Hans Ulrich Obrist

In Conversation with Julian Assange, Part I

When I first met Julian Assangethanks to lawyer and Chair of the Contemporary Art Society Mark Stephens and curator/lawyer Daniel McClean, both of the law firm Finers Stephens Innocentwe discussed ideas for various interview formats. Anton Vidokle and I had discussed the idea to conduct an interview with Assange in which questions would be posed not only by me, but also by a number of artists. This seemed only natural considering the extent to which so many artists have been interested in WikiLeaks, and we then invited seven artists and collectives to ask questions over video for the second part of the interview.

My archive now contains over 2000 hours of interviews recorded in many different places, and I am constantly attempting to discover new rules of the game, new approaches to how an interview can work. For an interview with Hans-Peter Feldmann published initially in AnOther Magazine and then in book form, I emailed him one question per day, and each of Feldmanns responses would take the form of an image. For my interview with Louise Bourgeois, I would send a question and she would email back a drawing. When Julian came to my office with Mark and Daniel for our first meeting, we discussed the idea of a different format with questions from artists, and Julian liked this a lot, suggesting that the artists send the questions as short videos so that he could see them. We set the interview for two weeks later at 10 or 11 p.m., as we discovered that we both work late at night. Traveling more than three hours from London on Sunday, February 27, I arrived at Ellingham Hall, the Georgian mansion near the Eastern coast of England that Vaughan Smith offered Julian to use as his address for bail during his UK extradition hearings. In the living room of the picturesque home he described to me as a golden cage we drank many cups of coffee and spoke until 3 a.m. about his life, his nomadism, his early beginnings and the invention of WikiLeaks, his time in Egypt, Kenya, Iceland, and other places, his scientific background, and the theoretical underpinnings of WikiLeaks. The interview is divided into two partsin the first, I was interested in tracing his work back to its beginnings. I was not interested in his court case or private life, but in his public work as the voice of WikiLeaks, and the experiences and philosophical background that informs such a monumentally polemical project. In the second part, which will be published in the following issue of e-flux journal, Assange responds to questions posed to him by artists Goldin+Senneby, Paul Chan, Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk), Martha Rosler, Luis Camnitzer, Superflex, Philippe Parreno, and Ai Weiwei.

Many people have contributed to making this interview possible, and I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Julian Assange, to all the artists for their questions, to Joseph Farrell, Laura Barlow, Orit Gat, Joseph Redwood-Martinez, Mariana Silva, Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Daniel McClean, Julia Peyton-Jones, Mark Stephens, Lorraine Two, and all the artists. This first part of the interview is accompanied by graphics from a pro-active series of works designed by Metahaven, an Amsterdam-based studio for design and research, who have been studying an alternative visual identity for WikiLeaks since June 2010. Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist: How did it all begin? Julian Assange: I grew up in Australia in the 1970s. My parents were in the theatre, so I lived everywherein over fifty different towns, attending thirty-seven different schools. Many of these towns were in rural environments, so I lived like Tom Sawyerriding horses, exploring caves, fishing, diving, and riding my motorcycle. I lived a classical boyhood in this regard. But there were other events, such as in Adelaide, where my mother was involved in helping to smuggle information out of Maralinga, the British atomic bomb test site in the outback. She and I and a courier were detained one night by the Australian Federal Police, who told her that it could be said that she was an unfit mother to be keeping such company at 2:00 a.m., and that she had better stay out of politics if she didnt want to hear such things. I was very curious as a child, always asking why, and always wanting to overcome barriers to knowing, which meant that by the time I was

around fifteen I was breaking encryption systems that were used to stop people sharing software, and then, later on, breaking systems that were used to hide information in government computers. Australia was a very provincial place before the internet, and it was a great delight to be able to get out, intellectually, into the wider world, to tunnel through it and understand it. For someone who was young and relatively removed from the rest of the world, to be able to enter the depths of the Pentagons Eighth Command at the age of seventeen was a liberating experience. But our group, which centered on the underground magazine I founded, was raided by the Federal Police. It was a big operation. But I thought that I needed to share this wealth that I had discovered about the world with people, to give knowledge to people, and so following that I set up the first part of the internet industry in Australia. I spent a number of years bringing the internet to the people through my free speech ISP and then began to look for something with a new intellectual challenge. HUO: So something was missing. JA: Something was missing. This led me to using cryptography to protect human rights, in novel ways, and eventually as a result of what I was doing in mathematics and in physics and political activism, things seemed to come together and show that there was a limit to what I was doingand what the rest of the world was doing. There was not enough information available in our common intellectual record to explain how the world really works. These were more the feelings and process, but they suggested a bigger question, with a stronger philosophical answer for explaining what is missing. We are missing one of the pillars of history. There are three types of history. Type one is knowledge. Its creation is subsidized, and its maintenance is subsidized by an industry or lobby: things like how to build a pump that pumps water, how to create steel and build other forms of alloys, how to cook, how to remove poisons from food, etc. But because this knowledge is part of everyday industrial processes, there is an economy that keeps such information around and makes use of it. So the work of

preserving it is already done. HUO: Its kind of implicit. JA: There is a system that maintains it. And theres another type of information in our intellectual record. (This is a term I interchange freely with historical record. When I say historical record, I dont mean what happened a hundred years ago, but all that we know, including what happened last week.) This second type of information no longer has an economy behind it. It has already found its way into the historical record through a state of affairs which no longer exists. So its just sitting there. It can be slowly rotting away, slowly vanishing. Books go out of print, and the number of copies available decreases. But it is a slow process, because no one is actively trying to destroy this type of information. And then there is the type-three information that is the focus of my attention now. This is the information that people are actively working to prevent from entering into the record. Type-three information is suppressed before publication or after publication. If type-three information is spread around, there are active attempts to take it out of circulation. Because these first two pillars of our intellectual record either have an economy behind them, or there are no active attempts to destroy them, they do not call to me as loudly. But, this third pillar of information has been denied to all of us throughout the history of the world. So, if you understand that civilized life is built around understanding the world, understanding each other, understanding human institutions and so forth, then our understanding has a great hole in it, which is type-three history. And we want a just and civilized worldand by civilized I dont mean industrialized, but one where people dont do dumb things, where they engage in more intelligent behavior. HUO: Do you mean a more complex behavior?

JA: Right, more complex and layered behavior. There are many analogies for what I mean by that, but Ill just give a simple one, which is the water ritual. If you sit down with a friend, and theres a pitcher of water on the table, and there are two glasses, then you pour the other persons water before your own. This is a very simple ritual. But, this is better than the obvious step, which is to pour your own water before the other persons. If we can see a few steps ahead, the water ritual is a more intelligent way to distribute water at a table. Thats what I mean by civilizationwe gradually build up all these processes and understandings so we dont need to make bad moves with each other or the natural world. So with regard to all this suppressed information, weve never had a proper understanding of it because it has never entered our intellectual record, and if we can find out about how complex human institutions actually behave, then we have a chance to build civilized behavior on top of it. This is why I say that all existing political theories are bankrupt, because you cannot build a meaningful theory without knowledge of the world that youre building the theory about. Until we have an understanding of how the world actually works, no political theory can actually be complete enough to demand a course of action.

Proposal for a MultiJurisdictional Logo: Can a visual presence be created, and dismantled, based on domains based in different jurisdictions, switching on and off? Courtesy of Metahaven. HUO: So that clearly maps out how you came to where you are today. Since many people now refer to you as one of their heroes, I was wondering who inspired you at the beginning. JA: There have been heroic acts that I have appreciated, or some systems of thought, but I think its better to say that there are some people I had an intellectual rapport with, such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. That comes when youre doing mathematics. The mathematics of Heisenberg and Bohr is a branch of natural philosophy. They developed a system or

epistemology for understanding quantum mechanics, but encoded within this intellectual tradition are methods to think clearly about cause and effect. When reading mathematics you must take your mind through each intellectual step. In this case, the steps of Heisenberg or Bohr. Because good proofs are very creative, it takes the full energies of your mind to reach through one step to another. Your whole mind must be engaged in a particular state of thought, and you realize that this mental arrangement is the same as the authors at the moment of writing, so the feeling of mental similarity and rapport becomes strong. Quantum mechanics and its modern evolution left me with a theory of change and how to properly understand how one thing causes another. My interest was then in reversing this thought process and adapting it to another realm. We have an end state that we want, and I looked at all the changes that are needed to get to this end state from where we are now. I developed this analogy to explain how information flows around the world to cause particular actions. If the desired end state is a world that is more just, then the question is: What type of actions produce a world that is more just? And what sort of information flows lead to those actions? And then, where do these information flows originate? Once you understand this, you can see it is not just starting somewhere and ending elsewhere, but rather that cause and effect is a loop; here we are today, and we want to create an end state as a result of action. We act and by doing so bring the world into a new state of affairs, which we can consider our new starting point, and so this process of observe, think, act continues. HUO: Science, mathematics, quantum theoryall of these come together in your work. If one reads about your beginnings before WikiLeaks, one finds that you were not only instrumental in bringing the internet to Australia, but that you were also one of the pioneering, early hackers. You co-authored this book called Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. Im curious about your hacker background, and this book as well, since it seems to be a sort of fundament on which a lot of things were based afterwards.

JA: In my late teenage years, up until the age of twenty, I was a computer hacker and a student in Melbourne. And I had an underground magazine called International Subversive. We were part of an international community of underground computer hackers. This was before the internet connected continents, but we had other ways of making international connections. So each country had its own internet, of a sort, but the world as a whole was intellectually balkanized into distinct systems and networks. HUO: Like The WELL in the States. JA: Right, that kind of thing, or ARPANET, which connected universities in the States. And something called x.25, run by the telecommunications companies, that banks and major companies used to link systems together. We, the underground community, sometimes bumped into each other deep inside these computer networks. Or we would meet at underground watering holes like QSD in France or ALTOS in Germany. But it was a very small community, with perhaps only twenty people at the elite level that could move across the globe freely and with regularity. The community was small and involved and active just before the internet, but then crossed into the embryonic internet, which was still not available to people outside of university research departments, US military contractors, and the pentagon. It was a delightful international playground of scientists, hackers, and power. For someone who wanted to learn about the world, for someone who was developing their own philosophy of power, it was a very interesting time. Eventually our phones were tapped and there were multiple, simultaneous raids that resulted in close to six years of legal proceedings. The book covers my case, but I deliberately minimized my role so we could pull in the whole community, in the United States, in Europe, in England, and in Australia.

The tableware of transparency is so far limited to that handy office assistant, the mug. Mugs could have a soft focus Assange effigy (press photo) on them, or they could be overprinted with documents. The mug as public space. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: it also created a kind of connection between all these different local scenes? At that time, you were also known as an ethical hacker. JA: Right, though I actually think most computer hackers back then were ethical, since that was the standard of the best people involved. Remember, this was an intellectual frontier, and it had very young people in it. It needed young people for the degree of mental adaptation necessary. Because it was an intellectual frontier, we had a range of people who were very bright, though not necessarily formally educated. HUO: Was there a connection to America, to the beginnings of The WELL, to people like Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, or Kevin Kelly? JA: There was almost no connection. The WELL had influenced some parts of the computer hacking community in the United States, but we were deep underground, so most of our connections didnt rise above the

light and we were proud of that discipline. Those who knew did not speak. Those who spoke did not know. The result was a distorted US-centric perception of the underground. In the United States, in particular, you had quite marginal computer hackers engaging in conferences but the people engaged in the really serious business, because of the risks involved, were almost completely invisible until they were arrested. The entry points into it were the bulletin boardsthese were the central places, places like P80 in the United States, and Pacific Island in Australia, which had public cover for a private side. But then, once reaching a certain level, people only used completely underground bulletin boards. There were on x.25 networks places like ALTOS in Hamburg where we would go to talk. ALTOS was one of the first, if not the first, multi-party chat system, but in order to get into it, you had to have x.25 credentials. While some bank workers and telecommunications workers would have access to these, teenagers would only have them if they were decent computer hackers, or if their fathers worked for the telecommunications company. HUO: In a previous issue of e-flux journal I discussed a lot of the history of anarchists and piracy with Hakim Bey, who mentioned that as an anarchist he has never fetishized democracy, saying that democracy, to be interesting for an anarchist, has to be direct democracy.1 When you worked as a hacker, were you inspired by anarchistic ideas? JA: I wasnt personally. The anarchists tradition revolving around figures like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin was not something on my horizon. My personal political inspirations were people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, anti-Stalinists in The God That Failed, and US radical traditions all the way up to the Black Panthers.

