WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

by David Leigh, Luke Harding

Overview

A team of journalists with unparalleled inside access provides the first full, in-depth account of WikiLeaks, its founder Julian Assange, and the ethical, legal, and political controversies it has both uncovered and provoked.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610390613
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	02/15/2011
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

David Leigh is a British journalist, author, editor, and Anthony Sampson Professor of Reporting in the journalism department at City University London. He has been a prominent investigative journalist since the 1970s and is currently investigations editor of the Guardian. He was educated at Nottingham High School and King's College, Cambridge, receiving a research degree from Cambridge in 1968. He was a journalist for the Scotsman, Times, and Guardian (UK) and a Laurence Stern fellow at the Washington Post in 1980. From 1980, he was chief investigative reporter at the Observer.

Luke Harding is the Guardian's Moscow correspondent. He was previously the Guardian's South Asia correspondent in New Delhi and has reported for the paper from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ed Pilkington is the Guardian's New York correspondent. He is a former national and foreign editor of the paper and is the author of Beyond the Mother Country.

Robert Booth is the author of Boston's Freedom Trail, which has been in print for twenty-five years, and has contributed to the anthology Salem: Place, Myth & Memory. A graduate of Harvard and Boston Universities, he is curator emeritus of the Pickering House in Salem and serves on the boards of several history organizations. He lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Paul Michael Garcia, an AudioFile Earphones Award winner and former company member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, received his classical training in theater from Southern Oregon University, where he worked as an actor, director, and designer.

Table of Contents

Cast of characters vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Hunt 13

Chapter 2 Bradley Manning 20

Chapter 3 Julian Assangc 32

Chapter 4 The rise of WikiLeaks 49

Chapter 5 The Apache video 65

Chapter 6 The Lamo dialogues 72

Chapter 7 The deal 90

Chapter 8 In the bunker 104

Chapter 9 The Afghanistan war logs 116

Chapter 10 The Iraq war logs 128

Chapter 11 The cables 135

Chapter 12 The world's most famous man 145

Chapter 13 Uneasy partners 164

Chapter 14 Before the deluge 176

Chapter 15 Publication day 194

Chapter 16 The biggest leak in history 210

Chapter 17 The ballad of Wandsworth jail 227

Chapter 18 The future of WikiLeaks 240

Appendix: US Embassy Cables 251

Acknowledgements 331

Index 332

Editorial Reviews

Mediaite, February 5, 2011
“While [The Guardian’s] rendition of experience does not fail to leave out the requisite depiction of Assange as overbearing and paranoid, the overall tone of the story, rather than vengeful, is surprisingly self-effacing.”

TechCrunch, February 12, 2011
“You can imagine, then, how delighted I was to receive a copy of the Guardian’s new crash-published Wikileaks book and discover that it was all the things I wanted from the Times’ book. And more… Indeed, while ‘Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War On Secrecy’ is many things – a thriller, a story of international diplomacy, a tale of greed and ambition and double-crosses; a comedy, a tragedy – above all it’s a manifesto for the future of professional journalism…If Wikileaks is this generation’s Watergate, then ‘Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy’ might well prove to be its All The President’s Men; educating a whole new generation of would-be reporters on the power and importance of the professional press.”
 
MacLean’s, March 1, 2011
“Leigh’s portrait of the WikiLeaks founder is at once affectionate and damning—a dry-eyed examination of the way celebrity can pervert a burgeoning ego.

From the Publisher

We truly are in the Information Age—but what information should be released to the public, and how? This book tries to formulate answers to those questions by looking at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his life, including his early penchant for computers and the rape charges against him. Paul Michael Garcia’s narration is functional, and his diction is clear. But his delivery has a robotic quality, as if he were reading a script. The last few hours of the book, on the politics of information, tend to be dense. What truly engages is the authors’ inside look at how WikiLeaks was able to disseminate masses of classified information, both through technical means and through the cooperative effort of the mainstream media. M.B. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2011 - AudioFile