Eric Schmidt - Part 4: Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt lyrics

ES: And Lisa a**isted me. And we seem to be ok with her a**ist. What we agreed was that we would talk about the technology directions and maybe the implications of all of this, and the deal was that it would be on the record for the book. We would have a transcript prepared, which he would have an opportunity to modify and improve its clarity, which all seemed incredible reasonable to me. So we just started talking a little bit about... we talked a little bit about sort of the general principles he's articulated and I was just starting to talk a little bit about the structure, why WikiLeaks is architected the way it is. And the rough summary there is that, the concern that he had in architecting this was that if you look at the governments you know the sort of the stuff that they do, murder journalists, imprison journalists and that kind of stuff, his view was that we want to attack that problem by making a system that was very very hard to block. So the non technical explanation of what he did is that if you built a system where if they do the obvious things to block them it can essentially show up in another way. Change its name and replicate... JA: We developed an internal system to do some of these fast replicas. Not quite unsophisticated, but worked quickly. But I think this is... I've been thinking about this for a while now. I think there is... The naming of things is very important. The naming of human intellectual work and our entire intellectual record is possibly the most important thing. So we all have words for different objects, like "tomato." But we use a simple word, "tomato," instead of actually describing every little aspect of this god damn tomato...[JA playing with Tomato on table] JA: ...because it takes too long. And because it takes too long to describe this tomato precisely we use an abstraction so we can think about it so we can talk about it. And we do that also when we use URLs. Those are frequently used as a short name for some human intellectual content. And we build all of our civilization, other than on bricks, on human intellectual content. And so we currently have system with URLs where the structure we are building our civilization out of is the worst kind of melting plasticine imaginable. And that is a big problem. ES: And you would argue a different name-space structure, involving... properly... JA: I think there is a fundamental confusion, an overloading of the current URL. ES: Yep. Absolutely. JA: So, on the one hand we have live dynamic services and organizations... well there's three things. Live dynamic services. Organizations that run those services, so that you are referring to a hierarchy. You are referring to a system of control. An organization, a government, that represents an organized evolving group. And on the other hand you have artefacts. You have human intellectual artefacts that have the ability to be completely independent from any system of human control. They are out there in the Platonic realm somehow. And shouldn't in fact be referred to by an organization. They should be referred to in a way that is intrinsic to the intellectual content, that arises out of the intellectual content! I think that is an inevitable and very important way forward, and where this... where I saw that this was a problem was dealing with a man by the name of Nahdmi Auchi. A few years ago was listed by one of the big business magazines in the UK as the fifth richest man in the UK. In 1980 left Iraq. He'd grown rich under Saddam Hussein's oil industry. And is alleged by the Italian press to be involved in a load of arms trading there, he has over two hundred companies run out of his Luxembourg holding unit. And several that we discovered in Panama. He had infiltrated the British Labour political establishment to the degree that the 20th business birthday in London he was given a painting signed by 146 members Commons including Tony Blair. He's the same guy who was the principal financier of Tony Rezko. Tony Rezko was the financier and fundraiser of Rod Blagoyevich, from Chicago. Convicted of corruption. Tony Rezko has been convicted of corruption. And Barack Obama. He was the intermediary who helped Barack Obama buy one of his houses and then the money not directly for the house but it bouyed up Tony Rezko's finances came from that... [indistinct]. So during the - this is detail, but it will get to a point. During the 2008 presidential primaries a lot of attention was turned to Barack Obama by the US press, unsurprisingly. And so it started to look into his fundraisers, and discovered Tony Rezko, and then they just started to turn their eyes towards Nadhmi Auchi. Auchi then hired Carter Ruck, a rather notorious firm of London libel solicitors, whose founder, Carter Ruck, has been described as doing for freedom of speech what the Boston strangler did for door to door salesmen. [laughter] JA: And he started writing letters to all of the London papers who had records of his 2003 extradition to France and conviction for corruption in France over the Elf-Acquitaine scandal. Where he had been involved in taking kickbacks on selling the invaded Kuwaiti governments' oil refineries in order to fund their operations while Iraq had occupied it. So the Guardian pulled three articles from 2003. So they were five years old. They had been in the Guardian's archive for 5 years. Without saying anything. If you go to those URLs you will not see "removed due to legal threats." You will see "page not found." And one from the Telegraph. And a bunch from some American publications. And bloggers, and so on. Important bits of history, recent history, that were relevant to an ongoing presidential campaign in the United States were pulled out of the intellectal record. They were also pulled out of the Guardian's index of articles. So why? The Guardian's published in print, and you can go to the library and look up those articles. They are still there in the library. How would you know that they were there in the library? To look up, because they are not there in the Guardian's index. Not only have they ceased to exist, they have ceased to have ever existed. Which is the modern implementation of Orwell's dictum that he controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. Because the past is stored physically in the present. All records of the past. This issue of preserving politically salient intellectual content while it is under attack is central to what WikiLeaks does -- because that is what we are after! We are after those bits that people are trying to suppress, because we suspect, usually rightly, that they're