COLD OPEN

Show Notes

The following presentation is not suitable for young children. Listener discretion is advised. 

Julian Assange looked into the mirror one last time and frowned. He looked older than his 47 years.  

Yeah, his hair was prematurely gray. But there were also heavy bags under his eyes. He was thinner, and his skin was pale due to the lack of sunlight. 

Well, nothing to be done about that. If anything, it probably helped his cause. The more he looked like a political prisoner, the better.

And hey, if his overall appearance didn’t do the job, he’d also recently grown a long, white beard for good measure. He styled it just like his hero Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist and dissident who was sent to the gulag for criticizing Stalin.

Assange tugged at the wispy strands. Even he had to admit his beard wasn’t quite as impressive as Solzhenitsyn’s was. 

With that, Assange tied his long white hair back into a man bun, slipped on his black blazer, picked up his copy of Gore Vidal’s History of The National Security State, and waited. 

SFX: knock on a door

At least they had the courtesy to knock.

The door opened. There was Ecuador’s ambassador to the UK, Jaime Marchan-Romero, along with several embassy security staff, plus six London police officers.

Mr. Assange? It’s time, the ambassador said.

The cops cuffed him and led him out of the small room where he’d lived for the past seven years.  

Outside, a crowd of reporters and bystanders had gathered.

The moment Assange saw them, he went limp.

This is unlawful! Assange shouted. I am not leaving!

Bloody hell, said one of the officers. They grabbed him by the armpits and dragged him towards a waiting van.

UK must resist! UK must resist!, Assange shouted. Once he was inside the van, he flashed a defiant thumbs up. 

The van brought him to a police station, and then to Westminster Magistrate’s Court, Assange sat in the englis while his lawyer and a British prosecutor negotiated his fate.

I object to this entire ordeal, said Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson. My client is a publisher of state secrets. He has been villainized for more than a decade. It’s impossible for him to receive a fair trial anywhere.

The prosecutor cut in. Mr. Assange’s notoriety is irrelevant to the case. By absconding to the Ecuadorian embassy, he has violated the terms of his parole.

The judge looked over at Assange.

Assange…looked like he wasn’t paying attention. He was thumbing through his copy of History of the National Security State, making sure the title was prominently displayed for all to see.

Mr. Assange, do you understand the charges brought against you?

Assange shrugged. Eh, I’m sure the lawyers will explain it to me, 

Mr. Assange, your behavior is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own self-interest, the judge said. I’m sentencing you to ten months incarceration for violating your bail. There will also be a hearing to determine your status with regards to your charges from the United States.

Assange was taken out of the court room and brought to Belmarsh, a modern prison in southeast London that had housed many War on Terror suspects. 

His cell was hardly smaller than his room at the Ecuadorian embassy. Really, he’d just moved from one form of solitary confinement to another.

He flopped down on the bed and stared at the wall. The founder of Wikileaks had once been described as “the most dangerous man in the world.” Now, there was nothing he could do but wait for the US and the UK to decide what to do with him.

On this episode: Aussie hackers, Kenyan elections, Guantanamo Bay, Swiss banks and the birth of Wikileaks. I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.

You’re listening to Modem Mischief. On this series we explore the darkest reaches of the Internet. We’ll take you into the minds of the world’s most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We’ll also show you places you won’t find on Google and what goes on down there. This is part one of the story of Julian Assange.  

ACT ONE 

It was time to wake the bees.

Julian Assange approached the beehive in the backyard of his apartment complex on October 17, 1989.

The hive was enclosed inside a large white wooden box. He removed the clear plastic cover and slipped his bare hand inside.

In the moonlight, Assange could see a few of the bees float lazily out of the honeycomb and towards his hand. They smelled him and recognized his scent. Satisfied that he wasn’t a threat, they flitted back to the hive.

Just like he’d planned it. Assange had spent months feeding his bees sugar water diluted with his own sweat. Now, all 60,000 of them trusted him implicitly. As far as animals were concerned, they were a lot cheaper than a guard dog.

Assange reached down into the bee box and found the collection of floppy disks he’d secured to the side. They represented the entirety of his online life. He retrieved the disks, replaced the lid, and walked back inside.

He tried to be as quiet as possible. His wife, Teresa, had recently given birth to their son, Daniel, and—

SFX: baby crying

Shiiiiit.

