TRANSCRIPT - Assange - Malaysia - HITB SecConf 2009

TRANSCRIPT [for quotation purposes, confirm audio] Edit of Part II transcript appearing here Entire Series Transcribed at this link HITB SecConf 2009 Malaysia: WikiLeaks 2/8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpOI6I3Ink&feature=youtu.be [...] so we limit, we limit ourselves to the hardest cases, the hardest publishing cases that no-one else can publish.  So that means, non-public censored documents, of political, diplomatic, or historical significance. OK, so, a sort of feeling for what we're doing.  What is the impact?  Not on individual nation states, but the impact in the media. This is something you can measure a little bit.  Other stuff's a bit harder. And I’ll go into examples. But, we have caused the publication, or reprinting, of about 40,000 articles, based on our content, in websites that are listed by Google News. So that’s most, but not all, of the mainstream press. [Just yesterday, I] looked on Google Books search. There’s about 40 something books -- Google books. That doesn’t cover most book publishers, so about 40 to 100 books have, in part, been catalysed as a result of material we have released. Google hits: WikiLeaks, presently about 670,000. Our four Malaysians here, in comparison: Malaysia Insider has about 46,000. And blog references are 92,000. Now, guys.  I’ve been censored. [audience laughter] Speaking of which, in this crisis that is occurring in the United States with journalists: a journalist who is fired is one hundred per cent censored. [Thanks. OK.] So this map is by Freedom House, this is the global press freedom index for 2007, the green is what -- Freedom House is an independently funded -- OK, Freedom House is an independently funded arm of the United States government. So, it does have a little bit of a bias, but it also has some good people. So, within the US prism of how it looks on the world, this is an accurate map. So, green for the so-called 'free press countries.' Yellow, for partly free (that includes Malaysia). And grey*, not free. So you see, in fact, even according to Freedom House, most of the world is not free from censorship. Now, of course, from my -- you’ll hear from the stories I’ll tell you, that this green is a complete illusion. An entire illusion. What has happened is that there has been a privatisation of censorship in the green countries. It’s no longer direct state censorship, most of the time, it’s censorship on behalf of private organisations through the courts, and the courts are run by the states. So it’s an indirect form of state censorship when you [...] a major institute privatised [...] the major institutions of your country. How many people here have ever gone to the front page of the website? May I see some hands? How many people haven’t? OK, so this section is not completely useless. So, this is what you will see if you go to the front page of the website: This is WikiLeaks. We help getting the truth out. If you then scroll down you’ll see on the right-hand side recent material that we have released, or that has been censored and we have uncensored it. On the left-hand side, is news reports that have been caused by the material on the right-hand side, so information catalysed in the mainstream press. Sometimes including press, and sometimes articles that we have written ourselves -- if no one else is picking it up. [00:05:01] OK, so, just looking at something recent, we released this week. The UK MoD Manual of Security Volume 1,2 & 3, Issue 2 -- 2,389 pages -- all classified. So, this manual is interesting. Not -- I mean, you guys are probably interested in security. But it’s interesting for another reason, because it shows that the corruption -- the moral corruption inside the UK military -- is documented. This manual refers to investigative journalists about 13 times. What are the biggest threats, the biggest leaking threats? The kind of security threat, is what military security is really concerned about: is information being disclosed. Their biggest threats is not the Russians, is not the Chinese; it's investigative journalists. And why are they concerned about it? Because it might embarrass the government, or might embarrass their departments. OK. So, now, looking on the other column, you can see mainstream press that has picked this up. This was front page of the Telegraph earlier this week, a newspaper in the UK. MoD how to stop leaks. Document is leaked. But I encourage you to read all the 2,389 pages and don’t just rely on the Telegraph story, because you'll get a very different perspective. So you can follow the link to the Telegraph. There it is. And how do people tend to use the site? Journalists tend to use the site on a day-to-day basis. Well, in fact, nearly all the stories we catalyse we do not have time to cut and paste and stick in here, it’s just impossible. So, to some degree we are victim of our own success, although I should say the project is very embryonic. We're two years in, but I think we're only 10% in to what we're trying to achieve. So, yes, it has been quite successful. But we are very embryonic. It's still a proof of concept. It’s showing a lot of good effect, but there’s still a lot of work to do. So, you will notice here. So, to catalyse a point -- you can have a look at news, blogs, and twitter -- so this is where in fact you will find most of the media pick up. And this is from earlier today, and you can see there tends to be something every few hours catalysed in the mainstream press, based upon what we have released. This is blogs. This is the best blogs search, by the way, is IceRocket. And this is Twitter. Often you’ll see stuff here before you see it in the mainstream press. People are just starting to [...] And, OK, there’s one more: PressDisplay as well. This is actually a big organization that scans the front pages and pages of newspapers across the world and puts them online. They charge you to actually buy chunks, but you get one, or something, a day free. And so you can see this is what has been happening this week [...] in relation to events in relation to the Telegraph, MoD. And sometimes we will write our own material. So this MoD document looked at getting travel advice to UK spies about going to China and Russia, what do they need to look out for when they are in those countries. OK, so this is -- [   ---audio cuts out -- 9:40---  ] [*I think Assange means 'blue' (rather than 'grey') for 'not free.' The colour in the accompanying slide appears blue, although he refers to 'grey.'] ---------------------- PressDisplay = now known as PressReader | here IceRocket  | here Freedom House  = CIA association  | here {I guess one can refer to their information; but where the information derives from must be kept in mind} MoD = Ministry of Defence (Britain's, in this case) ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT Fun checking this out. Think I could get right into checking out all this early material ... if only there was enough time in the day. lol Thanks to the blogger who did all the hard slog transcribing. I've listened and edited the output.  So what's posted here is after I've arranged things as I want them, having made the occasional adjustment.  But there's a couple of missing bits. The audio isn't as good as it could be and the early Assange speaks too quickly, so I think I might just listen to the rest of these segments without trying to get them down word for word. ꕤ

