The numbers of people who have access to that material are just as unfathomable. Four million Americans have some form of clearance to read classified information. Of those, about 1.2 million have top secret clearance.
But the abundance of widely shared secrets is hardly the only factor pushing the leaking movement forward. Anonymous whistleblowing remains a game of skirting surveillance, and WikiLeaks’ key advancement in the science of spilling information has been in separating the leaker from the leaked information. Cutting the data trail to a leak’s source was the crucial trick that emboldened ever-greater disclosures from whistleblowers leading up to the Cablegate blowout.
That’s why the story of leaked secrets, from the days of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers to the growing brood of sites hoping to reproduce WikiLeaks’ work, has not been driven merely by digital disclosure, but by digital anonymity. And true digital anonymity requires cryptography.
The craft of cryptographic leaking that WikiLeaks brought to light seems like a paradox: A movement focused on divulging secrets depends on a technology invented to keep them. But anonymity technologies represent a special kind of encryption: They reveal data itself while hiding certain metadata about the data. Specifically, anonymity tools hide that one metadatum that counts most, the IP address that can be linked immediately to a user’s location and device. Protecting that one fact is a harder trick than it sounds: In the end, strong anonymity tools have taken more than a decade longer than mere strong encryption to make their way into the hands of the average Internet user. But that strong anonymity, as it slowly matured over the course of two decades, was the lever WikiLeaks used to upend the world.
Today, a schizoid hive-mind of Internet pundits and social media theorists claims, simultaneously, that everyone knows no anonymity exists on the Internet (“These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone,” states a New York Times headline from 2011) and that everyone knows no identity exists on the Internet—that “no one knows you’re a dog,” as the New Yorker cartoon caption reads. Half of security gurus preach about the Internet’s invasion of privacy, while the other half bemoan the Internet’s lack of authentication, which they say makes the task of identifying bad actors—what they call the “attribution problem”—nearly impossible.
Forget these conflicting parallel realities. The Internet is neither fundamentally private nor fundamentally public, anonymous or onymous. Those who behave a certain way online and use certain services will have no privacy, while those who behave another way and use other services can be very, very hard to identify—harder to identify now, in many ways, than ever in communication’s history.
The public and private paths on the Internet have been diverging. Today users have the option to use a service like Facebook, which is designed to learn your real name and attach it to all your actions, preferences, locations, and even thoughts. Or they can use a service like WikiLeaks’ now-defunct submission system, which was designed to learn absolutely nothing about them—in fact, to provably demonstrate to users, by using modern anonymity software like Tor, that it can’t learn anything about them.
All of which is to say that WikiLeaks wasn’t a one-off fluke, a brilliant hacker’s lucky break, or, as digital pundit Clay Shirky has characterized the press’s image of WikiLeaks, a “series of unfortunate events.” It was the inevitable outcome of the changing nature of information and advancements in cryptographic anonymity, catalyzed to an explosion by Assange’s actions.
The first two parts of this book will tell the story of how leaking has been transformed over the last forty years by generations of cryptographers and revolutionary activists of all stripes. The third part tours the post-WikiLeaks world, following the same movement of radical hacktivists as they seek to systematize, replicate, and evolve the craft of disclosure.
As I traveled from San Francisco to Iceland to Berlin to Bulgaria to report this story, I was searching not so much for WikiLeaks’ methods, its influences, or its sequels as I was trying to write the story of an ideal that drove this hidden movement. It was on a street in my own neighborhood in Gowanus, Brooklyn, that I saw a busker sitting on a curb, strumming a guitar with the same words scrawled across it that once were written across the one Woody Guthrie played: This Machine Kills Fascists. That sentence, to me, brought to mind the ideological arrow I see from Ellsberg to Assange and beyond: a revolutionary protest movement bent not on stealing information, but on building a tool that inexorably coaxes it out, a technology that slips inside of institutions and levels their defenses against the free flow of data like a Trojan horse of cryptographic software and silicon.
But the machine that kills secrets isn’t merely WikiLeaks, or the photocopier that duplicated the Pentagon Papers, or the anonymity network Tor, or even the Internet. It’s a living idea—one that continues to evolve in the minds of all those who aim to obliterate the world’s institutional secrecy.
PART ONE
LEAKER PRESENT, LEAKER PAST
“The mice will win in the end. But in the meantime, the cats will be well fed.”
BRUCE SCHNEIER
CHAPTER 1
THE WHISTLEBLOWERS
When Dr. Daniel Ellsberg decided to violate thirteen years’ worth of security clearances, embark on the largest public breach of top secret documents in the twentieth century, and likely spend the rest of his life in prison, he faced a problem: how to duplicate seven thousand pieces of paper many times over using 1969 technology.
RAND, the California military think tank where Ellsberg held a position two steps removed from the president of the United States, didn’t have a Xerox machine. The technology was twenty years old, but still not widely used. And it presented some obvious security issues for an agency dealing with ultraclassified materials. So Ellsberg, a thin, thirty-eight-year-old man with wiry dark hair and features that resembled a more Semitic Paul Newman, needed help. He contacted Tony Russo, a mildly subversive Virginian co-worker, and Russo soon became the only other analyst at RAND who knew about and sympathized with Ellsberg’s leaking plans.
