[Reader-list] Fwd: Der Spiegel interview with Julian Assange (part I)

[patrice]

(resend as it was probably too long!)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Der Spiegel interview with Julian Assange
Date: 2015-08-04 10:19
 From: Patrice Riemens <patrice at xs4all.nl>
To: reader-list at sarai.net

Original to: 
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-with-wikileaks-head-julian-assange-a-1044399.html


SPIEGEL Interview with Julian Assange: 'We Are Drowning in Material'
Interview Conducted By Michael Sontheimer

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks via video link during an event
on the sidelines of the United Nations Human Rights Council session in
Geneva in July.


In an interview, Julian Assange, 44, talks about the comeback of the
WikiLeaks whistleblowing platform and his desire to provide assistance
to a German parliamentary committee that is investigating mass NSA
spying.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Assange, WikiLeaks is back -- releasing documents proving
United States surveillance of the French government, publishing Saudi
diplomatic cables and posting evidence of the massive surveillance of
the German government by US secret services. What are the reasons for
this comeback?

Assange: Yes, WikiLeaks has been publishing a lot of material in the
last few months. We have been publishing right through, but sometimes it
has been material which does not concern the West and the Western media
-- documents about Syria, for example. But you have to consider that
there was, and still is, a conflict with the United States government
which started in earnest in 2010 after we began publishing a variety of
classified US documents.

SPIEGEL: What did this mean for you and for WikiLeaks?

Assange: The result was a series of legal cases, blockades, PR attacks
and so on. With a banking blockade, WikiLeaks had been cut off from more
than 90 percent of its finances. The blockade happened in a completely
extrajudicial manner. We took legal measures against the blockade and we
have been victorious in the courts, so people can send us donations
again.

SPIEGEL: What difficulties did you have to overcome?

Assange: There had been attacks on our technical infrastructure. And our
staff had to take a 40 percent pay cut, but we have been able to keep
things together without having to fire anybody, which I am quite proud
of. We became a bit like Cuba, working out ways around this blockade.
Various groups like Germany's Wau Holland Foundation collected donations
for us during the blockade.

SPIEGEL: What did you do with the donations you got?

Assange: They enabled us to pay for new infrastructure, which was
needed. I have been publishing about the NSA for almost 20 years now, so
I was aware of the NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance. We required a
next-generation submission system in order to protect our sources.

SPIEGEL: And is it in place now?

Assange: Yes, a few months back we launched a next-generation submission
system and also integrated it with our publications.

SPIEGEL: So we can expect new publications?

Assange: We are drowning in material now. Economically, the challenge
for WikiLeaks is whether we can scale up our income in proportion to the
amount of material we have to process.

SPIEGEL: Nine years ago, when WikiLeaks was founded, you could read on
its website: "The goal is justice. The method is transparency." This is
the old idea of Enlightenment born in the 18th century. But if you look
at brutal political regimes and ruthless big corporations, isn't that
slogan too idealistic? Is transparency enough?

Assange: To be honest, I don't like the word transparency; cold dead
glass is transparent. I prefer education or understanding, which are
more human.

SPIEGEL: The work of WikiLeaks seems to have changed. In the beginning
it just published secret documents. More recently, you have also been
providing context for the documents.

Assange: We have always done this. I have personally written thousands
of pages of analysis. WikiLeaks is a giant library of the world's most
persecuted documents. We give asylum to these documents, analyze them,
promote them and obtain more. WikiLeaks has more than 10 million
documents and associated analyses now.

SPIEGEL: Are the personnel of the US government and the US Army still
technically blocked from using your library?

Assange: WikiLeaks is still a taboo object for some parts of the
government. Firewalls were set up. Every federal government employee and
every contractor received an e-mail stating that if they read something
from WikiLeaks including through the New York Times website, they have
to remove this from their computer immediately and self-report. They had
to cleanse and confess. That's a new McCarthy hysteria.

SPIEGEL: Do you know something about your readers?

Assange: Not much, we don't spy on them. But what we do know is that
most of our readers come from India, closely followed by the United
States. We also have quite a number of readers who search for persons.
The sister is getting married and someone wants to check the groom. Or
someone is negotiating a business deal and wants to know something about
his potential partner or a bureaucrat he has to talk to.

SPIEGEL: Did WikiLeaks change its ways of cooperating with journalists
and the media over the years?

Assange: We use a lot more contracts now.

SPIEGEL: Why?

Assange: That's due to a few bad experiences, principally in London. We
have contracts now with more than a hundred media organizations all
around the world. We have a unique perspective on the global media. We
put together various consortiums of journalists and media organizations
on different levels and try to maximize the impact of our sources. We
now have six years of experience with Western European media, American
media, Indian media, Arab media and seeing what they do with the same
material. Their results are unbelievably different.

SPIEGEL: Edward Snowden said that many journalists got interesting
stories from his documents, but the only organization that really cared
about him and helped him to escape from Hong Kong was WikiLeaks.

Assange: Most of the media organizations do burn sources. Edward Snowden
was abandoned in Hong Kong, especially by the Guardian, which had run
his stories exclusively. But we thought that it was very important that
a star source like Edward Snowden was not put in prison. Because that
would have created a tremendous chilling effect on other sources coming
forward.

SPIEGEL: It would surely have been a deterrence for other sources. But
most of the journalists insist on being independent and objective. They
also like to stress that they are not political activists.

Assange: All they show is that they are activists for the way things
are.

SPIEGEL: Haven't you also met journalists who dig deep into complex
issues and work hard to deliver a proper analysis?

Assange: In the United Kingdom at various stages, journalism has been
the profession of gentlemen amateurs. And some of them even pride
themselves on being amateurs. Their quality is not comparable with the
quality of intelligence services even if most of them harbor a
remarkable degree of corruption and incompetence. But they still have a
certain ideal of professionalism. In order to protect sources now,
extreme diligence and professionalism is required.

