By Robert Stevens

Director Bill Condon’s The Fifth Estate is the second major film this year dealing with the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. It is no improvement on the previous risible effort, Alex Gibney’s documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. Its failings are not primarily the fault of weaknesses in direction or poor performances. Rather it was commissioned and produced by DreamWorks, with a screenplay by Josh Singer, based on two very dubious books, both hostile to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the organisation itself.
From this point on the project was unsalvageable as an essentially untruthful work based on politically suspect and prejudiced source material.

Despite claims by the director and others involved that the film was not conceived as an attack on Assange and WikiLeaks, it is a tendentious work promoting a definite agenda.

An honest account of WikiLeaks, an organisation with sworn enemies in the highest echelons of the US establishment, would confront major battles in obtaining decent funding and even getting off the ground. None of these problems were posed to the makers of The Fifth Estate, which was allocated an estimated budget of $30 million by DreamWorks, with Disney leading its distribution.

WikiLeaks traitor Daniel Domscheit-Berg. A cowardly turncoat working for the empire.

The story is largely seen through the eyes of a character based on Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former German WikiLeaks volunteer who was suspended from the organisation in August 2010. His account of his experiences, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, was published in 2011 and was praised by the media on the basis of its character assassination of Assange.

The circumstances surrounding Domscheit-Berg’s exit from WikiLeaks are peculiar to say the least. His first act was to sabotage and disable WikiLeaks’ submission platform, resulting in its being closed down for an extended period of time. Domscheit-Berg also departed with a trove of unpublished documents, which, according to WikiLeaks, “included evidence of more than 60 women and children being massacred in Afghanistan by US forces.”

[pullquote]“DreamWorks has based its entire production on the two most discredited books on the market … As justification it will claim to be fiction, but it is not fiction. It is distorted truth about living people doing battle with titanic opponents. It is a work of political opportunism, influence, revenge and, above all, cowardice.”[/pullquote]

Domscheit-Berg later admitted that he destroyed 3,000 submissions related to the activities of Bank of America. Shortly afterwards he established his own “OpenLeaks” project, which has never published a single document.

Domscheit-Berg claimed, as does the film, that he became disillusioned with Assange largely because the latter was unwilling to work as part of a team and was being “reckless” regarding the protection of sources. This is disingenuous. The reality is that his departure from WikiLeaks coincided with the unprecedented global witch-hunt of Assange, which began in mid-2010.

By this point, WikiLeaks had already made public the “Collateral Murder” video, showing the US military’s aerial killing of innocent civilians in Iraq, and the “Afghan War Logs,” documenting civilian killings and violent assaults by US and allied special forces. The ruling elite was united in its determination to stop WikiLeaks and its founder. This was the basis for a politically motivated frame-up of Assange, using false accusations of sexual misconduct, during his trip to Sweden in August 2010.

Domscheit-Berg was suspended from WikiLeaks on August 26, 2010. On August 25, at his instigation, technicians responsible for maintaining the web site had closed down its engine used for publications and changed passwords for the email system and Twitter access. These events occurred just days after two women had lodged complaints against Assange in Sweden on August 20.

Domscheit-Berg told Der Spiegel on September 27, 2010 that the legal assault on Assange was “a personal attack against him, but they [the accusations] do not have anything to do with WikiLeaks directly.”

Domscheit-Berg was expressly hostile to WikiLeaks’ exposures of crimes committed by the United States and other major imperialist powers. He told the Times the following month, “The aim of the platform when it started in 2006 was to inform intelligent people and supply them with a basis of solid facts for intelligent decisions. But it became a problem as soon as we started to take sides.(sic)”

The second source for the film, “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy,” was published in February 2011 by the Guardian and written by journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. The book crowned the Guardian’s campaign against Assange, after firstly securing agreement with him to assist in the publication of secret US diplomatic cables, starting in November 2010.

The Guardian’s support for Assange to be railroaded to Sweden, and its portrayal of him as an ego-maniac, meant the book was rapidly elevated to the status of the “official” WikiLeaks story.

Assange was never approached by anyone at DreamWorks and allowed to give his account. He refused a request by actor Benedict Cumberbatch to meet him in preparation for his portrayal of Assange in the film.

