♪♪♪ michael brissenden: few people have had an impact on the history of this century quite like julian assange, and few have been as polarizing. julian assange: good evening, london. michl: to some, he's a principled champion of free spch, to others, he's an irresponsible anarchist. assange has sparked fierce debate about the power of information, over the right to know and the right keep secrets. julian: police descended on this building-- scott shane: i suppose very flawed personalities often are,

you know, sort of the engineers of history, and i think julian assange is one. p. j. crowley: i don't see julian assange as this great crusader of transparency. i see him as a reckless narcissist. julian: seven years of dettion-- alan rusbridger: he's quixotic, charming, brilliant, intolerable, maverick, difficult, impossible, narcissistic, entrepreneurial, vindictive. i mean, you know, we could go on all night, and he's all those things, and that's, in a way, why we're here talking about him. he's a very interesting man. julian: as wikileaks stands under threat-- michael: julian assange harnessed the technology of the digital age and challenged the supremacy of governments. scott: he created, invented this mechanism by which people could be given a voice, and not just a voice, but an outlet

for information by the terabyte. michael: in april, assange was finally dragged from his sunless refuge in the ecuadorian embassy in london. he's now facing espionage charges and could spend the rest of his life in jail. julian: i must resist. jennifer robinson: he's now in prison, facing extradition. this fight could go on for years. it's an incredibly sad story, and it's disappointing, to me, that more people are not outraged by the treatment that an australian citizen who has won awards for his publishing work is now being prosecuted for having made that information public. julian: i must resist. kristinn hrafnsson: a line has been drawn in the sand, extradition and thoseing to indictments, or you basically step back, and the lights will go out.

that's how serious it is. michael: from teenage computer hacker to person of global influence, julian assange has become one of the most significant and divisive figures of our time. tonight on "4 corners," we look at how he harnessed the power of the digital era, and we ask the question "is assange a hero or a villain?" ♪♪♪ male voice: and there's more that keep walking by and one of them has a weapon. male voice: roger--received target fifteen.

male voice: see all those people standing down there? michael: in 2010, a little-known organization called wikileaks exploded onto the world stage when it released classified u.s. military footage that revealed a shking event during the war in iraq. male voice: yup, he's got a weapon too. daniel domscheit-berg: in this video, you have this idea that basically you know something terrible is about to happen, and thent still buil. it's working, it's building up towards something terrible. you have this idea, and then suddenly all hell breaks loose in thivideo, and it just gets worse from there. male voice: just f-- once you get on 'em just open 'em up. all right. male voice: i see your element. you got about four humvees out along the-- male voice: you're clear. male voice: all right, firing. male voice: let me know when you've got them. male voice: let's shoot. male voice: light 'em all up. come on, fire. [rapid fire] male voice: roger.

male voice: keep shootin'. [rapid fire] male voice: keep shootin'. [rapid fire] male voice: roger. i got 'em. male voice: two-six, this is two-six, we're mobile. male voice: oops, i'm sorry. what was going on? male voice: god damn it, kyle. all right, ha-ha, i hi'em-- ♪♪♪ michael: the footage showed an attack on a group of men by u.s. apache helicopters. twelve people, including two reuters news staff were killed. two children were injured. the callous behavior of the u.s. troops exposed the brutality of the conflicto the world. male voice: all right, we got about eight individuals. male voice: yeah, we got one guy crawling around down there, but, you know, we got--definitely got something. we're shooting some more. daniel: collateral murder in 2010 was what gave us, let's say, world headlines in every major news publication anywhere in the world, which led to, you know, people, millions of people

watching this video on youtube. male voice: hey, you shot. i'll talk. male voice: hotel two-six. crazy horse one-eight. scott: wikileaks went from this obscure organization that very few people certainly outside the national security news business had ever heard of to being, you know, talked about all over the world. male voice: hotel two-six. crazy horse one-eight. male voice: oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards. male voice: nice. male voice: two-six. crazy horse one-eight. kristinn: the video has since, of course, become iconic as testimony of the iraq war. it's like the napalm girl of the vietnam war. it tells a bigger story than the actual video. female: and joining me now for more details on both the release and the video, julian assange. he's cofounder and editor of the website. hi, there, julian. michael: the collateral murder video also made julian assange a household name.

