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Chapter 1: What events led to Chelsea Manning leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks?
A listener production. Before we begin today's episode, we would like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we're recording, the Gadigal people, and pay our respects to elders past and present. Hi, I'm Hannah. And I'm Sarah. Welcome to Big Talk.
Big talk deep dives into the big news stories that you've heard of but you don't know all the serious and salacious details about.
We revisit the most shocking headlines of the past that have shaped the world we know today. And in this episode, we're looking at Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
So, before we get into part two, let's do a little bit of a recap of what we learned in the last episode. To take you all back... the early 2000s, there's a hacker named Julian Assange who believes that governments shouldn't be able to operate in secrecy. He believes that it allows them to have additional power and control over their people.
And so Julian believes that all information governments attain should be public information. He believes this would be a more equal distribution of power to the people.
And how does he want to do that? By creating Wikileaks, a website that allows whistleblowers to share information stolen from governments and large corporations.
Using encrypted technology, the whistleblowers now have a never-before-seen level of anonymity, and the full breadth of information they provide is uploaded to the site for the public to read and make their own judgments on.
Over the next three years, WikiLeaks publishes 23 different drops. They range from Guantanamo Bay's Standard Operating Procedures Manual to Scientology's secret documents that expose operating thetan levels... And whilst a number of their leaks gain worldwide attention, Assange still feels like there's more that can be done to hold governments to account.
And he feels that their reach is limited when dense documents and long reports require time, require context. and expertise to interpret by journalists.
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Chapter 2: How did the Iraq War logs and Afghan War diaries impact public perception?
The US Army became tighter over who was given access to certain information. Protocols around sensitive information were changed. Diplomats became more careful about what they wrote in these cables. There was, however, one win, in that the public was now more aware of the ways in which governments lied about strategies in wartime to control narratives and keep the public invested in the war.
Within a month of the last document being uploaded to WikiLeaks, Manning was arrested. Her downfall came as she told an online acquaintance about her role in the leak and he reported it to the authorities. With his statement and forensic analysis of computer activity and her chat logs, investigators were able to prove Manning's role.
She was convicted on 20 charges across Espionage Act violations, computer-related offences and other military offences and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. However, seven years later, President Obama would commute her sentence.
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Meanwhile, Julian Assange was facing a different battle overseas. So he was aware that the convictions from the U.S. government would be coming at some point. Chelsea Manning had gone down, but the fact that he wasn't a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks didn't operate out of the U.S. gave him some more time. But it wasn't just the U.S. he had to worry about. It was also Sweden.
So in between the drops of the Chelsea Manning League, Assange was being charged with a different crime altogether. Sexual assault. Two counts. Assange was in Sweden for a WikiLeaks conference and whilst there had sexual encounters with two women separately. After both of their encounters, the woman turned to the police to file a complaint against Assange.
The first woman alleged that she was pressured into sex with Assange and that Assange purposefully broke the condom he was using on her. The second woman alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Assange whilst she was half asleep and that he also didn't use a condom.
The two complaints were initially handled separately, then later connected by Swedish prosecutors as part of the same investigation. And after initially complying with the Swedish authorities' request to talk, Assange's tune changed and he alleged that the accusations were a U.S. setup.
Assange fled Sweden and when requested that he return for additional questioning, he refused and an arrest warrant was produced. The UK detained him for a short period of time before releasing him on bail while working through the extradition charges to Sweden. This is something that comes up, of course, every time we talk about Julian Assange.
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Chapter 3: What was revealed in the Cablegate leaks and how did it affect global politics?
Yeah. It was huge and had a lot of diplomatic relations involved, right? But it's interesting because... Even in this story, like having to condense it down, you just miss a lot of the kind of Australia's government's position, like all the negotiations that unfold, that his legal teams work.
This is very much like a, it is like a 101 to the story. Like there are so many different little pathways that we could go off and like how each individual government reacted.
Also, all of the WikiLeaks leaks, all the drops. Every single one. There's so much to it.
I mean, I hope this sort of just gives the overview so that when you hear the name Julian Assange... You kind of have a bit more tangible detail.
Yeah, you know what WikiLeaks are and you know the major. You know how expensive what they covered was? You might think one certain drop, but this was a long time with a lot of different matters and issues that he was involved in.
Well, not only that, but then just the amount of conversations around anti-establishment, what governments are hiding from us. Like, there's both so many conspiracies, how journalists should conduct themselves. It makes you wonder what else governments are hiding. Like, this really all came down to this one guy. Yeah.
Yes, it was massive. But I guess the question is also, what is he up to now?
Okay, so it's sort of hard to say what he's up to now. One of the things that we know for sure is he's living a much lower profile private life compared to his WikiLeaks years. He's made limited public appearances and statements since returning home to Australia and is no longer running the day-to-day operations of WikiLeaks in the way that he once did. But what about WikiLeaks?
Well, after 2016, much of the site's activity shut down. Its relationship with major news outlets absolutely collapsed. And it continues to publish the occasional document, but these are often more focused on smaller leaks. Its last major leak was actually in 2017 and was a set of cyber espionage tools used by the CIA known as Vault 7.
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