"We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks" is about the rise and fall of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Through interviews of various associates and correspondents we find out what kind of person Assange is, his aims, his goals, his beliefs, and how they seem to have changed over time.

Also of note were Bradley Manning, the Army soldier who leaked thousands of documents and files regarding the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Adrian Lamo, a hacker who turned in Bradley Manning.

The world of hackers is a world I will only know through movies and T. V. They all seem strange to me, and this documentary only confirmed that. It's a good documentary though. I only had a trifle of knowledge about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. This documentary does a good job of shedding light upon the entirety of the matter of exposing state secrets and the ethical dilemma it causes. This is not among Alex Gibney's best work, but if I were to watch anyone's documentary on the subject, it would be his.

A documentary that details the creation of Julian Assange's controversial website, which facilitated the largest security breach in United States history.

How do you make a documentary on Assange without being political? Even if you try to be neutral, you will inevitably be able to lump interview into two groups: his supporters and his detractors. And he has plenty of both.

For supporters, you can rally around the "Collateral Murder" video and how it shows war in its unvarnished form. Whether or not this video showed a crime or a mistake, it makes us aware of what war is -- something that most of us today will never experience.

Detractors can appreciate how this film not only focuses on Assange's hacking (which is good or bad depending on who you are),but also shows how he is something of a sketchy person, abandoning his children and allegedly assaulting women. And then, he may even have been using Wikileaks funds to pay for his assault defense, which would be wrong.

The documentary also looks closer at Bradley (or Chelsea) Manning than any other source thus far. The e-mails, the access he had and his personal problems. I learned relatively little about Wikileaks from this film, but a good deal on Manning. And for that, I would highly recommend it.

In this documentary about the trials and tribulations of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning (the latter now a woman): everything about Manning is concise and brilliantly put together, with his text coming through in his conversations and confessionals (mostly to the hacker who ratted him out),and the actual story of Assange with the escalation of Wikileaks and all those many documents and videos is fascinating to watch, raising good questions about the nature of information and classified info in the digital age (and despite everything Assange has no charges against him from the US).

If I have a criticism there was just a bit too much information on the sex case - not so much the press reaction, which by Assanges one doing in part, ended up connecting to Wikileaks as a struggle itself - mostly with a supposedly incognito interview with one of the accusers in the case (which I didn't think was just shot very well whether to preserve her identity or not). It's needed there as some part of the story, but it felt too padded out in that section when really the main focus and what Gibney as a storyteller gets the best material is how these two men communicated.

That's where thematically you see this story still playing out with much harsher terms with Snowden, a kind of logical extension of the likes of Manning and Assange, who had their own problems relating to the world and used the many-tentacled beast known as the world wide web to reach out to people for various reasons ("hey, all info should be out there" to "I... care?") It's very good stuff that I wish was a masterpiece, but if you want to know about this whole story and never knew exactly all the key details, look no further.