关于维基揭秘和阿桑奇的第一本深入调查的书籍。阿桑奇传记名为《维基揭秘：朱利安·阿桑奇与秘密作战内幕》。作者是英国《卫报》记者戴维·利和卢克·哈丁。作者为《卫报》的著名调查记者David Leigh。
Paperback: 352 pages Publisher: Guardian Books (1 Feb 2011) Language English ISBN-10: 0852652399 ISBN-13: 978-0852652398 Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 13.4 x 3 cm 
基本信息编辑本段回目录
WIKILEAKS: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy
By David Leigh & Luke Harding
Paperback
RRP ￡9.99
内容简介编辑本段回目录
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 would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination.
Award-winning Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding have been 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.
作者简介编辑本段回目录
WikiLeaks has been written by a team of top Guardian journalists, led by David Leigh, the paper's investigations editor whose work was behind the jailing of Jonathan Aitken and the exposure of secret payments by arms company BAE, and Luke Harding, the paper's Moscow correspondent.
摘要编辑本段回目录
Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange. It was a memorable kind of name. All editors receive a daily mix of unsolicited tip-offs, letters, complaints and crank theories, but there was something about the periodic WikiLeaks emails which caught the attention.
Sometimes there would be a decent story attached to the emails. Or there might be a document which, on closer inspection, appeared rather underwhelming. One day there might arrive a diatribe against a particular journalist - or against the venal cowardice of mainstream media in general. Another day this Assange person would be pleased with something we'd done, or would perambulate about the life he was living in Nairobi.
In Britain the Guardian was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing. In August 2007, for instance, we splashed on a remarkable secret Kroll report which claimed to show that former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi had been siphoning off hundreds of millions of pounds and hiding them away in foreign bank accounts in more than 30 different countries. It was, by any standards, a stonking story. This Assange, whoever he was, was one to watch.
Unnoticed by most of the world, Julian Assange was developing into a most interesting and unusual pioneer in using digital technologies to challenge corrupt and authoritarian states. It's doubtful whether his name would have meant anything to Hillary Clinton at the time - or even in January 2010 when, as secretary of state, she made a rather good speech about the potential of what she termed 'a new nervous system for the planet'.
She described a vision of semi-underground digital publishing - 'the samizdat of our day' that was beginning to champion transparency and challenge the autocratic, corrupt old order of the world. But she also warned that repressive governments would 'target the independent thinkers who use the tools'. She had regimes like Iran in mind.
Her words about the brave samizdat publishing future could well have applied to the rather strange, unworldly Australian hacker quietly working out methods of publishing the world's secrets in ways which were beyond any technological or legal attack.
Little can Clinton have imagined, as she made this much praised speech, that within a year she would be back making another statement about digital whistleblowers - this time roundly attacking people who used electronic media to champion transparency. It was, she told a hastily arranged state department press conference in November 2010, 'not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community.' In the intervening 11 months Assange had gone viral. He had just helped to orchestrate the biggest leak in the history of the world - only this time the embarrassment was not to a poor east African nation, but to the most powerful country on earth.
It is that story, the transformation from anonymous hacker to one of the most discussed people in the world - at once reviled, celebrated and lionised; sought-after, imprisoned and shunned - that this book sets out to tell.
Within a few short years of starting out Assange had been catapulted from the obscurity of his life in Nairobi, dribbling out leaks that nobody much noticed, to publishing a flood of classified documents that went to the heart of America's military and foreign policy operations. From being a marginal figure invited to join panels at geek conferences he was suddenly America's public enemy number one. A new media messiah to some, he was a cyber-terrorist to others. As if this wasn't dramatic enough, in the middle of it all two women in Sweden accused him of rape. To coin a phrase, you couldn't make it up.
Since leaving Nairobi, Assange had grown his ambitions for the scale and potential of WikiLeaks. In the company of other hackers he had been developing a philosophy of transparency. He and his fellow technologists had already succeeded in one aim: he had made WikiLeaks virtually indestructible and thus beyond legal or cyber attack from any one jurisdiction or source. Lawyers who were paid exorbitant sums to protect the reputations of wealthy clients and corporations admitted - in tones tinged with both frustration and admiration - that WikiLeaks was the one publisher in the world they couldn't gag. It was very bad for business.
At the Guardian we had our own reasons to watch the rise of WikiLeaks with great interest and some respect. In two cases - involving Barclays Bank and Trafigura - the site had ended up hosting documents which the British courts had ordered to be concealed. There was a bad period in 2008/9 when the high court in London got into the habit of not only banning the publication of documents of high public interest, but simultaneously preventing the reporting of the existence of the court proceedings themselves and the parties involved in them. One London firm of solicitors over-reached itself when it even tried to extend the ban to the reporting to parliamentary discussion of material sitting on the WikiLeaks site.
