Julian Assange in Berkeley
by zunguzungu
This is from a forum Julian Assange participated in when he was in Berkeley in April of this year. It’s quite illuminating — after his initial somewhat unfortunate effort at humor — sufficiently illuminating, in fact, that I’ve transcribed it and pasted the transcript below.
Moderator: The question has to do with the shift, alleged shift at Wikileaks from simply posting the material, having it crowdsourced, and people interpreting it, to actually interpreting what it means. Is that a change?
Julian Assange: No. That’s part of the right-wing reality distortion field (some laughs in audience). Mother Jones has had some changes in the past few years.
No, there hasn’t been a change, whatsoever. Although of course it was our hope that, initially, that because we had vastly more material than we could possibly go through, if we just put it out there, people would summarize it themselves. That very interestingly didn’t happen. Quite an extraordinary thing.
Our initial idea — which never got implemented — our initial idea was that, look at all those people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that they’re working on. Surely, if you give them a fresh classified document about the human rights atrocities in Falluja, that the rest of the world has not seen before, that, you know, that’s a secret document, surely all those people that are busy working on articles about history and mathematics and so on, and all those bloggers that are busy pontificating about the abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries and other human rights disasters, who are complaining that they can only respond to the NY Times, because they don’t have sources of their own, surely those people will step forward, given fresh source material and do something.
No. It’s all bullshit. It’s ALL bullshit. In fact, people write about things, in general (if it’s not part of their career) because they want to display their values to their peers, who are already in the same group. Actually, they don’t give a fuck about the material. That’s the reality.
So, very early on, we understood from experiences like this, that we would have to at least give summaries of the material we were releasing — at least summaries — to get people to pick it up, to get journalists to pick it up to get them to dig deeper. And if we didn’t have summaries to give a piece context, it would just fall into the gutter and never be seen again.
Moderator: The raw data…
Julian Assange: You cannot do it. It will just fall into the gutter. In cases where I’ve understood the material is more complex, or other people in our group have understood the material is more complex (especially militrary material which has lots of acronyms), you understand, it’s not even enough to do a summary. You have to do an article, or we have to liaise with other journalists to give the material to them, some sort of exclusive basis, or semi-exclusive basis, to get them to extract it into easily understandable human readable form. Otherwise it goes nowhere.
But. Unlike other organizations, we always release the full source material at the same time. The summary is some sort of introduction, or the articles we do are based upon the raw source material. So everything we do is like science. It is checkable, independently checkable, because the information which has informed our conclusion is there. Just like scientific papers which are based on experimental data must make their experimental data available to other scientists and to the public, if they want their papers to be published. It’s our philosophy that raw source material must be made available so that conclusions can be checkable, and that’s what we did with this video.
But, we’re also, we’re an activist organization. The method is transparency, the goal is justice. Part of the method is journalism. But it is our end-goal to achieve justice, and it’s our sources’ goals, usually, to also achieve justice. So, when they give us material, what we promise is not just that we will protect them, but we will try and get maximum impact from the material. Whether that’s working with other journalists, whether that’s summarizing things ourselves, in the case of the video, whether that’s putting context in the initial part of the video, even if we then also provide the full thing.
zunguzungu 
Julian Assange is a genius. I understand him fully and know that his intention was not to kill our troops or endanger lives. Those acts are being performed by the United States and her allies in Europe. It is raw data he is uncovering just like he said and it means nothing to nobody unless they put it in a frame of reference. He has done no harm but wounding the stature of a secret American espionage project that spelled out exactly how they were going to conquer the entire world. The stuff Assange turned up has to be framed as it were like a picture puzzle and it means not much in it’s multitude of billions of particles. Truly science at work and he needs people to put the picture together and I support his efforts and wish I had the skills that are needed to do this essential task. When it is done perhaps it can stop the American war machine that keeps on grinding up human souls.
very true!
If anyone is interested, the full forum is posted here: http://fora.tv/2010/04/18/Logan_Symposium_The_New_Initiatives
I’ve been following your twitter, and I’m not sure to what extent the distinction between transparency and justice as a goal are. Assange believes that secrecy leads to abuse of power, so he is using ‘leaks’ as a means of crippling unjust non-transparent organizations. He likely doesn’t personally care if USG or any other ‘conspiracy’ becomes more transparent, but he cares about exposing secrets that he believes are “of significant public ethical, historical or diplomatic interest”(quote from the forum posted above).
[…] on Julian Assange in Berkeley for a video and transcript in which Assange explains his relationship with the press and how he […]
Two points.
Assange’s complaint about crowdsourcing the Wikipedians is a little misguided. Wikipedia principles are not compatible with Wikileaks. Take ‘verifiability’, ‘no original material’, or ‘neutral point of view’… In reality, they are in direct opposition to the way Wikileaks operates. On the other hand, the content published by Wikileaks eventually finds its way to Wikipedia, with the “reliable source” media as the channel inbetween. I think the difference in their approach comes down to their understanding of ‘the common’ and what should be linked to it. Couple of days ago i wrote an essay touching this topic, for download here (still under construction, there is a rather abrupt end to it, and also the excluded/common dynamics has to be expanded, eg. in light of Habermas’ communicative/strategic action Andrew mentioned in comment two entries back).
And secondly, “people write because they want to display their values to their peers” argument is true for instance in case of “Operation Leakspin“, which followed the Anonymous’ DDOSes couple of days ago, when the (semi)anonymous crowd began diving into the raw data of published leaks, producing the very summaries Assange complained about.. They do give a fuck about the material here or here.
“Actually, they don’t give a fuck about the material.” It’s sad but (mostly) true.
