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Transcript of secret

meeting between Julian

Assange and Google CEO

Eric Schmidt

Friday April 19, 2013

On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took

place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whowas under house arrest in rural UK at the time and

Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Also in attendance wasJared Cohen, a former Secretary

of State advisor to Hillary Clinton, Scott Malcomson,

Director of Speechwriting for Ambassador Susan Rice

at the US State Department and current

Communications Director of the International Crisis

Group, and Lisa Shields, Vice President of the Councilon Foreign Relations.

Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to

discuss ideas for "The New Digital World", their

forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.

We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of

the meeting; a close reading, particularly of the latter

half, is revealing.

You can download the recording here(ogg)

Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assa... http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assang

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[beginning of tape]

Well do you want us to start eating?ES

Well, we can do both.JA

Yeah, is that ok?ES

So this is... what's the date?JA

June 23rdLS

...June 23rd. This is a recording between

Julian Assange, Eric Schmidt and...?JA

Lisa ShieldsLS

...Lisa Shields. To be used in a book by

Eric Schmidt, due to be published by

Knopf in October 2012. I have been given

a guarantee that I will see the transcript

and will be able to adjust it for accuracy

and clarity.

JA

Can we start... I want to talk a little aboutThor. Right. The sort of, the whole Navy

network and...ES

Tor or Thor?JA


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Yeah, actually I mean Tor. Uh...ES

And Odin as well.JA

That's right, sorry. Tor, uh, and the Navy

network, and I don't actually understand

how all of that worked. And the reason I'm

mentioning this is I'm...I'm fundamentally

interested in what happens with that

technology as it evolves. Right. And so,

the problem I would assert, is that if

you're trying to receive data you need to

have a guarantee of anonymity to the

sender, you need to have a secure channel

to the recipient, the recipient needs to be

replicated, you know... What I'd like you to

do is if you could just talk a bit about that

architecture, what you did in WikiLeaks

technically, you know, with the sort of the

technical innovations that were needed

and maybe also what happens. You know,how does it evolve? Technology always

evolves.

ES

Let me first frame this. I looked at

something that I had seen going on with

the world. Which is that I thought there

were too many unjust acts.

JA

OKES

And I wanted there to be more just acts,

and fewer unjust acts. And one can sort ofJA


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say, well what are your philosophical

axioms for this? And I say I do not need to

consider them. This is simply my

temperament. And it is an axiom because

it is that way. And so that avoids, then,

getting into further unhelpful discussionsabout why you want to do something. It is

enough that I do. So in considering how

unjust acts are caused and what tends to

promote them and what promotes just

acts I saw that human beings are basically

invariant. That is that their inclinations

and biological temperament haven't

changed much over thousands of years

and so therefore the only playing field left

is: what do they have? And what do they

know? And "have" is something that is

fairly hard to influence, so that is what

resources do they have at their disposal?

And how much energy they can harness,

and what are the supplies and so on. But

what they know can be affected in a

nonlnear way because when one personconveys information to another they can

convey on to another and another and so

on in a way that nonlinear and so you can

affect a lot of people with a small amount

of information. And therefore you can

change the behaviour of many people with

a small amount of information. So the

question then arises as to what kinds of

information will produce behaviour which

is just? And disincentivise behaviour

which is unjust? So all around the world

there are people observing different parts

of what is happening to them locally. And


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there are other people that are receiving

information that they haven't observed

first hand. And in the middle there are

people who are involved in moving

information from the observers to the

people who will act on information. Theseare three separate problems that are all

coupled together. I felt that there was a

difficulty in taking observations and

putting them in an efficient way into a

distribution system which could then get

this information to people who could act

upon it. And so you can argue that

companies like Google are involved, for

example, in this "middle" business of

taking... of moving information from

people who have it to people who want it.

The problem I saw was that this first step

was crippled. And often the last step as

well when it came to information that

governments were inclined to censor. We

can look at this whole process as the

Fourth Estate. Or just as produced by theFourth Estate. And so you have some kind

of... pipeline... and... So I have this

description which is... which is partly

derived from my experiences in quantum

mechanics about looking at the flow of

particular types of information which will

effect some change in the end. The

bottleneck to me appeared to me to be

primarily in the acquisition of information

that would go on to produce changes that

were just. In a Fourth Estate context the

people who acquire information are

sources. People who work information and


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distribute it are journalists and publishers.

And people who act on it... is everyone. So

that's a high level construct, but of course

it then comes down to practically how do

you engineer a system that solves that

problem? And not just a technical system,but a total system. So WikiLeaks was and

is an attempt - although still very young -

at a total system.

For all three phases?ES

To deal with... not for all three phases but

for the political component, the

philosophical component and the

engineering component in pushing out

first component. Politically that means

anonymizing and protecting... Sorry.

Technically that means anonymizing and

protecting sources in a wide variety of

ways. Politically that also means

protecting them politically, andincentivizing them in a political manner.

Saying that their work is valuable, and

encouraging people to take it up. And then

there is also a legal aspect. What are the

best laws that can be created in the best

jurisdictions to operate this sort of stuff

from? And practical everyday legal

defense. On the technical front, our first

prototype was engineered for a very

adverse situation where publishing would

be extremely difficult and our only

effective defense in publishing would be

anonymity. Where sourcing is difficult. As

JA


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it still currently is for the national security

sector. And where internally we had a very

small and completely trusted team.

So publishing means the question of the

site itself? And making the materialpublic?

