The Julian Assange Show: Episode 9

Transcript

THE WORLD TOMORROW – EPISODE 9

CYPHERPUNKS – PART 2

GENERIC TITLES – JA VOICE-OVER CUT WITH AUDIO FROM NEWS CLIPS

00:01

I am Julian Assange.

00:05

Editor of WikiLeaks.

00:06

We’ve exposed the world’s secrets;

00:10

Been attacked by the powerful.

00:18

For 500 days now I have been detained without charge, but that hasn’t stopped us.

00:26

Today we are on a quest for revolutionary ideas that can change the world tomorrow.

PROGRAMME SPECIFIC INTRO - JA VOICEOVER

NONE

PROGRAMME

00.33 – 00.38

ON SCREEN GRAPHIC: C Y P H E R P U N K S

00.39

A furious war over the future of our society is underway. For most this war is invisible. On the one side a network of governments and corporations that spy on everything we do. On the other, the Cypherpunks – virtuoso activists who make codes and take public policy. This is the movement that spawned WikiLeaks.

01.03

I am joined by three Cypherpunk friends; from Germany, Andy Müller-Maguhn, from France, Jeremie Zimmermann and from the United States, Jacob Appelbaum. I want to ask them, is the future of the world the future of the internet?

01.20

ON SCREEN GRAPHIC: PART 2

01.20

So…wait…wait…wait…

Before you go too negative…please! I would like to agree with you; I think that architecture matters and that this is central to everything we stand for but that this is a message that we have a responsibility to convey to the public because we understand it as hackers as technicians who build the internet everyday and play with it.

01.49

AMM

You know, there’s one good thing about governments is there is never a singular - they are always in plural. That is finally what is going to save us from the Big Brother because there is going to be too many who want to be Big Brother and they will have fights amongst each other and so on.

02.05

I don't think so Andy, I think that is, I think we once upon a time had national elites, national elites that were competitive with each other and now they are linking together bad they are lifting off their perspective...

02.15

AMM

They are linking together you are right in that respect and I am not sure it is really going to save our arse but there is the chance of um like keeping our own identity and our, I mean we have to stuck to our own infrastructure, that's like the important to learn here.

02.31

I think this is why the copyright wars are so essential because um with peer to peer technologies since Napster in ‘99 people just understood, got it, that by sharing files between individuals...

You are a criminal.

No you build better culture. People who partis....

Are you a criminal?

That is the storytelling.

AMM

no, no, no, no.

But you build a better culture for yourself, everybody will use Napster. Let me finish now please....

03.02

AMM

They history of the human race and the history of culture is the history of copying thoughts, modifying and processing them further on and if you call it stealing then you are like on the....

03.16

Had in the West since in fact the 1950s where we've had industrial culture. Our culture has become sort of industrial products.

AMM (all talking over eachother)

I restrict your thoughts well...

We are feeding the troll here because he is playing the devil’s advocate and he is doing very good, so yes.

JACOB A

Someone has to. I mean it is such obvious bullshit.

03.32

Yeah it is bullshit in the political storytelling it is called stealing but I want to make my point here that every body who used Napster back in '99 became a music fan and then went to concerts and became a prescriptor telling everybody oh you should listen to those people, you should go to that concert and so on. And when it is about sharing culture, it is exactly the same when it is about sharing knowledge. So we have examples where decentralised services and sharing between individuals makes them better and the classic example is the devil's advocate you were playing where an industry comes and says, oh this is steeling and this is killing everybody, killing actors, killing Hollywood, killing cinema, killing kittens and everything. And I once again have to disagree with the devil's advocate you have been playing earlier. Some conservative members of the European parliament now understands it. Understands that individuals when they share things, when they share files without a profit shouldn't be enforced, shouldn't go to jail, shouldn't be punished.

04.36

Andy, we all speak about the privacy of communication and right to publish and that is something that is quite easy to understand, has a long history and in fact journalists love to talk about it because they are protecting their own interests. But if we compare that value to the value of the privacy and freedom of economic interaction, actually every time we see an economic interaction, every time The CIA sees an economic interaction they can see it is this party from this location to this party in this location and they have a figure to the value and important of the interaction. So, isn’t actually the freedom or privacy of economic interactions more important then the freedom of speech.