What the hell, Julian! said Teresa from the other room. It’s nearly midnight!

Assange hurried back to his office, closed the door behind him, and slipped the floppy disks inside his computer.

SFX: old computer booting up

His computer had started out as a Commodore 64, which his mother Christine had bought for him when he was 13–a major expense for a single mother. Since then, Assange had enhanced it with parts he’d salvaged from dumpsters across Melbourne. 

After the computer booted up, Assange pulled up the online bulletin board where he hung out with his crew of fellow hackers. A crew of three. Assange knew them as Prime Suspect and Trax. They knew him as Mendax. Together, they called themselves “The International Subversives.” 

Teresa thought it was childish. Well, she just didn’t “get it.” 

Tonight, there was a message from Prime Suspect.

Yo, Mendax, it said. Looks like your little project is “taking off.”

Assange rolled his eyes. Good one, Prime.

But when Assange pulled up an admin account he’d hacked into a few days earlier, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

9,700 miles away, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the Space Shuttle Atlantis was sitting on the launch pad at Complex 39B. Attached to it was Galileo. It was supposed to be the first space probe that would orbit Jupiter.

The probe weighed 5 ½ tons, but just 50 pounds of it had sparked an international outrage.

Galileo was the first nuclear-powered space probe. That 50 pounds of plutonium would fuel its 2.8 billion mile journey.

But this was just three years after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. If the Atlantis met a similar fate while it was in Earth’s orbit, with Galileo onboard, it would poison the planet with radiation.

Protesters had gathered in Cape Canaveral for weeks to express their displeasure. Assange and the International Subversives had done their part. Sure, they were on the other side of the planet, but the reach of the Internet allowed them to participate. Soon, their message would drown out all the others.

Around the world, thousands of NASA engineers, scientists, and researchers logged onto their computers, which were connected to the agency’s worldwide computer system, called SPAN.

But instead of familiar login screens, their computers displayed the same message:

Your system has been officially WANKed.

It was a computer worm. Their computer worm. The WANK Worm.  

“WANK” stood for Worms Against Nuclear Killers. It’s also Aussie slang for…well, you can look that up on Urban Dictionary.

Assange had only intended for the worm to infect a few dozen computers at the space agency. Instead, it quickly spread to thousands of NASA computers around the world.

Holy shit, Assange thought. Their little worm of protest was way, way more successful than they’d ever expected. Surely the American government would be hunting for whoever was responsible.

Assange quickly ejected his floppy disks and headed back to the beehive. 

Or, at least that’s one version of the story.

In fact, the identity of the WANK worm’s creator has never been proven. 

The WANK worm is remembered as the first computer worm used in a political protest. Whoever created the WANK worm uploaded it to the SPAN system on Friday, October 13th. It lurked within NASA’s computer for four days, then began its work. 

The worm infected thousands of computers, threatening to delete their files. In reality, it didn’t. On Wednesday, after a one-day delay for weather, Galileo blasted off into the sky without further incident.

SFX: Three…two…one…we have ignition and liftoff. (https://youtu.be/4nsI1h7Tajg?t=32)

The ensuing investigation determined that the WANK worm’s creator was based in Melbourne. There were plenty of clues. The worm displayed the message, “You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.”

It was an obvious anti-nuclear power message. But, it was also lyrics from the Australian band Midnight Oil song “Blossom and Blood.”

That’s where the trail ran cold. 

Julian Assange was one of Melbourne’s most skilled hackers in 1989. He held many of the same anti-nuclear and anti-military industrial complex views that the WANK worm hacker did. Several journalists have suggested that he was involved with coding and launching the worm. He’s never confirmed it, but he’s never denied it, either. 

It’s a typical Julian Assange story. For someone who’s dedicated his life to exposing the truths of the world, it’s surprisingly difficult to pin down concrete details about Julian Assange’s life. 

This is a person who disavowed his own autobiography—that’s right, a book he wrote himself. 

Here’s what we do know. 

Julian Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia in 1971. He claims his parents met at a Vietnam War protest. An anti-nuclear activist herself, Assange says his mother Christine’s politics inspired him to fight injustice wherever he saw it.

Assange borrowed his hacker name, Mendax, from the Roman poet Horace. Specifically the phrase splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful.” By age 16, Assange had formed his own hacking crew, the International Subversives, with two other teenagers from Melbourne whom he met online. Assange even published a monthly newsletter, just for the three of them. 

