ForbiddenKnowledgeTV
Alexandra Bruce
May 25, 2011

‘WikiSecrets’ the full movie, can be seen here:

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FRONTLINE: Extended Interview with Julian Assange

PBS: So let’s just talk about the idea of WikiLeaks, how it comes about, when you begin to conceptualize what eventually becomes WikiLeaks. What were you thinking?

JA: I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform. And in my involvement in cryptography and human rights, protecting human rights workers using cryptography, [this] also showed that privacy is an important part of spreading knowledge. [The] ability to be able to communicate privately helps people spread knowledge out to the public for these human rights workers in South America. …
“Our technology does not permit us to understand whether someone is one of our sources or not, because the best way to keep a secret is to never have it.”

So there’s certain constraints on knowledge, and those basic constraints affect all of us. So we could go back to James Madison, who put it perhaps best: that a people who mean to be free must have the power that knowledge brings.
Because knowledge will always rule ignorance. In the United States’ context, that meant people who wanted to self-rule, to have a democracy, needed the information that is the lifeblood of a democracy. So I considered what were the limitations in spreading of knowledge, and they were really at the source so that we have a Fourth Estate: We have journalists; we have the press.

But all of this is only as good as its basic input. The knowledge that we have about secret governments, the governmental programs’ secretive organizations, organizations acting in secret to conceal abuses — and so we needed to devise a mechanism so as much knowledge from those organizations could enter into the press and then be distributed to the people.
I found that wasn’t the only thing that needed to be done. We also needed to protect the publishing side, because there was a lot of press self-censorship and a lot of assertive, direct censorship in different countries. So WikiLeaks and the Sunshine Press publishing organization is an attempt to bring these two parts together, to get more knowledge from sources who know what’s actually happening in powerful organizations, and to have a publishing infrastructure that is able to publish that knowledge even though states or other powerful organizations are trying to censor it from getting to the people. It gets to the people; it brings that lifeblood that Jefferson spoke about true democracy.

PBS: You wrote to Daniel Ellsberg [the former U.S. military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971] at one point asking him to participate in the project?

JA: That’s correct.

PBS: And you said to him, “We have come to the conclusion that fomenting a worldwide movement of mass leaking is the most [cost-]effective political intervention.”

JA: That’s correct.

PBS: Can you elaborate?

JA: Well, this is [a] very old message, so it’s hard to elaborate. But — When you talk about political intervention — There’s a bit of confusion between the Australian use of the word “political” and the U.S. use of the word “political.” The word “political” in the Australian vernacular, what we mean by “political” is that everything that has to do with polity. So “political” means the political system, the interaction between information and people and power. And that is what we mean by “political.” And a “political intervention” is anything that intervenes within the system.

PBS: I’m not sure Daniel Ellsberg, as an American, would have understood that either.

JA: Well, I didn’t understand this difference until I spoke on [The] Colbert [Report] that the Australian view about “political” means everything that encompasses politics and the U.S. view that “political” is something that is “party political.” In Australian English, we use “party political” to talk about political parties, “political” to talk about democracy and everything that it entails.
I mean, the reason that people raise that is, for example, is they question whether or not you have a partisan political agenda.
Well, it’s absolutely false. I mean, you can see the proof of that in all of the material we have released, from Climategate on the one hand, broadly sympathetic to Republican politics, and the U.S. diplomatic cables on the other, which actually reveals abuses from many organizations all over the world, but including the central powers in Washington, like the State Department.
Climategate is an interesting case. What’s the intent that you had when you leaked the Climategate e-mails?
The truth needs no policy position, so there does not need to be an intent. We have a framework, and the framework has an intent. We have policies that have an intent as a whole. And our intent is to bring knowledge to the people where it can do some good.

We have, unlike every other media organization, a very concise and clear editorial policy. So our editorial policy is we accept information of diplomatic, political, ethical or historical significance that is under active suppression, that has not been published before.

PBS: But if you believed that we had a climate problem, that man was contributing to rising greenhouse gases — I don’t know, do you believe that’s a reality?

JA: I believe the issues are very complex. I do not think anyone working outside of climate science understands whether that is true or not, because people simply do not understand all the complexities. Rather, instead we look to see who is the most critical voice. What are the motivations behind those people?

On the one hand, we can see scientists are typically not very good political players. They’re not very good manipulators. They are geeks. On the other hand, we see well-funded oil companies and politicians associated with them, powerful interests that are good political players.

When these two are starting to achieve parity in political debate, it is natural to assume that this group is more credible because their ability to manipulate and influence the political debate without facts is reduced compared to this group, who has long experience and plenty of money behind them. So my view is it is probably the climate scientists are right because they are scientists, and they are a more critical voice.

PBS: Did it give you any second thoughts that by releasing the Climategate e-mails, it would give credence [to] the climate-change deniers?

JA: It gave me pause for thought that we have established policies. We make promises to sources that we publish material of that sort. And in that particular case, we had the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, a central hub in Climategate science, deliberately try to suppress information from the Freedom of Information Act, asking other scientists to delete information before Freedom of Information request got it.

So on the one hand, in this particular case, was justice served or not in the overall? We are not sure. Certainly when we look at keeping effective Freedom of Information Act and exposing abuses of the Freedom of Information Act, justice was served.
But it is important to keep the system as a whole, our system as a whole, as integral as possible. So we must dispense our duties in a manner that is in accordance to what we are publicly promising. And that is what keeps us on the straight and narrow in terms of this journalistic project, to be doing as most editors do do, picking and choosing cases to promote up or promote down, depending on whether they like the people associated with it. It’s a topic corruption, and that is something that we are seeking to fight against.

PBS: So you publish the truth regardless of what effect it’s going to have on the debate? Fair?

JA: Anything that is received by us that fits that editorial promise, we publish.

PBS: You wrote an essay, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” [PDF] — this has been brought up to you a number of times, I’m sure — about how to destroy conspiracies’ abilities to conspire. Can you explain the mechanism?