05.24

AMM

That is a very tough one...

05.28

If we just look from a simple intelligence perspective you've got a 10 million dollar intelligence budget you can spy on people's email interactions or you can have total surveillance of the economic interactions, which one would you prefer?

AMM

Well these days what they will do is they will say okay we'll just force payment and banking to use the internet, um, so we have those.

[laughter]

05.55

AMM

Actually there was this very interesting thing from the cables that said that Russia government tried to negotiate a way that visa and MasterCard payments from Russian citizens within Russia would have to be processed in Russia and Visa/MasterCard actually refused it.

Yeah well the power of the US embassy and Visa combined was enough to prevent even Russia with from coming up with its own domestic payment card system and keeping....

AMM

Meaning that even, that even payments from Russian citizens within Russian to Russian shops will be processed through American data centres...

So when Putin goes to buy a coke...

AMM

So the US government will have jurisdictional control or at least inside.

Yeah so when Putin goes out to buy a coke 30 seconds later it is known in Washington DC.

AMM

And that of course is a very unsatisfying situation independent of the fact if I like the US or not, this is just a very central dangerous thing to have a central place where all payments are stored because it invites defacto to all kinds of usage of that data.

07.02

JACOB A

Well with architecture I mean one of the fundamental things that cypher punks recognises is that the architecture actually defines the political situation. So, if you have a centralised architecture even if the best people in the world are in control of it is it tracks arseholes and those arseholes do things with their power that the original designers would not do. And no matter where we look, we can see especially with financial systems that that effectively even if the people have the best of intentions it doesn't matter. I mean the architecture is the truth, it's truth of the internet with regard to communications. The so called lawful intercept systems which is just a nice way of saying spying on people, right, that stuff was built I think...

07.41

Well it’s a euphemism - lawful interception...

07.44

JACOB A

Yeah like lawful murder. You’ve heard about the drone strikes on American citizens by the US president, Obama, you know when he killed Anwar al-Awlaki's 16 year old son in Yemen - that is lawful murder. A targeted killing as they put it, right, so a so called lawful intercept is the same thing, you just put lawful in front of everything and then all of a sudden because the state does it is legitimate but it is in fact the architecture of the state that allows them to do that at all and it's the architecture of the laws and the architecture of the technology just as the same as it's the architecture of financial systems and what the cypher punks wanted to do was to create systems where we compensate each other in a truly free way where it was not possible to interfere. And with financial issues, it is the most dangerous thing to be working on. I mean there’s a reason that the person that created Bitcoin did so anonymously.

08.30

AMM

With money it is a lot more complicated and we have these things called money laundering laws and so on and they tell us that you know drug and terrorist organisations are like um otherwise abusing...

JACOB A

It's the horsemen of the....

AMM

... of using the infrastructure to do evil things. Actually, I’d be very interested to have more surveillance companies and governments spendings to be transparent on this issues but um so the question is what do we buy when we provide total anonymity of only the money system. What would happen, actually? I think um, this might lead here and there to interesting areas where people um may get themselves a little more easy and say well you know I can raise my voice, I can go to the parliament but I can also just buy some politicians which would um....

09.29

You are describing the US right? There is here a real problem, I think.

Are you sure it is a problem Jeremy? Maybe in fact it is a good tribute that those industries that are productive, those industries that are productive....

AMM

I think advocate drinking like vodka, whisky...

[all talk over each other]

JACOB A

Jeremy, Jeremy let's actually see if he can actually finish the sentence without... Control us master troll.

[laughter]

10.05

Those industries that are productive, that produce wealth, that produce wealth for the whole society in fact because they are productive, they have the money in order to make sure that they continue to be productive and that random legislation, random legislation that comes out as a result of political myth making er isn't constraining their productive activities and the best way to do that is in fact to byy congressmen, to take the labour of your productive industry and use it to modify the law, to keep the productive nature of the industry going.

JACOB

Right, right I’ll get this one. Ready, ready right now. Ready. No!

[laughter]

Why?

