Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website is the book where Daniel Domscheit-Berg, one of the members that joined WikiLeaks in the early days, tells us the inside story of the website responsible for some of the world’s most important leaks. He also describes with a lot of detail the day-to-day at WikiLeaks, the dangerous situations and the risks necessary to share the information with the public. By doing this, we can get to know more about Julian Assange. It’s a kind of biography written without his consent, so we cannot be sure if what the author describes is the true.
Nevertheless, the fact is that some chat conversations are shown and some details and events cannot be denied due to the proofs used. It’s a terrifying version of Wikileaks, in fact.
It started with a good purpose, but quickly turned out to be the project of an authoritarian ‘founder’, as Julian loves to be called. Daniel tried, for sure, to solve all the problems and give a new future to this ambicious project, but, unfortunatelly, he faced a difficult leader, if we can call it so.
By the end of the book, Daniel tells us the ideas behind his new platform, OpenLeaks, which aims to be what the WikiLeaks was supposed to be but never was. This is a really well written book and with lots of episodes that involve not only journals from all arround the world, like The Guardian or The New York Times, but also important politics, like Ursula von der Leyen.
Joining all this, there’s a constant humor on point which makes this book one of my favourites. I already watched the movie that was inspired by the book, The Fifth Estate, but I’ll certainly watch it again with a different point of view after the reading.
As I’m a person that judges only after being told about both sides of the story, I’ll read the Julian Assange autobiography in a near future.
To finish, I recommend this reading, of course, to everyone.
Rating 4.6/5
Read in 2021