Category: People
Key figures: Julian Assange (WikiLeaks founder/editor-in-chief), Chelsea Manning (source of State Department cables), Sarah Harrison (WikiLeaks spokesperson), Hillary Clinton (US Secretary of State), Adrian Lamo (hacker who reported Manning to US authorities)
Summary
Julian Assange became a globally recognized figure in 2010 through WikiLeaks’ release of classified US State Department diplomatic cables beginning November 28. The Australian activist founded WikiLeaks in 2006 as a platform for publishing leaked documents from governments and corporations. By 2010, he had already overseen releases of the Collateral Murder video, the Iraq War Logs, and the Afghan War Diary. The State Department cable release — consisting of 251,287 classified documents from 274 US diplomatic missions worldwide — represented the largest official US document disclosure in history and thrust Assange into international prominence as both a champion of transparency and a controversial figure accused by US authorities of endangering national security.
Background and Rise
Julian Paul Assange (born 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, Australia) spent a peripatetic youth across Australia before becoming an accomplished programmer and computer hacker in the 1980s and 1990s. Under the handle “Mendax,” he was charged in 1994 with 31 counts of hacking-related offenses in Australia; he pleaded guilty to 25 charges and received a fine rather than imprisonment after the judge found he had not acted for personal gain.
Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 on a theoretical basis he articulated in a 2006 essay: that governments and large institutions maintain power through the opacity of their internal communications, and that transparency — even of sensitive information — would disrupt authoritarian or corrupt systems. The organization’s early leaks included documents from Kenya, the Church of Scientology, and banks in the Cayman Islands, establishing a model of publishing raw primary documents alongside contextual analysis.
By mid-2010, three releases had established WikiLeaks’ credibility and reach:
- Collateral Murder (April 5, 2010): A classified 2007 US military video showing an Apache helicopter crew killing 12 civilians — including two Reuters journalists — in Baghdad. The video was viewed over 13 million times in its first week online.
- Afghan War Diary (July 25, 2010): 91,731 classified US military logs from the Afghanistan War (2004–2010), published simultaneously with The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and The New York Times.
- Iraq War Logs (October 22, 2010): 391,832 classified US Army reports from the Iraq War — the largest classified military document leak in US history at that point — revealing previously unreported civilian casualties and evidence of systematic torture by Iraqi authorities under US oversight.
Chelsea Manning: The Source
The source of the State Department cables — and the prior Iraq and Afghanistan leaks — was Army Specialist Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning), a 22-year-old intelligence analyst stationed at a base near Baghdad. Manning had Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearance, giving her access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), the classified network on which the cables and military reports were stored.
Manning transmitted the documents to WikiLeaks via a secure encrypted submission system Assange had designed, using a peer-to-peer music network as cover for the data transfer. In May 2010, she confided details of the leaks in online chats with Adrian Lamo, a convicted hacker. Lamo reported the conversations to US military authorities; Manning was arrested on May 26, 2010 — nearly six months before the cable release. She was held in military confinement at Quantico, Virginia under conditions that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture later described as “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”
Manning was convicted in July 2013 on 17 of 22 charges, including violations of the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 35 years in military prison. She was released in May 2017 after President Obama commuted her sentence on January 17, 2017.
The State Department Cables Release: Cablegate
On November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks began publishing the first of 251,287 classified US State Department diplomatic cables, ranging from 1966 to February 2010. The cables were classified at three levels: 15,652 were marked Secret, 101,748 were marked Confidential, and 133,887 were unclassified. They originated from 274 US diplomatic missions — embassies, consulates, and other posts — in 180 countries.
WikiLeaks coordinated the release with five international media partners: The Guardian (UK), The New York Times (US), Der Spiegel (Germany), Le Monde (France), and El País (Spain). The partners published redacted analyses of selected cables while the full searchable archive was gradually released by WikiLeaks over the following months. By November 2011, all cables were publicly available.
Key revelations included:
- Candid assessments of foreign leaders: US diplomats’ private characterizations of world leaders were embarrassing — German Chancellor Angela Merkel was described as “rarely creative,” Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as “feckless” and linked to Vladimir Putin, and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as erratic.
