Julian Assange talking:
There’s been nearly four years that I’ve been detained without charge, in one form or another, here in the United Kingdom, first in prison, the solitary confinement, then under house arrest for about 18 months, and now two years here in the embassy. The Ecuadorean government gave me political asylum in relation to the ongoing national security investigation by the DOJ, the Department of Justice, in the United States into our publications and also into sourcing efforts. So, did I enter into a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced last year to 35 years in prison?
So, the question as to how I’m doing, of course, personally, it’s a difficult situation, in a variety of ways. I would say that when someone’s in this position, what you are most concerned about is the interruption in your family relationships. So, because of the security situation, that’s made it very hard for my children and my parents.
But if we look at the bigger picture, WikiLeaks, as an organization, has survived that attack by the U.S. government, and we’ve gone on to do further work and some quite significant work. Unlike many media organizations during that period, we have not gone bankrupt, despite a worldwide, extrajudicial banking blockade by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and so on, and none of our members of staff have been fired. So, I think if you went back and said to yourself, “What are the chances that a small investigative publisher could publish this information about the Iraq War and the State Department and the Afghanistan War and many other documents about Guantánamo, and enter into conflict with the United States government in a very serious way, would they still be publishing? Would their people be in prison?” and you would think, probably, yes. But actually, we have managed to mostly overcome, apart from my situation here, the barriers that have been put up against us.
While most of our resources have been concerned with the ongoing U.S. investigation and pending prosecution, which the U.S.—which the DOJ admits to in its court filing of the 25th of April this year, continues, the Swedish investigation has obstructed my asylum. So, United Kingdom says, “Look, there’s this questioning warrant that Sweden has put out for you. They may have dropped the case,” which they did and re-raised it, “but nonetheless there’s this questioning warrant, and therefore we say you cannot go to Ecuador to accept asylum until we’ve extradited you to Sweden.” Now, that is actually a violation of international law. The international law is quite clear: Asylum trumps extradition, because of the nature of the relationships with the U.N. and the 1951 asylum convention. So, every time we try and we get some traction publicly and politically in the U.S. case, people say, “Oh, no, no, the whole thing is really about the Swedish case.” So it’s quite important to deal with the Swedish matter and kind of show it for what it is and that it should be dropped.
There has been no movement. Although the Swedish government is obligated to somehow progress the situation, they’ve been very happy to keep it a complete stasis. They’ve refused to come here to speak to me here or pick up a telephone or to accept an affidavit. They have also refused to provide a guarantee that I will not be extradited to the United States if I offer to go to Sweden. So, that situation means we have to tackle the Swedish matter, it seems, in Sweden. The only other alternative is perhaps going to the International Court of Justice in relation to the asylum.
Anyway, so it will be the first date in nearly four—in four years that the matter has been heard about in Sweden. And my lawyers are confident that either in the lower court, and more likely the appeal court, we will be able to dismiss the case, because the law is reasonably clear. You’re meant to proceed with—the Swedish government has an obligation under its own law to proceed with maximum speed, with minimum cost, and also with bringing the minimum suspicion on the person who’s being investigated. And it is in clear violation of all those points of law.
Because of the abuses in this case and some other cases, new European law was introduced and pulled in—and enacted in Sweden. And it was meant to be enacted by June the 1st this year; it wasn’t. But by July the 1st it should have come on board, so just recently. So that new legislation permits people who are suspects, who had their liberty deprived in some way, to be able to access evidence that shows that they’re innocent. And so, we understand that there’s significant evidence that was collected by the police that show that I am innocent, and they have thus far refused to hand it over. But this new European law means that they have to hand it over.
you have to be careful in saying that they have accused me, because actually when you read their correspondence and their early statements, they don’t say that at all. In fact, they say that they didn’t accuse me and that the police took the matter and the state accused me, that they didn’t want any charges, that they weren’t filing a formal complaint. That’s what they say in those text messages.
The chief prosecutor of Stockholm reviewed the material very early on in the case and dropped the rape complaint, dropped it, said there’s no—said, “It’s not that I don’t believe what the women say, but there’s just no evidence that any crime has been committed.” And so, the matter was dropped. Then, subsequently, a senior Swedish politician, Claes Borgström, who was running for election, then took it to Gothenburg, a city which has nothing to do with the case, and resurrected it under another prosecutor.
they can dismiss it; they can say that the law is unclear and ask maybe European Court of Justice to give clarity on this new European law and how it is to be implemented.
And subsequently, the Cambridge Journal of Comparative Law wrote two papers about what had happened. And there’s a lot of concern about this idea that you could extradite someone without even charging them. So, political pressure—there was a backbench revolt in the British Parliament, principally amongst the conservative backbench, that this was—you know, that any police officer in Europe could just ask for someone in the U.K. to be extradited without it going before a court and without them being charged. And so new legislation was introduced to prevent that happening. So, no more extradition without charge from the U.K. But there was then debate that, “Well, will this in fact protect Assange?” And so, a specific clause was entered into it that it will not be retrospective for those people where the court has decided that they will be extradited, but they haven’t been extradited yet—which just applies to me.
Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, a hawkish trans-Atlanticist who was hired by the Liberation of Iraq Committee, for cash, to provoke the invasion of Iraq here in Europe, and has done many similar things—this year was his 14th Bilderberger, he’s an old friend of Henry Kissinger, etc. Carl Bildt has, in fact, continually, publicly interfered and denounced WikiLeaks and me, or statements that my lawyers have made, in various ways over the past four years—not only Carl Bildt, but the rest of the Swedish Cabinet, as well. So, it’s one of these situations where when someone doesn’t want to answer a question, they rely on principles—which are good principles, of not interfering in judiciary—but on the other hand, when they want to interfere, then they do just that.
