-By Warner Todd Huston
Julian Assange, the famed head of the website WikiLeaks, is not happy with the upcoming DreamWorks film based on his famous document-leaking website. As far as Assange is concerned the film is just “massive propaganda.”
Via videolink, Assange recently told a gathering of the Oxford Union debate that the movie, titled The Fifth Estate and directed by Bill Condon, is nothing but a “massive propaganda attack on WikiLeaks and the character of my staff.”
Assange was speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy in London since Ecuador offered him asylum from countries seeking to prosecute him for his release of many thousands of pages of secret government documents.
The Internet interloper told his audience that he had an advanced copy of the shooting script for the film and said it begins with Iranian officials working on building a nuclear bomb. The WikiLeaks founder said that the reason for such an opening was to “fan the flames of war” and that Iran’s nuclear bomb has nothing to do with him and his website. “It is a lie upon lie,” he said.
Recently the film’s director released a statement on the film, saying, “It may be decades before we understand the full impact of WikiLeaks and how it’s revolutionized the spread of information. So this film won’t claim any long-view authority on its subject, or attempt any final judgment. We want to explore the complexities and challenges of transparency in the information age and, we hope, enliven and enrich the conversations WikiLeaks has already provoked.”
WikiLeaks was controversial for its release of thousands of secret government documents, certainly, but it was also controversial for the many lies that Assange and Domscheit-Berg told about their organization.
To name a few, WikiLeaks claimed to be impregnable from outside attacks telling those that submitted secret documents that their identities couldn’t be discovered. This turned out to be untrue. Another claim was that the WikiLeaks team was vast and could vet and authenticate all documents it received, but it turned out that there were really only two guys running the thing and most documents were more or less just thrown up onto the site without ever having been looked at. The rigorous “authenticity checks” Assange claimed he had instituted simply didn’t exist.
In the end, Assange and Domscheit-Berg dissembled extensively about their organization and misled millions of people.
The film is to star Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange and Daniel Bruhl as Assange coworker Daniel Domscheit-Berg. It is set for a November release.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.