10.48

JACOB A

There are couple of reasons but for one there’s a feedback loop that is extremely negative. So for example, I believe the largest political er campaign donor in the state of California is the prison guards union and part of the reason to do this is because they like to lobby for stronger law not because they care about the rule of law but because there is job incentive. So, if you see that these people are lobbying to create more prisons, to jail more people, to have longer sentences- what is it that ye are effectively doing? What they are doing is they are using the benefit that they actually receive for the labour that was actually beneficial arguably in the first place in order to expand the monopoly that the state grants to them in what they are allowed to do.

11.28

So, they are just using it for wealth transfer from actual productive industries to industries that are not productive.

11.32

JACOB A

You could sum it up that way, you could also sum it up..

But maybe that is just a small component, I mean you know you every system is abused, perhaps if you like free riders that are just involved in wealth transfer, perhaps those are a small element. In fact the majority of the lobbying, the majority of the influence on congress does actually come from productive industries making sure that that the laws continue to permit those productive industries from being productive.

12.00

AMM

I think, you’re missing… I mean okay the question is, what's the policy here? So what's the positive way we could formulate these things.

I just wonder whether we couldn't in fact sort of standardise the actual practice in the United States, informalise it so you do simply buy Senators..

No, no, no, no.

[all speak over each other]

12.20

AMM

Let's assume we have the money, let's assume we have the money to buy the...

yeah and then it was all open and it’s highest bidder and each one goes for an auction....

AMM

But the weapon industry would still have more money.

12.29

Each one goes for auction. I think they wouldn't, I think they wouldn't. I actually think the military industrial complex would be relatively marginalised because they're ability to operate behind back doors in a system that is not open to general market bidding is in fact higher than other industries.

[all talk over each other]

12.47

I just want to....

JACOB A

... address the clearance thing he just said because there is a fundamental inequality....

But this is, but please...

JACOB A

No...

12.58

Jeremy, Jeremy go on.

JACOB A

You got to tell me what the fundamental inequality I mean you're the French guy in the room, come on.

When you say let's let the dominant actors decide what the policy will be I can answer you from the perspective of what was the internet in the last fifteen years where innovation was so called bottom up where um, new practices emerge out of nothing where a couple of guys in a garage um invented a technology that spread like er.....

For near, for nearly everything, for Apple, for Google for everything - You Tube....

13.36

For everything, everything that happened on the internet just boomed after being unknown a few months, a few years before so you cannot predict what will be the next innovation. My point is that...um policy has to adapt to society and not the other way around. We have the impression with the copyright wars that legislator tries to make the whole society change to adapt to a framework that is defined by Hollywood, say okay what you're doing when you’re with your new cultural practice is just morally wrong so if you don’t want to stop it then we'll design legal tools to make you stop doing what you think is good. This is not the way to make good policy. So, I’m convinced that when you enable to most powerful industrial actors to decide what policy should be you don't go that way.

14.35

And can you speak a little bit about this detainment that you have had at US airports and why that has occurred?

14.42

JACOB A

Well I mean, you know, they have asserted that, that, it occurs because I know why. But you know to speak to your point about what it is like depending on when, you know they always give me different answers but usually they say one response which is I mean uniformly across the board they say because we can. And I say okay I do not dispute your authority, well I do dispute your authority I do not dispute it now, I merely wish to know why this is happening to me. Now I, I mean, people tell me all the time well isn't it obvious you work on TOR, er, your sitting next to Julian what did you expect, right, for example I have had people literally tell me what did you expect for, for associating with people like this. I've also had them tell me bullshit like oh remember 9/11, that's why or because we want you to answer some questions and this is the place where you have the least amount of rights we assert and the stuff that they do in this, you know, in this situation like deny access to a lawyer, they will deny access to a bathroom but they will give you water, right - they will give you something to drink and order like a diuretic in order to convince you that you really want to cooperate in some way. They did this to pressure for political reasons. They asked me questions about how I feel about the Iraq war, how I feel about the Afghani war, um, you know, basically all of these steps of the way they repeated the tactics of the FBI during Co Intel Pro for example where they specifically tried to assert through their authority their authority to change political realities in my own life and to try to pressure me not only to change them but to give them some special access to what is going on in my head. And they have seized my property, I’m not even, you know, I’m not really at liberty to discuss all of the things that have occurred to me.