There may be an element. For example, the Holder visit was unscheduled and was sudden and occurred at the time when there was a significant debate in Sweden about dropping the matter in relation to me. That’s possibly related to me. And the Hillary visit, yes, it was just a week before I was meant to be extradited to Sweden.
But I think it more likely reflects a very strong alliance between Sweden and the United States, which has developed since the end of the Cold War, and rapidly since 2006, when the center-right party, the moderates, entered into government. And that alliance we can see, for example, in that Swedish troops are under U.S. command in Afghanistan; that Sweden was the fifth into Libya; that Sweden was the number one seller of arms to the United States during the Iraq War, in absolute terms; that the National Security Agency and Sweden have an agreement, which is even stronger than the agreement between—that in aspects is even stronger than the agreement between GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, and National Security Agency to conduct bulk surveillance of traffic passing through Sweden.
we still have the issue as to whether the British would then activate a U.S. extradition request. The British are also conducting their own counterterrorism investigation in relation to our involvement and The Guardian’s involvement in Edward Snowden’s documents. And there’s also questions about the Snowden grand jury that we’re not sure about. But the most clear aspect is the WikiLeaks grand jury in the U.S., which has been the largest investigation and pending prosecution of a publisher in U.S. history, more than a dozen different agencies involved. It’s very well documented, not just by us, but by other journalists and New York Times. And, in fact, the DOJ admits it in court filings. So, that’s an issue.
Now, in 2012, when the conflict was at its height, and this embassy was completely surrounded by British police—it is still surrounded by British police. There is still a siege underway with about eight to 16 uniformed and undercover police officers around the embassy at any time. But going back to 2012, there was a siege involving, at various times of the day, over a hundred police officers. At that time, the British police were ordered to smash—ordered to smash into a diplomatic car, if I was in a diplomatic car; if I had diplomatic immunity, to arrest me. So, that’s quite extraordinary that there would be a direct instruction to violate the most tested part of international law, which is the Vienna Convention, which is the protection of embassies and diplomatic cars. It’s not like there’s any debate on whether it might be illegal and might be legal to do that under some circumstances. It’s completely illegal. And yet the British police were ordered to do it.
it’s come out under a Freedom of Information Act request just about two—about two weeks ago, that the U.K. had reached 6.5 million pounds, or about eleven-and-a-half million dollars. It’s now up to 6.7 million pounds. Interestingly, when there’s a request of the breakdown, because that only—that should be about 16 people full-time. When there’s a request of the breakdown, they refuse to reveal the breakdown under national security—for national security reasons. So the U.K. government—there’s something that they’re doing with that police surveillance that they say is a matter of national security.
to see conservative organizations like Human Rights Watch, which, as you well know, has a lot of former State Department people in it, to come out with that position, that this prosecution, or this pending prosecution of WikiLeaks by the DOJ, National Security Division, is a dangerous precedent to set and would be a significant stain on the record of the Democrats. And so, I think there is a view that that should be stopped, and a number of different organizations are pushing for it. Now, of course, that always should have been the view. You can ask the question: Why wasn’t Human Rights Watch in there two years ago saying these things? Well, I think people were scared. I think they really were scared and that they thought that perhaps they could isolate us and, “OK, let the U.S. government go after WikiLeaks, just as long as we can keep our media organizations and our human rights groups, and we can stay out of the fight.”
But if you look at how the Espionage Act prosecutions have developed, there is now more investigations and prosecutions by the Obama administration of people under the Espionage Act—principally, whistleblowers and journalists—than all previous presidents combined, going back to 1917—in fact, more than double. And people understand that it’s not just us. In fact, the precedent has been set that you can perhaps do this to almost anyone. And that should be checked.
unfortunately, you can see the conditional, which is doing his job. And we’re being—interestingly, this public statement by Holder reflects a development of thought in the State Department over the past two years that we have been following quite closely. And it is to somehow say that there are certain types of reportage which are legitimate and other types of reportage which are not legitimate. And the State Department has refused to recognize us as a media organization. And it’s done that in a number of different ways, not just in its public statements by its officials over a wide variety of time, but, for example, when the Bradley Manning trial was on and Kristinn Hrafnsson, our spokesperson—the top award-winning journalist of Iceland, has won journalist of the year three times—applied for a visa to go to the trial, to the U.S. State Department, a journalist visa, it was refused. And the grounds for refusal were not specified; they refused to specify them. But they are obviously that the State Department has a policy position that it will refuse to recognize WikiLeaks as a media organization, because then this would activate their other position that they’re not going to prosecute journalists for doing their jobs.
I could see the experience Edward Snowden was about to go through. I have been through a similar experience. And I’ve also watched Chelsea Manning go through an even worse experience, now sentenced to 35 years in prison and, at one stage, kept in cages in Kuwait and so on, and treated very, very badly. So, I have personal sympathy for what he was about to go through—and not just from the legal side, but also from the press side. But as a result of us having gone through it, we developed certain understandings about diplomacy, secure communications, which had long been our specialty, and we have a good kind of diplomatic network as a result of specializing in diplomatic publications. So we thought there was a chance that we could help him, and he reached out and asked for help, and we thought it was important to assist.
