We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, director Alex Gibney’s (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) documentary about WikiLeaks, begins with a few riffs from one of Julian Assange’s favorite songs — Midnight Oil’s “Blossom and Blood” — and then segues into a clips of an interview with the WikiLeaks founder (he actually refused to participate with the film without payment so all the interviews with him came from secondary sources). It’s a dramatic start to a film that portends to tell the behind-the-scenes story of one of this century’s most sensational hacktivists. In one interview, Assange maintains he’s trying to “help the unjust” and it’s that premise that Gibney carefully scrutinizes in this film. Unfortunately, the rest of the 140-minute film doesn’t live up to its compelling opening.

We learn that WikiLeaks started posting government documents on a website in the early 2000s, garnering international attention when it leaked information about an Icelandic bank. Assange was subsequently invited to an Icelandic conference where he spoke about wanting to “protect people.” The next big leak came courtesy of Brad Manning, an Army intelligence officer who was a computer whiz. Stationed in Iraq, he had access to an incredible number of classified documents that he then sent off to Assange. This major security breach causes a bit of a brouhaha and Manning got arrested. Assange also ended up in hot water after allegations of a sexual assault surfaced and he ends up seeking asylum from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The film chronicles Assange’s rise and fall in painstaking detail and suggests that his initial activist impulses became obfuscated by his desire to silence his detractors in the same way he had been silenced. Without an interview with Assange, the film certainly lacks a little of the evidence it needs to make the argument stick.