Assange 10-26-16 Full Transcript

JA:In Buenos Aires?

JA:Ok, We'll try and do this, um this is the uhh the first time that I have spoken to people outside the Embassy since my internet was cut off. It's a bit unusual for me to do an interview by telephone but I like a challenge so we're going to try and do it.

JA:First of all um thank you to the Computer Workers' Union who put this event together and organized it, I see that quite a lot of Universities involved in Argentina, uh it's interesting to see people here, quite nice actually, the support for the Free Software movement and the ideals that I have fought for a long time, by the government of Argentina and other institutions within Argentina.

Panel: Mr Julian Give us just a minute to explain to the Public here what is happening, exactly. Could you give us a minute?

JA:Ok Well

Panel: Thanks

JA:First of all let me, let me just introduce myself. Uh My name is Julian Assange I am the editor, founder and publisher uh of Wikileaks. I have uh a technical training, I taught myself programming when I was 13, I became a computer hacker, explorer of the world when I was quite young, uh, from Australia. And developed a lot of free software and different projects, became a systems administrator, started my own internet service in Australia, and Writing cryptography programs to protect people and their privacy from spying, written books about that type of thing and studied the NSA and eventually theoretical physics and decided that actually I wanted to try and bring about more education and justice in the world and the easiest way so .....

Panel: Bueno, --- etc

JA:(Static) Ok Uhh I'm instructed ... programmers behind it and the people and instutions ... courageous people uh ... and alot of conflict, we publish on average 1 million secret docs per year for the last 10 years and of that time, 6 years I've been detained without charge here in the UK and for 4 years in this embassy, the embassy in london where ecuador gave me asylum the idea being to then go to ecuador but the embassy was then surrounded by police--

Panel: Police--

JA: -- Under siege by the british of the embassy for the last 4 years, by that they say the've spent over $20m in spying equipment, that is outside the embassy, plainclothes police and so on.

JA: now just recently we started our series on the us election which is extremely interesting about how the power networks in DC operates particularly around HRC who has been there many many years because she was the wife of bill clinton and the lobbyists and campaigners that work for her like John Podesta. So our first big leak in that series was the DNC leaks, as a result of that publishing in JUly the top 5 officials of the Democratic Party resigned including its president Debbie Wasserman Schultz

JA: Uh the Democratic Primary election between HRC and Bernie Sanders principally had been rigged in favor of HRC by the committee that runs the US Democratic party in many different wasy including pushing out fake stories that Bernie Sanders supporters were trying to organize violence, making sure more of the money went to HRC and so on.

JA: When we released those 20k emails we did it in a way that we've become famous for which is to make a customized search engine to search them essentially quite hard to make a search engine to display and search through email because there's so many broken mail standards in mail programs so it's quite a lot of work and it encouraged all the people in the US and some outside the US who were interested in the election to sort through them. This punched a hole in the media censorship that exists in the US by the top TV networks and about 8 of the 9 major publications in the US are biased in favor of HRC.

JA: So in response there was many attacks and the US DC establishment which believe HRC will be the winner of the election tried to find different wasy to distract from our publication. They first of all tried to say that we supported Donald Trump because we were criticizing HRC. Then they tried to say that actually we were secretly working with RUssia to publish this material which was criticizing her and thsi was some kind of cyber warfare against the US.

JA: What I've heard from people with experience with these sort of attacks is the best way to deal with it is to never flinch, you neve rblink .You just keep on publishing because every day you publish is another day you have the initiave in the conflict.

JA: So we continued on publishing the emails of Hillary Clintons uh chief campaign manager which are even more politically interesting than the emails of the DNC. I have been exploring what was the connection between HRC and her campaign manager and the sale of 20% of all US uranium to RUssia through a company in the US called JEwel Limited and that was very interesting that we showed that uh clintons campaign manager had been lyhing about his investments in this Nuclear energy company and he's very closely connected with a big Canadian mining magnate and that he had 75,000 shares in this company and that he moved it into another company secretly controlled by his daughter and so on but much more important was that in the investigation we managed to get ahold of more than 50K emails related to HRC's chief campaign manager John Podesta.

