Then in November 2007, the handbooks from Guantanamo Bay, the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, appeared on WikiLeaks.
They revealed that the US was violating internees' human rights and the Geneva Conventions at their military base in Cuba.
WikiLeaks was a great idea. For people who'd been active from the beginning in these sorts of communities, the internet was not a global sea of data, but a village.
If I needed a reliable opinion about something, I knew where to ask. So that's what I did, and the answer was always: "WL? It's a fantastic idea."
That encouraged me to learn more. I logged in to a chat room, which still exists today on the WikiLeaks site, and started making contacts. I got the sense immediately that these people were the same as me.
They were interested in the same issues. They worked the same ungodly hours. They talked about social problems and believed the internet offered previously unimaginable solutions.
After a day of this, I asked if there was anything I could do. At first I got no answer. I was confused and a bit insulted. Still, I kept participating in the chat.
"Still interested in a job?" came a message two days later. It was WikiLeaks' founder, Australian Julian Assange.
"Sure! Tell me what," I typed in response.
At first Julian gave me a couple of menial tasks: cleaning up the Wiki website, making formats cohere, and revising some content.
I was still a long way from dealing with any sensitive documents.
Then I had the idea of introducing WikiLeaks into the program of the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, the legendary meeting of the hacker and computing scene sponsored by the Chaos Computer Club, a well-respected organisation of technology activists in Germany. The congress takes place every year in Berlin between Christmas and New Year's Day.
Back then, I had a regular job. I was responsible for network design and security for a large American company that did IT work for civilian and military clients and had its German headquarters in the town of Russelsheim.
My employer and I had a tacit agreement that I wouldn't have to deal with any weapons companies, so I worked primarily for GM, Opel, and a number of airlines. Anyone who books an overseas flight these days will probably use the technology that I developed.
I lived nearby in the small city of Wiesbaden and my girlfriend at the time, a very beautiful young woman, worked as a secretary for the company.
My first thought on seeing Julian was: Cool guy. He was wearing olive-green cargo pants, a white shirt, and a green woollen vest from a suit, attire that distinguished him from the rest of the congress participants.
The way he walked was both energetic and carefree, and he took huge strides. When he went up the stairs, the floorboards would vibrate.
We met for the first time face-to-face by the spiral staircase on the second floor of the Berliner Congress Centre. The congress was really full that day.
On the second floor, things were somewhat more relaxed. There was a leather sofa with a view of Alexanderplatz, eastern Berlin's main city square. This was to become our meeting point for the next couple of days.
We talked for hours. Then we would simply sit side by side, saying nothing, Julian absently working away at his computer.
I don't know what Julian was expecting when he came to Berlin. I wasn't particularly happy with the basement room we had been allocated for his presentation, but it turned out we were lucky it was small.
Fewer than 20 people showed up at the lecture, and none of the more familiar faces within the club, as I noted to my dismay. I couldn't understand why no one seemed interested in this topic.
If Julian was disappointed by the small number of listeners he attracted, he didn't let it show. He spoke for 45 minutes, and afterward, when three people in the audience wanted to know more, he patiently answered their questions. I felt a bit sorry for him that so few people had wanted to hear his lecture.
Yet even though most people didn't know what to make of WL, in the months that followed, Julian and I would keep talking about the project to anyone who was prepared to listen for a few minutes. Even if there were only three of them. Today, the whole world knows us. Back then, every individual counted.
I learned after the fact that there'd been a lot of trouble with the organisers, and Julian had quarrelled with many of my acquaintances.
In any case, Julian had made a huge impression on me. This lanky Australian was someone who didn't let anyone boss him around or stop him from pursuing his work. He was also well read and had strong opinions about a number of topics.
He was always judging people on their "usefulness", however he defined that category in a given situation. In his eyes, even particularly gifted hackers were idiots if they didn't apply their talents toward a larger goal.
Even back then I thought that his uncompromising personality and extreme opinions, which he would simply spit out undiplomatically, would put him at odds with a lot of people.
I didn't ask myself then whether his behaviour was normal or not. For me, Julian Assange was not only the founder of WL but also the hacker known as Mendax, a member of the famous International Subversives, one of the greatest hackers in the world, and the co-author-researcher (with Suelette Dreyfus) of Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier, a highly respected book among connoisseurs.
We hit it off right from the start. He asked me very few personal questions. I think he respected me as someone who had said straightaway that he'd like to help and then showed commitment. That was probably more than what he had got from most other people at that point.
What's more, WikiLeaks quickly established a bond between us. We believed in the same ideals. We were equals; at least, that's the way I felt. Julian may have founded WikiLeaks, and he may have had more experience than I did, but right from the start I had the feeling that we were a pretty awesome team.
After the CCC conference at the end of 2008, Julian came to Wiesbaden and lived with me for two months. This was typical of him. He didn't have a fixed address, crashing instead at other people's places.
Usually, all he carried with him was his backpack with his two notebook computers and a bunch of cell-phone chargers, although he could seldom find the one he needed. He wore several layers of clothing. Even indoors, he wore two pairs of pants -- though I've never understood why -- and even several pairs of socks.
My apartment was a basement walk-down that faced out to the road. At first the fact that people could look into my apartment made Julian pretty nervous. We pulled down the blind, a transparent, yellow paper thing with a Tibetan flag I had pinned in the middle. It let through a fuzzy warm light. I liked it.
