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title = "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy - David Leigh"
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date = 2015-03-29
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "david leigh", "reviews", "history", "biography", "julian assange", "wikileaks"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10318540-wikileaks):
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A team of journalists with unparalleled inside access provides the first full,
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in-depth account of WikiLeaks, its founder Julian Assange, and the ethical,
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legal, and political controversies it has both uncovered and provoked.
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{{ stars(stars=3) }}
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**Almost a Cablegate novelization**
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The first comment I did on my updates about this book is "Words, words, words.
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This doesn't look good." This is my warning that there are some things the
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writer did that are completely unnecessary and could be thrown out without
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losing any context. There are a lot more of those "words, words, words"
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moments all over the content, so much that the book feels more like a
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novelization of the Cablegate events than a proper recounting of the events.
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It doesn't make the story itself bad, it is a good story with a lot of cruft.
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But the story itself it's about Wikileaks, from its inception to the release
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of the so called Cablegate -- the release of several diplomatic cables.
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Actually, Wikileaks is just the background story here; the whole action is
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more about how The Guardian dealt with Assange and the other publishing
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partners than Wikileaks itself.
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It's not a bad story, even with the abundance of words. There are a lot of
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forgotten elements -- like the story behind Manning and his leaking -- which
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tend to be completely ignored at this point. But, again, there are too many
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unnecessary words that go nowhere. Prepare to get annoyed about the continuous
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mention of the some cable over and over again -- and see the said cable in its
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complete form in the end.
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(Why I'm mentioning this? 'Cause the book makes a huge deal of how several
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cables affected international politics, but keep mentioning the same three
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cables over and over again. I mean, if several where that important, why are
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the same three mentioned so many times?)
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