Title: Lies, Spin, Propaganda & Manipulation (w/ Suelette Dreyfus)
Show: Consortium News
Date: 2021-03-04
URL: https://youtu.be/2WA64yu3itQ
Duration: 101:00

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[00:04] good morning everyone and welcome to this free the truth seminar um my name is deepa govinda raj and driver along with my colleague professor ian monroe who's on the panel today we're here to discuss and uh mark the ninth year since the stratfor of the global intelligence files were released and um on our panel today we have three fantastic um panelists we have dr solid braifus who's

[00:36] a tech researcher and a whistleblowing expert hi silas um we have john kiriakou who is uh well known as the cia torture whistleblower and we have uh laurie laup who um is well known as a hacktivist and an expert on all things information technology and of course we have professor ian monroe whistleblowing expert and um founder co-founder of free the

[01:10] truth in terms of today's session our this webinar is being transmitted by on the dea channels as well as um by a number of other sources we're also very grateful to consortium news who are reporting on this event and streaming it through their twitter channel um a big thank you to the committee to defend julian assange whose grassroots supporters have contributed towards the cost of the zoom

[01:41] uh and as they have done in ordinary times outside of coping to the costs of the hall that we used to vote we have speakers today from across the world across from australia to america um and we're going to talk about issues that affect both the global south and the global north and um as we go into this one of the things that um that sticks in my head is mike pompeo talking about wikileaks being a

[02:12] hostile non-state intelligence service and it seems quite apt that it was this hostile non-state intelligence service that was supposedly betting the government of russia that nine years ago um through the ingenuity of people like julian assange and those who were behind wikileaks brought to light the way in which a private unaccountable firm was um

[02:43] essentially engaging in all kinds of activity including bribery and um and manipulation to uh and would it literally stop at nothing including uh in order to boost its bottom line so that it get information a privileged commodity that was only available to the few and this was of course highly manipulated tailored information and rather than a rather than a source of knowledge and

[03:16] information for the many which is what wikileaks sought to do and wikileaks of course did this through being pioneering in offering what was an electronic dropbox so to speak for whistleblowers that provided anonymity both to the source as well as to as well as a certain level of security for the documentation a level of security that means that to this day wikileaks has a 100 record of accuracy um in in contrast what this private intelligence firm stratfor was doing was

[03:48] um providing information to governments to um to the marines to lots of um quite dubious uh regimes around the world as well as to companies like dow chemicals and the for example with dao the they were reporting information in relation to activists uh who were who were reeling from the pogba gas tragedy in

[04:20] india in madhya pradesh where um you know so many people over 500 000 people were injured as a result of a gas leak and i i always remember the story of this particular trade unionist a worker who was carrying a gas called phosgene in a container and managed to drop it on himself and then pulled off the mask the gas mask that he was wearing and died within 72 hours of inhaling

[04:52] this information now not only was dao involved in this huge tragedy which went under the union carbide overhanging the company but it also was involved in contaminating the water after that and um stratfor was also involved involved in um in in relation to the vancouver olympics on advising coca-cola about peta activists and what they were

[05:23] involved in so for those of you who are activists sitting in the audience wondering what julian assange's case has to do with you a lot of what wikileaks revealed was about the ways in which governments and private actors were colluding to um to to essentially clamp down on activism and whistleblowing on the public right to know now stratfor uh quite uh interestingly describes itself and i'm trying to read the words

[05:54] here as a as the world's leading geopolitical intelligence platform um and this geo world leading geopolitical intelligence platform is actually trying to make money for a small bunch of shareholders and it is actually public money that is being used in the pursuit of many of the activities that um stratfor is trying to get into which is quite to a large extent disconnected from the socio-political and economic realities of the jurisdictions in which companies like stratfor operate um in a way what they do

[06:27] is entrench some of the structural inequalities including racism that that comes from the kinds of perverted information that is leaked in relation to some of these sources and when governments and intelligence agencies and public bodies rely on this kind of information which is flawed biased and often inaccurate and where the customers of this information within these governments often become assets often become people

[06:57] who work within intelligence firms like stratfor it creates a situation where the uh the people who are using these inform this information or the people who are providing this information are largely unaccountable to the ordinary public while benefiting hugely from public money and this is something that many of you especially those of you who are interested in uh holding the state accountable for its criminality will be really interested in so i'd like to um stop there and invite our first speaker john kiriyaku

[07:30] to tell us a little bit about what for those of us who don't know very much about what firms like stratfor do could you tell us about who they are what they do what their kinds of clients are and how this affects um you know the the quality of the intelligence that we get over to you john certainly thank you thanks for having me first uh first off i i'm very happy to talk about stratfor uh because i think it's a very important issue that most people