ES

Yeah. Making the primary source material

public. That is what I mean by publishing.JA

So the first step was to make that

correctly.ES

It was clear to me that all over the world

publishing is a problem. And... Whether

that is through self censorship or overt

censorship.

JA

Sorry, just you're gonna have to... is that

because of fear of retribution by the

governments, you know? Or all...

ES

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 themurders 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.

JA


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Sure.ES

Which doesn't necessarily result in

murder but may result in incarceration or

asset 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, thereare 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

killed.

JA

Right. I see.ES

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

JA


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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 thiscensorship 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 waslooking 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...


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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?

ES

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.

JA

So, again, in constructing the argumentyou were concerned that governments or

whatever would attack the front ends of

this thing through whatever... denial of

service attacks or blocking, basically

ES


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filtering them out, which is essentially is

commonly done. So an important aspect of

this was to always be available.

Always be available in one particular way

or another. Now that's not a.. it's a battlethat 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.

JA

Of course they are.ES

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.

JA

That's a structural problem with the

naming of the internet, but the ChineseES


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[background noise. JC entering]

would simply do content filtering on you.

Well, HTTPS worked for about a year and

a half.JA

Okay.ES

Worked quite well actually. And then

changing up IPs, because they were... theChinese internet filtering system is quite

baroque, and they have evolved it...

sometimes they do things manually and

sometimes they do it in an automated way,

in terms of adding IPs to the list based on

domain names, and then we did... we had

a quite interesting battle where we saw

that they were looking up our IPs, and we

see that these requests came from a

certain DNS block range in China.

Whenever we saw that we just then

returned...

JA

Ha ha ha ha ha. That's clever. Ha ha ha ha

ha.ES

...different IPs. I was actually thinking wecould return Public Security Bureau IPs!JA

This is Jared Cohen, by the way.ES


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[Chatter]

[chatter]

That's alright!JA

We're actually, we could use...ES

It's a useful day to drive!JA

We've actually been having a perfectly

wonderful time.ES

I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure.SM

Why don't you just. Scott sit there, and

then you sit here, next to me...LS

Are you joining us?SM

Julian was kind enough... we... did not

bring a tape recorder!LS

Ha ha ha ha ha...

ESQuite embarrassing that you're you ask to

interview someone and you have to

borrow a tape recorder.

LS


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[laughter]

Um!JC

A friend of mine did an interview...JA

Hi!LS

...in Fiji, the staff of... during General

Rabuka's coup. Where he had General

Rabuka's second in command admit, on

tape, that the CIA had paid him off...

JA

Wow.JC

... and he got back. And he was like, yes!

This is the story of the decade! And the

tape had failed. I have a few of these. You

should always...

JA

Always always have your own...JC

For Scott and Jared, we spent a fair

amount of time just sort of chatting about

Google, and I went up to introduce Lisa... I

failed to properly articulate what abrilliant book we are working on.

ES

Ha ha ha!LS


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JA playing with Tomato on table],

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...

...because it takes too long. And because it

takes too long to describe this tomatoprecisely 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.

JA

And you would argue a different

name-space structure, involving...

properly...

ES

I think there is a fundamental confusion,

an overloading of the current URL.JA

Yep. Absolutely.ES


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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 bereferred 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 severalthat 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

JA


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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 from2003. 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


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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 theyare going to induce some change.

So it's the evidence of the suppression

that you look for in order to determine

value?

JC

Yeah, that is a very good - not precisely -

but it is a very good...JA

Well, tell me precisely. Ha ha.JC

Well, it's not precise... it's not always

right. It's a very suggestive...JA

It's not perfect!ES

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

JA


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information going around can come out.

So...

No no no, I wanted water, but Eric took

mine. Ha ha.JC

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.

JA

So, just, I want to know a bit more aboutthe 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...

ES

OK. That's a very good question.

JAYeah, it is a pretty complicated question.

ES

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,

JA


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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 exposethese people. It's a classic 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 whohounded 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


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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.

The problem is..ES

And Google didn't send any lawyers to

help them either!JA

Yeah, we guessed... [indistinct]

entertainment industry in California.JC

That's an example of what happens if you

have pretty bright guys; they had a good

Indian technical guy. They had bright

JA


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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 tothe 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 soonfind 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


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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'sAssociation, 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.

Huh huh, huh huh huhJC

Hhm hm hmES

Huh huh. WowJC

Malaysia Today, run by a wonderful guy by

the name of Raja Petra who, he has two

arrest warrants out for him in Malaysia,

he is based in London, but his servers

can't survive in London, they are inSingapore and the United States.

JA

But again, I get the, the, that's [indistinct]

there are sites that participate in this?ES


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Yes, we have some fourteen hundred, but

those are... we have mirrors that are

voluntary as well as

JA

So they basically opt-in mirror sites.

ESThey determine their own risks, we don't

know anything about them, we can't

guarantee that they are all trustworthy,

etc, but they do increase the numbers.

JA

You have been quoted in the press as

saying that there is a much larger store ofinformation that is encrypted and

distributed. Is it distributed in those sorts

of places?

ES

No, that's an open... we openly distribute

backups of... encrypted backups of

materials that we view are highly sensitive

that we are to publish in the coming year.

JA

Got it.ES

Not as some people have said so that we

have a "thermonuclear device" to use on

our opponents. But rather so that there is

very little possibility that that material,

even if we are completely wiped out, will

be taken from the historical record.

