Free WikiLeaks by Luke Harding, David Leigh Page A

interesting weakness. If a message isn’t specially encrypted from the outset, then its actual contents can sometimes be read by other people. This may sound like an obscure technical point. But there is evidence that it explains the true reason for the launch of WikiLeaks at the end of 2006 – not as a traditional journalistic enterprise, but as a piece of opportunistic underground computer hacking. In other words: eavesdropping.
    On the verge of his debut WikiLeaks publication, at the beginning of 2007, Assange excitedly messaged the veteran curator of the Cryptome leaking site, John Young, to explain where his trove of material was coming from:
    “Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inexhaustible supply of material. Near 100,000 documents/emails a day. We’re going to crack the world open and let it flower into something new …We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, opec, UN sections, trade groups, tibet and falun dafa associations and … russian phishing mafia who pull data everywhere. We’re drowning. We don’t even know a tenth of what we have or who it belongs to. We stopped storing it at 1Tb [one terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes].”
    A few weeks later, in August 2007, a Swedish Tor expert, Dan Egerstad, told Wired magazine that he had confirmed it was possible to harvest documents, email contents, user names and passwords for various diplomats and organisations by operating a volunteer Tor “exit” node. This was the final server at the edge of the Tor system through which documents without end-to-end encryption were bounced before emerging. The magazine reported that Egerstad “found accounts belonging to the foreign ministry of Iran, the UK’s visa office in Nepal and the Defence Research and Development Organisation in India’s Ministry of Defence. In addition, Egerstad was able to read correspondence belonging to the Indian ambassador to China, various politicians in Hong Kong, workers in the Dalai Lama’s liaison office and several human rights groups in Hong Kong. “It kind of shocked me,” he said. “I am absolutely positive that I am not the only one to figure this out.”
    The speculation was largely confirmed in 2010, when Assange gave Raffi Khatchadourian access to write a profile. The NewYorker staffer wrote: “One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, ‘We have received over one million documents from 13 countries.’ In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a ‘secret decision’, signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China.”
    The geeky hacker underground was only one part of the soil out of which WikiLeaks grew. Another was the anti-capitalist radicals – the community of environmental activists, human rights campaigners and political revolutionaries who make up what used to be known in the 1960s as the “counter-culture”. As Assange went public for the first time about WikiLeaks, he travelled to Nairobi in Kenya to set out their stall at the World Social Forum in January 2007. This was a radical parody of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, where rich and influential people gather to talk about money. The WSF, which originated in Brazil, was intended, by contrast, to be where poor and powerless people would gather to talk about justice.
    At the event, tens of thousands in