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WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Responds to Hillary Clinton: Fair U.S. Trial for Snowden "Not Possible"
In part two of our exclusive interview, Amy Goodman goes inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London to speak with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Assange has been living in the embassy for more than two years under political asylum. He faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States, where a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing a trove of leaked documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as State Department cables. Assange responds to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent comments that National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden should return home to face trial. "It’s the advice of all our lawyers that he should not return to the United States. He’d be extremely foolish to do so," Assange says. "It’s not possible to have a fair trial, because the U.S. government has a precedent of applying state secret privilege to prevent the defense from using material that is classified in their favor."
Click here to watch part one of this interview.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the second part of our Democracy Now! TV/radio broadcast exclusive. We went inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London last weekend to interview WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange. He has just entered his third year inside the embassy, where he has political asylum. Assange faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. Here in the U.S., a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing a trove of leaked documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as State Department cables. In Sweden, he’s wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have been filed. Let’s go to that interview.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where Julian Assange has actually lived for more than two years. He has political asylum in Ecuador but can’t make it there because he is concerned if he steps outside to get on a plane to Ecuador, the British government will arrest him and extradite him to Sweden. And he’s concerned, in Sweden, he would be extradited to the United States to face charges around his organization, WikiLeaks, which he publishes.
So, Julian, I’d like you to respond to Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, could be running for president, her comments on Edward Snowden. She was interviewed by The Guardian, which first released the revelations based on the documents of Edward Snowden. And if you could just hit the first comment.
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I would say, first of all, that Edward Snowden broke our laws, and that cannot be ignored or brushed aside.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, that first point of Hillary Clinton’s?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it’s always interesting when someone proclaims to be a master of what is within the law and what is not within the law. We’ve seen a lot with Pentagon generals and other State Department figures, including Hillary. We’ve seen it in this case with General Alexander, talking about what is the law and what is not the law.
AMY GOODMAN: The former head of the NSA.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. But, actually, in the end, in the United States, it’s the Supreme Court that determines what the law is and what the law isn’t. And part of what goes into the Supreme Court is the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment obligations. So, whether the Espionage Act is constitutional is a very interesting question and has not been properly tested before. In fact, the U.S. government has been quite careful to not go to a proper appeal in relation to a conviction under the Espionage Act, in order to keep the threat there and not find that it is unconstitutional in court. So, I think there is actually a question even as to whether Edward Snowden, through his activities, broke the law. But then you can even go, OK, well, if he did, was it in fact the correct thing to do? Maybe the law is out of date. Maybe the law is wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Hillary Clinton’s next point.
HILLARY CLINTON: Secondly, I believe that if his primary concern was stirring a debate in our country over the tension between privacy and security, there were other ways of doing it, instead of stealing an enormous amount of information that had nothing to do with the U.S. or American citizens.
JULIAN ASSANGE: As a journalist, I have been working at various times in documenting what the National Security Agency has been doing in its burgeoning mass surveillance practice for more than 20 years. And other journalists, some of them very fine, have also been trying to expose the National Security Agency. And other whistleblowers have come forward—so, Thomas Drake, William Binney, both from the National Security Agency, for example. But what was the problem? While we could point to, based on a sophisticated analysis of what the National Security Agency is doing—say, look at this piece here, look at this little bit of congressional testimony, look at the subpoena record, look at the technology that they are buying from this company, look at the number of employees, look at the DOD budget as a whole—when you add everything else up, you can work out the National Security Agency’s budget. That’s a very complex picture, and that’s not a picture that can generate political reform and debate. And what Edward Snowden did was, by bringing out classified documents, that were official documents, that were even some of them just last year, he was able to show, even to people that didn’t understand, the complexity of what was actually going on. So, we have proof. People did try to start a debate, using all sorts of methods, including former National Security Agency whistleblowers, and it’s only primary source documents in volume that are probably capable of starting a debate about a complex issue like mass surveillance.
AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton again.
HILLARY CLINTON: I would say, thirdly, that there are many people in our history who have raised serious questions about government behavior. They’ve done it either with or without whistleblower protection, and they have stood and faced whatever the reaction was to make their case in public.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, Hillary Clinton is alluding to, without mentioning the name of Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower from the 1970s. There’s a reason she doesn’t mention his name, because Daniel Ellsberg has come forward again and again this year and said that, in fact, he couldn’t do what he did in the 1970s today, that the situation has changed, as far as the courts—the use of the state secrets privilege, how things have been sewn up holding all national security cases in Alexandria, Virginia—there’s not a neutral jury pool—that he couldn’t do that. And the reality is, that’s the case for all national security whistleblowers who have classified documents. You can’t fight a normal case, as we would think about it in the public. You’re swept into a very aggressive system that is set against you from the first instance.
AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton again.