JA

So, so and eventually you will reveal the

key that is necessary to decrypt it.ES


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No, ideally, we will never reveal the key.JA

I see.ES

Because there is things, like, so redactions

sometimes need to be done on this

material.

JA

Sure.ES

So it's... our view is that the material is so

significant that even if we released it as is,with no redactions, that the benefits

would outweight the harms. But through

redacting things we can get the harm

down even more.

JA

And I understand that. One more sort of

tactical question for now. So, my simple

explanation is that the tools will get betterfor an anonymous sender send to a

distrustful recipient, and then this

anonymous [noise] your describing. We

will get to the point where the... a very

large amount of people using such

services for all sorts of reasons: truthful,

lying, manipulation, what have you. The

current technology used... basically, like

FTP [indistinct] runners sent to you.

Basically people will FTP something and

then just sort of ship it to you.

ES

No we have... we have lots of differentJA


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that I have about, of the vast increase of...

Yes! So I've...JA

So what are those technologies?ES

The most important one is naming things

properly. If we are able to name some... a

video file or a piece of text in a way that is

intrinsically coupled to the information

there, so that there is no ambiguity-- a

hash is an example of this--but thenthere's variations, maybe you want one

that human beings can actually remember.

Then it permits this information to be

spread in such a way where you don't

have to trust the underlying networks.

And you can flood it.

JA

Why don't you have to trust the underlying

networks?ES

Well because you can sign... you can sign

the hashes.JA

You can sign the name as well as the

content.ES

You can sign the hash.JA

You can sign the hash.ES


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many millions of computers involved in

thee hashtree, and many many entry

points into this hashtree so it is very hard

to censor. And the addressing for content

is on the hash of the content.

Right so you are basically doing the hash

as the address, and you do the addressing

within the namespace to provide... so as

long as you have a signed...

ES

As long as you get the hash...JA

...you can't hide it.ES

Well, there's a question as to you've got a

name of something, you've got a hash, but

what does that tell you. Nothing really,

because it is not really human readable.

So you need another mechanism to get the

fact that that's important to you.

JA

Sure.ES

And that is something like WikiLeaks signs

that, and says that that is...JA

An interesting piece of informationES

...an interesting piece of information, and

we have verified that it is true. But that,

once you feed that information into the

system then it becomes very unclear how

JA


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it got into the system. Well how do you get

rid of it from the system? And if you do get

rid of it, if someone does manage to get

rid of it, you know for sure that it's been

gotten rid of, because the hash doesn't

resolve to anything anymore. Similarly, ifsomeone were to modify it, the hash

changes...

I was just gonna say, why wouldn't they

just rename it, rather than...JC

They can't because the name is

intrinsically coupled to the intellectual

content.

JA

I think the way to explain this... To

summarise the technical idea is... take all

the content in a document, come up with a

number, so if the content is gone, the

number doesn't match, show anything.

And if the content has changed, the

number doesn't compute right anymore.

So it is an interesting property.

ES

Mm hm. So...JC

So...JA

So how far are we from this type of

system?ES

On the publishing end, the magnet links

and so on are starting to come up. There'sJA


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also a very nice little paper that I've seen

in relation to Bitcoin, that... you know

about Bitcoin?

No.ES

Okay, Bitcoin is something that evolved

out of the cypherpunks a couple of years

ago, and it is an alternative... it is a

stateless currency.

JA

Yeah, I was reading about this just

yesterday.JC

And very important, actually. It has a few

problems. But its innovations exceed its

problems. Now there has been innovations

along these lines in many different paths

of digital currencies, anonymous,

untraceable etc. People have been

experimenting with over the past 20

years. The Bitcoin actually has the balanceand incentives right, and that is why it is

starting to take off. The different

combination of these things. No central

nodes. It is all point to point. One does not

need to trust any central mint. If we look

at traditional currencies such as gold, we

can see that they have sort of interesting

properties that make them valuable as a

medium of exchange. Gold is divisible, it is

easy to chop up, actually out of all metals

it is the easiest to chop up into fine

segments. You can test relatively easily

whether it is true or whether it is fake.

JA


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[laughter]

You can take chopped up segments and

you can put them back together by

melting the gold. So that is what makes it

a good medium of exchange and it is also

a good medium of value store, because

you can take it and put it in the groundand it is not going to decay like apples or

steaks. The problems with traditional

digital currencies on the internet is that

you have to trust the mint not to print too

much of it.

And the incentives for the mint to keep

printing are pretty high actually, because

you can print free money. That means you

need some kind of regulation. And if

you're gonna have regulation then who is

going to enforce the regulation, now all of

a sudden you have sucked in the whole

problem of the state into this issue, and

political pushes here and there, and who

can get control of the mint, push it one

way or another, for particular purposes.

Bitcoin instead has an algorithm where

the anyone can create, anyone can be

their own mint. They're basically just

searching for collisions with hashes.. A

simple way is... they are searching for asequence of zero bits on the beginning of

the thing. And you have to randomly

search for, in order to do this. So there is

a lot of computational work in order to do

JA


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this. And each Bitcoin software that is

distributed.. That work algorithmically

increases as time goes by. So the difficulty

in producing Bitcoins becomes harder and

harder and harder as time goes by and it

is built into the system.

Right, right. That's interesting.ES

Just like the difficulty in mining gold

becomes harder and harder and harder

and that is what makes people predict that

there is not going to be a sudden amount

of gold in the market, rather...

