by Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann
Let me tell you my involvement with the Nadhmi Auchi story. In 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and that led to the first Gulf War. The Kuwaiti government in exile, and also during its return, needed cash, so it started to sell off various assets including several oil refineries outside Kuwait. A UK businessman, Nadhmi Auchi, who had immigrated to the UK in the early 1980s from Iraq, where he used to be a figure in Saddam Hussein’s regime, was a broker in that deal and was subsequently accused of being involved in channeling $118 million of illegal commissions. That investigation was the largest corruption investigation in European postwar history. In 2003 Auchi was convicted of fraud in what was to become known as the Elf Aquitaine scandal. Nevertheless, nowadays he has over 200 companies registered through his Luxembourg holding outfit, and others through Panama. He is involved in post-war Iraqi cellular contracts and many other businesses around the world.102
In the United States Tony Rezko, a fundraiser for Barack Obama’s Senate campaign, was a long term pal of Auchi’s, who had been his financier. Similarly Auchi and Rezko became involved with the former Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. Both Rezko and Blagojevich were convicted of corruption, Rezko in 2008 and Blagojevich in 2010/11 (after the FBI recorded him in telephone intercept trying to sell Obama’s former Senate seat). In 2007/8, when Obama was running to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate, the US press started to investigate Obama’s connections. They investigated Rezko and reported some links in relation to the purchase of Barack Obama’s house. In 2008, shortly before his trial, Rezko received a $3.5 million transfer from Auchi which he didn’t report to the court, despite being required to—for which he was jailed. So US press scrutiny turned to Auchi, and at that moment he instructed UK lawyers Carter-Ruck to wage an aggressive campaign on much of the 2003 reportage about the Elf Aquitaine scandal and his conviction in France. This was very successful. He targeted the UK press, and even US blogs, and had nearly a dozen articles removed that we know about. Most of those articles, including in UK newspaper archives, simply disappeared. It was as if they had never even existed. There was no, “We have received a legal complaint and decided to remove the story.” They also disappeared from the indexes. WikiLeaks dug these out and republished them.103
JACOB: They erase history.
JULIAN: History is not only modified, it has ceased to have ever existed. It is Orwell’s dictum, “He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.” It is the undetectable erasure of history in the West, and that’s just post-publication censorship. Pre-publication self-censorship is much more extreme but often hard to detect. We’ve seen that with Cablegate as WikiLeaks works with different media partners all over the world, so we can see which ones censor our material.104
For example the New York Times redacted a cable that said that millions of dollars were distributed to covertly influence politically connected Libyans via oil companies operating in Libya. The cable didn’t even name a specific oil company—the New York Times simply redacted the phrase “oil services companies.”105 Probably the most flagrant was the New York Times’ use of a sixty-two-page cable about North Korea’s missile program, and whether they had sold missiles to the Iranians, from which the New York Times used two paragraphs in order to argue, in a story, that Iran had missiles that could strike Europe, whereas elsewhere in the cable just the opposite was argued. 106
The Guardian redacted a cable about Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine, which said that she might be hiding her wealth in London.107 It censored out allegations that the Kazakhstani elite in general was corrupt—not even a named person—and an allegation that both ENI, the Italian energy company operating in Kazakhstan, and British Gas were corrupt.108 Essentially the Guardian censored instances where a rich person was accused of something in a cable, unless the Guardian had an institutional agenda against that rich person.109 So, for example, in a cable about Bulgarian organized crime there was one Russian, and the Guardian it made it look like the whole thing was about him, but he was just one person on a long list of organizations and individuals associated with Bulgarian organized crime.110 Der Spiegel censored out a paragraph about what Merkel was doing—no human rights concern whatsoever, purely political concerns about Merkel.111 There are lots of examples.112
ANDY: Our understanding of freedom of information and the free flow of information is in some way a very radical new concept if you look at planet Earth. I would say it’s not much different between Europe and other countries. Well, there are countries that have a democratic framework, which means you can read and understand and maybe even legally fight the censorship infrastructure, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there, while you will have a hard time trying in Saudi Arabia or China.
JULIAN: My experience in the West is that it is just so much more sophisticated in the number of layers of indirection and obfuscation about what is actually happening. These layers are there to give deniability to the censorship that is occurring. You can think about censorship as a pyramid. This pyramid only has its tip sticking out of the sand, and that is by intention. The tip is public—libel suits, murders of journalists, cameras being snatched by the military, and so on—publicly declared censorship. But that is the smallest component. Under the tip, the next layer is all those people who don’t want to be at the tip, who engage in self-censorship to not end up there. Then the next layer is all the forms of economic inducement or patronage inducement that are given to people to write about one thing or another. The next layer down is raw economy—what it is economic to write about, even if you don’t include the economic factors from higher up the pyramid. Then the next layer is the prejudice of readers who only have a certain level of education, so therefore on one hand they are easy to manipulate with false information, and on the other hand you can’t even tell them something sophisticated that is true. The last layer is distribution—for example, some people just don’t have access to information in a particular language. So that is the censorship pyramid. What the Guardian is doing with its Cablegate redactions is in the second layer.
