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After just two years the sites made public over a million secret documents.
But WikiLeaks as an organization continues to be largely shrouded in secrecy.
Only Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg appear in public, the latter under the pseudonym Schmitt.
Okay, Hello everybody my name is Daniel Schmitt, this is Julian Assange,
we're here to make a short presentation about the WikiLeaks project.
According to The National, which is something that we are kind of proud of...
This is one of our last quotes. The National has said that
we have produced more spooks in our short existance than the Washington Post in the last 30 years.
Their publication activities soon lead to counter-attacks,
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 becomes the object of lawsuits and threats.
Wikileaks now attracts the attention of the US Intelligence,
who in a classified report, claim 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 U.S. Intelligence however only managed to keep the report secret a short while
before it is 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,
would also create new opportunities for WikiLeaks.
October came, October 2008, and the Icelandic banking system imploded,
it lost 17/18th of its mass over the course of about a week or two,
it was essentially one bank per week went bankrupt.
WikiLeaks obtained material that show how Icelandic catastrophic bank system collapses
were partly due to cronyism or favoritsm, careless and secretiveness.
When this highly detailed document is put out on the net,
the bank launches a counter-attack.
Well, the first time I ever heard of WikiLeaks was beginning August 2009.
I was waking up to a report on (TV) when I got a tip that
this website had an important document, just posted online.
The document was the high exposure loanbook for the failed Kaupthing bank.
It was essentially "all of the regulators had been delerict in their duties,
all of the bankers had been lying about the actual state of affairs."
The bank's management react in panic to the revelations,
and in a desperate move, force the Icelandic judiciary
to resort to extreme measures.
I was the first one to actually break that story,
but the bank reacted in a manner that was quite interesting.
This is the news, Saturday August 1 -
but not all the news we meant to tell.
They got a gag order on the state television,
actually the first and only one in the history of Iceland state news department.
It's all there for everyone to read on www.wikileaks.org.
The leak lays bare the disastrous effects
of the cronyism inheriant in Iceland.
We had failed as a country because we had not been sharing the information that we needed.
We were in the middle of an information famine.
That sort of.... eventually lead to this...
lets just get the WikiLeaks people here, and when they were here,
we just went 'hmm, ok, is there anything you want us to do?',
and obviously there was.
Host : Welcome to this program. Julian : Thank you
Host : You mentioned to me, a dream, that we, in Iceland,
should become a vanguard of publishing freedom.
Julian : Absolutely, absolutely...
And they were presenting this idea which they call Switzerland of Banks,
which was basically to take the tax haven model
and transform it to the transparency haven model.
Why doesn't Iceland become the center for publishing in the world?
Because it's going to be...
Julian and I, we were just throwing that idea out,
just declaring on national television that we thought
this was the next business model for Iceland, so that felt pretty weird.
Then realizing that the next day that everyone wanted to talk about it.
Iceland has seen some of the problems that happens
when society becomes too secret.
WikiLeaks gave us the nudge that we needed.
We had had this idea but we didn't know what to do with it,
and they came and told us. And that is an incredible valueable thing.
WikiLeaks now teams up with Icelandic activists and parlimentarians
and together drew up a proposal that would transform Iceland
into a haven for journalism.
Herbert and I, [Inaudible], and Julian Assange,
the five of us sat in this hotel room for about four or five hours
and wrote the entire proposal, from scratch.
The proposal is adopted unanimously by Iceland's Parliament.
Just getting a bill accepted in the Parliament is nearly impossible.
And this is a huge victory for the Parliament, to have a proposal of this nature
to pass through the Parliament with
everybody saying yes.
It's also a victory for Wikileaks, who are now
not only using disclosures as a weapon, but also directly influencing freedom of expression laws.
The entire hacker world behind Wikileaks is growing increasingly confident
that their vision will lead to an improved society.
I think people that are dealing with systems,
and technologically oriented people are dealing with systems,
they understand systems pretty well.
If you look at society, that's just yet another system,
people involved with Wikileaks are exactly the same as Nean and the other people who are fighting this fight,
and they are information activists first and foremost.