JA

To enforce the scarcity...ES

Yeah, to enforce scarcity, and scarcity will

go up as time goes by, and what does that

mean for incentives in going into the

Bitcoin system. That means that you

should get into the Bitcoin system now.

Early. You should be an early adopter.

Because your Bitcoins are going to be

worth a lot of money one day. So once you

have a... and the Bitcoins are just... a

Bitcoin address is just a big hash. It's a

hash of a public key that you generate. So

once you have this hash you can just

advertise it to everyone, and people cansend you Bitcoins, and there is people who

have set up exchanges to convert from

Bitcoin to US dollars and so on. And it

solves a very interesting technical

JA


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[JA using lunch table objects]

problem, which is how do you stop double

spending?

All digital material can be cloned, almost

zero costs, so if you have currency as a

digital string of numbers, how do you stopme... I want to buy this piece of pasta.

Here is my digital currency and, now I

take a copy of it. And now I want to buy

your bit of egg. And then you go... andnow I want to buy your radish! And you

go, what? I've already got that! What's

going on here? There's been some fraud!

So there's a synchronization problem.

Who now has the coin? So there is a point

to point.. a spread network with all these

problems, some points of the network

being faster, some points of the network

being slower, multiple paths of

communication, how do you solve this

synchronization issue about who has the

currency? And so this is to mind actually

the real technical innovation for Bitcoin, it

has done this using some hashtrees and

then a delay time, and then CPU work has

to be done in order to move one thing to

another so information can't spread toofast etc. OK, so, once you have a system of

currency that is easy to use like that, then

you can start to use it for things that you

want to be scarce. What is the example of

JA


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some things that we want to be scarce?

Well, domain names. Names. We want

names to be scarce. We want short names

to be scarce, otherwise if they are not

scarce, if it doesn't take work to get them,

as soon as you have a nice naming system,some arsehole is going to come along and

register every short name themselves.

Right. That's very interesting.ES

So this Bitcoin replacement for DNS is

precisely what I wanted and what I was

theorizing about, which is not a DNS

system, but rather short names... short bit

of text to long bit of text tuple registering

service. Cause that is the abstraction of

domain names and all these problems

solved. Yes, you have some something that

you want to register that is short, and you

want to couple that to something that is

unmemorable and longer. So for example,the first amendment, that phrase, the "US

first amendment", is a very short phrase,

but it expands to a longer bit of text. So

you take the hash of this text, and now you

have got something that is intrinsically

coupled to that which is unmemorable.

But then you can register "US First

Amendment" coupled to the hash. And

that then means you have a structure

where you can tell whether something has

been published or unpublished, you can...

one piece of human intellectual

information can cite another one in a way

JA


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that... can't be manipulated, and if it is

censored the censorship can be found out.

And if one place is censored, well you can

scour the entire world for this hash, and

no matter where you find you know it is

what you wanted precisely!

RightES

So that, in theory, then permits human

beings to build up an intellectual scaffold

where every citation, every reference to

some other part of human intellectual

content, is precise, and can be discovered

if it exists out there anywhere at all, and is

not dependent on any particular

organization. So as a way of publishing

this seems to be the most censorship

resistant manner of publishing possible,

because it is not dependent on any

particular mechanism of publishing. You

can be publishing through the post, youcan be publishing on conventional

websites, you can be publishing using

Bittorrent, whatever, but the naming is

consistent. And same is for... publishing is

also a matter of transferring, you can... all

you then have to do is, if you want to

transfer something anonymously to

someone else, one particular person, you

encrypt the information with their key,

and you publish it.

JA

Are you worried.. basically this entire

system depends on basically irrevocableES


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key structures. Are you worried that the

key structures would fall apart?

Well the hashing, in terms of the naming

part, going to patterns--it doesn't depend

on the key structure at all. In terms of

Bitcoin has its own key structure and

that's an independent thing, there is all

sorts of problems with it. Hackers can

come in and steal keys etc. And the same

problems that you have with cash.

Armored vans are needed to protect the

cash etc. And there are some

enhancements you can use to try andremove the incentives one way or another.

You can introduce a subcurrency with

fixed periods of expense. So you retract

for one week or one day and a merchant

will accept or not accept.

JA

The average person does not understand

that RSA was broken into an awful lot of

private keys involving commerce were

taken,

ES

YesJA

so...ES

The public key structure is a tremendous

problem, so in the same way that domain

name structures are a tremendous

problem. The browser based public key

system that we have for authenticating

JA


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what websites you are going to, it is awful.

It is truly awful. The number of people

that have been licensed to mint keys is so

tremendous.. there's one got bankrupted

and got bought up cheaply by Russian

companies, you can assume, I have beentold actually that VeriSign, by people who

are in the know, although I am not yet

willing to go on the public record, cause I

only have one source, just between you

and me, one source that says that VeriSign

has actually given keys to the US

government. Not all, but a particular key.

That's a big problem with the way things

are authenticated presently. There are

some traditional alternative approaches,

like PGP has a web of trust. I don't think

those things really work. What I think

does work is something close to what SSH

does, and that's probably the way forward.

Which is it is opportunistic key

registration. So there is part of your

interaction, the first time you interact, youregister your key, and then if you have a

few points of keying or some kind of flood

network, then you can see that well lots of

people have seen that key many times in

the past.

And one more technical question, and I

think we should probably, Scott you were

sort of...

