Yesterday morning a video showing the US army opening fire on a group of men – some of whom turn out to be unarmed civilians, including two Reuters employees – in Baghdad in 2007 was released by WikiLeaks. So, who is this mystery organisation and how do they operate? We spoke with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange.

Listen to the interview in the player above or read the full transcript here:

Kirsten Drysdale: Could you explain for us, who are WikiLeaks?

Julian Assange: WikiLeaks is an international public service run by Sunshine Press. Sunshine Press is a collection of journalists and activists who are trying to publish information that has been withheld from the public, or censored once journalists have published it. We run a multijurisdictional service which protects sources with encryption technology and also through the legal system by basing our operations in countries such as Sweden and Belgium which have strong source protection laws.

KD And how long has WikiLeaks been in operation?

JA We’ve been publishing since July 2007

KD Julian, the video you guys leaked a couple of days ago has sparked major mainstream media interest in your group. How do you think this coverage will impact the work that WikiLeaks does?

JA Well, we hope it funnels more disclosures into WikiLeaks that we can get out to the world. And we have actually quite a lot of supporters before this event in different areas, but I think the level of exposure to this material and the fact that it’s video, will bring us to support of another group, that don’t already know about us. But within the technical internet community and within the intelligence community we are well-known and perhaps within the investigative journalism community, but this will expose us to I think the broader anti-war community.

KD Do you think it will bring your organisation under any more negative pressure?

JA Well, we’ve had and dealt with successfully some adverse scrutiny in the past. Although one of the events was tragic where some human rights activists who were feeding us material, though in a very public way, in Kenya were assassinated in March last year. 

But otherwise, we’ve had involvement with intelligence agencies in the past, and in fact released a US military counterintelligence report on us that originally authored in 2008, 32 pages we released recently looking at how to destabilise us, to destroy our centre of gravity, to try and prevent US military whistleblowers by providing us with material. 

That document concocts a recommendation to publicly expose our sources, to discourage other people from stepping forward. It also speaks about destroying our reputation for integrity by feeding us bogus information and it mentions that we could be – although it’s not clear – the recommendation for the US government hacked to try and expose our sources, however no source that we know of has been exposed, certainly has not been exposed publicly, ever. 

So it appears that that recommendation was either not acted upon or wasn’t successful.

KD You mention that they threatened to feed you guys with bogus information – how do you verify your sources and documents?

JA In the standard journalistic way. We look at means, motive, opportunity, the document itself, in the end if it’s not clear we call up the organisation and probe a bit. Or we’ve got other confidential sources who may have access to similar material. But we’ve also become good at looking at the forensics of digital documents. There’s often trails that are left in these documents, and those are trails that we have to often remove, we’ve become very good at removing, to prevent trackbacks to the real source who has released us material in the case of documents that are legitimate.

KD So how would I approach you if I had material that I thought should be made public?

JA Well, the simplest way is to go to our website and to go to secure.wikileaks.org which will establish an encrypted connection immediately, using the highest level of encryption, the same level of encryption that is used by the US military to protect its secrets or as is used by the best banks. 

We also then have added layers in the case of sources that may be already being monitored to anonymise their material. The instructions are there. There’s also other ways of sending us material – contacting us in the post is still quite a good method for people that have either a lot of information, they can stick it all on a USB stick, or people that are uncomfortable with understanding the technological risks, post office boxes are a little easier to understand. 

But also people can go to net cafes or a computer that is not associated with them to upload this material. 

KD Now, if you’re able to decrypt US military grade files, how can you be sure that your files are secure and that other people can’t decrypt them?

JA Well, we do something that is a bit different. We don’t rely upon security. We rely upon anonymity. There are of course some aspects of security involved in our operations through the initial encryption that is sent, but it’s a lot easier to throw information away immediately and never keep it than it is to keep something secure over a long time. So we specialise in not ever collecting information about our sources, therefore it’s easy to secure, because there simply is nothing to secure.

KD You mentioned earlier that people can send things in hard copy to PO Boxes – where are those PO Boxes based?

JA PO Boxes are based in Australia, Kenya and in Germany. We do have other PO Boxes that are non-public in the United States and other countries that people can get by contacting us.

KD Do you guys ever actively seek material or do you wait for it to come to you?

JA In some cases we actively seek material. Often triggered by some other form of material we’ve received and we want to get supporting documents, or more context, or material of a similar type. We sometimes ask for this publicly or we approach sources.

KD Is there anything you wouldn’t publish?

JA We make a guarantee to people that provide us with material that provided their material meets a simple criteria, that is, it has been restricted from the public record, or has been censored and is under an active suppression and it is of diplomatic, political or authorical significance, provided they get it to us we will eventually publish it. 