Petri Dishes (Image Economies): The uncontrolled lab experiment with geopolitics that is WikiLeaks, is signified by an expanding image economy, visualized here through a series of petri dishes. These proposals feature faces that, in the media, have become mentioned in a WikiLeaks context. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: Liberation movements. JA: Yes, the various liberation movementsin their emotional tone and force of will, not in intellectual content. That tradition really spread into some other things I did later, like the Cypherpunks, in 1993 and 94. 1994 was probably the peak of the Cypherpunk micro movement. Cypherpunk is a wordplay on Cyberpunk, the latter was always viewed as nonsense by real computer hackerswe were the living Cyberpunks while others were

just talking about it, making artistic pastiche on our reality. We viewed the better books as a nice showing of the flag to the general public, but like most causes that are elitist and small, we had contempt for bowdlerized popularizations. The Cypherpunks were a combination of people from California, Europe, and Australia. We saw that we could change the nature of the relationship between the individual and the state using cryptography. I wouldnt say that we came from a libertarian political tradition as much as from a libertarian temperament, with particular individuals who were capable of thinking in abstractions, but wanting to make them real. We had many who were comfortable with higher mathematics, cryptography, engineering or physics who were interested in politics and felt that the relationship between the individual and the state should be changed and that the abuse of power by states needed to be checked, in some manner, by individuals. HUO: Is this the fundament of WikiLeaks? JA: Yes and no. There are many different intellectual strands that ended up in WikiLeaks that are unrelated to ideas swirling around the Cypherpunk community. But the use of mathematics and programming to create a check on the power of government, this was really the common value in the Cypherpunk movement. HUO: And you were one of the protagonists? JA: I was. There wasnt really a founding member or a founding philosophy but there were some initial principles, people like John Young, Eric Huges, and Timothy C. May from California. We were a discussion group like the Vienna school of logical positivism. From our interactions certain ideas and values took form. The fascination for us was simple. It was not just the intellectual challenge of making and breaking these cryptographic codes and connecting people together in novel ways. Rather, our will came

from a quite extraordinary notion of power, which was that with some clever mathematics you can, very simplyand this seems complex in abstraction but simple in terms of what computers are capable ofenable any individual to say no to the most powerful state. So if you and I agree on a particular encryption code, and it is mathematically strong, then the forces of every superpower brought to bear on that code still cannot crack it. So a state can desire to do something to an individual, yet it is simply not possible for the state to do itand in this sense, mathematics and individuals are stronger than superpowers.

Petri Dishes (Image Economies): Other motifs are the globe, and camouflage patterns made transparent. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: Could this have been an epiphany that then led to WikiLeaks? JA: Well, there is no singular epiphany. WikiLeaks is many different ideas pulled together, and certain economies permit it to be cheap enough to realize. There are some epiphanies, such as my theory of change, an understanding of what is important to do in life, an understanding of what information is important and what is not, ideas having to do with how to protect such an endeavor, and many small technical breakthroughs that go along the way. Theyre building blocks for my final view about what form things should take. It is a complex construction, like a truck, which has wheels, cranks, and gears, all contributing to the efficiency of the whole truck, and all of which need to be assembled in order for the truck to get to the destination that I want it to get to by a certain time. So to some degree the epiphany is not in the construction of this vehicle, because there are many little epiphanies in each part, but rather it is that there is a destination that this truck should go to and a way to get out of there. HUO: Theres a path? JA: Yes, theres a path, and therefore there needs to be a truck that will go down this path. Then, it becomes a matter of assembling all the pieces necessary for this truck, which is a complex machine, technically and logistically, in terms of political presentation and cause and effect, and as an organization, and how I interact, personally, with all this. Its not a simple thing. I actually think that anyone who has built an institution around an idea will tell you thisthat there are some ideas about where you want to go, but in order to get there you need to build an institution. In my case, I builtand got other people to help me buildboth the machine and the institution.

Proposal for an N(G)O Logo: The WL acronym built of a constellation of circles demarcating distinct locations, hosts and leaks as basic shapes inspired from Google Maps pins; a proposal to reduce all iconography to its most basic level. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: So obviously then, because its such a complex thing, I suppose its not possible for you to just sketch it on a piece of paper. JA: No, this would be like sketching democracysomething thats not possible to draw. There are all these different parts, and each has their own drawing. Its the ensemble of all these parts that makes WikiLeaks work like it does. But perhaps there are some economic epiphanies. Theres a universe of information, and we can imagine a sort of Platonic ideal in which we have an infinite horizon of information. Its similar to the concept of the Tower of Babel. Imagine a field before us composed of all the information that exists in the worldinside government computers, peoples letters, things that have already been published, the stream of

information coming out of televisions, this total knowledge of all the world, both accessible and inaccessible to the public. We can as a thought experiment observe this field and ask: If we want to use information to produce actions that affect the world to make it more just, which information will do that? So what we ask for is a way to color the field of information before us, to take a yellow highlighter and mark the interesting bitsall the information that is most likely to have that effect on the world, which leads it toward the state we desire. But what is the signal that permits us to do that? What can we recognize when we look at the world from a distance? Can we somehow recognize those things that we should mark as worthy candidates to achieve change? Some of the information in this tremendous field, if you look at it carefully, is faintly glowing. And what its glowing with is the amount of work thats being put into suppressing it. So, when someone wants to take information and literally stick it in a vault and surround it with guards, I say that they are doing economic work to suppress information from the world. And why is so much economic work being done to suppress that information? Probablynot definitely, but probablybecause the organization predicts that its going to reduce the power of the institution that contains it. Its going to produce a change in the world, and the organization doesnt like that vision. Therefore, the containing institution engages in constant economic work to prevent that change. So, if you search for that signal of suppression, then you can find all this information that you should mark as information that should be released. So, it was an epiphany to see the signal of censorship to always be an opportunity, to see that when organizations or governments of various kinds attempt to contain knowledge and suppress it, they are giving you the most important information you need to know: that there is something worth looking at to see if it should be exposed and that censorship expresses weakness, not strength.

Proposal for an N(G)O Logo: Proposal to self-censor one of WikiLeaks' key slogans, We Open Governments. And, Leaks, rather than Wiki-, is a more appropriate proposed brand name for the future. In this proposal Wiki- would be censored away from the name by means of a black bar, so the result is "Leaks. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: So within that complex field of information this signal is actually a very clear sign. JA: Yes, within that complexity. Censorship is not only a helpful economic signal; it is always an opportunity, because it reveals a fear of reform. And if an organization is expressing a fear of reform, it is also expressing the fact that it can be reformed. So, when you see the Chinese government engaging in all sorts of economic work to suppress information passing in and out of China on the internet, the Chinese government is also expressing a belief that it can be reformed by information flows, which is hopeful but easily understandable because China is still a political society. It is not yet a fiscalized society in the way that the United States is for example. The basic

Proposal for an N(G)O Logo: Proposal to self-censor one of WikiLeaks' key slogans, We Open Governments. And, Leaks, rather than Wiki-, is a more appropriate proposed brand name for the future. In this proposal Wiki- would be censored away from the name by means of a black bar, so the result is "Leaks. Courtesy of Metahaven.

power relationships of the United States and other Western countries are described by formal fiscal relationships, for example one organization has a contract with another organization, or it has a bank account, or is engaged in a hedge. Those relationships cannot be changed by moderate political shifts. The shift needs to be large enough to turn contracts into paper, or change money flows.

The fashion of transparency could take on a decidedly sci-fi direction. These proposals work with three letters acronyms around Freedom of Information, and NGOs, and enlarged faces overprinted over shirts. These Leaks shirts engage in a sense of psychedelica. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: And thats why you mentioned when we last spoke that youre optimistic about China? JA: Correct, and optimistic about any organization, or any country, that engages in censorship. We see now that the US State Department is trying to censor us. We can also look at it in the following way. The birds and the bees, and other things that cant actually change human power relationships, are free. Theyre left unmolested by human beings because they dont matter. In places where speech is free, and where censorship does not exist or is not obvious, the society is so sewn upso depoliticized, so fiscalized in its basic power relationshipsthat it doesnt matter what you say. And it doesnt matter what information is published. Its not going

to change who owns what or who controls what. And the power structure of a society is by definition its control structure. So in the United States, because of the extraordinary fiscalization of relationships in that country, it matters little who wins office. Youre not going to suddenly empty a powerful individuals bank account. Their money will stay there. Their stockholdings are going to stay there, bar a revolution strong enough to void contracts. HUO: It was around 2007 that WikiLeaks began developing contacts with newspapers. When was the first major coup? JA: We had published a number of significant reports in July 2007. One was a detailed 2,000-page list of all the military equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan, including unit assignments and the entire force structure. That was actually important but, interestingly, too complex to be picked up by the press, and so it had no direct impact. The first to be recognized by the international press was a private intelligence report by Kroll, an international private intelligence agency. This was produced by their London office, at great expense to the new Kenyan government, who were trying to find out where Daniel arap Moi and his cronies had smuggled the Kenyan Treasury to. They managed to trace some three billion dollars worth of money, looted from Kenya, to London Banks, Swiss Banks, a 10,000 hectare ranch in Australia, properties in the US, companies in London, and so on. HUO: And that changed the Kenyan elections. JA: It swung the electoral vote by 10 percent, changing the predicted result of the election and leading to a rather extraordinary series of events, which ended with an overhaul of the structure of the government and the Kenyan constitution.

Proposal for a map of WikiLeaks hosting and links, based on public sources and news articles (as of December, 2010). The relevance of the hosting model is the simultaneous usage of multiple jurisdictions. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: So one could say that, for the first time, WikiLeaks produced reality? JA: Yes. Remember that in the theory of change I outlined, we have a starting point. We have some observations about reality, like Kroll observing where Daniel arap Moi stashed all his money. Then that information came to us, and then we spread it around in a way designed

to maximize impact. And it entered the minds of many people, and caused them to act. The result was a change in the Kenyan election, which then went on to produce many other changes. HUO: And what would you say was the next big production of reality after that? JA: Some of them are harder to track. An election is fairly easy, because either the government or the opposition is elected. In Kenya, we saw a situation somewhere in the middle, where the opposition was elected, but the government wouldnt give up power, resulting in a power struggle. The next big disclosure was the two sets of the main manuals for Guantanamo Bay. We got one from 2003, which is the year after Guantanamo Bay started taking detainees, it revealed a new banality of evil. The Pentagon tried to say, Oh, well, that was 2003. That was under General Miller. And the next year there was a different commander, so supposedly everything changed for the better. But courage is contagious, so someone stepped up to smuggle us the 2004 manual. I wrote a computer program to compare every single letter change between the 2003 Guantanamo Bay manual and the 2004 manual. We pulled out every goddamn difference and showed that the manual had gotten significantly worse; more despotic as time had advanced. HUO: There is a question Julia Peyton-Jones wanted to ask you: To what extent do you think WikiLeaks prompted the current wave of protests in the Middle East? JA: Well, we tried. We dont know precisely what the cause and effect was, but we added a lot of oil to the fire. Its interesting to consider what the possible interactions are, and its a story that hasnt really been told before. Theres a great Lebanese newspaper called Al Akhbar who in early December of last year started publishing analyses of our cables from a

number of countries in Northern Africa, including Tunisia, and also our cables about Saudi Arabia. As a result, Al Akhbars domain name was immediately attackedredirected to a Saudi sex site. I didnt think there was such a thing, but apparently there is. Then, after Al Akhbar recovered they received a massive denial of service attack, and then much more sophisticated computer hackers came in and wiped them out entirely their entire cable publishing operation, news stories, analyses, completely wiped out. The Tunisian government concurrently banned Al Akhbar, and WikiLeaks. Then, computer hackers who were sympathetic to us came and redirected the Tunisian governments own websites to us. Theres one particular cable about Ben Alis regime that covers his sort of internal, personal opulence and abuse, the abuse of proceeds. The New Yorker had an article describing that this was actually reported by an American Ambassador.

