Julian Assange, Eric Schmidt - Part 2: Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt lyrics

ES: So publishing means the question of the site itself? And making the material public? JA: Yeah. Making the primary source material public. That is what I mean by publishing. ES: So the first step was to make that correctly. JA: It was clear to me that all over the world publishing is a problem. And... Whether that is through self censorship or overt censorship. ES: Sorry, just you're gonna have to... is that because of fear of retribution by the governments, you know? Or all... JA: It's mostly self censorship. In fact I would say it's probably the most significant one, historically, has been economic censorship. Where it is simply not profitable to publish something. There is no market for it. That is I describe as a censorship pyramid. It's quite interesting. So, on the top of the pyramid there are the murders of journalists and publishers. And the next level there is political attacks on journalists and publishers. So you think, what is a legal attack? A legal attack is simply a delayed use of coercive force. ES: Sure. JA: Which doesn't necessarily result in murder but may result in incarceration or a**et seizure. So the next level down, and remember the volume... the area of the pyramid.... volume of the pyramid! The volume of the pyramid increases significantly as you go down from the peak. And in this example that means that the number of acts of censorship also increases as you go down. So there are very few people who are murdered, there are a few people who suffer legal... there is a few number of public legal attacks on individuals and corporations, and then at the next level there is a tremendous amount of self censorship, and this self censorship occurs in part because people don't want to move up into the upper parts of the pyramid. They don't want to come to legal attacks or uses of coercive force. But they also don't want to be k**ed. ES: Right. I see. JA: So that discourages people from behaving... and then there are other forms of self censorship that are concerned about missing out on business deals, missing out on promotions and those are even more significant because they are lower down the pyramid. At the very bottom - which is the largest volume - is all those people who cannot read, do not have access to print, do not have access to fast communications or where there is no profitable industry in providing that. Okay. So we decided to deal with the top of this censorship pyramid. The top two sections: the threats of violence, and the delayed threats of violence that are represented by the legal system. In some ways that is the hardest case. In some ways it is the easiest case. It is the easiest case because it is clear cut when things are being censored there, or not. It is also the easiest because the volume of censorship is relatively small, even if the per event significance is very high. So in... Before WikiLeaks had... although of course I had some previous political connections of my own from other activities, we didn't have that many friends. We didn't have significant political allies. And we didn't have a worldwide audience that was looking to see how we were doing. So we took the position that we would need to have a publishing system whose only defense was anonymity. That is it had no financial defense, it had no legal defense, and it had no political defense. Its defenses were purely technical. So that meant a system that was distributed at its front with many domain names and a fast ability to change those domain names. A caching system, and at the back tunnelling through the Tor network to hidden servers... ES: So... if I could talk just a little bit about this, so... You could switch DNS... your website names very quickly, you use the tunnelling to get back... to communicate among these replicas? Or this is for distribution? JA: We had sacrificial front nodes, that were very fast to set up, very quick to set up, that we nonetheless did place in relatively hospitable jurisdictions like Sweden. And those fast front nodes were fast because there was no... very few hops between them and the people reading them. That's... an important lesson that I had learned from things that I did before, that being a Sherman tank is not always an advantage, because you are not manouevrable and you are slow. A lot of the protection for publishers is publishing quickly. You get the information out quickly it is very well read, the incentive for people to go after you in relation to that specific piece of information is actually zero. There may be incentives for them to go after you to teach a lesson to other people who might defy their authority or teach a future lesson to your organization about defiance of authority. ES: So, again, in constructing the argument you were concerned that governments or whatever would attack the front ends of this thing through whatever... denial of service attacks or blocking, basically filtering them out, which is essentially is commonly done. So an important aspect of this was to always be available. JA: Always be available in one particular way or another. Now that's not a.. it's a battle that we have mostly won but we haven't completely won it. Within a few weeks the Chinese government had handed us to their ban list. We had hundreds of domain names, of various sorts, the domain names that were registered with very very large DNS providers, so if there was IP level based filtering it would whack out another five hundred thousand domains and that would create a political back pressure that would undo it. However DNS based filtering still hits us in China because the most common names - the ones that are closest to "WikiLeaks" - the name that people can communicate easily - they are all filtered by the Chinese government. ES: Of course they are. JA: And any domain with "WikiLeaks" anywhere in it, no matter where it is, is filtered. So that means there has to be a variant that they haven't yet discovered. But people... the variant has to be known widely enough for people to go there. So there is a catch 22. ES: That's a structural problem with the naming of the internet, but the Chinese would simply do content filtering on you. JA: Well, HTTPS worked for about a year and a half. ES: Okay.