The other thing is about the sort of signal it sends. The U.S. government decided to smash Chelsea Manning—absolutely smash him—to send a signal to everyone: Don’t you ever think about telling people what’s really going on inside the U.S. military and its abuses. And they tried to smash also the next most visible person and visible organization, which was WikiLeaks, to get both ends—the source end and the publishing end. Now, we have mostly defended ourselves. I’m in a difficult position here, but WikiLeaks has never censored any of its publications in response to that attack. So we wanted to try and set a counterexample with Edward Snowden, that in fact you can blow the whistle, you can reveal this information to the public, which is of tremendous historical importance. It’s of importance to the ongoing development of civilization. Are we going to end up into a mass surveillance system with a very aggressive and strong military-industrial complex, or do we have an attempt to steer away from that? But if we could erect Edward Snowden as someone who blew the whistle and survived, and not even survived, but thrived and spoke about it and kept informing people of what was going on, then we wanted to do it, because that incentivized other sources coming forward.
you have to understand I need to speak carefully, because there is an ongoing Edward Snowden grand jury, which is looking at the matters of those people who assisted Edward Snowden, as well as Edward Snowden himself. But there’s a lot of surveillance of this embassy; on the other hand, we had developed certain techniques in defeating surveillance. And they’re not easy. They are hard techniques, and they do take diligence. But the reality is, the National Security Agency, for all its surveillance power, and the DOJ, for all their coercive power, in the end, they are bureaucracies. They are perfectly nasty, boring bureaucracies. And bureaucracies are inefficient, and they move slowly. And we knew this from our dealing with the State Department and the Pentagon previously.
And so, we were able to move quickly and fast and assess the situation, from a legal and political perspective, in Hong Kong and the mechanisms that would be needed to get him out, get him asylum, and the flight path that would be needed so he had protection at each step of the way and that none of the intermediary countries would grab him, due to us making pre-arrangements and also due to just the sort of where they stood geopolitically. So that’s what we did. And it’s not like it was guaranteed to work. In fact, there were certain stages where there were quite some risks. But the risks of inaction were even greater.
Sarah Harrison, one of our people, who went to Hong Kong to deal with the situation both from a legal perspective and a journalistic perspective, she was acting as a secure conduit to our lawyers, who were trying to understand the asylum situation and advise him. And from a journalistic perspective, of course, it’s a very interesting story. Accompanied him to Hong Kong—sorry, accompanied him out of Hong Kong to Moscow and dealt with a very difficult situation there of gaining him asylum, and, importantly, making sure—once it became clear that it would be difficult for him to go to Latin America, making sure that the situation into which he entered into asylum in Russia was a well-negotiated one, was not one of weakness. And so she stayed there for some three or four months to make sure that he had freedom in Russia and was well respected there. And to their credit, the Russian authorities did the right thing: They gave him asylum, and they didn’t interfere or coerce with his conditions there.
because it is our specialty to understand surveillance systems of various kind, and it was my profession beforehand, the broad—many of the broad parameters, we already knew about. But the confirmation of each one of those parameters was extremely important for others to realize it. I think what is most surprising is not any one thing. It’s the scale, the incredible scale, and that at any point where you could guess, “Are they doing this, or are they not doing it?” they are doing it. So, for example, intercepting packages that are sent out in the post and backdooring them, backdooring chips. So we see the corporation list between National Security Agency and U.S. hardware manufacturers, so Intel, Qualcomm, that makes the chips for telephones and so on. That’s quite surprising. That had been rumored and speculated on, but that the actual physical hardware is backdoored before you even get it, that, I think, is—that is a bit surprising. And then the absolute numbers, the billions of interceptions that are occurring per day. Actually, people who were studying this knew that, but to see a map of the world and the different countries with how many millions or billions of intercepts per day were coming in, I think that is probably the most consequential.
No surprise at all that intelligence officers are being bribed by the United States. We have had volunteers being paid by the FBI and so on, being bribed by the United States. That’s no surprise at all. What is very interesting is that Germany has decided to make it public, that they have found someone and that they’re going to prosecute him, not just dismiss him. That’s a decision by the German government to cater to the popular will of the German population.
Snowden has no possibility to conduct a meaningful defense in the United States. That’s just a sad reflection of how the federal court system has evolved in relation to national security cases. They will make sure, A, that the case is in Alexandria, Virginia. In fact, they already have. That’s where his grand jury is. It’s where the WikiLeaks grand jury is. It is the highest density of military intelligence contractors and government employees in all of the United States. That’s why it’s there, so they always get what they want.
The state secrets privilege is used in these espionage cases, where the government tries to work out a way to present evidence that it doesn’t allow to the defense under the basis that it’s classified. So, even at the sort of procedural level, he will not be able to conduct a meaningful defense.
Then, in relation to his obligations under law for classified access, it’s a strict liability. So he can’t conduct any whistleblower defense that it was in the public interest, etc. It’s strict liability.
And then we only need to—and you go, “Well, how does that all play out in practice?” Well, actually, we’ve seen the case of Bradley Manning: 35 years for speaking to the press, no allegation that there was any money involved, no allegation that he was dealing with any opponents of the United States government, and 35 years in prison. So, those are the actual conditions that people go through in cases like this.
And in the Chelsea Manning case, it was even worse than that. We filed to get his—Center for Constitutional Rights, a number of cases, even to get any transcript out of that hearing. So, you’ll see a similar thing in the Snowden case, a lockdown under the basis that secrets are being discussed. And then the conditions that Snowden would be kept in in the United States would be SAMs, so special administrative measures, because it’s what they do in these national security cases. They say that there’s something in his head that’s valuable—it’s not just documents—and that by speaking, he could reveal this information. And so he’d basically be kept in incommunicado detention during the bail process, and the court case, I imagine, could go for five to seven years, even if in the end political constellations came together and he won in the Supreme Court.
