A Fascinating New Interview With Wikileaks’ Julian Assange

SPIEGEL: Who uses these methods? 
Assange: The British GCHQ has its own department for such methods called JTRIG. They include blackmail, fabricating videos, fabricating SMS texts in bulk, even creating fake businesses with the same names as real businesses the United Kingdom wants to marginalize in some region of the world, and encouraging people to order from the fake business and selling them inferior products, so that the business gets a bad reputation. That sounds like a lunatic conspiracy theory, but it is concretely documented in the GCHQ material allegedly provided by Edward Snowden…
SPIEGEL: What does this “colonization” look like? 
Assange: These corporations establish new societal rules about what activities are permitted and what information can be transmitted. Right down to how much nipple you can show. Down to really basic matters, which are normally a function of public debate and parliaments making laws. Once something becomes sufficiently controversial, it’s banned by these organizations. Or, even if it is not so controversial, but it affects the interests that they’re close to, then it’s banned or partially banned or just not promoted.
– From the recent Spiegel interview of Julian Assange
Ever since I read the lengthy and extremely interesting discussion between Google’s Eric Schmidt and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, I always try to make an effort to hear what the man has to say from his forced asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.

His latest interview is with Germany’s Spiegel and it doesn’t disappoint. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts, but it’s worth reading the entire thing.

From Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: The work of WikiLeaks seems to have changed. In the beginning it just published secret documents. More recently, you have also been providing context for the documents.
Assange: We have always done this. I have personally written thousands of pages of analysis. WikiLeaks is a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents. We give asylum to these documents, analyze them, promote them and obtain more. WikiLeaks has more than 10 million documents and associated analyses now.
SPIEGEL: Are the personnel of the US government and the US Army still technically blocked from using your library? 
Assange: WikiLeaks is still a taboo object for some parts of the government. Firewalls were set up. Every federal government employee and every contractor received an e-mail stating that if they read something from WikiLeaks including through the New York Timeswebsite, they have to remove this from their computer immediately and self-report. They had to cleanse and confess. That’s a new McCarthy hysteria.

Land of the free.

SPIEGEL: In October, a book will be published called “The WikiLeaks Files. The World According to the US Empire” for which you wrote the foreword. Do you try to develop the contextualization, the analysis and the counter-narrative which the documents provided by WikiLeaks need? 
Assange: Generally there is not enough systematic understanding. This has to do with media economics, the short-term news cycles, but actually I don’t blame the media for that failure. There is a terrible failing in academia in understanding current geopolitical and technical developments and the intersection between these two areas. WikiLeaks has a very public conflict with the United States, which is still ongoing and in which many young people have gotten involved. They suddenly saw the Internet as a place where politics and geopolitics happen. It’s not just a place where you gossip about what happened at school. But where were the young professors stepping forward trying to make sense of it all? Where is the new Michel Foucault who tries to explain how modern power is exercised? Absurdly, Noam Chomski was making some of the best comments and he is now 86.

SPIEGEL: Do you see a potential blackmail situation? 
Assange: They wouldn’t leak transcripts of tapped phone calls as that would draw focus to the spying itself. The way intelligence services launder intercepts is to extract the facts expressed during conversations; for example to say to their contacts in the media, “I think you should look into this connection between this politician and that person, what they did on that particular day.” 
SPIEGEL: Have you got a documented example in which this sort of tactic has been used? 
Assange: We haven’t published one yet about a German politician, but there are examples of prominent Muslims in different countries about whom it was leaked that they had been browsing porn. Blackmail or representational destruction from intercepts is part of the repertoire used. 
SPIEGEL: Who uses these methods? 
Assange: The British GCHQ has its own department for such methods called JTRIG. They include blackmail, fabricating videos, fabricating SMS texts in bulk, even creating fake businesses with the same names as real businesses the United Kingdom wants to marginalize in some region of the world, and encouraging people to order from the fake business and selling them inferior products, so that the business gets a bad reputation. That sounds like a lunatic conspiracy theory, but it is concretely documented in the GCHQ material allegedly provided by Edward Snowden.