As he explained in a lengthy letter to Cumberbatch, “DreamWorks has based its entire production on the two most discredited books on the market … As justification it will claim to be fiction, but it is not fiction. It is distorted truth about living people doing battle with titanic opponents. It is a work of political opportunism, influence, revenge and, above all, cowardice.”

Cumberbatch said Assange’s letter at least forced him to ponder his participation, stating, “I wanted to create a three dimensional portrait of a man far more maligned in the tabloid press than he is in our film.”
A Vogue article noted that after reading an early script, “Cumberbatch realized that some of Assange’s fears were justified. ‘On a lot of the stage direction, we collided paths because Bill [Condon] did seem to be setting him up as this antisocial megalomaniac.’”

As a drama The Fifth Estate lacks coherence. It flits here and there to what is at times a deafening soundtrack.

The vast crimes exposed by WikiLeaks seem largely unimportant to the makers of The Fifth Estate, which cuts from the current activities of Assange in various locations to flashbacks to a lonely Assange as a child. One scene falsely claims he was part of a “cult” as a child that “made the kids dye their hair white.”

The actual revelations made public by WikiLeaks, particularly from “Collateral Murder” onward, are briefly and haphazardly treated. A number of sub-plots are introduced, designed to prove, falsely, that WikiLeaks was unnecessarily endangering lives with its leaks.

Toward the end of the film, the Domscheit-Berg character meets with Guardian journalist Nick Davies (David Thewlis), the newspaper’s original link to Assange.

Davies, a consultant on the film, pontificates about the origins of the free press in Britain and how the “fourth estate”–the mass media–came about on the bones of those who were martyred for it. He tells Domscheit-Berg that the “information revolution” is ushering in a new “fifth estate,” hell-bent on “destroying its predecessor.” His is a paean on behalf of “responsible,” i.e., politically-compromised and pro-establishment journalism–replete with a warning against dangerous Assange-types who need to be sidelined.

“Daniel, you and Julian gave us a glimpse of what the future could be,” Davies declares. This is nauseating. Davies did much to legitimise the unprecedented campaign to “get Assange” in order to crush WikiLeaks, with his scurrilous Guardian December 2010 article, “10 days in Sweden: the full allegations against Julian Assange.”

Assange has, for more than three years, been denied his basic democratic rights, forced to seek refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. His life and freedom remain threatened by immensely powerful enemies.

He is the victim, the persecuted. This is simply glossed over. Condon has airbrushed the last three years out of his WikiLeaks story. Everything after Assange’s December 2010 detention in London is covered in less than five minutes, reduced to a few title cards, interspersed with the fictional Assange speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy. The Fifth Estate is a tawdry project, and everyone involved in it, artistically and financially, should be ashamed of themselves.

By Thomas Gaist, wsws.org

The president that implicitly promised transparency and a strengthening of citizens’ rights, has instead decimated them.

The Washington Post on Tuesday published new revelations stemming from PowerPoint slides and documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. In an article headlined “NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally,” the Post wrote that “the National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans.”

The new information reported by the Washington Post further confirms what has become apparent since the first Snowden leaks emerged last June: the NSA data collection programs are virtually unlimited. The NSA and other state agencies are in possession of a wealth of private and personal information on every individual who uses the Internet or a telephone, both in the US and around the world. All of this is carried out in violation of the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

According to the Post, “The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and ‘buddy lists’ from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.”

The PowerPoint slides outline the sprawling dimensions of the NSA’s contact list collection efforts. As reported in the Post, the slides show that the NSA’s Special Source Operations acquired “444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers” in the course of a single day in 2012.

The slides describe intrusive and aggressive practices by the agency. One slide, with the heading “Data is stored multiple times,” cites three different programs—MARINA, MAINWAY and PINWALE—that sort through Internet metadata, telephone metadata and contact chaining, and written content, respectively.

Another slide presents a case study of a Yahoo account, belonging to a member of the Iranian Quds Force, that was hacked by the NSA in September of 2011. A mass of spam messages subsequently sent from the account led to the accidental collection of huge quantities of data as a result of all the “false connections” generated by the spamming.

[pullquote]As reported in the Washington Post, the slides show that the NSA’s Special Source Operations acquired “444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers” in the course of a single day in 2012.[/pullquote]

Slide four reads: “Buddy Lists, Inboxes: Unlike address books, frequently contain content data—Offline messages, buddy icon updates, other data included—Webmail inboxes increasingly include email content—Most collection is due to the presence of a target on a buddy list where the communication is not to, from, or about that target.”