[08:00] uh don't talk about it's certainly an issue here in washington um and i've always gotten a little bit of a kick out of the conversation about stratfor because i never took stratfor seriously as a serious organization and frankly i don't know any intelligence professional uh that did or that does stratfor the the joke about stratfor for many years has been uh about stratfor's so-called

[08:32] secret sources they talk about what a great intelligence platform they are because they have these sources all over town well the joke is that their sources are the press officers of every uh embassy in the city and and their other special sources are the washington post and the new york times so really what stratfor is what stratfor has always been is a group of um underpaid

[09:02] very attractive young women and we can talk about that separately if you'd like because that's who george friedman the the co-founder of stratfor always hired was very attractive young women um sitting around and reading newspapers and uh watching cnn and msnbc and jotting down notes and then calling the embassy of yemen or the embassy of saudi arabia the embassy of jordan and talking to the press officer there and then writing up a report like it's

[09:32] some special secret insight that nobody else could possibly come to um and that's why when jeremy hammond god bless him uh did what he did i was so shocked at the way the boom was lowered on him because he didn't reveal anything he didn't reveal anything that was dangerous what he did though was expose a very washington kind of phoniness that uh

[10:04] that was stratfor and its business model now what firms like stratfor try to do what they try to market is a certain level of political and strategic insight that nobody else has uh what they say is that they're full of former cia people former nsa people former fbi people that's just simply not true they can't afford those people so they hire these young college

[10:35] graduates um researchers uh writers to just press pieces and send out their bulletins mostly their subscribers were individuals now they brag or they used to brag on their website about how their subscribers were mostly fortune 500 companies that was largely not true they were mostly individuals llc's sole proprietorships with very specific

[11:07] questions should i do business in yemen should i buy that that silver mine in romania and then you would need to know things like well if i do want to buy that silver mine in romania uh who's going to win the next election the conservatives who are going to let me mine the silver or the socialists who are going to not let me mine the silver and that's it this was all about this was all about capitalism it was all about making money

[11:38] it wasn't about strategic thinking it wasn't about long-term prognostication it wasn't about secret clandestine sources this was all about money and that's why stratfor didn't pay its people anything because it was all about money for the principles and putting money into the pockets of those people who had negotiated favorable terms with the government and with other investors so in my view stratfor has always just been

[12:10] a fake phony underachieving organization whose sole purpose was to make money for its initial investors it provided nothing to the greater context of intelligence collection or intelligence analysis in washington or even in the business community thanks john can i just stay with you there and ask you to tell us a little bit about how um organizations like stratfor if

[12:41] they are you know i i heard somebody describe them as half clown half intelligence agency and i was really curious if if they are indeed who who as described why is it that they are so powerful could you tell us a little bit about that and also about your general understanding of how their information is used by organizations within the establishment um in addition to you know in addition to furthering

[13:12] the interests of capitalists sure let me answer your your uh second question first the information um is used by insiders to to either confirm or to refute the information that the insiders have because their sourcing is going to be different um insiders you know at the cia we had this mantra and it was uh recruit spies to steal secrets period that's how you get promoted by recruiting spies to steal secrets um stratfor doesn't recruit

[13:44] spies to steal secrets that's espionage and they don't have diplomatic immunity or diplomatic cover to protect themselves so they don't steal the secrets they just read the papers and analyze uh the the media and see if the if the results are the same as what the the intelligence organizations are uh are getting in their own analysis so that's easy it's just to either refute or to support uh conclusions based on different sourcing

[14:15] uh how did they get started well you know every retiring or former cia officer especially from the directorate of intelligence which is the analytic organization inside the cia wants to keep doing what he's doing see at the cia part of the culture is to convince you that your job is so specialized that you can't do anything else right you can't market that skill outside the cia

[14:46] and that's one of the reasons why turnover is so low at the cia it's actually under two percent and has been for decades uh it's because they convince you that you can't do anything else where are you going to go you're going to go to the washington post you can't because then everything that you write has to be cleared by the cia you can you'll never get anything published so what you do if you do leave the cia is you create an organization like stratfor or join an organization like stratfor which is trying to do exactly what the

[15:18] cia has always been doing but without the sourcing so like i say it's it's an empty shell of of what a real intelligence organization uh would do thanks john uh lowry thank you very much for being here um could you tell us a little bit a lot of what we're talking about in relation to the stratfor leagues also has a a lot to do with um the work done by anonymous

[15:50] uh could you tell us a little bit about the hacktivism that sits alongside um these leaks and what what the people who were involved and what the circumstances that were surrounding this were about uh larry you're still muted i'm just going to make sure you're unmuted sorry um yeah i can try and fill in a little bit of those blanks um unfortunately the passage of time and the several assaults on my um brain made it harder to remember the exact details but um