ES

I'm ready! Ha ha ha.SM


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When we were sort of chatting initially we

talked about my idea that powering,

mobile phones being powered, is sort of

changing society. A rough summary of

your answer for everybody else is that

people are very much the same and

something big has to change their

behaviour, and this might be one of them,

and you said, you were very interested in

someone building phone to phone

encryption. Can you talk a little bit about,

roughly, the architecture where you would

have a broad open network and you have

person to person encryption. What doesthat mean technically, how would it work,

why is it important. That kind of stuff. I

mean, I think people don't understand any

of this area in my view.

ES

When we were dealing with Egypt we saw

the Mubarak government cut off the

internet and we saw only one - there was

one ISP that quite few of us were involved

in trying to keep its connections open, it

had maybe 6% of the market. Eventually

they cut.. eventually the Mubarak

government also cut off the mobile phone

system. And why is it that that can be

done? People with mobile phones have a

device that can communicate in a radio

spectrum. In a city there is a highdensity... there is always, if you like, a

path between one person and another

person. That is there is always a

continuous path of mobile phones, each

JA


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one can in theory hear the radio of the

other.

You could form a peer to peer network.ES

So in theory you could form a peer to peer

network. Now the way most GSM phones

are being constructed and others is that

they receive on a different frequency to

that which they transmit...

JA

Yes.ES

...and that means that they cannot form

peer to peer networks. They have to go

through base stations. But we're seeing

now that mobile phones are becoming

more flexible in terms of base station

programming. And they need to do this

because they operate in different markets

that have different frequencies. They have

different forms of wireless output, and so

... and also, even if there is not sufficiently

flexible mobile phones, we are seeing that

in the mobile phone aspect, maybe WiMax

is coming along which will give them

greater radius for two way

communications. But also it is getting very

cheap to make your own base station.

There is software now which will run a

base station.

JA

Right, right.ES


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For you. So you can throw these things up

and make your own networks with

conventional mobile phones pretty quickly.

In fact this is what is done to spy, to keep

spying on mobile phones. You set up a

fake base station. And there's vans now,

you can buy these in bulk on the

commercial spy market, to set up a van

and intercept mobile phone calls. During

these revolutionary periods the people

involved in the revolution need to be able

to communicate. They need to be able to

communicate in order to plan quickly and

also to communicate information aboutwhat is happening in their environment

quickly so that they can dynamically adapt

to it and produce the next strategy. Where

you only have the security services being

able to do this, and you turn the mobile

phone system off, the security services

have such an tremendous advantage

compared to people that are trying to

oppose them. If you have a system where

individuals are able to communicate

securely and robustly despite what

security services are doing, then security

services have to give more ground. It's not

that the government is necessarily going

to be overthrown, but rather they have to

make more concessions.

JA

They have their networks. So your

argument that even with these existing

phones they modify them to have peer to

peer encrypted tunnels for voice and data,

ES


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presumably.

Voice is a bit harder. What we did

internally in this prototype I designed was

a -- which only works for medium sized

groups - so a peer to peer flood

UDP-encrypted network -- UDP permits

you to put lots and lots of cover traffic in

cause you can send stuff to random

internet hosts.

JA

Oh, so, oh, so that's clever, so that way

you can't be blocked, right?

ES

Yeah.JA

Because UDP is a single packet, right?

So...ES

Right, so you send it to random internet

hosts and a random internet host doesn'trespond, which is exactly the same thing

as a host that is receiving stuff. And even

structured... and using this you can do

hole punching through firewalls and it

means that normal at home people can

use this. They don't need to have a server.

And it is very light bandwidth, so you can

put it on mobile phones as well. The killer

application is not lots of voice. Rather it is

chat rooms. Small chatrooms of thirty to a

hundred people -- that is what revolution

movements need. They need it to be

secure and they need it to be robust. The

JA


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system I did was protocol independent. So

yes, you've got your encapsulating thing,

UDP or whatever, and in theory you could

be pushing it over SMS you could be

putting it over TCP, you could be pushing

it over whatever. You could be using amobile phone, you could be using a

desktop or whatever. You can put that into

one big mesh, so that all you need, even

when the whole country is shut off you

just need one satellite connection out and

your internal network connects to the rest

of the world.

Yeah, yeah.ES

And if you've got a good routing system. If

it is a small network you can use flood,

and thereby -- flood network takes every

possible path therefore it must take the

fastest possible path. Right? So a flood

network always finds a way but doesn'tscale to large quantities. But if you've got

a good routing system you just need this

one link out. And in Cairo, we had people

who hacked Toyota in Cairo, and took over

their satellite uplink, and used that to

connect to this ISP that fed 6% of the

market, and so that sort of thing was

going on all this time. There was a hacker

war in Egypt to try and keep this -- I don't

like to call it radical, but this more

independent ISP -- that provided 6% of the

market, up and going. But it shouldn't

have been so hard. It should have been

JA


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the case that all you need to do is have

one connection and then the most

important information could get out. And

if you look at, if this is equivalent to SMSs,

I mean look how important Twitter is and

how important SMS is. Actually, humanbeings are pretty good at encoding the

most important thing that is happening

into a short amount of data. There's not

that many human beings. There just aren't

that many. So with one pipe you can...

It's not a bandwidth problem.ES

It's not a bandwidth problem. So all you

need is one pipe. And you can connect a

country that is in a revolutionary state to

the rest of the world. And points within

that country just as important. Cities

within that country. And it's not that hard

a thing to do quite frankly.

