Sir David Frost Interviews Julian Assange Upon Release from Jail

in Current Affairs | December 23rd, 2010 Leave a Comment

Let me preface things by saying this will likely be our last WikiLeaks post for a while. Don’t want to slip into WikiLeaks overkill. With that said…

Yesterday, Sir David Frost landed the first television interview with Julian Assange since his release from a London jail. The 24 minute interview aired on Al Jazeera English (where Frost hosts a show called Frost Over the World) and pretty quickly they dive into some important questions: Do governments have the right to keep state secrets? And do media organizations have the right to divulge such secrets? Assuming so, where (if anywhere) must journalists draw the line? Why has WikiLeaks recently taken aim at the United States? Is it fair to characterize WikiLeaks as an anarchic organization? The list of questions goes on, including ones delving into Assange’s legal problems. Thanks for @eacion for the heads up on this one…

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Who is Julian Assange? Three Profiles of the WikiLeaks Founder

in Current Affairs | December 2nd, 2010 5 Comments

Trying to make heads or tails of WikiLeaks, which just released 250,000 US diplomatic cables this week? Then you may want to spend some time with one article and one video. First,?The New Yorker published this summer an extensive profile of Julian Assange, the driving force behind WikiLeaks. A key passage explaining Assange’s world view appears below, and you can get the full profile right here. Next up, we have Chris Anderson, the head of TED, in conversation Assange. The interview, running 20 minutes, tells you essentially?“Why the World Needs WikiLeaks.” And then why not add to the list Forbes’ lengthy interview with Assange, published earlier this week. (Thanks Avi for that.)

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

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