Messages. In these sketches the laboratory petri dish, overwritten with circles forming the WL acronym, becomes a more neutral lens through which to observe the world, such as, a cable from Warsaw, or a page from Foreign Affairs magazine. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: Right, that he had seen a cage with a tiger and abuses of power. JA: Right, so some people have reported that the people in Tunisia were very upset to hear about these abuses in this cable, and that inspired them to revolt. Some parts of that may be true, though two weeks later there was also a man who set himself on fire, the 26-year-old computer technician, reportedly because of a dispute over a license in the market. And this took the rage to the streets. But my suspicion is that one of the real differences in the cables about Tunisia came in showing that the United States, if push came to shove, would support the army over Ben Ali. That was a signal, not just to the army, but to the other actors inside Tunisia, as well as to the surrounding states who might have been considering intervening with their intelligence services or military on behalf of Ben Ali. Similarly, some of the revelations about the Saudis caused Saudi Arabia to turn inward to deal with the fallout of those relations. And it is clear that Tunisia, as an example, then set off all the protests in the rest of the Middle East. So when we saw what was happening in Tunisia, we knew that Egypt was on the borderline, and we saw these initial protests in Egypt as a result of Tunisia. We really tried very hard to get out lots and lots of cables, hundreds of cables, to show the abuses of Mubarak and so on, to give the protestors some additional fuel, but also to remove Western support for Mubarak. Now we also have Libya bordering Egypt. Working with the Telegraph in the UK, we pushed out 480 cables about Libya, revealing many abuses, but also intelligence about how the Libyan regime operatedwe removed some

of that Western support for the Libyan regime, and perhaps some of the support from the neighboring countries. The approach we took, and continue to take, with the demonstrations in the Middle East, has been to look at them as a pan-Arab phenomenon with different neighboring countries supporting each other in different ways. The elitesin most cases the dictatorial eliteof these countries prop each other up, and this becomes more difficult if we can get them to focus on their own domestic issues. Information produced by the revolutionaries in Egypt on how to conduct a revolution is now spreading into Bahrain. So this is being pushed out. We have pan-Arab activists spreading, and there exists Western support for these opposition groups, or for the traditional dictatorial leadership. And that support can be affected by exposing not just the internal abuses of power on the part of the regime, but also by exposing the nature of the relationship between the United States and these dictatorships. When the nature of this is exposed, we have a situation much like what actually happened with Joseph Biden, the Vice President of the United States, who last year called me a hi-tech terrorist. This year, he said that Mubarak was not a dictator, but presumably a democrat, and that he should not stand down. Look at how the behavior of Washington changed with regard to Mubarak just before he fell. After we released these cables about the relationship between the United States and Mubarak in foreign military subsidies and the FBIs training of torturers in Egypt, it was no longer possible for Biden to make these kinds of statements. It became completely impossible, because their own ambassadors were saying, just the year before, that Suleiman and Mubarak had been extremely abusive to the Egyptian people in so many waysand that the United States had been involved in that abuse, in some way. So, if youre able to pull out regional support and Western support, and the underground activists are good, and are sharing and spreading information with each other, then I think we can actually get rid of quite a few of these regimes. Already were seeing that Yemen and Libya might be the next to go. HUO: And youve got cables there as well.

JA: Yes, there was a big one we did for Yemen, which revealed that the president had conspired with the United States to have the US bomb Yemen and say that the Yemeni Air Force did it. So that was a big revelation that we released in December of last year. Although the President is still there, he has been handing out tremendous concessions as a result. Thats been happening throughout the Arab world nowsome of them are literally handing out cash, and land, and offering cabinet posts to some of the more liberal forces in the country. Theyve been pulling election timetables forward, saying theyll resign at the next electionmany interesting and important types of concessions. So, although I think we will see a few more go down, in the end it actually doesnt really matter whether the leader is removed or not. What matters is that the power structure of the government changes. If you make the concessions that the people want, youre actually nearly all of the way when you want to be a just and responsible elite. HUO: Constitutional monarchies? JA: Right, they can keep their monarch. In practice, you may have a society that is closer to what people want, a society thats much more civilized. But let me first qualify all that Ive just said. Ive received reports from people who have been on the ground in Egypt, in Bahrain, and have come over and briefed me personally on whats happening. And it seems very good that, for example, when Mubarak was removed he was the head of a patronage network that extended down into every position in Egypt, to the chief of the lawyers syndicate to the groceries industry, to particular people in the army, and so forth. So every institution and every city council had its own mini-revolution after Mubarak was removed. I think that this change in the power structures underneath will, to a large degree, confine and constrain whoever assumes power later. Still, with these revolutions we have to be careful not to end up with something like the Orange Revolution, where you had liberal forces, but ones that were being literally paid by the United States and Western Europe. They opened up and liberalized the Ukraine in

important ways, but the result was that opportunists inside the country rose up and opportunists outside the country came in and really destroyed the social fabric of the country, leading within five years to a backlash that installed a much more Soviet-style president with close ties to Russia. These situations still need monitoring. One of the documents used by the revolutionaries in Cairo is quite interesting to consider. After Mubarak fell, we witnessed an extraordinary change in rhetoric from Hillary Clinton and the White House, from Mubarak is a great guy and he should stay, to Isnt it great what the Egyptian people have done? And isnt it great how the United States did it for them? Likewise, there is an idea that these great American companies, Facebook and Twitter, gave the Egyptian people this revolution and liberated Egypt. But the most popular guide for the revolutionaries was a document that spread throughout the soccer clubs in Egypt, which themselves were the most significant revolutionary community groups. If you read this document, you see that on the first page it says to be careful not to use Twitter and Facebook as they are being monitored. On the last page: do not use Twitter or Facebook. That is the most popular guide for the Egyptian revolution. And then we see Hillary Clinton trying to say that this was a revolution by Twitter and Facebook.

Messages. These proposals feature nation branding for Iceland, and a cover from Time magazine. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: What about Iran? Does WikiLeaks have releases connected to Iran? JA: Yes. There have been more demonstrations there recently, so weve been releasing material on Iran consistently since December. And the reason it has been consistent is quite interesting. Media partners that weve worked withsuch as Der Spiegel, The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, and Le Mondehave already been inclined to produce stories critical of Iran, so they trawled through the cables to find bad stories about Iran and have been publishing them since December at a tremendous pace. Beyond publishing the underlying cables, we havent actually done any of our own work on Iran. But this is actually because the Western mainstream

press is, as far as I can tell, inspired to produce bad stories about Iran as a result of geopolitical influences. So we didnt need to assist, while with Egypt we had to do all the work. Wed given these Western papers all the material, and they didnt do a goddamn thing about Egypt. However, this changed later on when we partnered withThe Telegraph, who listened closely to our predictions. HUO: When you began working with what you call media partners, was that a new strategy of concerted action of some sort? JA: It was a concerted action for a number of reasons. Weve partnered with twenty or so newspapers across the world, to increase the total impact, including by encouraging each one of these news organizations to be braver. It made them braver, though it did not entirely work in the case of The New York Times. For example, one of the stories we found in the Afghan War Diary was from Task Force 373, a US Special Forces assassination squad. Task Force 373 is working its way down an assassination list of some 2,000 people for Afghanistan, and the Kabul government is rather unhappy about these extrajudicial assassinations there is no impartial procedure for putting a name on the list or for taking a name off the list. Youre not notified if youre on the list, which is called the Joint Priority Effects List, or JPEL. Its supposedly a kill or capture list. But you can see from the material that we released that about 50 percent of cases were just killtheres no option to capture when a drone drops a bomb on someone. And in some cases Task Force 373 killed innocents, including one case where they attacked a school and killed seven children and no bona fide targets, and attempted to cover the whole thing up. This discovery became the cover story for Der Spiegel. It became an article in The Guardian. A story was written forThe New York Times by national security correspondent Eric Schmitt, and that story was killed. It did not appear in The New York Times.

Posters, screen print 120x180 cm, courtesy Triennale Design Museum / Graphic Design Worlds, Milan, Italy. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: Im very interested in the whole idea of projects that are unrealized for having been censored, for being too big, or for other reasons. What are your unrealized projects or dreams? JA: There are so many. Im not sure its quite right to say theyre unrealized because a lot will hopefully be realized, or are in the process of being realized. Were still too young to look back and say, oh, this is something we never managed to do. But there is one thing we tried to do and failed at, and its very interesting. So, it was my view early on that the whole of the existing Fourth Estate was not big enough for the task of making sense of

information that hadnt previously been public. To take our most recent case as an example, all the journalists in the world would not be enough to make complete sense of the 400,000 documents we released about Iraq, and, of course, they have other things to write about as well. I always knew this would be the case. I was very confident about having enough source material. So what we wanted to do was to take all that volunteer labor that is spent on writing about things that are not terribly important, and redirect it to material that we released, material that has a real potential for change if people assess it, analyze it, contextualize it, and push it back into local communities. I tried very hard to make that happen, but it didnt. I had looked at all these people writing Wikipedia articles, and all these people writing blogs about the issue du jour, whatever that was, especially in relation to war and peace. And I thought about the tremendous amount of effort that goes into that. When some of these bloggers are asked why they dont do original stories, and why they dont have opinion pieces and analysis of media output, they say, Well, we dont have original sources so we cant write original material. So, surely, rather than write a Wikipedia article on something that would have no political influence, the opportunity to write about a secret intelligence report revealed to the world at that very moment would surely be irresistible, or so I thought. But Ill give you an example to explain what I found instead. I released a secret intelligence report from the US Army Intelligence on what happened in Fallujah in the first battle of Fallujah in 2004, and it looked like a very good documentsecret classification labels all over it, nice maps, color, a good, combined military and political description of what had happened, even Al Jazeeras critical involvement. And there was analysis of what the US should have done, which was to conduct a political and psychological shaping operation before they went in. In the case of Fallujah, some US Military contractors had been grabbed and hung in the town, and the US response gradually became an invasion of the town. So, rather than being a carefully pre-planned operation, it had been a continual escalation. They hadnt set up the necessary political and media factors to support the

military objective. It was an extremely interesting document, and we sent it to 3,000 people. Nothing appeared for five days. Then, a small report by a friend of mine, Shaun Waterman at UPI, appeared as a newswire, and then another one by a guy, Davis Isenberg, who spends half his time at the Cato Institute, but published this for the Asia Times. But before the UPI report, there was nothing by any bloggers, by any Wikipedia-type people, by any leftist intellectuals, by any Arab intellectuals, nothing. Whats going on? Why didnt anyone spend time on this extraordinary document? My conclusion is twofold. First, to be generous, these groups dont know how to lead the intellectual debate. Theyve been pacified into being reactive by the presence of the mainstream press. The front page of The New York Timessays something and they react to that. Find what is newsworthy and tell the public that it is newsworthy. Thats the generous interpretation, but I think the main factor, however, for those who are not professional writers, and perhaps many who are, is simply that they use their writing to advertise their values as conforming to those of their paper. The aim of most non-professional writers is to take the cheapest possible content that permits them to demonstrate their value of conformity to the widest possible selection of the group that they wish to gain the favor of. So if one were a European leftist, why wouldnt going through that secret Fallujah document, assessing it, and writing about it properly advertise ones own values to their group? Well, actually, it would. But the costreward ratio doesnt work. The cost is that they would have to read and understand a thirty-page document, and then write about it in a way that would get this new information into their group and prove that it was important. ButThe New York Times and other mainstream press vehicles already do that, and theyve also created the market for a response. One only needs to read a single article in The New York Times and issue a riposte or agreement. The frame and the audience have already been primed.

