The WikiLeaks Conference and Its Impact on Government Secrecy

We've been lied into a wrongful and hopeless war. Every organization rests upon a mountain of secrets. We're drawn together from opposite sides of the world, but a new year conference demanding less government secrecy. Skipping in from Australia, Julian Assange, the co-founder of WikiLeaks.org. Julian Assange, Australian born editor-in-chief of the Internet whistleblower site WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, what a great story to be. WikiLeaks is inherently an anti-authoritarian act. It's inherently an anti-Kist act. And his hero, Daniel Ellsberg, famous for outing US government lies about the Vietnam War, Ellsberg was called the most dangerous man in America. And I believe that Barack Obama was lying. When he implied to the public in his state of the Union message, just like Lyndon Johnson in 65, there was a limit, a small limit to what he's going to put into F. Afghanistan. The 5.5.6. A Sige and WikiLeaks hit the headlines for this, releasing a classified US video showing civilians being gunned down in Iraq. OK, so our process from two different perspectives. The WikiLeaks exclusive illuminated the failures of the mainstream media and made Julian Assange an enemy of the US government. You can create bait to draw dragons out of their cave, we agree. As Assange addressed the conference from the safety of Australia, the US military was secretly interrogating one of his suspected sources. They also have their sights on Assange. I'm sure it's a high priority for them to try to neutralize him one way or another. And I wouldn't exclude physical major, but in particular ways trying to find ways to discredit him or to keep him from communicating with possible sources, is a very high priority for him. Those birds should know. In 1971, he leaked the Pentagon papers. But, too recently, he was one of the few US government employees ever to be prosecuted for legal. I remember that many people who are willing to take the payers and serve the very key to face the intermediate enemy of France. But the Obama administration is cracking down on whistleblowers. In 17 months, it's outdone all previous administrations in pursuing leaders. The Obama administration very briefly is as secretive as the Bush administration in matters of so-called national security in matters of war and peace and aggression. In many cases, it's gone beyond Bush. So I hope that in the future, Wikiliks will induce a great deal more leaking. For the past three years, Wikiliks has challenged governments everywhere, outing human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay, exposing political merns in Africa and banks laundering money through offshore tax havens. Wikiliks has hit the political left and right, and won media awards from Amnesty International and the Economist magazine. Naturally enough, Wikiliks is very guarded and difficult to track down. Arranging meetings involves a lot of cloaken dagger. Conversations in lifts, so no one can be bowed. Locations in times of meetings shift at the last minute. Why is it necessary to go through the labour at the counterintelligence operation? Just to sit down for a TV interview? Yeah, well, the amazing labour at the EU, but it just seems everyday to me. The issue is not my safety. Rather the issue is the safety of our sources. So there's some simple precautions, but it's enough to make it costly and inconvenient to spy on us and try and find out who our sources are. Wikiliks built an information system. It thinks is foolproof. Instead of secret documents, physically changing hands, they're anonymously sent to digital drop boxes and stored on servers around the world. Finally, they're posted on the Wikiliks site. What we want to create is a system where there is guaranteed free press across the world. Entire world that every individual in the world has the ability to publish material that is meaningful. We are kept honest by the fact that we release brain source material and journals who base their articles on us. On our materials are also kept honest because readers can check what does a primary source say. This is targeted to the US space mission. This kind of an attack was really something that nobody thought was going to happen. And later we would describe things as an electronic Pearl Harbor. Ronten Kathy was on duty at NASA control when the computers went high wire. As control staff prepared for the launch of the nuclear power, Galileo Pro, the Atlantic Space Shuttle, the word Wayne, stayed back at them for their screens. And you see this banner that says worms against nuclear killers. And we at the time at NASA, we had a shuttle on the launch pad about to launch that had plutonium energy canisters for its power source. If this blew up like the Challenger did, all of this plutonium is going to kill everybody in Florida. One clue to where the attack came from appeared at the bottom of the screen, the lyrics of Australian rock band Midnight Oil. We'll talk a time for peace for all and then prepare for war. Yep. Junior the science was part of the hacker club, but specifically denies being involved in the wake-worm attack. Nevertheless, police attention focused on his activities. The telecom network is easy, they're not barriers after that, I want to get through. Yet not really a need to be conscious of his security. The