JA

Scott, do you wanna?ES

It's hard to stop! It's so interesting!SM

I actually, I have like five hours more...ES

I know! Because it's like one thing and

then there's like more and...SM

How would you architect this how would

you architect that... I think my summaryES


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would be that this notion of a hash idea of

the name is a very interesting one,

because I had not linked it to Bitcoin, or

that kind of approach, with scarcity. That's

a new idea for me. Have you published

that idea?

I've published... not the link to Bitcoin,

that paper that came out about coupling

something to Bitcoin was just trying to

address the DNS issue. But fortunately the

guy who did it understood that... why just

have quadtets? You know, why limit it to IP

addresses? It's sort of natural in a way to

make the thing so that it could go to any

sort of expansion. But the idea for... that

there should be this naming system and

the importance of this naming system, the

importance of preserving history and

doing these scaffolds, and mapping out

everything. Yeah, so that's on the site,

under... I think it is part of one of the Hans

Ulrich interview.

JA

I think we should study this quite a bit

more so we generally understand it... so

we might have a few more questions about

it... The other comment I would make is

that on the assumption that what you are

describing is going to happen someday is

probable given that the incentive

structure is...

ES

Well I've had these ideas several years but

now I see other people are also getting

into...

JA


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[chatter about food]

Well there is enough people who are

interested in solving the problem you are

trying to solve. On the internet you see a

lot of experiences. What I am thinking of

is how would I attack it. How would I

attack your idea. And I still think I would

go after the signing and the key

infrastructure. So if I can break the keys...

ES

There are different parts of the idea. So, if

you publish some information or if you

spread some information... this publishing

thing is quite interesting as to whether

when something has gone from not beingpublished to being published its quite...

interesting. So if you spread some

information and you've got it well labeled,

using a hash.

JA

That hash is important. It is something

that has to spread in another way. So that

is say by WikiLeaks signing the hash. But

there is many ways for it to spread. I mean

people could be swapping that hash in

email. They could be telling each other on

the telephone etcetera.

JA

You are saying that all of these systems

are do not have a single point of attack, I

can break down your HTTPS but you can

still use the US postal service to send it,

for example.

ES


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Exactly, and you would know that you

were getting the right thing, because of its

naming it is completely accurate.

JA

I am just wondering, on the human side of

this, you have such experience of the

world you described earlier. I mean I had

three hours sleep, so forgive me if I don't

remember exactly what you said, but some

combination of technical and altruistic

people and what amounts to a kind of

subculture that you've been in for some 15

years now.. So you know about how the

subculture works. And that subcultureneeds to either I guess stay the same or

expand in order to do the work that you

are describing, and so since our book is

about ten years away...

JC

It's dramatically expanded...JA

What are the patterns there in terms of

the people part, rather than the...?JC

That's the most optimistic thing that is

happening. The radicalization of internet

educated youth. People who are receiving

their values from the internet... and then

as they find them to be compatible

echoing them back. The echo back is nowso strong that it drowns the original

statements. Completely. The people I've

dealt with from the 1960s radicals who

helped liberate Greece and.. Salazar. They

are saying that this moment in time is the

JA


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most similar to what happened in this

period of liberation movements in the

1960s, that they have seen.

Do you see it scaling differently than it did

in the 60s?JC

And as far as what has entered into the

West, because there are certain regions of

the world I am not aware of, but as far as I

am aware that -- and of course I wasn't

alive in the 1960s -- but as far as I can tell,

that statement is true. This is the political

education of apolitical technical people. It

is extraordinary, in the same way that the

young...

JA

A-political? Do you mean one word?LS

One word. People are going from... young

people are going from apolitical to

political. It is a very very interestingtransition to see.

JA

How do you think... I mean this is your

world why do you think that took place? I

mean, why do you think it took place?

JC

Fast communication. Critical mass of

young people. Newer generation. And

then some catalyzing events. The attack

on us was a catalyzing event. And our

defense... our success in defending was a

catalyzing event. I don't know, do you

remember the PGP case, and that grand

JA


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[LS spills water all over her note taking laptop]

[JA quickly grabs her laptop and turns it upside

down]

[laughter]

jury with Zimmermann and so on?

He had a lot of fun that with that.ES

I wrote half a book on that. It was never

published, because my cowriter went and

had children.

JA

Ha ha ha haLS

Ha ha ha!ES

Ha ha ha! Why do I feel that has happened

before?JC

So much for the historical record!SM

As I said--multiple copies!JA

Why don't you save whatever you wereSM


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[chatter]

[laughter]

[laughter]

[Laughter]

doing... get it into the name tree before...

Someone: everything goes wrong...

Did you see how fast he was? It was like

an impulse.LS

Yeah, I feel you were almost there before

the computer...JC

Computers are important...

SM

That was sweet, thank you. Go ahead.LS

So you were saying. But young people

aren't inherently good. And I say that as a

father and with regret.SM

Oh no I think that actually... well, I've read

the Lord of the Flies...JA

and I went to thirty different schools, soJA


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[laughter]

I've seen plenty of Lord of the Flies

situations...

...But no, I think that the instincts human

beings have are actually much better than

the societies that we have.

JA

Then the governments, basically.JC

I am not going to say governments. Thewhole structure of the society. The

economic structure. And that people learn

that simple altruistic acts don't pay off and

they see that some people who act in non

altruistic ways end up getting Porsches

and fast cars, and it tends to pull people in

that direction. I thought about this a while

ago when I saw there was this fantastic

video that came out of Stanford in about

'69 on nuclear synthesis of DNA. Have you

seen it?

