JULIAN ASSANGE SPEAKS AT CONFERENCIA INTERNACIONAL DE SOFTWARE LIBRE

UMET, Buenos Aries, Argentina

26 October 2016

JULIAN ASSANGE

OK, we'll try and do this. So this is the first time that I have spoken to people outside the embassy since my internet has been cut off. It is a bit unusual for me to be trying to do a talk by telephone but I like a challenge so we're going to try and do it.

First of all, thank you to the computer workers union who put this event together and organized it. I see that quite a lot of universities involved in Argentina and there's some interesting people here, it's quite nice to see actually such support for the free software movement for ideals that I have fought for a long time by the government of Argentina and other institutions within Argentina.

MODERATOR

Please Julian just give us a minute to explain to the public here what is happening.

JULIAN ASSANGE

First of all, let me just introduce myself. My name is Julian Assange and I'm the editor and founder and publisher of Wikileaks. I have a technical training, where I taught myself to program when I was 13 and became a computer hacker, or explorer of the world, when I was quite young, from Australia, and then developed a lot of free software and different projects, became a system administrator and started my own internet service in Australia. And writing cryptography programs to protect people and their privacy from spying. And wrote some books about that type of thing and studied the National Security Agency, and eventually (unintelligible) and actually decided that I wanted to try and bring about more education and justice in the world and the easiest way for some (unintelligible)

(Break and resumption)

JULIAN ASSANGE

OK. I'll try and get back where I was. I constructed Wikileaks. The idea, as the programmer behind it, and then behind the institution there's a lot of talented and courageous people. And I've had a lot of stress and a lot of conflict. We've published on average 1 million secret documents per year for the last 10 years and of that time, 6 years, I have been detained without charge here in the United Kingdom, and 4 years in this embassy, the Ecuadorian embassy of London, where Ecuador gave me asylum. The idea being to go to Ecuador, but the embassy was then surrounded by police, and this began a very expected surveillance siege by the British of the embassy for the last 4 years that they say that they've spent about 20 million dollars on the spying equipment that is outside around the embassy and the plainclothes police and so on.

Now, just recently, we started our series on the U.S. election, which is extremely interesting, about how power networks in Washington, D.C. operate, principally around Hillary Clinton, who's been there for many, many years because she was the wife of Bill Clinton, and the lobbyists that work for her and campaign managers like John Podesta. So our first big leak in that series was the DNC Leaks and as a result of that published in July, the top 5 officials of the U.S. Democratic party resigned, including its president, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

(Unintelligible)

JULIAN ASSANGE

Can I continue?

The Democratic primary election between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, principally, had been rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton by the committee that runs the U.S. Democratic party in many different ways, including pushing out fake stories that Bernie Sanders supporters were trying to organize violence, making sure that more of the money went to Hillary Clinton and so on.

When we released those twenty-thousand e-mails, we did it in a way which we've become famous for, which is to make a special, customized search engine to search them. It's actually quite hard to make a search engine to display and search through e-mail because there's so many broken mail standards and mail programs. It's quite a lot of work. And it encouraged all the people in the United States and some outside of the United States who were interested in the election to sort through them. So this punched a hole in the media censorship that exists in the United States where 4 of the 5 top TV networks and about 8 of the 9 major publications in the United States are biased in favor of Hillary Clinton.

So, in response to as many attacks, and U.S.-D.C. establishment, which is, believes that Hillary Clinton will be the winner of the election, tried to find different ways to distract from our publication. They, first of all, tried to say that we supported Donald Trump just because we were criticizing Hillary Clinton. Then they tried to say that actually we were secretly working with Russia to publish this material that was criticizing her and this was some kind of cyber warfare against the United States.

What I have learned from a lot of experience that the best way to deal with these attacks is that you never flinch, alright, you never blink, you just keep on publishing. Because every day that you publish is a day that you have the initiative in the conflict.

So we continued on publishing the e-mails of Hillary Clinton's chief campaign manager, which, even more politically interesting, than the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee, I had been exploring what was the connection between Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager and the sale of 20% of all the U.S. uranium to Russia, through a company in the United States called Joule Limited.

And that was very interesting. And we showed that Clinton's campaign manager had been lying about his investments in this nuclear energy company, and he was very closely connected with a Canadian mining magnate and that he had 75,000 shares of this company and that he'd moved it into another company secretly controlled by his daughter, and so on, but much more importantly, with that, in the investigation, we'd managed to get hold of more than 50,000 e-mails related to Hillary Clinton's chief campaign manager, John Podesta.