Posters, screen print 120x180 cm, courtesy Triennale Design Museum / Graphic Design Worlds, Milan, Italy. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: Do you have dreams for the future? JA: Yes, many. Ill tell you about one, which is interesting. Orwells dictum, He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future, was never truer than it is now. With digital archives, with these digital repositories of our intellectual record, control over the present allows one to perform an absolutely untraceable removal of the past. More than ever before, the past can be made to completely, utterly, and irrevocably disappear in an undetectable way. Orwells dictum came about as result of what happened in 1953 to the Great

Soviet Encyclopedia. That year, Stalin died and Beria fell out of favor. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia had a page and a half on Beria from before he fell out of favor, and it was decided that the positive description of Beria had to go. So, an addendum page was made and sent to all registered holders of this encyclopedia with instructions specifying that the previous page should be pasted over with the new page, which was an expanded section on the Bering Straight. However, users of the encyclopedia would later see that the page had been pasted over or ripped outeveryone became aware of the replacement or omission, and so we know about it today. Thats what Orwell was getting at. In 2008, one of the richest men in the UK, Nadhmi Auchian Iraqi who grew rich under one of Saddam Husains oil ministries and left to settle in the UK in the early 1980s engaged in a series of libel threats against newspapers and blogs. He had been convicted of corruption in France in 2003 by the then magistrate Eva Joly in relation to the Elf Aquitaine scandal. HUO: She was the investigating judge. I remember reading about it when living in France at the time. It was in the daily news every day. JA: Right. So Nadhmi Auchi has interests all over the world. His Luxembourg holding company holds over 200 companies. He has companies under his wifes name in Panama, interests in Lebanon and the Iraqi telecommunications market, and alleged involvement in the Italian arms trade. He also had a $2 billion investment around Chicago. He was also the principle financier of a man called Tony Rezko, who was one of Obamas most important fundraisers, for his various pre-presidential campaigns, such as for the Senate. Rezko was also a fundraiser for Rob Blagojevich, the now disgraced Governor of Illinois. Rezko ended up being convicted of corruption in 2008. But in 2008, Barack Obama was involved in a run against Hillary for the presidential nomination, so the media turned their attention to Barack Obamas fundraisers. And so attention was turned to Tony Rezko, who had been involved in a house purchase for Barack Obama. And attention was then turned to where some of the

money for this house purchase might have come from, and attention was then turned to Nadhmi Auchi, who at that time had given Tony Rezko $3.5 million in violation of court conditions. Auchi then instructed Carter-Ruck, a libel firm in the UK, to go after stories mentioning aspects of his 2003 corruption conviction in France. And those stories started to be removed, everywhere.

Proposal for Leaks; presence revealed through absencea link to a domain of which the license has been revoked. Courtesy of Metahaven. HUO: So they were literally erased from the digital archive?

JA: Yes. The Guardian pulled three of the stories. The Telegraph pulled one. And there are a number of others. If you go to the former URLs of those stories you get a page not found. It does not say that it was removed as the result of a legal threat. As far as we can tell, the story not only ceased to exist, but ceased to have ever have existed. Parts of our intellectual record are disappearing in such a way that we cannot even tell that they have ever existed. HUO: Which is very different from books, or newspapers, when some copies always survive. JA: Right. Its very different from newspapers, and its very different from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The current situation is much, much worse than that. So what is to be done? I want to make sure that WikiLeaks is incorruptible in that manner. We have never unpublished something that we have published. And its all very well for me to say that, but how can the public be assured? They cant. There are some things that we have traditionally done, such as providing cryptographic hashes of the files that we have released, allowing for a partial check if you have a copy of a specific list of cryptographic hashes. But thats not good enough. And were an organization whose content is under constant attack. We have had over one hundred serious legal threats, and many intelligence and other actions against us. But this problem, and its solution, is also the solution to another problem, which is: How can we globally, consistently name a part of our intellectual history in such a way that we can accurately converse about it? And by converse I dont mean a conversation like were having now, but rather one that takes place through history and across space. For example, if I start talking about the First Amendment, you know what I mean, within this current context of our conversation. I mean the First Amendment of the United States. But what does that mean? Its simply an abstraction of something. But what if the First Amendment was only in digital form, and someone like Nadhmi Auchi made an attack on that piece of text and made it disappear forever, or replaced it with another one? Well, we know the

First Amendment is spread everywhere, so its easily checkable. If we are confused in our conversation and unsure of what were talking about, or we really want to get down to the details, its in so many places that if I find a copy, its going to be the same as the copy you find. But this is because its a short and very ancient and very popular document. In the cases of these Nadhmi Auchi stories, there were eight that were removed, but actually this removal of material as a result of political or legal threats, its happening everywhere. This is just the tip of the iceberg. And there are other forms of removal that are less intentional but more pernicious, which can be a simple matter of companies going under along with the digital archives they possess. So we need a way of consistently and accurately naming every piece of human knowledge, in such a way that their name arises out of the knowledge itself, out of its textual, visual, or aural representation, where the name is inextricably coupled to what it actually is. If we have that name, and if we use that name to refer to some information, and someone tries to change the contents, then it is either impossible or completely detectable by anyone using the name. And actually, there is a way of creating names in such a way that they emerge from the inherent intellectual content of something, with no extrinsic component. Now, to make this a bit clearer, look at URLs as a name for something. There is the text for the King James Bible in Project Gutenberg, as a URL. It is the short, convenient name for thiswe pass it around, and it expands to the text of the King James Bible. The problem with URLs is that they are authority names. A URL goes to some company or organization, and the name is completely controlled by the company or organization, which means that Project Gutenberg could conceivably copy the Talmud over the King James Bible but the URL name would remain the same. It is simply up to the whim of whoever controls that domain name.

T-shirt as public surface. This proposal has a leaked cable boldly overprinting a shirt together with the WL circles. Courtesy of Metahaven. HUO: Its private. JA: Exactly. We all now suffer from the privatization of words, a privatization of those fundamental abstractions human beings use to communicate. The way we refer to our common intellectual record is becoming privatized, with different parts of it being soaked up into domain names controlled by private companies, institutions or states. And we could have a sort of deliberate, pernicious change, like someone replacing King James Bible with Talmud. Of course, that is unlikely to happen, but it is more likely that these companies will simply stop caring

about that information. It no longer becomes profitable, or the company goes under. Or you have an important archive, and powerful figures are simply removing bits of history. So Ive come up with this scheme to name every part of our intellectual history, and every possible future part of our intellectual history. And you can actually see the desire to do this as already being expressed in impoverished forms. When you look at something like TinyURL, or bit.ly, or one of these URL shorteners, you see that they are creating a short name from a longer and less comprehensible name, which is a URL. And those longer names are also short names or abstractions of whole texts, like the King James Bible. We can also see it with dot-coms. Why shouldnt URLs be company, type of company, then, say, Coca-Cola? It could be us.beverages.company.CocaCola, right? But instead we just have coca-cola.com. We just go straight there with one word. And so, in our human language, we use words in such a way that we dont need to constantly provide a map with everything we say. Instead of having a big tree, its a flat name space. Similarly, services like TinyURL are popular because its just enough to get there. So my scheme is to pull out of every transmissible piece of intellectual content and intrinsic name that is mathematically bonded with that content. Theres no registration, no server, no company that controls the coupling between a particular name and a piece of information. For example, for Project Gutenberg, a number of domain name registrars and Project Gutenberg itself couple the URL to King James Bible. And when you pass around that URL, you are actually passing around a dependence on the authority of the whole domain name system, and the dependence on the authority and the longevity of Project Gutenberg itself. HUO: So it becomes a kind of digital robustness. JA: Thats right, and the idea is to create an intellectual robustness. So if you think about citations when using URLs, if we make an intellectual work, we stand on the shoulders of giants, which we all do, and we cite our

influences in some waynot necessarily in a formal academic sense, but we simply refer to them by linking to the original thing you were looking at. URLs are an example of how we become intellectually dependent on this citation mechanism. But if that citation mechanism is actually like plasticine, and it is decaying all around usif oligarchs and billionaires are in there ripping out bits of history, or connections between one part of history and another, because it interferes with their agendathen the intellectual constructs that we are building up about our civilization are being built on something that is unstable. We are building an intellectual scaffold for civilization out of plasticine.

New Alphabet. Proposals for new characters (as part of the Arial, Courier and Times typefaces) indicating censorship, hosting, leaking, mirroring, and WikiLeaks. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: So in that sense its actually regressive compared to the book. One cant remove parts of a published book in the same way once the book is out in the world. JA: Exactly. So this new idea that I want to introduce to protect the work of WikiLeaks can also be extended to protect all intellectual products. All creative works that can be put into digital form can be linked in a way that depends on nothing but the intellectual content of the material itselfno reliance on remote servers or any organization. It is simply a mathematical function on the actual intellectual content, and people would need nothing other than this function. HUO: So thats your dream, that this could be implemented somehow. JA: I think its more than a dream, actually. Its been realized. It will be a new standard that, I hope, will apply to every intellectual work, a consistent way of naming every piece of intellectual creation, anything that can be digitized. And so, if we have a blog post, it will have a unique name. And if the post changes, the name will change, but the post and the name are always completely coupled. If we have a sonata and a recording of it, then it has a unique name. If we have a film in digitized form, then it has a unique name. If we have a leaked, classified document that we release, it has a unique name. And its not possible to change the underlying document without changing the name. I think its very importanta kind of indexing system for the Tower of Babel, or pure knowledge. HUO: I also suppose most people dont know about the danger that the archive can just be eliminated, no? JA: No, they dont, because the newspapers try to keep it all quiet. And everyone else tries to keep it quiet. If they dont, they will look weak, and theyll look like theyve betrayed their readership by removing something

their readership was interested in. And theyll encourage further attacks, because someone was successful in the first one. It is actually quite extraordinary that in the UK libel law, mentioning that you have removed something can be argued to be libelous. We saw this in a really flagrant case, where I had won the Index on Censorship Award for fighting against censorship.

Proposal for an N(G)O Logo: The WikiLeaks logo, as it consists two worlds leaking, may be recreated using the UN globe, the Google Maps pin turned upside down (becoming a leak), and the Wikipedia globe. The two worlds may also be joined together to form an S-shaped symbol. Courtesy of Metahaven.