HILLARY CLINTON: Mr. Snowden took all this material. He fled to Hong Kong. He spent time with the Russians in their consulate. Then he went to Moscow seeking the protection of Vladimir Putin, which is at the height of ironies, given the surveillance state that Russia is. If he wishes to return home, knowing that he would be held accountable, but also be able to present a defense, that is his decision to make. But I know that our intelligence forces are doing what they can to understand exactly what was taken.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Hillary Clinton. Julian Assange?
JULIAN ASSANGE: This is sadly typical of Hillary Clinton. We have facts about this matter. Not even the National Security Agency accuses him of working with the Russians. In fact, the National Security Agency, formally, in its investigation, has said that they don’t think that he was working with the Russians, at least not before he left the agency. And Hillary Clinton, however, tries to reshape the chronology in order to smear Edward Snowden with being a Russian spy. The actual chronology is that Edward Snowden went to Hong Kong. He then saw that the situation was very difficult, reached out for us to help, and we were intimately involved from that point on. So I know precisely, myself, and our staff know, what happened. We submitted 20 asylum applications on behalf of Edward Snowden to a range of different countries, Latin America. It was Ed Snowden’s intent to go to Latin America—Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador was also looking favorable, and Bolivia offered him asylum. En route to Latin America, the U.S. State Department canceled his passport, leaving him marooned in Russia, unable to catch his next flight, which had already been booked from the very beginning. His whole path had been booked while he was in Hong Kong.
AMY GOODMAN: But she does say he went to the Russian Embassy in Hong Kong.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Hillary says that he went to the Russian Consulate in Hong Kong. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure that perhaps he was looking for all different kinds of asylum options, and that would have made perfect sense for anyone to do that in such a severe situation. It is not a matter of irony that Edward Snowden was marooned by the U.S. State Department in Russia. Asylum is a serious business. It is something of a concern that the countries in western Europe, for example, that he asked for asylum—France, Germany, Spain—did not in fact come to the table. They were too scared about their geopolitical relationships. It’s something of a concern that Edward Snowden, as an American citizen, felt that he could not speak freely in the United States. And he is right. It’s the advice of all our lawyers that he should not return to the United States. He’d be extremely foolish to do so.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Hillary Clinton, who now goes on to talk about the debate in the United States.
HILLARY CLINTON: The debate about how to better balance security and liberty was already going on before he fled. The president had already given a speech. Members of the Senate were already talking about it. So I don’t give him credit for the debate. I think he may have raised the visibility of the debate, but the debate had already begun.
JULIAN ASSANGE: A lot of people in the civil liberties community in the United States, in the privacy community in the rest of the world, and specialists, national security journalists like myself, had been following what the National Security Agency has been doing for a long time. We have been trying very hard to erect a debate. And there, yes, there were small debates, that really didn’t proceed anywhere. The lawsuits filed by the EFF and ACLU to try and get somewhere went nowhere, because they didn’t have the evidence. And what Edward Snowden revealed was documentary evidence, and it was that primary source evidence that has led to this debate. Everyone knows the difference—most people can’t even remember hearing about the National Security Agency prior to last year. Now everyone knows about it. And that is almost entirely as a result of these disclosures.
AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton makes other critical points.
HILLARY CLINTON: I don’t know what he’s been charged with; those are sealed indictments. I have no idea what he’s been charged with. I’m not sure he knows what he’s been charged with. But even in any case that I’m aware of, as a former lawyer, he has the right to mount a defense. And he certainly has the right to mount both a legal defense and a public defense, which of course can affect the legal defense.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, your response?
JULIAN ASSANGE: As Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, has said, it is not possible for a national security whistleblower now in the United States to have a fair trial. It’s not possible to have a fair trial because all the trials are held in Alexandria, Virginia, where the jury pool is comprised of the highest density of military and government employees in all of the United States. It’s not possible to have a fair trial, because the U.S. government has a precedent of applying state secret privilege to prevent the defense from using material that is classified in their favor. It’s not possible to have a fair trial, because as a defendant in a national security case, you are held under special administrative measures, which makes it very hard to look at any of the material in your case, to meet with your lawyers, to speak to people, etc. So, this is—it’s just simply not a fair system. And even if you do eventually win by the time you get up to the Supreme Court, you spend seven years or something in a very serious condition trying to defend yourself, instead of what has happened with Edward Snowden. As a result of him having asylum, we can talk about the issues, not talking about whether Snowden is guilty or not, and Edward Snowden himself can tell the world, "Well, look, this is what actually happened. This is what is going on."
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to what Hillary Clinton has to say.
HILLARY CLINTON: But the other issue that has never been satisfactorily answered to me is, if his main concern was what was happening inside the United States, then why did he take so much about what was happening with Russia, with China, with Iran, with al-Qaeda?
