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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]
EU-NATO IMPERIALISM ❌ 