JA:This is one of many sort of theoretical documents that provide a background into WikiLeaks. It’s a real concern in our own eternal debate as to whether if we released information about an abusive organization, whether it would simply go off record. So would an organization simply move all their correspondence, all their planning and plotting, off paper into purely all conversations?

So I produced this essay looking at that situation and showing that, well, if organizations do do that, if they move themselves off paper, and they are large organizations, then they will cease to be functional organizations, because they won’t be able to efficiently administrate themselves. That is why large organizations do use paperwork, they use e-mails, they use trackable material.

And when in late 2007 we got hold of Guantanamo Bay’s main manuals, we discovered that there were sections outlining how to keep information from the Red Cross and how to falsify records in relation to Red Cross visits to detainees. And this really surprised me, because I thought, who would be foolish enough to put in a military manual that that sort of deliberate fabrication against U.S. covenants with the Red Cross would occur?

But I came to understand why: that if you have a center that is devising policy, the center of a military organization, the center of a commercial organization, and it wants to have that policy widely implemented, including by grunts [inaudible], then it needs to go down in writing, because otherwise you just have Chinese whispers occurring, and the grunts [inaudible] can’t work out what it is precisely that they are meant to be implementing.

Instead, they conduct behavior that is purely in their own interests, and the central policy gets distorted. So that’s a rather interesting understanding of how organizations really only have two choices to deal with transparency. The first choice is they can simply stop doing things that embarrass the public, so instead of committing an unjust act, commit a just act. Instead of hiding something, explain it. That’s one choice.

The other choice is that they can spend more on their security; they can become more baroque; they can take things off-record, speak orally and continue with this course of unjust action. But if they do that, they will become inefficient compared to other organizations, and they will shrink in their power and scale. And that’s also great because unjust organizations are in economic and political equilibrium and competition with just organizations.

PBS: That’s what you call the “secrecy tax”?

JA: Yes, that’s right. So organizations that are doing things that the public doesn’t like, when there are leaks, self-impose [a] secrecy tax through all this bureaucracy administration secrecy, and as a result simply shrink in their power and influence to conduct their affairs in that manner.

PBS: Are all governments necessarily conspiracies?

JA: Well, they’re not necessarily conspiracies. One has to be careful with this word that I use, “conspiracy,” and to differentiate it from the sort of conspiracy talk that you hear about 9/11. The notion of conspiracy is quite ancient and goes back to Lord Halifax, who speaks about political groupings in general as a type of conspiracy. Or if we look at the RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations] Act against the Mafia in the United States, it speaks directly about conspiracies.

So what we mean about conspiracy is simply people getting together in private to make plans to do something that the public would be outraged against. They keep it in private because the public would oppose it. And if the public finds out about it and opposes it before it’s implemented, then chances are it won’t be implemented.

PBS: There’s a number of things that come up in your writings that cause people to sit back and say: “What’s this guy talking about? Governments are conspiracies?” [PDF] Tell me whether this is true, that in an e-mail you said, “The total annihilation of the current U.S. regime or any other regime that holds its authority through mendacity alone could be accelerated or advanced by several years if WikiLeaks does its job right.”

JA: I don’t know if I wrote that e-mail, but I recall that it spawned [controversy]. That I’ve read. I don’t think the word “regime” was used. I believe the word [was] “administration.”

PBS: … I just raise the issue to give you a chance to address [it] before our audience [gets] this idea that you are setting yourself up as an opponent of the government of the United States and are interested in the annihilation of the U.S. government.

JA: We’re not interested in annihilating any government. It is a difficult thing to have a critical, functional institution. Institutions derive their legitimate authority from an informed public that chooses to grant them authority. If the public is not informed, then any authority that chooses to grant an organization in itself is not informed, and therefore is not legitimate.
When we have cases of clear cover-ups of abuse, which was certainly true under [President George W.] Bush, certainly true in relation to its rendition program and the administration of Guantanamo Bay and many other matters we are dealing with, in the case of those sections or Bush, then an administration that governs by, I’m not sure the word “mendacity” would have been used, but governs by concealing of abuse. And that in itself is abuse, and that must be stopped.

PBS: Can I take you back to your association with Tor [network]? It’s been said that you had set up — this is prior to this sort of drop box WikiLeaks idea — that you had set up listening posts at the edge of Tor to essentially —

JA: This is not true.

PBS: No use of Tor listening post to —

JA: We used Tor in many different ways, which is to conceal the path that things travel. There was an investigation into the use of Tor by Chinese intelligence, and we had sources who were involved in that investigation.

PBS: But I just want to be clear: You were not using Tor, as some say, to hack information out of the —

JA: No, of course not. …

PBS: Your idea initially was to post documents and then let people comment upon those, and perhaps illuminate things that weren’t clear in the document, or to explain them, like an annotation.

JA: Yes, that was my initial idea, and the reason being is that I was of the belief, and I am still of the belief, that the total economic size of the media is not enough to be able to properly contextualize and assess the potential volume of leaked material. And we can see that, I mean, even in the case of Cablegate, where we are only some 7,000 cables in, pulling together over 63 different media organizations around the world.

So really the Fourth Estate as a functional unit of the civilization that we have is just not large enough to make sense of the world [as] we know it. So it is required to bring in other sources of labor to make sense of this. So we did try to do that, and —

PBS: Why didn’t it work?

JA: Very interesting. So it didn’t work for a couple of reasons. The first reason has to do with incentives. So when we release a document that is complex or long to everyone, the supply goes from zero to infinity. Everyone can have it, so there’s infinite supply. And just like the air that everyone can have, no one pays for it. In our case, what that means is no one pays labor to investigate it. And people are motivated by many different reasons. But they are all in sort of an economic equilibrium.

PBS: Can you talk about the importance of the Julius Baer case to WikiLeaks?

JA: The Bank Julius Baer case was the first big, real case that we had. We had come across information from the Swiss bank Bank Julius Baer, the largest private Swiss banking concern. It handles the accounts predominantly of millionaires. You need a million bucks to open an account.