They believe in the power of information, and power of knowledge,
and the importance of allowing everybody to have both laws.
Perhaps it's similar convictions that prompt a young former american hacker
to make one of the most crucial decisions of his life.
Bradley Manning, serving as an intelligence analyst for the US army in Iraq in early 2010 has,
just like millions of other Americans in the military or civil service,
access to a massive database of classified information.
He discovers indications of crime and corruption
and tells another hacker, Adrian Lamo about it.
[Chat on a screen] Manning : If you had free access to classified network,
and you saw incredible things, awful things what would you do ?
Lamo : Depends. What are the particulars ?
Manning : Well, it was forwarded to Wikileaks.
Manning : To a crazy white haired dude.
Manning : I've made a huge mess.
Manning writes that he sent hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic reports to Wikileaks,
the biggest leak ever.
[CHAT ON A SCREEN] Manning : I can't believe what I am confessing to you.
Lamo : What's your endgame plan then?
Manning : God knows what happens now.
Manning : Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.
Manning : Or maybe I am just young, naïve, and stupid.
Manning puts his faith in Wikileaks.
However, Lamo reports the chapter to the military.
Manning now risks the fifty-two year jail sentence.
Many of the facts are still unclear. One thing is certain : at this point in time,
Wikileaks received documents for the same materials
that Manning is charged of having leaked.
We make a commitment to our sources
that we will represent their material to the public
to the best of our ability.
And achieve maximum political impact for the risks that they take.
Wikileaks are in possession of explosive material.
Too big, in fact for them to handle alone.
Assange decides to stake all of his resources in one move.
We were sitting in a cafe and he flipped open his laptotp
and told me "Well, you're going to see something interesting".
I was quite shocked.
This was something that I recognized instantly
as extremely important and strong material.
This is what the crew of an American attack helicopter see
while out on patrol in Baghdad.
See all those people standing down there?
There's a group of men on the street below.
Two of them work for the international news agency Reuters.
The driver, Saeed Chmagh
and the Cameraman, Namir Noor-Eldeen.
What annoys me the most is when people abuse their power
and harm innocents,
and they didn't actually need to do it.
- Hotel 26, this is Crazy Horse 18, have individuals with weapons.
Request permission to engage.
- Roger that, we have no personnel east of our position.
For me, the person who sent it and put so much effort into trying to stop this war
that at least, if this would be shown to people,
that it might give people enough motivation to try to stop the next one.
- Alright, clear to engage.
- Roger, go ahead.
- I can't get them now because they are behind that building.
What shocked me with the video was the high resolution, the quality of it,
the excessive use of force to shoot people with hollow thirty millimeter bullets
that are designed to penetrate armored vehicles and techs
basically shot to pieces.
- Let me know when you get them.
- Will do.
- Light em all up.
- Cmon, fire !
[Machine Gun] Keep shooting.
[Machine Gun] Keep shooting.
[Machine Gun] Keep shooting.
[Machine Gun]
Different people argue that it was right for the United State to be in Iraq,
or wrong to be in Iraq,
but nonetheless in this incident,
even if you argue that it was right for the United States to be in Iraq,
even if it was right for them to be in that suburb, at that time,
with a helicopter,
overlooking this wounded man crawling in the street.
It was not helpful, for the United States,
for that wounded crawling man to be shot.
We got one guy crawling around down there
The Reuters employee, Saeed Chmagh has been seriously wounded.
- He's getting up.
- Does he have a weapons on his hands?
- No I don't see one yet.
It's very important to offer a voice to the voiceless.
Nobody really believes the people on the ground
when they're trying to tell what war crimes are ocurring and that happen to the people there.
So I offered to help with this in any way possible.
- Dispatcher, Crazy horse, we have indivduals going to the scene,
possibly picking up bodies and weapons.
- We need to stop that [inaudible] down there!!!
- Picking up the wounded.
- Requesting permission to engage.
- Command, what to shoot?
A father driving his children to school catches sight of the injured man
and stops to help him.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community