BIMI in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) presents:

We Steal Secrets: the Story of Wikileaks

Alex Gibney, USA, 2013, 124 minutes

Presenter: James Brown

Looked at one way, Alex Gibney’s film is a story of a few marginal, maladjusted individuals, who don’t know where their loyalties lie. Looked at another way, it’s an indictment of the rest of us, the supposedly normal, well-adjusted majority, for giving our loyalty so lightly.
We Steal Secrets tells the stories of Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, and of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, the US army intelligence analyst who gave Wikileaks information about (among other things) the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. Assange and Manning seem caught in a tangle of motives. Assange’s hack-tivism aims to clear the way to a new world by exposing the secrets of the old. But he is represented as having secrets of his own, and as confusing his ideals with his interests in his efforts to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex charges. Manning was disaffected in the masculine world of the US military, and has since changed sex. But whatever their motives, Assange and Manning took huge risks for scant personal gain. One reason Manning gives for his actions is that he finds it impossible not to care. At present, she is serving a 35-year prison sentence, while Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The movie poses tough questions about the motives of the rest of us and our capacity to care.

For information about the Guilt Group's work, see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/research/guilt-working-group.

BIMI is funded by four schools at Birkbeck: the School of Arts, the School of Law, the School of Social Sciences,
History and Philosophy, and the School of Science. The University of Pittsburgh is also a partner and co-funder.

BIMI BISR Guilt Screening Series