WEBVTT

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All right!

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Good evening everybody!

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This hall is pretty full.

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So I guess this is gonna be an interesting talk.

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We are on a tight schedule. Our speaker Jake Applebaum

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is gonna be joined by Julian Assange via, by a videostream

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I really hope that's gonna work.

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So without further do, please welcome our speaker and have fun!

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So! We have a surprise guest. Some of you might know her.

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She saved Edward Snowdens life. Her name is Sarah Harrison.

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Thank You!

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Good evening my name is Sarah Harrison, as you all appear to know.

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I'm a journalist working for WikiLealks.

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This Year I was part, as Jacob just said, of the WikiLeaks-team that saved Snowden from a life in prison.

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This act and my job has meant that our legal advice is that I do not return to my home, the UK,

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due to the ongoing terrorism investigation there in relation to movements of Eward Snowden documents.

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The UK Government has chosen to define disclosing classified documents

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with an intent to influence government behavior as terrorism.

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I’m therefore currently remaining in Germany.

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But it’s not just myself personally that has legal issues at WikiLeaks.

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For a fourth Christmas arrested, Julian Assange continues to be detained without charge in the UK.

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He’s been granted formal political asylum by Ecuador

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due to the threat from the United States.

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But in breach of international law,

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the UK continues to refuse to allow him his legal right to take up this asylum.

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In November of this year,

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a US Government official confirmed that the enormous grand jury investigation,

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which commenced in 2010, into WikiLeaks,

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its staff, and specifically Julian Assange, continues.

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This was then confirmed by the spokesperson of the prosecutor’s office in Virginia.

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The Icelandic Parliament held an inquiry earlier this year,

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where it found that the FBI had secretly and unlawfully sent nine agents to Iceland

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to conduct an investigation into WikiLeaks there.

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Further secret interrogations took place in Denmark and Washington.

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The informant they were speaking with has been charged with fraud

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and convicted on other charges in Iceland.

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In the Icelandic Supreme Court, we won a substantial victory over the extralegal US financial blockade

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that was erected against us in 2010 by VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and other US financial giants.

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Subsequently, MasterCard pulled out of the blockade.

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We’ve since filed a $77 million legal case against VISA for the damages.

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We filed a suit against VISA in Denmark as well.

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And in response to questions about how PayPal’s owner can

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start a free press outlet whilst blocking another media organisation,

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he’s announced that the PayPal blockade of WikiLeaks has ended.

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Sorry! That wasn't meant to be pause for a clap. I just needed some water, sorry.

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We filed criminal cases in Sweden

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and Germany in relation to the unlawful intelligence activity against us there,

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including at the CCC in 2009.

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Together with the Center for Constitutional Rights we filed a suit against the US military

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against the unprecedented secrecy applied to Chelsea Manning’s trial.

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Yet through these attacks we’ve continued our publishing work.

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In April of this year, we launched the Public Library of US Diplomacy,

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the largest and most comprehensible searchable database of US diplomatic cables in the world.

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This coincided with our release of 1.7 million US cables

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from the Kissinger period. We launched our third Spy Files,

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239 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors

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exposing their technology, methods, and contracts.

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We completed releasing the Global Intelligence Files, over five million emails

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from US intelligence firm Stratfor, the revelations from which included

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documenting their spying on activists around the globe.

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We published the primary negotiating positions for fourteen countries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership,

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a new international legal regime that would control

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40% of the world’s GDP.

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As well as getting Snowden asylum, we set up Mr Snowden’s defence fund,

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part of a broader endeavor, the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund,

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which aims to protect and fund sources in trouble.

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This will be an important fund for future sources, especially when we look at the US crackdown on whistleblowers

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like Snowden and alleged WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning,

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who was sentenced this year to 35 years in prison, and another

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alleged WikiLeaks source Jeremy Hammond, who was sentenced to ten years in prison

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this November.
These men, Snowden, Manning, and Hammond,

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are prime examples of a politicized youth who have grown up

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with a free internet and want to keep it that way. It is this

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class of people that we are here to discuss this evening, the powers they

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and we all have, and can have, and the good that we can do with it.