It’s not even what I think. WikiLeaks and I have a team of excellent lawyers—there’s about 30 of them now—that have been understanding the situation for several years. They include Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights and others in the United States. And their advice is that, yes, there’s a high chance that you would be subject to SAMs, special administrative measures, during the whole time that the court case went on. You obviously wouldn’t get bail as a foreigner. And yeah, so, the punishment is in the process. And the DOJ understands that. And if you look at other cases, like Thomas Drake, for example, former National Security Agency whistleblower, given 13 counts of espionage, and then, in the end, he beat it and beat them down to one count of mishandling classified information. So you see this attempt to punish people by drawing them into a long and extended, drawn-out process, and, OK, in the end maybe you’ll win it, but you don’t get all those years back again. And, you know, that I have responsibilities to the organization I’m running, to my family, and I’ve been advised to not go to the United States. And I think that’s good advice.
But being in an embassy is actually, in some ways, not in others, a national security reporter’s dream, because there’s no subpoenas to an embassy. You can’t subpoena. The British police can’t come in. The Ecuadorean police can’t come in. No police can come in. There can be no raids in the night or during the day. And that’s quite a comforting position for the publisher of WikiLeaks to work from. It’s not a position I would like to keep forever, obviously, but it does at least allow me to continue working—yes, with a lot of constraints about can my family safely visit, can sources safely visit, can our most sensitive staff safely visit the embassy. There’s a lot of surveillance of the embassy. Some of that has been publicly declared. There’s a lot of other surveillance of the embassy that we are aware of, in different forms, surrounding what faces onto the embassy in different ways, which I don’t want to go into what we know and what we don’t know, for obvious reasons.
actually, the Data Protection Act, we filed a act against Harrods and got information out showing how Harrods were in fact assisting the police surveillance operation.
By permitting the police to use various buildings and facilities that Harrods has, not just the formal building, but they have a number of buildings which face onto the embassy. Additionally, it might be something of interest that Harrods was bought out by the Qatar sovereign fund a while ago, so it is ultimately Qatar that is supporting the surveillance operation of this embassy through its collaboration with the British government.
Around the embassy, there are a number of uniformed police and plainclothes police operating and others. The publicly admitted expenditure is now 6.7 million pounds, $11.5 million. It’s about $15,000 per day. And so, there has been some analysis of that and what that means. There’s about eight visible people around the embassy. But the salaries cover 16 people, so there’s a number of others also involved in the processing and management of the information. That doesn’t include what MI5 is doing and what GCHQ is doing.
The embassy security found, at the time of the visit of—shortly before the visit of Ricardo Patiño, the Ecuadorean foreign minister, in terms of the security—getting ready for the security of the minister’s visit, yes, they found a bug planted, a GSM bug planted in a hidden socket in the ambassador’s room.
Fortunately, the embassy has a 24-hour security guard—me—who never leaves the building and is always watching or alarmed in one way or another. So not all places, but, yes, others.
hopefully the greatest legacy is still to come. But WikiLeaks started in 2007, but it was really this very public confrontation that we had in 2010, 2011, which people saw watching. So it was not—a new generation saw history unfolding in real time, before their eyes, a history that they were part of. Young people see the Internet as their place, where they exchange ideas and culture and so on. And previously, they had been politically apathetic, because they didn’t feel that they could be a part of the power process. But seeing Hillary Clinton’s personal cables and equivalents for many different countries, and the fight that we were in, and being part of that in some way, by spreading this information or talking about it with others, educated a new generation. And the Internet went from being a politically apathetic space to being a political space. And that then spread into many different things. And so, I think this is actually the most significant thing that we have done.
We have also, in terms of the publishing industry, widened the envelope of what is acceptable to publish and so on. That’s been quite important and set off a cascade of examples, which—going through allegedly Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and Jeremy Hammond and many others, to come forward and reveal abuses in government.
– source democracynow.org
Hillary Clinton said, “Edward Snowden broke our laws”.
Julian Assange said:
it’s always interesting when someone proclaims to be a master of what is within the law and what is not within the law. We’ve seen a lot with Pentagon generals and other State Department figures, including Hillary. We’ve seen it in this case with General Alexander, The former head of the NSA, talking about what is the law and what is not the law.
But, actually, in the end, in the United States, it’s the Supreme Court that determines what the law is and what the law isn’t. And part of what goes into the Supreme Court is the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment obligations. So, whether the Espionage Act is constitutional is a very interesting question and has not been properly tested before. In fact, the U.S. government has been quite careful to not go to a proper appeal in relation to a conviction under the Espionage Act, in order to keep the threat there and not find that it is unconstitutional in court. So, I think there is actually a question even as to whether Edward Snowden, through his activities, broke the law. But then you can even go, OK, well, if he did, was it in fact the correct thing to do? Maybe the law is out of date. Maybe the law is wrong.
As a journalist, I have been working at various times in documenting what the National Security Agency has been doing in its burgeoning mass surveillance practice for more than 20 years. And other journalists, some of them very fine, have also been trying to expose the National Security Agency. And other whistleblowers have come forward—so, Thomas Drake, William Binney, both from the National Security Agency, for example. But what was the problem? While we could point to, based on a sophisticated analysis of what the National Security Agency is doing—say, look at this piece here, look at this little bit of congressional testimony, look at the subpoena record, look at the technology that they are buying from this company, look at the number of employees, look at the DOD budget as a whole—when you add everything else up, you can work out the National Security Agency’s budget. That’s a very complex picture, and that’s not a picture that can generate political reform and debate. And what Edward Snowden did was, by bringing out classified documents, that were official documents, that were even some of them just last year, he was able to show, even to people that didn’t understand, the complexity of what was actually going on. So, we have proof. People did try to start a debate, using all sorts of methods, including former National Security Agency whistleblowers, and it’s only primary source documents in volume that are probably capable of starting a debate about a complex issue like mass surveillance.