It had been hiding assets in the Cayman Islands and minimizing its own taxes through tricks in the Cayman Islands. We released a number of secret trust records. This is not a sort of conventional banking operation. This is using the laws of the Cayman Islands and trust hiding to conceal assets of wealthy and powerful individuals.

In response, Baer threatened to sue us. And in fact, my legal advice at the time was that this is not the case that we should fight because of some political claims made by Baer. But nonetheless, it was our promise to never censor things that fitted our editorial policy, and this material certainly did. And as a result, the case was taken in California by Baer, and very quickly. And initially for that day we were not represented, but we pulled together a big team of around 22 different lawyers.
From different publications — Eleven mainstream media organizations, professional journalist unions, NGOs [non-governmental organizations], Harvard, University of Texas and our own four lawyers, and won the day under the First Amendment protections for what was going on.

PBS: So that was a big deal for you.

JA: That was a big deal. I mean, The New York Times put our IP address in its editorial. CBS came in to support us. It was quite important. The reason these groups had come to bat for us was that today we would be taken down, in terms of our domain name, tomorrow CBS.com or NYTimes.com would be taken down from the Internet. So there was a strong mutual interest and a good tradition among groups like the First Amendment Coalition [FAC] and Citizen.org in protecting the First Amendment.
And we had structured things so that this case would take place in San Francisco, arguably the hotbed of First Amendment activism in the U.S. And the end result, other than winning the case, was that Bank Julius Baer had to cancel its U.S. initial stock offer, which it had predicted would bring it a profit of $300 million. So it was a good case. We stood by our public guidelines; we stood by our philosophy, even though we knew it was going to be very hard; and we prevailed.

PBS: Describe how you reacted when you first saw the Apache video, as much as you can tell me about the circumstances of seeing it, and how you took it in and what you thought, felt, saw.

JA: Well, when we finally had the Apache video decrypted and de-encoded and saw it —

PBS: It was encrypted?

JA: Yes.

PBS: Not very much, I thought.

JA:It [w]as encrypted, and we had to go through a program to break it. And it was quite complex. So when we finally managed to decode it into a form where I could see it, actually I wasn’t shocked. I wasn’t shocked at all. Rather, I saw a complex situation involving individuals. I had no idea what they were doing, who they were, what their purpose [was]. The before and the after — was it contiguous time, was it jumps? Who was on which side of the equation, who was a civilian, who not a civilian.

And as I researched it more, I started to piece together dates from this video to an event that occurred in Baghdad, where two Reuters journalists were killed. And then I looked for, could we see which ones were the Reuters journalists, which ones were not? We managed to find them and follow them throughout the sequence.

And the research made it more and more impact[ful] and more extraordinary as time went by. So it turned out that the Reuters journalists were the two principal visual characters, the people that move the most, and they suffer the most, including Saeed Chmagh, who is at one stage, after a large group of people have been mowed down, is crawling along the curb, wounded in his blood, toward the van that has stopped by, seeing this wounded man in the street. And he’s lifted up and taken into the van. And then extraordinar[ily], the helicopter opens fire on the van and wounded men, killing the Reuters journalist and most of the occupants of the van. So it was only after understanding what was happening that it became so impactful.

And this taught me a lesson in terms of how we would have to present it, that we couldn’t just release it as it came in, with no context. Rather, in order for people to feel the impact that I felt after researching it, we needed to present that.

So I experimented in different ways when I showed it to my colleague Kristinn Hrafnsson. I gave an introduction, a narration: “You will see these two people — they are journalists — and follow them through here. And you will see what happens to them. And then there’s other people, etc., etc.”

PBS: So you now [have] a production of the documentary about that video, “Collateral Murder,” that is the basis under which we proceeded to give people an understanding of who they were looking at, why they happened to be there that day, what was going on, because it is that that really gives the impact. It is not just this dramatic scene. In fact, most people have seen more dramatic scenes in Hollywood movies in full color, in video games.

JA: So it is not the scene that is dramatic; rather it is what actually happened, combined with this visual proof. And of course the cover-up that the U.S. military engaged in, and [that] the mainstream media, like The New York Times, was complacent in that, to me made this a big story.

PBS: Would you do anything differently in releasing that video if you had to do it all over again?

JA: Always when I look back in the past, I hope to want to do things differently. That is what happens to anyone who learns.

PBS: Not always.

JA: Always.

PBS: Sometimes you nail it.

JA: No, always. You should always look back in the past and think, I would do something differently, because otherwise you haven’t learned.

PBS: But in this case, were you satisfied with the impact of the video? Did it achieve the result that you had hoped?

JA: It was pretty close. I mean, it is hard to know precisely what a more successful impact would look like. So I can imagine some scenarios where that is a possibility, but those scenarios also have costs.

PBS: Some say that you felt that it taught you the lesson that you needed to work more closely with established organizations.

JA: I’m sure established organizations say this. But actually we have been working with fellow journalists since 2007.

PBS: But you’re not disappointed in the impact of it. I mean, that’s what is being said out there.

JA: No, I am not disappointed with the impact of it. Could we have structured things, structured various deals, economic incentives and so on, to get an even bigger impact? The answer is probably yes. The answer, if we had done a deal with a U.S. broadcaster, to give them some kind of exclusive access to this, that U.S. broadcaster probably would have then defended it.

PBS: They wouldn’t have called it “Collateral Murder.” I mean, that’s been–

JA: No, I’m not concerned about that. I wanted to call it “Permission to Engage,” because that was a phrase that came out of it. But that phrase was already used elsewhere. And as you know, as a sort of headline, many documentary titles are inflammatory. And actually, we did want to attract attention to the very specific event of this journalist crawling in the gutter and being deliberately targeted and killed, even though he was unarmed, and his rescuers.

In common parlance, that is murder, and there is no doubt about it. We also released the rules of engagement, in very detailed description, including flow charts, to show that even under the U.S. military’s internal procedure, that was not a justified attack. And all sorts of rhetoric occurred by a military apologist after the event, talking about, “Oh, well, the rules of engagement perhaps allows this.” But we produced the rules of engagement. Not one of those people read those rules of engagement and said, “Here, under this section, this is not a murder.”

