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WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War On Secrecy (2011)

by David Leigh(Favorite Author)

3.39 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

161039061X (ISBN13: 9781610390613)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

PublicAffairs

review 1: An interesting insight into the secretive world (no pun intended!) of WikiLeaks and especially of its founder, the enigmatic Julian Assange. This book gives some of the background story of Assange, his unusual upbringing and entry in the world of "hacktivism" in the 1990s and examines his motivation for seeking to make the secrets of the wealthy and powerful open to public scrutiny. The book also goes in to the connected story of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and why that young US soldier was willing to risk so much in the cause of exposing the mis-deeds and crimes carried out by US forces in Iraq. Overall, I found it an informative read and well worth a look for any reader interested in World affairs, online security and the rights to privacy in the digital... more age.
review 2: This book and the one by Daniel Berg, who actually worked for Wikileaks, supposedly provided the source material for the movie "The Fifth Estate," so I wanted to read both of them. I'm astonished to report that the book by Berg (an amateur) was better written, detailed, and more insightful than this one (by two professional journalists). Berg's book also clearly had more influence on the movie, even though both books came out in 2011.Berg certainly had his own bias, but he acknowledges it. He also clearly cared about explaining his conclusions, examining motivations, and including a lot of specific detail (including references to outside material the reader could look up for themselves). He was also just a better storyteller than these guys from the Guardian. I learned a lot from Berg's book, and only a few things about Tunisia from this one. In comparison, this book not only depersonalizes the story, reporting on the authors' participation in the story in the third person, it completely ignores its own bias (a book about The Guardian working with Wikileaks written by people at The Guardian). The authors also seem preoccupied with defending the importance of "real journalism" as compared to what Wikileaks did. As it happens, I'm a reporter, so I am somewhat sympathetic to that defensiveness. But in this case, chapters of detail on how much work The Guardian put into analyzing the Wikileaks info doesn't serve the reader very well. less

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