Russo found one of the newfangled photocopiers in the advertising agency of a friend who shared their antiwar agenda. Over the next year, Ellsberg would spend countless nights hauling RAND’s papers out of the building in an inconspicuous briefcase, then standing in front of that primitive copier in a dark office reproducing a secret history of America’s involvement in Vietnam: the Pentagon Papers.
It was tedious work. At first Ellsberg tried to copy two pages at a time from one of the forty-seven bound volumes. But he found that the words near the spine were faded and distorted. So he resorted to disassembling the binder and photocopying the pages one by one. “I tried to program my motions,” he wrote in his memoir, Secrets:
One hand picked up a page, the other fit it on the glass, top down, push the button, wait . . . lift, move the original to the right while picking another page from the pile. . . . This is all very familiar now, but it was a new technology then. It took a little extra time to put the top down and up, and I didn’t know why it had to be done. Did it have to do with the copying quality, or was the light bad for the eyes? Was it dangerously bright? How did it work, anyway? Was that peculiar green color some kind of radiation?
There were complications: Ellsberg intended to give portions of the papers to several senators, and if necessary, the news media too. To make multiple copies, he would have to hand the papers over to a professional copying office, where they’d be subjected to the curious eyes of who-knew-how-many clerks. Inconveniently, the papers were marked with glaring “Top Secret” stamps across their tops and bottoms, with more classified signifiers peppered throughout the margins of the monstrous classified tomes.
So at first Ellsberg cut off the heads and feet of the pages with scissors, later upgrading to a paper cutter. Then Russo suggested he tape strips of cardboard over the top and bottom of the photocopier’s
glass face, what Ellsberg would later refer to as “declassifiers.” Even then, some words were cut off by the declassifiers, and small, randomly interspersed “Top Secret” markings lingered on the edges of the pages. Ellsberg had to comb through the encyclopedia-size pile to excise them. When he thought he was ready to hand the first briefcase-size fraction of the stack over to a New York copy shop months into his project, he riffled through the papers one last time and was startled to immediately find another page with an obvious, unsheared “Top Secret” marking. He left the copy shop and retreated to a lunch counter where he surreptitiously pruned more “Top Secret” remnants out of the papers while attempting to nonchalantly consume a sweet roll and a cup of coffee over the course of several hours.
The process was punctuated by Ellsberg’s periodic visits by the local police. Russo’s friend in advertising wasn’t particularly skilled at manipulating her office’s security system, and the result was multiple silent alarms—an average of three a week—that brought in bored policemen to check on the distinguished-looking man who always seemed to be photocopying late at night. Ellsberg would casually cover the classified documents on the desk beside the copy machine, greet the policemen politely, and carry on his work as soon as they left.
Ellsberg recruited Russo to help with the endless task, along with Russo’s advertising friend, Ellsberg’s second wife Patricia, even his two thirteen – and ten-year-old children from his first marriage. (Why did Ellsberg involve his children? He writes that he expected to spend the next decades talking to them only through a pane of glass in a federal prison, and he wanted them to at least understand exactly what he had done, and why.)
Even with his ragtag team’s help, it took the Harvard – and Cambridge-educated analyst more than a year of on-and-off grunt work to create a full set of the papers and duplicate them at commercial copy centers, eventually creating an eight-foot-tall stack of breached classified documents. At ten cents a page in those shops, the process also required Ellsberg to spend several thousand dollars. (The equivalent of more than twenty thousand dollars today, accounting for inflation.) Once, when he sent a batch of papers off to Senator William Fulbright, Fulbright’s aide politely offered to reimburse him. But when Ellsberg named the price—$345 including postage—the aide hastily rescinded the offer. Fulbright, who had told Ellsberg he would launch congressional hearings based on the documents, would later rescind that offer too.
The data leaks that would earn army private first class Bradley Manning the alleged title of the world’s most prolific whistleblower weren’t merely orders of magnitude larger than Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers. Compared to photocopying seven thousand pages several times over, Manning’s leaks were also phenomenally easier—the difference between spending months harvesting a season of crops and playing a few hours of FarmVille on Facebook.
In the midst of his work as a low-level intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning slipped a rewritable CD marked with “Lady Gaga” into the tray of his work machine, a PC connected only to the military’s high-security Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet. The SIPRNet was “airgapped”: It wasn’t connected to the Internet through any plug or wireless signal. But Manning could simply copy the CD’s music to the computer, delete it from the rewritable disc, burn whatever top secret data he wanted to the piece of plastic, and walk away with it minutes later. “[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” Manning would write a few months later. “Pretty simple and unglamorous.”
The data caches that Manning replicated, allegedly, included 91,000 files from the war in Afghanistan, 392,000 from the Iraq War, 779 files of inmates in the Pentagon’s Guantánamo prison, and a quarter of a million memoranda from the U.S. State Department, which also shared its data with troops via SIPRNet.
