“WikiLeaks appeared out of nowhere,” says Domscheit-Berg. “It caused a lot of new problems no one had thought about before. Now they’ve thought about this whole thing for a bit. The dust has settled. And it will never be as easy again.”
Hence Domscheit-Berg’s plan for the entire Chaos Communication Camp to pile on OpenLeaks’ data conduit in a massive hackfest starting tomorrow. Better to be attacked by friends first than intelligence agency spooks and state-sponsored hackers later.
“There was a Swiss newspaper that wrote something like, first there’s a visionary, and then come the engineers,” Domscheit-Berg says. “That’s what’s happening with us as well. Julian had the vision, paired with the spirit to kick this off. We are the engineers.”
In March 2011, while late to a meeting and running down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, I received a call on my BlackBerry from Sarah Harrison, Julian Assange’s personal assistant.
“Julian would like to speak with you,” she tells me.
“Great, when?” I ask cheerily, trying to restrain my out-of-shape panting.
Suddenly Sarah’s voice has been replaced with Assange’s, and he’s launched into a critique of my latest blog post, a bit of news about WikiLeaks’ reaction to plans for an upcoming film based on two books, one by two reporters at The Guardian and one by Domscheit-Berg, neither of which portrays Assange in a flattering light. “This is how bullshit ends up being history,” a WikiLeaks staffer had written on Twitter earlier in the day.
On the other end of the phone, Assange is taking issue with how I described Domscheit-Berg in my story, as having “left WikiLeaks in September” 2010 and taking “several” staffers with him. “He did not leave. He was suspended,” Assange says in a scolding tone. “And he did not take several staffers with him. He took one.” (I later spoke face-to-face with several staffers who had left WikiLeaks at the same time as Domscheit-Berg, two of whom had gone on to work for OpenLeaks.)
“What this shows me, Andy,” he continues slowly in the manner of a disappointed school headmaster, “is that you’re not properly checking your facts.”
I can sense the subtext of this one-way conversation: I’ve quoted Domscheit-Berg in recent stories. And Assange knows that I and every other journalist covering WikiLeaks have read Domscheit-Berg’s just-published memoir, which describes Assange as an arrogant tyrant and a selfish, petty nerd, complete with descriptions of him mistreating his German compatriot’s cat, eating his Ovaltine straight from the package, and possessing the table manners of someone “raised by wolves.”
I point out that checking facts with him is difficult when Domscheit-Berg returns my phone calls, and Assange doesn’t. Then I try to explain that my primary interest in speaking with Domscheit-Berg is not to insert myself into the feud between him and Assange, but rather to learn more about OpenLeaks and what it’s doing to continue the work Assange began.
“As far as I can tell, it’s doing nothing,” Assange says.
“That’s true, I suppose. But I’m interested in the ideas behind it and where they’re going,” I respond lamely.
“Then you should know that every idea in OpenLeaks is my idea,” Assange replies without hesitation. “So I’m glad you like my ideas.”
I’m not quite sure how to respond to this, and we sit on the phone in silence for a moment.
“I have to go now, Andy,” he says. Then he hangs up.
If Assange had violated his house arrest in England, flown to Germany, made a surprise appearance at the Chaos Communication Camp, and personally pegged Daniel Domscheit-Berg with a piece of rotten fruit during the announcement of OpenLeaks’ test launch, perhaps the otherwise near-total failure of the day would have been complete.
Domscheit-Berg takes the stage inside one of the Camp’s hangars, and within a few minutes, he’s delivering bad news, admitting to the packed room of hackers that after months of delay, the test site still isn’t yet online. He complains in passive-aggressive terms that the Camp’s staff hadn’t properly set up their server colocation facility.
He goes on to explain all the massive technical challenges OpenLeaks faces: how, for instance, to set up secure anonymous submissions systems on the websites of media outlets that use widgets and tools that make online anonymity nearly impossible? Tracking tools included in newspapers’ Web advertisements collect data on users to better sell them cars and toothpaste. Anonymous leaking sites aren’t meant to collect any data at all. Many of the scripts that run in visitors’ Web browsers when they visit media sites can even be rigged to gain control of the user’s computer. And given that OpenLeaks doesn’t plan to run its submissions system exclusively as a Tor Hidden Service—the group sees them as too complex for many users to access—Domscheit-Berg explains that they need to come up with anonymity protections that don’t rely solely on popular anonymity tools like Tor.
After listing this litany of problems, Domscheit-Berg neglects to explain how OpenLeaks will solve any of them.
Instead, he jumps right into his call for the Camp’s hackers to pile onto the test site as soon as it comes online—he assures the crowd it will be up shortly—and examine it for security flaws. “All of you are so important in determining what the future looks like—the technical side of the future—and what the influence will be on the freedoms in society,” he says in a short pep talk. “This goes to the heart of society. If we don’t come up with solutions, who else will?”
But when Domscheit-Berg’s idealistic speech ends and the floor opens for questions, the crowd’s skepticism comes pouring out. The first darkly worded statement is made by a member of the audience that Domscheit-Berg considers a longtime friend: Jacob Appelbaum.
