I don't think it's reasonable to expect a movie about Wikileaks to be any more accurate than, say, a movie about Facebook. Yeah, they took some liberties and made a nice, tidy narrative. It's a movie.
And whose fault is it that the journalist apparently didn't know a password he was given for files for his own use was being reused to secure a public insurance file? It does not speak well to their stewardship of sensitive documents that they were giving out that password to people who are "careless and clueless."
>I don't think it's reasonable to expect a movie about Wikileaks to be any more accurate than, say, a movie about Facebook.
That's why I have a problem with movies like The Social Network and Zero Dark Thirty. It's fine to composite, or eliminate less significant details, or even play some details up for their metaphorical significance. My problem is with movies containing counterfactual plot points that change the entire moral calculus of the events being depicted, often in favor of the status quo.
It's as of you made a movie about the Iraq War, and based a key scene around how they find a bunch of WMD in the desert. Or depict Martin Luther King on the phone to his handlers in the USSR, or delivering "I Have a Dream" at a rally against racial quotas in hiring.
Actually, it wasn't being reused to secure the public insurance file - we still don't know know the password for that. The problem was that other people managed to get their hands on the encryped file for the Guardian journalist under dubious circumstances involving a prominent ex-Wikileaks member sabotaging them.
> the journalist apparently didn't know a password he was given for files for his own use was being reused to secure a public insurance file
I think he got the file from bittorrent so he knew it was public. Not making an ecrypted archive just for him with a new password was Assange's mistake, no doubt about it, but publishing that password in a book takes it to a whole new level.
The fact that Bittorrent is used for distribution doesn't automatically make a file fully public. But as far as I know the file was provided to the journalist in the equivalent of an FTP /pub folder, not via Bittorrent. But Assange never removed the file afterwards and it eventually got backed up and publically-trawled afterwards somehow.
And whose fault is it that the journalist apparently didn't know a password he was given for files for his own use was being reused to secure a public insurance file? It does not speak well to their stewardship of sensitive documents that they were giving out that password to people who are "careless and clueless."