If the Ellsberg of 1969 could have seen the size of those leaks and the ease with which Manning extracted them, he might have cried at the unfairness of technological progress. One of Manning’s Lady Gaga CDs offered enough capacity to have stored the Pentagon Papers about fifty times over, and the laser head that wrote to those discs could have accomplished in a minute or two what required a year of off-and-on work for Ellsberg and his photocopier.
To turn that comparison around, how long would it have taken Ellsberg to copy a leak the size of Manning’s using only his 1969 technology? On a modern copier, I found I could only achieve a pace of around eight pages a minute. Assume that Ellsberg was able to photocopy for eight uninterrupted hours out of every twenty-four—say, from nine at night to five in the morning to avoid suspicion and keep his demanding job at RAND. At that rate, and even with a 2011 photocopier magically transported to 1969, it would have taken Ellsberg six months of straight work to reproduce just one copy of the 261 million words included in the State Department Cables—not even considering the Afghan or Iraqi files—that Manning effortlessly transported onto his Lady Gaga CD.
In fact, Ellsberg never worked steadily at that eight-pages-a-minute pace. If he had, he would have finished copying the Pentagon Papers in a week or less. But at the more realistic pace that Ellsberg set, factoring in the need for sleep, fear of being caught, his much slower copier, distractions, a high-level military job that often required late nights and travel, breaks to maintain his sanity, the need to make secondary copies, and the niggling task of manually scissoring out any evidence of the files’ classification before turning them over to a professional copying service, he didn’t finish his photocopier work for close to three months of solid work interspersed over a year.
Adding in the textual data that filled the smaller but still massive files from two data-flooded wars and Ellsberg’s need to make multiple copies, and it’s possible to roughly extrapolate how long a Manning-size leak would have realistically taken at Ellsberg’s rate: about eighteen years. Suffice it to say that by then, his revelations would have belonged in a history book rather than The New York Times. And therein lies the clearest of so many differences between the act of leaking in the twentieth century and the twenty-first.
Daniel Ellsberg was born into an upper-middle-class Chicago family in 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression. Though his parents were Russian-born Jews, they had converted and raised Ellsberg as a strict Christian Scientist. Ellsberg’s father was trained as an engineer but, like many men in that decade, spent years without work. Although Ellsberg would later come to admire his father, the rosy-cheeked boy with a dark, wiry coif first found a different hero: his father’s brother, Ned Ellsberg, the navy admiral and writer. Admiral Ellsberg had risen to fame as a member of the navy’s submarine salvage team, invented an underwater torch for cutting through the steel of sunken ships’ hulls, and wrote a dozen fiction and nonfiction books with titles like Men Under the Sea, Ocean Gold, and I Have Just Begun to Fight! The young Ellsberg devoured the books and looked up to their author.
Ellsberg’s father found work first in Springfield, Illinois, and later in Detroit in 1937, and the family moved to the middle-class Highland Park suburbs. Ellsberg, an intensely intelligent child with few friends, won a scholarship to attend the prestigious Cranbrook private school, just as World War II began to rage in Europe. Despite his reverence for his military uncle, Ellsberg’s early memories of war itself were of a vague and evil specter. One of his elementary schoolteachers passed around a model of a magnesium bomb of the kind capable of penetrating buildings and remaining alight continuously no matter how much water was poured on it. “A particle . . . , we were told, would burn through flesh to the bone and wouldn’t stop burning even then,” he wrote. “It was hard for me to understand people who were willing to burn children like that. It still is.”
Ellsberg was a top student in his classes. But his mother wanted her son to be the next Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein, and it was to the piano that she committed nearly all his time. He was expected to practice for
six to seven hours a day. Reading was considered a vice and a distraction, and Ellsberg remembers his mother quietly hiding his books to keep him at the keyboard.
As obediently as Ellsberg followed his mother’s ambitions, he was less willing to blindly accept the religion that his parents lived by. At Sunday school, he peppered his teacher with tough theological questions. Later, in his teens, he read and deeply absorbed an exposé of plagiarism in the works of Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science’s founder, that shook the faith his parents had tried to instill in him.
One summer day in 1946, much of the influence that Ellsberg’s family held over his life suddenly, violently vanished. On a road trip to a party in Denver, Ellsberg’s father fell asleep at the wheel of the family’s sedan. He awoke just seconds before the car plowed into the concrete structure of an overpass, demolishing the right side of the vehicle. Ellsberg’s mother was killed instantly. Though the details were initially kept from him, Ellsberg later learned she was beheaded. His father received facial injuries but survived. Ellsberg awoke thirty-six hours later. His sister never did.
When Ellsberg gained consciousness, his father had gone back to Michigan, leaving him in a Denver hospital with his mother’s family. For months after the accident, the elder Ellsberg felt too guilty to face his son. Daniel, for his part, was overcome with a strange emotional numbness. He once said that his first thought after his mother’s death was simply “I guess I don’t have to play the piano anymore.”
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