Judges were as nonplussed as global corporations by this new publishing phenomenon. In one hearing in March 2009 the high court in London decided that no one was allowed to print documents revealing Barclays' tax avoidance strategies - even though they were there for the whole world to read on the WikiLeaks website. The law looked a little silly.
But this new form of indestructible publishing brought sharp questions into focus. For every Trafigura there might be other cases where WikiLeaks could be used to smear or destroy someone. That made Assange a very powerful figure. The fact that there were grumbles among his colleagues about his autocratic and secretive style did not allay the fears about this new media baron. The questions kept coming: who was this shadowy figure 'playing God'? How could he and his team be sure of a particular document's authenticity? Who was determining the ethical framework that decided some information should be published, and some not? All this meant that Assange was in many respects - more, perhaps, than he welcomed - in a role not dissimilar to that of a conventional editor.
As this book describes, the spectacular bursting of WikiLeaks into the wider global public eye and imagination began with a meeting in June 2010 between the Guardian'sNick Davies and Assange. Davies had sought out Assange after reading the early accounts that were filtering out about the leak of a massive trove of military and diplomatic documents. He wanted to convince Assange that this story would have more impact and meaning if he was willing to ally with one or two newspapers - however traditional and cowardly or compromised we might be in the eyes of some hackers. An agreement was struck.
And so a unique collaboration was born between (initially) three newspapers, the mysterious Australian nomad and whatever his elusive organisation, WikiLeaks, actually was. That much never became very clear. Assange was, at the best of times, difficult to contact, switching mobile phones, email addresses and encrypted chat rooms as often as he changed his location. Occasionally he would appear with another colleague - it could be a journalist, a hacker, a lawyer or an unspecified helper - but, just as often, he traveled solo. It was never entirely clear which time zone he was on. The difference between day and night, an important consideration in most lives, seemed of little interest to him.
What now began was a rather traditional journalistic operation, albeit using skills of data analysis and visualisation which were unknown in newsrooms until fairly recently. David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations editor, spent the summer voraciously reading his way into the material. The Guardian's deputy editor in charge of news, Ian Katz, now started marshalling wider forces. Ad hoc teams were put together in assorted corners of the Guardian's offices in King's Cross, London, to make sense of the vast store of information. Similar teams were assembled in New York and Hamburg - and, later, in Madrid and Paris.
The first thing to do was build a search engine that could make sense of the data, the next to bring in foreign correspondents and foreign affairs analysts with detailed knowledge of the Afghan and Iraq conflict. The final piece of the journalistic heavy lifting was to introduce a redaction process so that nothing we published could imperil any vulnerable sources or compromise active special operations. All this took a great deal of time, effort, resource and stamina. Making sense of the files was not immediately easy. There are very few, if any, parallels in the annals of journalism where any news organisation has had to deal with such a vast database - we estimate it to have been roughly 300 million words (the Pentagon papers, published by the New York Times in 1971, by comparison, stretched to two and a half million words). Once redacted, the documents were shared among the (eventually) five newspapers and sent to WikiLeaks, who adopted all our redactions.
The extent of the redaction process and the relatively limited extent of publication of actual cables were apparently overlooked by many commentators - including leading American journalists - who spoke disparagingly of a 'willy nilly dump' of mass cables and the consequent danger to life. But, to date, there has been no 'mass dump'. Barely two thousand of the 250,000 cables have been published and, six months after the first publication of the war logs, no one has been able to demonstrate any damage to life or limb.
It is impossible to write this story without telling the story of Julian Assange himself, though clearly the overall question of WikiLeaks and the philosophy it represents is of longer lasting significance. More than one writer has compared him to John Wilkes, the rakish 18th-century MP and editor who risked his life and liberty in assorted battles over free speech. Others have compared him to Daniel Ellsberg, the source of the Pentagon Papers leak, described by the New York Times's former executive editor, Max Frankel, as 'a man of incisive, devious intellect and volatile temperament'.
The media and public were torn between those who saw Assange as a new kind of cyber-messiah and those who regarded him as a James Bond villain. Each extremity projected on to him superhuman powers of good or evil. The script became even more confused in December when, as part of his bail conditions, Assange had to live at Ellingham Hall, a Georgian Manor set in hundreds of acres of Suffolk countryside. It was as if a Stieg Larsson script had been passed to the writer of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes.
Few people seem to find Assange an easy man with whom to collaborate. Slate's media columnist, Jack Shafer, captured his character well in this pen portrait:
'Assange bedevils the journalists who work with him because he refuses to conform to any of the roles they expect him to play. He acts like a leaking source when it suits him. He masquerades as publisher or newspaper syndicate when that's advantageous. Like a PR agent, he manipulates news organisations to maximise publicity for his 'clients', or, when moved to, he threatens to throw info-bombs like an agent provocateur. He's a wily shape-shifter who won't sit still, an unpredictable negotiator who is forever changing the terms of the deal.'