JA: So this time we started a different strategy which was to write an algorithm called a Stochastic Terminator which is designed to be unpredictable and to adjust how much it publishes and what it selects based upon what we as human beings suggest to it but also based upon what it reads in the news. So it selects the emails to be published and publishes them each day and we started doing that on the 7th of October

JA: And this really whipped up a crazed hornets nest atmosphere in the HRC campaign and in all the establishment that are backing her. Now we always had the analysis that HRC would win for sure, we've had that analysis from more than 12 months ago but she has pooled around her every single establishment in the US. The inteliigence agencies, the neoconservatives that started the Iraq war, the weapons manufacturers, the big banks, invenstment companies like Goldman Sachs, most of the middle class and most of the media, and so, now we have all these people in these establishments trying to defend HRC from being exposed as having many corrupt relationships.

JA: So they started attacking our servers with DOS attacks, and attempted hacking attacks. There was a, there IS an amazing ongoing campaign where fake documents were put in the US and the British courts to accuse me of both being a Russian spy and a pedophile, a molester of children.

JA: You can look up that amazing story that we tracked down about how this hoax was made in the US and British courts to call me a Russian spy and a pedophile, by a front company in the US in Texas called Todd And Claire.

JA: But that wasn't enough so the pressure started to increase and started to pressure Ecuador, which some of the opposition parties in Ecuador were sympathetic to, perhaps because of their relationships with the US, and pressure, statements made to Ecuador at the political level and the intelligence level that I needed to be stopped or that there would be consequences.

JA: But um, Wikileaks is a global publisher, publishes 1m documents a year. We publish from France, Germany, several, Norway, Holland, several other countries and we have most of our lawyers and staff in the EU and the US. We don't publish from Ecuador, no particular reason, just the bandwidth is cheaper and the servers are cheaper than in Ecuador.

JA: So the US and Hillary, the US Government in the form of John Kerry, the Secretary of State, some other US officials and the HRC campaign, kept putting forth propaganda to say that our publications revealing various forms of corruption and scandal within HRC's network was in fact interference in the US electoral process.

JA: But this isn't interference in the electoral process, this is the DEFINITION of the electoral process. It is for media organizations and in fact everyone to publish the truth and their opinions about what is occurring.

JA: There cannot be a free and informed election unless we are free to inform.

JA: So you basically have the Obama administration taking control of parts of the goverment and using the government to try and shut down critical true information being revealed and analyzed by Wikileaks, uh, being read by the American population.

JA: So now let's look at it fro Ecuadorian point of view. While I disagree that they didn't give me any notice about what was occuring, I did not like the, how it was done, I am very sympathetic to the concern that the Ecuadorian state has.

JA: Ecuador, like most states that are not empires, has a policy of non intervention in the interior processes, including elections, of other states

JA: Now, it makes perfect strategic sense why small states should have such a policy, because if they do not have such a policy, larger states can use that as the excuse to intervene in their affairs or their elections.

JA: So here we have a dilemna on one hand Wikileaks is a publisher that doesn't publish from Ecuador. And it is a publisher, its duty and obligation is to publish everything and anything that's true that it can get its hands on about a very important election that's occuring right now in the US.

JA: On the other hand the TV networks in the US with the exception of Fox are controlled by clinton supporters and the US intelligence establishment which is also aligned to Clinton pushing statements before the public that Wikileaks publishing about the US elections is interference in the US elections which is false but nonetheless it is a claim that is being made very loudly in the US.

JA: And this claim, although false, could be used to legitimize the US interfering in Ecuador's election next year.

JA: Now of course we ACTUALLY publish from Germany, France, Holland, Norway and so on, the US has not as far as we're aware tried to apply significant country, pressure to those countries. But, I am a symbol as the ideological leader of Wikileaks, and that symbol is being protected as a political refugee by the state of Ecuador. So they think that they can go after the symbol and they think they can bully, or try to bully Ecuador because it is a state in Latin American that's not the size of Brazil.

