Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

[kgnu_fan]

Hero of whistleblowers!!!

Talks
Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html


The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who's reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED's Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished -- and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.


About Julian Assange

Internet activist Julian Assange serves as spokesperson for WikiLeaks, a controversial, volunteer-driven website that publishes and comments on leaked documents alleging government and

[kgnu_fan]

1. It is a cool site with interactive transcript- you click the text and it will play!

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 just 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)