Hillary Clinton is alluding to, without mentioning the name of Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower from the 1970s. There’s a reason she doesn’t mention his name, because Daniel Ellsberg has come forward again and again this year and said that, in fact, he couldn’t do what he did in the 1970s today, that the situation has changed, as far as the courts—the use of the state secrets privilege, how things have been sewn up holding all national security cases in Alexandria, Virginia—there’s not a neutral jury pool—that he couldn’t do that. And the reality is, that’s the case for all national security whistleblowers who have classified documents. You can’t fight a normal case, as we would think about it in the public. You’re swept into a very aggressive system that is set against you from the first instance.
Not even the National Security Agency accuses him of working with the Russians. In fact, the National Security Agency, formally, in its investigation, has said that they don’t think that he was working with the Russians, at least not before he left the agency. And Hillary Clinton, however, tries to reshape the chronology in order to smear Edward Snowden with being a Russian spy. The actual chronology is that Edward Snowden went to Hong Kong. He then saw that the situation was very difficult, reached out for us to help, and we were intimately involved from that point on. So I know precisely, myself, and our staff know, what happened. We submitted 20 asylum applications on behalf of Edward Snowden to a range of different countries, Latin America. It was Ed Snowden’s intent to go to Latin America—Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador was also looking favorable, and Bolivia offered him asylum. En route to Latin America, the U.S. State Department canceled his passport, leaving him marooned in Russia, unable to catch his next flight, which had already been booked from the very beginning. His whole path had been booked while he was in Hong Kong.
Hillary says that he went to the Russian Consulate in Hong Kong. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure that perhaps he was looking for all different kinds of asylum options, and that would have made perfect sense for anyone to do that in such a severe situation. It is not a matter of irony that Edward Snowden was marooned by the U.S. State Department in Russia. Asylum is a serious business. It is something of a concern that the countries in western Europe, for example, that he asked for asylum—France, Germany, Spain—did not in fact come to the table. They were too scared about their geopolitical relationships. It’s something of a concern that Edward Snowden, as an American citizen, felt that he could not speak freely in the United States. And he is right. It’s the advice of all our lawyers that he should not return to the United States. He’d be extremely foolish to do so.
A lot of people in the civil liberties community in the United States, in the privacy community in the rest of the world, and specialists, national security journalists like myself, had been following what the National Security Agency has been doing for a long time. We have been trying very hard to erect a debate. And there, yes, there were small debates, that really didn’t proceed anywhere. The lawsuits filed by the EFF and ACLU to try and get somewhere went nowhere, because they didn’t have the evidence. And what Edward Snowden revealed was documentary evidence, and it was that primary source evidence that has led to this debate. Everyone knows the difference—most people can’t even remember hearing about the National Security Agency prior to last year. Now everyone knows about it. And that is almost entirely as a result of these disclosures.
As Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, has said, it is not possible for a national security whistleblower now in the United States to have a fair trial. It’s not possible to have a fair trial because all the trials are held in Alexandria, Virginia, where the jury pool is comprised of the highest density of military and government employees in all of the United States. It’s not possible to have a fair trial, because the U.S. government has a precedent of applying state secret privilege to prevent the defense from using material that is classified in their favor. It’s not possible to have a fair trial, because as a defendant in a national security case, you are held under special administrative measures, which makes it very hard to look at any of the material in your case, to meet with your lawyers, to speak to people, etc. So, this is—it’s just simply not a fair system. And even if you do eventually win by the time you get up to the Supreme Court, you spend seven years or something in a very serious condition trying to defend yourself, instead of what has happened with Edward Snowden. As a result of him having asylum, we can talk about the issues, not talking about whether Snowden is guilty or not, and Edward Snowden himself can tell the world, “Well, look, this is what actually happened. This is what is going on.”
It’s no surprise to me that Hillary Clinton thinks that human beings that are not formally U.S. citizens don’t have any rights. But not everyone thinks like that. Other people in other countries have rights. Now, if we look at the practicalities of Edward Snowden acquiring documents while he was a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton working for the National Security Agency and, prior to that, a contractor for Dell, the National Security Agency runs a mass surveillance program, a strategic surveillance program. The same technology, the same protocols are used to surveil people inside the United States, people outside the United States, etc. So if you’re trying to collect information to expose mass surveillance, then, by its very nature, you’re going to expose National Security Agency practices all over the world, because it’s the same process that occurs, whether you’re in England or whether you’re in Germany or whether you’re in the United States.
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/9/wikileaks_julian_assange_responds_to_hillary
WikiLeaks has been publishing since 2007. We have published material from every country—almost every country in the world and about every country in the world. We are now up to just over eight million individual documents that we have released during that period. Now, the heat in the debate with the United States arose in 2010. We have had heated debates with other countries, and we’ve had major court cases in the United States in relation to our fight with Swiss banks and so on. In 2010, the number of documents and publications that we were releasing, each one after another, ended up erecting a grand jury against us by the DOJ, National Security Division. And so, we entered into a major media conflict with the U.S. government.
So, going in order, they are “Collateral Murder,” a documentary that we produced based on the tape from an Apache helicopter mowing down 12 to 18 people in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, and very clearly engaged in the murder. And the murder was an unarmed man, wounded, crawling in the gutter, and good Samaritans came to rescue him, and all of them were killed, and two children came away with serious injuries.
