The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who's reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED's Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished -- and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.
At the start of Session 12 of TEDGlobal 2010, Chris Anderson announced a mystery guest. “There’s a site some of you may know, called WikiLeaks.” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange steps onstage for a surprise appearance at TEDGlobal 2010, in a Q&A with Chris.
We learned how WikiLeaks works: “We’re using state-of-the-art encryption and anonymizers to get information. And we get submissions by mail, regular postal mail. If we happen to find out the identity of a source, we destroy that information.”
[Corrected quotes from TED's official transcript follow] Chris asked about the recent controversy over leaked diplomatic cables. (WikiLeaks has tweeted that it was not given the documents.) Chris asks: “If you did receive thousands of U.S. embassy diplomatic cables …” Assange replies: “We would have released them. Yeah.”
Why? “Because these sort of things reveal what the true state of, say, Arab governments are like, the true human-rights abuses in those governments. If you look at declassified cables, that’s the sort of material that’s there.”
Watch now on TED.com: Julian Assange’s Q&A with Chris Anderson. (To see the clickable interactive transcript, click on the small red text to the right of the player window that says “Open interactive transcript.”)
After he spoke, Assange spoke briefly to attending press. Some reports:
Design Mind: “Julian Assange of WikiLeaks: Troublemaker or Hero?”
Internet activist Julian Assange serves as spokesperson for WikiLeaks, a controversial, volunteer-driven website that publishes and comments on leakedYou could say Australian-born Julian Assange has swapped his long-time interest in network security flaws for the far-more-suspect flaws of even bigger targets: governments and corporations. Since his early 20s, he has been using network technology to prod and probe the vulnerable edges of administrative systems, but though he was a computing hobbyist first (in 1991 he was the target of hacking charges after he accessed the computers of an Australian telecom), he's now taken off his "white hat" and launched a career as one of the world's most visible human-rights activists.
He calls himself "editor in chief." He travels the globe as its spokesperson. Yet Assange's part in WikiLeaks is clearly dicier than that: he's become the face of creature that, simply, many powerful organizations would rather see the world rid of. His Wikipedia entry says he is "constantly on the move," and some speculate that his role in publishing decrypted US military video has put him in personal danger. A controversial figure, pundits debate whether his work is reckless and does more harm than good. Amnesty International recognized him with an International Media Award in 2009.
Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He wrote Strobe, the first free and open-source port scanner, and contributed to the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier.
"WikiLeaks has had more scoops in three years than the Washington Post has had in 30."Clay Shirky documents alleging government and corporate misconduct.