We did. I did. I am confident that that title is correct. Now, should we have chosen another title to discourage an attack based on the title, a misleading [title] that would deflect from the content? Possibly. But having done many of these high-profile releases now, I know for certain that you have initiative for about two days.

After two days, the group that you’ve exposed conducts a counterattack, and they look for whatever is a weakness or something that will gain parlance in the political debate, and they seize on it. And there’s always one. And those energies will go toward some mechanism of defense for the organization that has been exposed and embarrassed.

And when you’re dealing with a situation like we were dealing with the United States, where we have a very powerful grouping, which is not just the U.S. military — rather, it is a patronage system that conserves the U.S. military, and tens of thousands of military contractors and their families and the politicians that make their way and their power out of that system — it is inevitable that there is a very aggressive counterattack. And we saw that.

But the way that this footage has gone on in the world is effective. So there are continual documentaries and investigative reports that use this footage in many languages, in many nationalities. It is now part of the historical record. That political churn and debate over it is now gone. Now this piece of information, this footage, is part of history and is being used like part of history, like a quote from Madison.

PBS: Not long after the release of that video, you hear about this chat between Bradass87 and [hacker] Adrian Lamo. What went through your mind?

JA: I saw this in Wired magazine, and the claims were that this “Bradass” character was the source for the “Collateral Murder” movie video.

PBS: He’s in it. He says he’s the source, whoever that is —

JA: This is a computer record. We investigated very quickly who this Adrian Lamo character was, and this is a very disreputable character.

PBS: He was a contributor to WikiLeaks.

JA: And he was not right to call him a contributor to WikiLeaks. We looked up our records. According to those records, he donated $20 on one occasion and then immediately went out and told his social grouping that he had done so.

So it was mischievous to suggest the individual has anything to do with WikiLeaks. He seems to be someone who plays on the media. He’s even perhaps addicted to the media in a very self-destructive manner. He owes the federal government a large amount of money. I encourage everyone to simply look at an interview with him to see the sort of character involved.

But this is an individual [who] has some computer skills, strange motivations. Had been in a mental hospital three weeks beforehand, is addicted to the limelight, and has done I would say almost self-harm in order to get media exposure.
So the integrity of the electronic record, which can be fabricated very easily, that he submitted to a friend, a very long-term friend of his and former computer hacker at Wired magazine, Kevin Poulsen, we don’t know about. But we investigated the context and the surroundings very quickly when it came out.

PBS: Do you believe that it’s not a legitimate chat?

JA: We know that there are certain sections that are not legitimate. For instance, the time stamps at one point in time are reversed in this conversation. We also know that Adrian Lamo has made statements that are contradictory to each other and what is inside the conversation. We know that there are some contradictions with what Kevin Poulsen, the editor at Wired magazine, has said.

For instance, Kevin Poulsen said that all material that didn’t reveal national security matters, or was purely personal issues, was released. But we can see that Adrian Lamo has spoken about other parts that he alleged to be in this conversation that are neither personal nor matters of national security that concerned things that he says are the framework of the conversation — how the conversation started, under what conditions, etc. — and those are not there. So there is something odd with this conversation. We don’t know whether it is mostly illegitimate or partly contaminated. But there are certainly elements of it that are incorrect.

PBS: So what do you suspect? You think it’s a frame?

JA: We can look at the long history of the interaction between Adrian Lamo and Wired magazine. It goes back almost, with Kevin Poulsen, almost 10 years. He has been involved in these sorts of things, trying to get stories into the media about hacking-related activities.

PBS: What’s his motivation, do you think?

JA: Adrian Lamo, as far as I can see, his general motivation is he’s an attention seeker.

PBS: He says that you wrote him an e-mail after the fact

JA: Yes, that’s correct.

PBS: And that you encouraged him to change his characterization of the events.

JA: Well, I don’t have the e-mail before me. Perhaps you —

PBS: This is just from an interview with him where he says, “Assange sent me an e-mail after Bradley was arrested, encouraging me to change my characterization of the events to refer to Manning as a whistleblower rather than a spy.”

JA: Yes, I thought that if there was a chance that — regardless — let me clarify. As spokesperson for WikiLeaks, we are in a very difficult position concerning Bradley Manning. The difficulty of our position is that our technology does not permit us to understand whether someone is one of our sources or not, because the best way to keep a secret is to never have it. We are dealing with intelligence agencies that are very sophisticated.

So instead of keeping source identity secret, we simply do not collect them at all, even in the first place. So we do not know whether Mr. Manning is our source or not, or whether he is some intermediary in this process or whether he knew a source. We have no understanding of this. And of course if we did know, we are obligated ethically to not reveal it.

We are also in a position where we cannot say things which might be misconstrued as us suggesting that he is a source. But nonetheless, what we do know is we have a situation where there is a young man in solitary confinement, who has been there for over 300 days now, in very severe conditions, and the allegations against him are related to our publishing activities. Therefore, we do have some kind of moral obligation to look into his case. But we have to conduct how we talk about it very carefully.

PBS: People who have read the chat will raise those sections [where] this guy Bradass87 — I don’t know if that’s Manning or not; there’s no way I can know at this point — talks about developing a relationship with you. He says things: “I don’t know much more than what he tells me.” And there’s several of these instances where he talks about you and his relationship. And when you read it, it sounds like there’s a connection, perhaps a chat or e-mail or some kind of connection with you. When you read those, what did you think?

JA: We looked at the whole context, and was there someone trying to big-note themselves by suggesting their connection to us? We don’t have sources that we know about. And I had never heard the name Bradley Manning before. I never heard the Bradass87 before.

PBS: And you wouldn’t have a relationship with somebody that was supplying source material?

JA: We receive inquiries from people who say, “How do I upload something?” That is something that our help desk deals with. People ask questions about what is secure, what is insecure and things like this.