Then the Afghanistan War Logs, now, these came at a very important moment in 2010, where Michael Hastings had just—the late Michael Hastings had just released a report on McChrystal, and these publications came not long after that.
Rolling Stone journalist who died in a car crash. And that shifted the debate about Afghanistan. Early in 2010, it was: What can we do to win in Afghanistan? After the Hastings article about McChrystal and WikiLeaks’ war logs, the result was: There was no longer a debate about can we win in Afghanistan; it is how were we going to get out of Afghanistan. So it was quite an important shift.
Then, with the Iraq War Logs, which were published in October 2010, which in some ways has been one of our best analytical works, we worked together with not just other media organizations, but a number of statistical organizations to work out what the kill count was for Iraq, and combining with other figures, and we ended up with more than 100,000 civilian casualties—in fact, 15,000 new, completely undocumented civilian kills—and documenting U.S. involvement and approval of Iraqi torture centers within the police and many killings of civilians at checkpoints and some political issues and so on. And that produced a number of inquiries and has fed into cases that have been taken by Iraqis, and that has now ended up with an ICC filing, International Criminal Court filing, against the British military.
If we then move on, in December of that year, we started the release of Cablegate, the more than 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables from all around the world from 1966 to 2010. And that is the largest compendium of diplomacy that has ever been released. It’s about 3,000 volumes of material. As a sort of history of how the modern world behaves in practice, it’s extremely important, and it fed into the Tunisian revolution quite directly. In fact, Ben Ali’s propaganda minister, after the government fell, said that the WikiLeaks releases about Tunisia is what broke the back of the Ben Ali system.
because it exposed the corruption that many Tunisians knew about, but in a much more flagrant form of what money had gone where and people keeping pet tigers and so on, but also that there was various kinds of debates about it, and within the United States and from others, and that when push came to shove the U.S. would probably back the military and not Ben Ali. And it was undeniable. So it wasn’t just the Tunisian activists alleging this; it was a U.S. ambassador writing back to Washington, for several years, you know, that the U.S. had kind of let it gone on, but documenting what had gone on. And that then made its way into Europe and affected the French support for Ben Ali, and the Tunisians became—Tunisian activists again confident. And then, two weeks—20 days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, and then he became the personified symbol of all the problems, and then it properly kicked off. But anyway, the propaganda minister and some others say this is what broke the back of the Ben Ali system.
And those cables are really quite incredibly important. They have gone into literally dozens of court cases. They have released people from prison. People have been released from prison holding these cables above their head as the reason that they had been released from prison. The El-Masri case, where the CIA kidnapped a German citizen unlawfully, renditioned him and kept him in a CIA black site for four months, it was a case of mistaken identity. He wasn’t even an alleged terrorist. He just happened to have the same name. And they then dumped him in eastern Europe, later on, on the side of the road, no explanation given, to try and make it look—you know, to give him no evidence to take a case. And he did try and take cases in the United States. And this is something relevant, perhaps, what would happen to Edward Snowden in the United States. He was not able to get anywhere because the U.S. government activated state secrets privilege, said all the things that the CIA had done to him were secrets, and they would not be revealing anything at all. He met a complete dead end. Then, as a result of the release of the diplomatic cables, which spoke about what the United States had done with Macedonia, where he was taken from when he tried to enter into Macedonia, he was able to take a case against Macedonia at the—within Europe and to the European Court of Human Rights, and eventually won. And there were six cables cited in the judgment, you know, showing that it actually happened.
Similar cases in Spain, and an important precedent was set about the use of our materials in court cases generally, specifically cables. So, this relates to Chagos islands. So there’s an island group called Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. It’s owned by the British. It is very important strategically because it’s sort of on the way between things. Now, the British handed over, rent-free, one of these islands, Chagos, to the United States military.
And it has been now turned into a base, and rendition flights go through there and so on. But there was original inhabitants. At the time it was handed over to the United States in the ’60s, the original inhabitants were pushed off. And they were all pushed off to Mauritius and Madagascar, and they had been trying to fight a court case to come back. And some cables revealed that in fact the British government had told the U.S. it was setting up a secret plan to make it very difficult or impossible for them to come back. It was going to declare—you know, it was going to suck in the Liberal Left. And here’s how it was going to do it. Create a marine park. It’s a coral atoll, the Chagos islands. Going to create a marine park. Well, what was the economy of the Chagos islands? It was fishing. So this is explicitly that they’re going to prevent the Chagos islanders having any meaningful economic return to the island by creating this marine park, which all the Liberals will love. And that way, you know, these islanders won’t be able to interfere or spy on the U.S. base.
Anyway, that provoked new litigation by the Chagos islanders in the British courts. And ultimately, the lower courts found that the cables were inadmissible, because they had come from embassies, and there’s a Vienna Convention, the same thing that is protecting me here that protects diplomatic correspondence. But in a higher court, it was appealed, and it was found that’s not true. Actually, diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks are not protected by the Vienna Convention. They’re already public. It’s the first instance of getting them out that’s protected, not what happens to them subsequently. So that’s quite an important precedent within the common law world, because it means these cables can be used in many more court cases.
It’s Associated Press, who did an extensive review. It is the U.S. government itself, in the Bradley Manning case, under oath. Under oath, the head of the person who was responsible for investigating whether anyone had come to physical harm said under oath that they couldn’t find a single person who had been killed or physically harmed as a result.
Robert Carr in the Pentagon started up what they called a WikiLeaks war room, which had more than 150 people in it—DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and FBI and others—involved in trying to understand what we were going to publish, what we had and what the effects were. And a lot of money was spent trying to check us in different ways. And the result of all that expenditure and understanding, and then the attempt to build up the Bradley Manning prosecution and to denounce our publishing efforts, which we had revealed that the U.S. military—documenting the deaths of more than 100,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan, they found that zero people had been physically harmed by our publication.