16.22

So this has happened to you but Chinese people I speak to when they speak about the great firewall of china, in the West we talk about this in terms of censorship and it is blocking Chinese citizens from coming out and reading what is said about the Chinese government in the west and by Chinese dissidents and (NO IDEA WHAT IS SAID HERE?) um, but their concern is actually not about censorship. Their concern is in order to have it, internet censorship, there must also be internet surveillance in order to check what someone is looking at to see whether it is permitted or denied you must be seeing it and therefore if you are seeing it you can record it all and so this has had a tremendous chilling affect on Chinese.

17.07

JACOB A

I guess I think that it is important to just to remember that censorship and surveillance are not issues of other places and you know people in the West love to talk about how Iranians and the Chinese and North Koreans they need anonymity and they need freedom and they need all that stuff but we don’t need it here. And it’s very important to know that actually it is not just oppressive regimes because if you happen to be in the top echelon of any regime it is not oppressive to you. It turns out right? But I mean but we consider the UK to be a wonderful place. We consider generally think Sweden is a pretty great place and yet you can see that when you fall out of favour with the people in power that you know you don’t end up in a favourable position. I mean but you're still alive right so I mean clearly that is symbol that it is a free country - right?

My point is that...

17.52

But maybe we should actually speak about this, I mean censorship...

Sweden?

17.55

No internet censorship in the West.

AMM

With Wikileaks there was this case that people couldn't even in the accusation against you couldn't read the documents and Bradley Mannings....

18.04

Yeah so the US prosecutors, um, so the Pentagon set up a filtering system so that any email sent to the Pentagon with the word Wikileaks in it would be filtered so the prosecution in attempting to prosecute the case of course was mailing back and forth about Wikileaks and didn't receive the email replies because they had the word Wikileaks in them...

18.29

AMM

Which brings us back, wait a second, to the really basic question and the basic question is there is something such as negative effecting effecting information so from a society point of view do we want censored internet because it’s better for society or not? And even if we talk about child pornography you could argue saying wait a moment, this child pornography like addresses the problem that is abuse of children and in order to solve the problem we need to know the problem so...

JACOB A

... evidence for the crime.

19.05

I think the solution is always another one than censorship. When we talk about child pornography we shouldn't even use the word pornography, it’s a representation of crime scenes of child abuse. We all agree that we should remove those images from the internet.

19.21

JACOB A

I’m sorry but I’m just…I'm squirming over here. It is so frustrating to hear the argument that you making, I want to throw up, right? Because what you just did is you said I want to erase history. And you know, I mean maybe an extremist in this case and in many other cases I’m sure but I'm just going to go out on a limb here, you know. This is actually an example of where erasing history does a disservice. Right it turns out that with he internet we learnt that there is an epidemic in society of child abuse. That is what we learnt with this, with this child pornography issue. You know. I think it is better to call it child exploitation, we see evidence of this. Covering it up, erasing it is I think a travesty to do that because in fact you can learn so much about society as a whole. For example you can learn and I mean you know I'm obviously never going to have a career in politics after I finished this sentence but I mean just to clear about this right you learn for example who is producing it, you learn about the people that are victimised, it is impossible for people to ignore the problem. But the answer is not to destroy a medium or destroy a medium or to police that medium. It is when you find evidence to prosecute the crimes that the medium has documented. It is not to weaken that medium, it is not to cripple society as a whole over this thing. The easy thing to do is to pretent that it doesn’t exist and then to stop it and say that has stopped the abuse and then doesn't.

20.38

Andy, I spoke recently with a president of Tunisia and I asked him about what was going to happen to the intelligence records of the Ben Ali, so the equivalent of the Stasi achieves of Tunisia and he said that while these were very interesting and the intelligence agencies, um, he would have to, there are problem in that they are dangerous and he would have to lock them off one by one but in relation to these achieves, er, he thought it best for the cohesion of Tunisian society that they all be kept secret so there wasn't a blame game. You were a young man during the fall of the Stasi in East Germany can you speak a little bit about the Stasi achieves and what do you think about this opening up of security achieves.