expending economic work on suppressing those bits because they perceive that they are going to induce some change. JC: So it's the evidence of the suppression that you look for in order to determine value? JA: Yeah, that is a very good - not precisely - but it is a very good... JC: Well, tell me precisely. Ha ha. JA: Well, it's not precise... it's not always right. It's a very suggestive... ES: It's not perfect! JA: It's not perfect. It is a very suggestive signal that the people who know the information best - ie. the people who wrote it - are spending economic work in preventing it going into the historical record, preventing it going into the public. Why spend so much work doing that? It's more efficient to just let everyone have it. You don't have to spend time guarding it, but also you are more efficient in terms of your organization because all the positive unintended consequences of the information going around can come out. So... JC: No no no, I wanted water, but Eric took mine. Ha ha. JA: So we selectively go after the information, and that information is selectively suppressed inside organizations and very frequently if it is a powerful group as soon as someone tries to publish it it is also suppressed. ES: So, just, I want to know a bit more about the technology. So in this structure, you basically have a, you basically can put up a new front very quickly and you have stored replicas that are distributed. One of the questions I have is how do you decide which ISPs... JA: OK. That's a very good question. ES:Yeah, it is a pretty complicated question. JA: Yeah, so I will give you an example of how not to choose them. So we dealt with a case in the Cacos islands where there was a great little group called the TCI journal. The Turks and Cacos Islands Journal, which is sort of a best use case of the internet. So who are they? Well they are a bunch of legal reformers, logically minded people in the Turks and Cacos islands, who lived there, who saw that overseas property developers were coming in and somehow getting crowned land, very cheaply and building big high rises on it and so on. They were campaigning for good governance and trying to expose these people. It's a cla**ic best use case for the internet. Cheap publication means that we can have many more types of publishers. Which means that you can have self subsidizing publishers. So you can have people that are able to publish purely for ideological reasons or for altruistic reasons, because the costs of altruism in relation to publishing are not so high that you cannot do it. They were hounded out of the Turks and Caicos islands pretty quickly. And they moved their servers to India. The Turkish property developer they had been busy exposing then hired correspondent lawyers in London who hired correspondent lawyers in India who hounded them out of their ISP there, they then moved to Malaysia, they got hounded out same deal there. The ISP, they became non profitable to the ISP as soon as the legal letters started coming in. They went to the US, and once they were in the US their US ISP didn't fold - they picked one of the better ones - and it didn't collapse as fast. However it was noticed that they were using a Gmail address. The editors were anonymous because of the threats. Who was the responsible party? It was anonymous, although their columnists often were not. And so a suit was filed in California, and as part of filing suit they started issuing subpoenas. They issued a subpoena for Gmail. And the result was that Gmail... Google told them that they had to come to California to defend, otherwise it would be handed over. These are little guys in the Turks and Caicos Islands trying to stop corruption in their country against property developer with hundreds of millions. How can they go to California to fight off a libel suit, to fight off a subpoena which is part of a bogus libel suit? Well, of course they can't go. We managed to arrange some lawyers for them and there just happened to be a nice little bit of the California statute code that addressed this precise situation which is when someone publishes something and then a subpoena is issued to try and get their identity--you can't do it and you've got to pay costs. That was a nice little legal hook that someone had introduced. ES: The problem is.. JA: And Google didn't send any lawyers to help them either! JC: Yeah, we guessed... [indistinct] entertainment industry in California. JA: That's an example of what happens if you have pretty bright guys; they had a good Indian technical guy. They had bright political guys. You have a decent technical guy, you have decent political guys, you come together to try and fix corruption in your country using the internet as a publishing mechanism, what happens? You are hounded, from one end of the earth to the other! These guys were lucky enough that they had enough resources that they could survive this hounding, and they ended up finding some friends and settling into a position where they are alright. For us this was a matter of looking at what ISPs had survived pressure, also because I was connected to this role of politics and technology and anticensorship for a long time and I knew some of the players. So we had friends at ISPs, within the ISPs, that if you like we had already ideologically infiltrated so we knew that they would fight in our corner if there was a request come in and we knew if there was a decent chance that subpoenas were served, even with a gag order, we'd soon find out about it. So how can someone do it who is not in that world. Well the answer is, not easily. You can look at ISPs that WikiLeaks has used or is currently using, or that the Pirate Bay has used, or other groups that are tremendously under attack. In the case of this little ISP, and it is often a little ISP that is fighting, take the little ISP PRQ in Sweden that was founded by Gottfried, whose nickname is Anakata, he is one of the technical brains behind the Pirate Bay, so they had developed a niche industry, also Bahnhof an ISP in Sweden of dealing with refugee publishers, and that is the correct word for it, the correct phrase for it, that they are publishing refugees. They had at that time other than us Malaysia Today, which had to flee, the American Homeowner's Association, which had to flee -- from property developers in the United States, the Cavatz Centre, a Caucasian, a Caucus news center which is constantly under attack by the Russians. In fact PRQ was raided several times by the Swedish government under pressure from the Russian government. The Rick Ross institute on destructive cults, an American based outfit had been sued out of America by Scientology and so on.