Slide four further states: “NSA collects, on a representative day, ~500,000 buddy lists and inboxes—More than 90 percent collected because tasked selectors identified only as contacts.”

Collection of the address lists is carried out, the Post reported, on the basis of “secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.”

The address lists provide the NSA with enormous amounts of data. The Post described the lists as “far richer sources of data than call records alone,” noting that “Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information.”

The address books are reportedly collected overseas, allowing the NSA to skirt nominal restrictions on the collection of data produced by US citizens. As the Post reported, “In practice, data from Americans is collected in large volumes—in part because they live and work overseas, but also because data crosses international boundaries even when its American owners stay at home.”

The newspaper continued: “The NSA has not been authorized by Congress or the special intelligence court that oversees foreign intelligence to collect contact lists in bulk, and senior intelligence officials said it would be illegal to do so from facilities in the United States…

“The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points ‘all over the world,’ one official said.”

Reports of address book collection are only the latest in a torrent of revelations that have emerged over the past four months regarding illegal surveillance programs carried out by the NSA and other state agencies. These include:

* Telephone metadata collection, including historical location data produced by cell phones

* PRISM, a global electronic surveillance and data-mining operation

* The Drug Enforcement Agency’s Hemisphere Project, a partnership involving DEA agents and AT&T employees from 2007, which collects vast quantities of telephone data

* The XKeyscore program, which enables the NSA to monitor practically all internet traffic produced globally through a variety of spying activities, including dragnet surveillance of web data and reading of email content

* Boundless Informant, a data analysis system used by the NSA to summarize the results of global data-mining for surveillance managers

* NSA penetration of the European Union computer network and its bugging of EU headquarters and offices in Washington, DC and New York City

* Extensive collaboration between the NSA and Microsoft, with the latter making available for snooping all documents and messages produced by users

* Treasury Department plans to transfer data on Americans’ financial records to the military and intelligence agencies.

These programs have the full support of the political and media establishment, including the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

In an opinion piece published in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, defended the unconstitutional NSA programs with the standard claim that they are necessary to protect the US from terrorism.

Ignoring the voluminous evidence that the programs are used to spy on millions of ordinary Americans who are not remotely linked to terrorist groups, as well as foreign governments, organizations and individuals allied with the United States, Feinstein wrote: “The US must remain vigilant against terrorist attacks against the homeland… The NSA call-records program is working and contributing to our safety… If we end this vital program, we only make our nation more vulnerable to another devastating terror attack.”

This is nothing less than a blanket justification for shredding all democratic rights and instituting a police state. Moreover, it ignores the well established fact that the US is supporting groups in Syria, Libya, and other countries that are allied with Al Qaeda, the supposed target of the surveillance programs.

The real target of the surveillance apparatus is not foreign terrorist groups, but the American people. The ruling class is fearful of the emergence of broad social opposition to its reactionary policies and is building up the means for carrying out political repression on a mass scale.

Wikileaks, The Fifth Estate and Corporate Pop Culture’s War on Whistleblowers

Promotional still from The Fifth Estate, with British actor Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange. Do actors ever understand the political implications of their work, and do they care?

by CHRIS GEOVANIS, Counterpunch
If Walt Disney had actually been cryonically frozen and subsequently revived, he’d be laughing his ass off with delight at the reactionary dreck his namesake film company has just pumped out with The Fifth Estate. The film’s central themes would have been right up the notorious right winger’s alley — from the racist stereotype of the ‘good Arab’ State Department asset to its reactionary embrace of censorship, lest full disclosure ‘harm’ a government busily committing and covering up the evidence of its war crimes.

Wikileaks has opined at some length on both the film’s egregious factual inaccuracies and the lethal intent of its embedded meta-messages. Certainly The Fifth Estate serves as a rolling character assassination of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — in these kinds of toxic infotainment fabrications, it’s always more important to spin the politics of personality than to honestly examine the realpolitic of governments and the corporations they represent. But the film is just one cog in the wider wheel of wholesale assault on advocacy journalism and freedom of the press – and it diligently parrots the larger spin that government authorities use to subvert an uncensored review of their crimes.