HUO: I was on the jury for it this year. I read that WikiLeaks won the Freedom of Expression award two years ago. JA: Oh really? Right, so after I won this, Martin Bright wrote a blog post in the New Statesman saying it was nice to meet Julian, and so on and so forth. And the next part of his blog post mentioned that these articles about Nadhmi Auchis conviction for corruption have been disappearing. And here are the titleshe just put their titles in, as they were in the newspapers. A legal attack was then made on that particular blog post, the particular one that said we had won an award for anti-censorship. And it was then censored. The list of articles was removed, and then the whole post was removed. Thats how I became interested in Nadhmi Auchi, and we managed to find all these articles and get hold of a huge Pentagon report on Auchis activities. And we managed to have the issue raised in Parliament, where they had a 90-minute discussion on libel. But theres another big story; that Martin Bright lost his job at the New Statesman.

To be continued in In Conversation with Julian Assange, Part II.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

In Conversation with Julian Assange, Part II

Continued from In Conversation with Julian Assange, Part One.

When I first met Julian Assangethanks to lawyer and Chair of the Contemporary Art Society Mark Stephens and curator/lawyer Daniel McClean, both of the law firm Finers Stephens Innocentwe discussed ideas for various interview formats. Anton Vidokle and I had discussed the idea to conduct an interview with Assange in which questions would be posed not only by me, but also by a number of artists. This seemed only natural considering the extent to which so many artists have been interested in WikiLeaks, and we then invited seven artists and collectives to ask questions over video for the second part of the interview. My archive now contains over 2000 hours of interviews recorded in many different places, and I am constantly attempting to discover new rules of the game, new approaches to how an interview can work. For an interview with Hans-Peter Feldmann published initially in AnOther Magazine and then in book form, I emailed him one question per day, and each of Feldmanns responses would take the form of an image. For my interview with Louise Bourgeois, I would send a question and she would email back a drawing. When Julian came to my office with Mark and Daniel for our first meeting, we discussed the idea of a different format with questions from artists, and Julian liked this a lot, suggesting that the artists send the questions as short videos so that he could see them. We set the interview for two weeks later at 10 or 11 p.m., as we discovered that we both work late at night. Traveling more than three hours from London on Sunday, February 27, I arrived at Ellingham Hall, the Georgian mansion near the Eastern coast of England that Vaughan Smith offered Julian to use as his address for bail during his UK extradition hearings. In the living room of the picturesque home he described to me as a golden cage we drank many cups of coffee and spoke until 3 a.m. about his life, his nomadism, his early beginnings and the invention of WikiLeaks, his time in Egypt, Kenya, Iceland, and other places, his scientific background, and the theoretical underpinnings of WikiLeaks. The interview is divided into two partsin the first, published in the

previous issue of e-flux journal, I was interested in tracing his work back to its beginnings. I was not interested in his court case or private life, but in his public work as the voice of WikiLeaks, and the experiences and philosophical background that informs such a monumentally polemical project. In the second part, which follows here, Assange responds to questions posed to him by artists Goldin+Senneby, Paul Chan, Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk), Martha Rosler, Luis Camnitzer, Superflex, Philippe Parreno, and Ai Weiwei. Many people have contributed to making this interview possible, and I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Julian Assange, to all the artists for their questions, to Joseph Farrell, Laura Barlow, Orit Gat, Joseph Redwood-Martinez, Mariana Silva, Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Daniel McClean, Julia Peyton-Jones, Mark Stephens, and Lorraine Two. Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist: Before we begin with the questions from the artists, I wanted to ask you about the Bourbaki, an anonymous group of mathematicians that you have often referred to. I am very curious to know more about your interest in them, and whether they were related to your own decision to appear in public rather than remain anonymous.

The dangerous bend symbol appeared in the books of Nicolas Bourbaki, indicating a tricky passage on a first reading or a difficult argument. This image was later re-used by computer scientists in textbooks. Julian Assange: The Bourbaki were an anonymous group of French mathematicians who published a series of mathematics books over a period of about 20 years under the collective allonym Nicolas Bourbaki. They kept their individual identities anonymous, and their books are still regarded as some of the finest math books ever published in French. In 2006, I saw that WikiLeaks needed to be, if not completely anonymous, then pseudo-anonymousideally publishing under a collective allonym such as Bourbaki. First of all, as a young organization publishing very controversial material, we didnt want to be more of a target than we needed to be. While I was publicly a member of the advisory board, that is different than being the editor in chief or one of the principal writers. I also wanted to remove ego as much as possible from what we were doing, to make sure people were writing and conducting their work for reasons other than ego. Also, as an organization that did not yet have a reputation, we needed a personalized voice to quickly get a reputation. If we pulled our collective efforts into a name like Jack Bourbaki, or another collective allonym, our personality would quickly gain a reputation because of the relatively high level of our output. But within a month of our coming to the public stage there was a leak of one of our internal mailing lists by a New York architect named John Young, who had been involved in his own primitive, but aggressive publishing project. John saw from the press publicity that WikiLeaks would become significant in the field and might threaten his own project. But it was quite a revelation to have our own leak very early on. And I thought to myself, well, this is very interestingnow we get to taste our own medicine. And actually, this medicine tasted quite nice, in that what I saw was a group of very committed, idealistic people whose internal dialogue was even stronger than their external dialogue. So, there was no hypocrisy in what

we were doing, precisely the oppositewe were even more principled and idealistic internally than we were externally.

Luis Camnitzer,This is a mirror. You are a written sentence, 19661968. Vacuum formed polystyrene mounted on synthetic board, 48 x 62.5 x 1.5 cm. Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich. Photo: Peter Schlchli.

Early on, I already had an existing reputation, and I spent that reputational capital to get volunteer labor from good people. But when the press started sniffing around, very curious as to who some of the principle people in

this project were, some of my friends, rather unfortunately, said, well, its Julian, and he deserves all the credit. I couldve shot them! And then I saw that, by trying to engineer a position in which I was not seen as an authority figure for the organization, we ended up with people who were not involved in the organization at all claiming to represent it. And so we started suffering from reputational opportunism, which we had to stamp out. We also grew more politically powerful with many supporters all over the world. So we no longer needed anonymity for ourselves in quite the same wayI still needed locational anonymity for security reasons, but my name being known was not so important anyhow, given that the information was already floating around for anyone who really cared to look. HUO: This locational anonymity has caused you to move through many different places, and in interviews with you, there is a great deal of discussion about your nomadism going back much earlier. You seemed to be traveling the world with literally just your backpack and two notebooks, just living in peoples houses. JA: Well, Ive been traveling all over the world on my own since I was twenty-five, as soon as I had enough money to do it. But for WikiLeaks, I have been consistently on the move since the beginning of 2007. Up until the latest problem with the Pentagon, which started around June/July of last year, it wasnt a matter of being on the run. It was more about following opportunity and ensuring that I wasnt in one place long enough to allow for a proper surveillance operation, which involves getting inside and installing video cameras, monitoring all outgoing electronic signals, and so forth. Such operations take time and planning, so if youre a resourceconstrained activist organization facing the prospect of surveillance by some of the most advanced surveillance agencies, such as the National Security Agency and GCHQ, you only have two methods to resist it: one, changing the location of your headquarters with some frequency, and two, complete geographic isolation.

Martha Rosler, Saddams Palace, 2004. Photomontage from the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, New Series.

HUO: And you chose the first one?

JA: Yes. I lived in Cairo for a while, and thats one of the reasons why these events in Egypt have been so interesting to me. HUO: And Iceland as well, no? JA: And Iceland, and Germanymany countries. In late 2008, Icelands economy collapsed as a result of the general financial crisis. The Icelandic banking sector was 10 times larger than the rest of the Icelandic economy. The largest bank was a bank called Kaupthing, and we got hold of documentation of all the loans that Kaupthing had made, together with very detailed and frank comments about each oneloans of over forty-five million euros, totaling six billion euros. We released this, and Kaupthing then threatened to put us, and any alleged source, in prison in Iceland for a year. They then prevented the main TV station, RUV, from reporting it on their nightly news with an injunction that arrived on the news desk at 6:55 for the 7 oclock news. The newsreader deadpanned, well, this is the nightly news, but we cant bring you all the news there is tonight, as weve received an injunction. So the program showed our website and directed people to WikiLeaks to fill the missing slot. Overnight, WikiLeaks became very important to Icelanders, because the banks and the banksters were perceived to have destroyed a very important part of Icelands economy, and to have ruined Icelands international reputation.

Goldin+Senneby, Gone Offshore: Walking tour led by Blue Badge Guides Rachel Kolsky and Caroline Dale, London, March 30th, 2008.The tour concentrates on Middlesex Street, which marks the shift from Tower Hamlets to the City of London. From this point, a guide initiates a movement towards fictitious space, narrating the legal construction of offshore jurisdictions.

HUO: And was that when the Iceland Modern Media Initiative began? JA: Yes. After that I was invited to speak in Iceland. Id had this idea of exposing the nature of offshore banking and secrecy havensoperations such as Bank Julius Baer in the Cayman Islands, and so forth. Regardless

of what financial people call these offshore havens, they are actually secrecy havens made explicitly for hiding money flows. The United States military and the CIA were engaged in the same practice in Guantanamo, except there they laundered people through offshore jurisdictions to evade the commonly accepted laws of most countries. And I wondered whether I could devise a system that would turn this on its head. Instead of having a secrecy haven, we could have an openness haven. The offshore sector works for secrecy havens like this. You have a country like the British Virgin Islands that provides certain corporate and banking structures that are very opaque, and where there are even criminal laws against revealing certain information. Then, neighboring Caribbean states and other small island economies in other parts of the world will take the most attractive parts of this legislation and implement it as well. So competition prompts a gradual ratcheting up of the level of secrecy across these various financial havens. And now the world has a new refugee publishers. The Rick Ross Institute on Destructive Cults had to move its web service to Stockholm in order to evade lawsuits in the United States. Malaysia Today had to move to Singapore and the United States in order to evade government censorship in Malaysia. We originally had some of our service in the United States and they moved to Stockholm. There was legislative flight, or judicial flight, because a lot of these abuses occur within the judicial system, as part of the process. Theyd be exiled.

World map of internet usage. Courtesy of Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University.

HUO: Involuntarily, as publishing refugees? JA: Exactly. These publishing refugees have a demand for a certain protective legislative structure, an economic demand similar to the demand of those who want to hide their assets. Well, I couldnt find an island that was quite right for this, because you also need a few other things you need a belief that freedom of the press is important, an island with a population and economy large and independent enough to not fall prey to the first major pressure it encounters. You need internet connections that are good for publishing and an educated enough workforce for these internet connections. I actually saw Iceland as the perfect island economy for this kind of haven. And with islands, you can often get new legislation going very quickly because the economy is small enough that you dont have a whole lot of lobbyists keeping it down. I mentioned this on the biggest Sunday political show in Iceland, and the next day everyone was talking about it. It was clear that a number of Icelanders would also support such a move. I came back and we brought in some thirteen different legislative

consultants to think about different ways of pulling it all together. As I was coming from the outside, it was necessary for Icelanders to make the idea their own, or it would never succeed legislatively. It had to become endemic to Iceland. So I worked hard to do this and we got a draft proposal, in Icelandic, put to the Parliament. Then a Parliamentary order was made for the government to draft the legislation, and it passed through the Parliament unanimously.

Bartolomeo Del Bene, Civitas Veri (City of Truth), 1609.

HUO: So perhaps now is a good time for the questions we invited the artists to send.

