Wikileaks head and founder Julian Assange speaks for first time since the Ecuadorian embassy cut his internet. Here is a transcript of some of his most revealing statements and highlights:
"Our first big leak [in the series] was the 'DNC Leaks' and as a result of that, published in July, the top five officials of the US Democratic Party resigned including its president Debbie Wasserman Schultz."
"The Democratic primary election between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders principally had been rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton by the committee that runs the US Democratic Party in many different ways including pushing out fake stories that Bernie Sanders supporters were trying to organize violence, making sure more of the money went to Hillary Clinton and so on.”
“When we released those 20,000 emails, we did it in a way which we’d become famous for which is to make a special, customized search engine….it encouraged all the people in the United States, and some outside the United States, who were interested in the election to sort through them. So this punched a hole in the media censorship that exists in the United States where four of the five top TV networks own about eight of the nine major news publications in the United States biased in favor of Hillary Clinton.”
“In response there were many attacks from the US-DC establishment which believes that Hillary Clinton will be the winner of the election [they] tried to find different ways to distract from our publication. They first of all tried to say that we supported Donald Trump just because we were criticizing Hillary Clinton. Then they tried to say actually that we were secretly working with Russia to publish this material. That we were criticizing her and this was some sort of cyber warfare against the United States.
“I’ve learned from a lot of experience the best way to deal with these attacks is that you never flinch, you never blink you just keep on publishing. Because every day that you publish, is a day that you have the initiative in the conflict.”
“So this time we started a different strategy which was to write an algorithm called the stochastic terminator which is designed to be unpredictable and to adjust how much it publishes and what it selects based upon what we as human beings suggest to it. But also based upon what it reads in the news. And so it selects the emails to be published and publishes them each day. And we started doing that on the 7th of October.
“This really whipped up a crazed hornet’s nest atmosphere in the Hillary Clinton campaign and in all the establishments that were backing her. We always had the analysis that Hillary Clinton wins for sure. We’ve had that analysis from more than 12 months ago. But she has pulled around her every single establishment in the US. The intelligence agencies, the Neo-conservatives who started the Iraq war, the weapons manufacturers, the big banks, investment companies like Goldman Sachs, most of the middle class and most of the media. And so now we have all these people, all these establishments trying to defend Hillary Clinton from being exposed as having many corrupt relationships.”
“So they started attacking our servers with denial of service attacks and attempted hacking attacks. There is an amazing ongoing campaign where fake documents were put in the UN and the British courts to accuse me of being both a Russian spy and a pedophile and a molester of children…But that wasn’t enough so the pressure started to increase and started to pressure Ecuador. Which some of the opposition parties in Ecuador were sympathetic to, perhaps because of their relationships with the United States, or statement made to Ecuador at the political level and at the intelligence level that I needed to be stopped or their would be consequences. But Wikileaks is a global publisher publishing over a million documents a year. We publish from France, Germany, Norway, Holland and several other countries and we have most of our lawyers and staff in the EU and the United States. We don’t publish from Ecuador. No particular reason. Just the bandwidth is cheaper and the servers are cheaper in Europe rather than in Ecuador.”
“So the United States government in the form of John Kerry, the Secretary of State, other US officials and the Hillary Clinton campaign kept putting forth propaganda to say that our publications revealing various forms of corruption and scandal within Hillary Clinton’s network, was in fact interference in the United States electoral process. But this is not interference in the electoral process, this is the definition of the electoral process is for media organizations, and for everyone, to publish the truth and their opinion about what is occurring. There cannot be a free informed election unless people are free to inform.”
“So you basically have the Obama administration taking control of parts of the government and using the government to try and shut down critical true information being revealed and analyzed by Wikileaks and being read by the American population.”
“So here we have a dilemma. On the one hand, Wikileaks is a publisher that doesn’t publish from Ecuador. And as a publisher, its duty and obligation is to publish everything that is true that it can get its hands on about a very important election that is occurring right now in the United States. On the other hand the big TV networks in the United States, with the exception of FOX, are controlled by Clinton supporters and the US intelligence which is also aligned with Clinton pushing statements before the US public that Wikileaks is interfering with the US election – which is false – but nonetheless it is a claim that is being made very loudly in the US.”
“Now of course we actually publish from Germany, France, Holland, Norway and so on. The United States, as far as we’re aware, has not tried to apply significant pressure to those countries. But I am symbol of the ideological leader of Wikileaks and that symbol is being protected as a political refugee by the state of Ecuador. So they think they can go after the symbol and they think that they can bully – try and bully – Ecuador because it is a state in Latin America that’s occupied with Brazil.”
“Wikileaks is one of the fighting dogs that has a lot of energy and runs around fighting all the time. It is built to fight it loves nothing more than to fight. And so when my internet was cut off we had long ago made strategic contingency plans for exactly this situation. So despite bombs raining down on us from statements by high US officials, media and so on this is exactly the sort of situation we enjoy so there was not even one day pause. We just continued on publishing the next day even though I was cut off from my team.”
