09 ISSUE IX
NOVEMBER 2025
NOVEMBER 2025
Crushing Bastards
The 2013 film “We Steal Secrets” offers a comprehensive, albeit overly personalized, examination of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and whistleblowing: a timely revisit in the age of Trump.
By Griffith Swidler
For a brief period, around 2010 and 2011, in the US and for much longer in the rest of the world, Julian Assange came close to claiming the title of the world’s most interesting man.
American director Alex Gibney’s 2013 film, “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” documents the rise and fade of Assange and his website WikiLeaks, an online publishing house for state secrets.
From a poster for “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.”
Midway through the film, a press conference clip shows Assange being asked why he does what he does. He smiles to himself and answers, “I’m a combative person.” He pauses, then adds, “And I enjoy crushing bastards.”
Gibney introduces Assange to us as a young Australian computer whiz, who first tinkers with cyber-justice during his involvement with the 1989 WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers), a cyberattack that hacked into a NASA systems network. The story of Assange and WikiLeaks is described to us through interviews with his collaborators, friends, foes, and ultimately, his victims. Assange himself, for reasons that become clear later in the film, is never interviewed. This is Gibney’s seventeenth documentary.
Assange designed WikiLeaks to be an accessible online warehouse for sensitive, important, and often classified information. The website provided the public with access to millions of documents related to war, espionage, crimes, corruption, and diplomacy. The first portion of “We Steals Secrets,” pieces together footage taken during the early days of WikiLeaks. We see Assange and his inner circle poring over their computers in startup-like conditions as they attempt to set up a “journalism safe haven” in Iceland. Then we’re propelled forward to January of 2010, when Assange is suddenly gifted material that will make his career and change his life. He is contacted through encrypted channels by Chelsea Manning, an intelligence analyst with the United States Army. (“Bradley” Manning, as referenced in the film, transitioned and became “Chelsea” Manning publicly six months after the release of the film. I will be referring to Manning here with the name and pronouns she now uses.) Manning, a sympathetic figure who is tormented by both gender dysmorphia and intimate knowledge of American war crimes in the Middle East, passes Assange 750,000 plus classified and sensitive military documents.
The bulk of “We Steal Secrets” focuses on Manning’s leaked material, now known as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary, and the fallout of their publication on WikiLeaks. The Logs and Diary contained damning documents, correspondences, and video footage of war crimes committed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. In July of 2010, Assange began publishing this leaked content on WikiLeaks, coordinating simultaneous publications with The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and The New York Times. It’s here that a battle over information, perception, and truth begins, as Assange does the “unthinkable” by “taking on the American government in public.”
The United States government is blindsided by the move, quickly moving to parry the embarrassing publication of its secrets and salvage its reputation as the world’s moral compass. It immediately seized on language and leaned on news outlets, attempting to control narratives surrounding the leaked material. We see American politicians and military figures take to the airwaves to brand this unknown leaker ( Manning) as a traitor to America. And Assange is labelled by those same figures as a murderer who will “have blood on his hands,” a reference to strategic military information in the leaked documents that may have resulted in compromised operations. It’s worth noting that while WikiLeaks did not censor much of the documents in its possession, no documents were published that contained the names of American spies or informants. The United States also appears unusually preoccupied with imagery from the logs and leaks. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency (NSA), speaks candidly about this in the film, noting that the American public has always responded strongly to powerful visuals—such as the flag-draped coffin of a fallen American soldier. According to Hayden, the most damaging element of the WikiLeaks disclosures was not the documents themselves but the classified video footage from an American Apache helicopter, which documents how American military personnel killed a Reuters photographer, a group of nearby men, and a father driving his son to school.
Viewers can hear the helicopter’s crew making jokes as they shoot civilians from above. The footage was widely circulated after the WikiLeaks publication and remains available online, garnering tens of millions of views.
We Steal Secrets concludes with Assange intentionally blurring the lines between himself and WikiLeaks as he attempts to raise his profile and protect himself. Those closest to Assange describe him as a paranoid individual who desperately wanted to live the life of a spy-thriller protagonist. Chelsea Manning’s material allowed him to make that dream a reality, but it also made him a political opponent of the United States government. Months after the initial Iraq War Logs publications, Assange was charged with rape in Sweden. In response, both Assange and the United States government attempt to further merge the man and the website. The American government launches a media assault, using the criminal charges to discredit Assange and by extension, his website. Assange then clings tighter to his website, claiming the charges were cooked up by governments fearful of his website. He asserts publicly that the attempt to imprison him is an indirect attempt to shut down his website.
“We Steal Secrets” ends as the walls close in on Assange and Manning. Evading extradition to Sweden, Assange finds (temporary) refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, UK. His collaborative circle of “freedom fighters and truth tellers” then turns on him when he asks them to sign NDAs. Chelsea Manning was turned in by her confidant, Adrian Lamo, and promptly court-martialed for violations of the Espionage Act, the same act that Assange will be tried and convicted under in absentia, years later. While Assange, who eagerly sought the spotlight, is remembered as the most notorious figure of that WikiLeaks era, it is Manning who assumed the bulk of the risk and eventually served the much longer prison sentence.
As of writing, Assange is back in Australia. He struck a plea deal with the Americans, was tried on a military base in the Pacific, sentenced to time served and flew back to his childhood home. The repercussions of that era live on, though.
Watching “We Steal Secrets” today reveals unsettling parallels in how states manage surveillance, information, and dissent. Governments and the media outlets that take their cue from them have long shaped public narratives through strategic language. A striking recent example came in March of last year, when THE INTERCEPT published a leaked internal memo from THE NEW YORK TIMES advising reporters to avoid using terms such as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “occupied territory,” and “refugee camps” when describing Gaza and Palestine. The guidance illuminated how institutions can sanitize or restrict terminology to narrow the boundaries of permissible discourse.
Media framing has played similar roles elsewhere. During the Arab Spring in 2011, AL JAZEERA, the Qatari state-backed network, covered simultaneous uprisings in Syria and Bahrain very differently. Protests in Syria were swiftly labeled a “revolution,” while those in Bahrain—an island nation just off Qatar’s coast—were described as an “uprising.” Critics have argued that this linguistic discrepancy reflected political intervention from Qatari officials wary that revolutionary language might echo too close to home.
A comparable dynamic appears in the case of Israel, where the state has intentionally fused its political identity with the Jewish people and Judaism itself. This blurring has enabled the Israeli government to respond to criticism with accusations of antisemitism, redirecting scrutiny away from government actions. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly stated that external criticisms of the state “can and should” be treated as antisemitic, an approach that effectively reframes political critique as bigotry and positions the state as a victim rather than a subject of accountability.
Language is only one dimension of this narrative management. Imagery, carefully curated, staged, or selectively released, has long been a powerful political tool. This is hardly new: President Franklin Roosevelt concealed his wheelchair, John F Kennedy used makeup to manage his televised image during debates, and Ronald Reagan brought cinematic production values into the White House. But the practice continues. Just recently, the White House published thermal footage of a small boat – allegedly carrying drugs – being destroyed by the U.S. military near Venezuela. The video, reminiscent of the WikiLeaks Apache helicopter footage, functions as a visual assertion of toughness on drug trafficking, using spectacle to reinforce state messaging.
Griffith Swidler is completing an ma in international affairs at the new school.