In a sense, nothing about this was particularly unusual. Any Internet service’s data is fair game for law enforcement. In 2006, for instance, AOL revealed to The New York Times that it received about one thousand such requests for its users’ information from the government every month. Three years later, when Facebook was still less than a third of the size it is now, one of its staffers told Newsweek that it was receiving ten to twenty requests for data from law enforcement every day. Google, the only major technology company to formally publish statistics on those requests, reports that in the first half of 2011 alone, the government asked it to hand over user data 5,950 times, and that the company complied in 93 percent of those cases.
The only fact that set Jónsdóttir’s case apart from those thousands of others was that Twitter had even bothered to notify her about the government’s snooping instead of silently acquiescing.
Jónsdóttir contacted the lawyers at that cyberlibertarian stalwart, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who agreed to represent her in the legal fight to keep her private data private. Soon it was apparent she wasn’t alone: the online information of Jacob Appelbaum, the Dutch WikiLeaks associate Rop Gonggrijp, and likely Julian Assange and Bradley Manning were all caught up in the same dragnet. The U.S. Department of Justice was searching for any scrap of incriminating communications related to WikiLeaks; conversations between any of the group and Manning might be used to build a conspiracy case. And though Twitter had the courage to speak up about the government’s probe, Jónsdóttir’s lawyers learned that four other unnamed companies had also quietly received requests for her data without alerting her.
Together with Appelbaum and Gonggrijp, Jónsdóttir would spend the next year fighting the data requests in court, demanding that a judge unseal the rest of the secret investigation of their online activities. But in appeal after appeal, the courts ruled against them, declaring that users have no expectation of privacy on services like Twitter even as they kept the investigation’s own inner workings shrouded. Eventually they would lose the legal battle, and their Twitter data, along with their personal information from several other unidentified services, would be handed over to investigators.
When I speak to Jónsdóttir about the case in the fall of 2011, she’s surprisingly cheery. “I’m quite happy the American government has chosen to violate my privacy and make this an international diplomatic issue,” she says. Better to go after a public figure and bring attention to the problem than let the cherry-picking of private individuals’ data by the American government continue in secret, she says.
Even so, the legal threats that have obtained her private data and prevented Jónsdóttir from traveling to the United States since the investigation began represent a problem for IMMI too. The Internet doesn’t reside in some abstract “cyberspace” of John Perry Barlow’s gospel and Tim May’s sci-fi imagining. Much of it, like Jónsdóttir’s Twitter data, resides in the United States. And until it physically moves to Iceland, it won’t be protected by IMMI’s laws.
As legal blogger Arthur Bright pointed out when IMMI first surfaced, a media or technology company would have to relocate all of its staff and assets to Iceland or face the reality that its people and property back at home would be subject to the same archaic media laws as always. “Even if Iceland’s laws offer the best protections in the world, they’re still a Maginot Line,” Bright wrote.
Jónsdóttir is undeterred. Moving their entire staff and assets to Iceland, she argues, is exactly what companies ought to do. “I don’t see why that’s not a possibility,” she muses, disregarding the sunless winters and relative isolation from the rest of humanity. But she helpfully offers another option. “The United States could also repeal the Patriot Act and try democracy instead of tyranny.”
Changing the rest of the world’s media laws isn’t outside of Jónsdóttir’s endless ambition. She and Smári McCarthy, IMMI’s other champion, have been holding up Iceland as a proof of concept for the rest of the world, meeting with free information advocates in Reykjavík and elsewhere to spawn nascent movements like the Irish Modern Media Initiative, the Italian Modern Media Initiative, and even one American Indian woman in Berkeley, California, who hopes to use an Indian reservation’s legal protections as the basis for a data transparency haven within America’s own borders.
Like WikiLeaks before it, Jónsdóttir sees IMMI as just another piece of a grander, global “alchemy of change.”
“These things are just drops in one big wave. That wave is just one wave in a river,” she says. “And I don’t know where that river is going to take us.”