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I am joined here tonight for this discussion by two men I admire hugely.

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Hopefully one of them will appear soon.

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WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum, both who

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have had a long history in defending our right to knowledge, despite political

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and legal pressure. There He is...

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So Julian, seeing as I haven’t seen you for quite awhile,

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what’s been happening in this field this year, what’s

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what’s your strategic view about it, this fight for freedom of knowledge, are we winning

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or are we losing?

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I have an 18-page speech

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on the strategic vision, but I think I’ve got about five minutes, right?

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At the most.

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No, less?

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Okay. Well. First off, it’s very

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interesting to see the CCC has grown by 30%

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over the last year.

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And we can see the CCC

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as a type a very important type

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of institution which does have analogues.

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The CCC is a paradox in that it has the vibrancy

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of a young movement, but also now has been going nearly

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30 years since its founding in 1981 by Wau Holland

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Great point, great point.

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Blame the NSA?

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Blame the NSA?

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It’s the new ‘blame Canada’.

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Is it here or the embassy they’re spying on the most?

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Such a good talk, isn’t it guys?

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I wish Bruce Willis (Assange’s Skype name) would pick up the phone.

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Should we move over while we’re waiting to you, Jake.

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As I saying, I think it’s quite interesting, it does seem to be a trend that there are these young

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technical people. We look at Manning, Snowden, Hammond…

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often sysadmins. Why are they playing such an important role

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in this fight for freedom of information?

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Well, So, I think there are

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a couple important points. The first important point is to understand that

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ll of us have agency, but some of us actually have literally

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have more agency than others in the sense that you have access to systems

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that give you access to information that helps to found knowledge

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that you have in your own head.
So someone like Manning

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or someone like Snowden who has access to these documents in the course of their work,

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they will simply have a better understanding of what is actually happening. They have access

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to the primary source documents as part of their job.

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This, I think, fundamentally is a really critical,

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I would say a formative thing.
When you start to read these

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original source documents you start to understand the way that organisations

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actually think internally. And, this is one of the things that Julian Assange has said quite

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quite a lot, it’s that when you read the internal documents of an organisation,

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that’s how they really think about a thing. This is different than a press release.

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And people who have grown up on the internet, and they’re essentially natives on the internet, and that’s all of us,

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I think, for the most part. It’s definitely me. That

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essentially forms a way of thinking about organisations where the official

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thing that they say is not interesting. You know that there’s an agenda behind that

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and you don’t necessarily know what that true agenda is.
And so people

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who grow up in this and see these documents, they realise the agency

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that they have. They understand it, they see that power, and they want to do something about it.

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In some cases, some people do it in small starts and fits.

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o there are lots of sources for lots of newspapers that are inside

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of defense organisations or really, really large companies, and they share

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this information. But in the case of Chelsea Manning,

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in the case of Snowden, they went big.

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And I presume that this is because of the scale of the wrongdoing that they saw,

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in addition to the amount of agency that was provided by their access

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and by their understanding of the actual information that they were able to have in their possession.

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And do you think that it’s something to do

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with being technical; they have a potential ability to

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find a way to do this safer than other people, perhaps? Or?

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I mean, it’s clearly the case that this helps.

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There’s no question that understanding how to use those computer systems and

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being able to navigate them, that that is going to be a helpful skill.

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ut I think what it really is is that these are people who grew up in an era,

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and I myself am one of these people, where we grew up in an era where

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we are overloaded by information but we still are able to absorb a great deal of it

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And we really are constantly going through this.

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And if we look to the past, we see that it’s not just technical people, it’s actually people who have an analytical mind.

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So, for example, Daniel Ellsberg, who’s famous for the ‘Ellsberg Paradox’.

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So, for example, Daniel Ellsberg, who’s famous for the ‘Ellsberg Paradox’.

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He was of course a very seriously embedded person in the US military,

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he was in the RAND corporation, he worked with McNamara,

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and during the Vietnam War he had access to huge amounts of information.

