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