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Hillary Clinton in her Guardian interview. This last point that she addresses, Julian Assange?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s no surprise to me that Hillary Clinton thinks that human beings that are not formally U.S. citizens don’t have any rights. But not everyone thinks like that. Other people in other countries have rights. Now, if we look at the practicalities of Edward Snowden acquiring documents while he was a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton working for the National Security Agency and, prior to that, a contractor for Dell, the National Security Agency runs a mass surveillance program, a strategic surveillance program. The same technology, the same protocols are used to surveil people inside the United States, people outside the United States, etc. So if you’re trying to collect information to expose mass surveillance, then, by its very nature, you’re going to expose National Security Agency practices all over the world, because it’s the same process that occurs, whether you’re in England or whether you’re in Germany or whether you’re in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Julian Assange responding to The Guardian's interview with Hillary Clinton. It was The Guardian's Phoebe Greenwood who questioned the former secretary of state. You can see her full interview at TheGuardian.com. Back to my conversation with Julian Assange in a minute.
Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tiff w/ The Intercept & Whether He'll Ever Leave Embassy Refuge
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sits down with Democracy Now! inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been living in political asylum for over two years. Assange explains his critique of First Look Media and The Intercept for agreeing not to name a country targeted by bulk National Security Agency spying, following U.S. government concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. Assange and WikiLeaks went on to reveal the targeted country, Afghanistan, which along with the Bahamas had all of its cellphone calls recorded. "That is as great an assault to sovereignty as you can imagine, other than completely militarily occupying a country, to record the intimate phone calls of every single Afghan citizen," Assange says. "My perspective is, [this is] up to the Afghan people." Assange also gives an overview of the close to eight million documents WikiLeaks has released since 2007 about nearly every country in the world; details how WikiLeaks helped Edward Snowden evade U.S. arrest and find political asylum in Russia; and addresses his prospects for ever being able to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy without fear of arrest.
Click here to watch part one of this interview.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange from inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London, where he has political asylum and has been living for more than two years.
AMY GOODMAN: In a nutshell, Julian, if you would, can you summarize the releases of documents since the "Collateral Murder" video was released in the spring of 2010? For people who aren’t keeping up on things, and even if you are an avid viewer of the media or reader of the media, especially in the United States, they may know who Julian Assange is, the publisher of WikiLeaks, but actually what it is you have released, the substance of these documents, could you just go through them?
JULIAN ASSANGE: WikiLeaks has been publishing since 2007. We have published material from every country—almost every country in the world and about every country in the world. We are now up to just over eight million individual documents that we have released during that period. Now, the heat in the debate with the United States arose in 2010. We have had heated debates with other countries, and we’ve had major court cases in the United States in relation to our fight with Swiss banks and so on. In 2010, the number of documents and publications that we were releasing, each one after another, ended up erecting a grand jury against us by the DOJ, National Security Division. And so, we entered into a major media conflict with the U.S. government.
So, going in order, they are "Collateral Murder," a documentary that we produced based on the tape from an Apache helicopter mowing down 12 to 18 people in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, and very clearly engaged in the murder. And the murder was an unarmed man, wounded, crawling in the gutter, and good Samaritans came to rescue him, and all of them were killed, and two children came away with serious injuries.
Then the Afghanistan War Logs, now, these came at a very important moment in 2010, where Michael Hastings had just—the late Michael Hastings had just released a report on McChrystal, and these publications came not long after that.
AMY GOODMAN: This is the Rolling Stone journalist who died in a car crash.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Rolling Stone journalist who died in a car crash. And that shifted the debate about Afghanistan. Early in 2010, it was: What can we do to win in Afghanistan? After the Hastings article about McChrystal and WikiLeaks’ war logs, the result was: There was no longer a debate about can we win in Afghanistan; it is how were we going to get out of Afghanistan. So it was quite an important shift.
Then, with the Iraq War Logs, which were published in October 2010, which in some ways has been one of our best analytical works, we worked together with not just other media organizations, but a number of statistical organizations to work out what the kill count was for Iraq, and combining with other figures, and we ended up with more than 100,000 civilian casualties—in fact, 15,000 new, completely undocumented civilian kills—and documenting U.S. involvement and approval of Iraqi torture centers within the police and many killings of civilians at checkpoints and some political issues and so on. And that produced a number of inquiries and has fed into cases that have been taken by Iraqis, and that has now ended up with an ICC filing, International Criminal Court filing, against the British military.
If we then move on, in December of that year, we started the release of Cablegate, the more than 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables from all around the world from 1966 to 2010. And that is the largest compendium of diplomacy that has ever been released. It’s about 3,000 volumes of material. As a sort of history of how the modern world behaves in practice, it’s extremely important, and it fed into the Tunisian revolution quite directly. In fact, Ben Ali’s propaganda minister, after the government fell, said that the WikiLeaks releases about Tunisia is what broke the back of the Ben Ali system.
AMY GOODMAN: Because?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, because it exposed the corruption that many Tunisians knew about, but in a much more flagrant form of what money had gone where and people keeping pet tigers and so on, but also that there was various kinds of debates about it, and within the United States and from others, and that when push came to shove the U.S. would probably back the military and not Ben Ali. And it was undeniable. So it wasn’t just the Tunisian activists alleging this; it was a U.S. ambassador writing back to Washington, for several years, you know, that the U.S. had kind of let it gone on, but documenting what had gone on. And that then made its way into Europe and affected the French support for Ben Ali, and the Tunisians became—Tunisian activists again confident. And then, two weeks—20 days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, and then he became the personified symbol of all the problems, and then it properly kicked off. But anyway, the propaganda minister and some others say this is what broke the back of the Ben Ali system.