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

And this really whipped up a crazed hornets nest atmosphere in the Hillary Clinton campaign and in all the establishments that are backing her. Now we always had the analysis that Hillary Clinton would win for sure, we've had that analysis from more than 12 months ago. But she has pulled around her, every single establishment in the U.S. The intelligence agencies, the neo-conservatives who started the Iraq war, the weapons manufacturers, the big banks and investment companies like Goldman Sachs. Most of the middle class and most of the media. And so now we have all these people all these establishments trying to defend Hillary Clinton from being exposed as having many corrupt relationships.

So they started attacking our servers with denial of service attacks and attempted hacking attacks. There was, er there is an amazing ongoing campaign where fake documents were put in the UN and in the British courts to accuse me of being both a Russian spy and a paedophile and molestor of children.

You can look up that amazing story that we tracked down how this hoax was made at the UN and in the British courts to call me a Russian spy and a paedophile by a front company in the United States, in Texas, called ToddandClare.

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

But Wikileaks is a global publisher, publishes a million documents a year, we publish from France, Germany, Norway, Holland and several other countries, and we have most of our lawyers and staff in the EU and the United States. We don't publish from Ecuador. No particular reason. Just the bandwidth is cheaper and servers are cheaper in Europe rather than Ecuador.

So the United States government in the form of John Kerry, the Secretary of State, and some other U.S. officials and the Hillary Clinton campaign kept putting forth propaganda to say that our publications revealing various forms of corruption and scandal within Hillary Clinton's network was in fact interference in the United States electoral process.

This is not interference in the electoral process. This is the definition of the electoral process. Is for media organizations, and in fact everyone to publish the truth and their opinion about what is occurring.

There cannot be a free and informed election unless people are free to inform.

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

So now let's look at it from Ecuador's point of view. While I disagree that they didn't give me any notice about what was occurring. I did not like how it was done. I am very sympathetic to the concern that the Ecuadorian state had.

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

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

So here we have a dilemma. On the one hand, Wikileaks is a publisher that doesn't publish from Ecuador and as a publisher its duty and its obligation is to publish everything that is true and that it can get its hands on about a very important election that is occurring right now in the United States.

On the other hand the TV networks in the United States which with the exception of Fox are controlled by Clinton supporters and the U.S. intelligence establishment which is also aligned to Clinton, pushing statements before the public that Wikileaks' publishing about the U.S. election is interference in the U.S. election, which is false, but nonetheless it is a claim that is being made very loudly in the U.S.

And this claim although false could be used to legitimize the United States interfering in Ecuador's election next year.

Now, of course, we actually publish from Germany, France, Holland, Norway and so on. The United States has as far as we're aware not tried to apply significant pressure to those countries but, I am a symbol, as the ideological leader of Wikileaks, and that symbol is being protected as a political refugee by the state of Ecuador. So they think they can go after the symbol and they think they can bully Ecuador because it is a state in Latin America that (unintelligible).

So we end up with a strategic position by Ecuador that the internet to the embassy is shut off until the end of the election so that Ecuador's policy of non-intervention can't be misinterpreted by actors in the United States and even domestically in Ecuador.

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

And Ecuador has been strong in many other ways giving me asylum in the first place and continuing to resist quite strong pressure from the United Kingdom, United States and Sweden to cast me out into the streets and be arrested.

And if I just compare what the government's position is, about half the opposition party, going into the Ecuadorian election next year in February, say that they also will protect my asylum but about another half don't as they campaign (unintelligible) they will hand me over to be arrested, despite the United Nations in February of this year, making a formal finding that I am legally correct in my being illegally detained by the United Kingdom.

But Wikileaks is a, you know, you could ask what type of dog is a different company or organization and Wikileaks is one of these fighting dogs, that has a lot of energy and runs around fighting all the time. It just loves to fight, it loves nothing more than to fight. So when my internet was cut off, of course we had long ago made strategic contingency plans for exactly this situation. So despite bombs reigning down on us from statements by high U.S. officials, media and so on, this is exactly the sort of situation that we enjoy, so there was not even one days pause, we just continued on publishing the next day even though I was cut off from my team.

OK. So we're up to date in the story. Any questions?

MODERATOR

Question #1

JULIAN ASSANGE

As I said, it has long been our analysis that Hillary Clinton would win the election because she has all the establishments on her side and we can see that in terms of polling. If someone like Donald Trump who has a great many problems, I'm sure all of you are aware of it, but if he managed to get up near the 48-50% level, of the polling, which he has on just two occasions across the different polls. United. Then immediately those big networks and the funders get together and smash him back down. So I don't think there's any chance of Donald Trump winning the election. That would probably be bad inside the United States, it would be probably be good outside the United States. But even with the amazing material that we are publishing and will continue to publish, because even though we publish it and there's a lot of people on the internet reading it directly, most of the media organizations in the United States are very strongly aligned with Hillary Clinton, for two reasons, really, a lot of them are owned by big businesses which are owned by banks which are aligned to Hillary Clinton and the other is a class reason. Most journalists and media workers are very middle class and Donald Trump represents in their eyes white trash. And so to be doing anything that looks like it might support Donald Trump, looks like you're supporting the trash and that means to those Bibles that they have within their class, that they are white trash. And so it lowers their social status and that's a very dangerous thing to do, in the institution, to have your social status lowered, because someone else might get your job or the job that you want to have within the institution, so there's a lot of conformity and a lot of fear about criticizing Hillary Clinton in any way at all so it reduces the impact of even very significant material that is released.