PBS: But how do you prevent me from writing you and telling you in a chat that I have a video of a massacre in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere, and I want you to tell me how to get it to you? I mean, now you’ve got a situation sort of placed out there where —

JA: Yeah, our help desk has a completely anonymous chat. It’s anonymous to us. The usernames are anonymous and so on.
I understood that initially you had hoped to publish in the order in which it was received the material that you were leaked. Is that wrong? I want to get to this question of being overwhelmed by the amount.
Yeah.

PBS: Did you have in your imagination that you were going to be inundated with a tsunami of materials as you have been?

JA: Yes. That was a view that that would gradually happen, and we would need resources to scale up accordingly.

PBS: But you’re a very small organization with a very small infrastructure. How did you ever think that you were going to be able to handle the kind of volume of material that you got?

JA: Well, through delegation; that it’s something that needs to be built up and something we are building up. We’re working on 63 or more media partners now.

PBS: Did it happen faster than you imagined it would happen?

JA: Overall impact did not happen faster than we imagined, but the spikiness in receiving the material is something that was a bit unexpected. So some weeks things are very flat, and other weeks we see a lot of information often coinciding with press activity. So [they] hear about us, and they’re enthused and encouraged by hearing about a successful case that we’ve dealt with, and so they step forward.

PBS: More than 390,000 Iraq war logs — 391,000 or 392,000.

JA: We have a lot more than this.

PBS: So you expected you would get that kind of volume of material?

JA: Yes, eventually. That’s why I said that, you know, I believe that the media alone as an economic sector is simply not large enough to process what we need to understand about the institutions that make up our society. It’s just not big enough. We need the media and we need people, the average man, to come forward and assess the material we’re releasing.

PBS: Have you ever coached or helped a source figure out how to not deliver material to you but to crack it, to get it out of the system that it’s in?

JA: Well, I’m going to speak in a different way on this question. There is something occurring now in the United States which is very dangerous. It is, if it’s not dealt with, the end of national security journalism in the United States. The argument being proposed by the Pentagon pushed in a 40-minute public press conference by spokesperson Geoff Morrell is that any sort of traditional investigative journalism concerning classified information is espionage.

If that interpretation is allowed to stand, there will be no more quality journalism in the United States holding the national security sector to account — a very, very dangerous thing. And [executive editor] Bill Keller of The New York Times has slotted into that interpretation in order to protect the journalists of The New York Times and himself. Keller has said that The New York Times is not involved with any collaboration with us.

That is simply false. There was collaboration from beginning to end in terms of timetabling, researching stories, talking about how to understand data, etc., etc., embargo dates, the works. Keller has tried to say we were just the source; they were a passive recipient. And the reason that Keller did that and we knew before it became public was that they received legal advice in order to protect themselves from the Espionage Act they needed to be completely passive, or be presented as completely passive.

PBS: One man’s collaboration is another man’s conspiracy. So any collaboration between a journalist and a source, between one media organization and another media organization, can be viewed, the Attorney General Justice [sic] [Eric] Holder says, as a conspiracy that flows through.

JA: That’s a very dangerous interpretation, and that interpretation must be resisted. And The New York Times must stand up, and it must hold the line that the traditional form of journalism that people have been doing in the United States, Sy [Seymour] Hersh and others, concerning the national security sector, calling up sources, saying, “What do you know about this helicopter accident? What do you know about these abuse allegations that we’ve been hearing, and can you prove it?,” that needs to be protected at all costs, because if it is not protected, it will be the end of holding the national security sector to account. And the reality is that that sector makes up, directly and indirectly, some 30 to 40 percent of the entire U.S. economy. It is extremely powerful.

And at the moment that tax revenues in the United States have gone down, we see that that sector is increasing the amount of money it’s getting; i.e., it is increasing its political power domestically to suck out more money from the U.S. tax base and give it to its patronage network, which includes all the big military contractors, plus the military itself and the spy agencies and the politicians that get their power pulling the whole thing together. A very dangerous business.

PBS: I hear you, but your answer [is] effectively deflecting from the question of whether you have in practice encouraged, coached, helped sources get material out of —

JA: Well, I’m answering you this way for a very specific reason. To say yes would be to fall under what the Pentagon is trying to say is espionage, but is nonetheless legitimate journalistic activity, and to say no would be to not hold the line journalistically.
To say no [would be to] encourage and legitimize the argument that the only form of journalism that is not illegal is when journalists don’t speak to sources. Actually, WikiLeaks as an organization is one of the very rare media organizations that doesn’t tend to speak to sources.

PBS: But you want to defend the right of all journalists?

JA: I want to defend the right of all journalists to do precisely that, and that if we need to do that one day as well, I want to defend that right as well.

PBS: And there’s nothing in your view, just to be clear — in fact, it’s necessary for you to be in a position where you can help a source get material out of the national security establishment and release it to the public.

JA: We see that individuals like Sy Hersh and many other traditional investigative journalists in the United States, for some of their best stories, have done precisely that. They speak to sources embedded within the national security sector, and those sources give them proof of allegations in the form of documents. That’s a very, very valuable thing, and it must be protected at all costs. And the right of journalists to do that must be protected. …

PBS: Was there internal discussion about further release, after the “Collateral Murder” film was made, and then Manning’s arrest takes place, did you discuss internally, among yourselves, whether or not releasing additional [material], the war logs and eventually the cables, could further jeopardize him?

JA: There was discussion about, you know, we have a situation where there was a young man held in military prison under investigation who’s alleged to be a source for “Collateral Murder” video. But we have published and received military documents long before Bradley Manning ever joined the Army. We have received military documents long after Bradley Manning was arrested. So we are in a difficult position where we do not know precisely what it is Bradley Manning is alleged to have given to us.

PBS: But he did say he mentions some of these packages allegedly in the chat.