he was pursued and feted by media around the world. everyone wanted to know who this digital disruptor was. female: what does the release of this video say about the role of your website? are you essentially now the new fourth estate, the watchdogs, so to speak? julian: well, reporters that don't have new information, to some degree, have nothing useful to say. and what keeps people honest and what keeps our management over vilization going is we understand how the world actually works. kristinn: the question was who was the source of this, and who is this guy, julian assange? alan: suddenly this guy emerges who's a kind of hack, a developer, and no one, nobody knew quite how to categorize him or how somebody like that would have access to defense department. we assume that was where they come from--material. so he seemed to sort of have dark artthat the rest

of us didn't have. daniel: everybody wanted to meet him. everybody, you know--yeah. it was like having an audience with him, and not just a rock star, but it was combined with this whole secret agent type of vibe that it had to it. everything was super-secretive. everything had to be done--the whole communication was complicated, so this was in itself also even more appealing to everybody who wanted to meet him, you know. it was rock star combined with a james bond type of vibe, you know. michael: daniel domscheit-berg was one of the early members of wikileaks. he put his life savings into the group. daniel: basically, julian was living off my money for some time as well. i invested something around 50,000 euros or so into buying

some service, buying laptops for people who needed to work. then we had the situation in reykjavik where we were all, you know, six people crashing in two rooms in a hotel for some time, you know, so, in 2009, i put all my furniture into storage and dissolved my apartment as well, and we were just living on the road basically, so iwas people crashing on other people's couches or living in small-time hotel rooms, you know, in order to work on this project. male voice: this is two-six roger. i'll pop flares. we also have one individual movin'. we're lookin' for weapons. if we see a weapon, we're gonna engage. michael: the collateral murder video changed everything. male voice: yeah, bushmaster, we have a van that's approaching and picking up the bodies. daniel: the major thing that happened was that it became news all over the world.

male voice: where's that van at? male voice: right down there by the bodies. male voice: okay, yeah. daniel: there was no immediate backlash from the united states military to that. i mean, there was a reaction, but there was no backlash in the sense that there was a threat or suddenly anybody was worried that we would be arrested or so, but it was clear that we entered a whole new scene of people interested in what we do. male voice: bushmaster. crazyhorsene-eight. michael: no one in the organization knew the identity of the person who'd uploaded the video or where it had come from. kristinn: the way wikileaks is structured is basically promising the protection of the source, and the best protection is not knowing the source, and that's what we tried to achieve. ♪♪♪ michael: the source of the video was bradley manning, a lonely 21-year-old private, who later became chelsea.

the private was stationed in an outpost in iraq, struggling with her identity and with the gravity of what she was seeing about u.s. conduct in the war. nancy hollander: she felt affronted by what she saw. she was also in a difficult period for her. i mean, she didn't really have friends there. people weren't friendly to her. she was having all these conflicts about who she was, you know, whether she was bradley, a man, or chelsea, a woman. michael: manning secretly downloaded masses of classified material, then she contacted wikileaks. nancy: well, she reached out. she had the information. she was horrified by what she had seen, which many of us have seen now, and she wanted to get it out. she called "the new york times." she called "the washington post." nobody would even return her call. and she found wikileaks. nobody really knew about wikileaks in those days,

but she found it online. michael: assange and manning corresponded online in encrypted conversations. at this point, neither knew the identity of the person they were speaking to. nancy: she did find someone with a like mind in julian. she found someone who cared about the public having information, who was worried about what happens in a war, and who believed that this information should get out. and there was no one around her, who she could have that conversation with--no one. michael: the encrypted exchanges on the jabber online chat service would later be collected as evidence against manning and assange. in one chat, as they worked on cracking a secret defense department password, assange commented, "no luck so far." daniel: you know, we had a chat room. naturally, you can see there was lots of chat going on, and

today, if i read the chat logs, if these are real chat logs--and, you know, i would guess they are--then the conversations between julian and chelsea certainly didn't help anybody. michael: assange's dealings with manning would latebe one of the factors that lead to a bitter split in wikileaks. daniel: this is where i think on the next level, this was an abuse of responsibility, maybe, where you were milking a source. that's how i read that, and this is not something we should've been doing or julian shoulde been doing. michael: over a period of months, manning and assamanning uploadedgh theithousands of files.ons. sange was keen for more. at one-point, manning said, "after this upload, that's all i really have got left." assange replied, "curious eyes never run dry in my experience."

daniel: there's little to nothing about, you know, "be careful." there's just a lot about, you know, "what else can you provide?" and even when chelsea says there's nothing else, then there's this really f-- up comment about how the curious eye never runs dry, and that's something, for me, even though i was not part of that conversation, you know, it was happening at a time where, in parallel, i was hing a conversation with julian just in another window of his computer, and i didn't know about what was going on, and that's, in itself, a terrible thing also 'cause it clearly shows how we were failing on an organizational level also to keep checks an balances within our own project. kristinn: i don't really care about the statement of daniel

domscheit-berg, who hasn't been associated with the organization since he tried to basically push julian out of it in the mid-summer of 2010. michael: icelandic journalist kristinn hrafnsson is a collaborator and admirer of assange. he's now taken over as the wikileaks editor in chief. kristinn: has chelsea manning maintained that she was misled? no. has she maintained that she would have wanted publications to be in another format? not to my knowledge. michael: no, quite the opposite, in fact. kristinn: so why would you listen to the voice of daniel domscheit-berg? just listen to chelsea manning. nancy: i don't think chelsea s played at all. i think e did wh she did. julian and wikileaks did what they did. they connected. and i've looked at those transcripts, and i think she was looking for an outlet for this infortion.