We certainly had our moments of difficulty and tension during the course of our joint enterprise. They were caused as much by the difficulty of regular, open communication as by Assange's status as a sometimes confusing mix of source, intermediary and publisher. Encrypted instant messaging is no substitute for talking. And, while Assange was certainly our main source for the documents, he was in no sense a conventional source - he was not the original source and certainly not a confidential one. Latterly, he was not even the only source. He was, if anything, a new breed of publisher-intermediary - a sometimes uncomfortable role in which he sought to have a degree of control over the source's material (and even a form of 'ownership', complete with legal threats to sue for loss of income). When, to Assange's fury, WikiLeaks itself sprang a leak, the irony of the situation was almost comic. The ethical issues involved in this new status of editor/source became more complicated still when it was suggested to us that we owed some form of protection to Assange - as a 'source' - by not inquiring too deeply into the sex charges leveled against him in Sweden. That did not seem a compelling argument to us, though there were those - it is not too strong to call them 'disciples' - who were not willing to imagine any narrative beyond that of the smear.
These wrinkles were mainly overcome - sometimes eased by a glass of wine or by matching Assange's extraordinary appetite for exhaustive and intellectually exacting conversations. As Sarah Ellison's Vanity Fair piece on the subject concluded:
'Whatever the differences, the results have been extraordinary. Given the range, depth, and accuracy of the leaks, the collaboration has produced by any standard one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years.'
The challenge from WikiLeaks for media in general (not to mention states, companies or global corporations caught up in the dazzle of unwanted scrutiny) was not a comfortable one. The website's initial instincts were to publish more or less everything, and they were at first deeply suspicious of any contact between their colleagues on the newspapers and any kind of officialdom. Talking to the State Department, Pentagon or White House, as the New York Times did before each round of publication, was fraught territory in terms of keeping the relationship with WikiLeaks on an even keel. By the time of the Cablegate publication, Assange himself, conscious of the risks of causing unintentional harm to dissidents or other sources, offered to speak to the State Department - an offer that was rejected.
WikiLeaks and similar organisations are, it seems to me, generally admirable in their single minded view of transparency and openness. What has been remarkable is how the sky has not fallen in despite the truly enormous amounts of information released over the months. The enemies of WikiLeaks have made repeated assertions of the harm done by the release. It would be a good idea if someone would fund some rigorous research by a serious academic institution about the balance between harms and benefits. To judge from the response we had from countries without the benefit of a free press, there was a considerable thirst for the information in the cables - a hunger for knowledge which contrasted with the occasional knowing yawns from metropolitan sophisticates who insisted that the cables told us nothing new. Instead of a kneejerk stampede to more secrecy, this could be the opportunity to draw up a score sheet of the upsides and drawbacks of forced transparency.
That approach - a rational assessment of new forms of transparency - should accompany the inevitable questioning of how the US classification system could have allowed the private musings of kings, presidents and dissidents to have been so easily read by whoever it was that decided to pass them on to WikiLeaks in the first place.
Each news organisation grappled with the ethical issues involved in such contacts - and in the overall decision to publish - in different ways. I was interested, a few days after the start of the Cablegate release, to receive an email from Max Frankel, who had overseen the defence of the New York Times in the Pentagon papers case 40 years earlier. Now 80, he sent me a memo he had then written to the New York Times public editor. It is worth quoting as concise and wise advice to future generations who may well have to grapple with such issues more in future:
1. My view has almost always been that information which wants to get out will get out; our job is to receive it responsibly and to publish or not by our own unvarying news standards.
2. If the source or informant violates his oath of office or the law, we should leave it to the authorities to try to enforce their law or oath, without our collaboration. We reject collaboration or revelation of our sources for the larger reason that ALL our sources deserve to know that they are protected with us. It is, however, part of our obligation to reveal the biases and apparent purposes of the people who leak or otherwise disclose information.
3. If certain information seems to defy the standards proclaimed by the supreme court in the Pentagon papers case ie that publication will cause direct, immediate and irreparable damage we have an obligation to limit our publication appropriately. If in doubt, we should give appropriate authority a chance to persuade us that such direct and immediate danger exists. (See our 24-hour delay of discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba as described in my autobiography, or our delay in reporting planes lost in combat until the pilots can perhaps be rescued.)
4. For all other information, I have always believed that no one can reliably predict the consequences of publication. The Pentagon papers, contrary to Ellsberg's wish, did not shorten the Vietnam war or stir significant additional protest. A given disclosure may embarrass government but improve a policy, or it may be a leak by the government itself and end up damaging policy. 'Publish and be damned,' as Scotty Reston used to say; it sounds terrible but as a journalistic motto it has served our society well through history.
There have been many longer treatises on the ethics of journalism which have said less.
