We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

Such a bad film. Don't bother.

Extremely interesting and compelling ... I was surprised at how much I liked it

The hyped film, 'We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks', mutates a heroic young soldier into an "alienated... lonely... very needy" psychiatric case with an "identity crisis" because "he was in the wrong body and wanted to become a woman". So spoke Alex Gibney, the director, whose prurient psycho-babble found willing ears across a media too compliant or lazy or stupid to challenge the hype and comprehend that the shadows falling across whistleblowers may reach even them. From its dishonest title, Gibney's film performed a dutiful hatchet job on Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The message was familiar - serious dissenters are freaks. Alexa O'Brien's meticulous record of Manning's moral and political courage demolishes this smear. In the Gibney film, US politicians and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are lined up to repeat, unchallenged, that, in publishing Manning's leaks, WikiLeaks and Assange placed the lives of informants at risk and had "blood on his hands". On 1 August, the Guardian reported: "No record of deaths caused by WikiLeaks revelations, court told." The Pentagon general who led a 10-month investigation into the worldwide impact of the leaks reported that not a single death could be attributed to the disclosures. Yet, in the film, the journalist Nick Davies describes a heartless Assange who had no "harm minimisation plan". Mark Davis, a respected broadcaster for SBS Australia, was an eyewitness, accompanying Assange during much of the preparation of the leaked files for publication in the Guardian and the New York Times. His footage appears in the Gibney film. He told me, "Assange was the only one who worked day and night extracting 10,000 names of people who could be targeted by the revelations in the logs." While Manning faces life in prison, Gibney is said to be planning a Hollywood movie. A "biopic" of Assange is on the way, along with a Hollywood version of David Leigh's and Luke Harding's book of scuttlebutt on the "fall" of WikiLeaks. Profiting from the boldness, cleverness and suffering of those who refuse to be co-opted and tamed, they all will end up in history's waste bin. For the inspiration of future truth-tellers belongs to Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and the remarkable young people of WikiLeaks, whose achievements are unparalleled. Snowden's rescue is largely a WikiLeaks triumph: a thriller too good for Hollywood because its heroes are real. (from an article by John Pilger, published in the New Statesman)

These people are not breaching secutiry or stealing secrets, they are unveiling the truth and reality the powers that be didn't want you to know. Wake up people.