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| We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks – review | We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks – review |
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| Alex Gibney has directed some of the best political documentaries of recent years including the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and, most recently, the devastating exposé of sexual predators in the Catholic church, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. In We Steal Secrets he is at his forensic best in fairly and lucidly telling the story of how the infinitely devious Julian Assange became the world's most famous whistleblower through his revelation on WikiLeaks of American state secrets, and of how one of his most significant sources, Pfc Bradley Manning, a lonely, idealistic, cross-dressing military intelligence analyst, had his identity revealed to the CIA by the young bisexual, possibly autistic hacker Adrian Lamo. | Alex Gibney has directed some of the best political documentaries of recent years including the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and, most recently, the devastating exposé of sexual predators in the Catholic church, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. In We Steal Secrets he is at his forensic best in fairly and lucidly telling the story of how the infinitely devious Julian Assange became the world's most famous whistleblower through his revelation on WikiLeaks of American state secrets, and of how one of his most significant sources, Pfc Bradley Manning, a lonely, idealistic, cross-dressing military intelligence analyst, had his identity revealed to the CIA by the young bisexual, possibly autistic hacker Adrian Lamo. |
| Drawing on the testimony of more than 20 witnesses (though not Assange, who fell out with everyone, Gibney included), the film creates an astonishing picture of the complex new world of internet communications, intelligence and the ever-expanding web of post-cold war secrecy. It's into this fragile, ill-managed china shop that Assange, Manning and Lamo, the raging anti-establishment bulls, so recklessly charged, raising enough moral and ethical issues to occupy philosophers and political scientists for decades to come. The film's title is provided by the plausible General Michael Hayden, who spent a decade between 1999 and 2009 as director of first the NSA and then the CIA. "We steal secrets. We steal other nation's secrets," he genially confesses. "We cannot do that above board and be very successful for a very long period of time." | Drawing on the testimony of more than 20 witnesses (though not Assange, who fell out with everyone, Gibney included), the film creates an astonishing picture of the complex new world of internet communications, intelligence and the ever-expanding web of post-cold war secrecy. It's into this fragile, ill-managed china shop that Assange, Manning and Lamo, the raging anti-establishment bulls, so recklessly charged, raising enough moral and ethical issues to occupy philosophers and political scientists for decades to come. The film's title is provided by the plausible General Michael Hayden, who spent a decade between 1999 and 2009 as director of first the NSA and then the CIA. "We steal secrets. We steal other nation's secrets," he genially confesses. "We cannot do that above board and be very successful for a very long period of time." |
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