former Australian Federal Police Officer Ken Day was part of the investigating team. He was monitoring what we were up to, and knew that we would be coming sometime, but we were monitoring him monitoring us, so we were one step ahead of him. Yeah, that's right. It should be all right from about 11 o'clock tonight. Junior science and all the hackers, it was there you go. They were there in a very new field, and they had to prove that was the best. Please track the soldiers hacking to Melbourne's main telephoto exchange. He was piggybacking on its computer power to launch his overseas adventures. He was charged with computer offenses, but the court found he hadn't intended to cause any harm. They let him off with a fine and a suspended sentence. By then, the science had felt the power and the scope of a developing network. To be exploring the world and being involved in international politics from your bedroom, I was certainly a feeling that you're on the right path. This was an extremely educational experience, and you were able to do a little bit about the things that were pissing you off. Fast track 20 years, WikiLeaks is a powerful global force. But if there is an HQ, you won't find it in Melbourne or New York or London. It's national headquarters, its spiritual home is here, Iceland. It is the safe and more for journalism in general, for particularly domestic journalism. And also for people that, for example, risk their lives from China or to Nanka, to publish information about the situation. Might risk being tortured or killed, and there's story also of energy. Urged on by the likes of a son, and others, Iceland MP Bergita John Stotta, was at the forefront of a push to change the country's media laws, transforming it into an information freedom zone. It's the same idea as they use with great success in the tax havens around the world. And so I saw them be the launch pad for Wiki's defining leak. Journalists, lawmakers, and others were asked to do a preview screening of a video that would soon rock the rest of the world. I was shown it at a cafe here, it was completely shocked. I was sitting there crying, like many people do when they say it for the first time. It was confronting. A top secret US video shot from a military helicopter showed people gunned down in a hail of cannon shells in East Baghdad, killing up to a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists. But why would they killed? I thought it was essential to find the identity of the people we killed there, to... get their story, basically what we're doing there on the square that day. Wiki lakes formed an impromptu alliance with old media, a local TV channel, and one of its journalists, Christine Heraphnis. Julian has answered, he showed me the Iraqi video a few weeks prior to its release. That's the first time I saw that video of the killing in Baghdad. The first part of the video shows a number of men walking in the street, among them two Reuters journalists. The soldiers apparently mistake the camera one of them is carrying for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. They open fire. They're shooting two traffic to 60s. They're right. They shoot. Later, Avanna arrives and there's an attempt to rescue the still alive Reuters journalist Saeed Chamal. Chamal, let's shoot. With children in the front seat, the gunship opens fire, killing the driver and Saeed Chamal, and seriously injuring the children. Clear. Clear. Warn it. Christine Heraphnis on his TV crew tracked down the family of the minivan driver, Salam Natasha Tomals, for their side of the story. This was a guy who was basically dropping his kids to a special tutoring and picked up neighbors in the way you're getting them a lift and he just stopped to help somebody who was a bleeding on the curb. He was killed that day. He got a 30mm explosive round straight in the chest. And his two children were wounded heavily when they were in the front to the car within. I met with the children and the video. The wichy leagues video made headlines around the world, but it hadn't been seen where it would have its most devastating impact in this small Iraqi home. When the Iceland TV crew showed the family the video, they were grief-stricken, but at last they could piece together a little more of the puzzle. But the Iraq video for some wasn't new. Washington Post journalist David Finkel was embedded with US troops in Baghdad that day. What happened that day was part of a large operation where soldiers I was writing about from my book The Good Soldiers were trying to clear out an area that over the previous weeks had been especially vicious. Several soldiers had been killed by roadside bombs and there had been a number of catastrophic injuries. He's critical of wichy leagues not providing what he says is the correct context. He's among those who accuse wichy leagues of putting its own ideological spin on the video. They provided artificial agendas driven context. It comes up on a cycle collateral murder which which gives it a certain feel to a viewer coming into it. And before he see the video there's this great George Orwell quote providing the context. The context of that day was not what George Orwell had to say so many years before the context was that there was an operation underway in reaction to an ongoing war. Not to the Apache helicopters were circling and looking for a