The International Subversives didn’t hack for money or vandalism. They believed that knowledge should be free for everyone. They called it “ethical hacking.”

They  broke into several U.S. Government websites. The Air Force’s 7th Command Group Headquarters at the Pentagon. The Naval Surface Warfare Center in Virginia. Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Unisys. Even the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the U.S. built and tested nuclear weapons.

Assange would later compare it to trophy hunting. They just wanted to see how things worked, and they carefully removed any trace of their activities.

Or tried to. In 1991, Assange was caught hacking into the Canadian telecommunications provider Nortel. He avoided jail by paying a $2,300 fine.

Shortly after, his wife, Teresa, left him, taking their son Daniel with her. Assange’s mother Christine says that the stressful custody battle was when her 19-year-old son’s hair turned prematurely white. 

It’s also, Christine says, partly what gave him the idea to found Wikileaks. According to Christine, Assange felt that the Australian courts were controlled by a conspiracy of “radical feminists” who wanted to keep children away from men. Assange was determined to expose the truth–or, whatever truths he could get his hands on. 

Assange says he first had the idea for Wikileaks around 1997, but he wouldn’t actually register the domain name until 2006.

In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the Internet was making it easier than ever to distribute information. 

Wikileaks was a simple concept: Wikileaks would publish sensitive documents, the kind of information that governments and companies didn’t want the public to know about. It would get those documents from hackers, whistleblowers, or by any means necessary. 

To Assange, the injustices around the world could only be conducted with the help of secrecy. By providing an independent platform, Wikieaks would shine a light on the truth.

In other words, yeah, Julian Assange wanted to change the world. 

If it worked, Wikileaks could swing elections and topple governments. But it was also bound to make Assange a lot of enemies.

Like the name suggests, Wikileaks was inspired by Wikipedia, the user-run encyclopedia. Assange decided that Wikileaks would be run on a volunteer basis. For one thing, he didn’t have any money to pay employees. That would only be possible once Wikileaks began soliciting donations, and donations would only come in once people knew what the hell Wikileaks was.

Assange would be the only Wikileaks member with an official title: editor in chief. There would be no question who had the final say. 

Assange wanted Wikileaks to be a global operation, but to start, he’d have to set up a server somewhere.

He chose San Francisco. The city’s history of liberal politics also made it seem like the perfect haven for an organization that would be taking on the world’s authoritarian regimes–including, Assange would argue, the United States. 

Assange traveled across Europe and Asia, meeting hackers in person and trying to persuade them to join his cause. Assange would never say how many people were working for Wikileaks. He liked to claim that he had dozens of employees. In reality, in the early days, it was just him and an old laptop. 

Assange had no fixed address. He would crash on people’s couches for a few weeks at a time. He had few possessions, just a backpack full of laptops and cables, and another full of fresh socks and underwear. He rarely changed his clothes.

Which…might be why people didn’t offer their couches for very long.  

It was January 2007. Assange was determined to put Wikileaks on the map. His next stop was Nairobi, Kenya. It was the host city of the World Social Forum.

The World Social Forum is an antidote to the World Economic Forum, the billionaire’s conference held annually in Davos, Switzerland. Held at the same time, The World Social Forum is a gathering of 60,000 activists from around the world to discuss poverty, inequality and oppression.

By attending the World Social Forum, Assange hoped to network and introduce Wikileaks to a receptive audience. But it was the World Social Forum’s host country, Kenya, that would prove to be much more important for Wikileaks’ future.

A few days after he arrived, Assange sat in the office of Mwalimu Mati.

Mati was the founder of Mars Group Kenya, an activist organization devoted to exposing government corruption. He’d founded it a year earlier with his wife Jayna.

Something fell into our laps recently, Mati said.

He handed Assange a hefty document, more than 100 pages.

I got that from someone in the government, Mati continued. It’s a report about the activities of our last president, Daniel Arap Moi.

Assange leafed through it. According to the report, President Moi and his two sons had embezzled more than $2 billion from Kenya. They owned properties in 28 countries, including a 10,000-acre ranch in Australia. Assange was almost impressed.

Assange waited until just 100 days before the Kenyan election to pass the report along to the British newspaper The Guardian. The Guardian published it under the title “The Looting of Kenya,” crediting Wikileaks as the source.