One of the lessons from the WikiLeaks project is that it has shown the possibilities of collaboration. It's difficult to think of any comparable example of news organisations working together in the way the Guardian, New York Times, Der Speigel, Le Monde and El País have on the WikiLeaks project. I think all five editors would like to imagine ways in which we could harness our resources again.
The story is far from over. In the UK there was only muted criticism of the Guardian for publishing the leaks, though their restraint did not always extend to WikiLeaks itself. Most journalists could see the clear public value in the nature of the material that was published.
It appears to have been another story in the US, where there was a more bitter and partisan argument, clouded by differing ideas of patriotism. It was astonishing to sit in London reading of reasonably mainstream American figures calling for the assassination of Assange for what he had unleashed. It was surprising to see the widespread reluctance among American journalists to support the general ideal and work of WikiLeaks. For some it simply boiled down to a reluctance to admit that Assange was a journalist.
Whether this attitude would change were Assange ever to be prosecuted is an interesting matter for speculation. In early 2011 there were signs of increasing frustration on the part of US government authorities in scouring the world for evidence to use against him, including the subpoena of Twitter accounts. But there was also, among cooler legal heads, an appreciation that it would be virtually impossible to prosecute Assange for the act of publication of the war logs or state department cables without also putting five editors in the dock. That would be the media case of the century.
And, of course, we have yet to hear an unmediated account from the man alleged to be the true source of the material, Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old US army private. Until then no complete story of the leak that changed the world can really be written. But this is a compelling first chapter in a story which, one suspects, is destined to run and run.
Alan Rusbridger is the editor of the Guardian
Sometimes there would be a decent story attached to the emails. Or there might be a document which, on closer inspection, appeared rather underwhelming. One day there might arrive a diatribe against a particular journalist - or against the venal cowardice of mainstream media in general. Another day this Assange person would be pleased with something we'd done, or would perambulate about the life he was living in Nairobi.
In Britain the Guardian was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing. In August 2007, for instance, we splashed on a remarkable secret Kroll report which claimed to show that former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi had been siphoning off hundreds of millions of pounds and hiding them away in foreign bank accounts in more than 30 different countries. It was, by any standards, a stonking story. This Assange, whoever he was, was one to watch.
Unnoticed by most of the world, Julian Assange was developing into a most interesting and unusual pioneer in using digital technologies to challenge corrupt and authoritarian states. It's doubtful whether his name would have meant anything to Hillary Clinton at the time - or even in January 2010 when, as secretary of state, she made a rather good speech about the potential of what she termed 'a new nervous system for the planet'.
She described a vision of semi-underground digital publishing - 'the samizdat of our day' that was beginning to champion transparency and challenge the autocratic, corrupt old order of the world. But she also warned that repressive governments would 'target the independent thinkers who use the tools'. She had regimes like Iran in mind.
Her words about the brave samizdat publishing future could well have applied to the rather strange, unworldly Australian hacker quietly working out methods of publishing the world's secrets in ways which were beyond any technological or legal attack.
Little can Clinton have imagined, as she made this much praised speech, that within a year she would be back making another statement about digital whistleblowers - this time roundly attacking people who used electronic media to champion transparency. It was, she told a hastily arranged state department press conference in November 2010, 'not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community.' In the intervening 11 months Assange had gone viral. He had just helped to orchestrate the biggest leak in the history of the world - only this time the embarrassment was not to a poor east African nation, but to the most powerful country on earth.
It is that story, the transformation from anonymous hacker to one of the most discussed people in the world - at once reviled, celebrated and lionised; sought-after, imprisoned and shunned - that this book sets out to tell.
Within a few short years of starting out Assange had been catapulted from the obscurity of his life in Nairobi, dribbling out leaks that nobody much noticed, to publishing a flood of classified documents that went to the heart of America's military and foreign policy operations. From being a marginal figure invited to join panels at geek conferences he was suddenly America's public enemy number one. A new media messiah to some, he was a cyber-terrorist to others. As if this wasn't dramatic enough, in the middle of it all two women in Sweden accused him of rape. To coin a phrase, you couldn't make it up.
Since leaving Nairobi, Assange had grown his ambitions for the scale and potential of WikiLeaks. In the company of other hackers he had been developing a philosophy of transparency. He and his fellow technologists had already succeeded in one aim: he had made WikiLeaks virtually indestructible and thus beyond legal or cyber attack from any one jurisdiction or source. Lawyers who were paid exorbitant sums to protect the reputations of wealthy clients and corporations admitted - in tones tinged with both frustration and admiration - that WikiLeaks was the one publisher in the world they couldn't gag. It was very bad for business.