I have a lot of respect for Glenn. Glenn has defended WikiLeaks from the attack by the U.S. grand jury over a long period of time. And he’s been very brave in the Edward Snowden publications, and, you know, quite forthright. He left The Guardian, in part because of that reason, because The Guardian was censoring the material that he was trying to publish. But he entered into First Look. And unfortunately, First Look is not just Glenn. First Look is actually the big power. All the money and organization comes from Pierre Omidyar. And Pierre Omidyar is one of the founders—is the founder of eBay and owns PayPal and goes to the White House several times each year, has extensive connections with Soros, and can broadly be described as an extreme liberal centrist. So, he has quite a different view about what journalism entails. For example, he has said this year, and also in 2009, that if someone gave him a leak from a commercial organization, not from the government, then he would feel it was his duty to tell the police. So that’s a very different type of journalism standard that comes from Pierre Omidyar. And unfortunately, some of that, or perhaps a significant amount of it, has gone into First Look and created some constraints there.
And that was seen most—seen most disturbingly when First Look knew from the Edward Snowden documents that all of Afghanistan was having its telephone calls recorded. The National Security Agency had corruptly installed mass surveillance inside Afghan telcos, saying to the Afghan government that they were doing—installing this monitoring just going after drug dealers, not mass surveillance but targeted surveillance after Afghan opium dealers, and in fact they were recording the phone calls of every single Afghan. And that’s as great an assault to sovereignty as you can imagine, other than completely militarily occupying a country, to record the intimate phone calls of every single Afghan citizen. And Afghanistan, as a country, and its people have the right to choose their own destiny, knowing what is actually happening to them. And First Look decided that they would censor the fact that Afghanistan was having all its telephone calls recorded.
they were a bit mealymouthed with the original disclosure. Initially, they just said, “We’re not revealing it, and the reason we’re not revealing it is credible reports that it could lead to an increase of violence.” So, structured as a kind of political statement that, well, if Afghanis found out about this, maybe they would riot or something.
But we can take this from a number of different lines. My perspective is, that’s up to the Afghan people, just like it was in relation to the Arab Spring. If, knowing their environment and what is happening to their environment, they want to elect a new government, they want to roll the government, they want to expel people, that is a matter for that culture. It’s a matter of sovereignty of how that country chooses to manage it itself. It’s not a matter for other people to prevent a country from managing itself.
But we can also look at just what is the reality. The U.S. government always says this kind of thing. We have seen it for years and years, and it’s always been baloney. Let’s look at it. They have known for a year that Snowden has had that material. They have known specifically in relation to the country X was Afghanistan—they’ve known that for several weeks, because First Look had in fact had contacted the U.S. government and were dealing with them. So, if they had specific concerns about people in the U.S. Embassy or something like that, there’s plenty of time to have them removed. And then we also gave 72 hours’ warning that we would be publishing it.
if we pull back and try and look at it objectively. Where were all the other organizations? All these human rights groups, legal organizations, where were they in the—even refugee organizations—in this difficult situation that had to be done in Hong Kong? Very many meaning—you know, well-meaning organizations, certainly more well funded, The Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post were meant to be, you know, helping Snowden as a source, having an obligation to do that, and yet all of them felt, for one reason or another—fear, lack of ability—that they couldn’t do it, and we were forced into a position that we had to do it.
And, OK, so, yes, we do have some specific experience. So, we have specific experience in dealing with sources who are under very adverse situations trying to communicate securely. And I think that is an important lesson, that, actually, the organization—an organization that specializes in defeating surveillance for national security cases was the organization that was able to do this. Yes, we had some diplomatic contacts, and we certainly had the will and the desire to not see another Chelsea Manning. But I think a lot of it—we couldn’t have done that if we hadn’t specialized in these secure communications techniques for so long. How could we possibly coordinate as an organization, when the other organization, the opposing organization, was the National Security Agency, without—with about a thousand times more employees and a budget 10,000 times the size? I think it’s because we had specialized in communicating in a secure manner.
So that tells you about, what about all those people who—which is nearly everyone—who don’t specialize in communicating in a secure manner? They can’t do that. Aha! Now you see the problem with mass surveillance. Now you see that there’s all sorts of things that can’t be done anymore because of mass surveillance. And, OK, we’re able to do it because we’re specialists, but only because we’re specialists.
you can’t become a specialist unless you want to do that full-time and spend years and years doing it. That is the reality that we’re in right now. Fortunately, the National Security Agency stories have produced an understanding in people that they are being surveilled, and that’s created a demand, and as a result of that demand, various nonprofit organizations and commercial organizations are starting up to create technology that people can communicate with securely. But it’s still very hard to understand this technology. So, who’s actually behind the company? What jurisdiction is it? Are they—can they be bribed? The National Security Agency spends $350 million per year bribing manufacturers of cryptography or otherwise compromising through direct interaction their cryptography. So, I think it is quite difficult.
And in some ways, until new technology is more developed—there’s some good things like Tor and Telegram Messenger, perhaps, but until it is more developed and better understood, then people need to go back to the old ways. And, you know, I joke that, suddenly, Cuban intelligence, which a lot of people in the intelligence industry had considered like stuck in the ’60s and hadn’t made any real advances in a long time—suddenly, that’s a great thing. You know, like how is it that Cuba has survived even though you’ve got this mass surveillance and so on? Well, because they are stuck in these old ways of writing codes on paper and so on.