In Kenya, the report was a bombshell. Kenyans everywhere were outraged. Soon, Kibaki’s top challenger, prime minister Raila Odinga, shot up in the polls.

When the election took place in December, Kibaki declared himself the winner before officials even finished counting the votes. Kibaki was hastily sworn in for a second term despite allegations that he’d fraudulently added tens of thousands of votes to the total.

Odinga urged his supporters to protest, and they did. Kibaki’s police responded by opening fire on the protesters, killing about 800.

Kibaki was losing control of the country. Violence continued for months. Finally, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan arrived and brokered a power sharing agreement between Kibaki and Odinga.

For Assange, the publication of the report was a huge marketing opportunity. He immediately began claiming that not only did Wikileaks affect the outcome of the Kenyan election, it changed Kenyan history.

Wikileaks had indeed affected the election. Lives had been lost. But if Assange wanted to change the world, he had a long way to go.

Wikileaks was just getting started.

 ACT TWO  

Shafiq Rasul watched the sun set behind the Afghanistan mountains. He was sitting in the back of a moving pickup truck with his friends Asif and Rhuel. 

Last week, the three friends had flown from their hometown of Tipton, England, to Karachi, Pakistan to attend Asif’s wedding. 

But the wedding celebration was dampened by the situation across the border in Afghanistan.

Three months earlier, Al-Qaeda carried out the September 11th terrorist attacks. America retaliated by bombing Afghanistan. An invasion would be coming soon.

The American bombs were meant for the Taliban, but plenty were injuring and killing Afghani civilians.

Shafiq and his friends learned about a relief convoy that was headed for Afghanistan. They decided it was their duty as Muslims to join them. So instead of seeing the sites of Karachi, they’d spent the last week handing out food and water. They were sore and tired, and it was time to go home.

As the convoy rounded a bend, they spotted a truck blocking their path. Several men with rifles and RPGs were waiting for them.

Get the fuck out of the trucks and get on the ground! They shouted.

The men dragged them from the vehicles, bound them and gagged them, and took them away.

The men were loyal to General Rashid Dostum, an Afghani warlord. Dostum held onto the three British men for a month, then handed them over to the Americans.

The Americans threw sacks over the friends’ heads. They beat and kicked them, and accused them of being involved with the 9/11 attacks. Then, they threw them on an airplane, not telling them where it was headed.

About a day later, the plane landed. Shafiq and his friends were dragged outside and their hoods were pulled off. They blinked in the harsh sunlight.

When their eyes adjusted, they saw they were in a military base. It was Guantanamo Bay. Specifically, Camp Delta, home to more than 800 other so-called terrorism suspects. 

At Camp Delta, Rasul was kept in a cell. Beatings and torture were common. During periods of interrogation, he was kept in isolation for months at a time. He was put in stress positions for hours, and menaced by dogs.

At one point, the guards set up an area nicknamed “Romeo Block,” where detainees were forced to strip naked and sit, humiliated, for days.

When the War on Terror began in 2001, 85 to 90% of the American public supported it. But when Rasul’s case and cases like it were publicized, that was one of the reasons support for the war began to erode. Other revelations, like the abuse and torture of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, eroded support even further.

By 2007, President George W. Bush’s approval rating was an abysmal 32%. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were deeply unpopular in the United States. They looked unwinnable. Yet President Bush was showing few signs of de-escalating the conflict.

Around the world, the wars were even less popular—if that were possible. 

To Julian Assange, the War on Terror wasn’t just illegal. It was a symbol of everything wrong with the way the world worked. First World superpowers like the United States had been abusing third world nations for centuries. The War on Terror was just the latest iteration of that trend.

When Julian Assange founded Wikileaks, his goal was to expose secrets that oppressive governments and multinational corporations didn’t want the public to know.

Publishing the Kroll report about President Daniel Arap Moi’s corruption gave Wikileaks its first major victory. The report had materially affected the election, and President Kibaki was weakened–even if hundreds of Kenyans had died in the protests. 

A year later, Wikileaks would once again publish a sensitive document about Kenya’s political situation.Titled “The Cry of Blood,” this one detailed how Kenyan police had systematically abducted and killed members of the Mungiki street  gang. Over 500 young men were killed or had gone missing during President Kibaki’s time in office. 

Shortly after the Cry of Blood report was published, a Kenyan lawyer and civil rights activist named Oscar Kamau Kingara was gunned down in Nairobi, along with his assistant John Paul Oulu. 