And those cables are really quite incredibly important. They have gone into literally dozens of court cases. They have released people from prison. People have been released from prison holding these cables above their head as the reason that they had been released from prison. The El-Masri case, where the CIA kidnapped a German citizen unlawfully, renditioned him and kept him in a CIA black site for four months, it was a case of mistaken identity. He wasn’t even an alleged terrorist. He just happened to have the same name. And they then dumped him in eastern Europe, later on, on the side of the road, no explanation given, to try and make it look—you know, to give him no evidence to take a case. And he did try and take cases in the United States. And this is something relevant, perhaps, what would happen to Edward Snowden in the United States. He was not able to get anywhere because the U.S. government activated state secrets privilege, said all the things that the CIA had done to him were secrets, and they would not be revealing anything at all. He met a complete dead end. Then, as a result of the release of the diplomatic cables, which spoke about what the United States had done with Macedonia, where he was taken from when he tried to enter into Macedonia, he was able to take a case against Macedonia at the—within Europe and to the European Court of Human Rights, and eventually won. And there were six cables cited in the judgment, you know, showing that it actually happened.
Similar cases in Spain, and an important precedent was set about the use of our materials in court cases generally, specifically cables. So, this relates to Chagos islands. So there’s an island group called Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. It’s owned by the British. It is very important strategically because it’s sort of on the way between things. Now, the British handed over, rent-free, one of these islands, Chagos, to the United States military.
AMY GOODMAN: C-H-A-G-O-S.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, to the United States military. And it has been now turned into a base, and rendition flights go through there and so on. But there was original inhabitants. At the time it was handed over to the United States in the '60s, the original inhabitants were pushed off. And they were all pushed off to Mauritius and Madagascar, and they had been trying to fight a court case to come back. And some cables revealed that in fact the British government had told the U.S. it was setting up a secret plan to make it very difficult or impossible for them to come back. It was going to declare—you know, it was going to suck in the Liberal Left. And here's how it was going to do it. Create a marine park. It’s a coral atoll, the Chagos islands. Going to create a marine park. Well, what was the economy of the Chagos islands? It was fishing. So this is explicitly that they’re going to prevent the Chagos islanders having any meaningful economic return to the island by creating this marine park, which all the Liberals will love. And that way, you know, these islanders won’t be able to interfere or spy on the U.S. base.
Anyway, that provoked new litigation by the Chagos islanders in the British courts. And ultimately, the lower courts found that the cables were inadmissible, because they had come from embassies, and there’s a Vienna Convention, the same thing that is protecting me here that protects diplomatic correspondence. But in a higher court, it was appealed, and it was found that’s not true. Actually, diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks are not protected by the Vienna Convention. They’re already public. It’s the first instance of getting them out that’s protected, not what happens to them subsequently. So that’s quite an important precedent within the common law world, because it means these cables can be used in many more court cases.
AMY GOODMAN: The charge, Julian Assange, that you endanger lives when you release the unredacted documents that you do?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Completely false. And it’s not just me who’s saying that. It’s Associated Press, who did an extensive review. It is the U.S. government itself, in the Bradley Manning case, under oath. Under oath, the head of the person who was responsible for investigating whether anyone had come to physical harm said under oath that they couldn’t find a single person who had been killed or physically harmed as a result.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about retired Brigadier General Robert Carr. He had a kind of war room dealing with the release of the WikiLeaks documents, is that right, back to 2010?
JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s right. Robert Carr in the Pentagon started up what they called a WikiLeaks war room, which had more than 150 people in it—DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and FBI and others—involved in trying to understand what we were going to publish, what we had and what the effects were. And a lot of money was spent trying to check us in different ways. And the result of all that expenditure and understanding, and then the attempt to build up the Bradley Manning prosecution and to denounce our publishing efforts, which we had revealed that the U.S. military—documenting the deaths of more than 100,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan, they found that zero people had been physically harmed by our publication.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, you just recently had a Twitter battle with Glenn Greenwald. It might have surprised some. You know, the whole Intercept, the new online publication, releasing information based on Edward Snowden’s documents around the NSA spying on whole countries. You felt that they should name the countries, not withhold any names. Explain what that was about.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, I have a lot of respect for Glenn. Glenn has defended WikiLeaks from the attack by the U.S. grand jury over a long period of time. And he’s been very brave in the Edward Snowden publications, and, you know, quite forthright. He left The Guardian, in part because of that reason, because The Guardian was censoring the material that he was trying to publish. But he entered into First Look. And unfortunately, First Look is not just Glenn. First Look is actually the big power. All the money and organization comes from Pierre Omidyar. And Pierre Omidyar is one of the founders—is the founder of eBay and owns PayPal and goes to the White House several times each year, has extensive connections with Soros, and can broadly be described as an extreme liberal centrist. So, he has quite a different view about what journalism entails. For example, he has said this year, and also in 2009, that if someone gave him a leak from a commercial organization, not from the government, then he would feel it was his duty to tell the police. So that’s a very different type of journalism standard that comes from Pierre Omidyar. And unfortunately, some of that, or perhaps a significant amount of it, has gone into First Look and created some constraints there.
