EXCLUSIVO: Julian Assange habla de WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Cypherpunks y el Estado vigilante 1/2
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This is Democracy Now! democracynow.org, the war and peace report, I am Amy Goodman.
And I am Juan González, welcome to all our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world.
Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified
documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, may testify today at a pretrial proceeding
for the first time since he was arrested in May 2010. Manning could face life in prison
if convicted of the most serious of 22 counts against him. His trial is expected to begin
in February. Meanwhile, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian
Assange, remains holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought refuge
nearly six months ago to avoid being extradited to Sweden to be questioned over sexual assault
claims. Earlier this week, Assange vowed WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it.
On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not
break the European Union’s antitrust rules by blocking donations to WikiLeaks. Shortly
after the ruling, Assange addressed reporters in Brussels via video stream from inside the
Ecuadorean embassy. The strength of popular and private support
means that we continue. There is no danger that WikiLeaks will cease to exist as an organization.
Rather, its natural and rightful growth has been compromised, and that is wrong and must
change. It would set a very bad precedent—it was not only wrong for WikiLeaks; it sets
an extremely bad precedent for all other European organizations and all media organizations
worldwide that monopolies can simply exercise financial death penalties over organizations
and companies as a result of political controversy. That was Julian Assange speaking on Tuesday.
He now joins us in a rare interview from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. He has been
granted political asylum in Ecuador but can’t leave the embassy because the British government
promises to arrest him if he steps foot on British soil. He has just co-authored a new
book called Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. The book examines how the
internet can be used as both an instrument of freedom and oppression.
We want to welcome you, Julian Assange, back to Democracy Now! and first get your reaction
to the European Commission’s decision around the issue of Visa, saying it wasn’t breaking
antitrust laws when it blocked donations to you. The significance of the credit card company’s
blockade of donations to WikiLeaks, what it’s meant for your website?
Well, it’s good to be with you, Amy and Juan. The decision is disgraceful, but it
is only a preliminary decision. We have another submission that the commission has asked for,
so hopefully they will turn around before the end of the year or the beginning of next
year. Commission had been investigating our complaint for 16 months. The normal turnaround
time is four months. The European Parliament last week voted, through an Article 32 section,
on how banks should be reformed and credit card companies should be reformed in order
to stop arbitrary, extrajudicial financial blockades such as the one that is being applied
to WikiLeaks. This year, we—the Council of Europe, all 47 foreign ministers last year
passed a resolution saying that these sorts of arbitrary financial blockades on WikiLeaks
should not continue, so that it’s interesting to see the playoff in the political wills
in Europe between, on the one hand, the Council of Europe and the Parliament and, on the other
hand, the commission. But it’s been known for a long time that the commission is closer
to big business, and it is often successfully lobbied. Hopefully the commission will do
the right thing and turn around in this case. And how devastating has it been for WikiLeaks?
Since the blockade was erected in December 2010, WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of the
donations that were attempted to be transferred to us over that period. So, that is
over $50 million. Now, fortunately, our 5 percent of $50 million is still not nothing, and so the
organization can continue. But as I said in that press conference, our rightful and natural
growth, our ability to publish as much as we would like, our ability to defend ourselves
and our sources, has been diminished by that blockade.
Now, the United States government has looked into the blockade in January of 2011 and formally
found that there is no lawful reason to erect a U.S. financial embargo against WikiLeaks.
So what has happened here is that—and this came out in the commission documents that
we published yesterday—is that Senator Lieberman and Congressman Peter T. King pressured
at the very least MasterCard and Amazon, but perhaps others, including Visa, as well, pressured
those organizations to erect an extrajudicial blockade that they were not able to successfully
erect through the legislature or through a formal administrative process.
Julian, turning to your new book, Cypherpunks, those in the—around the world who have been
amazed at your ability to advocate transparency in government and in the corporate world through
the internet might be surprised that in your book you now say the internet is a danger
to human civilization. Could you explain why? Human civilization has merged with the internet.
Every society has gone onto the internet, with communications between all of us as individuals
but also communications between businesses, economic transfers, and even the internal
communications and external communications of states. So there is no barrier anymore
between the internet and global civilization. That means that when the internet develops
a sickness, global civilization also runs the risk of suffering the same sickness.
And the sickness that the internet has developed over the past 10 years is that nation states
and their corporate powers have ganged up together to engage in strategic interception
of all communications flowing over the internet across national borders and in many countries
even within, within its national confines, such as the United States. We know that that
has occurred in different places as a result of whistleblowing cases, such as Mark Klein’s case
or William Binney’s, a former chief of research at the National Security Agency.
So, we have gone from a position that dissidents face and activists face and individuals face
10, 20 years ago, where if we’re engaged in political activity, we could be individually
targeted and our friends could be targeted, to a situation where everything, almost, that
everyone does over the internet is recorded and intercepted all the time. And that shift
is a shift, as it’s called in the internal documents of the hundreds of companies now
who supply this national security sector, a shift between tactical interception on a
few people and strategic interception, intercepting the entire nation.
We exposed documents earlier this year, the Spy Files—you can look them up—where,
for example, the French company AMISYS, which is closely connected to French intelligence,
supplied a nationwide—that’s its own words—interception system to Gaddafi’s Libya back in 2009.
And in fact, lawyers connected to WikiLeaks and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism
were in the manual thatAMISYS shipped to Gaddafi as an example of how the interception system worked.
And in terms of corporate surveillance, as
well, you often find now in the media a huge push to get people to use social networks.