[16:22] yeah the the way um stratfor came into my radar as an online activist um exploring how to do activism online um the modalities of activism and the emergence of anonymous as this kind of network decentralized chaotic actor the internet developing a conscience and trying to um exert the power of the network to try and make the world a better place and it came on our radar because um we we

[16:53] found out that there was a dirty tricks campaign against us and not just us um a dirty tricks campaign against um online activists against wikileaks against uh glenn glenn greenwald and some other journalists who were reporting on information and that was coming out of online activities and this um this idea that this was something that could be solved i am the right kind of strategic uh interventions and um so stratfor um

[17:24] we're indicated with hp gary and palantir and some other of these private sector intelligence um adjuncts should we say um in attempting to disrupt these activities similarly to how you mentioned earlier deeper the um um activism uh to do with the uh the the chemical uh atrocities um in india and attempts to um kind of uh nail nail that activism and control

[17:54] it and similar thing was uh was um being perpetrated against this new emergent and tendency of online protest and um you know as john said the these these were not professionals these are you know cowboys in a clown car um selling um lisa simpson's magic rock that makes the tigers go away and you know you don't see any tigers here so the rock must work and then you can get away with this because if you claim to just have a little bit of intelligence then maybe a few law firms or a few other firms are

[18:24] going to hedge their bets because they just want to you know potentially get that bit of intelligence before making the wrong business decision et cetera in some part of the world that they don't have full insight into but um the the the actual activities that were exposed were and yeah i mean it's to say that they were they were not contributing to strategic analysis or or and prognostication or planning is too diplomatic they they were people trying to make a quick

[18:55] buck by being the cyber version of the pinkertons you know and some i jump to the state that can come in and and throw a little muscle around and act very unprofessionally and try and ensure things go the way that they ought to go thanks laurie while we're with you could you tell us a little bit about what motivates the kinds of people who get involved and anonymous and who are who are seeking to reveal such information before we go on

[19:26] to solet to talk a little bit about how that differs from whistleblowing or how that is similar to whistleblowing so um are you able to tell us a little bit about anonymous and what what kinds of uh people get involved why they get involved what what motivates them what kind of act um activism they're involved in etc i mean speaking solely through the lens of my own perspective and my own experiences and the the emergence of this um entity anonymous or this

[20:00] collective dynamic of people on the internet and was a liberating and empowering um pivotal change in how people that were on the internet or so some small subsection of them were able to view their ability to relate to the world and it's not just a place that you go to escape these things that you you were never really particularly uh on board with but it's a means by which you can actually um envision a better world and try and bring it about and it was um it was

[20:31] vastly liberating even um small symbolic uh gestural token actions such as helping um protesters out who were being suppressed by authoritarian regimes or revealing information about them corporate and civic uh malfeasance in in office and it it suddenly became apparent that there was a power here for a large number of people collaboratively to exercise a a form of

[21:03] oversight i would say that that hadn't emerged previously and and we were playing around with that role and what what our ability um could be to to to um to agitate for justice in that diversity thanks laurie um i i i wonder if we could now move to select to talk to you a little bit about um what what it means to hold power to account and how whistleblowers do that

[21:33] and where the boundaries lie between um those who are outside the organization and those who are inside the organization when they whistle blow and also perhaps also talk a little bit about um how this relates to the case of julian assange and um the current situation in relation to how um the state is going after him so over to you sualet um so it's interesting i mean we had this anniversary on the february 27th 2012 wikileaks began

[22:06] publishing the you know global intelligence files of over five million emails uh from the texas headquarters of this company um and uh and the emails were from 2004 to december 2011 and this this act was one of a number of acts in the activities of wikileaks that have really helped um expand the definition of whistleblower so traditionally um whistleblower has sort of evolved really from the 1980s

[22:38] and 1990s as being primarily about employees revealing serious wrongdoing often fraud financial fraud from inside a company but what we've seen is a movement over the last decade and wikileaks was certainly a major causative factor in this to broadening that definition and and that now includes in many definitions many protections contractors subcontractors it's now been expanded to say volunteer board members of a church or

[23:08] school and so these are people who are not just employed by or subjugated if you will by a boss in the organization but have some role in that community uh increasingly i've seen debate in academic circles about whether or not university students might be considered whistleblowers by virtue of being inside a university community even though they don't hold a official role as an employee or an oversight person like a board manager for those people who are entirely outside of a community and again the lines of community blur in an