At the Guardian we had our own reasons to watch the rise of WikiLeaks with great interest and some respect. In two cases - involving Barclays Bank and Trafigura - the site had ended up hosting documents which the British courts had ordered to be concealed. There was a bad period in 2008/9 when the high court in London got into the habit of not only banning the publication of documents of high public interest, but simultaneously preventing the reporting of the existence of the court proceedings themselves and the parties involved in them. One London firm of solicitors over-reached itself when it even tried to extend the ban to the reporting to parliamentary discussion of material sitting on the WikiLeaks site.
Judges were as nonplussed as global corporations by this new publishing phenomenon. In one hearing in March 2009 the high court in London decided that no one was allowed to print documents revealing Barclays' tax avoidance strategies - even though they were there for the whole world to read on the WikiLeaks website. The law looked a little silly.
But this new form of indestructible publishing brought sharp questions into focus. For every Trafigura there might be other cases where WikiLeaks could be used to smear or destroy someone. That made Assange a very powerful figure. The fact that there were grumbles among his colleagues about his autocratic and secretive style did not allay the fears about this new media baron. The questions kept coming: who was this shadowy figure 'playing God'? How could he and his team be sure of a particular document's authenticity? Who was determining the ethical framework that decided some information should be published, and some not? All this meant that Assange was in many respects - more, perhaps, than he welcomed - in a role not dissimilar to that of a conventional editor.
As this book describes, the spectacular bursting of WikiLeaks into the wider global public eye and imagination began with a meeting in June 2010 between the Guardian'sNick Davies and Assange. Davies had sought out Assange after reading the early accounts that were filtering out about the leak of a massive trove of military and diplomatic documents. He wanted to convince Assange that this story would have more impact and meaning if he was willing to ally with one or two newspapers - however traditional and cowardly or compromised we might be in the eyes of some hackers. An agreement was struck.
And so a unique collaboration was born between (initially) three newspapers, the mysterious Australian nomad and whatever his elusive organisation, WikiLeaks, actually was. That much never became very clear. Assange was, at the best of times, difficult to contact, switching mobile phones, email addresses and encrypted chat rooms as often as he changed his location. Occasionally he would appear with another colleague - it could be a journalist, a hacker, a lawyer or an unspecified helper - but, just as often, he traveled solo. It was never entirely clear which time zone he was on. The difference between day and night, an important consideration in most lives, seemed of little interest to him.
What now began was a rather traditional journalistic operation, albeit using skills of data analysis and visualisation which were unknown in newsrooms until fairly recently. David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations editor, spent the summer voraciously reading his way into the material. The Guardian's deputy editor in charge of news, Ian Katz, now started marshalling wider forces. Ad hoc teams were put together in assorted corners of the Guardian's offices in King's Cross, London, to make sense of the vast store of information. Similar teams were assembled in New York and Hamburg - and, later, in Madrid and Paris.
The first thing to do was build a search engine that could make sense of the data, the next to bring in foreign correspondents and foreign affairs analysts with detailed knowledge of the Afghan and Iraq conflict. The final piece of the journalistic heavy lifting was to introduce a redaction process so that nothing we published could imperil any vulnerable sources or compromise active special operations. All this took a great deal of time, effort, resource and stamina. Making sense of the files was not immediately easy. There are very few, if any, parallels in the annals of journalism where any news organisation has had to deal with such a vast database - we estimate it to have been roughly 300 million words (the Pentagon papers, published by the New York Times in 1971, by comparison, stretched to two and a half million words). Once redacted, the documents were shared among the (eventually) five newspapers and sent to WikiLeaks, who adopted all our redactions.
The extent of the redaction process and the relatively limited extent of publication of actual cables were apparently overlooked by many commentators - including leading American journalists - who spoke disparagingly of a 'willy nilly dump' of mass cables and the consequent danger to life. But, to date, there has been no 'mass dump'. Barely two thousand of the 250,000 cables have been published and, six months after the first publication of the war logs, no one has been able to demonstrate any damage to life or limb.
It is impossible to write this story without telling the story of Julian Assange himself, though clearly the overall question of WikiLeaks and the philosophy it represents is of longer lasting significance. More than one writer has compared him to John Wilkes, the rakish 18th-century MP and editor who risked his life and liberty in assorted battles over free speech. Others have compared him to Daniel Ellsberg, the source of the Pentagon Papers leak, described by the New York Times's former executive editor, Max Frankel, as 'a man of incisive, devious intellect and volatile temperament'.
The media and public were torn between those who saw Assange as a new kind of cyber-messiah and those who regarded him as a James Bond villain. Each extremity projected on to him superhuman powers of good or evil. The script became even more confused in December when, as part of his bail conditions, Assange had to live at Ellingham Hall, a Georgian Manor set in hundreds of acres of Suffolk countryside. It was as if a Stieg Larsson script had been passed to the writer of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes.