“As I said it has long been our analysis that Hillary Clinton will win the election because she has all the establishments on her side and we can see it in terms of polling. If someone like Donald Trump – who has a great many problems I’m sure all of you are aware of it – but if he managed to get up to the 48% or 50% level in the polling which he has just on two occasions across the different polls united, immediately those big media networks and the funders get together and smash him back down. So I don’t think there’s any chance of Donald Trump winning the election. That would probably be bad inside the United States. It would probably be good outside the United States. Even with the amazing material we have published and will continue to publish because even though we publish it and there’s a lot of people reading it on the internet directly, most of the media originations in the United States are very strongly aligned with Hillary Clinton. Two reasons really, a lot of them are owned by big businesses which are owned by banks which like Hillary Clinton. And the other is a class reason. Most journalists and media workers are very middle class and Donald Trump represents in their minds, white trash. So to do anything that looks to be like it might be supporting Donald Trump looks like you’re supporting white trash. And to those rivals that they have within their class they are white trash. So it lowers their social status and that’s a very dangerous thing to do in an institution, to have your social status lowered, because someone might get your job or the job that you want to have within the institution. So there is a lot of conformity and fear around criticizing Hillary Clinton in any way at all and it reduces the impact of even very significant material that is being released.”
“But what is the impact for Latin America? I think it is extremely positive because this is the first time in US electoral history that we can see the power structure going into a new presidency. There are various alliances, forces and influences of Hillary Clinton and her team that we are exposing day by day. So that’s going to shift understanding to a phenomena that everyone has to deal with inside the United States.”
“As a security expert, or former security expert, and someone who’s had to continue to understand that in order to protect Wikileaks and our sources, I think electronic voting is completely crazy. The electronic aspect of it, even if there is cryptography – especially if there’s cryptography, makes it so complex that individual people in communities can’t assess whether it is doing what it says it is doing. So it becomes easy to manipulate. Even if there are rules that have sophisticated auditors, external auditors, auditing what has been done in random checks and so on, we all know the reality that once those rules are set up for auditors, gradually they are defunded or auditors get lazy and they gradually start to disappear and those people who want to manipulate the system understand the ability and limitations of the auditors more and more. So I think electronic voting is completely crazy for national elections. For other things it might be alright but for national elections, where there’s real power involved, I think this is mad."
......see YouTube video below for full statements
"Our first big leak [in the series] was the 'DNC Leaks' and as a result of that, published in July, the top five officials of the US Democratic Party resigned including its president Debbie Wasserman Schultz."
"The Democratic primary election between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders principally had been rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton by the committee that runs the US Democratic Party in many different ways including pushing out fake stories that Bernie Sanders supporters were trying to organize violence, making sure more of the money went to Hillary Clinton and so on.”
“When we released those 20,000 emails, we did it in a way which we’d become famous for which is to make a special, customized search engine….it encouraged all the people in the United States, and some outside the United States, who were interested in the election to sort through them. So this punched a hole in the media censorship that exists in the United States where four of the five top TV networks own about eight of the nine major news publications in the United States biased in favor of Hillary Clinton.”
“In response there were many attacks from the US-DC establishment which believes that Hillary Clinton will be the winner of the election [they] tried to find different ways to distract from our publication. They first of all tried to say that we supported Donald Trump just because we were criticizing Hillary Clinton. Then they tried to say actually that we were secretly working with Russia to publish this material. That we were criticizing her and this was some sort of cyber warfare against the United States.
“I’ve learned from a lot of experience the best way to deal with these attacks is that you never flinch, you never blink you just keep on publishing. Because every day that you publish, is a day that you have the initiative in the conflict.”
“So this time we started a different strategy which was to write an algorithm called the stochastic terminator which is designed to be unpredictable and to adjust how much it publishes and what it selects based upon what we as human beings suggest to it. But also based upon what it reads in the news. And so it selects the emails to be published and publishes them each day. And we started doing that on the 7th of October.
“This really whipped up a crazed hornet’s nest atmosphere in the Hillary Clinton campaign and in all the establishments that were backing her. We always had the analysis that Hillary Clinton wins for sure. We’ve had that analysis from more than 12 months ago. But she has pulled around her every single establishment in the US. The intelligence agencies, the Neo-conservatives who started the Iraq war, the weapons manufacturers, the big banks, investment companies like Goldman Sachs, most of the middle class and most of the media. And so now we have all these people, all these establishments trying to defend Hillary Clinton from being exposed as having many corrupt relationships.”
