Review: We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

Wikileaks creator Julian Assange

Documentary movies made for the big screen generally present a dichotomy. The aim to tell the truth, get the raw facts out, is credible, but then the desire to make it a box office success or attract large audiences can lead to the dramatisation of the concept, and a repackaging of the facts to create a compelling narrative.  Somewhere down the line the doco can lose that vital rawness that was its original trump card.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks just manages to escape this trap.

The story of Wikileaks, Julian Assange and the people, institutions and countries affected by his work, is well known. This movie tells this story without sounding like a sermon and without apparent bias.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney takes the audience on Julian Assange’s journey from his days as a young hacker to his notoriety as a global phenomenon.

But at heart this tale is not just about computers and machines. Gibney says it is about  human beings as well, “about truth and lies – how hard it is to tell the truth and how easy it is to tell lies”.

“I discovered that the film is about how vulnerable we all are. And the story turned out not to be just about Julian Assange. It was also about Bradley Manning, the forgotten PFC who was the source of all the documents that WikiLeaks is famous for,” he continues.

Indeed the story of Bradley Manning, the talented but troubled young US soldier who leaked secret military documents, runs parallel to that of Assange. Gibney also comments on whistleblowers and their impact.

“It’s about the peculiar nature of whistleblowers, alienated tormented souls whose great value is that they don’t go along. But it‘s also their curse. They need affection; they need recognition; they need support. The story of WikiLeaks is supposed to be about a new transparency machine that allows anonymous leaks to find publishers. But it turns out that the relationship between source and publisher is more deeply human than that,” he says.

This is what makes the transcripts of online conversations between Bradley Manning and hacker Adrian Lamo among the most interesting accounts in the documentary. This film reminds us that the internet is not just a toy. As Gibney puts it, we really need to ask ourselves: “What is secret? What is public? Who do we become when we face the keyboard and the LED screen?”