We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks Page #3

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year increased from eight million

Office of the Director of

National Intelligence

to 76 million.

The number of people with access

to classified information

NSA National Business Park

soared to more

than four million.

And the government began to

intercept phone calls and emails

at a rate of

60, 000 per second.

Nobody knows how

much money is involved,

it's a secret.

Not even Congress

knows the entire budget.

The classification system can be a

very effective national security tool

when it's used as intended,

when it's used with precision.

NARRATOR:
During

the Bush Administration,

Bill Leonard was

the classification czar,

the man charged with overseeing

what information should be secret.

The whole information environment

has radically changed.

Just like we produce

more information

than we ever produced

in the history of mankind,

we produce more secrets than we've ever

produced in the history of mankind,

and yet we never

fundamentally reassessed

our ability to

control secrets.

NARRATOR:
In this environment

of expanding secrecy,

Assange went fishing

for secrets to publish.

To bait whistle-blowers, he published

a list of the most wanted leaks.

Those of us who have been

in the business a long time

knew that this day

would come,

knew that because we'd removed all

the watertight doors on the ship,

once it started taking on water,

it would really be in trouble.

[STATIC]

[INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS]

NEWS ANCHOR:
In Iceland,

winter is never easy,

but this year much

of the pain is manmade.

[PEOPLE SCREAMING]

Last October, all three of

Iceland's banks failed.

Normally stoic and proper

Icelanders have started protesting.

NARRATOR:
In July 2009, WikiLeaks

fueled a growing popular rage

when it published a confidential

internal memo from Kaupthing,

the largest failed

bank in the country.

BROOKE:
WikiLeaks had got hold

of the Kaupthing loan book,

which showed what was going on in

a lot of those Icelandic banks.

They had credit ratings

which were completely at odds

with their actual

credit worthiness.

It was all insiders,

they took out billions

of dollars out of this bank

and bankrupted the thing shortly

before it went bankrupt anyways.

NARRATOR:
A German IT technician,

Daniel Domscheit-Berg,

became the second full-time

member of WikiLeaks.

DOMSCHEIT-BERG:
We met online first, and

then we met personally in December 2007

at the Chaos Communication

Congress in Berlin.

He was not the stereotypical

hacker you would expect,

looked completely

differently,

he was interested in

completely different topics.

NARRATOR:
For Daniel and Julian, the Kaupthing

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