Assange would later say that Kingara and Oulu’s deaths were a “canary in the coal mine” moment that drove home to him the dangers facing whistleblowers around the world. 

But Assange also saw the deaths as an opportunity to promote Wikileaks, by turning Kingara and Oulu into martyrs. To Assange, the killings gave his organization legitimacy–people were being killed for the work they Wikileaks was doing. Assange would often bring up the Kingara and Oulu when Wikieaks faced criticism. 

Otherwise? Kenya had served its purpose. Assange continued traveling the world, meeting up with activists in countries like Egypt and Malaysia to publish more sensitive documents, and attending hacktivist conferences in the United States and Europe. 

Around this time, Assange met the man who would become Wikileaks’ first full-time employee. 

His name was Daniel Domscheit-Berg. He was a German computer programmer working for an American company that did IT work for civilian and military clients. He was softspoken, with thinning hair and glasses. He didn’t naturally seek the spotlight like Assange did, but he was no less passionate about wanting to change the world for the better. 

On Wikileaks, Domscheidt-Berg went by the alias “Daniel Schmitt.” It was the same name as his cat. That’s right, Daniel Domscheidt-Berg named his cat “Dan Smith.” 

For Assange, Domscheit-Berg represented not just an IT expert who could help run Wikileaks’ lone server, he was also someone to share the workload. They were even friends–as long as Daniel remembered who was in charge. 

As Assange continued to grow and expand Wikileaks, the War on Terror raged. Hundreds of Muslims were still being kept in cages at Guantanamo Bay. Civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq were being killed. Combatants on all sides were dying.

But it wasn’t just the injustice of the wars that was so galling to Assange. It was the secrecy with which the United States and its allies conducted them.

All of these scandals like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib only became known because whistleblowers and journalists had exposed them. The United States government certainly wasn’t forthcoming about the brutal realities of the war. In the early days of the War on Terror, the media was forbidden from filming coffins of American soldiers returning to the United States.

Hell, the American military wasn’t even saying how many Iraqis and Afghanis were dying. They claimed they weren’t keeping track. But for a modern government bureaucracy like the American military not to even keep track of enemy casualty totals was absurd.

Assange was determined to help end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the months after The Guardian published “The Looting of Kenya,” another document was uploaded to Wikileaks’ digital drop box.

This one was titled “Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures.” It was an instruction manual on how to handle terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay. It outlined details like how long they could be kept in solitary confinement, how they could be psychologically manipulated, how to use military dogs to intimidate them, and even how to conceal all of this from Red Cross observers.

It was even authorized by Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, Camp Delta’s commanding officer, who would be stationed at Abu Ghraib prison.

The manual matched much of what Shafiq Rasul and his friends have said in interviews with human rights organizations and their trial testimonies. Practically everything except “Romeo Block” was in the manual.

Then, shortly after publishing the Camp Delta manual, Wikileaks received another document in the dropbox. This one was an internal U.S. Army report about the 2004 Battle of Fallujah in Iraq. This report was originally supposed to be sealed for 25 years after it was issued.  

The First Battle of Fallujah began early on the morning of March 31st, 2004, when four employees of the defense contractor Blackwater walked out of their base and towards the waiting vehicles. 

They were Scott Helvenston, Mike Teague, Wesley Batalona, and Jerry Zovko. Three were ex-Navy SEALs, and one was an ex-Army Ranger.

Just four of us today? Helvenson said.

The others had to do paperwork. Teague replied. 

That might be a problem. Typically, each vehicle had three guards armed with assault rifles. Now, they had nobody providing rear cover.

I’m sure you heard about the IED explosion outside of town earlier this morning, Teague continued. Means we’ll have to be going through downtown Fallujah.

Everyone nodded, knowing what that meant.

They got into the waiting vehicles, black Mitsubishi Pajeros. Helvenston and Teague were in one SUV, Batalona and Zovko in the other. They were protecting a convoy of vehicles providing kitchen supplies for the 82nd Airborne division, which was stationed outside the city.

At around 10:30 a.m., the SUVs ran into traffic outside a shopping center. Suddenly, armed gunmen in ski masks approached Helvenson and Teague, who were in the rear of the convoy. The gunmen opened fire without warning, killing them both instantly.