SPIEGEL : That’s not a bad conclusion. Especially given that you chose to go up against the most powerful enemies available on Earth. Or what is more powerful than the US government and its military and secret services?
Assange: Physics. Mathematics. The underpinnings of physical reality are harsh and could do with adjustment but it is not clear how.
SPIEGEL: Are you experiencing greater support or solidarity as a result of the continuing persecution against you? 
Assange: The persecution was used to create desolidarization. Partly it had the opposite effect but partly in the Western countries it made the rhetorical attacks on us easier. But the climate has shifted positively. It never affected the majority of the Spanish-, French- or Italian-speaking worlds and obviously not the Russian-speaking world. Even in the United States we have support from the majority of people under 35 now.
SPIEGEL: What is your impression of the reputation of WikiLeaks in Germany? 
Assange: The transition of the German public opinion is interesting. A study in 2010 found that 88 percent of Germans appreciate the US government; after the disclosure about the NSA, the rate dropped to 43 percent. That is a healthy shift in the German view of the United States, which has been starry-eyed. Japan suffered the same problem. At the same time, German public support for WikiLeaks is significant and even quite mainstream.
SPIEGEL: Who put the German politicians on the list? 
Assange: James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, formally approved the policy to target the German government. There were three areas that were targeted in the material we have published so far: German political affairs, Eurpoean policies and economic affairs. That is explicitly listed in the table. None of the 125 number we released is listed as being targeted for “terrorism” or military affairs. The US is in the business of managing an extended empire. The ability to prevent Merkel from constructing a BRICS bailout fund for the euro zone by intercepting the idea at an early stage is an example.
SPIEGEL: So you think you can learn something about the political priorities of the US government? 
Assange: Yes, you can observe real policies — that the United States government was very interested in the idea that Germany would propose a greater role for China in the International Monetary Fund, for example. An executive decision can be taken: Kill that idea of Merkel’s before it learns to crawl, because the US sees China helping Europe as a threat to its dominance.
SPIEGEL: Well, we’ve talked about politicians. And about secret services. We didn’t talk about the big private corporations. You met Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. Do you think he is a dangerous man? 
Assange: If you ask “Does Google collect more information than the National Security Agency?” the answer is “no,” because NSA also collects information from Google. The same applies to Facebook and other Silicon Valley-based companies. They still collect a lot of information and they are using a new economic model which academics call “surveillance capitalism.” General information about individuals is worth little, but when you group together a billion individuals, it becomes strategic like an oil or gas pipeline. 
SPIEGEL : Secret services are perceived as potential criminals but the big IT corporations are perceived at least in an ambiguous way. Apple produces beautiful computers. Google is a useful search engine. 
Assange: Until the 1980s, computers were big machines designed for the military or scientists, but then the personal computers were developed and companies had to start rebranding them as machines that were helpful for individual human beings. Organizations like Google, whose business model is “voluntary” mass surveillance, appear to be giving it away for free. Free e-mail, free search, etc. Therefore it seems that they’re not a corporation, because corporations don’t do things for free. It falsely seems like they are part of civil society. 
SPIEGEL : And they shape the thinking of billions of users? 
Assange: They are also exporting a specific mindset of culture. You can use the old term of “cultural imperialism” or call it the “Disneylandization” of the Internet. Maybe “digital colonization” is the best terminology. 
SPIEGEL: What does this “colonization” look like? 
Assange: These corporations establish new societal rules about what activities are permitted and what information can be transmitted. Right down to how much nipple you can show. Down to really basic matters, which are normally a function of public debate and parliaments making laws. Once something becomes sufficiently controversial, it’s banned by these organizations. Or, even if it is not so controversial, but it affects the interests that they’re close to, then it’s banned or partially banned or just not promoted.
SPIEGEL: So in the long run, cultural diversity is endangered? 
Assange: The long-term effect is a tendency towards conformity, because controversy is eliminated. An American mindset is being fostered and spread to the rest of the world because they find this mindset to be uncontroversial among themselves. That is literally a type of digital colonialism; non-US cultures are being colonized by a mindset of what is tolerable to the staff and investors of a few Silicon Valley companies. The cultural standard of what is a taboo and what is not becomes a US standard, where US exceptionalism is uncontroversial.
SPIEGEL: If you look at yourself, you have paid a high price for what you did. And you’re still paying; you have been sitting here in this embassy for more than three years now and you have lost your freedom of movement. Did these experiences change your attitude, your political points of view or your readiness to act politically?
Assange: It is said that you get less radical as you get older. I just have turned 44 now, but I feel I have not become less radical.

In Liberty,

Michael Krieger

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