WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

by David Leigh, Luke Harding, The Guardian

Overview

Published to coincide with the forthcoming film, The Fifth Estate, starring Beneditct Cumberbatch, this tie-in edition contains two new chapters on Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, and a foreword by Alan Rusbridger.
It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate echoed around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination.
And Assange's actions continue to be felt, in the trial of Bradley Manning and the flight of Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.
Award-winning Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding were at the centre of a unique publishing drama that involved the release of some 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. (At one point the platinum-haired hacker was hiding from the CIA in David Leigh's London house.) Now, together with the paper's investigative reporting team, Leigh and Harding reveal the startling inside story of the man and the leak, and bring the story dramatically up to date.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783350186
Publisher:	Guardian Faber Publishing
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	469 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

The Guardian, David Leigh and Luke Harding
Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war and in summer 2022 put him on an official blacklist. He is the author of Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (nominated for the Orwell Prize) and The Snowden Files. Two of Harding's books have been made into films; The Fifth Estate and Snowden.

Table of Contents

Cast of characters vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Hunt 13

Chapter 2 Bradley Manning 20

Chapter 3 Julian Assangc 32

Chapter 4 The rise of WikiLeaks 49

Chapter 5 The Apache video 65

Chapter 6 The Lamo dialogues 72

Chapter 7 The deal 90

Chapter 8 In the bunker 104

Chapter 9 The Afghanistan war logs 116

Chapter 10 The Iraq war logs 128

Chapter 11 The cables 135

Chapter 12 The world's most famous man 145

Chapter 13 Uneasy partners 164

Chapter 14 Before the deluge 176

Chapter 15 Publication day 194

Chapter 16 The biggest leak in history 210

Chapter 17 The ballad of Wandsworth jail 227

Chapter 18 The future of WikiLeaks 240

Appendix: US Embassy Cables 251

Acknowledgements 331

Index 332

Editorial Reviews

Mediaite, February 5, 2011
“While [The Guardian’s] rendition of experience does not fail to leave out the requisite depiction of Assange as overbearing and paranoid, the overall tone of the story, rather than vengeful, is surprisingly self-effacing.”

TechCrunch, February 12, 2011
“You can imagine, then, how delighted I was to receive a copy of the Guardian’s new crash-published Wikileaks book and discover that it was all the things I wanted from the Times’ book. And more… Indeed, while ‘Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War On Secrecy’ is many things – a thriller, a story of international diplomacy, a tale of greed and ambition and double-crosses; a comedy, a tragedy – above all it’s a manifesto for the future of professional journalism…If Wikileaks is this generation’s Watergate, then ‘Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy’ might well prove to be its All The President’s Men; educating a whole new generation of would-be reporters on the power and importance of the professional press.”
 
MacLean’s, March 1, 2011
“Leigh’s portrait of the WikiLeaks founder is at once affectionate and damning—a dry-eyed examination of the way celebrity can pervert a burgeoning ego.

From the Publisher

We truly are in the Information Age—but what information should be released to the public, and how? This book tries to formulate answers to those questions by looking at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his life, including his early penchant for computers and the rape charges against him. Paul Michael Garcia’s narration is functional, and his diction is clear. But his delivery has a robotic quality, as if he were reading a script. The last few hours of the book, on the politics of information, tend to be dense. What truly engages is the authors’ inside look at how WikiLeaks was able to disseminate masses of classified information, both through technical means and through the cooperative effort of the mainstream media. M.B. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2011 - AudioFile