In his searing novel 1984, George Orwell stated, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”. How prophetic he was as we look back at the creation of Wikileaks in Alex Gibney’s (Mea Culpa: Silence In The House Of God / Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room) documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks. What starts out as a very clear, informative piece of film-making loses its way after Gibney fails to get access to Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. It does, however, expose the dysfunctional behaviour of some of the individuals and governments involved in the world of cyber secrecy as it attempts to get to grips with its subject.

Gibney’s film tells us that Assange’s anti-secrecy operations started as far back as 1989, when the ‘WANK’ worm was used in a cyber attack against the launch of NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, continued with the 2009/2010 release of sensitive bank documents in Iceland that effectively brought down that country’s economy, and reached critical mass with the 2010 release of the appalling footage of a USA Apache helicopter gunship attack on civilians in Iraq, which was deemed “collateral murder”. He goes on to document the relationship between the US Army whistleblower Bradley Manning and Wikileaks, and the allegations of sexual misconduct made against Assange by the Swedish courts.

Interviews with key players in this saga are revealing: Assange is seen in archival interview material (he and Gibney were famously unable to agree on the terms for an interview, the reasons for which are disputed by both sides), and comes across as a man with strong convictions; Bradley Manning’s thoughts are exposed by the use of transcripts of his online posts to Adrian Lamo and he presents as a young man with a complex personal life but strong political beliefs; and Lamo, the hacker who betrayed Manning’s trust, shows himself to be a rather fragile, weird character. Other key players interviewed are the ex-Wikileaks staffer and now critic Daniel Domscheit-Berg and the Wikileaks defector James Ball.

Gibney’s documentary is not sympathetic to Assange. It reaches the conclusion that he is indifferent to the fate of those exposed by Wikileaks, that he is prone to paranoid conspiracy theories (brushing over well-documented evidence that the US has issued a sealed indictment demanding that Assange appear before a grand jury) and that, generally speaking, he has been corrupted by his global notoriety. It’s disappointing that the Oscar-winning Gibney has, on this occasion, seemingly allowed his thoughts about the film’s protagonist to cloud his thoughts about the film’s subject, Wikileaks.

Currently Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, ironically seeking asylum from a country that has a rather dubious record on human rights and press freedom. To date, the Australian Government has not been of much assistance to the fate of one of its own citizens, a man that is yet to be charged with any crime.

// SALT

Previewed at Universal Theatrette, Sydney, on 17 June 2013