“So they started attacking our servers with denial of service attacks and attempted hacking attacks. There is an amazing ongoing campaign where fake documents were put in the UN and the British courts to accuse me of being both a Russian spy and a pedophile and a molester of children…But that wasn’t enough so the pressure started to increase and started to pressure Ecuador. Which some of the opposition parties in Ecuador were sympathetic to, perhaps because of their relationships with the United States, or statement made to Ecuador at the political level and at the intelligence level that I needed to be stopped or their would be consequences. But Wikileaks is a global publisher publishing over a million documents a year. We publish from France, Germany, Norway, Holland and several other countries and we have most of our lawyers and staff in the EU and the United States. We don’t publish from Ecuador. No particular reason. Just the bandwidth is cheaper and the servers are cheaper in Europe rather than in Ecuador.”
“So the United States government in the form of John Kerry, the Secretary of State, other US officials and the Hillary Clinton campaign kept putting forth propaganda to say that our publications revealing various forms of corruption and scandal within Hillary Clinton’s network, was in fact interference in the United States electoral process. But this is not interference in the electoral process, this is the definition of the electoral process is for media organizations, and for everyone, to publish the truth and their opinion about what is occurring. There cannot be a free informed election unless people are free to inform.”
“So you basically have the Obama administration taking control of parts of the government and using the government to try and shut down critical true information being revealed and analyzed by Wikileaks and being read by the American population.”
“So here we have a dilemma. On the one hand, Wikileaks is a publisher that doesn’t publish from Ecuador. And as a publisher, its duty and obligation is to publish everything that is true that it can get its hands on about a very important election that is occurring right now in the United States. On the other hand the big TV networks in the United States, with the exception of FOX, are controlled by Clinton supporters and the US intelligence which is also aligned with Clinton pushing statements before the US public that Wikileaks is interfering with the US election – which is false – but nonetheless it is a claim that is being made very loudly in the US.”
“Now of course we actually publish from Germany, France, Holland, Norway and so on. The United States, as far as we’re aware, has not tried to apply significant pressure to those countries. But I am symbol of the ideological leader of Wikileaks and that symbol is being protected as a political refugee by the state of Ecuador. So they think they can go after the symbol and they think that they can bully – try and bully – Ecuador because it is a state in Latin America that’s occupied with Brazil.”
“Wikileaks is one of the fighting dogs that has a lot of energy and runs around fighting all the time. It is built to fight it loves nothing more than to fight. And so when my internet was cut off we had long ago made strategic contingency plans for exactly this situation. So despite bombs raining down on us from statements by high US officials, media and so on this is exactly the sort of situation we enjoy so there was not even one day pause. We just continued on publishing the next day even though I was cut off from my team.”
“As I said it has long been our analysis that Hillary Clinton will win the election because she has all the establishments on her side and we can see it in terms of polling. If someone like Donald Trump – who has a great many problems I’m sure all of you are aware of it – but if he managed to get up to the 48% or 50% level in the polling which he has just on two occasions across the different polls united, immediately those big media networks and the funders get together and smash him back down. So I don’t think there’s any chance of Donald Trump winning the election. That would probably be bad inside the United States. It would probably be good outside the United States. Even with the amazing material we have published and will continue to publish because even though we publish it and there’s a lot of people reading it on the internet directly, most of the media originations in the United States are very strongly aligned with Hillary Clinton. Two reasons really, a lot of them are owned by big businesses which are owned by banks which like Hillary Clinton. And the other is a class reason. Most journalists and media workers are very middle class and Donald Trump represents in their minds, white trash. So to do anything that looks to be like it might be supporting Donald Trump looks like you’re supporting white trash. And to those rivals that they have within their class they are white trash. So it lowers their social status and that’s a very dangerous thing to do in an institution, to have your social status lowered, because someone might get your job or the job that you want to have within the institution. So there is a lot of conformity and fear around criticizing Hillary Clinton in any way at all and it reduces the impact of even very significant material that is being released.”
“But what is the impact for Latin America? I think it is extremely positive because this is the first time in US electoral history that we can see the power structure going into a new presidency. There are various alliances, forces and influences of Hillary Clinton and her team that we are exposing day by day. So that’s going to shift understanding to a phenomena that everyone has to deal with inside the United States.”
“As a security expert, or former security expert, and someone who’s had to continue to understand that in order to protect Wikileaks and our sources, I think electronic voting is completely crazy. The electronic aspect of it, even if there is cryptography – especially if there’s cryptography, makes it so complex that individual people in communities can’t assess whether it is doing what it says it is doing. So it becomes easy to manipulate. Even if there are rules that have sophisticated auditors, external auditors, auditing what has been done in random checks and so on, we all know the reality that once those rules are set up for auditors, gradually they are defunded or auditors get lazy and they gradually start to disappear and those people who want to manipulate the system understand the ability and limitations of the auditors more and more. So I think electronic voting is completely crazy for national elections. For other things it might be alright but for national elections, where there’s real power involved, I think this is mad."
......see YouTube video below for full statements
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