We would sit in my living room, typing away at our laptops. I worked at the desk in the corner by the window, while Julian was ensconced in front of me on the sofa with his computer on his lap.
He usually wore his olive-green down jacket with the hood pulled up and a blanket wrapped around his legs.
Julian aspired to type completely blind. It was almost meditative. When he replied to emails, for instance, he typed at a furious pace, moving through the various text fields without glancing at the screen once.
He told me that working without optical feedback was a form of perfection, a victory over time. He finished what he was doing long before his computer did.
We were already getting a few donations to our PayPal account and had got into the habit of sending out thank-you emails at regular intervals. We took turns doing this job.
This time it was Julian's turn to write the email and paste in the names of all our current donors.
But he came to an abrupt halt with a quiet "Goddamn!" Julian had made a mistake. Because we were sending the emails to a number of recipients, he was supposed to change the "to" line into a "bcc" [blind carbon copy] so that the recipients could not see the names of the other donors. And there was precisely where Julian had slipped up. He had already pressed the "send" button, thanks to his perfect way of working.
This mistake bestowed on us our first and only homegrown leak in February 2009. The reaction to this thank-you email did not take long in coming: "Unless you intended to leak the 106 email addresses of your supporters, bcc would be better."
As chance would have it, one of the donors whom we had thanked on this occasion was a certain Adrian Lamo. He was the semi-famous ex-hacker responsible for the arrest of US Army private Bradley Manning, who has been accused of being one of our sources.
I clicked our mailbox and yes, there it was: a new secret document. Someone had sent us our own donor list as an official leak, along with a relatively unfriendly comment. Normally, we don't know who our sources are. But Lamo would later confess that he was the one who had confronted us with our own blunder.
For good or for evil, we were going to have to reveal it. We had agreed we had to release things that were bad as well as good publicity.
In fact, our internal leak went down well with the press. At least we were consistent and none of the donors complained.
JULIAN often behaved as though he had been raised by wolves rather than by other human beings. Whenever I cooked, the food would not, for instance, end up being shared equally between us. What mattered was who was quicker off the mark.
It was not that he had never learned any manners. Julian could be very polite when he wanted to. For example, he frequently accompanied my visitors -- even when he didn't know them -- out the door, into the lobby and on to the street. It was as if he wanted to make sure that they were safe.
Julian was very paranoid. He was convinced that someone was watching my house, so he decided we should avoid ever being seen leaving or returning to the apartment together. I used to wonder what difference that made.
If someone had gone to the trouble of shadowing my apartment, he would have seen us together anyway. If we'd been in town together, Julian always insisted that we take separate routes home.
Sometimes I think Julian had been overly influenced by certain books, which, mixed with his own imagination, had resulted in a special set of Julian Assange rules of conduct. This reminded me of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who had started off as a science-fiction writer and then began believing his own stories.
I had the impression that Julian often tested out how far he could go.
For example, he had served me up a story about how his hair had gone white. He told me that when he was 14, he had built a reactor at home in his basement and got the poles reversed.
From that day on, his hair had grown in white as a result of the gamma radiation. Yeah, sure, I thought. I believe he wanted to see what he could get away with before I would say "Stop! I don't believe you."
For all his flaws, Julian could concentrate in a way like no one else I've ever seen. He could commune with his computer screen for days on end, becoming one with it, forming a single, immovable entity.
When I went to bed late, he'd often be sitting there like a thin Buddha on the sofa. When I woke up the next day, Julian would be sitting in a hooded sweatshirt in exactly the same position in front of the computer. Sometimes, when I went to bed the next night, he would still be sitting there.
You usually couldn't speak to him when he was working. He sat in deep meditation, programming or reading something or other. At most he used to leap up briefly without any warning and do some strange kung fu exercises. Some media reports said that Julian was at least the equivalent of a black belt in all known international martial arts.
In fact, his improvised shadowboxing lasted a maximum of 20 seconds, looked extremely silly, and was probably intended to stretch his joints and tendons after all that sitting.
Julian could work for days on end and then suddenly fall asleep. He would lie down in all his
pants, socks and sweatshirts, pull the blanket over his head, and drop off. When he woke up, he snapped back into the world just as instantaneously.
One of his amusing quirks was his desire to wear clothes to match his current state of mind. Or perhaps he thought he could only get into the right mood by wearing the right clothes.
"Daniel, I need a jacket. Do you have one?" he would say. "Do you want to go out?"
"I have to write a very important statement today."
"You what?"
Even though he usually sat at the kitchen table in hooded sweatshirt and cap, I suddenly had to lend him a jacket so that he could write a press release.
He wouldn't take off the jacket the whole day, wearing a serious face the whole time he composed his text. Afterward, he would also go to bed in the jacket.
On the one hand, I found Julian unbearable and, on the other, unbelievably special and lovable. I had the feeling that something must have gone very wrong in his life. He could have been a great person, and I was proud to have a friend who had such fire in his belly, who was so utterly committed to ideas and principles and changing the world for the better. Someone who just got up and did things without concern for what other people said.
In certain respects I tried to copy this attitude. But he also had a dark side, and this increasingly gained the upper hand in the months to come.
Our friendship began to fall apart the moment that Julian no longer felt that I was kowtowing to him. When I began to bring up concrete problems or criticise him, simply because problems existed and not because I saw our relationship differently, he started to describe me as someone who needed to be "contained".
Edited extract from Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, to be published in Australia by Scribe, $29.95.
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