“I think it would be really fantastic if everything you do is free software, and I want to advocate that you make sure everything you do is free software,” Appelbaum says. To the hackers present, the suggestion carries two shades of meaning: First, free software can be freely used by other organizations with similar aims. But free—as in “open source”—software can also be thoroughly checked for security bugs, both ones included by mistake and others planted for covert spying.
The young activist follows his comment with a question about OpenLeaks’ purported association with the Germany Privacy Foundation. “I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard those guys are just a front for the defense intelligence agencies of Germany,” he says. “My question is, if you have a foundation, how do you avoid being infiltrated by all the bad motherfuckers that want to infiltrate your organization? And how would you take a rumor like that one, that the Privacy Foundation are related to the spooks, and vet it? And if you found out they were spooks, would you stop working with them or not?” A round of tentative applause follows.
“I’m a German, I know this problem,” Domscheit-Berg responds with a thin smile. “I know all these rumors, and the problem is that you don’t know what to make of that . . . I’ve been reading about myself that I might be paid by the FBI, which is not the case.”
“It was you!” someone shouts from the back of the room, to some sparse laughs. Domscheit-Berg smiles and jokingly puts one finger over his lips.
“We shouldn’t be scared just by all these rumors,” Domscheit-Berg continues, unflustered. “Because that won’t enable us to do anything.”
Then Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who has been sitting quietly near the front of the room, pipes up. “Paranoia will kill us,” she says loudly and matter-of-factly.
“Yes, I agree with Birgitta,” echoes Domscheit-Berg, sounding tired. “Paranoia will kill us.”
The jabs continue, many picking up on Appelbaum’s open-source critique. “What could possibly justify that every bit of software produced so far is not released as free-speech software?” fumes one young hacker.
“It is free software, it’s just not open source right now,” Domscheit-Berg responds, arguing that
making code open source requires constant time-consuming bug fixes that OpenLeaks can’t yet afford to make. “This is due to the overhead—”
“Where’s the code? Where’s the code?” the critic interjects with controlled anger. Another member of the audience asks that OpenLeaks simply publish the SSH password to its servers so that anyone can get into the computers remotely and see exactly what they’re doing.
Domscheit-Berg shakes his head. “You can’t run this like a zoo where everyone can go and watch,” he says.
Near the end of the line of questioners stands CCC board member Andy Müller-Maguhn, a pale and wide-bodied German with compact facial features, a tuft of thin hair on his forehead, and clear blue eyes. “I’m trying to find out what’s open about OpenLeaks,” he says evenly. “I had hoped you would use the principle of openness to ensure the integrity and trustworthiness of the project. For now, you haven’t convinced me you’re doing that.”
Domscheit-Berg can only respond by begging for time again, saying that the group will “probably” open parts of the site’s code to the public. “You’ll have to take my word as much as that’s not optimal,” he says weakly. “That’s all that I can give.”
And then comes the final person in the line of interrogators: John Gilmore, the venerable bearded and ponytailed cofounder of the cypherpunks and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His mere appearance at a conference east of the Mississippi River is a meaningful event; in 2002, Gilmore filed and lost a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security that contested the constitutionality of its practice of asking for his identification before boarding an airplane. Since then, he’s vowed never to board a domestic U.S. flight again, so has had to fly directly from San Francisco to Europe.
“I just want to thank you for trying to do this work,” Gilmore begins with the calm of an elder statesman. “Because if you succeed at it, we get transparency in other parts of the world that have not had it. And if you fail at it, or if people think that you’re lame or whatever, maybe you inspire them to do it better.”
It’s hardly a glowing endorsement. But the crowd applauds more than it has for any other comment.
Over the next hours it becomes clear that OpenLeaks’ immediate problem isn’t a debate over open or closed source software, or even a whisper campaign about its supposed cooperation with intelligence agencies. It simply can’t get online.
The test platform for OpenLeaks is meant to be a submissions system for the left-leaning newspaper Die Tageszeitung—Taz for short. But an hour after Domscheit-Berg’s talk, Leaks.taz.de still returns a “Page not found” message. Moving from the camp’s facilities to an outside data center is taking OpenLeaks’ crew longer than they expected. Two hours pass, with no leak site online. Then three. Then twenty-four.
On the second day of camp, I meet with Reiner Metzger, the editor-in-chief of Die Tageszeitung, who has been camping for the first days of the conference in a small tent next to OpenLeaks’ temporary headquarters to oversee the launch of Leaks.taz.de. But now he’s packing up his things to head back to Berlin, with little to celebrate about his paper’s bold step into the future of leaking. In a very restrained, German way, Metzger is extremely pissed off. He opens his laptop to show me a headline on the website of the competing German newspaper Die Zeit: “Leaking Sky Prevents OpenLeaks Launch,” mocking Domscheit-Berg’s excuse that the storm hindered their preparations.
“Here’s why this is a PR disaster,” he explains as he stuffs his belongings into a bag and rolls up his tent. “We made a big splash. The hackers who come here are still mythical for media people. They’re coming here, thrown it into the ring to fight with this server. It’s a story that every news shift staffer can get immediately. It was a story that was running in every meaningful German newspaper, millions of people saw it. And now a high percentage tried to get to the website. And then again. And again. Nothing happened. Tomorrow the whole thing goes poof and vanishes from the media.”