JA: Okay, lets start with the first one. Luis Camnitzer: The first question concerns your high profile in the public media, while Bradley Manning, who seems to be the true hero (at least in terms of US policy documents), has a low profile. I know that WikiLeaks contributed money to Mannings defense fund and that is great, but it is also not really the issue. WikiLeaks is presumably operating on the basis of collective whistleblowing and contributions of information, and its power therefore comes from being a communal enterprise. Yet, the limelight seems to be on one person and not on the collective. Isnt the idea here that ultimately we all are, or should be, WikiLeaks? Shouldnt you reaffirm that point in your public appearances? The other question concerns the more complex issue of leaking. I am totally in favor of, and applaud transparency, and I dont have ideological issues with it here. When the issues are clear, like the corruption of the banking system for profit, or the evils of imperialism, the more the better. However, in political terms, it is also a little like watching a poker game and yelling out whatever cards are in everybodys hands. This may also be fine, except that sometimes it requires judgment with regard to the consequences. Any good game is not about single gambits, but the whole strategy. Exposure may reveal the evil of one move, but ignore the plan that justifies it with those to follow. On this level, the beauty of transparency becomes more difficult to evaluate since what is revealed is always partial and the intent is not always evil. I wouldnt like to be the judge because I would never feel that I know the full picture. In any case, I would rather denounce the game than the gambits within the game. I therefore vote on the basis of what I know, but I dont engage unless I am persuaded that I know enough. As an aside, I also wouldnt like to read all the thoughts of an interlocutor or have that person read all of mine. How does one determine limits? Such a determination necessarily implies really difficult ethical decisions and intricate qualifications. Out of curiosity, and in a non-aggressive way I would ask: What equipped you to play this role?

JA: These are two questions that Ive been asked often. The first is mischievous, though Im sure the attempt to play my difficulties off against the difficulties of Mr. Manning not arise endemically from Luis Camnitzer. That is something that is being deliberately hyped by our opponents who care for us. Were not in a competition for suffering. Rather, Bradley Manning and I, and other people, are being swept up in a very aggressive operation by the United States to advance the interest of certain decision makers in the United States and we must stand united. His plight, of course, deserves more attention, and this organization has spent a significant amount of effort in getting more attention for his plight. Some of that attention will come naturally, as he heads towards trial. He was originally arrested in Baghdad and held in Kuwait for some six weeks before winding up in Quantico, Virginia, where he has been awaiting trial for over 250 days in maximum security and solitary confinement. As someone who has been in maximum security and solitary confinement, I identify strongly with his predicament. It is a dilemma that has now been the subject of criticism by Amnesty International, and I hope will be the subject of much, much more scrutiny. In relation to the second question, on why it is important to give people information about what is happening behind closed doors, and where the limits lie: we say we believe in transparency, merely because this word is a rather convenient and accepted description for something more complex. I am personally not so fond of that description. Rather, I believe that if we are to build a robust civilization, we need to know what is happening, not necessarily at the very instant it happens, but we need a sophisticated and somewhat comprehensive intellectual record of everything that humanity is about. This is not a matter of simple transparency, but a matter of building up our common intellectual record. And what goes into the intellectual record should actually be everything, unless there is a very good reason for it to not be there, because everything in the world eventually, in one way or another, affects everything else. We need to see power from every angle if we are to understand and shape it. It is the right to know that draws forth

the right to speak. And, taken together, we can call these two rights the right to communicate knowledge. There is no need to be too theoretical to show how all this is helpful in practice. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing historyone that, given our resources, is something to be immensely proud of. Our work has resulted in tremendous positive change across the world, andas far as we are aware, and as far as any government official has allegedit has not directly resulted in harm being done to any individual, other than losing a job, or losing an election. As for where one draws the line in terms of our publishing, well, I think this is far too simple a question. Whenever a person does something, one can recast it into moral form and ask: Is it right? Instead, perhaps, we can cast it the other way: What right does the state have to use coercive force to prevent people from communicating knowledge? If there is an initial communication of knowledge, what right does the state have to use coercive force on second-hand, third-hand, or fourth-hand, or sixth-hand communications of knowledge? Should the state be permitted to do that? I say that it should not. Perhaps, in limited circumstances, the people may grant the state the right to stop the initial communication of knowledge. As for where we draw the line, the postal system does not draw the linethe rights of people to send knowledge through the postal system is absolute. The telephone company does not draw the line. E-mail does not draw the line. The rights to communicate any knowledge through those systems are granted.

A hackers keyboard.

HUO: Are there limitations to those rights, or are they unlimited insofar as they are granted? JA: There is no prior restraint, and there is no view that there should be any prior restraint. After knowledge has been communicated, any attempted restraint is, of course, futile. So, in practice, it is unlimited. Unlike every other news organization, we make a promise about what we will publish and what we will not, and it is very simple. That simplicity gives our sources and our readers confidence in us. We say that we will accept and publish any material that is of diplomatic, political, ethical, or historical significance, which has not been published before, and which is being suppressednot unpopular material, but material that is being suppressed through classification, through threats of violence, or some other significant force. We promise to publish such material, after it goes

through a harm-minimization review. The point of a harm-minimization review is not to prevent material from being published. Rather, it is to either delay publication or remove small parts of a publication for a strictly limited period of time, or until a harmful situation is resolved. It is clear that information should be published if there is no harm in publishing it. It is clear that our harm-minimization process has, to date, been completely successful in its goals. Therefore, we are correct in sticking to our promise to publish everything that is of diplomatic, political, ethical, or historical significance, that has not been published before, and is being suppressed. It is a good policy. It works. Goldin+Senneby: Hello, my name is Angus Cameron, and I am the spokesman for Swedish artists Goldin+Senneby. Their question begins with a quote: I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; he holds a steel dagger in his left hand, in his right hand a severed heart, aflame like the Sacred Heart. He is not a man. He is not a God either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster. Georges Bataille, The Sacred Conspiracy, 1936 You have stated in previous interviews that your original aim for WikiLeaks was to be faceless. You are by no means the first to have sought, and failed to achieve, this sort of transcendent organizational form. Various activist organizations have used secrecy and anonymity as part of their political strategiesyou have mentioned the Bourbaki, but there was also Batailles Acphale in the 1930s and the Mexican Zapatista, to name but a few. In all cases, these groups have either ultimately dropped their anonymity or made use of a spokesperson (such as Subcomandante

Marcos) whose identity is at least semi-known. What was your strategic and political thinking in becoming the face and voice of WikiLeaks its lightning rod, as you have put it? JA: Right, so I had a number of reasons for keeping people not completely anonymous, and also for keeping the authority structure of WikiLeaks relatively opaque. But it ended up not being possible for practical reasons, so I have become the lightning rod for the organization. Its actually quite interesting in trying to get other people to speak for WikiLeaks. We now have Kristinn Hrafnsson, an award-winning Icelandic investigative journalist, who also speaks for the organization. Ad hominem attacks on the organization are directed at its front men. Yet through this mechanism of attracting attacks, we do keep those attacks away from people who are less able to respond to, deal with, or defend themselves against them. This also creates a sort of market that stems the likelihood of others being swept up into ad hominem attackssimply because our publishing activities consist of putting out information that cannot be attacked by definition. It is absolutely pristine: there has never been a single allegation that we have got something wrong. Were not writing opinion pieces, though we do sometimes write factual analysis, but the bulk of our publication is raw source material that cannot be attacked as something that has our editorial influence in it. So the only way to attack it becomes, in fact, through an ad hominem attack on the message. Its a very difficult position to be in, but since Im already in it, I may as well keep the heat on me, and spare the other members of the organization. Martha Rosler: Hello Mr. Assange. I have a series of related questions. First, do you consider yourself to have a political position beyond what seems to be a relatively amorphous libertarianism? JA: Well, I do have a political position, and my political position is that all political philosophies are bankrupt, because theyre not created with a full understanding of how human institutions actually behave. A better

question would be: Do I have a political temperament? And I do have a political temperament, which is a combination of libertarianism and the importance of understanding. And what emerges from this temperament is holding power to account through action driven by understanding. So, if you have a libertarian temperament, then youre temperamentally opposed to authoritarian power. And if you have a temperament that is inclined to understanding, then you want to know what power is about. These two things combined drive forth a position, an intellectual and political position that is about understanding power to such a degree that power is not able to express its most abusive aspects. And I guess my other political positions are not political positions per se, but positions of understanding that most of the world is splitting into just two big power systems. The first is the free markets, which can be very big and powerful when you get to financial markets but can also be distorted by some economic interactions. The other is patronage, and patronage networksthese are really what accounts for, splits, promotes or encourages, and distributes all forms of non-market power. This is not a traditional political position as much as it is a view of the world. Similarly, Ive independently arrived at a view that is a more modern political concept, which concerns shadow states, which you can see more clearly in newer states in Eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria, where theres a pantomime at the surface about being a modern EU democracy not that there really are that many, since the more modern EU democracies also engage in this pantomime. It is simply clearer in states like Bulgaria. Underneath, there is a patronage network that actually controls who gets justice and the distribution of power and wealth within a country. I see that tendency growing in the United States also. In the United States now, there are two rival systems that control the distribution of power. There is the modern form of what we used to call the military-industrial complex or the intelligence complex, and there is Wall Street. These two rival groups are vying to be the central dispensers of power in the United States. I think they are actually loosely coupled to Hillary on the shadow state side, and Obama on the Wall Street side. Actually, its quite interesting in the cases against us in the United States to see this rivalry being expressed in the various actions against us.

Martha Rosler: Are you, for example, a social democrat? Do you have any philosophy of the state and of governance that you would care to share? JA: Oh, thats one. Weve spoken about this, but perhaps shes giving me license to go into it a bit more. Ill go more into that example in the United States. When I was in Russia in the 1990s, I used to watch NTV in Moscow. NTV was the freest TV I have ever seen. I dont know if youre familiar with Spitting Image. It was a British public satire that was very politically aggressive, but NTV and other Russian channels had far more guts. And that was because at that time, Russia had something like 10 independent points of power. It had the army. It had the remnants of the KGB and the external KGB, which ended up becoming the SVR. It had Yeltsin, and his daughter, and that mob. It had some broader mish-mash of bureaucracy that was left over from the Soviet Union. And it had seven oligarchs. That meant, in terms of media control, the state plus the oligarchs with own their own independent media. As a result, you could actually put out almost anything you wanted under the patronage or protection of one of these groups. And when Putin came in, he tamed the oligarchs. Some were arrested, some had their assets seized, and some were exiled. The result was that they fell in under Putins centralized patronage pyramid. The ownership of the TV stations also reined popular democracy under Putins pyramid. And now, in order to get anything of scale done in Russia, you have to have a sponsor in the pyramid somewhere. I see in the United States that there is now a rivalry between the modern form of the military industrial complex and Wall Street for this central pyramid. And the military industrial complex has been broadening and expanding its share of that patronage system aggressively. There are now around 900,000 people in United States that have top-secret security clearances. Ten years ago, the National Security Agency dealt with about sixteen private contractors. The National Security Agency is the biggest spy agency in the United States, and its combined budget is more than that of the FBI and CIA combined, or at least it was around eight years ago when

I had the last statistic. Now, it has over 1,000 contractors. Similarly, US involvement in Iraq created around 10,000 different private contractors. So the patronage is now moving into the private sector. Its less contained than it was. Its tentacles are spreading into all walks of our society and the number of people who are connected through family and business relationships, to that structure, continues to increase. My guess is that something like 30 to 40 percent of the US population is now either directly connected to that structure, or one step removed, through family and business relationships. In the past two years, US tax revenue has decreased nearly 25 percent, while the same time the amount of tax revenue flowing through to that sector in the first year of Obama was around 6% to 7% the amount of money being soaked up by this sector is increasing. So that shows you that as a patronage network it is increasing in its power, because its starting to eat up more of the pie, compared to other groups. Thats a real problem for the United States. Theres a vast shadow state of private companies hooked into the secrecy system, into national security system, and an ever-expanding number of new government bureaucracies as well. Its very worrying that in the United States, that area is heading towards a Putinization. What Putin and the siloviki did to Russia, that system is doing to United States. And its not just the US, but a broader Western patronage network.