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And it was the ability to analyse this information and to understand

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in this case how the US Government during the Vietnam War was lying to the entire world.

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And it was the magnitude of those lies combined

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with the ability to prove that they were lies that I believe,

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ombined with his analytical skill… It was clear what the action might be,

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but it wasn’t clear what the outcome would be.

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And with Ellsberg, the outcome was a very positive one. In fact it’s the most positive

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outcome for any whistleblower so far that I know of in the history of the United States

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and maybe even in the world.

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What we see right now with Snowden

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and what we’ve now seen with Chelsea Manning is unfortunately a very different outcome,

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at least for Manning.

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So this is also a hugely important point

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which is that Ellsberg did this in the context of resistance against the Vietnam War.

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And when Ellsberg did this, there were huge support networks,

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there were gigantic things that split across all political spectrums of society.

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And so it is the analytical framework

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that we find ourselves with still, but additionally with the internet.

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And so every single person here that works as a sysadmin,

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could you raise your hand?

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Right.

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You represent, and I’m sorry to steal Julian’s thunder, but he was using Skype and well…

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We all know Skype has interception and man-in-the-middle problems,

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so I’m going to take advantage of that fact. You see, it’s not just the NSA.

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Everyone that raised their hand, you should raise your hand again.

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If you work at a company

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where you think that they might be involved in something that is a little bit scary,

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keep your hand up.

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Right.

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So here’s the deal:

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everybody else in the room lacks the information that you probably have access to.

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And if you were to make a moral judgment,

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if you were to make an ethical consideration about these things,

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t would be the case that as a political class you would be able to inform all of the political classes in this room,

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all of the other people in this room, in a way that only you have the agency to do.

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And those that benefit from you never doing that are the other people that have that.

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Those people are also members of other classes as well.

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And so the question is, if you were to unite as a political class,

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and we are to unite with you in that political class, we can see that there’s a contextual way

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to view this through a historical lens, essentially.

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Which is to say when the industrialized workers of the world decided

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that race and gender were not lines that we should split on,

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but instead we should look at workers and owners,

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then we started to see real change in the way that workers were treated and in the way the world itself was organizing labor.

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And this was a hugely important change

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during the industrial revolution.

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And we are going through a very similar time now

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with regard to information politics and with regard to the value of information in the information age.

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Fantastic, Bruce Willis.

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Jesus Christ, Julian, use Jitsi already.

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And so, we’ve identified the potential

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people that you’re talking about and you’ve spoken about how it’s good

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for them to unite.

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What are the next steps?

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How do they come forth? How do they share this information?

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Well, let’s consider a couple of things.

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First is that

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Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning; Daniel Ellsberg, still Daniel Ellsberg;

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Edward Snowden, living in exile in Russia unfortunately.

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Still Edward Snowden.

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Still Edward Snowden, hopefully.

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These are people who have taken great actions where they did not even set out to sacrifice themselves.

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But once when I met Daniel Ellsberg he said,

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‘Wouldn’t you go to prison for the rest of your life to end this war?’

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This is something he asked to me, and he asked it quite seriously.

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And it’s very incredible to be able to ask a hypothetical question

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of someone that wasn’t a hypothetical question.

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What he was trying to say is that right now you can make a choice

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in which you actually have a huge impact,

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should you choose to take on that risk.

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But the point is not to set out to martyr yourself.

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The point is to set out...

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Are you going to stick around this time, Julian?

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I don’t know, I’m waiting for the quantum hand of fate.

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The quantum hand that wants to strangle you?

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Yeah.

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Yeah. So we were just discussing right now the previous context,

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hat is Daniel Ellsberg, the Edward Snowdens, the Chelsea Mannings,

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how they have done an honorable, a good thing

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where they’ve shown a duty to a greater humanity,

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a thing that is more important than loyalty,

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for example, to a bureaucratic oath, but rather loyalty to universal principles.

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So the next question is, how does that relate to the people that are here in the audience?

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How is it the case that people who have access to systems

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where they have said themselves they think the companies they work for are sort of questionable

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or doing dangerous things in the world?