JA

No.SM

No.JC

No.ES

It's on youtube. It's great. A wonderfulJA


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fiscalization. So fast bank transfers. The

IRS being able to account for lots of

people, it sucks people into a very rigid

fiscalized structure. So you can have a lot

of political change in the United States.

But will it really change that much? Will itchange the amount of money in someone's

bank account? Will it change contracts?

Will it void contracts that already exist?

And contracts on contracts, and contracts

on contracts on contracts? Not really. So I

say that free speech in many places - in

many Western places - is free not as a

result of liberal circumstances in the West

but rather as a result of such intense

fiscalization that it doesn't matter what

you say. ie. the dominant elite doesn't

have to be scared of what people think,

because a change in political view is not

going to change whether they own their

company or not. It is not going to change

whether they own a piece of land or not.

But China is still a political society.Although it is radically heading towards a

fiscalized society. And other societies, like

Egypt was, are still heavily politicized.

And so their rulers really do need to be

concerned about what people think, and

so they spend a portion of efforts on

controlling freedom of speech.

So if you were...JC

But I think young people have fairly good

values. Of course it's a spectrum and soJA


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on. But they have fairly good values most

of the time. And they want to demonstrate

them to other people and you can see this

when people first go to university and so

on. And they become hardened as a result

of certain things having a pay off andother things not having a payoff. Studying

for an exam, constantly, even though in

some cases the work is completely

mindless, and pointless, has a payoff at

the end of the year, but going and talking

to someone and doing a favour doesn't

have a payoff at the end of the year. And

so this disincentivizes some behaviours

and incentivizes other ones.

But let me tease out some of this, I mean

it sounds like you have got a view of the

globe with certain societies where the

impact of technology is relatively slight,

certain societies where politically the

impact of technology can be quite great,

and certain societies where it would be ata sort of middling way. And you would put

China into I guess the middling category.

JC

Well, it's starting to...JA

Since our book is all about technology and

social transformation ten years down the

line... what's the globe that you see given

the structure that you are describing?

JC

I am not sure about the impact on China.

It is still a political society, so the impactJA


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could be very great. I mean I often say

that censorship is always cause for

celebration. It is always an opportunity,

because it reveals fear of reform. It means

that the power position is so weak that

you have got to care about what peoplethink.

Right. It's like you find the sensitive

documents by watching them hunt.JC

Exactly.JA

This is a very interesting argument.ES

Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.JC

So when the Chinese express all this

energy on censoring in all these novel

ways, do we say that it is a complete

waste of time and energy, or do they have

a whole bunch of experience managing

the country and understand that it matters

what people think? I say it is much more

reasonable to interpret it as the different

groups different actors within China who

are able to control that censorship system

understand correctly that their power

position is weak and they need to becareful what people think. So they have to

censor.

JA

So the state is rational, at least in its

repression.JC


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I am always worried in talking about the

state, because it's all individuals acting in

their own perceived interest. Some, this

group or that group.

JA

Fair enough.JC

Even the censors in China of the Public

Security Bureau, people who work there.

Why do they censor stuff and what do they

censor first? I'll tell you what they censor

first? They censor first the thing that

someone in the Politburo might see. That'swhat they censor first. They are not

actually concerned about darknets.

JA

Sorry, about?JC

They are not concerned about darknets.

Because their bosses can't see what is on

the darknet, and so they can't be blamedfor not censoring it. We had this fantastic

case here in the UK, we had a whole

bunch of classified documents from the

UK military, and published a bunch. And

then later on we did a sort of preemptive

FOI which we do occasionally on various

governments when we can. So we did it on

the UK ministry of defense, just to see

whether they were doing some

investigation, sort of a source protection

to understand what is going on. So we got

back... first they pretended they were

missing documents and we appealed and

JA


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we got back a bunch of documents. And so

it showed that someone in there had

spotted that there was a bunch of UK

military documents on our website. About

their surveillance programme. Another

two thousand page document about howto stop things leaking, and that the

number one threat to the UK ministry was

investigative journalists. So that had gone

into some counterintelligence da da da da,

and they had like, oh my good, it has

hundreds of thousands of pages, and it is

about all sorts of companies and it just

keeps going, and it's endless, it's endless!

Exclamation marks, you know, five

exclamation marks. And that was like,

okay, that is the discovery phase, now the

what is to be done phase. What is to be

done? BT has the contracts for the MoD.

They told BT to censor us from them. So

everyone in the UK MoD could no longer

read what was on WikiLeaks. Problem

solved!

Interesting.ES

It's like all the generals and their bosses

and all these people could no longer see

that we had MoD stuff on there. And so

now there is no more complaints and their

problem is solved. So understandings like

this might be quite advantageous to use in

some of these systems. So it means that

darknets for example, if you understand

the bureaucratic structures that employ

JA


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people and give them tasks always have

that sort of thing going on then that

means that darknets are gonna have a

pretty easy time of it, until they are so big

that they are not darknets anymore.

Hm. That's really... that's really really

interesting. You mentioned investigative

journalism, do you... you've had a lot of

experience with journalism by now, in

many different respects, i mean, how do

you see the kind of freedom of information

that you are describing, that you were

describing earlier, as fitting into

journalistic processes, if at all, or is it

replacing it?