JA: So we end up with a strategic position for Ecuador that the internet at the embassy is shut off until the end of the election so that Ecuador's policy of non-intervention cannot be mis-interpreted by actors in the US or even domestically in Ecuador

JA: Of course I don't agree with it but I understand it.

JA: And Ecuador has been strong, in otherwise in the first place and also continuing to resist quite strong pressure from the UK, US, and Sweden to cast me out into the streets to be arrested.

JA: And I just compare um what the government's position is, about half the opposition party's that's becoming the Ecuadorian legislation next year in February saying that they also would protect my asylum but about another half don't (Static) saying they would hand me over to be arrested despite the United Nations in February this year making a formal finding that i am legally correct in that I am being illegally detained by the UK

JA: But Wikileaks is a, you know you can ask what type of dog is a different company or an organization, and Wikileaks is one of these fighting dogs, that has a lot of energy, that runs around and loves to fight, does nothing more than fight. So when my internet was cut off of course we had long ago made contingency plans for exactly this situation so despite bombs raining down on us from statements from high officials, media and so on this is exactly the sort of situation we enjoy and there was not even a 1 day pause in publishing the next day even though I was cut off from my team.

Question 1:<Spanish trans needed>

JA: Thank you very very much

Question 2:

Panel: I don't know if the translator will make the questions to Julian or if Julian is listening to us (phonetically?) la pregunta ... Something about how US election affects latin america and Argentina?

JA: Uh as I said that it has long been our analysis that HRC will win the election because she has all the establishment on her side and we can see that in terms of polling that someone like Donald Trump has a great many problems I'm sure you're all aware of it but if he managed to get up near the 48-50% level, the polling, which he has just on two occasions crossed on different polls, united them immediately those big media networks and their funders get together and smash him back down. So I don't think there's any, any chance of Donald Trump winning the election. That would probaby be bad inside the US, it would probably be good outside the US, but even with the amazing material that we are publishing and will continue to publish. Because even though that we publish it and there's a lot of people on the internet reading it directly, that most of the media organizations in the US are very strongly aligned with HRC, Um for 2 reasons really a lot of them are owned by big businesses which are owned by big banks, which like HRC. And the other is a class reason, most journalists and media workers are very middle class and Donald Trump represents in their mind "white trash" and so to be, doing anything that looks like it supports Donald Trump, looks like it supports the trash, as it means to those rivals that they have within their class, that they are white trash and lowers their social status, which is a very dangerous thing to do in an institution, have your social status lowered, because someone else might get your job or the job you want to have within the institution. So there's a lot of conformity and a lot of fear about criticizing HRC in any way at all, so it reduces the impact of even very significant material that is released. But what is the impact for Latin America, why, I think it is extremely positive, because I think that this is the first time in US electoral history that we can see the power structure going into the new presidency so the various alliances and forces and influences of HRC and her team we are exposing day by day. And so that's going to shift understanding of the phenomenon that then everyone has to deal with, inside the US and out and it becomes more predictable and also the worst excesses of it are easier to contain.

Question 3:<translation needed>

JA: As a security expert or former security expert and someone who's had to continue to understand that in order to protect Wikileaks and our sources, I think electronic voting is completely crazy. The electronic aspect of it, even if there is cryptography, maybe especially if there's cryptography makes it so complex that individual peoples and communities can't assess whether it's doing what it says that it's doing. So it's become easy to manipulate. Now even if there are rules concerning sophisticated audits, external auditors, auditing that's being done, we all know the reality that once those rules are set up for auditors, gradually they are defunded or the auditors get lazy, and gradually they start to disappear and those people who want to manipulate systems understand the ability and limitations of the auditors more and more as time goes by. So I think electronic voting is completely crazy for national elections. Another thing that (static) when there's REAL power involved, I think this is mad.

