We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

Remove the awful stickiness that surrounds all things Julian Assange for a minute and remember the ‘wow’ moment in 2010 that came when a littleknown ‘hacktivism’ website WikiLeaks exposed the US military in a three-pronged attack with The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, leaking a vast amount of state secrets.

‘Without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public,’ Assange said. Having that information was suddenly empowering and terrifying. It felt as though something had been smashed. It was a movie come to life, but whether that movie has a ‘happy’ ending is yet to be decided. The material came from Bradley Manning, an intelligence officer in Iraq, who at the time of writing is in the fifth week of being prosecuted by the US government.

Before Manning was exposed by an online friend – interviewed in this documentary, not knowing whether or not to be tearful – Assange took centre stage and most of the glory as the frontman of WikiLeaks.

Alex Gibney, who directs this sharply presented film, has built a career on exposing the terrifying consequences of power. He directed Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, and the 2007 Oscar-winning documentary Taxi To The Dark Side about America’s torture policy. In WikiLeaks’s case, the consequences weren’t only for the US military, but for Assange. When it came to light only months later that he was facing sexual assault charges in Sweden, and WikiLeaks released more documents without blanking out the names therein, he had a rock star’s fall from grace, leading to refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Gibney lines up some interesting interviewees, but we still feel the lack of Assange. There’s plenty of past footage, but apparently he is now too expensive and, presumably, was too tied up in the embassy to take part. This gives We Steal Secrets – incidentally, a line from a former CIA boss about his own, legitimate agency – a strange feeling somewhere between an obituary and a moral exam question.

Nick Davies, the investigative journalist who first contacted WikiLeaks about publishing the documents in The Guardian, was troubled by Assange’s claim that there was a ‘harm minimisation process’ in running the material. Until it was pointed out to him, it didn’t occur to Assange to redact any of the names of innocent parties. Assange’s first priority is getting the truth out there, and any civilians or sympathisers whose names are on those sheets are simply collateral damage.

Assange may be the frontman, but Manning’s story is even more extraordinary, and affectingly told. His emails appear typed up on screen, cross-referenced with old photographs, showing an intelligent, confused man whose battle with his sense of self was just as overwhelming as that of whether or not to expose his country’s failings.

Gibney’s film ends with the two men in a sort of prison, which leaves you with the uneasy feeling that whistle-blowing is wrong – and that, too, should change.