[23:38] electronic setting but for those people who are outside entirely outside of an organization the term that i and some other academics have used to describe uh people who reveal serious wrongdoing is is bell ringers and uh bell ringers and particularly public interest bellringers which i think you would say this uh the people who provided this information to wikileaks as a publisher to publish or acting in the public interest um and we can talk about what it's

[24:10] revealed in the public interest um both of those sorts of people need protections and particularly one of the things that they need protection from is a kind of ugly threat that's been emerging from the onward push towards better protection for whistleblowers and so that better protection has been exemplified by a huge growth over the last decade in the number of laws and implementations of policy that protect whistleblowers including

[24:41] by the end of 2021 some 27 countries in the european union who will all have to adopt a minimum standard set of laws in national transposition of the eu directive protecting whistleblowers this is a massive thing it's fantastic um so uh so why you know why is this important well you've seen this move but there are threats to this move and one of the you know threats to it is a risk that with suppliers and we've seen this

[25:11] in julian assange's case and in other cases will be charged with data misuse or unauthorized access of data charges and and that this will be the side door channel that is used to attack the whistleblower or uh or someone who reveals the you know makes a disclosure in the public interest well why is that um okay it's because most things are actually stored in electronic form these days and they're you know we aren't reverting

[25:43] to paper very much and so a lot of the computer misuse acts um internationally have a very broad scope uh and they basically refer to either using any telecommunications uh you know facility well we all use those every day they follow us around like tracking devices with our phones um you know or or any online uh technology or any data that's stored in a technological um basis so that you know that is a that's a pretty serious concern um uh that's a threat to to the whistleblower

[26:15] and the kind of general movement that happened from 2010 to now and that is a push towards more transparency so i think one thing that's really important about the role of public interest bellringers as well as whistleblowers and this is an emerging thing that has happened uh really over the last decade to 15 years is that um we once in our in our free and open democracies believed that uh transparency was a corrective mechanism in its own right so you have foi laws for example and

[26:47] freedom of the press and that's great but we're drowning in data right we have more data i can't even keep all the files straight on my computer you know let alone all the other data that's on the internet we are drowning in data which is probably why some people pay a lot of money to places like stratfor um the problem with that is that what's in short supply now is less the data and more the guides and the signposts and the guides and the signposts are incredibly important those that do so in the public interest are doubly so and so

[27:18] punishing the whistleblower um or punishing the public interest um bellringer is is taking away that kind of key junction in the process that you need to have a protective umbrella over in the public interest and that process looks like the whistleblower the public interest bell ringer to for example the journalist to the publisher to the public if you break down any element of that chain the the people who lose are the public uh

[27:49] and and and we've seen you know for example um you know significant whistleblowing case uh alton deltor's uh case the luxely case you know he was initially charged with a computer is going to be charged with a computer crimes related charge and this is not um unusual at all so so i think those those that's where we've got a kind of nexus point that's very relevant to to this case um and uh i might just add that in terms of some big

[28:19] headline observations about why this case uh is so important um i mean the clown's comment is quite funny uh you could you could make an observation that um stratfor uh you know we thought that they were opening to the cia as john said but really they were sitting in the just doing google searches all day long um and it is john and it's not only a question the cia has access to information that obviously they don't have but cia actually does operations they don't just do google searches right so so um and that's really i mean you could say that's the difference as well

[28:50] between i don't know blackwater and the economist um so i think there was the atlantic might have quoted someone at the time that the stratfor uh uh documents were published saying something like um what you got in the intelligence reports from stratfor is what you could have gotten from the economist uh the week before um you know and uh and i think you know the observations that stratfor has paid sources which came out of this is interesting because i think i believe the atlantic also said uh yes we have people like that they're called reporters

[29:22] um and but the difference is their reports go to the public um so the that those are kind of my observations on on this thank you sulet um thank you very much um i'd i'd just like to move very briefly if i made to introduce professor ian mundro who's one of the co-founders of free the truth and to ask if ian would you like to add to this discussion of whistleblowing because you are a highly regarded whistleblowing expert

[29:53] and i wondered whether you wanted to add to uh the comments suelet has just made before we go to questions just to warn everybody who's watching in the audience if you wouldn't mind uh posting your questions if you're on the zoom if you can post it within the q a tab then we can pick it up for i can pick it up for the speakers and if you're watching on one of the um other channels at our expert our tech experts who are beavering behind the scenes will post them back to me so hopefully we

[30:24] will capture many of the questions that you want to ask so if you can please post your questions now while ian is speaking then we can try and pass them out to the right speakers ian over to you thanks deeper and uh thanks very much for the speakers and their very valuable insights into the stratfor leaks and more generally into the role of uh these uh private security in inverted commerce or private intelligence firms regardless of their competence and of course if you read the global intelligence files or some of them