Few people seem to find Assange an easy man with whom to collaborate. Slate's media columnist, Jack Shafer, captured his character well in this pen portrait:
'Assange bedevils the journalists who work with him because he refuses to conform to any of the roles they expect him to play. He acts like a leaking source when it suits him. He masquerades as publisher or newspaper syndicate when that's advantageous. Like a PR agent, he manipulates news organisations to maximise publicity for his 'clients', or, when moved to, he threatens to throw info-bombs like an agent provocateur. He's a wily shape-shifter who won't sit still, an unpredictable negotiator who is forever changing the terms of the deal.'
We certainly had our moments of difficulty and tension during the course of our joint enterprise. They were caused as much by the difficulty of regular, open communication as by Assange's status as a sometimes confusing mix of source, intermediary and publisher. Encrypted instant messaging is no substitute for talking. And, while Assange was certainly our main source for the documents, he was in no sense a conventional source - he was not the original source and certainly not a confidential one. Latterly, he was not even the only source. He was, if anything, a new breed of publisher-intermediary - a sometimes uncomfortable role in which he sought to have a degree of control over the source's material (and even a form of 'ownership', complete with legal threats to sue for loss of income). When, to Assange's fury, WikiLeaks itself sprang a leak, the irony of the situation was almost comic. The ethical issues involved in this new status of editor/source became more complicated still when it was suggested to us that we owed some form of protection to Assange - as a 'source' - by not inquiring too deeply into the sex charges leveled against him in Sweden. That did not seem a compelling argument to us, though there were those - it is not too strong to call them 'disciples' - who were not willing to imagine any narrative beyond that of the smear.
These wrinkles were mainly overcome - sometimes eased by a glass of wine or by matching Assange's extraordinary appetite for exhaustive and intellectually exacting conversations. As Sarah Ellison's Vanity Fair piece on the subject concluded:
'Whatever the differences, the results have been extraordinary. Given the range, depth, and accuracy of the leaks, the collaboration has produced by any standard one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years.'
The challenge from WikiLeaks for media in general (not to mention states, companies or global corporations caught up in the dazzle of unwanted scrutiny) was not a comfortable one. The website's initial instincts were to publish more or less everything, and they were at first deeply suspicious of any contact between their colleagues on the newspapers and any kind of officialdom. Talking to the State Department, Pentagon or White House, as the New York Times did before each round of publication, was fraught territory in terms of keeping the relationship with WikiLeaks on an even keel. By the time of the Cablegate publication, Assange himself, conscious of the risks of causing unintentional harm to dissidents or other sources, offered to speak to the State Department - an offer that was rejected.
WikiLeaks and similar organisations are, it seems to me, generally admirable in their single minded view of transparency and openness. What has been remarkable is how the sky has not fallen in despite the truly enormous amounts of information released over the months. The enemies of WikiLeaks have made repeated assertions of the harm done by the release. It would be a good idea if someone would fund some rigorous research by a serious academic institution about the balance between harms and benefits. To judge from the response we had from countries without the benefit of a free press, there was a considerable thirst for the information in the cables - a hunger for knowledge which contrasted with the occasional knowing yawns from metropolitan sophisticates who insisted that the cables told us nothing new. Instead of a kneejerk stampede to more secrecy, this could be the opportunity to draw up a score sheet of the upsides and drawbacks of forced transparency.
That approach - a rational assessment of new forms of transparency - should accompany the inevitable questioning of how the US classification system could have allowed the private musings of kings, presidents and dissidents to have been so easily read by whoever it was that decided to pass them on to WikiLeaks in the first place.
Each news organisation grappled with the ethical issues involved in such contacts - and in the overall decision to publish - in different ways. I was interested, a few days after the start of the Cablegate release, to receive an email from Max Frankel, who had overseen the defence of the New York Times in the Pentagon papers case 40 years earlier. Now 80, he sent me a memo he had then written to the New York Times public editor. It is worth quoting as concise and wise advice to future generations who may well have to grapple with such issues more in future:
1. My view has almost always been that information which wants to get out will get out; our job is to receive it responsibly and to publish or not by our own unvarying news standards.
2. If the source or informant violates his oath of office or the law, we should leave it to the authorities to try to enforce their law or oath, without our collaboration. We reject collaboration or revelation of our sources for the larger reason that ALL our sources deserve to know that they are protected with us. It is, however, part of our obligation to reveal the biases and apparent purposes of the people who leak or otherwise disclose information.
3. If certain information seems to defy the standards proclaimed by the supreme court in the Pentagon papers case ie that publication will cause direct, immediate and irreparable damage we have an obligation to limit our publication appropriately. If in doubt, we should give appropriate authority a chance to persuade us that such direct and immediate danger exists. (See our 24-hour delay of discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba as described in my autobiography, or our delay in reporting planes lost in combat until the pilots can perhaps be rescued.)