Metzger had hoped to tout that Die Tageszeitung’s OpenLeaks submissions platform had passed the test of three thousand hackers attacking it. He isn’t looking forward to explaining to his staff that a launch in which his paper has invested a significant chunk of reputation and a front-page story simply didn’t happen.
And he worries the damage may be worse than embarrassment.
“Leak sites have to first have a leak,” he says. “But how do you get this leak? For that you need publicity. Now the publicity is there, and the website is not. And maybe some of the leakers are turned off. In the short run, it’s a disappointment. But in the long run the issue is the leaks.”
“To leak or not to leak,” he adds with a grim laugh as he packs up his things and prepares to head into the OpenLeaks tent to meet with Domscheit-Berg. “That is the question.”
Birgitta Jónsdóttir’s warning about the destructive power of paranoia must have rung a special bell for Domscheit-Berg. It was paranoia that introduced the man known then as Daniel Berg to Julian Assange. And it was paranoia that pushed the two into acts of mutual sabotage that would cause each of them more harm than any state intelligence adversary has yet been able to inflict.
Daniel Berg was born in the West German town of Wiesbaden, the son of an engineer who was the son of an engineer. He grew up playing with Fischertechnik mechanical toys—as a small child, he used the plastic motors and gears to build a functional refrigerator and a light sensor on the stairs up to his bedroom. The latter gadget was intended to alert him to his mother’s approach so he could pretend to be sleeping and continue reading late into the night.
Berg’s family bought a Commodore 64 in 1986, when he was eight years old. It had an interface that allowed him to connect the computer to his Fischer components, and he was amazed to see how the unassuming box of silicon let him program creations like a robotic hand and bring the inanimate plastic to life.
When Berg was thirteen, he bought a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf from a man selling illegal Nazi paraphernalia at a flea market. The book was then banned in Germany, and it fascinated and terrified the teenager. He had heard his grandfathers’ World War II stories—one had been stationed on a minesweeping boat in the North Sea, the other in Poland. Both had deserted near the end of the war—one was shot in the leg during his escape and arrived home in Wiesbaden in such a terrible state that his own mother and brother didn’t recognize him.
But Hitler’s sinister vision pushed Berg to read on about the war and its atrocities, books like The Diary of Anne Frank, The Order of the Death’s Head, about the dreaded Schutzstaffel, and Hell’s Gate, about the concentration camp in Ravensbrück on the outskirts of Berlin. And he was struck by the foolishness of hiding such a dark piece of the country’s history as the memoir of its former Führer.
Soon, his interest in banned words and computers began to mesh. His only friend who owned his own PC set up a bulletin board that allowed them to share files across phone lines. It had a total of about six regular users. But at one point, one of them posted a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook—about as exciting a piece of digital contraband as any bored teenager could hope to discover.
Berg and his friends used the virtual tome’s recipes to mix their own gunpowder and create homemade firecrackers from common chemicals. “For a few months we were completely crazy about explosives,” Domscheit-Berg says. They experimented with melting through various materials, and even obtained a few of the ingredients for plastic explosives. One night they borrowed an antique cannon on wheels from one of the friends’ parents who were away on vacation, filled it with homemade gunpowder, and at three A.M. fired it at a neighbor’s garage before running gleefully into the dark. (The teenagers hadn’t actually inserted a cannonball, so their stunt resulted only in a thrilling bang and a garage door completely blackened by soot.)
Berg was an extremely average, entirely unmotivated student. But he read the books his father,
a data center engineer for a German insurance company, left lying around the house. And during his high school summers, he worked for a cabling company, laying four-inch-thick electrical and networking copper lines and connecting them into data centers to keep up with the mid-1990s’ nearly infinite optimism about the coming deluge of data.
With that tech boom under way, Berg saw little reason to go to a university. He got a job at a consulting company, building and tweaking networks for corporate customers. In his spare hours he and his friends took an abandoned house owned by one of their parents and turned it into a kind of proto-hackerspace, filling its empty rooms with their computers, networking equipment, and records, and hauling couches up to its flat roof. “It was surrounded by trees so that no one could see what we were doing,” he says. “For one summer, we were totally free.”
In the earliest days of wireless Internet, Berg’s crew would pile into his tiny Renault 5, packing it with five bodies and as many antennas as they could buy or scavenge, and go war driving. Wi-Fi encryption was still rare, so most networks were wide open. At one point they climbed to the highest local point, Mount Neroberg, and used a five-foot antenna to access the Wi-Fi of a university ten miles away. On another war drive, they discovered an office management company’s open network, and mapped out its architecture, with its connections to satellite offices in Dresden, Munich, Hamburg. “At the time, it was the most complex network I had ever seen,” says Berg. They watched its traffic and studied it for two months, until one of Berg’s more reckless friends decided to send a note to every printer in the building that the staff should turn off a light they had left on overnight in an upstairs office. It printed on every printer in the office, again and again, until the machines ran out of paper. “Two days later, the wireless network wasn’t there anymore,” says Berg. “I think we had freaked them out.”
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