower’s identity had worked perfectly. The material simply arrived on the WikiLeaks server, posted by an anonymous whistleblower with access to the documents. But that safeguard could not extend to protecting whistleblowers from themselves. In the early hours of the morning on 16 September 2008, the private Yahoo email account of Sarah Palin was hacked into by a user calling themselves Rubico.

As John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, and his deputy, Sarah Palin, crisscrossed the country in a final push in what was expected to be one of the closest elections ever, 20-year-old David Kernell thought he might make the difference and tilt the balance in favour of the Democrats. He was looking for something that would ‘derail Palin’s campaign’.

She had been accused of using her private email to shield government business from public scrutiny. All Kernell needed was the answer to her Yahoo email password question and her date of birth. When it came to breaking into her account, it’s probably a good thing Palin didn’t design the security codes to launch a nuclear strike. Her birthday appeared on her Facebook page, and the password was simply a name of one of her children. The problem was any frontal assault on the email would identify the person who had broken in. So Kernell used a computerised ‘cut out’—an Internet host which provides a new identity to ‘launder’ his attempt to impersonate Sarah Palin. Once inside the account, Kernell copied Palin’s list of emails, and posted it on the web where WikiLeaks picked it up. The hack also uncovered some unflattering family photos and the addresses of Palin’s friends, the usual kind of material you’d expect to find on anyone’s email account. But there was also evidence that Palin was using her personal email for state business.

Among the emails in Palin’s account were several from government email addresses belonging to her aides, including a draft letter to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a discussion of nominations to the state Court of Appeals, and several bearing the acronym for the Alaska Department of Public Safety. Assange argued that the emails proved that Palin had used her private account to hide material concerning government business which should rightfully be in the public domain.

Palin brushed off the question of whether she’d done anything wrong and called in the FBI to find the hacker. They didn’t have to look far, and the following Saturday night FBI officers swooped on Kernell’s apartment where he lived with flatmates just a kilometre from Tennessee University, and photographed and logged everything in the place, including his computer. Though Kernell had carefully shielded his identity, he hadn’t been careful enough. His Facebook email was linked to Anonymous—the anarchist website he’d used to attack Palin’s account. When the FBI demanded to know from the organisation that provided the ‘cut out’ who had accessed Palin’s account, they promptly handed over the email address. The curly haired, cherubic Kernell, who might have hoped to please his father, a local State Democrat Party leader, by embarrassing Palin, was eventually found guilty on two charges of obstructing justice and unauthorised entry of a computer. He received a one-year jail sentence and three years’ ‘supervised release’. The judge ordered Kernell to spend his sentence in a ‘halfway house’ and not a federal prison. John McCain’s campaign described the hack as a ‘shocking violation of law’. Barack Obama’s office called it ‘outrageous’.

Assange defended WikiLeaks’ publication of the private photographs of Palin’s children because they authenticated the email account. ‘Everyone now knows the documents to be true,’ he said. ‘These previously unseen photos of Palin’s children were selected to lend credibility to the politically important text—the list of emails containing governmental correspondence.’

While the United States was moving away from hard right Republicanism towards the political centre ground, on the other side of the Atlantic the political consensus was fracturing, and extreme racism had began to re-emerge in Britain. Like all extremist parties, the leaders of the Far Right British National Party (BNP) deny it is a racist organisation, but they know their members understand only too well what the party really stands for. Even so, the last thing many of them want is their names revealed to the public, least of all to their neighbours or workmates.

After it had briefly appeared on a blog, WikiLeaks posted the membership list of the British National Party. It contained the names, addresses, ages and occupations of many of the 13 500 BNP members. Among the members were schoolteachers, doctors, lawyers and police officers. It is illegal for anyone in the British police to be a member of BNP and at least one person lost their job.

WikiLeaks was fast emerging as a major force in the world of investigative journalism and human rights; a game changer in the way stories broke and were reported. Just a few months earlier, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks had received the prestigious Economist Index on Censorship award for journalism for the inroads they had made in New Media. The Index on Censorship presents annual awards to courageous journalists, writers, lawyers, campaigners, filmmakers and whistle blowers from around the world who have made a significant contribution to free expression over the previous year. Assange joined some of the most highly regarded journalists in the world for the awards ceremony in London.

While WikiLeaks had made headlines with its prize, it was having less luck getting anyone from traditional journalism interested in an extraordinary story it had published on its website. It involved the murder of hundreds of Kenyans suspected of being members of a notorious gang. Outlawed following a spate of slum violence, the quasi-religious group from the dominant Kikuyu tribe had become one of Kenya’s largest crime and extortion rings.

Instead of arresting them and placing them before a court, a group of Kenyan Police carried out the systematic execution of anyone they suspected. As the bodies began to pile up in their hundreds in the Nairobi mortuary, police officers who disapproved of the killings tipped off the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. Their investigation revealed a pattern of execution: many had been shot at close range or strangled to death after being tortured, others set on fire after being doused in paraffin. The completed report, entitled ‘Cry of Blood’, was damning of the government. ‘These acts were ordered, directed or coordinated by the top leadership of the Kenya police acting jointly with a common purpose,’ it said. It also reported that the police had been complicit in the deaths of up to 500 young Kenyans in the past eighteen months.

President Mwai Kibaki ignored the call for a full inquiry. Like its victims, the report was buried. The Human Rights Commission found itself in a bind. As Assange told me the report was ‘too dangerous to release’ inside Kenya. Even posting a copy on an outside web page like WikiLeaks would be risky for those who leaked it in Kenya. But whoever it was decided to take the chance—and handed over a copy. WikiLeaks posted it on its site with great fanfare.

Assange was greatly disappointed that the report was mainly ignored by the established media. Only the UK’s Sunday Times and its reporter Jon Swain gave the story any prominence. There would have to be changes to the way WikiLeaks did business in the future if Assange was to honour his pledge to its whistleblowers that the risks they took would be worthwhile and that their material would have maximum impact. Just six months after the report was filed on the WikiLeaks site, two human rights lawyers, Oscar Kingara and Paul Oulu, who had been providing evidence to the Kenyan Human Rights Commission and also trying to get the International Criminal Court involved, were gunned down. As Assange tells the story, he clearly understands the terrible significance of what happened: one car pulled up behind and another pulled up in front. Both men were shot through the windows and a student who tried to take the bodies back to the university ‘to make sure there was a proper autopsy’ was also shot.

Assange was proud of the award Amnesty International gave WikiLeaks for its work in exposing the police killings, but the WikiLeaks activists in Kenya also raised serious questions that the organisation had never faced before. As we sat talking in a Melbourne sanctuary provided by his friends in early 2010, Assange wrestled with the dilemma of the Kenya killings. ‘They face many more risks than we do—as a sort of, as a white foreign national, I’m in a privileged position and these people cop it first,’ he said. Then Assange used a curious phrase to describe what had happened to the dead men. ‘For me personally, they are my canary in the coalmine,’ he said. Assange may not have meant it, but his comments sounded callous.

Protecting the whisteblowers who risked their lives seemed easy to deal with compared to this new complexity, the unintended consequences of an exposé that had left two men dead and another shot at close range. The business of leaking had just got a whole lot more complicated and ethically fraught.