In December 2010, just as the first rounds of WikiLeaks’ State Department Cables were metastasizing around the Internet, I spoke with Evgeny Morozov, a Belarusian academic and writer with a famously pessimistic attitude toward the Internet’s ability to democratize global politics. Instead, he believes digital tools have only tightened governments’ control over their citizens.
I ask him about WikiLeaks, and whether it might be an exception to his rule. He thinks not. “Information can embarrass governments, but you have to look at the nature of governments as well as the nature of information to measure this embarrassment factor,” he answers.
In Russia or China, he specifies, corruption is already an open secret. “Just go and take photos of their villas and the summer houses they buy with their state salaries,” he says. “It’s already in the open, but exposure by itself in these countries doesn’t lead to democratic change.”
And what about BalkanLeaks, the Bulgarian site that at that time was just starting to get its hands on some juicy documents? Bulgaria is a subject Morozov knows well: He studied for several years at Sofia’s American University.
“I don’t know what information you could publish to embarrass the Balkans. It’s a tough one,” he says. “There’s an environment that’s so suffused with cynicism toward politicians that to me it’s hard to imagine what kind of stuff would need to be leaked.”
In May 2011, BalkanLeaks put that cynicism to the test. It published the words of the U.S. ambassador that labeled Bulgaria’s prime minister a criminal several times over. The news reverberated around the country’s blogs and was written up in several newspapers.
And then, as Morozov predicted, very little happened.
In a display of frantic backpedaling, the U.S. embassy in Sofia released a statement backing Borisov. “While we cannot comment on the content of alleged classified materials which may have been leaked, we would like to underscore that the U.S. and Bulgaria share an excellent relationship and that our high level of bilateral cooperation speaks for itself.”
Borisov himself angrily told one reporter who asked about his ties to Lukoil that “I do not read WikiLeaks,” and “will not comment on yellow press publications.”
Soon the usual politics kicked in. The opposition party demanded a probe into the accusations. Borisov’s own party emphasized that the report’s release was an underhanded move timed to coincide with local elections. The country’s top prosecutor, Boris Velchev, refused to pursue the case. “If we allow an investigation to be opened on mere allegations, can you imagine what country we would be turning into?” he asked rhetorically.
Borisov, it seemed, had emerged with hardly a scratch.
A few months after that miniscandal, I ask Tchobanov if he’s satisfied with the results of his leaks. “Yes, I am quite satisfied with the impact,” he answers without hesitation. Several judges have been pushed out by various means since BalkanLeaks’ reports on bribery and the Masonic lodge, what he sees as internal housecleaning. And since the cable publication on the country’s prime minister, Borisov hasn’t been invited to meet with any other European leaders one-on-one, he says—they don’t want to be seen shaking hands with an “Armani-clad tough guy,” as the U.S. ambassador once secretly described him in a memo.
The former minister of defen
se and two other officials exposed in BalkanLeaks’ early wiretapping transcripts have been charged with bribery, and their prosecution is ongoing. Others, like the prosecutor blackmailed by Angel Donchev, and another who pressured a witness to change his testimony in a real estate case, haven’t been charged with crimes.
On a larger scale, the leaks may have also contributed to a decision by the Netherlands and Finland to veto Bulgaria’s accession to the EU’s visa-free Schengen travel zone based on concerns about organized crime—a clear sign from Bulgaria’s neighbors that it must clean up its mafia taint.
But didn’t Tchobanov hope that the cable about Borisov would lead to his resignation? The soft-spoken Bulgarian asks for patience. He says that the full influence of the report still isn’t clear. “It’s a slow process. With the Pentagon Papers, nothing happened at first. But eventually there was Watergate,” he says. “First they ignore it, then they fight it, then they finally accept it as evidence.”
I offer the adage attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
“No,” Tchobanov responds without looking at me. “Sometimes you lose.”
On my last day in Varvara, Tchobanov, Yordanov, and a group of friends invite me to go sailing in the Black Sea on a small boat with Moby Dick written on its side in Cyrillic. We drop anchor in a shallow cove with an isolated beach in the distance, populated by only a single tent and a pirate flag planted in the sand.