And that was seen most—seen most disturbingly when First Look knew from the Edward Snowden documents that all of Afghanistan was having its telephone calls recorded. The National Security Agency had corruptly installed mass surveillance inside Afghan telcos, saying to the Afghan government that they were doing—installing this monitoring just going after drug dealers, not mass surveillance but targeted surveillance after Afghan opium dealers, and in fact they were recording the phone calls of every single Afghan. And that’s as great an assault to sovereignty as you can imagine, other than completely militarily occupying a country, to record the intimate phone calls of every single Afghan citizen. And Afghanistan, as a country, and its people have the right to choose their own destiny, knowing what is actually happening to them. And First Look decided that they would censor the fact that Afghanistan was having all its telephone calls recorded.
AMY GOODMAN: They did say that the Bahamas were.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: But they said that they feared—they accepted the argument of the U.S. government that people could die as a result of revealing what was happening, or would be threatened as a result of what happened, as what’s happening in Afghanistan.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, they were a bit mealymouthed with the original disclosure. Initially, they just said, "We’re not revealing it, and the reason we’re not revealing it is credible reports that it could lead to an increase of violence." So, structured as a kind of political statement that, well, if Afghanis found out about this, maybe they would riot or something.
But we can take this from a number of different lines. My perspective is, that’s up to the Afghan people, just like it was in relation to the Arab Spring. If, knowing their environment and what is happening to their environment, they want to elect a new government, they want to roll the government, they want to expel people, that is a matter for that culture. It’s a matter of sovereignty of how that country chooses to manage it itself. It’s not a matter for other people to prevent a country from managing itself.
But we can also look at just what is the reality. The U.S. government always says this kind of thing. We have seen it for years and years, and it’s always been baloney. Let’s look at it. They have known for a year that Snowden has had that material. They have known specifically in relation to the country X was Afghanistan—they’ve known that for several weeks, because First Look had in fact had contacted the U.S. government and were dealing with them. So, if they had specific concerns about people in the U.S. Embassy or something like that, there’s plenty of time to have them removed. And then we also gave 72 hours’ warning that we would be publishing it.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange. We’ll be back to our conversation in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to our interview inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, where he has political asylum and has been living for more than two years.
AMY GOODMAN: I still want to get back to the issue of how it is that you, who are wanted by the most powerful country on Earth, the United States, are able, inside this embassy, under total global surveillance, to help the other most hunted person in the world, Edward Snowden, to get beyond the grasp of the United States.
JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s a bit absurd, if we pull back and try and look at it objectively. Where were all the other organizations? All these human rights groups, legal organizations, where were they in the—even refugee organizations—in this difficult situation that had to be done in Hong Kong? Very many meaning—you know, well-meaning organizations, certainly more well funded, The Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post were meant to be, you know, helping Snowden as a source, having an obligation to do that, and yet all of them felt, for one reason or another—fear, lack of ability—that they couldn’t do it, and we were forced into a position that we had to do it.
And, OK, so, yes, we do have some specific experience. So, we have specific experience in dealing with sources who are under very adverse situations trying to communicate securely. And I think that is an important lesson, that, actually, the organization—an organization that specializes in defeating surveillance for national security cases was the organization that was able to do this. Yes, we had some diplomatic contacts, and we certainly had the will and the desire to not see another Chelsea Manning. But I think a lot of it—we couldn’t have done that if we hadn’t specialized in these secure communications techniques for so long. How could we possibly coordinate as an organization, when the other organization, the opposing organization, was the National Security Agency, without—with about a thousand times more employees and a budget 10,000 times the size? I think it’s because we had specialized in communicating in a secure manner.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, how do you give—
JULIAN ASSANGE: So that tells you about, what about all those people who—which is nearly everyone—who don’t specialize in communicating in a secure manner? They can’t do that. Aha! Now you see the problem with mass surveillance. Now you see that there’s all sorts of things that can’t be done anymore because of mass surveillance. And, OK, we’re able to do it because we’re specialists, but only because we’re specialists.
AMY GOODMAN: So how do people protect themselves?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, you can’t become a specialist unless you want to do that full-time and spend years and years doing it. That is the reality that we’re in right now. Fortunately, the National Security Agency stories have produced an understanding in people that they are being surveilled, and that’s created a demand, and as a result of that demand, various nonprofit organizations and commercial organizations are starting up to create technology that people can communicate with securely. But it’s still very hard to understand this technology. So, who’s actually behind the company? What jurisdiction is it? Are they—can they be bribed? The National Security Agency spends $350 million per year bribing manufacturers of cryptography or otherwise compromising through direct interaction their cryptography. So, I think it is quite difficult.
