Film & TV

Film Review: We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

 

WikiLeaks founder Julian AssangeWe Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks is a brilliant documentary by Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and is a sharp reminder that someone is always watching and, no matter how much security you have protecting you, the truth will always come out.

More specifically, this documentary details the creation of controversial website WikiLeaks by Australian Internet activist Julian Assange. Launched in 2006 in Iceland by the organisation Sunshine Press, WikiLeaks is an international, online, non-profit organisation which gathers secret information, news leaks and classified media from anonymous sources and makes it public news. Between 2006- 2010, it facilitated the largest security breaches in US history.

Some people regard Assange as a free-speech hero, while others regard him as a traitor who was responsible for inciting fears that the information released could endanger innocent lives. However, no matter what your view of him might be, his rise and fall goes hand-in-hand with that of brilliant but anguished, young US Army Private Bradley Manning.

In 2010, WikiLeaks received information from the US Embassy in Reykjavik regarding the Icesave scandal, which involved the bankruptcy of European banks in Iceland. These documents were in a collection allegedly given to WikiLeaks by Manning, all of which then became public knowledge. Hundreds of thousands of documents downloaded by Manning, from classified US military and diplomatic servers revealed the behind-the-scenes strategies of government military decisions and their international diplomacy.

This is an outstanding documentary that takes the viewer into the depths of the controversies and the evolution of WikiLeaks. Quite unbiased, it lets us decide who Assange is: a brilliant innovator or a paranoid, obsessed man with his own beliefs in an imaginary world?

Whatever your thoughts may be, it cannot be ignored that We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks is a riveting piece about how IT has brought a level of clarity in our lives never seen before, with our never-ending search for the truth.

Kirstey Whicker

Rating out of 5:   4

 

More News

To Top