Every repressive state worth its salt understands that knowledge is power – and that secrecy is the stronghold of official deceit, with censorship that protects liars and criminals at the heart of some of the worst government crimes of the century. One might ask the Iraqis, whose neighborhoods and lives have been torn apart by the official fictions at the heart of the pretext for U.S. war on that nation in 2003 – but thousands are dead and thousands more are still dying, and the dead, as a rule, don’t speak up much. Whistleblowers, advocates and reporters – including journalists of the civilian/citizen/advocacy sort –commonly take up that task for the maimed and murdered.

Wikileaks has been at the forefront of the contemporary effort to push out uncensored, unvarnished data about crimes that range from corporate banking scandals to the U.S. massacre of Reuters reporters in Iraq. What really catches in the government’s craw? You’re free to review and assess that data unencumbered by big media spin or government censorship. How else to explain the feds’ debauched assault on independent journalist Barrett Brown, who’s facing over 100 years in prison for essentially repasting a publicly available link that contained publicly available data “that he was researching in his capacity as a journalist,” according to his lawyer.

Two principles have formed the core of Wikileaks’ operative mores since its formation: uncensored information and a rigorous commitment to protect the anonymity of the whistleblowers who provide that information. Unsurprisingly, authoritarian governments, criminal corporate enterprises and their toadies just hate these two prongs of potential exposure – full disclosure of primary source material and protection of the sources of that information. Just ask Richard Nixon how he felt about Deep Throat.

For a more contemporary example, just ask the censorship-happy Obama administration, which is increasingly being viewed as the single most hostile government to whistleblowers and freedom of the press in the history of history, at least among our vaunted Western ‘democracies.’ According to analysts like Timothy Karr of Free Press, who calls Obama “like Nixon, but worse,” the Obama administration has drawn liberally from the Nixon playbook to silence and criminalize people and projects who expose government wrongdoing.

Mass media and pop culture are potent tools in the effort to manufacture the public consent that neo-liberal states and their corporate allies require to smooth the course of their economic, political and environmental predations. Note, for example, the corporate news networks’ ceaseless conflation of ‘U.S. interests’ with corporate interests, when so many ‘U.S. interests’ like global trade deals and ‘humanitarian intervention’ are clearly terrible for most people and the planet but great for the quarterly bottom line of corporate interests. Mass media also serves as a critical linchpin in their ruling elite owners’ efforts to frame the pesky obstacles to our repression and disenfranchisement – the whistleblowers who make evidence of their crimes available — as ‘terrorists’, ‘leakers’, criminals and whatnot.

These reinforcing memes of ruling elite agendas pop up as visual punch-lines in a variety of formats, from high-rent docudramas like The Fifth Estate to the endless stream of blabbermouths on the nightly news shrieking over the perils of government leaks – occasionally bookended with B-roll of solemn flag-folding at some poor sucker soldier’s funeral. The broad goal: to twist your heart and turn your head from the real predations made possible by the growing security state and the authoritarian corporate monolith it lives to support.

You don’t have to channel surf much on the idiot box to find shows that reinforce these motifs, whether it’s Showtime’s Homeland franchise and its endless demonization of Arabs and Muslims of every stripe or re-runs of the openly proto-fascist ‘24.’ For that matter, virtually every formula cop show on the market backs up these unabashedly neo-jackboot notions, whether you’re eyeballing bunk science on the endless CSI spin-offs or inadvertently landing on Fox Noise. The messaging is pretty consistent, namely that we mustn’t know too much about what our governments are doing because (choose your favorite canard here): we’re not smart enough to evaluate uncensored information on our own; we help the ‘terrorists’; we endanger our ‘friends’; the ‘bad’ guys win; the government security state really does have ‘our’ best interest at heart.

[pullquote] Mass media and pop culture are potent tools in the effort to manufacture the public consent that neo-liberal states and their corporate allies require to smooth the course of their economic, political and environmental predations.[/pullquote]

That’s what makes big-budget pop culture endeavors like The Fifth Estate so valuable. Non-institutional players unwilling to submit to self-censorship in the service of the government’s notion of what’s good for you are simply intolerable to any jackboot state worth its salt. Fortunately for our overlords, most corporate news outlets are pretty terminally supine to this agenda. Not so Wikileaks and its sources. That’s one reason the U.S. Senate has once again taken up the effort to define ‘legitimate’ journalism, and by extension, who and what remains worthy of protection under what remains of our shredded concepts of freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Wikileaks is, of course, excluded from this protection, such that it is – and more and more, it’s less and less.

