Quotes by Daniel Berg

“Ultimately, of course, it was Julian who made the decisions. The rest of us were too indecisive and skittish or simply lacked the resolve to set any limits for him. Julian thus became the autocratic head of WL, accountable to no one and tolerating no challenges to his authority. This had emerged as a problem when Bradley Manning was arrested, and clearly it was going to be a problem in the weeks to come. The investigations in Sweden would prove to be the wedge that finally broke up our team. Within””

“There are entire professions that justify their existence only in terms of fluency in a self-referential system. A person’s actions might be completely banal in reality, but a description of them using these specialized terms would make them sound like high science. It’s no wonder Julian likes jargon. Jargon is a fraudulent form of significance, in which the person who is speaking automatically seems to know what he’s doing. This””

“Looking back, I ask myself whether WikiLeaks itself during my last months there had developed into a kind of religious cult. It had become a system that admitted little internal criticism. Anything that went wrong had to be the fault of something on the outside. The guru was untouchable and beyond question. Any external danger encouraged internal cohesion. Anyone who offered too much criticism was punished by being withdrawn from communication or by being threatened with possible consequences. Moreover, WL participants were only allowed to know as much as was absolutely necessary for them to carry out their appointed tasks. In any case, this much can be said: From reading the Scientology documents, and the philosophy and teachings of L. Ron Hubbard, Julian learned only too well how a cult of personality functions.””

“Julian seemed to delight in provoking people as much as possible. He was of the opinion that people liked to get upset. He thought, for instance, that spam was a welcome evil because it gave people an excuse to complain. You were doing them a favor by spamming them. As it happened, he had himself pressed the wrong button on our mailing list at one point so that 350,000 people received repeated e-mails. Our mailing address was put on a number of spam lists, and it wasn’t easy to get off them. Nonetheless, Julian succeeded in putting a positive spin on the mishap by claiming that people were happy when you gave them the chance to get pissed off. Another””

“Even back then I thought that his uncompromising judgments and unprompted opinions, which he would simply spit out undiplomatically, would put him at odds with a lot of people. There was so much to plan and discuss. I didn’t ask myself back then whether his behavior was normal or not. I didn’t ask myself whether I could trust Julian or whether he might get me in trouble. On the contrary, I was somewhat flattered that he was interested in working with me. For me, Julian Assange was not only the founder of WL but also the hacker known as Mendax, a member of the International Subversives, one of the greatest hackers in the world, and the coauthor/researcher (with Suelette Dreyfus) of Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier”

“The Chaos Computer Club was an important point of social connection for me, and the space where the club met in Berlin was always one of the first addresses I visited whenever I was in the German capital. How can I describe what I liked about the people there? All of them were complete curmudgeons. Very creative, clever, but somewhat gruff individuals who had no time for superficial social niceties. But what they lacked in grace, they compensated for ten times over in loyalty, once they had accepted you into their ranks.””

“The academic world was also fascinated by the Congressional Research Service, or CRS, reports. The American Congress has its own scientific intelligence service, which any congressman can use to obtain information. The reports issued by the service are painstaking and high-quality, covering topics from the cotton industry in Mexico to weapons of mass destruction in China. Scientists would love to have access to these reports, which are paid for with taxpayer money. But the congressmen themselves decide on whether a given report gets published or not. Most of the time, they refuse permission.””

“They concluded that the predominant emotion was anger and that, compared to words like sadness or fear, expressions of aggression increased in the days following the terrorist attacks. This was one proof of the theory that violence leads to more violence.””

“In our experience, complicated leaks”

“To create the impression of unassailability to the outside world, you only had to make the context as complicated and confusing as possible. To that end, I would make my explanations of technical issues to journalists as complex as I could. They in turn often did not want to admit their lack of knowledge and, exhausted, gave up. It was the same principle used by terrorists and bureaucrats. The adversary can’t attack as long as he has nothing to grab hold of. Modern-day customer relations works in a similar way. A customer who wants to complain but can never find anyone responsible to talk to ultimately has no choice but to swallow his anger.””

“Sometimes, I’d buy a whole series of numbers, search the Web for the names and addresses of large families (birthday party announcements on blogs were a good source), and then register the cards to those people.””

“FREEDOM OF SPEECH HAS A NUMBER. It was the WikiLeaks IP address: 88.80.13.160.””

“Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier”