Review of We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013) by Wil G — 07 Jun 2013

Alex Gibney, a prolific director of often hard-hitting and comprehensive documentaries, is perhaps best known for "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" - which examined the rise and fall of the once all-powerful corporation of the title - and his Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side" - which examined the role that torture has played in the U.S. war on terror. If you've seen any of his films - and there are many - then you know that he is an excellent journalist, committed to seeing all sides of an issue. No one is without ideology, and there is no such thing as pure objectivity (as an Al-Jazeera producer says in another great documentary - not directed by Gibney - "Control Room"), but any film that refuses to see anyone as all bad or all good - that, in fact, even rejects a simplistic notion of "good" and "bad" - and that strives to see the humanity in all of its participants, is the kind of documentary that always wins me over. It's one of the reasons I liked "The Queen of Versailles" so much: I thought the protagonists were ridiculous in many ways, but I also recognized that they were human, and therefore worth spending time with.

We Steal Secrets tells the story of WikiLeaks - a website devoted to publishing leaked information about governments and corporations in the interest of openness and transparency - and its founder, Julian Assange, as well as that of Private Bradley Manning, the man responsible for leaking secret U.S. government documents about Afghanistan and Iraq (and beyond) to that site. If you haven't followed Assange's story over the past few years, he is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he took refuge to avoid extradition to Sweden for a potential sex crimes trial. Manning, under military arrest since 2010, is now on trial for his actions. Gibney's film is, one can say, extremely topical at this particular point in time.

Most of Gibney's work focuses on the consequences of hubris. Whether he is examining the actions of Eliot Spitzer, the shady dealings of Jack Abramoff, or the unethical/illegal behavior of Enron executives, Gibney is fascinated with powerful people who begin to believe that the rules simply don't apply to them. In Assange, he has found another such clueless egomaniac. It wouldn't be an interesting film, however, if that were all there were to Assange. In fact, the idealism behind the founding of WikiLeaks and much of what Assange has accomplished in his life is admirable (to me, anyway). As someone who has spent a lot of time studying the former Soviet Union, as well as the Hollywood Blacklist, I am particularly wary of governmental opacity and secrets, and ascribe to the philosophy espoused by the main character in "V for Vendetta:" "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." Granted, I have no desire to blow up the houses of Parliament, as "V" does in that film, but I do believe in what Abraham Lincoln called "government of the people, by the people, for the people," and not the reverse. So if we look at what our government is doing and don't like it, I'm all for exposing its secrets (up to a point). National security interests should come in to play, and the film does talk about those, and you, dear reader, can decide where you stand on the issue.

What "We Steal Secrets" does extremely well, then, is explain how Assange started, and how he used his knowledge of technology (he was a hacker in his youth) to achieve his goals.

But it's not just about Assange, and the portions of the film that look at Private Manning were the most moving and disturbing to me. How such an obviously unhappy and unstable individual could remain in the military for so long - with access to classified files - is a mystery, and for those who are angry with him for leaking secrets in the first place, you have to ask yourself about an institution that claims awesome security powers, yet protects them so poorly.

Using simple graphics - the best I've seen for representations of emails and online chats - Gibney shows how Manning reached out to others, especially a fellow hacker, Adrian Lamo (who eventually turned him in), to tell his story. It's all very sad, and human, and reveals how even the most savvy tech people can be incredibly stupid, themselves, when it comes to their own privacy.

By the end of the film, we emerge from this tale of idealism gone wrong, of secrets published and lives ruined, feeling paranoid about privacy and governmental overreach, but also profoundly affected by the idealism of some of the film's main characters, and maybe a little hopeful that good journalists still exist in the world . . . for now.