[30:55] uh they're riven with prejudice uh mistakes and of course um yeah basic errors all coming probably from the newspapers that they're reading i suspect rather than intelligence work as this has been pointed out already uh and i would i would like to i completely agree what sulet just said uh if you think of the whistleblower chelsea manning she was uh charged with a whole bunch of things but she was actually only convicted of computer fraud and misuse i think it was three counts um five counts

[31:27] and put in prison for 35 years and that what they do if what the judge did in that case was of course give the maximum possible sentence uh for a relatively mundane what apparently mundane crime because they couldn't uh convict her of anything else because he also he'd done the public interest disclosures he'd revealed the existence of war crimes in afghanistan and iraq and um julian assange of course is being prosecuted more or less the same thing uh using uh

[32:00] based on similar laws except he's being even though he wasn't the whistleblower he was the uh po the published the journalist who handled the disclosures chelsea madness discloses he's up for 175 years and of course it's um as many people have already pointed out this is uh criminalization or not only of whistleblowing but we on the one hand we've got these new whistleblower laws being created for whistleblower protection which is all great but on the other hand we've got other other laws being

[32:31] used or misused uh for very severely um to try and deter whistleblowers and also whistleblower journalists and uh people who support whistleblowers but um yeah i think it's a very serious problem not just amongst the whistleblowing problem that the community but also in the activist community more generally i think last year or the year before last amnesty international produced a major report on the role of uh private intelligence firms that were tracking activists its

[33:03] activists and uh i think they particularly focused on a film called the nso but this is obviously a growing problem and i remember as well as wikileaks um i remember um mr um robert tibbo raising the issue that activists were being tracked by the intelligence community as well um journalists and so on in uh he gave the example of a police whistleblower in in canada um and the journalist was being was asked by

[33:34] the um canadian police force to can can you get information on on this on the journalist so we can find out who our who the whistleblower is but uh yeah i think that um this is a serious problem i just want to um even though the companies that we're strapped for may be uh clownish and not particularly professional or um if you look at uc global of course that's that was that seems to have had much more of a an effect as it were in the sense

[34:04] that it seems to be have had more very close links with us intelligence and also with um the type of information surveying lawyers uh journalists whistleblowers anyone talking to wikileaks staff and also possibly um providing information or misinformation which is then being circulated in the uh within the media but i i was just wondering what in

[34:35] in i would like to ask the question of the speakers what do you do about it um how do you uh in the it wasn't brilliant in the hp gary case anonymous basically revealed um how incompetent hb gary was and that this led to a decline in its reputation and its insolvency but how do we deal with this how do we address this uh this issue does anyone have any speakers have any particular um i could i could jump in at this point um i i think we actually ought to take

[35:08] seriously mike pompeo's um suggestion of what the world needs and that that is a public intelligence agency that is not beholden to the partisan interests of a particular region or a particular corporation or a particular demographic um but is beholden to the interests of humanity at large and the reason we need to have a public distributed decentralized intelligence agency is because as soon said our grievous

[35:39] our responsibility our duty um to act as the overseers of power um which is uh of um you know in inestimable importance for a civic society it's the reason we have a court in public is the reason why the the king deliberates at the court in public it's the reason why the administration of law is done in public it's the reason why democracy is done transparently and publicly as far as possible and that's because power when it is not

[36:11] uh under oversight that is effective uh tends inevitably towards corruption um and uh unpleasant things happen and the problem is we it's not a lack of information that we have it's a lack of ability to analyze that information and understand the import and so we need to need to bootstrap the um structures so that the public can continue to to to see what is being done um with the power

[36:42] that is seeded you must remember this that all power is seeded by the public to governments and to private corporate entities etc and to ensure that they are not um crossing some lines in the sand that we should you know uh retain the right to draw and i think we've lost that and as we transfer into this digital age we we have to think to ourselves very carefully how do we continue to uh have that uh faculty to exercise that oversight and for that we need um

[37:12] entities like wikileaks but it's not just the ability to source documents and to to get to office source protections and to publish them without fear or favor but it's also meaningful analysis and implications and and so this speaks to the way that um whistleblowing and bell ringing into that fantastic extension of that analogy um become now an integral part of the role of journalism in society that it's inextricable it's not no longer just this um

[37:43] uh separate class of journalists whose job it is to report on the news but anyone in any position where they interact with a system where some information about the inner workings of that system is necessary to be known by the greater greater whole and now puts on the hat of that that that duty to disclose and we need to make it as frictionless um we to eliminate all the barriers of entry to do that we need to make it safe and we need to make it effective because without that

