Vanity Fair Profile of Assange
(Image credit: Andrea James/BoingBoing)
The Man Who Spilled the Secrets
The collaboration between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Web’s notorious information anarchist, and some of the world’s most respected news organizations began at The Guardian, a nearly 200-year-old British paper. What followed was a clash of civilizations—and ambitions—as Guardian editors and their colleagues at The New York Times and other media outlets struggled to corral a whistle-blowing stampede amid growing distrust and anger. With Assange detained in the U.K., the author reveals the story behind the headlines.
Some noteworthy observations about the content of the profile in other publications:
Once the Assange connection was made, the Guardian brought in the New York Times. Assange, flexing his proprietary rights, recruited Der Spiegel—”without consulting anyone at the Guardian or the Times,” Ellison writes—for the publication of the Afghanistan war leaks in July 2010.
The Der Spiegel deal ruffled the Guardian, as did Assange’s eventual inclusion of Britain’s Channel 4 TV network in the Afghan-files “consortium.” The Guardian’s Davies felt so betrayed by Assange, Ellison reports, that the two have not spoken since.
But among the more interesting revelations in this piece: at one point, VF reports that Assange threatened to sue The Guardian because he was upset that the newspaper secured an unauthorized copy of one leak “package” from a Wikileaks volunteer, and was considering breaking the embargo.
In other words: Wikileaks was going to sue The Guardian over a leak, because Assange believed he owned the content which had been leaked to him.
Enraged that he had lost control, Assange unleashed his threat, arguing that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.
Go ahead and let that one sink in a minute.
Oh, the drama…
Update:
Kim Zetter @ Wired has noted what another stash of documents WikiLeaks got seems to be:
personal files of all prisoners who had been held at Guantánamo