And in some ways, until new technology is more developed—there’s some good things like Tor and Telegram Messenger, perhaps, but until it is more developed and better understood, then people need to go back to the old ways. And, you know, I joke that, suddenly, Cuban intelligence, which a lot of people in the intelligence industry had considered like stuck in the '60s and hadn't made any real advances in a long time—suddenly, that’s a great thing. You know, like how is it that Cuba has survived even though you’ve got this mass surveillance and so on? Well, because they are stuck in these old ways of writing codes on paper and so on.
But we also do that. We use a collection of very old techniques that are completely non-electronic, as well as, you know, some sort of sophisticated, modern electronic techniques, because the reality is that a lot of the electronic communication—electronic communication revolves on so many elements—so, the people who manufacture the chips for the computers that you’re using, the radiation that’s being given off by the computers, the security programs that are installed, the operating system. There are so many different elements. And you only need to compromise one. So, in order to communicate securely for an organization like WikiLeaks, one needs to have many different systems that are independent and won’t fail just because one failed.
But the question, not for individuals, but for society, is not about can I, as an individual, protect myself if the National Security Agency is after me and wants to spend a serious amount of money; the question, as a society, is how to stop society being dominated by a faction that already has very significant power and its allies. That’s the question for a society, including international society. And the answer to that is that one simply has to increase the cost of each—of surveilling each person. At the moment, it’s something like—it’s under 20 cents per person per day at the moment to surveil each person. You think, surely, that’s a lot of money, like if you add up billions of people. Yeah, it is a lot of money. And in fact, that lot of money is spent. There’s $50 [million], $60 million a year is actually spent doing that. And if you think about—there’s about 1.6 billion people who have access to the Internet and operate and communicate across it, OK, National Security Agency and its allies can encompass those people for under 20 cents a day. But if we are able to introduce standards—and nations can do this. Brazil could mandate that all communications with Germany are mandated to use a certain cryptographic standard, so they would only flow to the United States from South America, up to the United States, across to Asia and so on, to get to Europe. Brazil could mandate that there must be securing of those cables and those communications flows. So if we can increase the cost of mass surveillance to where it’s something like $3,000 per person, when you want to go after them, you can only go after individuals, you can’t go after entire continents. Then we will be back to a more healthier situation, something like we were in maybe in the 1970s in terms of mass surveillance.
AMY GOODMAN: As we are here holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, and I was just thinking, as we heard a siren outside, are you concerned about your own personal safety here? I mean, you’ve been here for two years. Your both personal physical safety and your mental health, being holed up here?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s a difficult physical environment. The U.N. minimum standard for prisoners is one hour outside of work or exercise per day. There is no outside. There is no sun. It is a difficult physical environment. On the other hand, I do have good friends and good staff and the staff of the embassy. So, yeah, so I continue on. There is a question, I suppose, how long can one do this sort of thing. And I think the answer is, well, you can do it for quite a long time. It just means you’ve got to be more diligent about what you’re going through. Let’s not forget that Bradley Manning was even in an even worse situation for a period of time in Quantico, Virginia. He managed to get through it. And I will also manage to get through this.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think you’re ever going to get out of here?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I think so. I think if we look at the political trajectory here in the U.K., where they’ve realized extradition without charge is a dangerous thing to expose the population to, and they’ve changed the law; in the United States, we see this call by 54 different groups, including conservative groups like Human Rights Watch, calling for the U.S. pending prosecution to be dropped; and that we see 59 human rights groups complaining and legal groups complaining to the U.N. in a formal way about Sweden’s involvement in this case; and debates in Sweden saying—you know, questioning what has gone on. So, I’m quite confident, bar some—bar a strange war appearing somewhere, that the political progress is positive and even inevitable. The U.K. government has now spent 6.7 million pounds, nearly $11 million, just on the police encirclement alone over two years. People in the U.K. also are looking at that and going, "How can this be? This is completely, utterly strange and disproportionate to spend that amount of money on someone who hasn’t even been charged."
AMY GOODMAN: That’s in the case of Sweden. But even if that inquiry goes away, if Sweden decides to end their investigation of you, you’ve got the U.S. government in this ongoing investigation. And if you’re charged there, even if you leave here, the possibility that you’ll never know freedom again.
JULIAN ASSANGE: The particular legal circumstance is that the U.S. government can issue a sealed extradition request, which the British government will keep sealed, so we won’t necessarily know when that happens or if it has happened. They can also phone in a preliminary extradition demand and send the paperwork within 40 days. So, it is necessary to deal with the U.S. case before I can leave the embassy, and also the counterterrorism investigation here and the Snowden grand jury. There’s quite a lot of different things to deal with. But I think we have to remember, in the end, all these cases are political, right? There’s geopolitical forces pushing them to continue and inflaming them and bringing prestige into the equation. And so, because the political situation is changing in a favorable manner, I think the legal situation, which we’re OK on in terms of the actual law, will start to crystallize in a way that’s favorable.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, you mentioned the toll this has taken on your family. What has been the cost to your family, to your parents, to your children?