[38:13] and power will continue to tend towards um tyranny thanks laurie um there are a couple of questions which are surfacing in the chat and before we um go into that what one of the things that it's worth probably picking up is a question about um julian and the way you know lowry talked about holding power to account and um how a democracy works and how it should be transparent and how we should understand that the the justice system works in a reasonable way and i'd like to

[38:44] go to sulet and lowry to talk to them a little bit about um so could you tell us about how this timeline of the stratfor leak sits with the broader timeline of julian's indictments and particularly could you focus on the way the the superseding enlightenments were introduced and explained that a little bit to us because i think a lot of people don't understand um the problems with due process not just in terms of companies like stratfor

[39:15] um planning to hold whole julian as one of the as some of the leaks revealed as a keep him as a bride in prison move him from country to country and so to talk about these things but then also perhaps go to larry and talk about a little bit about what the extradition process feels like so because although this um webinar is essentially commemorating the stratfor leaks i think we have to also talk about the organization and the people who were involved in um in

[39:47] bringing the information that was of public interest to light and how much many of them have lost and have sacrificed in order for us to be able to know what's really going on whereas the people who are the war criminals the bush the bushes the blairs the um the obamas of this world are putting out new books and sitting free and enjoying their lives so i think we do have to talk about what's happening in julian's case and what's happening um in belmarsh prison where julian you know

[40:19] he's been given his warm clothes in october or rather they've been sent into him and yet the prison hasn't delivered them to him and he's been sitting freezing cold preparing for the trial of his life and um this really brings a sense of urgency to our discussion so over to you sulet if you can tell us a little bit about the second superseding indictment and the broader timeline and then we'll go to lowry about the extradition process yeah i mean um so you know julian is dragged out of uh the embassy there are initial

[40:50] charges laid against him in april 2019. um and this has been due to a change of government uh in ecuador and the u.s activity actively lobbying ecuador and being instrumental in in raising billions of dollars of loans uh to ecuador um uh with i think you know one of the price tags being julian assange so in late may 2019 the you know espionage act charges are

[41:20] unveiled against julian and normally when those charges are uh unveiled that's that's the last word and that's because um the uk as the kind of men in the middle of all this has to go through a set of processes to start this proceeding because he's not being tried for these crimes in the uk he's being you know the debate is one of extradition not whether or not he's guilty of those particular crimes this time so the hearing opens itself in february 2020. um and uh that's because the us is

[41:51] pushing to speed things up they want things to happen quickly um and you know there are a set of hearings that are held and then in june 2020 june 24 all of a sudden the u.s is like well actually we've got additional charges that we want laid and the charge sheet is superseding hence the names to preceding indictment um the previous charges so it replaces the previous indictment now this is so confusing to the process and probably unprecedented uh in the

[42:21] um uk extradition proceedings that have gone before for anyone certainly in my knowledge i don't know of any case what this has been done sort of halfway through when the the cake is half baked um uh that the uk is is flounding around for four to six weeks after this has happened um uh because they don't know what to do with it they're not sure how to process it it's actually a very um outrageous thing for the usd doj to have done at that time um and and at the time these these superseding

[42:53] indictment this list of new charges uh are just kind of plonked on the um website of the doj no articles no fanfare just one day it kind of appears who knows possibly that was how the the uk government learned about it we don't know but um it you know from then september there is uh the hearing and uh julian assange's you know formally readdressed and you know on

[43:23] these new charges now you just wouldn't normally do that it's not it's not normal behavior and he's now not having the opportunity to respond properly to a set of these new charges which is completely outrageous in the justice system where he's about to be extradited so not having the challenge not having the opportunity to challenge these new allegations is is really an abuse of process um uh but um that's what has gone

[43:56] on here it's possible that um the judge took a very dim view of this uh in a sense it's an insult to the british justice system i i don't think you could describe it as anything else it treats the british justice system with a kind of contempt and and i suspect that most british judges would take a dim view of that um so uh so that's that's where you know that's

[44:29] where his case is you know is that at the moment obviously the um biden administration has decided to appeal the finding of the lower court which uh had what many people in civil society would would argue is a very bad set of decisions for freedom of the press and freedom of expression uh and human rights right up until the point in the decision where the judge rules not to extradite him but really on the grounds of uh of his mental health so um you know

[45:02] i'm not ruling i'm not saying he's not bad but he's mad and therefore we won't extradite him you know it's it's kind of smeared um but at least he's not extradited but uh the us didn't have to actually um fight those they could have just said it's gonna be a hard fight on legal grounds and therefore it's a waste of taxpayers taxpayers monies and by the way we have a whole new administration do we really want to spend the next years chasing the ghosts of the last four years administration and so they could have just decided to not proceed with that instead