But we also do that. We use a collection of very old techniques that are completely non-electronic, as well as, you know, some sort of sophisticated, modern electronic techniques, because the reality is that a lot of the electronic communication—electronic communication revolves on so many elements—so, the people who manufacture the chips for the computers that you’re using, the radiation that’s being given off by the computers, the security programs that are installed, the operating system. There are so many different elements. And you only need to compromise one. So, in order to communicate securely for an organization like WikiLeaks, one needs to have many different systems that are independent and won’t fail just because one failed.
But the question, not for individuals, but for society, is not about can I, as an individual, protect myself if the National Security Agency is after me and wants to spend a serious amount of money; the question, as a society, is how to stop society being dominated by a faction that already has very significant power and its allies. That’s the question for a society, including international society. And the answer to that is that one simply has to increase the cost of each—of surveilling each person. At the moment, it’s something like—it’s under 20 cents per person per day at the moment to surveil each person. You think, surely, that’s a lot of money, like if you add up billions of people. Yeah, it is a lot of money. And in fact, that lot of money is spent. There’s $50 [million], $60 million a year is actually spent doing that. And if you think about—there’s about 1.6 billion people who have access to the Internet and operate and communicate across it, OK, National Security Agency and its allies can encompass those people for under 20 cents a day. But if we are able to introduce standards—and nations can do this. Brazil could mandate that all communications with Germany are mandated to use a certain cryptographic standard, so they would only flow to the United States from South America, up to the United States, across to Asia and so on, to get to Europe. Brazil could mandate that there must be securing of those cables and those communications flows. So if we can increase the cost of mass surveillance to where it’s something like $3,000 per person, when you want to go after them, you can only go after individuals, you can’t go after entire continents. Then we will be back to a more healthier situation, something like we were in maybe in the 1970s in terms of mass surveillance.
It’s a difficult physical environment. The U.N. minimum standard for prisoners is one hour outside of work or exercise per day. There is no outside. There is no sun. It is a difficult physical environment. On the other hand, I do have good friends and good staff and the staff of the embassy. So, yeah, so I continue on. There is a question, I suppose, how long can one do this sort of thing. And I think the answer is, well, you can do it for quite a long time. It just means you’ve got to be more diligent about what you’re going through. Let’s not forget that Bradley Manning was even in an even worse situation for a period of time in Quantico, Virginia. He managed to get through it. And I will also manage to get through this.
I think if we look at the political trajectory here in the U.K., where they’ve realized extradition without charge is a dangerous thing to expose the population to, and they’ve changed the law; in the United States, we see this call by 54 different groups, including conservative groups like Human Rights Watch, calling for the U.S. pending prosecution to be dropped; and that we see 59 human rights groups complaining and legal groups complaining to the U.N. in a formal way about Sweden’s involvement in this case; and debates in Sweden saying—you know, questioning what has gone on. So, I’m quite confident, bar some—bar a strange war appearing somewhere, that the political progress is positive and even inevitable. The U.K. government has now spent 6.7 million pounds, nearly $11 million, just on the police encirclement alone over two years. People in the U.K. also are looking at that and going, “How can this be? This is completely, utterly strange and disproportionate to spend that amount of money on someone who hasn’t even been charged.”
The particular legal circumstance is that the U.S. government can issue a sealed extradition request, which the British government will keep sealed, so we won’t necessarily know when that happens or if it has happened. They can also phone in a preliminary extradition demand and send the paperwork within 40 days. So, it is necessary to deal with the U.S. case before I can leave the embassy, and also the counterterrorism investigation here and the Snowden grand jury. There’s quite a lot of different things to deal with. But I think we have to remember, in the end, all these cases are political, right? There’s geopolitical forces pushing them to continue and inflaming them and bringing prestige into the equation. And so, because the political situation is changing in a favorable manner, I think the legal situation, which we’re OK on in terms of the actual law, will start to crystallize in a way that’s favorable.
The security situation has been difficult for my family. I am used to dealing with difficult security situations, but my family is not used to dealing with difficult security situations. And various groups in the United States made threats towards my family, including one threat publicly calling for the killing of some of my children in order to get at me.
So my children have had to move; in one case, change the name that they were using, the same as my mother, etc. So that’s a result of the security situation. And then there’s also—there’s an issue as to whether I can be pressured in certain ways as a result of my family. So can people pressure you. So, that produces a situation where it is quite difficult to see your family, if they’re trying to be undercover and there is surveillance all around the embassy and there’s press all around the embassy.
I could still be here. I think the developments are such that if you look at kind of the direction of the—direction of how the politics is going, the U.S. primaries will start in about a year’s time. The Obama administration is starting to consider what its legacy is going to be in the liberal Democrat area of things. There’s an election next year here in the United Kingdom. There’s an election in September in Sweden, which will take their country from center-right to center-left, may not improve things much, in the same way that going from—well, I’m not sure what you call the Obama administration, but going from Democrat to Democrat, if Hillary gets in, may not change things very much in the United States. But this political trajectory, I think, is creating a situation where we can more effectively use the law, you know, that there’s not so much pressures on—not so much pressure on the courts to find one way—not so much pressure on the court system. And so I think it’s getting to a stage where it’s able to act in a more neutral manner.
The Ecuadorean government, as a state, it has obligations to protect someone that they’ve formally granted asylum, has asked the U.K., “Can you guarantee Mr. Assange will not be extradited to the United States?” And it’s also asked Sweden, “Can you guarantee Mr. Assange will not be extradited to the United States?” Not for anything, not a blanket guarantee, but in relation to our publications. And both governments have said no, that they refuse to do that.
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/9/julian_assange_on_aiding_snowden_tiff