chris anderson julian welcome it's been reported that wikileaks your baby has in the last few years has released more classified documents than
the rest of the
world's media combined can that possibly be true julian assange yeah can it possibly be true it's a worry isn't it that
the rest of the
world's media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than
the rest of the world
press combined ca how does it work how do people release the documents and how do you secure their privacy ja so these are as far as we can tell classical whistleblowers and we have a number of ways for them to get information to us so we use this state of the art encryption to bounce stuff around the internet to hide trails pass it through legal jurisdictions like sweden and belgium to enact those legal protections we get information in the mail the regular postal mail encrypted or not vet it like a regular news organization format it which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do when you're talking about giant databases of information release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks ca so you make an effort to ensure the documents are legitimate but you actually almost never know who the identity of the source is ja that's right yeah very rarely do we ever know and if we find out at some stage then we destroy that information as soon as possible phone ring god damn it laughter ca i think that's the cia asking what the code is for a ted membership laughter so let's take an example actually this is something you leaked
a few years ago
if we can have this document up so this was a story in kenya
a few years ago
can you tell us what you leaked and what happened ja so this is the kroll report this was a secret intelligence report commissioned by the kenyan government after its election in 2004. prior to 2004, kenya was ruled by daniel arap moi for about 18 years he was a soft dictator of kenya and when kibaki got into power through a coalition of forces that were trying to clean up corruption in kenya they commissioned this report spent about two million pounds on this and an associated report and then the government sat on it and used it for political leverage on moi who was the richest man still is the richest man in kenya it's the holy grail of kenyan journalism so i went there in 2007, and we managed to get hold of this just prior to the election the national election december 28. when we released that report we did so three days after the new president kibaki had decided to pal up with the man that he was going to clean out daniel arap moi so this report then became a dead albatross around president kibaki's neck ca and i mean to cut a long story short word of the report leaked into kenya not from the official media but indirectly and in your opinion it actually shifted the election ja yeah so this became front page of the guardian and was then printed in all the surrounding countries of kenya in tanzanian and south african press and so it came in from the outside and that after
a couple of
days made the kenyan press feel safe
to talk about
it and it ran for 20 nights straight on kenyan tv shifted the vote by 10 percent according to a kenyan intelligence report which changed the result of the election ca wow so your leak really substantially changed the world ja yep applause ca here's
we're going to
just show a short clip from this baghdad airstrike video the video itself is longer but here's a short clip this is this is intense material i should warn you radio just fuckin once you get on em just open em up i see your element uh got about four humvees uh out along you're clear all right firing let me know when you've got them let's shoot light em all up c'mon fire machine gun fire keep shoot n keep shoot n machine gun fire keep shoot n hotel bushmaster two six bushmaster two six
we need to
move time now all right we just engaged all eight individuals yeah we see two birds helicopters and we're still firing roger i got em two six this is two six we're mobile oops i'm sorry what was going on god damn it kyle all right hahaha i hit em ca so what was the impact of that ja the impact on the people who worked on it was severe we ended up sending two people to baghdad to further research that story so this is just the first of three attacks that occurred in that scene ca so i mean 11 people died in that attack right including two reuters employees ja yeah two reuters employees two young children were wounded there were between 18 and 26 people killed all together ca and releasing this caused widespread outrage what was the key element of this that actually caused the outrage do you think ja
i don't know
i guess people can see the gross disparity in force you have guys walking in a relaxed way down the street and then an apache helicopter sitting up at one kilometer firing 30- millimeter cannon shells on everyone looking for any excuse to do so and killing people rescuing the wounded and there was two journalists involved that clearly weren't insurgents because that's their full time job ca i mean there's been this u s intelligence analyst bradley manning arrested and it's alleged that he confessed in a chat room to have leaked this video to you along with 280,000 classified u s embassy cables i mean did he ja we have denied receiving those cables he has been charged about five days ago with obtaining 150,000 cables and releasing 50. now we had released early in the year a cable from the reykjavik u s embassy but this is not necessarily connected i mean i was a known visitor of that embassy ca i mean if you did receive thousands of u s embassy diplomatic cables ja we would have released them ca you would ja yeah ca because ja well because these sort of things reveal what the true state of say arab governments are like the true human rights abuses in those governments
if you look at
declassified cables that's the sort of material that's there ca so let's talk a little more broadly about this i mean in general what's your philosophy why is it right to encourage leaking of secret information ja well there's a question as to what sort of information is important
in the world
what sort of information can achieve reform and
there's a lot of
information so information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing that's a really good signal that when the information gets out there's a hope of it doing some good because the organizations that know it best that know it from the inside out are spending work to conceal it and that's what we've found in practice and that's what the history of journalism is ca but are there risks with that either to the individuals concerned or indeed to society at large where leaking can actually have an unintended consequence ja not that we have seen with anything we have released i mean we have a harm immunization policy we have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal personally identifying information in it but there are legitimate secrets you know your records with your doctor that's a legitimate secret but we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well motivated ca so they are well motivated and what would you say to for example the you know the parent of someone whose son is out serving
the u s
military and he says you know what you've put up something that someone had an incentive to put out it shows a u s soldier laughing at people dying that gives the impression has given the impression to millions of people
around the world
that u s soldiers are inhuman people actually they're not my son isn't how dare you what would you say to that ja yeah we do get
a lot of
that but remember the people in baghdad the people in iraq the people in afghanistan they don't need to see the video they see it every day so it's