21.31

AMM

Well Germany probably has the most well documented intelligence agency on the planet or one of those. The German, East German Staatssicherheit, um, all the handbooks, procedural papers, training documents er internal studies, internal training, all that documents are roughly public. I think um this is a very good thing to learn from and that is what the president of Tunisia should consider that he needs to distinguish between two things and one is personal records, I can understand it is a bit too much to expect that they publish all of the personal records the former intelligence agency has raised, so…

Did you follow this situation with the Amn Dawla in Egypt? So, where the domestic state security - 100,000 strong - people went in, they looted the achieves and lots of material came out and was spread around the place. You could buy records for $2 in a local market, upload it to.... and it hasn't destroyed Egyptian society.

22.43

AMM

No. I am just saying that I do have a bit of an understanding of people don't want their personal records to be released. I can understand that.

22.52

JACOB A

Look. Let’s take a step back. You argue essentially from a completely flawed point which is this notion that data is private when it is limited essentially and that’s just not true. For example in my country if a million people have a security clearance and they are allowed to access that private data....

4.3 million....

JACOB A

How can you call it data private - right? That is the problem right is that it is not actually truly 100% secret from every person on the planet. It is only secret from the people...

It’s secret from the powerless and to the powerful there (NOT SURE THIS IS WHAT J SAYS).

JACOB A

Exactly.

23.28

We can go to broader issue though so, so the internet has lead to an explosion of the amount of information that is available to the public, extraordinary, it is just extraordinary. Educative function is extraordinary. On the other hand what is not seen and people talk about Wikileaks and they say there is a... people talk about Wikileaks and they say, look all that private government information is now pubic, the government can't keep anything secret etc. I say this is rubbish. I say that Wikileaks is the shadow of a shadow. And in fact powerful groups have such a vast amount of secret material now that it dwarfs the amount of publically available material and the operations of Wikileaks are just a percentage fraction of this privately held material. So, do you think when you look at the balance between powerful insiders knowing every credit card transaction in the world, shadow states of information that are, that are starting to develop and swapping with each other and developing alliances in connections with each other and into the private sectors and so on versus the increased size of the commons, so the internet is a common tool for humanity to speak to itself, and that, and that increase in power…How do you see Jeremy that the battle in these playing out?

24.50

Indeed those topics are bound together, I will try to make the link between five conversations ago and three conversations ago and because when we talk about concentrating power we once again talk about architecture and when we talk about internet censorship it is about centralising the power to determine what people maybe able to access or not and whether it government censorship or also private owned censorship it is undue power. They're changing the architecture of the internet form one universal network to a Balkanisation of small sub networks. But what we are discussing since the beginning are all global issues, whether we are talking of the final true system going array, whether we are talking of corruption, whether we are talking about geo politics or energy or environment or I don’t know. All of these are global problems that mankind is facing today and we have one, still one global tool between our hands that enables better communication, better sharing of knowledge, better participation in political and democratic process. What I feel, what I suspect is that a global universal internet is the only tool we have between our hands...

...to solve global problems...

26.07

...to address those global issues and this is why this is a central fight that we have to fight and that we all have a responsibility here to fight.

26.18

We have this notion from cypher punks that code is law. On the internet what you can do is defined by what programmes are existing, what programmes run and therefore code is law.

26.28

JACOB A

Yep. Absolutely. The key thing I think that people should walk away with, especially if there’s some 16 year old or 18 year old person that wishes they could make the world a better place, the thing that they have to know is that you can build alternatives and everyone everyone especially with the internet is empowered to do that in the context that they exist in side of and it is not they have a duty to it but it is that if they wish to do this they can and if they do that they will impact many people especially with regard to the internet. Building those alternatives has an amplification, a magnification where, I think...

27.03

So just for you, if you build something you can serve it to a billion people.

27.07

JACOB A

I mean that’s what I see. That’s why I’m here. Because if I don’t support you now in the things that you are going thru, what kind of world am I building? What kind of message do I send? I’d let a bunch of pigs push me around - no way, never. We have to build and we have to change that. We have to, I mean like Gandhi said right you have to be the change you want to see in the world but you know, you have to be the trouble you want to see in the world too.

27.30

GRAPHICS – THE END

27.34

END CREDITS

Print

Film: The Julian Assange Show: Episode 9

http://www.journeyman.tv/film/5541

Transcript