JA: For example, in that alleged chat, he does not mention anything about the Afghan material or whatsoever. But the Iraq war logs and the cables are mentioned, and the Gitmo [Guantanamo Bay] papers that are about to be released. He mentions a number of things, or is alleged to have mentioned a number of things. What we don’t know [is] whether he is an intermediary source. We have no idea precisely how he’s alleged to be involved, how he is or is not involved in this conduit of getting information to us.

But what we do know is that we promised the source that we would publish everything that they gave to us. That’s what we publish. That’s what we promise all our sources. If we receive the information, it is done under that promise. We cannot be in a position whereby people can take hostages and prevent publication. We cannot be in a position where we negotiate with hostage takers, because to do that would not only be to violate a promise that we make to the people who give us information. It would be to set up a structure whereby publication could be stopped by taking hostages and claiming that these hostages, true or false, are our sources.

PBS: The question of harm minimization: You came in for a lot of criticism of that, that you were in your initial conversations not concerned.

JA: That’s absolutely false, and this is a typical rhetorical trick — Why does this keep coming up? Why are there people out there that are saying that you didn’t care if informants were killed?

It’s absolutely false. And I’ll explain to you why it keeps coming up. First of all, this is the bog-standard tactic of the Pentagon. Whenever they are or expect to be criticized for slaying innocent civilians, thousands — in the case of the Afghan war diaries — [of] people killed documented in this conflict, over 20,000 in our material. Whenever they come under that criticism, they use the bog-standard rhetorical trick which is to turn the precise criticism that you expect back on your opponent.

So the criticism that they were expecting is they were involved in the situation that has led to the deaths — that documents deaths of over 20,000 people. So what do they say? They say we might have blood on our hands when their own records document that broader military conflict killing 20,000 people.

Now, if we go to the detail about names, it is right to name names. It is absolutely right to name names. It is not necessarily right to name every name. We’re dealing with a situation where we have in Kabul radio stations, who are meant to be independent, who are funded by USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], taking PSYOPS programming content, psychological operations programming content, to be played on their radio stations as news, but it is actually propaganda. Now, the names of those people involved, do the Afghan people have a right to understand which one of their media channels are propaganda and which one is the true independent? Of course they do.

PBS: I’m confused. You’re saying that you have the right to name names of those people who were informing the U.S. military –

JA: Ah, there’s many names that first of all, we didn’t release one in five of the documents.

PBS: Right. You held them back.

JA: Right. We held it back, one in —

PBS: Those were the threat reports?

JA: One in five, because the assessment by the media partners that we were working with is that those documents contained names of informers who were innocent.

PBS: But you reject the idea or the allegation that you were into just releasing the names?

JA: It’s completely false. We, as all good investigative journalists do, name names. We name names of those people that are involved in corrupt or abusive activities, and that includes in Afghanistan. And then there are people that are incidental characters, that are not themselves threatened in any way. They should also be named as part of just the context of the situation.

We have a harm-minimization procedure. A harm-minimization procedure is that we don’t want innocent people who have a decent chance of being hurt to be hurt. Now, no one has been hurt. There is no allegation by the Pentagon or any other official source that anyone has been physically harmed as a result of our publication of the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war diaries or the State Department records, or the “Collateral Murder” video, or in fact anything we have done over the past four years in over 120 countries.

Now, we are dealing with very significant and substantial information. There may come a time where in order to save people from war, to save people from corruption, to assist in taking a dictatorship to a democracy that people incidentally come to harm. That is never our intention. That day may yet come, but that day has not come yet. And that is, in fact, a proud record for this organization.

PBS: The cables, according to U.S. diplomats, has made it harder for them to do their job. Was that the intent?

JA: Well, if they are embarrassed by what their job is, then yes, it is. That was absolutely the broader philosophical intent, to make embarrassing behavior harder to commit.

PBS: But it will make local officials less likely to share information —

JA: Their embarrassing behavior is just this side of abusive behavior. And we wanted to generate a situation not only where people have the knowledge to conduct their affairs, the knowledge to understand the powers in their society, but whereby there are disincentives for behaving in an abusive way.

PBS: But the embarrassed parties, for the most part, are foreign leaders, foreign officials, who now are reluctant to share information, to talk to U.S. officials.

JA: If the cost of stimulating revolutions like we’ve seen in Tunisia, in Cairo and a whole sway of political reforms that have been sweeping down through Southern [sic] America, if the cost for that is that for a little while some foreign leaders are going to be a bit more cautious when speaking to the State Department, then that is clearly a cost that bounces in favor of what people need.

PBS: Who are you accountable to, Julian?

JA: We are accountable to the public. And let me explain how we’re accountable to the public. All the fruits of our labor are published. We are a publishing organization. There is nothing that we do that does not result in material that is being published. So the public can see what it is we do. We don’t do anything that doesn’t result in publishing.

The public chooses to support us by defending us politically, by giving us money and by giving us source material. And the media chooses to work with us or not, depending on whether they think we’re doing a good job. And all our job is published.
We survive on a week-to-week and month-to-month basis purely as a result of public donations, purely as a result of intellectual donations, information provided by our sources. If the public believes that in a three-month period that we should not be supported, that is the end of WikiLeaks. And that is unlike any democratically elected government.

We are the, maybe not perhaps the most, but one of the most accountable organizations to the public because we draw out all our support from the public. We are not an organization that draws our support from advertisers. We are not an organization that draws our support from the USAID or from the Russian government. We are not an organization that draws its support from controlling oil in the ground. We are an organization that draws our support from the public. As soon as the public stops supporting us, there is no more WikiLeaks.

PBS: What’s next for WikiLeaks?

JA: WikiLeaks is continuing to step up its publishing speed, the number of organizations we’re involved in, the number of countries we’re involved in. We have a number of significant upcoming projects. We have an increased coalition of media partners. We are still involved in getting the majority of these cables out to all the countries where they can make a difference.
And you can see just recently we have done that in India, and we have done that in Paraguay, where this information about how senior people in these countries operate, their corruption, their relationships with each other, is really generating significant and important reform.

