One On One: Andy Greenberg, Author, \"This Machine Kills Secrets\"

Andy Greenberg is the author of “This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cyperpunks, and Hacktivists Aim To Free The World's Information,” published by Dutton Publishing. Mr. Greenberg, a Forbes writer, interviewed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange three weeks before he leaked 250,000 State Department files, the largest release of classified materials in history. In that interview, Mr. Assange alluded to another leak-this time involving a major bank-that he likened to the Enron e-mails. Speculation that Assange was referring to Bank of America shaved $3.5 billion off the bank's market capitalization. But that release never happened. Mr. Greenberg said he wrote the book, in part, to find out why. He traveled to cypherpunk hangouts all over the country and then the world-Iceland, Sweden, Bulgaria, Berlin-to meet Julian Assange's predecessors and those who seek to build the next WikiLeaks. The following is an edited interview about information and the sub culture tha t fights-often among themselves-to free it.

Q. What prompted you to write this book?

When I saw WikiLeaks dump these record-breaking troves of classified information in 2010, it seemed to me a new reality where anyone can eviscerate a government agency or company that they work for. I went to meet with Julian Assange in late 2010, three weeks before he released 250,000 State Department cables. At that point, the media was treating Assange as a singularity-this one crazy, or courageous, or evil hacker, however you wanted to see him-but I wanted to figure out how WikiLeaks did what it actually did. Was this about Assange? Or was it about the technology he used? And if it was the technology, then could this be replicated? So I went on this journey around the country, and then the world, to figure out where the ideas for WikiLeaks came from historically and where they were going.

Q. You introduce us to several pioneers of encryption technologies. What was their impression of Julian Assange?

It was mixed. Many cyberpunks in the 90s dreamed of using encryption to take power away from the government and give it to individuals. They see Assange as a gutsy hero to some degree, or the proof that everything they had dreamed of was possible.

Q. You introduce us to several hackers, like Peiter Zatko, the hacker better known by his hacker handle “Mudge”, who could have easily become the next Julian Assange but chose instead to work on anti-leaking technologies for the government.

Mudge and Assange were friends back in the day. Mudge never really wanted to talk about it. He claims now he has never worked on rooting out insider leakers but a Request for Proposals that he wrote seems very much to be trying to solve the problem of how to root out human leakers inside organizations. A lot of the hackers who were on the freedom of information side of this game in the 90s-when Assange was still a teenage hacker cracking into the Pentagon-have become part of the establishment and now work for the cybersecurity industry or the military.

Q. Their dynamic reminds me of Professor X and Magneto in X-Men.

My favorite analogy is “Sneakers.” Robert Redford and Ben Kingsley play Cosmo and Marty, two friends who are hackers that end up on opposite sides of the information war. Cosmo goes to prison and becomes a freedom of information advocate. Marty becomes a White Hat hacker who helps companies plug their security holes. There's this great moment in the film when Cosmo says to Marty: “No more secrets, Marty.”

But, to be clear, Mudge does not like this portrayal of his work. He claims his project is intended to root out malware not human leakers. But when you read his Request for Proposals, he writes about how to find someone who is printing a document, or writing it to a CD and taking it out of an organization. That's not something malware can do. Reading that, is becomes clear that his project is not just about malware but about humans, too.

Q. In his review of your book, Evgeny Morozov praises your exhaustive research of encryption technologies, but criticizes the fact you did not give anti-leaking technologies the same due. He wrote, “For every machine that kills secrets, there are at least two that keep them alive,” and cites the example of Fox News which was able to track down a leaker within 48 hours.

In part, Morozov and I agree that WikiLeaks touched off a cat-and-mouse game between leaking and anti-leaking technologies. But I don't think it's as easy to catch a leaker as Morozov makes it sound. The whole notion of what the industry calls “the insider threat” is that lots of people have legitimate access to the same documents and network security is not necessarily going to help you find out who leaked a document because everybody's fingerprints are on it. This game will continue to get more sophisticated on both sides. But looking ahead, there will always be ways to get around really strict network security. The next level of this game will be installing malware on multiple machines that gives you control of other people's machines so you can leak documents from their computers.

