EXPOSING CRIMES IS NOT A CRIME

The Reasons Behind
17:00–19:10 

With Stella Assange (Human Rights Lawyer, ZA/UK/AU), Sunna Ævarsdóttir (Global Director of Courage International, IS), Renata Ávila Pinto (Lawyer, Openness Advocate, CEO Open Knowledge Foundation, GT/UK), Chip Gibbons (Journalist, Researcher, US)
Moderation: Tatiana Bazzichelli (Founder and Artistic Director, Disruption Network Lab, IT/DE)

“Information wants to be free” is a motto that has shaped the development of hacker culture and journalism since 1984. The conference opens with the insights of four speakers that will dig deeper into the philosophy and actions behind WikiLeaks’s work. If Julian Assange had been extradited to the US, he would have faced a sentence of up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act for publishing US war crimes, including torture, murder and other human rights violations. In April 2019, Julian Assange was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police and imprisoned in the UK’s Belmarsh high security prison until 24 June 2024. Taken together with his seven-year-asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy and the house arrest in London, Assange spent 14 years in confinement without having been given the chance to a fair trial in defence of his work as an editor and public interest advocate. Assange’s work has been inspired since the 1990s by the principles of hacker ethics, cypherpunk and freedom of information. This body of values is crucial to understand the logic around the foundation of WikiLeaks, the publication of a massive number of leaks and the challenge of exposing unconditionally wrongdoing of people in power. 

For many decades, the political impact and drive to provoke societal change have informed the work of WikiLeaks. This work has inspired many sources and whistleblowers who have fought to reveal crimes committed by state powers or institutions, in the name of accountability and justice, but that have suffered also persecution and criminalisation – to name a few, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, and others that will be speaking during the conference days, 

The reasons and general impact of WikiLeaks’ work are discussed by speakers who have been close to the project or working actively within it: Stella Assange (human rights lawyer and Julian Assange’s wife), and Renata Ávila Pinto (lawyer, digital rights expert and openness advocate), that have been in different phases members of the legal team defending Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and advocating for his freedom. They will be in dialogue with Sunna Ævarsdóttir, an Icelandic politician, human rights lawyer and journalist, that investigated the detention and conviction of Assange, authoring a critical 2024 Council of Europe report that classified Julian Assange as a “political prisoner”. The panel involves also Chip Gibbons, journalist and researcher expert on the history of FBI political surveillance and the impact of the Espionage Act on press freedom. The conversation is moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli, the founder and director of Disruption Network Lab in Berlin, and a curator and researcher on digital culture, hacktivism and whistleblowing.

War & Military
20:00–22:00 

With Lisa Ling (Whistleblower, Former Technical Sergeant, US Air Force Drone Surveillance Programme, US), John Kiriakou (Former CIA Counter-Terrorism Officer, Anti-Torture Whistleblower, US), John Goetz (Investigative Journalist, US/DE), Jesselyn Radack (Director, Whistleblower & Source Protection at ExposeFacts, US/FR)
Moderation: Michael Sontheimer (Historian and Journalist, DE)

The first documents released by WikiLeaks for the section “War and Military” are dated September 2007, concerning the US Military Equipment in Afghanistan, the Military Dictionary and, in November of the same year, the US Military Equipment in Iraq. At the time, the platform was still operating as a wiki, constituting a very revolutionary innovation in the field of journalism and press freedom. The major leaks for this section are dated 2010, when from April to October WikiLeaks published the “Collateral Murder” video, as well as the “Afghan War Logs” and the “Iraq War Logs”. 

The material Chelsea Manning leaked included videos of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan, 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables and 482,832 Army reports. Prior to releasing the initial 75,000 documents, WikiLeaks made the logs available to “The Guardian”, “The New York Times” and “Der Spiegel”, which published reports throughout 2010. The impact of these leaks was global and shed light on the killing and injuries of civilians by coalition forces in a way that was unprecedent, exposing war crimes and misconducts of military forces, and other sensitive information including the funding of the Taliban. By creating a six-year archive of classified military documents, many media outlets indicated the documents have parallels with the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, which were a source of inspiration for the work of Julian Assange. 

Later leaks included the Gitmo Files (revealing in 2011 secret files on all Guantánamo prisoners), and the “Detainee Policies”, more than 100 classified or otherwise restricted files from the US DoD covering the rules and procedures for detainees in U.S. military custody and indicating that some prisoners were placed outside the areas which members from the International Committee of the Red Cross were allowed to visit. This was something the military has repeatedly denied. 

The speakers of this section include whistleblower Lisa Ling that has witnessed first-hand the consequences of US drone programmes and targeted killings on civilians, having travelled to Afghanistan to see the effects of what she participated in; John Kiriakou, the first US intelligence officer to reveal information about the US intelligence community’s use of torture techniques; John Goetz that collaborating with “Der Spiegel” reported on the Afghan War Diaries, the Iraq War Logs, and the State Department cables, as well as worked on the subject of the CIA torture in Guantánamo; Jesselyn Radack, who has worked on the legal impact of leaking military documents, representing several Air Force whistleblowers including Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland, Heather Linebaugh, Lisa Ling, as well as John Kiriakou, and Thomas Drake.

The conversation is moderated by Michael Sontheimer, a German journalist and historian who has been reporting on the Assange case since 2010 and played a key role at “Der Spiegel” in 2012 for publishing the WikiLeaks documents.