she found it. i didn't see anything in those transcripts where anyone was tempting her. she had the information. she released it. michael: manning was arrested just eight weeks after the video was released. she was discovered after she confessed online to another hacker that she was the wikileaks source. daniel: for many years, this was the lurking monster in the room, you know, in the closet somewhere, where we were so afraid that, one day, one of our sources would be arrested, that we would make a mistake or so, but this was the total catastrophe. nancy: she was detained. she was taken to kuwait, and then they sent her to quantico, which was even worse. it's closed now, but it was a marine facility. that's the first thing you need to know.

marines have their own thing, as it were, and i'm sure they did not like the bradley manning who came in, and they treated her very badly. first of all, she was in solitary for 11 months, and they would--made her stand at attention naked. michael: while manning was detained in a military prison, wikileaks was still holding a huge cache of files she had delivered. michael: the big media companies wanted to get their hands on whatever else assange might have. alan: on the basis of collateral murder, you thought, "well, if he's got access to that kind of material, then, of course, we would like to see more of it." michael: why do you think he decided that he would cooperate with you? alan: i can imagine there were a number of reasons jostling around in his mind, so i think it would've occurred to him that there he was on his own.

i mean, he was sort of metaphorically a fugitive. he was, when we first met him, he carried all his belongings in a couple of bags on his back. he had no fixed abode, and he was about to take on, you know, e mighest government on the planet, and he must've thought that was quite a frightening thing to do, so there was a kind of protective element. i imagine that he was quite conflicted in his own mind about the relative virtues of wanting to be his own publisher, his own impresario, his own showman, his own editor, against working in a team with people who would be more experienced than him in handling this kind of material. and so, i think, from the beginning, he was quite conflicted about whether he should partner with someone like "the guardian, but in the end, he decided it was worth it.

michael: "the new york times" was also quick to get on board with wikileaks. scott: they seemed to be sort of a shoestring operation, and assange did seem to be, you know, a somewhat eccentric character or extreme character. he was often making pronouncements about freedom of information that were very absolutist. but, you know, i was happy to work with him. michael: the data set delivered by manning contained hundreds of thousands of classified files. it was a tantalizing prize for any news organization. scott: there was this sort of gradual dawning that wikileaks had an enormous amount of material that the government didn't want out. alan: there had, i think, at that point, never been

a leak of sensitive material on this scale. michael: but julian assange and the old mastheads were like oil and water. the partnership was difficult from the start, marred by disputes about what to publish and what shoulbe redacted. alan: you know, over time, we were working with "der spiegel" and with "le monde," with "el pais," with "the new york times." we were used to making quite nuanced and sensitive decisions about redaction--what was safe to publish and what was not. and then, at the other extreme, you had julian who was--i don't know--less troubled by the process of redaction than we were. and so, i think he was quite suspicious of the way that we were working and very suspicious of any contacts with government. female newscaster: our top story this morning, the white house blasting the release of over 90,000 u.s.

military records on the war in afghanistan. newscaster: wikileaks dealing another massive blow to american foreign war-- male newscter: the white house has denounced the leaking of secret american military files on the war in afghanistan by the online whistle-blower wikileaks. newscaster: it was the largest leak of classified u.s. files in history. julian: i assume most of you have read some of the morning papers. so this is "the guardian" from this morning, 14 pages about this topic. also concurrently in "der spiegel," 17 pages. michael: in july 2010, wikileaks and its collaborators went public with a massive leak. the afghan war logs came from a trove of 90,000 incident and intelligence reports. among other things, they revealed the covert role of pakistan in the war and the true scale of civilian casualties.