SFX: gunshots 

Batalona and Zovko tried to escape, but in addition to the traffic, a crowd of about 300 men and boys was forming and filling the streets. Soon, The second pair of contractors was killed.

SFX: gunshots 

One of the attackers threw a grenade into an SUV, setting it on fire and burning the bodies, while the crowd cheered. When the flames died down, boys dragged the bodies out of the vehicles. They were hung from a bridge overlooking the Euphrates River. The crowd chanted things like, “Fallujah is America’s graveyard.”

That event kicked off the First Battle of Fallujah. At the time, most media sources dutifully passed along the American military’s accounting of what happened next.

According to the US Military, four days later about 2,000 soldiers encircled Fallujah to “pacify the city.” The fighting lasted for about five days, until the American-led coalition declared a ceasefire, then handed control of Fallujah to a Sunni-led militia.

But the Battle of Fallujah Report sent to Wikileaks told a different story.

According to the report, American forces hammered insurgent positions with airstrikes, heavy artillery, and laser-guided bombs. They destroyed 75 buildings, including two mosques. The attacks shut down all the city’s hospitals and prevented relief organizations from delivering essential supplies. More than 600 civilians, including children, were killed in the crossfire.

Al Jazeera was broadcasting photos of deceased children around the world. As part of the ceasefire agreement, the United States had Al Jazeera reporters removed from the city.

The fighting dragged on for months after the supposed cease fire. Later that year, American forces used white phosphorous bombs on the city, in violation of the Geneva convention.

The report detailed all of it, hundreds of pages in brutal detail.

And again: this was just one battle. What else was the US military covering up?

Assange published the Army’s report on the Battle of Fallujah on Wikileaks in December 2007, weeks after Wired published the Camp Delta prisoner manual.

If Assange was being honest, the response to both publications was…a bit of a letdown.

When Wired published the Camp Delta manual, the United States responded by claiming that the manual was outdated—but it didn’t deny the document’s authenticity.

But with the Fallujah report, the military didn’t even bother to comment.

The two document dumps didn’t move the needle much. The wars were already unpopular, and while these documents did provide a lot of evidence of wrongdoing, they were also, well, big piles of documents. The average reader wasn’t going to dig through hundreds of pages of military jargon to find damning details.

If Assange wanted to sway public opinion, he’d need something more impactful.

But while the US military was publicly ignoring Wikileaks, behind the scenes it was a different story. 

In late December 2007, a group of intelligence officers for the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Unit met at Fort Meade, Georgia to discuss the Wikileaks problem.

We still don’t know who’s been passing Wikileaks these documents, do we? Said the commanding officer.

That’s a negative, one of their subordinates replied. Wikileaks does all their communication on encrypted channels. Whistleblowers upload their documents on Tor browsers only.

So, how do we stop them? The CO asked.

Another officer spoke up. The whole organization relies on trust, right? Whistleblowers send Wikileaks sensitive stuff because they think they’ll be protected. But if we can guarantee legal consequences for whistleblowers, Wikileaks is fucked.

So we need to identify the whistleblowers, the CO said.

Soon after this meeting, Wikileaks would face its biggest threat—not from the government but from the private sector. Wikileaks would be in for the fight of its life.

ACT THREE

Rudolf, I think that car is following us.

Rudolf Elmer glanced at his wife Adehleid in the passenger seat, then looked in the rearview mirror. There, a few car lengths back, was a black BMW.

Shit, Elmer said under his breath, trying not to let their six-year-old daughter hear from the back seat.

He reached over and squeezed Adelheid’s hand. Then, he gunned the accelerator.

The car sped up. In the rearview, the BMW sped after them. Elmer quickly changed lanes, and the BMW followed suit.

Adelheid was right, the car was following them.

Elmer saw an exit up ahead. He swerved across multiple lanes of the Swiss autobahn, cutting off several angry drivers, and roared down the exit ramp.

SFX: horns honking.

The BMW did the same. 

Off the highway, Elmer pulled into a parking lot. The BMW pulled in a few hundred yards away.

Elmer glared at the black sedan. These people weren’t just harassing him, they were harassing his family. They weren’t going to stop. It was time to do something about it.

It was time to go to Wikileaks.

Elmer, 52, was a career banker, and he’d spent nearly 20 years working for the Swiss financial institution Julius Baer. Since 1994, he and his family had lived in the Cayman Islands, where he managed the local branch.