And I guess in a way [we] have the State Department to thank for collecting that information and the U.S. taxpayers for subsidizing the collection of that information. You know, it should have been the case that our release of that material made no difference whatsoever. If we had investigative journalists funded to the same degree that the State Department was funded, that information would have been picked up by those journalists. It isn’t.

So we have to rely on the subsidies that powerful organizations — intelligence agencies and diplomatic establishments — give to describe the world. And then we are able to give that description to the people, and it does good. We can see the effects all around us.

PBS:… [British investigative journalist] Nick Davies came to see you in Brussels. He says that he convinced you that you needed the major media, the mainstream media.

JA: It is normal for the British press to try and take credit for other people’s work. This case is no exception. However, Nick Davies did play an important and instrumental role. I was busy in Brussels giving a censorship talk to the European Parliament. I spoke to a local Guardian reporter and mentioned that Nick Davies was a good guy and that we would like to do something later on. And Nick flew over, and we had a six-hour discussion about how WikiLeaks was going to release this material.
We had already been in contact with Der Spiegel. We had worked with the mainstream press since 2007. In fact, our first Guardian front page was in September 2007. Working with whoever we can to maximize the impact for our sources is not a new idea for this organization. Rather, it’s always been there. And this particular event in that regard is no exception. Where it is different is that we decided to pull in three additional media partners together to work in collaboration and task them to share research with each other.

So we tasked The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel to work with us to share research, put it together and have it all released at a go date. Our role, other than providing the information and explaining how to read it and understand it, and publishing it, was to make sure this collaboration worked well.

And there were a number of disputes and debates about what was the right publishing time, whether people were sharing enough information, etc., etc. I’ll give you an example of one of those. For legal reasons, we felt that it was most likely that the source of the material or sources of the Afghan material were someone from within the United States government, so we wanted it to be very clear that the release of this material was normal press publishing, likely to be protected under the First Amendment.

That is why we insisted on bringing in The New York Times. We also insisted on The New York Times publishing first, so if there was any debate before a jury about had it been published first in a foreign publication or a U.S. publication, it would be very clear it was published first in a U.S. publication.

PBS: Protected by the First Amendment.

JA: Protected by the First Amendment.

PBS: Not an act of espionage by a foreign —

JA: Exactly. Not an act of espionage. But clearly that wasn’t the case, but we didn’t want anyone to try and spin it, either, that it was the case.

We also wanted to give The New York Times a sweetener to invest in the material. And having the initial publication is something that’s important to journalists, because that’s what they get awards from and what the newspaper gets its brand recognition from.

One week before our scheduled publication date, Bill Keller said that he didn’t want The New York Times to go first. The New York Times was too scared to release the first stories — not the material, but to release the first stories —

PBS: The Afghan war logs.

JA: — on the Afghan war logs. The New York Times asked that we go first. The New York Times —

PBS: That WikiLeaks publish first.

JA: — was asking that a small Web startup, a free-press organization, scoop it, in one of the biggest stories of the year, if not of the last eight years. Why was that? That goes against all the instincts you would think of a newspaper to have another organization publish first — because it was scared of the political fallout.

And that is a reality, a realpolitik reality for The New York Times. Now, one might say that perhaps someone other than Bill Keller might have handled things differently. There’s a pattern of behavior going back to how he dealt with the National Security [Agency’s] illegal warrantless wiretapping on its citizens.

PBS: On the eve of the election.

JA: On the eve of the election, and concealing that for a whole year. There’s some other events that are similar.

PBS: You’re attacking Keller and The New York Times for lack of courage and timidity. They say you are difficult to deal with. They used words like “arrogant,” “imperious,” “unreliable”; you don’t show up when you say you’re going to show up. If we’re going to get into attacking them for their timidity and lack of courage, I have to ask you to address what they throw back at you.

JA: Well, look, Bill Keller is meant to be the head of the most influential single publication in the world. That is a serious position. That is a leadership role. His journalism carries down through the whole of The New York Times and carries down, in fact, through many of the publications in the United States, because it is a type of a standards-bearer.

He has a special responsibility to not engage in yellow journalism, to not self-censor, and to act with courage and responsibility where the U.S. government and its pressure is concerned. And it’s the U.S. government that is particularly important, because that is the nation that The New York Times is meant to be holding to account.

That editorial committee at the Times, while it has done some very good work with us, has also failed in important respects. For example, going back once again to the Afghan war diaries, we discovered a very serious story about Task Force 373, an undisclosed U.S. Special Forces assassination squad working its way down a list of some 2,000 people to assassinate or imprison them. That list is called the JPEL, Joint Priority Effects List.

Der Spiegel, who we were concurrently publishing with, made that story their front cover. It’s a weekly magazine, and the most respected in Germany. The importance of a front cover for Der Spiegel is seven times that of the front page for a newspaper. Der Spiegel made it the front cover. The Guardian made it a significant story within their collection of stories. And it didn’t appear in The New York Times.

Now, does that just mean it was oversight and it wasn’t written for The New York Times? No. In fact, Eric Schmitt, senior national security reporter at The New York Times, that we had worked with on a number of other stories, had written the story. He had written the story on Task Force 373 for The New York Times, and it was killed off at the editorial level.
When I spoke to Keller and complained about this and asked him if The New York Times was doing things like this, why should we continue the collaboration, he said, “Well, maybe we thought maybe we could use it in the future,” etc., etc.

PBS: You were also upset about a very negative profile of you —

JA: No, not at the —

PBS: — and their treatment of Bradley Manning.

JA: Later on we were concerned about it.

PBS: But all these things angered you about The New York Times.

JA: Yes. And the treatment of Bradley Manning was really appalling; that while there had been some brief descriptions of him in Wired magazine, there had not been a proper treatment of him as a person presented to the U.S. public.

The New York Times decided to do the first one, so it carried with it a special responsibility, because it was the initial version of history of this young man that was being laid down, a young man completely unable to speak for himself. He is detained in a military prison, not talking to the press and, at that stage, possibly not even having the ability to speak at all to the press — even indirectly — through lawyers.