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Where do we go from people who have done these things previously to these people in the audience?

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Well, I don’t know how much ground you’ve covered,

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but I think it’s important that we recognize what we are

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and what we have become.

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And that high tech workers are... ...a class.

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In fact, very often... ... a position

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to in fact prompt the leaders of society...

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...cease operating...

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Should we just leave him like that and continue?

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Am I back?

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Yeah. You’ve got three minutes to say something.

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Make it good.

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Those high tech workers, we are a particular class

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and it’s time that we recognized that we are a class

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and look back in history and understood

00:18:46.650 --> 00:18:49.213
that the great gains in human rights and education

00:18:49.213 --> 00:18:53.163
and so on that were gained through powerful industrial workers

00:18:53.163 --> 00:18:56.323
which formed the backbone of the economy of the 20th century,

00:18:56.323 --> 00:18:59.852
and that we have that same ability

00:18:59.852 --> 00:19:04.380
but even more so because of the greater interconnection

00:19:04.380 --> 00:19:07.494
that exists now economically and politically.

00:19:07.494 --> 00:19:10.323
Which is all underpinned by system administrators.

00:19:10.323 --> 00:19:18.216
And we should understand that system administrators are not just those people who administer one UNIX system or another.

00:19:18.216 --> 00:19:21.379
They are the people who administer systems.

00:19:21.379 --> 00:19:24.769
And the system that exists globally now

00:19:24.769 --> 00:19:28.690
is created by the interconnection of many individual systems.

00:19:28.690 --> 00:19:36.793
And we are all, or many of us, are part of administering that system

00:19:36.793 --> 00:19:38.700
and have extraordinary power

00:19:38.700 --> 00:19:43.813
in a way that is really an order of magnitude

00:19:43.813 --> 00:19:48.814
different to the power industrial workers had in the 20th century.

00:19:48.814 --> 00:19:52.167
And we can see that in the cases of the famous leaks

00:19:52.167 --> 00:19:56.285
that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations,

00:19:56.285 --> 00:20:02.034
it is possible now for even single systems administrators to have a very significant change,

00:20:02.034 --> 00:20:07.368
or rather apply very significant constructive constraint

00:20:07.368 --> 00:20:10.533
to the behavior of these organizations.

00:20:10.533 --> 00:20:12.615
Not merely wrecking or disabling them,

00:20:12.615 --> 00:20:15.866
not merely going out on strikes to change policy,

00:20:15.866 --> 00:20:21.790
but rather shifting information from an information apartheid system

00:20:21.790 --> 00:20:25.326
which we’re developing from those with extraordinary power and extraordinary information

00:20:25.326 --> 00:20:30.948
into the knowledge commons, where it can be used not only as a disciplining force,

00:20:30.948 --> 00:20:33.095
but it can be used to construct and understand the new world that we’re entering into.

00:20:33.095 --> 00:20:36.487
Now, Hayden, the former director of the CIA and NSA,

00:20:36.487 --> 00:20:48.287
is terrified of this. In “Cypherpunks” we called for this directly last year.

00:20:48.287 --> 00:20:57.615
But to give you an interesting quote from Hayden,

00:20:57.615 --> 00:21:02.408
possibly following up on those words of mine and others,

00:21:02.408 --> 00:21:07.122
“We need to recruit from Snowden’s generation”

00:21:07.122 --> 00:21:08.292
says Hayden.

00:21:08.292 --> 00:21:11.117
“We need to recruit from this group because they have the skills that we require.

00:21:11.117 --> 00:21:15.621
So the challenge is how to recruit this talent while also protecting ourselves

00:21:15.621 --> 00:21:20.487
from the small fraction of the population that has this romantic attachment

00:21:20.487 --> 00:21:24.207
to absolute transparency at all costs.”

00:21:24.207 --> 00:21:27.815
And that’s us, right?

00:21:27.815 --> 00:21:32.524
So, what we need to do is spread that message and go into all those organisations.

00:21:32.524 --> 00:21:34.201
In fact, deal with them.

