Chapter 3: WikiLeaks.org – Website to Weapon

This chapter tells the story of WikiLeak's birth, growth, and mutations in terms of media and democratic design. While acknowledging how divisive figures like Assange and then Trump shaped the narrative, its focus is on how design choices of WikiLeaks.org afforded a specific shape to the narrative; why secrets were mediated to the public as they were; and what democratic consequences these crafted paths leave behind. The chapter is structured to map the four significant design iterations of WikiLeaks.org from 2006 to 2011 and concludes with consideration of WikiLeaks' return to publication via actively ‘hacked’ leaks around 2012 through to the 2016 US election via inclusion of FSB/GRU elements to the WikiLeaks apparatus. Each phase develops discrete affordances with specific democratic potentials – not only away from secrecy, but distinct from each other on the political plane. The political assumptions of WikiLeaks have been considered from various standpoints. There are accounts of WikiLeaks interactions with major media – mostly from their journalists' perspectives (Beckett & Ball, 2012; Keller, 2011; Leigh & Harding, 2011) – that tell what made the news. There are more hagiographic accounts of the story of its political impact – made by those inside or close to the organisation (Ali & Kunstler, 2019; Assange, 2014; Avila, Harrison, & Richter, 2017; WikiLeaks, 2015) (see O/R Press for a radical publishing apparatus in general). This chapter chooses to focus on WikiLeaks not as a document pipeline to press or as defined political movement, but through its constitution as a complex disclosure apparatus in its own right. That apparatus, despite its early ethos to publish everything, nonetheless, made choices around how to mediate information that had significant impact to its effectiveness to move the world away from secrecy and significant impact in lateral political movements towards the design of democracy.