As Tchobanov plays with his two squealing children, I swim over to an outcropping of volcanic rock fifty feet away, and Yordanov follows me. We admire a few of the dead medusa jellyfish floating in the tidal pools. “Very beautiful,” Yordanov says.
Then he points off in the distance to a complex of unfinished four-story buildings on a cliff beside the beach, modern structures with diagonally expanding floors that lean out over the sea, with a round, bare concrete tower at their center.
Yordanov explains that a story he wrote for Politika exposed what would have been a luxury apartment development there as illegal construction, part of the series of investigations that led to the knife attack on him in Burgas. The news resulted in a government order to halt the construction we’re looking at. If not for that story, he says, the beach below would have been developed as private land.
“I’m very proud my investigations can save this beach,” says Yordanov. “I’m very proud of my work.”
Since Yordanov’s exposé, the apartments’ massive concrete skeleton has been left to rot. No one is allowed to finish building it, but no one has bothered to remove its carcass either. It stands instead as an enormous concrete Acropolis, a monument to a country caught between its impulse to develop and the corruption it can’t escape. As we climb back into the Moby Dick and sail toward Varvara, the newly constructed ruins loom over us from the cliff face and then recede into the distance.
CHAPTER 7
THE ENGINEERS
The fifty-year-old Soviet biplane lurches, banks hard to the left, and nearly pitches me and the nine hackers aboard into the port-side windows. I resist the urge to vomit as my stomach floats into my chest. The fluffy-bearded young man sitting behind me doesn’t, and pukes generously into a paper bag.
A few thousand feet below the fuselage of steel in which we’re riding is a German landscape covered with trees, rivers, windmills, and suddenly a field populated with a patchwork of multicolored tents and strips of pavement. Our pilot, a tall Berliner with a sadistic smile, pushes the Antonov An-2 into an alarmingly steep descent, testing my nervous system’s accelerometers again. And then, with unexpected grace, the landing wheels connect with the tarmac and we glide to a stop.
As the plane’s Shvetsov engine sputters to a halt and passengers tumble out dazedly, two men approach, one with long purple hair and the other with a brown military hat, a thick black beard, and a suit and tie. They welcome us to the Chaos Communication Camp.
The CCC, or simply Camp, as it’s called by the transnational hackers who regularly attend, occurs every fourth summer at an airfield in Finowfurt, a tiny town in former East Germany an hour outside of Berlin. For five days, a distinct hacker-hippy culture takes shape in a village of tents, veined with power cords and Ethernet and permeated with Wi-Fi. The three thousand or so hackers hold research presentations in underground hangars on code-breaking, government surveillance, and insanely ambitious DIY projects. (One talk at the latest Camp set a new goal for the CCC: Put a hacker on the moon by 2034.) At night, they build elaborate light-shows and sculptures around the remains of the Soviet aircraft and tanks that litter the terrain. The result is something like a colder, wetter Burning Man for the radical geek elite.
I spend my first two hours at the Chaos Communication Camp wandering in the dusk around the surreal ruins: past a statue of Lenin with headphones and turntables added to convert him into a socialist DJ, a rusting fighter jet with elaborate rainbow-knitted caps for its pointed engines and nose. Hackers have bivouacked in the shelter of defunct missiles and helicopter engines, like survivors of the apocalypse who have rebuilt a simpler digital society amid the remains of the military-industrial complex.
It’s only after nightfall that I find Daniel Domscheit-Berg standing in the dark at the edge of the airfield, wearing a long reflective yellow coat, his face looking rather forlorn as it’s lit by another hacker’s headlamp. I call out his name and he turns and greets me with a wide-eyed smile and a handshake. The thirty-three-year-old engineer is Assange’s darkened doppelgänger, nearly as tall and slim but with dark short hair, dark-rimmed glasses, dark beard. I ask him how it’s going. “Everything’s going wrong,” he says, without dimming his innocent, slightly gap-toothed smile. “We’re a full two days behind.”
