This 2013 documentary film by Alex Gibney focuses on the enormous Wikileaks data dump of 2010, which was prompted by the massive files released by Bradley (Chelsea) Manning. The filmmaker takes an open-minded and balanced approach to this controversial topic. While Gibney was unwilling to pay the $1 million asking price for an interview with Julian Assange, there is still abundant footage and sound bytes of Assange in his own words.The film is successful in raising the ethical concerns about whether such classified information as strategic military data should be in the public domain. The position of Julian Assange is clearly stated in the film: "Information should be free." In this regard, Assange was breaking new ground in using his computer skills to release a video of war atrocities in Iraq when civilian deaths resulted from American military incompetence. Of course, the video footage drives home Assange's point when the driver of a truck was taking his kids to school when he was killed, and a bystander's camera was mistaken for a weapon, prior to the bombing. This kind of information was aired nightly during the Vietnam War. Today, it is not. Thus, the importance of accountability to the American public.The opposing position presented in the film is that it is necessary for the military to keep secrets to protect those who are engaged in a covert operations. This position is argued in the film by Michael Haden, a retired general and former Director of the CIA. The film's title, "We Steal Secrets" is a line spoken in the film by Haden, as he argues that the nature of war in the twenty-first century demands secrecy.But Haden's countervailing argument about mandatory secrecy does not hold up under close scrutiny. Haden believes that the American public must be kept in the dark about issues that HE deems imperative to national security. This paternalistic attitude is at the heart of why there have been so many needless wars in American history of the past century when bureaucrats, as opposed to elected officials are making decisions of policy and shaping our history as a nation. Haden was not an elected official, hence, the importance of Hayden keeping the Congress and Americans apprised of the protracted wars. As an apologist for state secrecy, Haden was also proven wrong about the computer skills of Bradley (Chelsea) Manning that allowed Manning to store images even after he had assaulted his female supervisor and was relegated to the mail room. There appears to be no concern from Haden about the ease of access to United States government classified materials that led to their eventual dissemination to the public. The ethical issues raised in the film appear to be tied directly to bureaucratic incompetence on the part of leaders like Michael Haden.Towards the end of this long documentary, the film went off the rails by spending far too much time on the allegations of sexual misconduct of Julian Assange (the rape charges against him were eventually dropped in Sweden in 2017). There is also too much time wasted on the personal sexual identity and the incarceration of Bradley Manning. (President Obama commuted the sentence of Bradley Manning, who had become Chelsea Manning by early 2017). So, where does that leave us now? ANSWER: Probably in the same state of confusion, controversy, and public apathy about the secrecy issue as when Assange was using the handle of "Mendax" as a teenager computer geek.

In what can only be accurately described as a political hit piece disguised as a documentary, we are asked by the director, Alex Gibney, to stop looking at the broader effects of the accomplishments of Wikileaks organization and its founder Julian Assange and focus on the minute and the irrelevant, the speculative and the unsubstantiated.The expected (not-so) subtle audio visual tricks employed by such shysters of Gibney's caliber could have been overlooked if it not were the mere fact that this so-called documentary, while asking us to change our mind, does so without providing a shred of concrete evidence supporting its implicit or explicit claims. It has going for it snippets of opinions from disgruntled former employees who are ironically too happy to play the role of the conscientious objector while harping on about noble cause corruption, with a straight face to my amusement; establishment journalists that are trying to distance themselves from Wikileaks now that a (half) black democrat has been elected president for two terms and the memories of the Bush years seems so far to imagine maybe U.S. imperialist interests are no longer the driving force behind the foreign policy of the nation.After all, we, the westerners are always the good guys, we're just misguided and we make mistakes but ultimately our hearts are always in the right place even though we may end up causing more death and destruction than the rest of the world combined. It's only reasonable that such morally upright people will be concerned with the "blood on the hands" of the founder of Wikileaks, dare I say, hypocritically more than the blood on the hands of the people they support with their tax dollars, they vote into office and they make excuses for. It asks rhetorical questions in futile hopes of appearing as objective which are only to be followed soon by the answers given to us in neatly packaged snippets from critics of Assange and Wikileaks.All of this effort, to cast a shadow of doubt as to the intentions of the founder of Wikileaks, Assange, hoping guilt by association will work its way through to discredit the organization and taint the information they have provided the public. The trick to planting the seed of doubt is isolation: through feeding the fragile egos of the individuals comprising western peoples and convincing them to believe in the lie that they are only concerned with the well-being of the people possibly effected by the leaks and ethics of how Wikileaks conducts their business. It's as ludicrous and transparent as it would be if some oil corporation executive accused the young protesters of harming the environment by chaining themselves to the trees that they intend to cut for the planned pipeline.It's also most generous in giving you the gracious way to exit the "insert political group to be presented as a cult". All you have to do in return for this gracious gesture is to give these people the benefit of the doubt every time they make a speculative and unsubstantiated claim with regards to the motives and actions of that group. You see, they understand that you're a good guy, just like them but only misguided by hateful anti-American, anti-freedom rhetoric of the "radical left". You too can be a respected member of the "good guy public" by doing so and you will also have the clear conscience of mind believing you were only motivated by your moral compass.Pathetic, predictably so but pathetic none the less.

