The nearly 500,000 U.S. Army documents published by WikiLeaks this year didn’t mark the first time founder Julian Assange thumbed his nose at the Pentagon. A new documentary about the secret-spilling site captures Assange in a rare moment of reminiscence as he reflects on his hacking of a Defense Department network in the 1990s, where he evidently kept a backdoor in place for some two years.
The documentary WikiRebels, produced by Sveriges Television in Sweden, was recently posted on the web in four parts. It provides an overview of Assange and WikiLeaks from the time the site published a classified Army video last April showing an Apache gunship attack in Iraq, to the latest release of U.S. State Department cables.
It also includes interviews with several current and former WikiLeaks activists, including former spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Icelandic volunteer Herbert Snorrason, who discuss the internal conflict at WikiLeaks that led them to resign.
It’s a compelling documentary, even if it provides little new information. In one segment (above, at 3:53), Assange reflects on his work as a black hat hacker in the early 1990s, recalling wistfully how he and others hacked into the Pentagon’s Security Coordination Center. The SCC was a Chantilly, Virginia, office that handled computer security issues for MilNet — later NIPRNet — the U.S. military’s portion of the public internet.
“We had a backdoor in the U.S. military Security Coordination Center –- this is the peak security for controlling the security of MilNet … U.S. military internet. We had total control over this for two years,” he tells the interviewer.
A backdoor refers to a malicious tool that hackers place on a network, once they’ve gained entry, to provide them with easy and continued surreptitious access to the network, allowing them to come and go at will.