[45:34] they have decided to do so so it will be interesting to see um what happens i think one of the important things that has come out of julian's case but it's also come out of um you know the other cases related to it for example jeremy hammond's case um chelsea manning's case uh is a is the biggest kind of existential threat to the nature of investigative journalism that we've seen in a long time and that threat looks like this where

[46:05] you have a journalist who finds information a tip off that there is serious wrongdoing that is happening it may be illegal uh it may be just immoral it may offend the public mores and they ask for the disclosure of that information whether it's a public interest bell ringer or a whistleblower for some evidence in in support of that allegation there is a tilt in the kinds of charges that have been um laid against

[46:35] the people involved in this you know decade-long saga and that tilt is to ask for that evidence is becoming a criminalized act it is criminalizing the act of verification and it's very ironic because many politicians around the world stand on their soapbox and say oh my god it's terrible you know facebook publishes fake news it's awful awful awful but here you actually have something that will undermine the verification of

[47:05] the accuracy of news in reporting but it creates a terrible precedent it's bad for the whistleblower and integrity in society in the organization and it's bad for journalism uh and the last thing you want to have is journalists who don't ask for evidence because then they're going to print things that are simply wrong i i think we saw some of that when um either because of journalists who choose not to ask for evidence or journalists who

[47:36] view the evidence only through a particular lens when they are for example embedded journalists doing war journalism and um like the journalist who was a bullitt's a price-winning journalist who was unwilling to reveal what happened within the collateral murder with video until wikileaks revealed it and chelsea's testimony came through and it became more and more evident that he knew about this information so um yes it is it is really worrying isn't it to see how evidence gathering and the the process

[48:08] by which we can penetrate some of the um the complexity and the opacity of these kinds of very complex institutions which make very important decisions about our lives and yet we have very little control over and where individuals in these institutions are hiding behind these facades to essentially um enrich themselves whether it is shareholders or stratfor or whether it is the owners of uh

[48:39] organizations such as these who are um who are hiring intelligence people who are sitting within the establishment to then come over and make money for themselves but just to take a step back before we go into uh perhaps with you a little bit john uh in a second about how companies like stratfor smear people and what kinds of information the the leaks actually revealed um could i come back to lowry and what i wanted to talk about this idea of

[49:09] holding power to account and um we we saw on the screen flashing by for those of you who are watching the live stream the information provided by declassified uk which showed that there are serious questions about conflicts of interest in relation to lady emma r buttsnot who's the chief who was the chief magistrate at westminster magistrates court and um how you know her son is involved with a company called dark trace which seeks to shut down places like wikileaks how her husband has a um has a is partnering with

[49:43] richard dear love in relation to things and how she herself receives financial benefits from secretive partner organizations of the uk foreign office and you know looking at that and looking at for example a judge uh at a hearing where julian is called in front of the court he says his name and his date of birth and the judge brands him a narcissist what does it feel like to go through this extradition process particularly if you are somebody perhaps on the um

[50:15] autism spectrum who is um expecting certainty my understanding from the work of professor niels meltzer the un special rapporteur who has confirmed that julian was being exposed to psychological torture is that a big part of psychological torture is the arbitrariness of the process and also the um the inability to rely on institutions that are supposed to protect you for example in julian's case he thought asylum he was granted asylum

[50:46] and then without grounds his citizenship was revoked and without due process similarly um you know when he goes to the court everybody else gets treated a certain way he gets treated differently when he in fact the law has to be changed after the case is taken in julian's case in order to make the european extradition warrants for example uh run in an appropriate way or whether it is in relation to um you know the the treatment as westminster magistrates course and i say

[51:17] this as somebody who was a legal observer julian's hearings and how how how difficult it was to attend those hearings and how we were intentionally kept out of the process so that you you know the the right of the public to know as much as if it is a right of julian to have a an extradition hearing or or a judicial process where uh the public can understand what's going on in his case was totally trampled over in this case

[51:47] so um i'd like to move back to lowry please and talk to you a little bit about your experience of the extradition process and um what it feels like in terms of this arbitrariness within the process please over to you larry thank you diva um yeah i mean if you haven't had the um wonderful opportunity in your lives yet to read trans kafka i i suggest you do um he wrote a book called the trial and from that and some of his other writings

[52:18] we have this adjective in the english language kafkesque and kafks basically means um well how can you describe it it's a a system um of administration of so-called justice or law that is um that is arbitrary that is undermining that is um to some extent gaslighting the people that are involved in it um because of all the expectations that uh things should proceed a certain way that there should be a sort of bare fairness of their equality to it