The degree to which private surveillance or corporate surveillance is going on, as well
as government surveillance? There’s not a barrier anymore between corporate
surveillance, on the one hand, and government surveillance, on the other. You know, Facebook
is based—has its servers based in the United States. Gmail, as General Petraeus found out,
has its servers based in the United States. And the interplay between U.S. intelligence
agencies and other Western intelligence agencies and any intelligence agencies that can hack
this is fluid. So, we’re in a—if we look back to what’s a earlier example of the
worst penetration by an intelligence apparatus of a society, which is perhaps East Germany,
where up to 10 percent of people over their lifetime had been an informer at one stage
or another, in Iceland we have 88 percent penetration of Iceland by Facebook. Eighty-eight
percent of people are there on Facebook informing on their friends and their movements and the
nature of their relationships—and for free. They’re not even being paid money. They’re
not even being directly coerced to do it. They’re doing it for social credits to avoid
the feeling of exclusion. But people should understand what is really going on. I don’t
believe people are doing this or would do it if they truly understood what was going
on, that they are doing hundreds of billions of hours of free work for the Central Intelligence Agency,
for the FBI, and for all allied agencies and all countries that can ask for favors
to get hold of that information. William Binney, the former chief of research,
the National Security Agency’s signals intelligence division, describes this situation that we
are in now as "turnkey totalitarianism," that the whole system of totalitarianism has been built
—the car, the engine has been built—and it’s just a matter of turning the key. And
actually, when we look to see some of the crackdowns on WikiLeaks and the grand jury
process and targeted assassinations and so on, actually it’s arguable that key has
already been partly turned. The assassinations that occur extrajudicially, the renditions
that occur, they don’t occur in isolation. They occur as a result of the information
that has been sucked in through this giant signals interception machinery.
Julian Assange, we can’t ignore the fact that we’re speaking to you inside the Ecuadorean
embassy, where you’ve taken refuge, where you’re really there as a kind of refugee.
You’ve gotten political asylum from Ecuador but can’t leave the embassy. What are your
plans right now? Are you negotiating with the Swedish government, if you were to be
extradited there, that they would not extradite you to the United States?
Well, Amy, Ecuador has really stepped up to the plate and must be congratulated.
I have been found to be, through a formal process, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a political
refugee and have been granted political asylum, in relation to what has been happening in
the United States and allied countries and their behavior—Sweden and the United Kingdom.
The situation for me now is that I have been here for five months in this embassy; prior
to that, 18 months under house arrest; prior to that, being chased around the world for about
six months by U.S. intelligence and its allies.
Now, I must correct an earlier statement that you made—this has become common in the press—
saying that I was here in relation to Sweden. The reason I am here is essentially in relation
to the United States. But the Swedish government said publicly that it would imprison me without
charge. And in such a situation, I’d not be able to apply for asylum. Now, the Ecuadorean
government has asked the Swedish government to give a guarantee that I would not be extradited
to the United States. We have asked for a long time for such a guarantee. That has been
refused. All the regular processes have been refused in this case. You know, it’s an
extremely odd and bizarre case, and I encourage everyone to go and look at that aspect of
the case at justice4assange.com. And you can see report after report. You can see all the
material that the police claim to be true and all the things that have occurred,
the Cambridge International & Comparative Law Journal condemning the decisions that were
made here in the British courts. Are you saying, Julian, that you would go
to Sweden, if they assured you that you wouldn’t be extradited to the United States, to answer
questions about these two women who have made charges on sex abuse on your count?
Yes, that has been our public position for quite a long time.
Julian, I’d like to get back to your book for a second and talk about, at this crossroads,
as you see it, in terms of the future of the internet, the importance that you see of cryptography
as a weapon of the people on the internet. Well, the development of cryptography is absolutely
fascinating. So, we’re not just talking anymore about people being able to write in
a secret code that other people can’t read except their intended recipient. Crytography,
as a science, in the last 30 years, has developed a basic—basic techniques that we would normally
associate with democratic civilization and moved it into the digital realm. So that includes
things like anonymous electronic cash and digital voting and signatures and proofs of
agreements between people. So, when we look at what happens when civilization
moves onto the internet, how is it controlled? At the moment, a lot of the problems we face
on the internet and the independence of the internet is guys with guns can simply turn
up to any internet server and tell the people there to behave in a certain way, just like
they do with oil wells or they do with customs. So, as an international new civilization,
a forum where people are intellectually expressing themselves, where we deposit our history and
our political ideals and ambitions, the internet is suffering, on one hand, from mass interception
and, on the other hand, that it is still in many ways subservient to the physical force
in the various states that its infrastructure is located in. Cryptography provides a way
to abstract away from the physical world to create a sort of mathematical barrier between
the physical world and the intellectual world, and in that way slowly declare independence
from nation states. So our intellectual world cannot simply be censored or deleted or taxed
in the manner which we have suffered from for so long in nation states.
Now, the internet—on the internet, there’s no direct physical force that needs to be
policed in that manner, so we don’t need armies on the internet. We don’t need policemen
on the internet, in a way that we may need them in our regular nation states. So, we
do have this opportunity, with careful use of cryptography and a movement behind it,
to achieve some forms of independence for the intellectual record and for our communications
with one another. And those aspects of cryptography, we have used, with varying degrees of success,
in WikiLeaks to publish material that no other publisher in the world was able to publish
because they were constrained by physical threats within particular nation states.
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