Interview
at Spiegel
Key
points:
“With a
banking blockade, WikiLeaks had been cut off from more than 90
percent of its finances. The blockade happened in a completely
extrajudicial manner. We took legal measures against the blockade and
we have been victorious in the courts, so people can send us
donations again.”
“I have
been publishing about the NSA for almost 20 years now, so I was aware
of the NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance. We required a next-generation
submission system in order to protect our sources. [...] a few months
back we launched a next-generation submission system and also
integrated it with our publications.”
“WikiLeaks
is still a taboo object for some parts of the government. Firewalls
were set up. Every federal government employee and every contractor
received an e-mail stating that if they read something from WikiLeaks
including through the New York Times website, they have to remove
this from their computer immediately and self-report. They had to
cleanse and confess. That's a new McCarthy hysteria.
... we do
know is that most of our readers come from India, closely followed by
the United States.”
“All
that US intelligence information is very valuable for the German
foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst. Please
imagine for a moment the German government complains about being
spied on and the Americans just say: Okay, we will give you more
stuff, which they have stolen from France. When the French complain,
they get more stuff, which was stolen from Germany. The NSA spends a
lot of resources obtaining information, but throwing a few crumbs to
France and Germany when they start whining about being victims costs
nothing, digital copies cost nothing.”
“If you
knew as a German politician that American intelligence agencies have
been collecting intensively on 125 top-level politicians and
officials over decades, you would recall some of the conversations
you had in all these years and you would then understand that the
United States has all those conversations, and that it could take
down the Merkel cabinet any time it feels like it, by simply leaking
portions of those conversations to journalists.”
“They
wouldn't leak transcripts of tapped phone calls as that would draw
focus to the spying itself. The way intelligence services launder
intercepts is to extract the facts expressed during conversations;
for example to say to their contacts in the media, 'I think you
should look into this connection between this politician and that
person, what they did on that particular day.'”
“...
there are examples of prominent Muslims in different countries about
whom it was leaked that they had been browsing porn. Blackmail or
representational destruction from intercepts is part of the
repertoire used. [...] The British GCHQ has its own department for
such methods called JTRIG. They include blackmail, fabricating
videos, fabricating SMS texts in bulk, even creating fake businesses
with the same names as real businesses the United Kingdom wants to
marginalize in some region of the world, and encouraging people to
order from the fake business and selling them inferior products, so
that the business gets a bad reputation. That sounds like a lunatic
conspiracy theory, but it is concretely documented in the GCHQ
material allegedly provided by Edward Snowden.”
“The US
government is pursuing five different types of charges against me. I
don't know how many charges altogether, but five types of charges:
espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, computer fraud and abuse,
theft of secrets and general conspiracy. Even if there were only one
charge of each type, which there wouldn't be, that would be 45 years,
and the Espionage Act has life imprisonment and death penalty
provisions as well. So it would be absurd for me to worry about the
consequences of our next publication. Saudi officials came out after
we started publishing the Saudi cables and said that spreading and
publishing government information carries a penalty of 20 years in
prison. Only 20 years! So if it's a choice between being extradited
to Saudi Arabia or the US, then I should go to Saudi Arabia, a land
famous for its judicial moderation.”
“The
persecution was used to create desolidarization. Partly it had the
opposite effect but partly in the Western countries it made the
rhetorical attacks on us easier. But the climate has shifted
positively. It never affected the majority of the Spanish-, French-
or Italian-speaking worlds and obviously not the Russian-speaking
world. Even in the United States we have support from the majority of
people under 35 now.
The
transition of the German public opinion is interesting. A study in
2010 found that 88 percent of Germans appreciate the US government;
after the disclosure about the NSA, the rate dropped to 43 percent.
That is a healthy shift in the German view of the United States,
which has been starry-eyed. Japan suffered the same problem. At the
same time, German public support for WikiLeaks is significant and
even quite mainstream.”
“The
US is in the business of managing an extended empire. The ability to
prevent Merkel from constructing a BRICS bailout fund for the euro
zone by intercepting the idea at an early stage is an example. [...]
... the United States government was very interested in the
idea that Germany would propose a greater role for China in the
International Monetary Fund, for example. An executive decision can
be taken: Kill that idea of Merkel's before it learns to crawl,
because the US sees China helping Europe as a threat to its
dominance.”
“If you
ask 'Does Google collect more information than the National Security
Agency?' the answer is 'no,' because NSA also collects information
from Google. The same applies to Facebook and other Silicon
Valley-based companies. They still collect a lot of information and
they are using a new economic model which academics call
'surveillance capitalism.' General information about individuals
is worth little, but when you group together a billion individuals,
it becomes strategic like an oil or gas pipeline. [...]
Organizations like Google, whose business model is 'voluntary'
mass surveillance, appear to be giving it away for free. Free e-mail,
free search, etc. Therefore it seems that they're not a corporation,
because corporations don't do things for free. It falsely seems like
they are part of civil society. [...] They are also exporting
a specific mindset of culture. You can use the old term of 'cultural
imperialism' or call it the 'Disneylandization' of the Internet.
Maybe 'digital colonization' is the best terminology.”
“These
corporations establish new societal rules about what activities are
permitted and what information can be transmitted. Right down to how
much nipple you can show. Down to really basic matters, which are
normally a function of public debate and parliaments making laws.
Once something becomes sufficiently controversial, it's banned by
these organizations. Or, even if it is not so controversial, but it
affects the interests that they're close to, then it's banned or
partially banned or just not promoted.”
“The
long-term effect is a tendency towards conformity, because
controversy is eliminated. An American mindset is being fostered and
spread to the rest of the world because they find this mindset to be
uncontroversial among themselves. That is literally a type of digital
colonialism; non-US cultures are being colonized by a mindset of
what is tolerable to the staff and investors of a few Silicon Valley
companies. The cultural standard of what is a taboo and what is
not becomes a US standard, where US exceptionalism is
uncontroversial.”
“Over
the last two years, we already have become specialists for the three
extremely important trade agreements, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)
and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TP). WikiLeaks has become the
place to go to leak parts of these agreements that are now under
negotiation. These agreements are a package that the US is using
to reposition itself in the world against China by constructing a new
grand enclosure. We are seeing something that would result in a
tighter economic and legal integration with the United States, which
draws Western Europe's center of gravity away from Eurasia and
towards the United States, when the greatest chance for long-term
peace in Eurasia is its economic intergration.”
Full
interview:
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