But what is the impact for Latin America? Well I think it's extremely positive because I think this is the first time in U.S. electoral history that we can see power structure going into the new presidency, so the various alliances and forces and influences of Hillary Clinton and her team, we are exposing day by day. And so that's going to shift understanding of the phenomenon that then everyone has to deal with inside the United States and out. It becomes more predictable and the worst excesses of it are then easier to contain.

MODERATOR

Question #2

JULIAN ASSANGE

As a security expert, or former security expert and someone who has had to continue to understand that in order to protect Wikileaks and our sources, I think electronic voting is completely crazy. The electronic aspect of it, even if there is cryptography, maybe especially if there is cryptography, makes it so complex that individual peoples and communities can't assess whether it is doing what it says that it's doing, so it becomes easy to manipulate. Now even if there are rules to have sophisticated auditors, external auditors, auditing what is being done with random checks and so on, we all know the reality that once those rules are set up for auditors, gradually they are defunded or the auditors get lazy, and they gradually start to disappear, and those people who want to manipulate the system, understand the abilities and limitations of the auditors more and more as time goes by. So I think electronic voting is completely crazy for national elections. Perhaps for some other things it might be alright. But for national elections, when there's real power involved, I think this is mad.

On the second part of that question, about overseas processing data in the States and elsewhere, obviously information if it's U.S. jurisdiction is accessible to U.S. authorities, however, that said, it might even be more accessible if it's not in U.S. jurisdiction, because they hack it and steal it anyway. So this issue of the breakdown in areas of jurisdiction, or areas of serenity, is a much broader issue, which is causing a disappearing of effective borders, a blending in or merging in of different states with one another. There's a lot of benefits to that. On the other hand it seems quite likely the largest, most powerful electronic states, like the United States, like maybe China in a few years, will be able to hold and gather together critically important functions of other countries and then will be able to squeeze these countries both in terms of taking data from them but perhaps more importantly in terms of demanding fees in court cases or simply cutting off access.

MODERATOR

Question #3

JULIAN ASSANGE

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

MODERATOR

Question #4

JULIAN ASSANGE

This is a very important question. One of the major power elements in society, one which shapes our thinking about the problems we have and our solutions to our problems can only be as good as the clarity of our thinking, is of course the media, the mass media. And we're also shifting into control from social media. So while social media and easy internet publishing has broken through a lot of the censorship on behalf of various establishments that the mainstream media been performing, at the same time, there is consolidation, in the owners of social media that is leading to various forms of censorship. There's a great book that's being published in Argentina, it's definitely in Spanish, called "Wiki Media Leaks", and that is an analysis of the Latin American media looking at the cables that Wikileaks published showing the relationships between the U.S. State Department and the various media oligarchs in Latin America. Now why did a separate book have to published on that? Well, because obviously the Clarin Group was not reporting about the Clarin Group and there also exists a type of truce between the different media owners and even amongst journalists to not report critical information about these groups or these individuals that you would think would be rivals, but they're too scared to get into a media war with each other, so they tend to censor news that is critical of the media. Now, one of the things most remarked on by our recent publications about the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign is how many unethical journalists were exposed, journalists who were you know checking in to make sure that Hillary Clinton or Hillary Clinton's campaign manager was approving of what they wrote, private parties, with 65 different journalists where they could report on anything that happened at the party with Hillary Clinton or campaign manager John Podesta, cooking together, and so on. But you're right, the full archives of the New York Times, the Clarin Group, or CNN, would make a very big difference to peoples' opinion and help to understand those power networks. We did it for Sony Corporation. Sony Corporation worked with News Corporation whose a media corporation, and that showed very interesting things, for example that Sony tried to do a deal with UK Prime Minister David Cameron at the time of the Scottish Referendum in 2014 to not air a TV series which was pro-Scottish until after the referendum. So they met with David Cameron and that was their strategy, later, going into that meeting, they wanted to do that, and what could they get from Cameron, well, they could get some tax positions from the UK prime minister in exchange for killing off this TV series about Scotland which would increase Scottish nationalism. So those sorts of games are at play in all the big media groups.