Alexa O'Brien

Alexa O'Brien is an American journalist and activist.

In March 2011, Alexa O'Brien started "US Day of Rage" (USDOR), a campaign to demand "free and fair elections" to "remedy a myriad ills and abuses of a government that preys on the resources and the spirits of citizens. ... Either we do this now or wait a hundred years and have our children grow up in a totalitarian nightmare." Later that year, USDOR organized all the nonviolent civil disobedience actions at Occupy Wall Street (OWS). In his book Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, author Nathan Schneider relates that during the early stages of OWS, O'Brien's "press releases and tweets became so ubiquitous that people started referring to #OCCUPYWALLSTREET and US Day of Rage interchangeably."

In a group discussion on Julian Assange's World Tomorrow 2012 TV program, O'Brien told the WikiLeaks founder that her advocacy of "'one citizen, one dollar, one vote', so to speak, is so radical that it's gotten me ... tied to al-Qaeda. I'm getting private messages from security contractors that have relationships with the FBI telling me, 'Be careful, you're somehow connected to al-Qaeda'. That tells me immediately—it's an intimidation tactic."

That same year, O'Brien was a plaintiff in Hedges v. Obama, a lawsuit in opposition to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). In 2013, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to challenge the NDAA.

In 2015, O'Brien's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department seeking documents related to internal government discussions about WikiLeaks forced the first official release of an email from Hillary Clinton's private account used to conduct official business while Secretary of State.

In January 2011, two months after its debut, O'Brien began blogging at WikiLeaks Central, a global news site that, according to its administrator and editor-in-chief, Heather Marsh, "was requested, announced, promoted, endorsed and hosted by WikiLeaks." Until December 2011, O'Brien recalls, "I was a blogger, who wrote mostly extramurally." In March 2011 she wrote, "It's a testament to Assange that WikiLeaks has lasted as long as it has, and that the institution has managed to publish what it has published in the face of constant attack and murderous tabloid coverage. I only hope that the bastards out to get Assange and WikiLeaks fall on their own words and swords."

From mid-December 2011 until summer 2013, O'Brien created an extensive archive of the only available pretrial transcripts of the court-martial of accused WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning. In May 2013, O'Brien was co-recipient with blogger Kevin Gosztola of an $8,500 grant from Freedom of the Press Foundation to cover the trial, which began on June 3 and stretched over 80 days. On August 21, immediately after the trial concluded with Manning's sentencing, O'Brien obtained the first exclusive interview with lead civilian defense counsel, David Coombs.

During the Manning trial, The New York Times referred to testimony in the soldier's pretrial hearings "as transcribed by Alexa O'Brien, an activist who was present in court." In response, O'Brien emailed Margaret Sullivan, then public editor of The Times, protesting that she was a journalist and should be referred to as one. To O'Brien, the term activist as used in this instance was "pejorative." Two days after publication, The Times revised its article to identify her as "an activist and independent journalist who was present in court" (emphasis added), explaining that their original wording "referred incompletely to Alexa O'Brien. While Ms. O'Brien has participated in activist causes like Occupy Wall Street and US Day of Rage, she also works as an independent journalist; she is not solely an activist."

In 2013, O'Brien was shortlisted for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in the United Kingdom. O'Brien's work has been published in The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, The Guardian, Salon, and The Daily Beast. She has been featured on the BBC, PBS Frontline, NPR's On The Media, Democracy Now!, Public Radio International (PRI), and teleSUR's Days of Revolt.

Manning court record and WikiLeaks

In January 2020, O'Brien posted a disclaimer at her blog. Beginning about six months into the 2012 pretrial proceedings, and for eight or nine months thereafter, she wrote, her documentation of PFC Manning's court-martial "was supported in part (both financially and morally)" by Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. CCR later utilized O'Brien's FOIA requests and investigative research in a lawsuit (to which O'Brien was party) that in March 2014 won release of an unclassified record of Manning’s court-martial. Ratner was also at the time the constitutional lawyer for WikiLeaks in the U.S. Around spring 2013, O'Brien recalls, "I discussed with Ratner how I needed to avoid any conflict of interest, as my work documenting the trial at Fort Meade ... was becoming the unofficial repository of the trial record." She does not further describe this discussion.

Following Manning's July 2013 conviction, O'Brien was approached by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange "(after arrangements were made by Ratner) to see if I would be available to work for WikiLeaks once their submission system was running." In January 2014, O'Brien moved to Berlin for six months to continue her "work on the Manning court-record and the U.S. investigation of WikiLeaks." Andy Müller-Maguhn, who coauthored Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks, helped arrange letters in support of O'Brien's German work permit from, among others, WikiLeaks spokesperson and Berlin resident Jacob Appelbaum. During her time there, O'Brien lived with then WikiLeaks section editor Sarah Harrison, who has been described as Julian Assange's closest adviser and whom O'Brien interviewed live onstage at the May 2014 re:publica conference.

"While I don't know for certain," O'Brien concludes, "my understanding is that financial support from Ratner during those portions of the Manning pre-trial and in 2014" via French advocacy group La Quadrature du Net "came from the WikiLeaks defense fund" via the Wau Holland Foundation, which by late 2010 had collected over $1.2 million for WikiLeaks.

By mid-February 2020, however, O'Brien had turned against Assange. "He is a mother f*cker," she tweeted from her verified account, "and deserves ridicule for being a self-centered narcissist clown, IMO." Two days later, she tweeted that although she'd been approached by agents over the last decade to write a book on Manning or her work, she was glad she had not done so. "If I ever write it," she joked, "title will be Useful Idiot, an autobiography."

Recent work

In late 2015 and early 2016, O'Brien collaborated with military scholar William M. Arkin on a multi-month VICE News investigation into U.S. institutions of higher education with the greatest number of students employed by the Intelligence Community (IC), with the closest relationships with the national security state, and with the greatest profit from the U.S. war footing. A follow-up investigation by Arkin and O'Brien revealed that one in 50 members of the IC with Top Secret security clearances and doctoral degrees had obtained the degrees from unaccredited schools.

In July 2019, a report written by O'Brien was published by Airwars, a London-based nonprofit that assesses allegations of civilian casualties from airstrikes during international military actions. For the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, she coauthored "The Ethics of Applied Intelligence in Modern Conflict" (July 2019) and "By the Numbers: Former U.S. Intelligence Officials Discuss Personal Opinion versus Professional Obligation" (February 2020).

In May 2020, O'Brien was named 2020 Tropaia Outstanding Student in Applied Intelligence by Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies, which conferred on her a Master of Professional Studies degree.