JULIAN ASSANGE: The security situation has been difficult for my family. I am used to dealing with difficult security situations, but my family is not used to dealing with difficult security situations. And various groups in the United States made threats towards my family, including one threat publicly calling for the killing of some of my children in order to get at me.
AMY GOODMAN: You have how many children?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I don’t want to say precisely, because of that risk. So my children have had to move; in one case, change the name that they were using, the same as my mother, etc. So that’s a result of the security situation. And then there’s also—there’s an issue as to whether I can be pressured in certain ways as a result of my family. So can people pressure you. So, that produces a situation where it is quite difficult to see your family, if they’re trying to be undercover and there is surveillance all around the embassy and there’s press all around the embassy.
AMY GOODMAN: You entered the embassy when you were 40 years old. On July 3rd, just a few days ago, you celebrated your 43rd birthday, your third birthday inside the embassy. Where will you be for your next birthday?
JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s a good question. I could still be here. I think the developments are such that if you look at kind of the direction of the—direction of how the politics is going, the U.S. primaries will start in about a year’s time. The Obama administration is starting to consider what its legacy is going to be in the liberal Democrat area of things. There’s an election next year here in the United Kingdom. There’s an election in September in Sweden, which will take their country from center-right to center-left, may not improve things much, in the same way that going from—well, I’m not sure what you call the Obama administration, but going from Democrat to Democrat, if Hillary gets in, may not change things very much in the United States. But this political trajectory, I think, is creating a situation where we can more effectively use the law, you know, that there’s not so much pressures on—not so much pressure on the courts to find one way—not so much pressure on the court system. And so I think it’s getting to a stage where it’s able to act in a more neutral manner.
AMY GOODMAN: If the Swedish government guaranteed that you would not be extradited to the United States, would you agree to go to Sweden for questioning?
JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s what we’ve been asking for four years now. But it’s not just me that’s been asking for it. The Ecuadorean government, as a state, it has obligations to protect someone that they’ve formally granted asylum, has asked the U.K., "Can you guarantee Mr. Assange will not be extradited to the United States?" And it’s also asked Sweden, "Can you guarantee Mr. Assange will not be extradited to the United States?" Not for anything, not a blanket guarantee, but in relation to our publications. And both governments have said no, that they refuse to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, thanks so much for agreeing to this interview.
JULIAN ASSANGE: You’re most welcome, Amy. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange. I interviewed him inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London this past weekend. To see the first hour of our TV/radio global exclusive, go to democracynow.org. Special thanks to Mike Burke, John Hamilton and Denis Moynihan.
I’ll be speaking in Hartford, Connecticut, July 21st at the Mark Twain House & Museum at 7:00 p.m., and on July 26th in Martha’s Vineyard. Check democracynow.org for details.
A fond farewell to our treasured fellows, Charina Nadura and Cassandra Lizaire. We wish you the very best for your oh-so-promising futures.
Democracy Now! is hiring. We have openings for administrative director and fall internships. Check our website.
Headlines:
•Palestinian Toll Rises as Israel Intensifies Gaza Strikes
The Palestinian death toll has surged as Israel intensifies its bombing of the Gaza Strip. Palestinians say at least 27 people have been killed and more than 150 wounded since Israel launched major airstrikes on Sunday. At least 18 civilians, including around seven children, have died over the past day. Israel carried out nearly 300 strikes on Tuesday with more overnight, sending thousands of Palestinians into the streets to avoid attacks on their buildings. One strike killed a leader of the group Islamic Jihad, along with two children and two women who were in his home.
•Thousands of Israelis Take Refuge as Rockets Target Jerusalem, Tel Aviv
Israel says it is responding to the latest round of Palestinian rocket fire that began after the mass Israeli raids that followed the kidnapping of three Israeli teens last month. Palestinian militants in Gaza have fired more than 100 rockets in a 24-hour span, targeting several towns including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Israel says its missile defense system intercepted Tel Aviv-bound rockets, prompting a state of emergency to be declared. Thousands of Israelis have fled to shelters in southern towns near Gaza. Two Israelis have been reported injured from the rockets so far. The Israeli Cabinet has approved the option of calling up nearly 40,000 army reservists for a potential ground invasion of Gaza. Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Israel is preparing for a lengthy battle.
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon: "We are now in a situation in which Hamas deteriorated the security situation around the Gaza Strip by provoking and launching rockets against Israeli civilians. So, by one way or another, we are going to stop Hamas, whether by charging them a heavy price or by launching any kind of offensive measures, by air, by ground or whatever, in order to stop them."