julian: we have tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocence at harm. all the material is over seven months old, so it's of no current operational consequence even though it-- michael: wikileaks published documents that contained names, places, and dates that the mainstream media partners had refused to include. daniel: in the middle of releasing the afghani papers, we had this really complicated situation with our three collaborating newspapers: "the new york times," "guardian," and "der spiegel," where we found out he made promises about redacting part of that publication, but no work was put into these redactions at all. p.j.: i mean, just dumping, you know, hundreds of thousands of documents into the public space, you know, that's not whistle-blowing to me. a whistle-blower is someone who knows the information,

understands it, and then can make an informed judgement that the compromise of that information and the benefit of that outweighs, you know, the risk and the harm. julian assange was in no position, you know, to make that judgement. michael: did you get the sense that perhaps he didn't even care? i mean, i know there's that quote that you often used about him where he's apparently sitting with "the guardian" journalist, and he says he's not worried about not removing the names of afghans because they're informants, and if they get killed, well, they deserve it. alan: well, i think if you are, which i think he is, then you think, "it's not my problem." he disputes that quote, but, you know, they're my colleagues, and if they say he said it, i'm satisfied he said it. leigh sales: did you say that? julian: no, and we are suing them for libel, and we have witnesses that show that that is a libelous claim and is an

ongoing dispute. so there's a lot of vitriol in the top end of the news business and a lot of backstabbing, and, unfortunately, we happen to be on the receiving end of it from this individual. robert gates: good afternoon. michael: the stories rocked governments and intelligence establishments in capitals around the world. robert: chairman? mike mullen: thank you, mr. secretary. michael: the u.s. military claimed the leak had put lives at risk. mike: mr. assange can say wherever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an afghan family. disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we've been given,

but don't put those who willingly go into harm's way even further in harm's way just to satisfy your need to make a point. kristinn: you saw the men who were responsible for massacres and deaths and had themselves been swimming in the pools of blood in two wars, dirty wars, were now claiming that the journalists who exposed those atrocities might have blood on their hands. it was surreal, and it stills. michael: did you find him, in your dealings with him--did the w york times find him or you personally find him that he sort of lacked a moral compass when it came to all of this stuff? scott: i a little bit hesitant to come down very hard on wikileaks and on assange as, you know, as sort of the founder of wikileaks because, you know, all journalists, certainly including "the new york times" and myself are doing the same sort of balancing act all the time.

we write stories all the time that people would rather not have us write and that cause people no end of grief and trouble and sometimes, you know, ends up with them in jail, and that's the nature of, you know, sort of informing the public about important things. certainly though, julian assange drew the line in many instances in a different place than we would've drawn it, and sometimes he argued there was no line. michae ineasing, assanghimself scott: at some point, you know, we wrote a "new york times magazine" story about assange that talked about his dirty socks, and he took great offense, and, you know, and that

did capture the tension in the relationship because, on the one hand, he was a very significant figure in the news and a very colorful figure in the news, and if you describedim in a sort of direct and honest way, you know, the result was not always pretty. alan: i mean, like, we all have our moments of vanity, and i think julian was not immune from vanity, but i also think he thought that actually by making himself a very high-profile figure would be, in some sense, a defense shield. michael: questions of character and personal behavior had left him exposed. assange was despised by governments around the world. retribution was coming. michael: 2010 was a momentous year for julian assange.

wikileaks had made him a celebrated media identity, but by the end of that year, he was under house arrest here in the u.k. the u. s. had announced an ongoing criminal investigation into the wikileaks releases and interpol had issued a red notice for his arrest in connection with sex crimes in sweden. male newscaster: the law enforcement around the world is turning up the heat on the website wikileaks. newscaster: an international arrest warrant can now be issued for julian assange. newscaster: one of these charges coerns an allegation of rape. newscaster: interpol has put him on a wanted list in connection with rape allegations in sweden. newscaster: two charges of molestation and one of unlawful coercion. jennifer: the swedish prosutor didot need to issue that warrant because we were actively offering his cooperation and testimony. she got an arrest warrant for his questioning in circumstances when we were offering his testimony. it wasn't required at that time, and yet they sought it in the context of a major publication.

that's why people ask questions about the timing. michael: the sex allegations led to even greater tension within wikileaks. daniel: for me, in any kind of a serious organization, if your manager or your editor in chief or whoever has to face these types of accusations, in order to avoid damaging the project, you take a break. this was all that we suggested. you know, nobody ever wanted to take away the project from julian also. we just wanted, let's say, this to be a little bit more professional. michael: the story was big news, too big for his newspaper partners to ignore. alan: we felt strongly that just because he was working with us, we couldn't pull our punches in a way that we covered whatever had happened in sweden, and i think he didn't like that.

michae the rif in wikeaks became so bad that daniel domscheit-berg and a number of others left. daniel: i think september, or so, 2010, is when me and the majority of the team quit the project, and when we left, let's say, the next phase of wikileaks became all kinds of people who were entering this project that had no experience, that were there because the project was so famous, that were there because they wanted this new type of guru or whatever--following a leader. and this is very different. think what the biggest thing that changed is that there was nobody who was actually challenging julian, his decisions, his position on things, his leadership. michael: assange has always contested this view of events.