Now, such censorship is deniable because it either it takes place out of the light, or because there is no instruction to censor a particular claim. Journalists are rarely instructed, “Don’t print anything about that,” or, “Don’t print that fact.” Rather they understand that they are expected to because they understand the interests of those they wish to placate or grow close to. If you behave you’ll be patted on the head and rewarded, and if you don’t behave then you won’t. It’s that simple. I’m often fond of making this example: the obvious censorship that occurred in the Soviet Union, the censorship that was propagandized about so much in the West—jackboots coming for journalists in the middle of the night to take them from their homes—has just been shifted by twelve hours. Now we wait for the day and take homes from journalists, as they fall out of patronage and are unable to service their debts. Journalists are taken from their homes by taking homes from the journalists. Western societies specialize in laundering censorship and structuring the affairs of the powerful such that any remaining public speech that gets through has a hard time affecting the true power relationships of a highly fiscalized society, because such relationships are hidden in layers of complexity and secrecy.
ANDY: Jérémie mentioned the pedo-Nazis.
JACOB: We’re back to the pedo-Nazis again.
JÉRÉMIE: Two Horsemen in one.
ANDY: The pedo-Nazis pretty well summarized the German, or maybe part of the European censoring arguments. Germany didn’t want any hate speech-like content on the internet due to its history and, of course, if you tell people you need to restrict the internet because of pedophiles then you will be able to do anything. Also, there was an internal working paper of the European Commission about data retention that argued, “We should talk more about child pornography and then people will be in favor.”113
JULIAN: Can you speak to this a little bit? That if we are to c
ensor just one thing, say just child pornography, then in order to censor child pornography from people seeing it we need to surveil everything that everyone is doing. We need to build that infrastructure. We need to build a bulk spying and censorship system to censor just one thing.
ANDY: It’s in the detail of the mechanics—the so-called pre-censorship system in Germany obliges you to name the legally responsible person for whatever you publish. So, roughly, if you publish something, be it on a piece of paper or on the internet, without saying who is legally responsible for the content, you already violate the law. This means that you allocate the responsibility and if someone violates the law by distributing, let’s say child porn or hate speech, you could just say, “Ok, we look at where that guy is located and we catch him and we get the stuff off of the net.”
JULIAN: That is we censor the publisher instead of censoring the reader.
ANDY: Yes. And this is watching specific things. I could agree that not everything needs to be available at all times because if I look at hate speech issues there are sometimes things with private addresses of people and so on that might lead to situations I’m not in favor of.
JULIAN: But Andy, this is such a German thing. In order to do that, in order to determine what’s going to be acceptable and what’s not you have to have a committee, you have to have appointments to that committee, you have to have a process of appointments to that committee…
ANDY: Yes, we have all that bullshit. The German killings in the Second World War—everything the Nazis did, every property they seized, they gave a receipt, they made a list. It was all bureaucratic acts. You can say that Germans unjustifiably killed a lot of people—that’s true—but they did it in a bureaucratic manner. That’s Germany.
JULIAN: If you have someone deciding what should be censored and what should not then you have to have two things. First of all, you have to build a technical architecture to do the censorship. You have to build a nationwide censorship machine to do it effectively. And then secondly, you have to have a committee and a bureaucracy to censor. And that committee inherently has to be secret because it’s completely useless unless it is secret and therefore you have secret justice.
ANDY: You know what? We have one good principle in Germany.
JACOB: Just the one?
ANDY: The principle is that if it is unrealistic for a law to be applied, then it shouldn’t be there. If a law doesn’t make sense, like if you forbid windmills or whatever, then we say, “Hey, come on, forget it.” We here are inspired by the internet as we knew it when it was growing up, by the free flow of information, in the sense of free as in unlimited, as in not blocked, not censored, not filtered. So if we apply our understanding of the free flow of information to planet Earth—and it has been roughly applied to planet Earth—we see, of course, the governments being affected by it and the way power has been applied and the way censorship has been run, be it pre-censorship, post-censorship or whatever censorship. We have all learned about these complicated conflicts that arise. The question is what is our concept of government or the future of a Post-Governmental Organization—maybe WikiLeaks is the first or one of the first PGOs—because I’m not sure governments are the right answer to all the problems on this planet, like environmental issues.