By “we,” Domscheit-Berg means OpenLeaks, his nascent spin-off from WikiLeaks. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who flew in to support the group, is sick in a hotel, he tells me. Her young son tripped on a tent stake, twisted his ankle, and is in the hospital. And ninety-mile-per-hour winds have been pummeling the two-room army tent OpenLeaks has set up as a headquarters, strong enough that the hackers have spent most of the last forty-eight hours trying to prevent it from collapsing. “This afternoon we were helping to set up the marquee tent,” he says in a plaintive German accent, pointing to a dome fifty yards away. “Then the storm hit, and ten minutes later it ended up looking like some kind of modern art installation.”
Domscheit-Berg invites me into the tent, an orangish structure with what looks like a small Tibetan shrine in one corner, an antinuclear poster, couches, and cases piled on cases of Club-Mate, the sugary, highly caffeinated tea favored by nocturnal German hackers. He hands me a bottle, sits down on the couch, picks up his laptop, and then, without apology, gets back to work.
For Domscheit-Berg, after all, tomorrow is a big day: For the first time, he plans to open OpenLeaks’ leak submission platform to the world.
With this launch, Domscheit-Berg and the other young men milling around the OpenLeaks tent and buried in computer screens don’t merely expect that their newly coded system will be attacked. They’re asking for it. “We will open the system for ninety-six hours to a penetration test,” Domscheit-Berg wrote to me by instant message a month before the Camp. “We want people to break it.”
OpenLeaks, in other words, aims to harden its code in the fire of three thousand hackers simultaneously probing it for vulnerabilities and leaks. “If it still works, and is not compromised, I think we are in a good position to go live,” he wrote.
Going live has been a long time coming. Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks in an epically messy divorce in September 2010. He announced OpenLeaks three months later. He planned to launch his first test with the site’s media partners, four small European newspapers and the nonprofit Foodwatch, in January 2011. Then April. Now it’s August, and OpenLeaks has yet to even launch its submissions website, fueling the
frustration of its supporters and the schadenfreude of Domscheit-Berg’s former colleagues at WikiLeaks.
“It’s not just putting up a website,” Domscheit-Berg counters patiently when I interrupt his typing to ask about this long delay. “We’re working on an end-to-end environment that takes into regard the whole process. What kind of material you get. What the requirements are to access that material to make sure there’s no security breach. How to allow lots of people to work on the material and redact it. How to encrypt it so that only the partners can decrypt it and we can’t. Adding checks in the system so that if there’s a maintenance window nothing is exposed. We’re working on a seriously engineered solution.”
The long-gestating system is designed to allow the same anonymous whistleblowing as WikiLeaks, but unlike the parent project where Domscheit-Berg spent three years of his life, OpenLeaks isn’t designed to actually make anything public. Instead, it aims to securely pass on leaked content to partnered media organizations and nonprofits, avoiding the dicey role of publisher that got WikiLeaks into so much trouble. It will focus, Domscheit-Berg says, on the most technically tricky and crucial link in the leaking chain: untraceable anonymous uploads.
Domscheit-Berg believes he has all the ingredients to build a new WikiLeaks that’s more efficient, more democratically organized, and perhaps most important, more legal. He wants to incorporate as a nonprofit, a steadfast, permanent institution that can strike blows for information freedom against the world’s governments and corporations without needing to hide from anyone.
But there’s another difference from WikiLeaks: Domscheit-Berg believes that merely replicating the previous project’s security isn’t good enough. Not only because, the former WikiLeaker says, Julian Assange’s brainchild never quite reached his ideal standards for data protection. Nor because, despite his denials, the German is still playing out a dark and bitter game of one-upmanship with Assange himself, who once counted Domscheit-Berg a close friend and now publicly casts him as one of the leaking movement’s greatest villains. (In a newspaper interview a few months earlier, Assange called Domscheit-Berg a “dangerous, malicious conman.”) But also because in the year since WikiLeaks began dropping nuclear data bombs on world superpowers, the stakes have risen considerably.
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