Make no mistake. The Fifth Estate’s shallow smear campaign has more than Wikileaks in its sites. Besides taking a series of cheap shots at Chelsea Manning, its broad themes undergird the same sorts of distortions that have been used to dirty up whistleblowers and information freedom advocates who include Stratfor whistleblower Jeremy Hammond, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdon, the late, great tech innovator and DemandProgress founder Aaron Swartz, and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou.

This is particularly relevant today as public opinion continues to evolve in the wake of Snowden’s work to reveal the sweeping scope of government spying on our private lives, and as big media continues to scramble to preserve its profit points and control of the flow of information to the public sphere. Hence, the utility of pop culture endeavors that support our ruling elites’ official embrace of repressive tolerance — the kind of state-sanctioned permission designed to preserve the veneer of democratic rights while undercutting any truly serious challenge to a status quo that is literally killing the planet.

At the core of corporate pop culture projects like ‘24’, The Fifth Estate, and media productions of this ilk is the push to advance the demolition of personal privacy while trumpeting the imperatives of state secrecy. This dovetails nicely with the joint corporate/government agenda to sell us shit – be it products or policies – while undermining our ability to gauge that product’s safety, efficacy or morality. While the The Fifth Estate script includes a couple of toss-away bromides about Wikileaks’ commitment to the anonymity of its whistle-blowing information providers, its real thrust is to boost the fabricated ‘common sense’ notion that some information just isn’t ready for prime time consumption, ergo we should rely on ‘responsible’ outlets like The New York Times to parse the data for us. That seems like a pretty dubious strategy, given the Times’ historic embrace of reporters like congenital liar Judith Miller or congenital hidden fister Thomas Friedman.

That ‘not ready for prime time’ frame is particularly important to state/corporate apparatchiks who’ve been screaming about disclosures like the Stratfor and NSA leaks, because the raw data in these kinds of leaks exposes the sweep of corporate/government collusion in our disenfranchisement (and re Stratfor, the pathetic idiocy of their ‘intelligence’). And that kind of government/corporate collusion is truly menacing, whether it’s used to push back public opposition to Keystone or support the bankster/government assault on Occupy Wall Street.

The information that our rulers can’t commodify and manage, they suppress – and projects like Wikileaks monkeywrench that scheme. Above all else, the U.S. government and its corporate allies just cannot abide anonymity, unless you’re on their team. You can’t, after all, crush disclosure and dissent if you can’t ID the dissidents or finger the whistleblowers. Repressive governments work mightily to shut down uncensored, anonymous sources of information and opposition organizing – just ask Athens Indymedia, for example, or Jeremy Hammond, who’s facing a decade in prison for exposing the Stratfor schmucks.

Anonymity undermines managed dissent, and we live in an age of managed dissent. See, for example, the vagaries of the ‘official’ U.S. peace movement, which for more than a decade willfully dismantled itself every 18 months to devote itself to boosterism for Democratic Party candidates like Barak Obama and his congressional cohort of corporate toadies. That’s hardly a recipe for truly radical resistance to state power or state repression – and that’s A-OK with the state, which would just as soon brand you a terrorist and put you on a kill list as allow you to get away with whistleblowing unmolested.

If you think this is hyperbole, then check out the promo posters going up globally for The Fifth Estate. The Benedict Cumberbatch cum Julian Assange image fills the frame and meets you eye to eye, with the word ‘traitor’ pasted just below. Subtle. That harmonizes rather nicely with the beyond-the-pale – but not beyond-the-possible – suggestion from one of the nation’s highest-ranking intelligence officials that Snowden, now that he’s been publicly identified as the NSA whistleblower, ought to be executed.

Wikileaks has just released its own film, a new documentary called Mediastan, which chronicles their largely fruitless efforts to partner with journalists and news outlets from South Asia to the United States to utilize unredacted content that documents U.S. government shenanigans. Mediastan may just concurrently help undermine the funding blockade that hostile corporate governments like the United States have sought to impose on the whistleblowing project. It’s sure as hell a better watch than the corporate smear campaign coming from Walt’s crime partners to a theater near you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Geovanis is a Chicago media activist, advocacy journalist and member of the HammerHard MediaWorks collective. You can reach her via Twitter @heavyseas, via her Facebook page or at chrisgeovanis(at)gmail.com.