•Abbas Appeals for International Protection of Palestinian People
Palestinians have argued Israel sparked the escalation with last month’s raids and other deadly attacks on the Occupied Territories throughout the year. According to the website Electronic Intifada, Israel had killed 31 Palestinians before the latest violent flare-up in Gaza, bringing the year’s overall toll to around 60. On Tuesday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas made an appeal for international protection of the Palestinian people.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: "What’s happening in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem is not a war between two armies. The Palestinian people are an unarmed people, people who live under occupation. It’s time now for the international community, and especially 'the Quartet' and the Security Council, to take their responsibility to guarantee the international protection of our people."
•U.S. Backs Israeli Offensive in Gaza
As the Palestinian Authority pleaded for international protection, the Obama administration expressed support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest spoke to reporters on Tuesday.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest: "Let me start by saying that we strongly condemn the continuing rocket fire into Israel and the deliberate targeting of civilians by terrorist organizations in Gaza. No country can accept rocket fire aimed at civilians, and we support Israel’s right to defend itself against these vicious attacks."
•10th Anniversary of ICJ Ruling on Illegality of Israeli Settlements, Separation Wall in West Bank
Today is the 10th anniversary of the International Court of Justice advisory ruling that said Israel’s separation wall and settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal.
•Obama Seeks $3.7 Billion for Migrant Crisis on U.S.-Mexico Border
President Obama has asked Congress for $3.7 billion to address the migrant crisis on the Mexico border. More than 52,000 unaccompanied children fleeing violence and poverty in Central America have been seized since October. Obama wants the increased funding to pay for detention centers, aerial surveillance, immigration judges and border agents. The $3.7 billion figure is nearly twice what had been expected. The Obama administration says half of the money would go toward improving children’s care in U.S. custody. At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said most children will ultimately face deportation.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest: "By addressing that backlog, we can ensure that those individuals have prompt access to the due — to the due process to which they’re entitled. It also means that as those cases are resolved — and as we expect in the majority of those cases, there will not be a basis for those individuals to remain in the country and be granted humanitarian relief — that we expect that the homeland security secretary will be able to exercise some additional discretion that would allow him to repatriate those individuals efficiently."
•UNHCR Asks U.S. to Consider Refugee Status for Central American Migrants
As the White House vows to speed the deportation of migrant children, United Nations officials are calling for most of them to be accepted into the United States as refugees. A report by the U.N. high commissioner for refugees in March found that 58 percent of unaccompanied children detained by the United States could be entitled to refugee protections under international law. The United Nations renewed the call ahead of a meeting Thursday in Nicaragua between the United States, Mexico and Central American countries. The agenda includes updating a 30-year-old declaration on state obligations to aid refugees. The UNHCR says: "The U.S. and Mexico should recognize that this is a refugee situation, which implies that [children] shouldn’t be automatically sent to their home countries, but rather receive international protection." President Obama is in Texas today meeting with Republican Gov. Rick Perry on the border crisis.
•Rival Claims Victory over General in Indonesia Vote; Journalist Faces Charges over Damning Report
In Indonesia, Jakarta Gov. Joko Widodo is claiming victory over rival presidential candidate, former army general Prabowo Subianto. Polls show Widodo, known as "Jokowi," has a several-point lead, but official results will not be known until after July 20. The American journalist Allan Nairn reported this week Indonesian forces tied to Prabowo have waged a campaign to rig the election in his favor, including "ballot tampering, street violence, and threats" against rivals. Prabowo, trained by the United States, has been accused of mass killings when he headed the Indonesian special forces in the 1990s. He was dismissed from the army in 1998 following accusations of complicity in the abduction and torture of activists. Nairn’s reporting on Prabowo became a major issue in the campaign. Prabowo has filed criminal charges against Nairn, including inciting hatred against the Indonesian military. Indonesia’s presidential vote will mark its first-ever transfer of power from one elected leader to another.
•Snowden Leaks Reveal NSA Spying on Prominent Muslim Americans
Newly disclosed leaks from Edward Snowden have identified five innocent Americans who were spied on by the National Security Agency. The news website The Intercept reports all five are Muslim Americans: Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group; Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative; two professors, Hooshang Amirahmadi of Rutgers University and Agha Saeed, formerly of California State University; and a prominent attorney, Asim Ghafoor, who has represented clients in terror-related cases. The five were among thousands of names in a database listing email accounts monitored between 2002 and 2008. None of the five have been charged with any crime. All appear to have been targeted for their Muslim backgrounds and ties to various Muslim causes or individual cases involving Muslims. In a video from The Intercept, Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations expressed outrage at being spied on by his government.
Nihad Awad, CAIR: "I was not aware that I was under surveillance, except recently. And I’m outraged that as an American citizen, my government, after decades of civil rights struggle, still the government spies on political activists and civil rights activists and leaders. It is outrageous, and I’m really angry that despite all the work that we have been doing in our communities to serve the nation, to serve our communities, we are treated with suspicion."
Tune into Democracy Now! on Thursday when we’ll speak with the lead reporter on this story, Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept.
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