I spent years blogging against Bush, Howard, Blair, Iraq, etc. The handful of people who really cared seemed to end up with mental health issues because of the stress – facing a world where the worst side of human nature is nearly always on display. As a society, we urgently need to reconsider our values, and what we teach our kids. Look at Climate Change, eg,…
Conservatives have an unimpeachable argument.
it goes like this–
we are subjected to the Tyranny of the Stupid until the demographic timer goes off.
the right has an unimpeachable argument.
Conservative “elites”—we will give you taxcuts, benefits, and selfesteem for your cherished but retarded ideas like creationism, homophobia, racism, fetal personhood and climatology denial, and you will never have to say you’re sorry for fucking up the country.
and we will painlessly balance the budget.
Liberal elites—but it is mathematically impossible to give tax cuts, benefits AND balance the budget.
Conservative “elites”—LOOK! the libruuls think you are stupid.
that is a “foolproof argument”, and i use the systems definition of foolproof as “inaccessible to the user”.
Absolutely true.
Aaron, everything Assange does and says conforms to a purpose.
Pardon me for rudely expressing my bewildered outrage yet again.
Assange has deployed a field test of a prototype closed information systems killer.
It is running right naow, and the US gov cannot shut it off.
The slow drip drip drip of the diplo cables is designed to induce paranoia infection and frag or freeze the OODA loops with exponential cognitive secrecy tax.
It appears to me to be working as intended.
Assange expects that America will become a police state on its way to non-linear system collapse.
The other thing no one is talking about, is that this is the end of conservatism.
Conservatism is the idea that human nature is immutable…so the conservative elite just farms their base for votes by telling them its their right to be racist anti-intellectual homophobes and that “commonsense” > intelligence.
no, they just ignore the substance of the material with factblocking and backfire effect.
“the right-wing reality distortion field”
Assange is fragging the conservative information cocoon — by releasing the diplo cables.
He is eroding the mutual trust benefit relationship of the global oligarchs…inciting other nations to suspect the powerless hyperpowers intent.
The reason the US was so much more vulnerable to WL attack…as opposed to say China…..is that the US pretends to not be evil.
[…] Julian Assange in Berkeley. zunguzungu.wordpress.com […]
For whatever it’s worth, the question Assange answers, and which Lowell Bergman repeats, was posed by an audience member who is an editor from Mother Jones (Dave Gilson, I think). The laughs from the audience after Assange mentions a right-wing distortion field are the result of the questioner identifying himself as being part of the famously liberal magazine. Hence Assange’s follow-up about Mother Jones changing in the last few years.
There was a little dust-up between Mother Jones and Wikileaks this spring, sparked by the magazine’s publication of the article Inside Wikileaks’ Leak Factory.
[…] journalism and the limitations of toughtful writers to apply themselves solely to material – as does Assange – but I just want to say that Brady’s piece is not a flash in the […]
In fact, people write about things, in general (if it’s not part of their career) because they want to display their values to their peers, who are already in the same group. Actually, they don’t give a fuck about the material. That’s the reality.
Well, I cry “bullshit” on that. Sounds like Mr. Entitlement Anarchist is too impatient and too willing to cut corners and looking for excuses. He should be willing to put all the material up and let people work on it — he’s yet another fake opensourcenike suddenly finding that the “Here Comes Everybody” of Clay Shirky either doesn’t work fast enough to suit *his* ego and vanity or it works too well and brings “the wrong sort” (elsewhere he complains about loons sending in UFO stories to the site).
It’s also not true that #cableleaks has involved him and his colleagues “always” simultaneously releasing the material. Again, all you have to do is actually follow some cables and subjects closely as I do on Eurasia to see that in fact he/his colleagues seem to be doling out certain pieces to the Guardian, Le Monde and others, letting them have the scoop first, then LATER (sometimes days later or weeks later) publishing the cable. There are also cables that have been published and not covered by the Guardian. The Guardian interactive map does not lead to pages with ALL the cables. They put those only in connections to stories, maybe for traffic/ad reasons, who knows, and then not all the cables.
The open question is why these theorists of transparency and the grand, disintermediated “now” are holding back 250,000 cables and doling them out as it suits them to get this or that sensation, sometimes timed to world events.
Why does the Mastercard cable out of Moscow only come out on the day Mastercard is attacked by 4chan? And so on.
The only difference between WikiLeaks and Wikipedia is truth! I question anything I find in Wikipedia, even for grade school kids they will find better source material elsewhere and be more introspective about what they are quoting! Julian and his WikiLeaks is a source of impeccable accuracy and cannot be questioned with such scrutiny as these writers here suggest. Wikipedia does not take the time to sort through all the entries to it’s vast compendium of information so research with caution. Government leaks are pretty accurate and I trust them over anonymous entries! You should too if you care to be accurate from now on!
Thanks , great blog . Good Information .
Cheers Bill
[…] the data and found the stuff that was damning. That looks a lot like what Julian Assange had said WikiLeaks was trying to achieve but which it had given up trying to do when people didn’t […]
[…] the data and found the stuff that was damning. That looks a lot like what Julian Assange had said WikiLeaks was trying to achieve but which it had given up trying to do when people didn’t step up […]
[…] the data and found the stuff that was damning. That looks a lot like what Julian Assange had said WikiLeaks was trying to achieve but which it had given up trying to do when people didn’t step up […]
the best for site in here
[…] of Wikileaks (start here) — but he misses something I think is critically important. I find this transcript of Assange’s Berkely video a lot more informative than the famous “state terrorism” essay Greenwald cites. From […]
[…] in full, was that open source news production doesn’t work. “Our initial idea,” he said at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, “was that, look at all those people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that […]
[…] in full, was that open source news production doesn’t work. “Our initial idea,” he said at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, “was that, look at all those people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that […]
[…] J., 2010. Zunguzungu. [Online]Available at: https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/julian-assange-in-berkeley/%5BAccessed 12 March […]