Current-events buffs probably think they know the tale of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Prolific filmmaker Alex Gibney may have thought the same when he began researching his film We Steal Secrets. But this engrossing documentary soon diverges from the expected.
Even the movie’s title, or rather the source of it, is a surprise. Not to spoil the fun, but it’s neither Assange nor one of his allies who nonchalantly acknowledges that “we steal secrets.”
Assange himself, currently in self-imposed exile at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, didn’t speak to Gibney. Neither did prominent WikiLeaker Bradley Manning, who’s been behind bars since early 2012. But Gibney’s reliance on archival footage of these two doesn’t hobble the movie, and the writer-director did locate some seriously conflicted people who were once close to either Assange or Manning.
The narrative begins in 1989, when Australian computer hackers hit NASA to protest the launch of a plutonium-powered Jupiter probe. The anonymous attackers, who called themselves WANK (“worms against nuclear killers”) probably included one Mendax, an alias used by a then-teenage Assange.
The nom de hack comes from the term “splendide mendax,” Latin for “nobly untruthful,” and in clips unearthed by Gibney and his team, the grown-up Assange retains the adolescent grandiosity such a choice suggests. He says he likes “crushing bastards” and calls WikiLeaks “an intelligence agency of the people.” Like many a maximum leader, it seems, Assange can’t always distinguish between “the people” and himself.