There sometimes can be delays, for all sorts of reasons, or delays because material can be complex in its formatting or putting it in context, but we guarantee that provided it meets that very simply stated editorial criteria we will publish it. In the cases where there – many private people are mentioned in material, which was the case for the secret membership lists of the British National Party, we have contacted those people prior to publication, a sort of harm minimisation strategy and so far we have found that simple editorial policy plus contacting people to minimise harm has resolved all the cases for all the material we get. It is possible in the future that we’ll find a case where that doesn’t work but so far that has worked for everything we have received.

KD How do those people react when you contact them?

JA Well, let us say that the phrase ‘shooting the messenger’ exists for a reason. And sometimes, they’re happy but most often of course they’re not happy. But wherever there’s someone trying to get information out they can put it out onto the blackmarket or give it to particular people privately or they can put it into historical record where the whole world can see it and everyone has a right of reply to the information and the people concerned have knowledge that it has been released. When information is kept out of public view it is driven into secret view and that information disparity forms between people who know and people who do not know. That’s a problem.

KD So have you ever come across material that you’ve decided not to publish for any reason you think it might be best not made public?

JA No. All material that has met our editorial criteria we have released.

KD WikiLeaks asks for donations. How much are your running costs?

JA About $600,000 a year, although we can certainly do more, for instance, in this recent case with the Iraq massacre video where two Reuters journalists and over a dozen other people were killed, we not only analysed the video and of course and the network and secured it and sourced it but we sent a team to Baghdad to get the back story and speak to the widows and collect first-hand evidence of it, of the damage, so with more resources we can do many more events like that and we have a number of other videos including an attack which killed 97 people in Afghanistan last May. Serious material, not just from the United States, but from many other countries as well that if we have the resources we can really achieve quite significant reforms by releasing it combined with the true back story.

KD You mentioned earlier WikiLeaks are particularly interested in anti-war material, are you guys actively seeking the types of footage that we’ve seen and the one you’ve just mentioned about Afghanistan out, or are people within the military coming to you with those videos?

JA Mostly they’re coming to us. We have a reputation amongst military intelligence for discretion and as the one place that will publish. There’s lots of national media organisations that are sort of beholden to the power structure in the countries that they operate and simply will not publish such material and we’re seen as an international organisation that rises above mere national interest.

KD That brings me to my next question, which is why do you think it is that major media organisations donate to WikiLeaks?

JA I think they see us as a free press vanguard, and we create a space by being at the edge of publishing in which they can successfully operate, so we’re some kind of force that pushes back moves to censor the press and we’re also press-functioning to the degree that our material is used by many mainstream press organisations and alternative press to produce stories. I would actually say it goes beyond just a sort of mutual self-interest, there’s a lot of journalists who actually really believe in what we do. And are proud to support us in the concept we have from time to time, with powerful organisations like SwissBank trying to sue us.

KD Are you guys in a way, the Blackwater of journalism – do you do things major media organisations can’t do?

JA Well, I think that’s a terrible, terrible analogy to use. No, we don’t go out and murder people. That’s in fact an irresponsible analogy to use.

KD Look I guess I’m asking whether you guys operate under different ethical frameworks. Do you have less ethical constraints than major news organisations or do you have stricter ethical constraints?

JA We have purer ethical constraints. So, we have a much purer ideology to some degree because we operate in a multijurisdictional sense so our ideology is not bound up with the power interests of particular nation-states, so we are able to take a more clear ethical stance, that is, that the integrity of historical record, which is mankind’s primary asset is sacrosanct and must be protected and must be documented. 

And that is something that is used for reform. We also take a harm minimisation point of view, so we are not zealots or idealists, we understand that a strong free press sometimes can affect people negatively so we try and minimise the harm created by that ideological purity, and so far I think we have been successful. As far as we know, there has been no person adversely affected by anything we have published except for losing their jobs as a result of scandal.

KD Do you feel that if somebody had leaked the footage of the Apache attack to a major news organisation they would have had difficulty in bringing that to light?

JA Yes, I believe that with the possible exception of Al Jazeera or an opposing news organisation in the geopolitical sense, like Russia today, that no – at least, no Western organisation, would have released that video in full. In fact, it actually appears, while I don’t want to criticise without knowing the full facts, but it appears that a Washington Post journalist did have access to that full video, certainly at least appears to have seen it, or one of the sources saw the entire video and documented it for him, and that was mentioned in a chapter of a book, so I don’t think that that video would have been released. 

It’s quite probable that some stills would have been released by many mainstream media organisations. If you remember the CBS sat on Abu Ghraib photos for many many months. The New York Times sat on revelations of bulk national security agency spying on telecommunications and other traffic coming into the United States for a year, often there’s first rate reportage by these mainstream news organisations but there’s also clear abuses.

KD Thank you very much for your time, Julian and all the best for your next few days in the states.

 

by Kirsten Drysdale April 7, 2010 at 05:32pm

NEXT STORY