4. For all other information, I have always believed that no one can reliably predict the consequences of publication. The Pentagon papers, contrary to Ellsberg's wish, did not shorten the Vietnam war or stir significant additional protest. A given disclosure may embarrass government but improve a policy, or it may be a leak by the government itself and end up damaging policy. 'Publish and be damned,' as Scotty Reston used to say; it sounds terrible but as a journalistic motto it has served our society well through history.
There have been many longer treatises on the ethics of journalism which have said less.
One of the lessons from the WikiLeaks project is that it has shown the possibilities of collaboration. It's difficult to think of any comparable example of news organisations working together in the way the Guardian, New York Times, Der Speigel, Le Monde and El País have on the WikiLeaks project. I think all five editors would like to imagine ways in which we could harness our resources again.
The story is far from over. In the UK there was only muted criticism of the Guardian for publishing the leaks, though their restraint did not always extend to WikiLeaks itself. Most journalists could see the clear public value in the nature of the material that was published.
It appears to have been another story in the US, where there was a more bitter and partisan argument, clouded by differing ideas of patriotism. It was astonishing to sit in London reading of reasonably mainstream American figures calling for the assassination of Assange for what he had unleashed. It was surprising to see the widespread reluctance among American journalists to support the general ideal and work of WikiLeaks. For some it simply boiled down to a reluctance to admit that Assange was a journalist.
Whether this attitude would change were Assange ever to be prosecuted is an interesting matter for speculation. In early 2011 there were signs of increasing frustration on the part of US government authorities in scouring the world for evidence to use against him, including the subpoena of Twitter accounts. But there was also, among cooler legal heads, an appreciation that it would be virtually impossible to prosecute Assange for the act of publication of the war logs or state department cables without also putting five editors in the dock. That would be the media case of the century.
And, of course, we have yet to hear an unmediated account from the man alleged to be the true source of the material, Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old US army private. Until then no complete story of the leak that changed the world can really be written. But this is a compelling first chapter in a story which, one suspects, is destined to run and run.
