“In We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks,” Academy Award winning documentary film maker Alex Gibney masterfully weaves together the complex story of Julian Assange’s famed and controversial website.
The film, which premiered on Jan. 26, at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, sorts through a colossal amount of news coverage and information to create a detailed yet suspenseful account of Wikileaks’ key players: Julian Assange, the founder Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, a U.S. private first class accused of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, and Adrian Lamo, a hacktivist who turned Manning in to the FBI, leading to his arrest.
“We Steal Secrets” talks briefly about Julian Assange’s life before Wikileaks, when he lived in the 1980s hacker haven of Melbourne Australia. Operating under the code name Mendax, Assange invented a computer program which allowed a group called the International Subversives to hack into the Pentagon and NASA.
In 1989, Assange was one of six Melbourne teenagers under suspicion for sending a hacking worm into the Atlantis space shuttle shortly before its launch.
Although he eventually pled guilty to 26 other unrelated hacking charges, Assange was set free because of his young age and disrupted childhood.
The film then shifts its focus to the founding of Wikileaks 17 years later, utilizing interviews with former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden to talk about Bradley Manning and Wikileaks’ Collateral Murder video.
Manning, having security clearance and access to classified information via the internet, was accused of passing 500,000 military reports to Wikileaks through an encrypted connection.
Adrian Lamo, a fellow hacktivist in whom Manning confided through an online chat, turned him in to the FBI after feeling that he was endangering lives by making this information public.
Throughout the film, Gibney uses intricate motion graphics to convey the chat logs between Lamo and Manning and to 3-dimensionalize what would otherwise be static online news articles.
The documentary also traces Wikileaks’ unravelling after its main success, including the allegations against Assange of sexual abuse, and Paypal and Amazon’s ceasing to support the website for donations and web hosting.
After being wanted by Sweden to return for a trial and hiding out in the United Kingdom, Assange sought political asylum. He was eventually granted it by Ecuador, and as of today he is still living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
While it does give much support for Wikileaks’ cause, “We Steal Secrets” also shows that Assange should “not be praised as an idealistic hero as much as he has been.
Gibney allows the viewers to make their own conclusions about Assange and Wikileaks after laying out accusations and defense from both sides.
His skillful storytelling exposes the Julian Assange who struggled with instantaneous fame and ironically praised transparency while at the same time vigilantly guarded his own secrets.
A thoroughly researched and wonderfully executed documentary overall, “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks” is a must-see film for when it publicly arrives in theaters mid-year.