WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is an organization founded in 2006 by Julian Assange to publish classified and restricted documents submitted anonymously, built on encryption and anonymity techniques drawn from the Cypherpunks movement in which Assange had been an early participant. Its 2010 release of United States military and diplomatic records, supplied by the Army analyst Chelsea Manning, made it a global political actor and prompted the major payment processors to cut off donations in a "banking blockade," after which WikiLeaks adopted Bitcoin. In 2010 and 2011 a private consortium called Team Themis, made up of Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies and working for the law firm Hunton & Williams and Bank of America, drafted proposals to attack WikiLeaks and to target the journalist Glenn Greenwald, exposed when Anonymous hacked HBGary's email in February 2011.¹²³

Assange and the Cypherpunk Roots

Assange joined the cypherpunks mailing list in the mid-1990s under the handle "Proff," posting from Australia, and wrote software in line with the movement's philosophy, including the Rubberhose deniable-encryption system designed to let a user reveal one passphrase under coercion while concealing the existence of further hidden data. He co-wrote, with Suelette Dreyfus, the 1997 history of the international hacker underground "Underground." The cypherpunk premise, that strong encryption lets individuals defend information against states and corporations, carried directly into WikiLeaks, which Assange built around encrypted, anonymous submission so that a source could deliver documents without the publisher being able to identify them.⁴⁵

WikiLeaks was registered through the Sunshine Press structure in 2006 and published early disclosures on extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic-waste dumping by the firm Trafigura, the membership rolls of the British National Party, and the operating manual for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Assange set out his theory of leaking in essays arguing that conspiratorial and authoritarian institutions depend on secret internal communication and that forcing them to operate under the threat of leaks degrades their capacity to act, a logic that treated disclosure as a way to raise the internal cost of secrecy. The journalist Andy Greenberg traced the line from the cypherpunks to WikiLeaks in his 2012 book "This Machine Kills Secrets."⁴⁶

The 2010 Disclosures and the Banking Blockade

In 2010 WikiLeaks published a sequence of records leaked by Chelsea Manning. In April it released the gunsight video of a 2007 Baghdad airstrike under the title "Collateral Murder," followed in July by the Afghan War Diary and in October by the Iraq War Logs, two collections of field reports running to hundreds of thousands of documents. In November 2010, working with Der Spiegel, El Pais, The Guardian, Le Monde, and the New York Times, WikiLeaks began publishing the Cablegate archive of about 250,000 United States State Department diplomatic cables. Manning was arrested, charged under the Espionage Act, and sentenced in 2013 to 35 years, later commuted in 2017.¹⁷

In early December 2010, following the Cablegate release, the principal financial intermediaries cut off WikiLeaks: PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, and Western Union stopped processing donations to the organization in what became known as the banking blockade. The blockade severed most of WikiLeaks's funding without any court order directing it. Anonymous responded with Operation Payback, coordinating distributed denial-of-service attacks against the payment processors in defense of WikiLeaks. The cutoff pushed WikiLeaks to seek a payment channel that no intermediary could close.⁷⁸

Bitcoin Adoption

WikiLeaks turned to Bitcoin as a censorship-resistant donation channel, one of the cryptocurrency's first prominent real-world uses. The move was delayed at the urging of Satoshi Nakamoto, who objected on the bitcointalk forum on 11 December 2010 that "WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest, and the swarm is headed towards us," warning that the attention would endanger the young network. Assange later wrote that WikiLeaks agreed with Nakamoto's analysis and held off, launching its public Bitcoin donation address on 14 June 2011 after the currency's first major price rise.⁹⁸

Assange argued in 2014 that the two projects had sustained each other, saying that Bitcoin gave WikiLeaks a funding route around the blockade while WikiLeaks's adoption gave Bitcoin an early demonstration of use. The donation address went on to receive thousands of bitcoin over the following years.⁹¹⁰

Team Themis

In late 2010 the law firm Hunton & Williams, retained by Bank of America and in contact with the United States Chamber of Commerce, brought together three contractors, Palantir Technologies (the data-analytics firm chaired by Peter Thiel), HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies, under the name Team Themis to develop a response to WikiLeaks, which Bank of America feared held damaging internal documents. The group produced a proposal titled "The WikiLeaks Threat," in which Palantir would handle network and insider-threat analysis while Berico and HBGary Federal analyzed the organization. Reporting in The Tech Herald by the journalist Steve Ragan and in the press that followed described the plan as a dirty-tricks operation against WikiLeaks, its supporters, and journalists.²¹¹

The proposal recommended submitting fabricated documents to WikiLeaks and then attacking the organization's credibility when it published them, stoking internal divisions, launching cyber attacks to steal data on sources, and running a "media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities." It included a chart of journalists and supporters whose careers could be pressured, among them Glenn Greenwald, then writing for Salon. The slides stated that Greenwald's "level of support" for WikiLeaks "needs to be disrupted," asserted that "without the support of people like Glenn wikileaks would fold," and judged that established professionals like him would "choose professional preservation over cause" if pressured. HBGary Federal's chief executive, Aaron Barr, separately set out to unmask members of Anonymous.³¹²

In February 2011, after Barr publicly claimed he had identified the leadership of Anonymous, the collective broke into HBGary's systems, took control of its email, and released roughly 50,000 internal messages, which exposed the Team Themis proposals and the exchanges between Barr and a Palantir employee about targeting Greenwald. Palantir's chief executive, Alex Karp, issued a public apology to progressive groups and to Greenwald in particular on 11 February 2011 and said the company had severed "any and all contacts" with HBGary; Palantir placed the employee involved, Matthew Steckman, on leave, and Berico's leadership said it had discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal. On 1 March 2011, seventeen members of Congress, led by Representative Hank Johnson, called for an investigation of possible illegal action by Hunton & Williams and Team Themis. HBGary Federal shut down.¹³³¹⁴