Whatever your view of Julian Assange, whether as a fearless crusader for truth or a heartless hacker and ego-maniac, Alex Gibney's amazing documentary following the Rise and Fall of Assange and the scapegoating of his sexually confused US Army collaborator, Bradley Manning, asks all the hard questions from every angle and paints a woeful picture of the crisis in western democracy. When the Wikileaks news was breaking it was so fragmented and intertwined with other war news, sensations, and scandals, that many people were unable to unscramble what was what, and who was who. For one thing with all the references to asylum in Sweden and the peculiar surname there were probably some who thought Assange was himself a Swede (he is not) and others who were possibly confusing wiki-leakage with the info website Wikipedia.All this is straightened out and put into context by Alex Gibney's "We Steal Secrets", which is partly an inquest into the dynamics of investigative journalism, and is itself a sparkling piece of investigative journalism -- in addition to which it has the feeling of an espionage thriller.The basics are this: Julian Assange (not his original name but the anglicized form of an Cantonese name) is Australian and started out as an expert computer hacker, later journalist and political activist, campaigning avidly for transparency of government information, particularly with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Numerous deaths of civilians were blithely written off as "collateral damage" by the military, but because of Assange's Wikileaks website activity were eventually exposed as blatant murder of noncombatants. This is only the tip of the iceberg: Loads of secret army files were turned over to Assange by a young American soldier, also an expert hacker, Bradley Manning an intelligence analyst stationed in Baghdad who had access to all the information stored in the computers there. Bradley was openly gay but because of his computer expertise his top secret clearance was never pulled. Eventually, when he realized what was going on and his conscience got the better of him he made the moral decision to pass his privileged information on to Assange in order to expose the atrocities he had discovered. In 2010 when Assange put hundreds of such files out on the worldwide web through his Wikileaks website he was hailed as an international hero by those against the war and condemned as a dangerous enemy agent by the U.S. governmentGibney's movie traces Assange's rise to notoriety via interviews with various journalists who followed him around, especially one Australian journalist and fervent Assange disciple Mark Davis. The entire first half of the film paints a very positive picture of a valiant charismatic crusader sporting long silvery hair something like an aging rock star. We see constant street demonstrations expressing solidarity with Assange in placards such as "Telling the truth is not a crime". Assange has become a public hero, but later when he gets into trouble in Sweden the picture begins to change. Two young female groupies accuse him of illicit sex and purposely breaking the condom! His extradition from England for trial in Sweden is demanded. At this point the US government also wants to get hold of him as an enemy agent and the plot thickens rapidly. By equating the mission of Wikileaks with his own campaign to discredit the sexual assault charges in Sweden, and advocating the kind of secrecy he had been fighting against all along, Assange manages to alienate many of his closest supporters. If the Swedes get him the next step could be extradition to the USA. To save him from extradition Ecuador offers him sanctuary in their London embassy. Gibney offered to interview him there so that he could present his side of the story in this film but Assange demanded one million dollars or nothing so that interview was canceled. But this is only half of the story --the parallel story of the persecution of Pfc Bardley Manning is the other half of the picture. Without Bradley there would have been no such mass leakage of military and political secrets. Bradley denounced by a buddy who later in the film repents tearfully, has been wallowing in an army brig for three years without being brought to trial. This parallel story interwoven with the meteoric ascent of Assange reveals Bradley's struggle with gender identity --he really wants to be a woman -- and his personal torment over what to reveal and what not to reveal. If construed as giving aid to the enemy the beef against him could carry a sentence of death. The government condemns Bradley but admits that little was revealed which could directly place US military personnel in jeopardy. The most striking statement comes from Michael Hayden, former CIA chief, who admits with surprising candor, "Yes, we steal secrets from other governments -- it's all part of what we have to do to preserve democracy..." -- a remark which informs the title of the film. Manning will come to trial on June 4. The release of this film at this point in time will surely cause many people to rethink their views on the whole leakage business and the whole attitude and role of the US military.The big question posed by this film is not whether Mr. Assange is a good guy or a bad guy, but the thornier question of control versus free flow of information in a democratic society; how much revelation of government secrets can a democracy tolerate?What will actually happen now is anybody's guess but it is very unlikely that Assange will ever go to Sweden to face the charges there or leave the Ecuadorian embassy anytime soon. They have a place called "Gitmo" for people who are deemed as being overly dangerous to the American way of life ...

I am not shocked by the amount of really dismal reviews this film has gotten from users on IMDb considering the passionate following the Assange has maintained. But people don't give Alex Gibney enough credit. I think the director has built a reputation as a fair, objective critic of power, and his filmography ('Taxi to the Dark Side, Smartest Guys in the Room') has shown that. I believe Julian Assange built a personality cult around him, and many of his followers are either unwilling or unable to see the complexities of this saga, and would rather blindly follow this man into the abyss. What a strange and modern tragedy. The tragedy and irony of the story really is how such a great and noble idea as Wikileaks was corrupted by the same forces it railed against, and how the need for secrecy prevails. Excellent and compelling documentary.