bunch of guys to just shoot up and kill. The interesting to have someone speculate or tell us exactly what context would mean to justify the killing that we see on the screen. As the killing goes on, you obviously will see the killing of men who were lying on the ground in an operation where ground troops are approaching and a perfectly capable of taking those people captive. But meanwhile you're murdering them before the troops are in that's a violation of that laws. And of course what the mainstream media and the have omitted from their stories is this context. The wichy leagues and its supporters the video define the difference between the old guard and the new. After all the Washington Post David Finkel in his book The Good Soldiers gives a word accurate recount to the cockpit conversation you hear in the video. Had he seen it, could if he had why didn't his paper famous for watergate the biggest political expose in US history investigate the killings. The Washington Post did not have a copy of the video and somehow Finkel's blueprint knowledge of the incident began and ended in the middle of a book. Unfortunately typical of newspapers they don't follow up these atrocities things are extremely critical of the administration. Only get you in trouble with the White House if you seem to be obsessed by them and pursue them. I haven't seen anyone raise the question now of why on what basis that video was denied to writers who were after all interested in the circumstances under which two of their journalists had been killed. Now have you seen anyone raise the question? All right now we have the video. What was the basis for denying this? How does it hurt national security? WikiLeaks subscribe to traditional journalistic principles when it comes to protecting its sources. It went to extraordinary lengths to strip the video of electronic fingerprints that might expose the origins of the leak. All that we can guarantee is that we won't be the source of a problem. I mean coming in through us. We're going to protect. And that if they are exposed then we will fight like hell to bring attention to their flight and we will send lawyers and cash if necessary to try and get them out of this out of that bad situation. Two years ago a secret US intelligence report recommended targeting WikiLeaks sources. Washington administration officials don't see the public interest in the Iraq video or anything else WikiLeaks might be about to unleash. We take the reports of the deliberate unauthorized disclosure of cat classified state department cables and materials not very seriously in the security of these materials is our highest priority. The video released triggered a major investigation but strangely the biggest breakthrough didn't come from crack police work but from a former hacker named Adrian Lamo who we tracked down on Skype. I first met Bradley Manning by a well and messenger. If Adrian Lamo is to be believed he casually found himself chatting online to a man claiming to be a military insider. The insider was bragging about leaking the video and a truckload of other national security documents to WikiLeaks. He proceeded to identify himself as an intelligence analyst and post the question. But what would you do if you had unprecedented access to classified data for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week? Instead of celebrating the insider's cyber heroics as a fellow travel of might Lamo blew the whistle and 22 year old Bradley Manning. An intelligence officer based in Baghdad was arrested. He was firing bullets into the air without thought to consequence of where they might land or who they might hit. The bigger concern for authorities is what else. Did Manning leak a library of other classified material to WikiLeaks? And what is it's next shot in the locker? Julian Assange is cryptic. He's not giving anything away yet. Is that a military operation you're talking about? Or is it something else? I'm not counting. It's not any one operation. So it's either a mass bombing that took place or it's a financial exposer. It's something involving, you know, it's not this, but I can give an analogy. It's a mass bombing that had affected many, many people in organizations. And the details of that mass bombing were released and that is something that would affect the reveals that the interests of many people have been abused. Is Assange a wanted man? There's no official word on that, but strangely one man who hunted him, former Australian Federal Police Officer Ken Day, now wishes him the best. One of the strengths of democracy is having a strong media and independent voice to actually challenge what government and corporate world is doing. I think we've lost a lot of that in recent years. And so at a very high level I would support what is doing to support transparency. But I will caution there are always inherent dangers in how it's done, but I think it's great. And the one time world title holder in the exposer business appears happy to pass the man's loan to a new generation. He's not only a danger to governments, to withholding one-three information. So yes, I think he's a good candidate for being the most dangerous man in the world in the eyes of people like to want to give me that award. I'm sure that Assange is now regarded as one of the very most dangerous men in the East and the quite proud of him. Thank you.