So what did The New York Times do? It could have looked in a balanced way at what was known about him, presented the difficult situation that he was in with the facts about perhaps why he said he had done what he’s alleged to have done. That never —

PBS: We don’t have any statement why he did. We have a chat with Adrian Lamo that you say you can’t trust.

JA: We have a chat with Adrian Lamo which we cannot trust in detail.

PBS: So that’s not exculpatory material, is it?

JA: But that chat is the chat that The New York Times used. It selectively picked material from that chat to paint Bradley Manning in a certain light as — let me put it crudely — as a sad, mad, bad fag in the military.

PBS:… The government has a right to secrets or not?

JA: The government doesn’t have a right to secrets. Governments give rights to the people. The government through police enforces rights for people. In a good system, courts are the mediators in that. Now, the government — parts of the government — can argue a case that in particular circumstances, they need to keep things secret. And I would agree with that, that there are many cases, operational cases, say, during the police investigation into a murder when information needs to be kept secret. Now, the question is, who has to keep things secret and for how long?

PBS: And who decides who leaks what?

JA: And who has to justify secrecy? And how is secrecy accountable? Now, the problem with secrecy is that it has encoded within it its own corruption.

PBS: But I feel like we’re getting away from the question. It’s a simple question: Does the government have the right to keep secrets? Yes, you’re saying?

JA: No, it is not a simple question. That’s completely wrong. Who bestows rights? Who has to justify the use of secrecy? If you’re justifying the use of secrecy, how can you do it? If you say, “I have this secret information, and it needs to be secret,” who do you then tell to say that you need this to be secret?

We have a situation in many countries, including the United States, where intelligence agencies go to congressmen and give them secret briefings, and they say to the congressmen: “Look, if you don’t give us all this money, something very bad is going to happen. But you can’t tell anyone why we say something very bad is going to happen. And in fact, we’re not going to show you the intimate details of that.” So you have a built-in unaccountability in the procedure of secrecy. So that means secrecy needs to be kept in check. It needs to be used very sparingly. Just like secret courts are inherently corrupting, because justice needs to be seen to be done, similarly, government secrecy is inherently corrupting, because it allows abuses to flourish in secret.

PBS: Would you agree that if a government has a hostage rescue operation in the works that that deserves to be kept secret?

JA: I would say that it is legitimate for those people involved in that, in the government, to take the necessary steps to keep that information secret. Now, that does not include deploying police to everyone else in the world to shut them up. Obviously, in some cases, we can say information, say about a hostage situation, would be better off kept secret. But we know what would be much worse off: if the state had the right to shut everyone up in the world at a point of a gun if those people were saying something that the state did not like.

That is the situation that mirrors that in the Soviet Union and instantly corrupts the state and the people, because in the end, it is only the people working with the press that holds powerful groups like the states to account. That system of scrutiny of the state is so sacrosanct in preventing democracy’s going astray that it must be kept open, and that people must be kept free to exchange knowledge with each other, and the press must not be censored.

Now, that is a lesson that the founding fathers of the U.S. learned with regard to censorship that was applied to them by the British. That is a lesson that has been learned in a number of countries that have themselves gone through revolutions after periods of dictatorship or abuse.

PBS: You’re a very bright guy, but do you understand why so many people have difficulty with you coming out of seemingly nowhere with this idea, WikiLeaks, and getting so many people bent out of shape — powerful people, but as well journalists, partners, other people within WikiLeaks?

JA: What other people within WikiLeaks?

PBS: Apparently the architecture was upset.

JA: According to whom?

PBS: To Daniel Domscheit-Berg.

JA: OK, the man we suspended.

PBS: Right?

JA: Yes.

PBS: But other people quit around that time.

JA: No, other people did not quit.

PBS: You’re very perceptive, but do you understand why you have become the subject of so much derision by so many —

JA: Of course. It is par for the course. And we have had it for years and years and years. Every time that we expose powerful organizations and powerful groups, there is a counterattack.

PBS: But isn’t that too easy?

JA: That has always happened in the history of the world, and we are no exception. We are a small organization that does not yet have a vast and powerful lobby to support it. But at the same time, we are taking on extremely powerful groups that do have vast and powerful lobbies to support them. So of course we are going to be attacked in all sorts of manners. Of course people are going to try and capitalize and distort and hype up any sort of possible criticism.

Just like the criticism that was against Obama into his presidential election, where we have statements that Obama was not even an American — that is still flowing around — that are completely insane. Those are a result of a very powerful lobby opposing the election of President Obama. But Obama had also a very powerful lobby pushing back in the other direction, so he was able to keep the relative influences of these two things in check.

PBS: Do you think you’re as powerful as Obama?

JA: As a young organization, we don’t have a lobby that is the size of the entire U.S. Democrat Party and its backers on Wall Street, so it is hard for us to respond to all that criticism. On the other hand, actually, the people and young journalists and some very good older journalists are strongly supportive of us. And people are starting to see, as we’re having this fight for political perception and for legitimacy in the public sphere, that actually we do have some people on our side.

We have a lot of people on our side. We have a lot of people who are not organized to the degree that the State Department or Democratic Party is organized. There are millions of people who support us. And we can see that not just in sort of statements that we see at rallies or statements that we see on the Internet or statements of good people coming out to the press in public. We can see this in a way which is impossible to fake.

We can see this in a way which is impossible to fake, which is mums and dads donating us money for no other reason than to keep us going. They don’t even get their name on the list. They don’t even get a thank-you card, although we are very thankful. They do it simply to keep us going.

PBS: You are a hero to many, and others want to see you dead — have actually called for your execution.

JA: What’s the question?

PBS: I don’t know. Its effect [on] you?

JA: We have to go through lots of inquiries, security procedures as a result of statements like that. They are not without cost. But also, they certainly have not stopped us publishing.

PBS: Some people say you’ve called too much attention to yourself and not enough to Bradley Manning.

Interview continued at: http://www.forbiddenknowledgetv.com/page/1774.html