Inside Wikileaks – the book

On a casual trip to the bookstore, as I was getting irritated by the lack of segregation and proper genre listings, this book suddenly caught my eye. Lying in the new arrivals section, I instantly picked up the paperback and browsed a little to gauge the gist. Written by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, former spokesman for Wikileaks and one of its earliest employees (if you could call 2 people running an operation out of their basement a company), the book details his time at Wikileaks from the time he met Julian Assange to when he left in Sepetember 2010.

The book starts with an author’s note telling the readers why he chose to leave Wikileaks and write about his time there. Indeed for an organization that prides itself on stripping large companies and governments off their secrets, precious little was known to outside world about itself and its self-professed messianic founder. Daniel starts off with how he came to be associated with the project and his meeting with Julian Assange for the first time in Berlin at the Chaos Communication Congress (a meeting point for tech-freaks, hackers and such) and details how two individuals with such seperate personalities became devoted single-mindedly to a project that was to create such ripples in the days to come.

The book provides us with an insight as to how 2 people took on corporations with vast legal and financial resources and brought them to their knees armed with just encrypted laptops and an ancient server. Julian’s personality traits, brilliance coupled with airy arrogance, his tendency to play up the hype, heroic syndrome, heightened sense of paranoia, nomadic existence (all the traits that were later seen on TV and interviews) are well documented. Daniel tells us how they would keep up the pretence of having large legal backing, in-numerable servers and answer emails with pseudonyms to keep the world in black about how many people actually worked actively for Wikileaks. Many important leaks like the one on Julius Baer, Scientology, Collateral Murder, Iceland financial crisis are documented along with a few almost comical like the fraternities’ handbook, Sarah Palin’s emails etc. Daniel tries hard to present an objective view of Wikileaks from an insider’s perspective and almost does a commendable job of it. The recent problems with Wikileaks and its under-seige founder Julian also find due space in the pages. Ultimately the story of its initiation, first public appearance in Berlin to just 20 people, the various leaks and the events leading to Daniel’s exit make a fascinating reading for anyone clued in to the recent international political developments.

Its an important book as it gives us a peek into what time magazine called ‘perhaps the most important journalistic tool of our times’ and its founder sans all the hype and hoopla of espionage. It tells us what made Wikileaks tick was not only Julian but a team of very few people who left cushy jobs with corporations to devote their time to sticking up for their ideals. In the end it raises important questions about how to protect whistle-blowers and the importance of journalistic ethics while reporting stories whose repercussions could reverberate around the globe.