Review: Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website

Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website by Daniel Domscheit-Berg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't know Julian Assange, but what I have seen of him talking in the media and his actions made me think he was an; at least no one I would want for a roommate. This insider view from would-be OpenLeaks founder Domscheit-Berg further supports that. Aside from that character study of a selfish, egoistic, and manipulative Assange, this is the story of how some obvious issues with the supposed WikiLeaks philosophy became problematic: wanting info to be free but trying to keep operational details and leakers secret; Assange and his organization appearing hypocritical in their actions; leaking information more harmful than helpful such as identifiers of vulnerable people, etc. Aside from the philosophical issues, most interesting to me was the insider's view of several key WikiLeaks episodes, including:

* the 2008–2012 Icelandic financial crisis providing a peculiar and unsteady fertile ground for Assange et al in the island nation including working w/Iceland MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir toward a free-media zone there

* The Iraq War documents leak allegedly provided to them by United States Army Private Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley). (The author goes to pains to avoid naming the leaker) and two Reuters employees being fired at as well as the "Collateral Murder" video, with its implications of crafting news rather than leaking facts

* 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009 and a growing relationship with Der Spiegel. The avalanche documents overwhelmed efforts in reviewing the documents, including some of the sources of the information. WikiLeaks began to error in some releases, hold back material it could not edit, and begun thus choosing what to release and back away from its purist approach of releasing in order without preference.

* The United States diplomatic cables leak which seemed to mark a point where the leak itself and WikiLeaks became more of a focus than the content of the leak.

Also interesting was the leaks of Scientology works (I didn't know they did that), and various fraternity ceremonies with the resultant heat from those.

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