Julian Assange Quotes
Computer programmer
We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal - personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets - you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret. But we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well motivated.
It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in.
You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.
Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship.
Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.
If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature.
The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.
True information does good.
Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.
We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it - which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.
All over the world, the barriers between what is inside an organisation and outside an organisation are being smoothed out. In the military, the use of contractors means that what is the military and what is not the military is smoothed out.
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison, we continue to release, our media partners continued to write stories. The important revelations from this material continue to come out. We have approximately 2,000 cables into 250,000.
During the period of house arrest, I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable.
It's interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring.
Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.
Democratic societies need a strong media, and WikiLeaks is part of that media.
To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.
We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.
These megaleaks... They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase.
These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them.
Well, there's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform. And there's a lot of information. So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good.
Through the confessional system, the Catholic church spied upon the lives of its congregants. While Latin mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.
We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us. But we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up.
As we've gotten more successful, there's a gap between the speed of our publishing pipeline and the speed of our receiving submissions pipeline. Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises, and our ability to publish is increasing linearly.
The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.
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.
WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.
That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth. And that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber, but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.
The corruption in reporting starts very early. It's like the police reporting on the police.
When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.
In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic.
The supply of leaks is very large. It's helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It's protective to us.
Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times.
What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes.
We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.
We like to engage in a normal publishing effort, which is to act in a responsible manner and make sure the material is not likely to harm anyone, that it is properly investigated by quality news organizations, and by lawyers and human rights groups and so on.
In my role as Wikileaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks. To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.
We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod ... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit.
I mean there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world - within the E.U., between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see.
I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them.
I'm not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can't be.
My family has had to move and change their name and have been subject to threats from right wing blogs calling for my son, for example, to be killed to get at me.
When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.
We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure.
Although I still write, research and investigate, my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists.
Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another.
I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.
I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.
Every law, every constitution, every regulative decision is based upon what people are discussing in their community. It's based upon our sum knowledge of history and the present.
To be alive as a human being is to know, in the same way as it is to have a heart that beats.
Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers.
Being editor of WikiLeaks was always a pretty difficult job.
The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation.
The media helps keep government honest.
You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in.
I always believed that WikiLeaks as a concept would perform a global role, and to some degree it was clear that it was doing that as far back as 2007 when it changed the result of the Kenyan general election.
WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars and broken stories about corporate corruption.
Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.
Journalists always like an excuse for why are they talking about something now when they didn't talk about something a week ago. They always like to say something is new.
I believe that the way to justice is education.
It raises questions about the natural instincts of Clinton that, when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, et cetera.
Often it's the case that we have to do a lot of exploration and marketing of the material we publish ourselves to get a big political impact for it.
Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks.
So far, we have a perfect record of WikiLeaks having never revealed information that exposed a source over 10 years.
By bringing out into the public domain how human institutions actually behave, we can understand frankly, to a degree, for the first time the civilization that we actually have.