00:21:34.201 --> 00:21:37.498
I’m not saying, ‘Don’t join the CIA’.

00:21:37.498 --> 00:21:38.723
No, go and join the CIA. Go in there.

00:21:38.723 --> 00:21:41.871
Go into the ballpark and get the ball and bring it out,

00:21:41.871 --> 00:21:44.846
with the understanding, with the paranoia,

00:21:44.846 --> 00:21:50.285
that all those organizations will be infiltrated by this generation,

00:21:50.285 --> 00:21:53.537
by an ideology that is spread across the internet.

00:21:53.537 --> 00:21:56.617
And every young person is educated on the internet.

00:21:56.617 --> 00:22:00.086
There will be no person that has not been exposed to this ideology

00:22:00.086 --> 00:22:07.462
of transparency and understanding and wanting to keep the internet which we were born into free.

00:22:07.462 --> 00:22:11.532
This is the last free generation.

00:22:11.532 --> 00:22:16.007
The coming together of the systems of governments,

00:22:16.007 --> 00:22:17.652
the new information apartheid, across the world,

00:22:17.652 --> 00:22:20.691
linking together in such that none of us will be able to escape it in just a decade.

00:22:20.691 --> 00:22:30.933
Our identities will be coupled to the information sharing

00:22:30.933 --> 00:22:33.203
such that none of us will be able to escape it.

00:22:33.203 --> 00:22:36.488
We are all becoming part of the state,

00:22:36.488 --> 00:22:38.206
whether we like it or not.

00:22:38.206 --> 00:22:46.653
So our only hope is to determine what sort of state it is that we are going to become part of.

00:22:46.653 --> 00:22:48.703
nd we can do that by looking and being inspired

00:22:48.703 --> 00:22:52.483
by some of the actions that produced human rights and free education and so on

00:22:52.483 --> 00:22:55.578
by people recognizing that they were part of the state, recognizing their own power

00:22:55.578 --> 00:23:02.687
and taking concrete and robust action to make sure

00:23:02.687 --> 00:23:06.974
they lived in the sort of society they wanted to and not in a hell-hole dystopia.

00:23:06.974 --> 00:23:08.367
Thank you.

00:23:08.367 --> 00:23:26.090
So basically all those poor people Jake just made identify themselves,

00:23:26.090 --> 00:23:29.595
you have the power to change more systems than the one you’re working on right now.

00:23:29.595 --> 00:23:34.848
And I think it’s time to take some questions because we don’t have long left.

00:23:34.848 --> 00:23:40.374
if there are any? What's the...

00:23:40.374 --> 00:23:44.281
If you do have Questions, please line up in the middle of the room. we have microphones there.

00:23:44.281 --> 00:23:50.537
If you cannot reach one please put your hand up, we try to get one to you.

00:23:50.537 --> 00:23:53.651
While we wait for the first question.

00:23:53.651 --> 00:23:56.815
I’d like to say, it looks like there’s quite a lot of people there..

00:23:56.815 --> 00:23:59.812
Start going to the mic even while he's talking if you do have a question.

00:23:59.812 --> 00:24:03.788
Cause otherwise we won't know that you have one and we just keep on going.

00:24:03.788 --> 00:24:09.498
Alternatively just raise your hand... ...quite a lot of people there.

00:24:09.498 --> 00:24:14.122
but you should all know that due to the various sorts of proximity measures

00:24:14.122 --> 00:24:17.805
that are now employed by NSA, GCHQ, and Five Eyes Alliance,

00:24:17.805 --> 00:24:21.621
if you’ve come there with a telephone,

00:24:21.621 --> 00:24:24.794
or if you’ve been even in Hamburg with a telephone,

00:24:24.794 --> 00:24:27.891
you are all now coupled to us.

00:24:27.891 --> 00:24:29.337
You are coupled to this event.

00:24:29.337 --> 00:24:31.576
You are coupled to this speech in an irrevocable way.

00:24:31.576 --> 00:24:33.890
And that is now true for many people.