Goldin+Senneby, After Microsoft, 2007. Photo from installation. Image depicts the Sonoma Valley in California a few years after the Microsoft desktop image was launched was made unusable by a a phylloxera bug infestation.

HUO: Do you think the Western world as a whole is being Putinized? JA: The Western world is slowly being Putinized. It has progressed the most in the United States. But there is a rivalry with the banking sector, and its not clear who is going to win. Its not even clear, as time goes by, that these will even be two separate, rival systems. Rather, the privatization of the national security sector means that, as time goes by, the connections

between Wall Street and the national security sector are starting to disappear, because you have shared ownership of, say, Lockheed Martin or Boeing. And then you have cross investments and portfolios and credit default swaps, and so forth, on the functions of these intelligence contractors and military contractors. So, they are actually starting to merge at critical points. But, looking at the behavior of the White House, its clear that still within the White Houseand in influences upon the White Housethat there are still some distinctive differences between these two groups. Obamas backers are from Wall Street. They are from his banking sector, his big money. And he does not actually have a handle on the intelligence and military patronage network. So its like hes sitting on some cake mix, which is this military intelligence patronage network. As it grows stronger, he just has to sort of rise up with it as it moves in a particular direction. He has to move with it, because he doesnt have a handle on it. He doesnt have any spoon he can stick into it to move it around, because his family doesnt have anything to do with this system. Theyre not meshed with the system, so he cant control it, whereas Hillary has significant connections within that system. And we can look at something like when it was announced that Knopf had signed an 800,000 dollars deal for my book to be published in the US, and I stated that I would use a portion of this money to keep WikiLeaks afloat. Peter T. King, the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committeea powerful position in United States Congresswrote to Timothy C. Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary, and personally asked him to add Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as an organization to the US Specially Designated Nationals List, which is the US embargo list. So in the way that Cuba is embargoed from all economic interaction with any US citizen under penalty of criminal action, I, personally, would be embargoed from any economic interaction with any US citizen, and so would WikiLeaks. Timothy C. Geithner then smacked this request back within 48 hours and denied it. Its very unusual. Geithner is right from the elite of the Wall Street patronage network. And as US Treasury Secretary, hes remained there. In terms of a diplomatic signal, that was very interesting. As a purely technocratic response, Geithner could have sat on it for two, three weeks, to then reject or accept it for technical

reasons. To knock it back so quickly is to say, no, were deliberately sending a signal that we dont want that to happen. And its very easy to understand, because the national security, government, and private sector in the United States flourishes from its lack of accountability, from its secrecy. Thats how its able to gradually increase its power. But WikiLeaks is holding that power to account. To generate or to encourage the adoption of a position where publishing or revealing information about the national security sector is illegalor will result in being added to the US Specially Designated Nationals Listis to foster the power and expansion of that national security patronage network at the economic and power expense of the Wall Street network.

Luis Camnitzer, Window, 20012002/2010. Books and concrete, 70 x 60 cm. Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich.

Martha Rosler: Do you feel there is any place at all for diplomatic secrecy, for perhaps a limited period, or do you think there should be no secretive negotiations among states and other political actors on the world stage? JA: This is an interesting question, because when the US revolutionary government first came into power, it did publish all its diplomatic negotiations within a month of their having taken place. So, in fact, ideally, all diplomatic communications would be open. But, in real politics that simply will not happen. That is too ideal a state. I think the new diplomatic standard should be to make all these things as open as possible. Theres a sacrifice that were not making, which is to suppose that if people cant conceal things through secrecy, they can conceal them through complexity instead. And you can see that in the appalling politically correct bureaucratic language how this dynamic is used in some institutions that are held to routine public accountability, where there is no secrecy. Instead, they distort their language and conceal things through complexity or weasel words. But if you had to make a stand, its not clear to me which would be the better outcome. The perils of secret communications are so appalling that I suspect we would be better off suffering from political correctness and from increased complexity. But as its sort of a short-term thing, given the realpolitik, it makes sense to keep things secret from time to time. Its a question of who should be keeping the secrets. Of course, its the organization itself that is mandated to keep secrets. Its not the entire bulk of the world population, or even one nations population, that is mandated to not spread communication and knowledge to others. Martha Rosler: Are the US bank details going to be made public anytime soon?

JA: I wont say when they will be made public. Its best not to speak about times. Martha Rosler: Are you going to continue to work with journalists? And if so, why not bloggers, such as Glenn Greenwald? JA: We work with journalists, bloggers, and NGOs, and that has always been the case and what weve made the case. As were getting more resources, were able to expand the number of people we can work with. Its really a matter of logistical overhead, in that in a large media organization, you can enter into a negotiation with it and then use all its resources to get something through, whereas dealing with a hundred freelancers or bloggers requires pretty much the same costs, but times a hundred. HUO: How many people are working for you now? JA: At the moment we have about twenty.

SUPERFLEX, FREE SOL LEWITT, 2010. Installation view at the Van Abbemuseum. Photo: Peter Cox.

Martha Rosler: Is journalism a public good, and if so, should it be noncommercial? JA: This is a very interesting question. It concerns the way intellectual information that is cloneable loses its scarcity value almost instantly, and economic interactions are all about scarcity. Intellectual works are inherently different from other economic works, which have built-in scarcity value. For example, this cup in front of us is expensive to duplicate, though it may have been inexpensive to produce. Its value can never be removed to make another cup like it, whereas with a news story or a work of fiction, the cost of producing another digital copy is essentially zero.

There is a completely different kind of economy associated with cloneable material, material that cant have any forced scarcity. For example, E=mc continues to be important in all sorts of ways, yet it has a scarcity of zero. There is an infinite supply of E=mc, so it should probably be a public good, and in some cases we recognize this. With scientific papers, we understand that once something in science has been discovered to be important, it spreads very quickly. And it is impossible to profit from its scarcity value, or to even keep it scarce. It very quickly becomes an infinite good, and theres an infinite supply of it. As a result, successful societies have set up mechanisms to fund scientists who produce those very important infinite goods. Perhaps the same could be true for journalism, but the most important journalism is journalism that holds government to account, and holds powerful organizations to account. And there is no significant tradition anywhere in the world of state-funded, aggressive, investigative journalismthis has always been funded by readers or advertisers, which is easy to understand. It is by holding these powerful people to account that the funding gets cut off. So it is not clear how funding such a group would be practical. Maybe one could specify in a constitution that some taxes must go toward this, but then there would need to be a way to administer how this tax, if even collected, is dispensed. That becomes a political function, suffering from all the problems political functions have. Martha Rosler: You have compared your original conception of WikiLeaks to the mathematics collective with the fictional identity Nicolas Bourbaki, but then decided to allow yourself to become the public face of WikiLeaks. Because of the allegations of sexual misconduct, however, hostile forces (governments and journalists) have attempted to divert the conversation and target the accomplishments of WikiLeaks. Do you regret becoming the face of WikiLeaks? Was your decision to do so a source of friction and dissent among the WikiLeaks volunteers/members? JA: No, there was no friction or dissent. It was a forced movethere was

no choice but to gradually reveal that I was the founder of WikiLeaks. There is something quite interesting, though, that factored into the handling. Earlier on, I was very annoyed by the interest among journalists and the public in the person representing this organization. It was my view that they should just stop writing about us. But actually, weve always had this problem of the press writing much more about us than about the material that we release. Now they finally write more about material we release than they do about us. With this, I came to understand that the public is right to want to see individual human beings taking responsibility for the actions of an organization, because if the organization fails in some manner, there is someone to blame for its failures. Our memories are good at coupling actions with individuals, and more complex systems with particular individuals that are responsible for those systems. Those cognitive simplifiers are actually necessary for people to remember and understand and predict the behavior of an organization. Martha Rosler: Are you willing and able to assist Bradley Manning, or is that better left to others? JA: We have to be quite careful in how we assist Manning, or other accused sources, in that too much assistance or concrete and citable forms of assistance could be used to infer a connection between the source and us not in any strictly factual manner, but rather before a jury, or in the court of public opinion. That is something that has needed very delicate handling, and something for which all alleged sources will continue to need delicate handlingon the one hand, in order to support them, but, on the other hand, to avoid making their situation any worse by supporting them. Of course, it would make us look very good to offer local support in different ways, but we would not be doing a favor for these people who are in very difficult situations by being seen as too closely associated with them. Martha Rosler: Is there an effective way to support you if the US succeeds in extraditing you? Have you set up a cadre to substitute for you if

you are incarcerated? JA: The last time I was incarcerated, WikiLeaks continued publishing. The organization is robust to that extent. As for supporting me if I am extradited, I would say that it would be way too late. If people want to support us, they need to do it before I am extradited, or before any of our other people are arrested. Its not as if Im the only one with difficulties. The United States government has detained volunteers and others who have filled in for us at speaking arrangements, or people who are merely trying to raise money for Bradley Manning. These individuals were released, but they have been detained on multiple occasions and have had equipment seized. The FBI has been trying to bribe individuals. Theres an attempt to round people up around Boston. Theres an attempt to find people who may have been acting as intermediaries between sources in the United States and WikiLeaks. But if Im extradited to the United States, or if one of our other people is arrested in the United States, they will be placed in maximum security for many years while some trial progresses, and their safety in that situation will not be guaranteed. Even if theyre technically innocent under the law, which probably anyone within WikiLeaks isas I know that our activities are protected under the First Amendmentthe verdict is still not guaranteed, due to of the degree of national security sector influence in the judicial process. Such a trial would almost certainly take place in Alexandria, Virginia. Thats where they have deliberately set up the grand jury. Theres a reason why the grand jury is in that location: Alexandria, Virginia has the highest density of military contractors in United States. Their families are all around there, and there is a jury selection rule that states that you cannot disqualify a jury member based on the employment of their spouse. The US government chooses to have all its high-profile national security cases there for precisely that reason.

Philippe Parreno, Speech Bubbles (black), 2007. Mylar balloons, helium. Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York. Photo: Milgrammer.

Superflex: Do you not fear that WikiLeaks, because of the very powerful reaction to it by organized structures/systems, will prevent similar types of organizations from emerging in the future, since the same model will be financially, technically, and politically strangled early on? WikiLeaks can do its work now because it has created a global network of supporters, but I fear that other organizations will be destroyed before they manage to reach a larger level of importance or public awareness.

JA: I think the attacks on us by Visa, PayPal, MasterCard, Bank of America, PostFinance, Moneybookers, and other US companiespredominantly banks and financial intermediariesis the most interesting revelation that has come out of what weve been doing. Like the Pentagon Papers case, the reaction and overreaction of the state and other groups involved in it will be seen to be one of the most important outcomes of the revelation itself. What we see is that the United States, in its reaction to us, behaved no differently than the Soviet Union in the 1960s towards Solzhenitsyn, and in the 1970s towards Sakharov, just in a more modern way. Previous censorship actions in the West have been more subtle, more nuanced, and harder to see, but here we have a case of absolutely naked, flagrant, extrajudicial state censorship working through the private sector. I have said before that censorship is always an opportunity. The signal that censorship sends off reveals the fear of reform, and therefore the possibility of reform. In this case, what we see is a clear signal that those structures are not merely hypocritical, but rather that they are threatened in a way that they have not been previously. From this, we can see, on one hand, extraordinary hypocrisy from the entire White House with regard to the importance of the freedom of speech, and, on the other hand, a betrayal of those statements an awful betrayal of the values of the US Revolution. In spite of this, when such a quantity of quality information is released, we have the opportunity to rattle this structure enough that we have a chance of achieving some significant reforms. Some of those, perhaps, are just being felt, while others will take a while, because of the cascade of cause and effect.

Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen, 196772. From the series "Bringing the War Home, House Beautiful." How are we actually dealing with that? We are increasing our sophistication in gaining ways of working around this. We have worked our way around PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard. Bank-to-bank transfers are working now for everything except bank transfers going through Bank of America. If we win, which I think we will, we will continue as an organization, and it will actually be encouraging. Those discouraging financial attacks will be encouraging to other organizations in the sense that we got through them. Regardless of whether we win or lose, they provide encouragement for people to set up alternative financial conveyance structures, and that is a really positive outcome, because the fiscal censorship that was used against us, as a sort of digital McCarthyism, is something that does affect other organizations. Its rare for it to affect publishing organizations, which is

why this case is so remarkable. Its also rare for it to be used so flagrantly. Its a fiscal, boycott used against a number of other forms of organizations, such as activist organizations, guerilla organizations, revolutionary organizations from many different parts of the world, or organizations that are simply not large enough and or do not have enough bureaucratic resources to deal with all the incredible paperwork demanded by some of the financial intermediaries. I actually think thats quite a hopeful outcome.

SUPERFLEX, COPYSHOP, 2005-7. The COPYSHOP project was a store where products, which challenge intellectual property, such as modified originals, improved copies, political anti-brands, were sold. It intended to discuss the control of value in the same place where it is produced and distributed: the market.

When asked during the interview to write a mathematical formula for WikiLeaks, Julian Assange wrote simply Publish or Perish.

HUO: And it could lead to new structuresnew alternative economies and new forms of exchange! JA: Yes, exactly. New forms of exchange, new forms of currency, new alternative means of economic interaction other than going through banks. And Ive seen that. It has actually accelerated the development of a number of different projects that aim to provide a new form of exchange. Superflex: What do you think about copyright and intellectual property or the system of rights, as we in Superflex like to call it, and what about the struggle for free culture? What is your opinion on this? JA: With respect to copyright, I mentioned earlier that intellectual goods

that can be copied are inherently different from every other type of good. That is, they do not fall into existing economic theoriesthey require separate economic theories and a separate type of economy. The example used by Richard Stallman is one I quite like: if you have the ability to make free loaves of bread, you bake your first loaf of bread, and this requires some investment, but every additional loaf of bread you bake is for free. These loaves of bread are so amazing that all you have to do is give one of them to someone else and they can make their own loaves of bread for free, at zero cost. It is actually criminal, then, to not give this to people, because these loaves of bread can go around and feed everyone. Of course, this is an extreme analogy, but for some forms of intellectual goods, it applies. And we can see that its actually quite wrong to call them goodsthey are something else, and were trying to shoehorn an existing understanding of physical matter and economics into something that just does not behave in the same way. WikiLeaks, in practice, receives many copyright threats. According to the more strict definitions of copyright, every single thing we publish breaches copyright. In the more grounded interpretations of copyright, such as those that exist in the United States Constitution, nothing we publish is a breach of copyright because copyright was originally designedat least following its original political argument and justificationto potentiate a greater economy. It was not there to protect the internal documents of a company from being exposed to the public. And it certainly was not there to protect government documents in cases where the Crown claims copyright over all government documents. The use of copyright to suppress revelations of the abuse of power by companies or governments is, in itself, an abuse of these basic notions that authors, rather than opportunists, should be making the majority of money from the production of books, and those basic notions are what led to the development of copyrights in the first place.

Ai Weiwei, June 1994, 1994. Black and white photograph, 121 x 155 cm.

Ai Weiwei: As a perfect example of how individuals can act against collective power, such as the state, what do you think about the future of this trend? How can individuals use their power to question state power? JA: There are many technical and practical responses to this question. But this is just not a matter of things that may be useful or practical to do. I think a certain philosophical attitude is needed. And it is this attitude that then pulls together the practical considerations that must be part of a realization of that attitude. So, we encourage the people and our supporters to understand that courage is contagious. Its a practical reality that, for

example, most revolutions start in public squares. Why is that? Its not like there are more people in a public square. You still have the same number of people in the population, whether they are in their homes, in the street, or in the public square. But in a public square, if there are a few courageous people, everyone else in the public square can see the courage of those individuals and it starts to spread. HUO: Like in Egypt last month? JA: Just as in Egypt. And the more it spreads, the more it spreads, and at some point theres a runaway cascade, and people realize that they are the ones with the numbers. This is why Tiananmen Square is so heavily policed in China, because its a congregation point where courage can spread like a contagion. I think first its necessary to have an understanding that one is either a participant in history or a victim of it, and that there is no other option. It is actually not possible to remove oneself from history, because of the nature of economic interaction, and the nature of intellectual interaction. Hence, it is not possible to break oneself off. Once you have this understanding that you can either be a victim of history or a participant, I say that because no one wants to be a victim, one must therefore be a participant, and in being a participant, the most important thing to understand is that your behavior affects other peoples behavior, and your courage will inspire actions. On the other hand, a lack of courage will suppress them. Theres another view I have about how to frame how one proceeds. Many people say, oh, Julian, youre being very courageous with what youre doing, and therefore you must be fearless. I say, no, I feel fear just like any other person. In fact, people who dont feel fear are dangerous to themselves and to others. Fear is a very good and important instinct to have. Courage is not the absence of fear. On the contrary, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear. Courage is all about understandingunderstanding what the terrain is, and understanding your own abilities and limits in order to thereby plot a safe and effective path through the terrain. It is not about foolishly and fearlessly engaging an

opponent. Its about understanding first, and then carefully and decisively engaging the opponent. Metahaven: First, is WikiLeaks a movement rather than an organization? JA: The values that I have espoused and hold dear, and have put into the DNA of WikiLeaks, which have then been expressed by WikiLeaks as an organism, as a functional organization, have inspired a movement. Theres an interaction between the organization and this movement, which is fluid, but it is also a distinct, operational group. Independent sub-operations have now sprung up everywhere, and these sub-operations interact with us. So I suppose that this could actually be like most movements, where there is an inner core and there is widespread support among people, and then there is more organized local support. Metahaven: WikiLeaks has a great deal of support in the third world. Why is that? JA: For the third world, we do have really, very strong support. And in languages other than English, we have stronger support than in Englishspeaking countries. The reason seems to be that we have done a lot of work over the past four years in many different countries. But the highest profile work weve done has been in the past six months. And that work is related to the United States, which has attacked us in an aggressive manner. In August, the Pentagon made an ultimatum that this organization and I, personally, must destroy everything that we had ever published about the Pentagon, including all upcoming publications, and cease to deal with US military whistleblowers, and if we did not agree to do that, we would be compelled to do so. When asked by a reporter at the press conference which mechanism would be used to compel us, Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesperson, stated that the Department of Defense was not concerned about matters of law. The third world, the developing world,

has been continually placed in a subservient role to Western nations over the past 200 years or more, and in particular has been frequently exploited and victimized by United States since World War II. So there is a natural affinity for our position from small states and other organizations that have suffered as a result of US support for dictatorships within those countries, or for other forms of abuse of those populations. Metahaven: Our final question: Can art play a role in advancing the cause of WikiLeaks? JA: Of course. I wouldnt be doing this interview if I didnt think that art could play a role in supporting us. At the moment, the ideological front line has been drawn, and were now engaged in bitter trench warfare, insofar as the mainstream press is concerned. We have a large number of people on the outside, there are a large number of opponents, and this front line takes a lot of energy to move. The press has an influence on the bulk of the population, but actually there are places where there are no front lines, yet. The art world has a way of coming through in a more indirect manner, pulling on peoples emotions in a way they werent expecting. Similarly, just in terms of practical connections, the art world is able to reach powerful people through the back door, through their sons and daughters, through their wives, through their grandmothers, and through moments when theyre least expecting it. In this way, I believe that if the art world is able to distill some of the important values of what were doing, and the lessons to be learned from the opposition to what were doing, and present it in such a way that it calls on the better values of these people, or the values that they aspire to, then this is a psychological inroad into particular sections of the culture that are connected to people who oppose us and who would support us, but who do not yet. Paul Chan: Recently, a Slovenian philosopher wrote about you, comparing you to the Joker in Batman movies. It seems flattering, but I wonder. I wanted to first ask you whether or not you think that comparison

is right, and, if not, if there are other characters in movies or in literature, or even in philosophy, that you identify with. My second question is more general. Are there pieces of text or a book or work of literature that you read or return to, to find sources of thought or imagination as you fight with what seems to be every government on earth? Im just curious to know where you find your imaginative resources as you go through the extradition trial and all the things that you have gone through. Lastly, thanks for what youre doinggood luck. JA: Theyre two very good questions, actually. Unexpected. I have read that iek piece. I actually am rather fond of iek, but that piece was facile. I had the impression that he actually doesnt know much about the situation and was responding to market demand and writing quickly. So I was struck when I saw a video of a lecture by ieknot just by his curiously autistic lecturing style in which he keeps pulling at his t-shirt, but rather exactly the same impression that I had. Donald Rumsfeld said that there were known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. When I heard Rumsfeld say this, I immediately said, well, hes missed one permutation, which is that there are unknown knowns. iek also spotted this, though it could be true that anyone whos had some logical math background would. This fear of the Joker that iek comes up with is typically of a sort of shallow mainstream media mythmaking, some James Bond villain figure. Theres so much demand for information about us, and about me, at the same time as there are also such strong forces influencing news content in particular directionsnot in some sort of conspiratorial sense, with the White House bringing in key editors to tell them to write something, although that actually does happen in relation to national security reportage, and has happened to us. Rather, the general malaise of the powerful spreads down into these large mainstream media groups because they are so close to power, and it travels through editors and journalists all the way down into the general community. That, combined with demand for information about us, which we do not serve, results in people writing,

reinterpreting, inventing, or trying to come up with information about us. That then starts to be whipped around, cut and pasted, edited and reedited. The end result of this information cycling is a game of telephone that reveals the internal contours of the media economy, the internal contours of journalists minds, and the internal contours of political pressure upon the media economy. Ultimately, it creates myths. It takes small features and makes them large. It takes other large features and makes them small. When youre actually in the heat of it yourself, you become very aware of it, because you know what really happened, because you were there. To then see the level of distortion grow and grow and grow on its own without any fresh input becomes really quite an interesting process to observe. As for inspirational texts, well, there isnt one in particular. But when I was in prison, I read Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Ive been a long-term appreciator of Solzhenitsyn and other Russian literature.

Paul Chan, Oh, why so serious?, 2008. Plastic and electronics, computer keyboard.

HUO: Who else besides Solzhenitsyn? Tolstoy? JA: Oh, Pasternak and Dostoyevsky, and yes, Tolstoy when I was younger, and Bulgakov, though hes a Ukrainian who wrote in Russian. Cancer Ward is a wonderful book. Solzhenitsyn was in a cancer ward after being released from prison and exiled in Siberia, and he draws parallels between experiences in a Soviet labor camp and a hospital ward, but also uses these as a way to get at power relationships within a Sovietized state. But having cancer in a cancer ward is even worse than being locked in the basement of Wandsworth Prison in solitary confinement. So I found it oddly cheering. HUO: Theres one last question that came in by SMS from Philippe Parreno, and it ties in with Paul Chans question: What is the most beautiful story youve ever heard? JA: Im very fond of Russian childrens cartoons from the 1970s and 80s. These cartoons embody the highest representation of childhood and beauty and innocence and curiosityall together. This is terribly underappreciated in Western society in this particular period. For something that I find beautiful, this is what comes to mind instantly.
copyleft e-flux 2011