SPIEGEL: In October, a book will be published called "The WikiLeaks
Files. The World According to the US Empire" for which you wrote the
foreword. Do you try to develop the contextualization, the analysis and
the counter-narrative which the documents provided by WikiLeaks need?

Assange: Generally there is not enough systematic understanding. This
has to do with media economics, the short-term news cycles, but actually
I don't blame the media for that failure. There is a terrible failing in
academia in understanding current geopolitical and technical
developments and the intersection between these two areas. WikiLeaks has
a very public conflict with the United States, which is still ongoing
and in which many young people have gotten involved. They suddenly saw
the Internet as a place where politics and geopolitics happen. It's not
just a place where you gossip about what happened at school. But where
were the young professors stepping forward trying to make sense of it
all? Where is the new Michel Foucault who tries to explain how modern
power is exercised? Absurdly, Noam Chomski was making some of the best
comments and he is now 86.

SPIEGEL: Maybe young professors presume it might not be very helpful for
their careers to address this subject because it is highly
controversial.

Assange: Exactly. It is inherently controversial. At the same time, the
relationships of the major intelligence agencies is a one of the great
structuring factors of the modern world. It is the core of non-economic
relationships between states. I worry most about academia and the
particular part of academia that is dealing with international
relations. WikiLeaks has published over 2 million diplomatic cables. It
is the single largest repository for international relations of primary
source materials, all searchable. It is the cannon for international
relations. It is the biggest dog in the room. There has been some
research published in Spanish and in Asian languages. But where are the
American and English journals? There is a concrete explanation: They act
as feeder schools for the US State Department. The US association that
controls the big five international relations journals, the ISA, has a
quiet, official policy of not accepting any paper that is derived from
WikiLeaks' materials.

SPIEGEL: Let's talk about politicians. Why have politicians -- who had
to learn, thanks to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, that their phones are
tapped and their emails are read by English-speaking spies -- reacted in
such a timid, slow and lame way to these revelations?

Assange: Why are they playing it down? Angela Merkel had to look tough
because she didn't want to be seen as a weak leader, but I reckon she
came to the conclusion the Americans aren't going to change. All that US
intelligence information is very valuable for the German foreign
intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst. Please imagine for a
moment the German government complains about being spied on and the
Americans just say: Okay, we will give you more stuff, which they have
stolen from France. When the French complain, they get more stuff, which
was stolen from Germany. The NSA spends a lot of resources obtaining
information, but throwing a few crumbs to France and Germany when they
start whining about being victims costs nothing, digital copies cost
nothing.

SPIEGEL: If it worked like that, it would be utterly embarrassing for
the German and the French governments.

Assange: It's sad. It seems like German politicians think this debate
makes us look weak and creates conflict with the Americans. So we better
play the surveillance issue down. If you knew as a German politician
that American intelligence agencies have been collecting intensively on
125 top-level politicians and officials over decades, you would recall
some of the conversations you had in all these years and you would then
understand that the United States has all those conversations, and that
it could take down the Merkel cabinet any time it feels like it, by
simply leaking portions of those conversations to journalists.

SPIEGEL: Do you see a potential blackmail situation?

Assange: They wouldn't leak transcripts of tapped phone calls as that
would draw focus to the spying itself. The way intelligence services
launder intercepts is to extract the facts expressed during
conversations; for example to say to their contacts in the media, "I
think you should look into this connection between this politician and
that person, what they did on that particular day."

SPIEGEL: Have you got a documented example in which this sort of tactic
has been used?

Assange: We haven't published one yet about a German politician, but
there are examples of prominent Muslims in different countries about
whom it was leaked that they had been browsing porn. Blackmail or
representational destruction from intercepts is part of the repertoire
used.

SPIEGEL: Who uses these methods?

Assange: The British GCHQ has its own department for such methods called
JTRIG. They include blackmail, fabricating videos, fabricating SMS texts
in bulk, even creating fake businesses with the same names as real
businesses the United Kingdom wants to marginalize in some region of the
world, and encouraging people to order from the fake business and
selling them inferior products, so that the business gets a bad
reputation. That sounds like a lunatic conspiracy theory, but it is
concretely documented in the GCHQ material allegedly provided by Edward
Snowden.

SPIEGEL: Snowden is trapped in Moscow, Chelsea Manning, formerly known
as Bradley Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for submitting
classified documents to WikiLeaks. Did this not deter other potential
whistleblowers?

Assange: It was designed to be a very strong deterrent. However, a
number of people have come forward subsequent to that and these acts of
repression have a mixed effect. Obviously, sentencing someone to 35
years in prison does have some deterrent effect. But it also erodes the
perception of the US Government as a legitimate authority. Being
perceived as a just authority is the key to legitimacy. Edward Snowden
told me they had abused Manning in a way that contributed to his
decision to become a whistleblower, because it shows the system is
incapable of reforming itself.

SPIEGEL: Did you get more cautious?

Assange: The US government is pursuing five different types of charges
against me. I don't know how many charges altogether, but five types of
charges: espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, computer fraud and
abuse, theft of secrets and general conspiracy. Even if there were only
one charge of each type, which there wouldn't be, that would be 45
years, and the Espionage Act has life imprisonment and death penalty
provisions as well. So it would be absurd for me to worry about the
consequences of our next publication. Saudi officials came out after we
started publishing the Saudi cables and said that spreading and
publishing government information carries a penalty of 20 years in
prison. Only 20 years! So if it's a choice between being extradited to
Saudi Arabia or the US, then I should go to Saudi Arabia, a land famous
for its judicial moderation.

(to be continued)