- Saudi Arabia and Iran: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had urged the US to attack Iran’s nuclear program and “cut off the head of the snake.”
- Corruption in Afghanistan: Cables documented Afghan Vice President Ahmed Zia Massoud traveling to Dubai with $52 million in cash.
- US pressure on allies: Documents showed the US pressuring Spain to drop a war crimes investigation against former Bush administration officials and lobbying European governments on behalf of Guantánamo detainees.
- Yemen civilian strike: Cables revealed that the Yemeni president told US counterparts that he would claim credit for US missile strikes as Yemeni attacks, to provide the US with political cover.
International Response and Operation Payback
The cable release triggered an immediate, multi-front response:
US government: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the release as “an attack on the international community.” The State Department requested that WikiLeaks return the documents, a request WikiLeaks rejected. The Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into Assange for potential violations of the Espionage Act.
Corporate pressure: PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Amazon all ceased services to WikiLeaks within days of the cable release, cutting off WikiLeaks’ payment processing and web hosting. The Swiss bank PostFinance froze Assange’s personal account.
Operation Payback: In response to the corporate boycott, hacktivist network Anonymous launched “Operation Payback” — coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, and Amazon websites that temporarily disrupted their services. The campaign marked one of the first large-scale coordinated hacktivist actions and demonstrated the organizing capacity of online anonymous collectives. (See also: Stuxnet — the same year’s most consequential cyber event, demonstrating state-level offensive cyber capability.)
Diplomatic fallout: Multiple countries summoned US ambassadors to demand explanations. Cablegate strained relations with allies — Germany, France, and Spain each responded to specific revelations about their own leaders or citizens.
2010 Arrest and Extradition Proceedings
Swedish authorities had issued an arrest warrant for Assange in August 2010, based on allegations of sexual misconduct from two Swedish women who had contact with him during a WikiLeaks conference in Stockholm in mid-August. The allegations initially prompted a warrant, which was withdrawn and then reissued by a different prosecutor in September.
On December 7, 2010 — nine days after the cable release began — Assange surrendered voluntarily to London police. He was held at Wandsworth Prison before appearing in court. On December 16, he was released on £240,000 bail (raised through supporters including filmmaker Ken Loach and activist Jemima Khan) and placed under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, England, with an electronic ankle monitor.
Extradition proceedings began in 2011. Assange lost a British court appeal in November 2011 and exhausted his domestic legal options in May 2012. On June 19, 2012, he entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and was granted diplomatic asylum, beginning a seven-year residence there that would end with his arrest in April 2019.
Significance
In 2010, Julian Assange embodied the tension between radical transparency and state security that would define the 2010s. WikiLeaks demonstrated that a small organization with encryption and digital distribution could challenge state power in ways previously unavailable to individuals and journalists. The cables provided journalists worldwide with raw material for investigations into US foreign policy, corruption, and military activity — many stories emerging from Cablegate won major journalism awards in 2011 and beyond.
Assange’s 2010 prominence directly influenced subsequent whistleblower activity: Edward Snowden, who leaked NSA mass surveillance documents in 2013, cited WikiLeaks as a model and initially sought assistance from the organization in his asylum efforts. The legal precedent surrounding Assange — whether publishing classified documents constitutes journalism or criminal espionage — remained unresolved through his 2024 release following a plea deal with US prosecutors.
More broadly, 2010 marked the moment when the concept of “radical transparency” moved from activist theory to global political reality — reshaping international diplomacy, the relationship between governments and the press, and the political theory of internet-enabled accountability.
Sources
- Wikipedia: WikiLeaks — comprehensive history and overview
- Wikipedia: United States diplomatic cables leak — detailed documentation of the November 28 release, revelations, and aftermath
- Wikipedia: Chelsea Manning — background, arrest, trial, and sentencing of the cables’ source
- Wikipedia: Julian Assange — biographical information and 2010 events
- The Guardian: WikiLeaks cables — contemporary news coverage and editorial perspective