00:24:33.890 --> 00:24:41.094
So either we have to take command of the position that we have,

00:24:41.094 --> 00:24:44.538
, understand the position we have, understand that we are the last free people,

00:24:44.538 --> 00:24:46.246
and the last people essentially with an ability to act in this situation.

00:24:46.246 --> 00:24:53.205
Or we are the group that will be crushed

00:24:53.205 --> 00:25:08.170
because of this association.

00:25:08.170 --> 00:25:11.577
So you were talking about the sysadmins here.

00:25:11.577 --> 00:25:15.400
What about those people who are not sysadmins?

00:25:15.400 --> 00:25:21.561
Not only joining CIA and those companies, what else can we do?

00:25:21.561 --> 00:25:25.033
Jake, do you want to have a go at that one?

00:25:25.033 --> 00:25:27.116
Sure. This is a question of agency.

00:25:27.116 --> 00:25:27.955
Good timing.

00:25:27.955 --> 00:25:29.890
It’s a question in which one has to ask very simply,

00:25:29.890 --> 00:25:31.934
what is it that you feel like you can do?

00:25:31.934 --> 00:25:35.014
And many of the people in this audience I’ve had this discussion with them.

00:25:35.014 --> 00:25:38.497
For example, Edward Snowden did not save himself.

00:25:38.497 --> 00:25:41.534
I mean, he obviously had some ideas, but Sarah, for example,

00:25:41.534 --> 00:25:45.620
not as a system administrator, but as someone who was willing to risk her person.

00:25:45.620 --> 00:25:49.247
She helped, specifically for source protection, she took actions to protect him.

00:25:49.247 --> 00:25:53.121
So there are plenty of things that can be done.

00:25:53.121 --> 00:25:57.408
To give you some ideas, Edward Snowden, still sitting in Russia now,

00:25:57.408 --> 00:25:59.922
there are things that can be done to help him even now.

00:25:59.922 --> 00:26:06.117
And there are things to show, that if we can succeed

00:26:06.117 --> 00:26:07.648
in saving Edward Snowden’s life and to keep him free,

00:26:07.648 --> 00:26:09.538
that the next Edward Snowden will have that to look forward to.

00:26:09.538 --> 00:26:12.248
And if we look also to what has happened to Chelsea Manning,

00:26:12.248 --> 00:26:17.688
we see additionally that Snowden has clearly learned,

00:26:17.688 --> 00:26:20.488
just as Thomas Drake and Bill Binney set an example

00:26:20.488 --> 00:26:24.561
for every single person about what to do and what not to do.

00:26:24.561 --> 00:26:26.486
It’s not just about systems administrators,

00:26:26.486 --> 00:26:31.767
it’s about all of us actually recognizing that positive contribution that each of us can make.

00:26:31.767 --> 00:26:35.403
OK our next question will be microphone 4 ..2 please

00:26:35.403 --> 00:26:41.605
Hi Julian, I’m wondering,

00:26:41.605 --> 00:26:42.087
do you believe that transparency alone is enough to inject some form of conscience into evil organizations,

00:26:42.087 --> 00:26:52.335
quote and quote “evil” organizations?

00:26:52.335 --> 00:26:58.285
And if not, what do you believe the next step after transparency is?

00:26:58.285 --> 00:27:02.038
It’s not about injecting conscience,

00:27:02.038 --> 00:27:04.656
it’s about providing two things:

00:27:04.656 --> 00:27:08.451
one, an effective deterrent to particular forms of behavior

00:27:08.451 --> 00:27:17.168
and two, finding that information which allows us to construct an order in the world around us,

00:27:17.168 --> 00:27:20.682
to educate ourselves in how the world works

00:27:20.682 --> 00:27:25.765
and therefore be able to manage the world that we are a part of.

00:27:25.765 --> 00:27:28.700
The restriction of information,

00:27:28.700 --> 00:27:33.407
the restriction of those bits of information, colors it.

00:27:33.407 --> 00:27:37.563
It gives off an economic signal that information is important when it’s released,

00:27:37.563 --> 00:27:41.405
because otherwise why would you spend so much work in restricting it?