Q. What was your impression of Julian Assange when you first interviewed him? How has that changed?

At the time, he struck me as very charismatic and ultra-smart. I was impressed with his ideology. WikiLeaks seemed like a noble experiment. Yes, leaks hurt companies and government agencies but there is a moral argument behind them because if whistleblowers see the need to get information out, then he is just enabling them. But when I watched WikiLeaks fall apart over the next year, I became less impressed with the way Assange ran the project. To some degree, he let his own paranoia take over. That caused a mutiny in which The Architect, the engineer who built WikiLeaks infrastructure, left and took Wik iLeaks' best resources with him to OpenLeaks.

Q. You are only journalist to ever meet “The Architect.” How did you track him down?

I found him by accident. I was tracking the launch of a WikiLeaks spin-off group called OpenLeaks who were debuting at the Chaos Communication Camp, a gathering of radical hackers who camp out in an airfield outside of Berlin. I was shadowing everything they were doing at the camp, because I still believed then that OpenLeaks might become the next WikiLeaks. There was one guy who struck me as very authoritative and was teaching everyone some really technical things about anonymity. So I pulled him aside and he started to say things that made it clear he had been part of WikiLeaks. I started pressing him about who he was and eventually he told me he was The Architect.

Q. What is the status of his relationship with Julian Assange?

They do not have a very fond relationship at this point. He sees Assange as driven by his ego and there were points when he felt like Assange was not as focused about the release of significant information as he was on breaking records, releasing leaks that were bigger than the last one.

Q. In your interview with Julian Assange, he alluded to an upcoming leak that would involve a major American bank. Rumors he was referring to Bank of America cut $3.5 billion off of its market cap. But that leak never happened? Why?

I kept waiting for it and it never happened. It became the leak that got away. It was one of the mysteries I set out to solve with this book. What happened to that bank leak? I don't know if I should give away the ending but that bank leak essentially became a casualty of the mutiny within WikiLeaks.

Q. Was it Bank of America? What happened to the files?

WikiLeaks has now said the leak was Bank of America. But they don't have it anymore. WikiLeaks blames The Architect and Daniel Domscheit-Berg for taking the files with them to OpenLeaks. Those two claim that was not the case, that WikiLeaks just lost the files.

Insiders have told me that when The Architect joined WikiLeaks it was a mess. It was two creaking servers without all the flashy security that Assange had promised in interviews with the media. The Architect rebuilt it from scratch. They say the leak was lost because of an I.T. problem, that WikiLeaks was trying to deal with enormous amounts of data and that one of their storage drives crashed and they lost it.

Those are the two versions of events. It has been impossible to get to the bottom of which one is true. But I don't ever expect to see those bank documents.

Q. How many WikiLeaks copycats are there now? Which have been the most successful?

More than 50. I spent the most time with BalkanLeaks, which has been successful. But BalkanLeaks proved that for this to work you have to be in a country with a free media because none of their scoops were picked up by the mainstream media. I don't think anybody has successfully replicated WikiLeaks. The best we've seen have been various sub-groups of  Anonymous. But that's not insider whistleblowing so much as stealing stuff.

Q. And even Anonymous was paralyzed earlier this year by the revelation that one of its own was a government informant.

Anonymous is a multi-headed hydra. As soon as you cut off one head, another one will just pop back up. There are basically two ingredients for any WikiLeaks-like organization: One is a really strong understanding of the anonymous technologies, which I think OpenLeaks has. The second is a trusted figure at the helm, which is what Julian Assange was, but OpenLeaks lacks. OpenLeaks is very distrusted after what they did to WikiLeaks. That part is just as rare as the technical know-how and that is why I don't think we've seen a successful WikiLeaks since.