Question 4:<translation needed>

JA: On the second part of that question about overseas processing data in the US and elsewhere, obviously information in, jurisdiction is acceptable to US authorities, Now with that said it might even be more accessible if it's not in US jurisdiction because they hack it and steal it anyway. So this issue of the breakdown in areas of jurisdiction or areas of (servility?) a much broader issue, which is causing the disappearance of effective borders, a blending in or a merging in of different states with each other. There's a lot of benefits to that, on the other hand it seems quite likely that the largest most powerful electronic state like the US, maybe like China in a few years, will be able to hold and gather together critically important functions of other countries , and then will be able to squeeze these functions, both in terms of data from them but possibly more importantly in terms of demanding fees, court cases, or simply cutting off access.

Question 5:<translation needed>

JA: Ok. The power structures of the whole world, are becoming computerized, that shouldn't be any surprise to anyone in this room. And therefore we, as technological workers, can have a unique ability to shape the power to become and not simply be useful idiots, which is how politicians in general and company executives think of most technical workers. Rather the intelligent, skilled technicians that understand not just about our technical labors but understand how our technical labors interface and facilitate the evolving structure of international civilization and of course within our country. Now if it's to establish our own rules and our own culture, in say the Free Software community, have produced really quite important advances. But at the same time, some of those advances like Free software are also being treated as a common and being gobbled up by ever larger corporations like Google or ever more abusive mega government instituions like the NSA which uses Linux and free software all over the place. It's nothing to be proud of that the fruits of our mind is being used in that way. Rather it's something to be ashamed of that the fruits of our mind can be taken and repurposed in a way to make the world we live in less free and less humane. So Wikileaks is the vision I had for using my technical skills to do something about some of these problems but there's many other ways in which one can do it. I think it's important is to kind of look at what is happening in the world as the rest of the world's power structures coming into our domain and try, thereby exercise some influence over the situation rather than seeing our domain as something that is being gobbled up by the existing power structures.

Question 6:<translation needed>

JA: Hm. That is a very important question. One of the major power elements in society, one which shapes our thinking about the problems that we have, and the solutions to our problems can only be as good as the clarity of our thinking, is of course the media, the mass media. And we're also shifting into control from social, the way social media and internet publishing has broken through a lot of the censorship on behalf of various establishments that the mainstream media has been performing. At the same time there is consolidation in the owners of social media that is leading to various forms of censorship. There is a great book that's been published in Argentina, it's definitely in Spanish, called Wiki Media Leaks, and that is an analysis of the Latin American media, looking at the cables that Wikileaks published showing the relationships between the US State Department and the various media oligarchs in Latin America. Now why did a separate book have to be published on that? Well because obviously the Clarin Group was not reporting about the Clarin Group. And there also exists a type of truce between the different media owners and even amongst journalists not to report critical information about these groups or individuals that you would think would be rivals but they're too scared to get in a media war with each other so they tend to censor news that is critical of the media. Now in the, one of the things most remarked on by our recent publications about the DNC and HRC's campaign is how many unethical journalists were exposed, Journalists who were checking in to make sure that Hillary Clinton was, the campaign manager, was proving to throw private parties with 65 different journalists where they didn't report anything that happened at the parties, HRC or campaign manager John Podesta cooking together and so on. But you're right, the full archives of the NYT or Clarin Group or CNN would make a very big difference to peoples opinions and help them understand those power networks. We did it for the Sony corporation, while the Sony corporation is not a news organization it is a media organization. And that showed very interesting things, for example that Sony tried to do a deal with UK prime minister david Cameraon, at the time the scottish referendum, in 2014, to not air a TV series which was pro-Scottish until after the referendum. They had met with DAvid Cameraon that was their stratgegy going into the meeting, they wanted to do that, and what could they get from cameron, well they could get some tax provisions from the prime minister in exchange for killing off this Tv series about scotland which would increase scottish nationalism. So that's the games that are played in all the big media groups.