00:27:41.405 --> 00:27:44.090
So the people that know it best restrict it.

00:27:44.090 --> 00:27:46.805
We should take their measurements of that information

00:27:46.805 --> 00:27:52.285
as a guide and use that to pull it out where it can achieve some kind of reform.

00:27:52.285 --> 00:27:55.033
That, in itself, is not enough.

00:27:55.033 --> 00:27:59.485
It creates an intellectual commons which is part of our mutual education.

00:27:59.485 --> 00:28:05.455
But we need to understand, say, if we look at the Occupy event,

00:28:05.455 --> 00:28:08.487
a very interesting political event,

00:28:08.487 --> 00:28:17.246
where revelations and perhaps destabilization led to a very large group wanting to do something

00:28:17.246 --> 00:28:23.894
However, there was no organizational scaffold for these people to attach themselves to,

00:28:23.894 --> 00:28:29.615
no nucleus for these people to crystallize onto.

00:28:29.615 --> 00:28:31.978
And it is that problem,

00:28:31.978 --> 00:28:36.287
which is an endemic problem of the anarchist left, actually.

00:28:36.287 --> 00:28:39.573
The CCC. Why are we having this right now?

00:28:39.573 --> 00:28:43.039
Because the CCC is an organized structure.

00:28:43.039 --> 00:28:50.957
It’s a structure which has been able to grow to accommodate the 30% of extra people that have occurred this year.

00:28:50.957 --> 00:28:55.244
To shift and change and act like one of the better workers’ universities that are around.

00:28:55.244 --> 00:29:01.564
So we have to form unions and networks

00:29:01.564 --> 00:29:05.735
and create programs and organizational structures.

00:29:05.735 --> 00:29:10.039
And those organizational structures can also be written in code.

00:29:10.039 --> 00:29:13.486
Bitcoin, for example, is an organizational structure

00:29:13.486 --> 00:29:19.290
that creates an intermediary between people, it sets up rules between people.

00:29:19.290 --> 00:29:23.698
It may end up as a quite totalitarian system one day,

00:29:23.698 --> 00:29:26.938
who knows, but at the moment it provides some kind of balancing.

00:29:26.938 --> 00:29:29.813
So code and human structures do things.

00:29:29.813 --> 00:29:37.561
WikiLeaks was able to rescue Edward Snowden because we are an organized institution with collective experience.

00:29:37.561 --> 00:29:42.701
Okay, I think there’s one question left that’s coming from the internet.

00:29:42.701 --> 00:29:50.785
On IRC there was the question, what was the most difficult part on getting Snowden out of the US?

00:29:50.785 --> 00:29:56.654
That’s quite a loaded question.

00:29:56.654 --> 00:30:01.042
Yeah, that’s interesting to think whether we can actually answer that question at all.

00:30:01.042 --> 00:30:06.792
I’ll give a variant of the answer because of the legal situation it is a little bit difficult.

00:30:06.792 --> 00:30:12.958
As some of you may know, the UK Government has admitted to

00:30:12.958 --> 00:30:19.851
spending £6 million a year approximately surveilling this embassy in the police forces alone.

00:30:19.851 --> 00:30:21.869
So you can imagine the difficulty in communicating with various people in different countries

00:30:21.869 --> 00:30:34.884
in relation to his diplomatic asylum and into logistics in Hong Kong in a situation like that.

00:30:34.884 --> 00:30:37.176
And the only reason we were able to succeed is because of extemely dilligent…

00:30:37.176 --> 00:30:48.541
Perfectly timed.

00:30:48.541 --> 00:30:49.795
And we didn’t use Skype.

00:30:49.795 --> 00:30:54.486
Do we have time for one more question?

00:30:54.486 --> 00:30:57.880
I think we run out of the time.

00:30:57.880 --> 00:30:59.333
That was such a fantastic, perfect way to make sure that you didn’t learn the answer to that question.

00:30:59.333 --> 99:59:59.999
Unfortunately that is all the time we have for this talk