JULIAN: The governments are not sure either, of the barrier between what is government or not. It’s fuzzed out now. Governments occupy space, but WikiLeaks occupies part of the space of the internet. Internet space is embedded in real space, but the degree of complexity between the embedded object and the embedding means that it’s not easy for the embedding to tell that the embedded object is even part of it. So that’s why we have this sense of a cyberspace—that it is actually some other realm that exists somewhere—it’s because of the degree of its indirection, complexity and universality. When you read some file on the internet in one location it’s the same as reading it in another location or in the future—that’s its universality. So to that degree, as an organization that occupies cyberspace and is adept at moving its information around the underlying embeddings, maybe we are a post-state organization because of the lack of geographic control.
I don’t want to take this analogy too far, because I am under house arrest. The coercive force of states obviously applies to all our people, wherever they are known. But the rest of the press likes to say we’re a stateless media organization and they are quite right about the importance of statelessness. I always used to say, “Well what do you think Newscorp is? It’s a big multinational.” But nonetheless, Newscorp is structured in such a way that you can get at its key components, and that’s why it has had so much trouble here in the UK with the phone-hacking scandal, and why it is trying so hard to suck up to the US establishment. But if an organization’s assets are primarily its information, then it can be transnational in a way that is quite hard to stop as a result of cryptography. There is a reason a financial blockade was erected against us—our other organizational facets are harder to suppress.114
JACOB: If we’re talking about it in Utopian terms, we have to actually go back a little bit further. So, you asked me about the harassment I received, you asked about censorship in the West and I talked earlier about Obama’s targeted killing program, which they say is lawful because there is a process, therefore it counts as due process.
JULIAN: Well, a secret process.
JACOB: We can also tie this back to John Gilmore. One of John Gilmore’s lawsuits about his ability to travel anonymously in the United States resulted in the court literally saying, “Look, we’re going to consult with the law, which is secret. We will read it and we will find out when we read this secret law whether or not you are allowed to do the thing that you are allowed to do.” And they found when they read the secret law that, in fact, he was allowed to do it, because what the secret law said did not restrict him. He never learned what the secret law was at all and later they changed the US Transportation Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security policies in response to him winning his lawsuit, because it turns out the secret law was not restrictive enough in this way.115
JULIAN: So they made it more restrictive?
JACOB: Effectively, through enabling legislation of the bureaucracy. But it’s important to note that the targeted assassination program, the harassment that people face at borders, the censorship that we find online, the censorship that corporations perform at the behest of a government or at the behest of a corporation, these things all tie back together. And what it really comes down to is that the state has too much power at each of the places that we see these things come out. This is because the power has concentrated in these areas and it has attracted people that abuse it, or that push for its use. And even if there are sometimes legitimate cases, what we see is that the world would be better off if there was not that centralization, if there was not the tendency towards authoritarianism.
The West is not in any way special with regard to this, because it turns out that if you have a czar of cyber-security, well, that’s not so different from a tsar that was in the internal security forces of another nation fifty years ago. We’re building the same kind of authoritarian control structures, which will attract people to abuse them, and that’s something that we try to pretend is different in the West. It’s not different in the West because there’s a continuum of governance, which is authoritarianism to libertarianism. I don’t mean it in the American political party sense, but in this sense: on that continuum, the United States is very far from the USSR in many, many ways but it’s a lot closer to the USSR than Christiania is, the autonomous neighborhood in the heart of Copenhagen, in Denmark.116 And it is even further, I think, from a potential Utopian world if we went and created a brand new colony on Mars. We would want to move what we might build on Mars as far away from totalitarianism and authoritarianism as we could. These are failings when we don’t have that.
JÉRÉMIE: Once again, all those topics are bound together. When we talk about conc
entrating power we once again talk about architecture. And when we talk about internet censorship, it is about centralizing the power to determine what people may be able to access or not, and whether government censorship or also private-owned censorship is undue power. We have this example: our website laquadrature.net got censored in the UK by Orange UK for several weeks. It was among a list of websites that Orange was denying to those less than eighteen years old. Maybe we mentioned the term child pornography while we were opposing that type of legislation, or maybe they just disliked us because we oppose their policy against net neutrality, as we advocate for a law to ban them from discriminating their users’ communications.117 We will never know. But we have a private actor here that, as a service, was offering to remove from people the ability to access information on the internet. I see a major risk here beyond the power we give to either Orange or the Government of China or whoever.
JACOB: Clarification—when you say private in the UK, do you mean that they actually own every line, every fiber connection and everything, or do they use some of the state’s resources? How were the airwaves licensed? There’s no state involvement at all? They have no duty of care?