Alan Rusbridger is the editor of the Guardian
新书揭秘阿桑奇不寻常成长历程编辑本段回目录
“维基揭秘”网站创始人朱利安·阿桑奇特立独行，行为备受争议。在他与众不同的人生背后是一段不寻常的成长历程。1月31日在英国发行的一本阿桑奇传记进行了揭秘。
上过37所学校
阿桑奇传记名为《维基揭秘：朱利安·阿桑奇与秘密作战内幕》。作者是英国《卫报》记者戴维·利和卢克·哈丁。
阿桑奇1971年7月3日出生在澳大利亚昆士兰州汤斯维尔，出生后不久，父母分手。母亲克里斯蒂娜带着儿子改嫁戏剧演员兼导演布雷特·阿桑奇。
因为拍戏和演戏缘故，一家人经常搬家，以至于阿桑奇童年时上过37所不同学校。
母亲第二段婚姻结束后，又嫁给一名业余音乐人。按阿桑奇说法，新任继父属于一个极端宗教团体，结婚后为躲避这个团体追踪，在五六年时间里经常带着克里斯蒂娜和阿桑奇搬家，并用假名生活。
有父亲“叛逆基因”
母亲克里斯蒂娜17岁时离家出走，1970年在悉尼参加反越南战争游行时遇到约翰·希普顿，坠入爱河，次年生下阿桑奇。
父母分手后，阿桑奇失去父亲音信，直到25岁时才恢复联系。
重逢时，阿桑奇发现自己思维冷静、逻辑性强遗传自做建筑师的父亲。
阿桑奇认为自己同时遗传父亲不喜欢墨守成规的“叛逆基因”。2006年，他把“维基揭秘”网站域名登记在希普顿名下。
父子分开一幕多年后在阿桑奇自己身上重演。阿桑奇18岁时女友生下儿子丹尼尔。女友在儿子快两岁时带着儿子离开阿桑奇。阿桑奇因此患上抑郁症。
打扮成一个老太太
“维基揭秘”网去年11月开始公布25万份美国外交文件。阿桑奇当时在伦敦认定遭到美国中央情报局特工跟踪，于是乔装打扮。
网站工作人员詹姆斯·鲍尔告诉传记作者：“你想不出这有多可笑，他把自己打扮成一个老太太，把那个样子保持两个多小时。”
美国《纽约时报》1月31日推出《公开的秘密：维基揭秘、战争和美国外交》。作者、《纽约时报》高级编辑比尔·凯勒写道：“他时刻警觉，但是衣冠不整，像个在街上游走的流浪女人……身上气味像是几天没洗澡。”
欧飒(新华社供本报特稿)
维基解密创办人性暴力?误堕美人计? 遭美国防部陷害?编辑本段回目录
8月23日电 在瑞典卷入强奸疑案的“维基解密”(WikiLeaks)网站创办人阿桑奇，22日暗示美国国防部可能是幕后黑手，他坚称自己从没强迫他人与自己发生性行为。据香港《明报》报道，瑞典传媒认为，阿桑奇可能误堕美人计，但一名自称是受害者的女子现身否认受美国或其它人指使诬告阿桑奇，她宣称自己与另一女子自愿与阿桑奇发生性行为时，遭对方暴力对待。
自称被阿桑奇性侵犯的瑞典女子年约30岁，声称早前在瑞典政党“海盗党”(Pirate Party)宣传信息自由的活动中，与另一名年约20至30岁的女性朋友，认识已婚兼育有两名孩子的阿桑奇，她们之后分别与他发生性行为。她说，最初是自愿与阿桑奇上床，但后来却遭对方暴力侵犯。她那名女性朋友后来亦告诉她，曾被阿桑奇施以性暴力，要向警方控告他强奸。她自己原本没考虑向警方告发，但为证明友人对阿桑奇的指控属实，遂公开自己的类似遭遇。她又否认是受美国国防部或其它人指使，强调性侵犯指控有根有据，全因阿桑奇的“变态行为”。
坚称无强迫他人发生性行为
39岁的阿桑奇向瑞典传媒强调，从没强迫他人发生性行为，“无论在瑞典或其它国家，一切性行为都基于双方自愿”。但当记者追问，他是否真的没有与案中两名女子发生性行为，他含糊其辞，既不否认，也不承认，“传媒没透露她们的身分，我不知她们是谁”。他又解释，没现身向警方自首，并非刻意逃避，而是因为要寻求律师的法律意见。
瑞典传媒揣测，阿桑奇可能真的曾与该两名女子共度春宵，却未必涉及强奸或性骚扰，有可能是有关当局布美人计陷害。有评论称，作为已婚男子，阿桑奇若有变态性行为也不会想被家人知晓，情报部门可能以此要挟他停止公开机密文件，以换取撤销强奸控罪。前苏联情报机关KGB在1960年代便涉嫌安排年轻演员色诱英国陆军大臣普罗富莫(John Profumo)，令他最终被迫辞职下台。
检控前后矛盾 瑞典称没犯错
根据瑞典警方上周五晚发出的通缉令，阿桑奇涉嫌在本月中于斯德哥尔摩强奸一名女子，并于数日后在附近的恩雪平镇性骚扰另一名女子。但控方在不足一日内即撤销强奸指控及通缉令，令外界揣测当局涉及诬陷。瑞典检察部解释，当值检察官上周五晚发出通缉令后，较高级的检察官翌日接手，收到可显示阿桑德并非强奸疑犯的新证据，遂撤销通缉令。当局强调两名检察官均无过错，但就没说明掌握什么新证据。警方则指出，阿桑德仍是性骚扰疑犯，不排除稍后向他问话。
“一周前已知有人想搞他”
早前与阿桑奇合作公开7.7万份美军机密文件的英国《卫报》记者戴维.利(David Leigh)相信，事件是外国势力的抹黑阴谋。“他当然不是暴力的人。事件正值他准备公开更多敏感资料，却突然被人指控强奸，时机并不寻常。”“调查新闻中心”(CIJ) 主管麦克法迪恩(Gavin MacFadyen)称：“我们最少一周前已估计到他会官非缠身，没想过对方部署这么久才采取行动。他们落案起诉后又再撤销控罪，以此伎俩破坏他的名誉。”
维基解密创始人被控强奸 疑美国是幕后黑手
据香港《文汇报》报道，“维基解密”早前大爆美军机密后，39岁澳洲籍创办人阿桑奇身处险境，瑞典检察部门日前指他涉嫌强奸和性骚扰，发出通缉令，但未够1日，当局又迅速撤销通缉令，称他不涉强奸指控，只对性骚扰指控进行调查。阿桑奇接受瑞典《晚报》访问时表示，怀疑美国国防部是指控的幕后黑手。
瑞典检方昨为朝令夕改辩护，认为并无不妥，称全因正式接手案件的检察官掌握到新资料。
阿桑奇认为，瑞典当局的指控仍对“维基解密”造成损害。他强调不知道谁在背后提出指控，但对罪名感到震惊，因为他不曾在未得对方同意下，与任何人发生性关系。
不过，他透露曾收到警告，指五角大楼等机构可能会用肮脏伎俩破坏“维基解密”，尤其叫他小心堕入“性丑闻陷阱”。虽被撤销通缉令，但他相信，敌人还会借此借题发挥以损害网站。他又以私稳为由，拒透露两名涉及“强奸和性骚扰”案女子的详情。
参考文献编辑本段回目录
http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780852652398
http://www.amazon.co.uk/WikiLeaks-Inside-Julian-Assanges-Secrecy/dp/0852652399
http://www.amazon.co.uk/WikiLeaks-Inside-Julian-Assanges-Secrecy/dp/0852652399