Assange: 2009 - Malaysia - HITB

TRANSCRIPT [for quotation purposes, confirm audio] ADAPTED / edited from | here HITB SecConf 2009  Malaysia WikiLeaks 1 of 8  VIDEO   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq-LSlLC8Oo ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- Thank you. Thank you. Everyone hear me OK? I am a writer, really, now by profession, so I can be very softly spoken. So, if I start speaking too softly, please just go like this [gestures]. I know you're an Asian audience, but you can still do it.  [audience laughter] OK. So, I just had this lovely introduction here, but perhaps some of you should know a little bit more about my background and my involvement in this. So, I was a famous teenage computer hacker in Australia, a long-term activist, and I'd been reading generals' e-mails since I was 17. After some famous cases, where I had a magazine that I wrote, I was involved in a court dispute in Australia (6 years in court), I went on to do other things. I wrote books, I did documentaries, and lots of human rights work, lots of photography work. Some of you may know Strobe where I invented parallel port scanning [here]; if you're using [???] , you're using my code; [???] ... or anything like that. But after a while I decided I would go and do something else. And, so, I entered into the academy, into the ivory tower, and started to do theoretical physics. And what I though I would create was a world that was mathematically pure for myself, that had a good history, a good intellectual history, and possibly a good intellectual future. And it was in some way honest work. But what I found, being an academic, was that no part of the economy anywhere in the world is isolated, including the highest part of the ivory tower. That, in fact, at the bottom of every ivory tower rests corrupt money, rests bodies of people killed in war.  And, in my particular case, I found that the quantum cryptography group ... in Australia was being financed by the National Security Agency; that the applied mathematics group, in Australia, was designing mathematical models to build an enhanced versions of the Grizzly Plow, that's a high-speed military bulldozer designed to bury people alive.  And many more things like that. So, not even in this highest reach of the ivory tower can you avoid the fact that the world is completely connected. When government is illegitimate, the government tanks[?] everything beneath it:  every aspect of the economy; every person in the country; including, those most removed (including, pure mathematicians). In fact, if you look on WikiLeaks you'll see an article I wrote analysing 3,600 academic papers that had been financed, overtly or covertly, by the National Security Agency. Google for MDA904, the grant code used by the Maryland Procurement Office, a cover name -- a light cover name -- for the National Security Agency. Google for grant code MDA903 -- a cover code used by the Defence Intelligence Agency -- [which] funded many, many of so-called 'pure papers' of academic research. The CIA has funded papers (supposedly by anthropologists and people interested in stress), covertly, to determine the most efficient way to torture people. Nowhere is free from the illegitimacy of corrupt -- morally or financially corrupt -- government. So, having discovered this, and also having many journalistic friends and activist friends, we decided to do what we could to make government and organisations more legitimate. What we had seen, as journalists, is that there were two sorts of political reform happening is society. One:   something that is part of a tide of change, that happens because a new invention is introduced into the society, or a new form of commerce or environmental change that seems to happen anyway, organically, and there's nothing we can do about it. And it may be positive, and it may be negative. But there are other aspects of reform that don't have to happen. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. And those paths of reform are seeded and created by unauthorized disclosures. A good one-third of the front of The New York Times of any day is built out of unauthorized disclosures. You won't see it, you'll just see "document seen by The New York Times" or you'll see "a senior official speaking confidentially says -- " something.  And that's really the big driving force for political reform all across the world: is individuals who know of an unjust plan (or an unjust past), revealing it to the population, so all the people in the population can decide to support (or, not support) those people or their opponents. Not just in democracies, but in all countries. So, what is WikiLeaks? A group of people, activists and journalists, cryptographers, who came together. We call them Sunshine Press. We have a platform on the Internet and our most famous platform, and that is called WikiLeaks. So, we do something relatively simple. We want to enable information to go out to the public, that is just not any information, but that it has the greatest chance of achieving political reform: positive political reform in the world. There's a lot of bits everywhere in the world. Some of those bits are special. Some of those bits can achieve something good. And the more bits are in the world, the more the problem becomes:  how do you find those bits which can change our civilization into a better state. So, we look for an economic symbol -- a colour on those bits -- which is that:  they are restricted. Someone understands those bits: the people who created them. That's who understands them the best. And they have restricted them from the public. Because they understand that we have materials we release, it makes it harder for them to carry out unjust plans. Because those plans could be opposed. Or, if they have carried out such plans in the past, the anger from the discovery will cause people to take away some of their power.  [OK] So, to get things to the public you need to protect sources who want to disclose, and you also need to protect your ability to publish in the face of attack.  And, people like to say that the Internet is a place of free speech. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the Internet has allowed is publishers to publish cheaply, and with that vast influx of new publishers, some of those publishers are motivated to protect what they are publishing. But, in general, the Internet is the easiest place to censor. You can't take a paper back from the library. Not very easily. But you can do it on the Internet. No problem at all. You can censor commercially on the internet by driving publishers away from your [?] So, protecting publishing on the internet is not something that comes about as a product of the internet itself. It needs something extra. We don't publish everything, because there's too much -- [audio cuts out -- 9:40] ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- Hack In The Box (HITB) MALAYSIA  |  here ꕤ