not going to
change their opinion it's
not going to
change their perception that's what they see every day it will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all and that's our hope ca so you found a way to shine light into what you see as these sort of dark secrets in companies and in government light is good but do you see any irony in
the fact that
in order for you to shine that light you have to yourself create secrecy around your sources ja not really i mean we don't have any wikileaks dissidents yet we don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources should they come forward that would be a tricky situation for us but we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission not to screw it up ca i'd actually be interested just based on what we've heard so far i'm curious as to the opinion in the ted audience you know there might be
a couple of
views of wikileaks and of julian you know hero people's hero bringing this important light dangerous troublemaker who's got the hero view who's got the dangerous troublemaker view ja oh come on there must be some ca it's a soft crowd julian a soft crowd we have to try better let's show them another example now here's something that you haven't yet leaked but i think for ted you are i mean it's an intriguing story that's just happened right what is this ja so this is a sample of what we do sort of every day so late last year in november last year
there was a
series of well blowouts in albania like the well blowout in the gulf of mexico but not quite as big and we got a report a sort of engineering analysis into what happened saying that in fact security guards from some rival various competing oil firms had in fact parked trucks there and blown them up and
part of the
albanian government was in this etc etc and the engineering report had nothing on the top of it so it was an extremely difficult document for us we couldn't verify it because we didn't know who wrote it and knew what it was about so we were kind of skeptical that maybe
it was a
competing oil firm just sort of playing the issue up so under that basis we put it out and said look we're skeptical about this thing we don't know but what can we do the material looks good it feels right but we just can't verify it and we then got a letter just this week from the company who wrote it wanting to track down the source laughter saying hey
we want to
track down the source and we were like oh tell us more what document is it precisely you're talking about can you show that you had legal authority over that document is it really yours so they sent us this screen shot with the author in the microsoft word id yeah applause that's happened quite a lot though this is like one of our methods of identifying of verifying what a material is is to try and get these guys to write letters ca yeah have you had information from inside bp ja yeah we have a lot but i mean at the moment we are undergoing a sort of serious fundraising and engineering effort so our publication rate over the past few months has been sort of minimized while we're re engineering our back systems for the phenomenal public interest that we have that's a problem i mean like any sort of growing startup organization we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth and that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information ca so that's the key bottleneck basically journalistic volunteers and or the funding of journalistic salaries ja yep yeah and trusted people i mean we're an organization that is hard to grow very quickly because of the sort of material we deal with so we have to restructure
in order to
have people who will deal with the highest national security stuff and then lower security cases ca so help us understand a bit about you personally and how you came to do this
and i think
i read that as a kid you went to 37 different schools can that be right ja well my parents were in the movie business and then on the run from a cult so the combination between the two laughter ca i mean a psychologist might say that's a recipe for breeding paranoia ja what the movie business laughter applause ca and you were also i mean you were also a hacker at an early age and ran into the authorities early on ja well i was a journalist you know i was a very young journalist activist at an early age i wrote a magazine was prosecuted for it
when i was a
teenager so you have to be careful with hacker i mean there's like there's a method that can be deployed for various things unfortunately at the moment it's mostly deployed by the russian mafia
in order to
steal your grandmother's bank accounts so this phrase is not not as nice as it used to be ca yeah well i certainly don't think you're stealing anyone's grandmother's bank account but what about your core values can you give us a sense of what they are and maybe some incident in your life that helped determine them ja i'm not sure about the incident but the core values well capable generous men do not create victims they nurture victims and that's something from my father and something from other capable generous men that have been in my life ca capable generous men do not create victims they nurture victims ja yeah and you know i'm a combative person so i'm not actually so big on the nurture but some way there is another way of nurturing victims which is to police perpetrators of crime and so that is something that has been in my character
for a long time
ca so just tell us very quickly in the last minute the story what happened in iceland you basically published something there ran into trouble with a bank then the news service there was injuncted from running the story instead they publicized your side that made you very high profile in iceland what happened next ja yeah this is a great case you know iceland went through this financial crisis it was the hardest hit of any country
in the world
its banking sector was 10 times the gdp of
the rest of the
economy anyway so we release this report in july last year and the national tv station was injuncted five minutes before it went on air like out of a movie injunction landed on the news desk and the news reader was like this has never happened before what do we do well we just show the website instead for all that time as a filler and we became very famous in iceland went to iceland and spoke about this issue and
there was a
feeling in the community that that should never happen again and as a result working with icelandic politicians and some other international legal experts we put together a new sort of package of legislation for iceland to sort of become an offshore haven for the free press with the strongest journalistic protections
in the world
with a new nobel prize for freedom of speech iceland's a nordic country so like norway it's able to tap into the system and just a month ago this was passed by the icelandic parliament unanimously ca wow applause last question julian when you think of the future then do you think it's more likely to be big brother exerting more control more secrecy or us watching big brother or it's just all to be played for either way ja i'm not sure which way
it's going to
go i mean there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation
around the world
within the e u between china and
the united states
which way is it going to go it's hard to see that's why it's a very interesting time to be in because with just
a little bit of
effort we can shift it one way or the other ca well it looks like i'm reflecting the audience's opinion to say julian be careful and all power to you ja thank you chris ca
thank you applause