In 2002, a cache of internal documents including customer and banking information went missing. As Julius Baer’s Hurricane Officer, Elmer kept backup copies of data at home. So, he immediately fell under suspicion.

The company tried to subject Elmer to a polygraph test, but since he had recently had spinal surgery, he was unable to complete it. Shortly after that, the company laid him off.

According to Elmer, he was unfairly scapegoated for the data going missing. According to Julius Baer, Elmer deliberately stole the data because he had been passed over for a promotion.

Either way, after his layoff, Elmer was out for revenge.

In his time at Julius Baer, Elmer had become aware that the bank was shuffling money into offshore accounts so that it could avoid paying Swiss taxes. Now, fresh off his layoff, he began sending incriminating documents to Swiss tax authorities. He also began emailing his former clients, threatening to go public with their shady dealings.

According to Elmer, this was when he began receiving anonymous death threats. Then, Julius Baer hired the Swiss private detective agency Ryffel AG to keep tabs on his family. They were following him as well as his wife and daughter.

Swiss tax authorities weren’t interested in Elmer’s information. But Elmer had been following the Kenyan embezzlement scandal and Wikileaks’ involvement in it closely. The whistleblowing organization seemed like the perfect outlet to publicize his story.

At the time, Wikileaks claimed to publish any sensitive documents it received without editing. To test this, Elmer created a fake letter from Julius Baer to German chancellor Angela Merkel, advising her to close her offshore bank accounts. When Wikileaks published it, Elmer was satisfied.

In January 2008, Rudolf Elmer uploaded bank transaction records from 14 Julius Baer customers to Wikileaks’ servers. The documents detailed how money wa s   through subsidiaries and hidden in offshore bank accounts to shield them from taxation. The amounts ranged between $5 and $100 million.

On January 15th, Wikileaks published them. 

That same day, Assange’s second-in-command Daniel Domscheit-Berg received an email from a California law firm representing Julius Baer. It demanded Wikileaks take the documents down, then reveal its source. 

Domscheit-Berg was nervous. He didn’t see how a fledgling operation like Wikileaks could possibly defend itself against a high-powered law firm. He wondered if they should give in to the law firm’s demands. 

But Assange refused. 

Assange replied to the law firm as Wikileaks’ head of legal, Jay Lim–in reality, an alias Assange created to make it look like Wikileaks had a legal department. He replied that Wikileaks would be hiring a lawyer. That bought them some time. 

But a few days later, when Assange tried to log onto Wikileaks, it was offline.

Remember, Wikileaks’ first—and so far only—server was in San Francisco. Julius Baer’s lawyers had filed an emergency injunction with Wikileaks’ California Internet Service Provider, Dynadot, demanding the site be shut down on the grounds that it had published Julius Baer’s “company secrets.” Judge Jeffrey D. White agreed and signed off an injunction that shut down Wikileaks. Permanently.

Wikileaks needed lawyers, and it needed them now. Problem was, the site still had basically no money. Their only legal representation was one attorney in Texas who had offered her services for free.

Up against a powerful Swiss bank and the American legal system, Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheidt-Berg, and their small band of volunteers knew their chances of victory were slim.

But Assange’s years of working the hacktivist community paid off.

Shortly after the injunction, Wikileaks volunteers around the world began hosting the site on servers outside America’s jurisdiction. Wikileaks was back online, for now. But its operations in the US were still in jeopardy.

The injunction made headlines across America. In the following days, human rights organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and media organizations like the New York Times and CBS News condemned the injunction as a violation of freedom of speech.

The nonprofits sent a dozen lawyers to San Francisco to contest the injunction. They argued that shutting down Wikileaks over one batch of documents would be like shutting down the entire New York Times because of one specific article.

Judge White was at a loss. The judge agreed with Julius Baer that Wikileaks had published documents that were obtained illegally. On the other hand, there was no clear legal precedent for a case involving an Internet publisher.

But the deciding factor wasn’t justice, it was PR. For Julius Baer, the longer the case remained in the media, the more the public would associate the bank with questionable business practices.  

On March 1, 2008, Julius Baer withdrew the injunction request. The bank would continue to pursue legal consequences against Rudolf Elmer for years, but Wikileaks was free to continue operating in the United States.

Julian Assange had won.

But it was also becoming clear that America wasn’t as safe as he’d once thought.

