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We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks
| Released |
12 July 2013 |
| Director |
Alex Gibney |
| Writer(s) |
Alex Gibney |
Producer(s)
|
Marc Scmuger, Alex Gibney, Alexis Bloom |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
130 minutes |
| Genre |
Documentary |
| Rating |
15A |
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The truth is out there.
It’s startling how, even in this Information Age, it can take a movie to make sense of a news story. Never before in history has information been so readily available but sometimes the sheer volume of this information can drown the truth. That the story of WikiLeaks, an organisation designed to democratise information, should fall victim to an avalanche of opinion and misinformation is particularly ironic. We Steal Secrets, from acclaimed director Alex Gibney (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God), sets out to strip away the accumulated baggage that has collected around this particular moment in history and expose the real story that lies hidden underneath.
We Steal Secrets tells the story of the creation of WikiLeaks and the two men behind its biggest revelations - Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. Assange cut his teeth as a computer hacker before establishing the website designed as an anonymous platform for the sharing of information deemed classified and out of the reach of the general public. Manning, meanwhile was a troubled U.S soldier stationed in Iraq who gained access to and leaked countless documents pertaining to the U.S. military’s engagements. While Assange became an international star on the back of this work, Manning suffered from the exposure, eventually being arrested and held for his transgressions.
As we have come to expect from Gibney, We Steal Secrets is a thorough and unbiased piece of work that lays bare the ambiguities at the heart of the struggle over the freedom of information in a post-internet world. The interviews collected by Gibney are impressively diverse, ranging from journalists and politicians to the people who were closest to both Assange and Manning. The picture painted of both men is never clear cut and Gibney never forces any conclusions. What he does however, is use this particular story as a springboard to look at the dangers of what Guardian journalist and WikiLeaks supporter James Ball describes as ‘noble cause corruption’ and the potential that paranoia has to pollute a political movement and its followers.
Told in the style of a thriller, We Steal Secrets is an eye-opening and relentlessly entertaining documentary.
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Linda O’Brien |