JC

No it is, I mean it's more how these

journalistic processes fit into something

that is much bigger, and the much bigger

thing is that we as human beings

shepherd and create our intellectual

history as a civilization. And it is that

intellectual history on the shelf that we

can pull off to do stuff, and not do the

dumb thing again. Someone already said

said it was done and wrote about their

experience and we don't do it again. And

so there are several different processes

that are creating that record and other

processes where people are trying to

destroy pieces of that record and others

that are trying to prevent people putting

things into the record. We all live off that

intellectual record, so what we want to do

is get as much into the record, prevent as

JA


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much as possible being deleted from the

record, and then, and then have the

record as searchable as possible.

But one consequence of this view is that

actors will find the generation of verylarge amounts of misinformation strategic

for them.

ES

Yeah. So this is another type of censorship

that I have thought about but don't speak

so much about. Which is censorship

through complexity.

JA

Hide it. Too complicated.ES

And that is basically the offshore financial

sector. Censorship through complexity.

Censorship of what? Censorship of

political outrage. With enough political

outrage there is law reform and enough

law reform you can't do it anymore. Sowhy is it that all these careful tax

structuring arrangements are so complex?

I mean, they may be perfectly legal, but

why are they so god damn complex? Well,

because the ones that weren't complex

were understood and the ones that were

understood were regulated, so you're only

left with the things that are incredibly

complex.

JA

More noise less signal, kind of...ES


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Yeah, exactly, exactly...JA

But how in the future will people deal with

the fact that the incentive to publish

information that is misleading, wrong,

manipulative, is very high. Furthermore

you can't figure out who the bad publisher

was as well as the good...because there's

anonymity in the system.

SM

Yeah, so I suggested. Well, the way it is

right now is there is very... first we must

understand that the way it is right now isvery bad. Friend of mine Greg Mitchell

wrote a book about the mainstream

media, So Wrong For So Long. And that's

basically it. That yes we have these heroic

moments with Watergate and Bernstein

and so on, but, come on, actually, it's

never been very good it's always been

very bad. And these fine journalists are an

exception to the rule. And especially when

you are involved in something yourself

and you know every facet of it and you

look to see what is reported by it in the

mainstream press, and you can see naked

lies after naked lies. You know that the

journalist knows it's a lie, it is not a simple

mistake, and then simple mistakes, and

then people repeating lies, and so on, thatactually the condition of the mainstream

press nowadays is so appalling I don't

think it can be reformed. I don't think that

is possible. I think it has to be eliminated,

and replaced with something that is

JA


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publishers, this is a reputation business.

And so what I would like is that part of

that repetitional business, like in science,

where is your data? You're not providing

your data, why the hell should I take this

seriously? Is that now that we can publishon the internet, now that there is

physically room for the data, newspapers

don't have physical room for the primary

source, now that there is physical room

for the primary source, it should be there

and we should create a standard that it

should be there. And sure people can

deviate from this standard, but well you

deviate from the standard, if you can't be

bothered providing us with the primary

source data why should we pay any

attention to what you are writing? You're

not treating the reader with respect. It's

not falsifiable therefore, therefore we can

pay no attention to it. But the issue of

reputation, this is an important issue. How

do things have reputation? Well, part ofthe way that they have reputation is by

this coupling of something happens,

someone else says something about it,

someone else says something about that,

etc. And this is a series of citations as

information flows from one person to

another and they augment it and so on.

For that to be strong you need this naming

system. Where what you are relying on is

not some startup website that just appears

tomorrow, or some company that didn't

like it and has modified it or is being sued

out of existence. So that, I think, would


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help with reputation. Complexity is

harder. I think that is a big problem. So

when things become open things tend to

become more complex, because people

start hiding what they are doing, their bad

behaviour, through complexity. And so thatwill be bureaucratic double speak is an

example. When things get bureaucratized

and so on, and everything becomes mealy

mouthed, and so that's a cost of openness.

Is that kind of bureaucratization, and in

the offshore sector you see incredible

complexity in the layers of things

happening to one another so they become

impenetrable. And of course cryptography

is an intellectual system that has

specialized in making things as complex

as possible. Those things are hard to

attack. On the other hand complex

systems are also hard to use. So

bureaucracies and internal

communications systems which have this,

which are full of weasel words and arsecovering, are inefficient internal

communications systems. And similarly,

those tremendously complex offshore

structuring arrangements are actually

inefficient. But maybe you're ahead when

the tax regime is high, but if the tax

regime is zero you're not going to be

ahead at all. Sorry, if the tax regime is 3%,

you're not going to be ahead at all, you're

going to be choked by the complexity.

Well, if they weren't inefficient then

everybody would have their moneyJC


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offshore Julian.

Yeah, that's right.JA

I mean that as a joke, but it's probably

true, heh.JC

No, that's true.JA

Let me just add that uh...JC

There is a battle between all of these

things going on. With different people,

economic different... see I don't see a

different between government and big

corporations and small corporations,

actually this is all one continuum, these

are all systems that are trying to get as

much power as possible. So that's what

they are. A general is trying to get as

much power for his section of the army,

and so on. They advertise, they produce

something that they claim is a product,

people buy it, people don't buy it, they

complexify in order to hide the flaws in

their product and they spin, so I don't see

a big difference between government and

non government actors in that way. Thereis one difference about the deployment of

coercive force but even there we see that

well connected corporations are able to

tap into the governmental system and the

court system and are able to deploy...

JA


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effectively deploy coercive force, by

sending police to do debt requisiti

assange schmidt

Documents