In the weeks following his courtroom victory, Assange received another sensitive document from an anonymous source.

It was an internal report from the U.S. Army’s Counter-Intelligence Division, produced after that meeting about Wikileaks.

Since Wikileaks had published the Camp Delta manual and the First Battle of Fallujah report months earlier, the Army’s Counter-Intelligence Division concluded that Wikileaks was now a legitimate threat to national security. The report then outlined a plan to silence Wikileaks by identifying its whistleblowers and pursing the harshest criminal penalties possible.

And this was just what the Army was willing to write down. Assange knew that lawsuits were just one way the U.S. government could silence a whistleblower. Other ways could be a lot more violent.

Assange decided to publish the Army’s report on Wikileaks, but Wikileaks needed a new home. 

About a year later, that home presented itself.

In the summer of 2009, Wikileaks received the loan book from Kaupthing Bank.

It was one of the three biggest banks in Iceland. But when Iceland’s economy tanked during the global financial meltdown of late 2008, all three banks declared bankruptcy.

Kaupthing Bank’s loan book detailed a series of loans the bank had given out to some of its wealthiest customers, shortly before the bank went under. These loans totaled several billion dollars, and were given without collateral.

In other words, with the bank’s closure looming, the bank’s employees looted everything they could from it, then sent it off to their VIP clients.  

It was the perfect sort of document to kickstart a national scandal in the tiny island nation. By now, Wikileaks was receiving regular submissions just like it, from countries all around the world.

But Iceland had strongest laws protecting journalists and whistleblowers. So, Iceland went to the front of the line.

In September 2009, Wikileaks published Kaupthing’s loan book. Thousands of Icelanders took to the streets to protest the banks.

Like Julius Baer, the bank tried to issue an injunction to stop it. But public outrage was so swift and immediate that it didn’t matter.

In November 2009, Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheidt-Berg traveled to Iceland to attend a conference on freedom in the digital age. They were greeted like rock stars.

One activist immediately offered to let them stay in their guest house. This could work, Assange thought as he worked the crowd.

Wikileaks had a long way to go. It needed money, lawyers, volunteers, and most of all servers. It hadn’t yet affected the trajectory of the War on Terror, or done much to upend the First World status quo.

But Wikileaks had also come a long way since it was a word on a whiteboard in Julian Assange’s Melbourne apartment. It had published several bombshell reports that had tangible effects in countries like Kenya and Iceland. It was starting to make a name for itself. And soon, from its new home in Iceland, it would shake the world.

ACT FOUR 

In March 2010, Julian Assange entered a Reykjavic café, sat at a table, and took out his laptop. As he waited, he scanned the crowd.

Assange was still getting used to being recognized. In Iceland, he was practically a local celebrity. 

But some people were paying attention to him for a different reason.

Recently, an anonymous source told Assange that the US government had dispatched agents to follow him and investigate his activities. 

Everywhere he went, people were already recognizing him. Now, he was convinced that anyone who looked at him funny could be an American agent. 

Finally, the person Assange was waiting for entered. Her name was Birgitta Jonsdottir. She was in her late 30’s, an Icelandic member of parliament who was impressed with Wikileaks mission and was helping Assange establish a base of operations in the country.

Hello, Brigitta, Assange began. She had given up correcting him on it. He never could get a handle on Icelandic names. 

Assange opened his laptop. Once I show you what’s on here, you’ll definitely have dinner with me.  

Jonsdottir rolled her eyes. Assange just wouldn’t give up. Let’s just see what it is, she replied.

Assange pulled up a video file. As he did, he lowered his voice to make sure he wasn’t overheard. 

My confidential source within the US military sent this to me. Have a look.

The video had been taken from an Apache attack helicopter flying over what looked like Baghdad, opening fire on the city below.

It was nearly 38 agonizing minutes long. When the video finally ended, Jonsdottir was weeping.

If we play this right, this could put us on the map, Assange said.

But Jonsdottir wasn’t listening. All she could think about was what one of the helicopter pilots had said during the video.

It’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle. 

On the next episode of Modem Mischief, Part 2 of the story of Julian Assange. 

Credits

Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe or follow button in your favorite podcast app right now so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. And another way to support us is on Patreon or a paid subscription on Apple Podcasts. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus monthly bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by Jim Rowley. Mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard aka WANK Worm is his nickname for his Johnson. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!