[52:50] and you see these evaporators you participate in the system and it can be small things such as when you're put into westminster magistrates court you are um you're not allowed able to sit with council you're not able to confer with council and um help them represent you as is their brief this is their responsibility and this is your right to inform them you're put in a little goldfish bowl um effectively segregated from the rest of the court and presented to the court as a guilty party

[53:20] and then you know select reminded us that trial is not to establish guilt the the judges in an extradition hearing should not allow themselves to form an opinion on the guilt of the or non-guilt of the requested person however we see that it colours their decision-making the way that the united states in particular because of our unbalanced extradition treaty with the us is able to completely set the stage and frame the narrative and steal a march on the storytelling

[53:51] by the way the um the allegations are put together in the indictments that form the extradition uh request and then as a soulette said they could somehow late in the game just decide to wipe that slave and put a whole bunch of new things on there and then the problem in an extradition hearing is you don't have a right to contest any of these claims say that again for the people at the back you are sitting in a goldfish bowl in the dark being lied about by the most powerful organization in the world the most

[54:22] powerful entity in the world indirectly the the sole remaining superpower in the world in front of a institution that in theory um administers justice under truth that administers justice under truth that uh ensures the outcome by ensuring truth to ensure that justice is done you said and you listen to people lie about you and you can't even raise your hand and say please miss please lady not to impugn any of our judiciary in particular but please can these um

[54:53] people i haven't met from another country i've never been to stop lying about me so that they can lock me up in a small box for the rest of my life because that isn't the way i was raised to believe court should work there should be an adversarial process of contesting evidence and um an impartial panel of people who are not part of the establishment the same political entity that is embroiled in the uh abuses of power that you are bringing to light and there should be that at least that check and balance and all these things

[55:24] are not there in the extradition process so it is a little bit like you're being served a meal of justice but there's no there's no nutrients in there that's just um there's just psychological torture and it's not a pleasant process to be put through and it this is why it's so essential to have the um have other people involved not to to um accept themselves as passive observers but to actually participate

[55:54] as you attempted to do deeper as a observer legal observer in this process and so many other fantastic organizations around the world have attempted to do to say hold on a minute you can't you can't get away with this like we we we we are here to watch and ensure that what's done is right and every effort has been made um in uh julian's case to um obstruct that oversight faculty again to to ensure that things can be done in a twisted and underhanded way

[56:26] um and you know it's not very for for anyone and i can only speak from my own experience but um someone of my should we say personality typology uh or someone who's in the kind of mold of mindset of viewing the world that i have um have very strong sense of innate justice and what is right and then to be to be put into that you know what should be a sacred and hallowed place for the administration of

[56:56] that justice and to see its integrity and its honor besmirched by by the way that process is not put together and orchestrated to ensure justice but put together an orchestrator to assure a particular outcome a political outcome and that political outcome in this case is the suppression of the vital and necessary um duty of journalists to report the truth without fear without fear and favor we

[57:28] say without fear and favor and you cannot say that anyone who is aspiring to be an investigative journalist or is working at a publication in uh in the capacity of an editor is not looking at this case and thinking i know where the line is now i i know how far i can go and not no not any further before i i come under the crosshairs and i have um myself detained in various forms extra legally for for decade um subjected to a vile uh character assassination campaign

[57:59] um my life made into a sorted so popular mockery um and and facing uh withering away in a cell for daring to give the public what the public needs to know about things like war crimes and things like abuses of power in in detention in guantanamo and of the things that we absolutely must be able to see so that we can say no we could say this is not on

[58:31] and so yeah i guess to summarize um the extradition process is very very very flawed and it is a similar it is a simulation of justice in the sense of borderland um it puts on all of the airs it puts on all of the um costumes and it goes through the motions but when you're sitting there you can see that it is not uh bent towards the the the moral arc of

[59:03] this process is not bent towards justice as it should be um and um you know that's harrowing and and i i'm lucky um being the first person um for whom extradition to the united states was refused um on on the grounds of the forum bar and and that it would be unjust and oppressive to put someone um with any sort of mental uh physical uh health complications in such a barbaric system of detention i was lucky to be able to be here and

[59:34] speak speak to you about this um but these situations haven't changed the the detention system is still barbaric someone put in there with any psychological difficulties will not flourish they they will expect to have degradation of their physical and mental condition um and an inability to provide meaningful care to them and so we we we're still fighting that battle um in julian's case

[1:00:06] um and i just want to implore everyone to remember that it's like we're all in this fight we can all play a role we can all do something even if it's just letting the power know that you are observing so writing a letter turning up at court um expressing opinion sharing this discussing it with friends and family and say well this does concern me it does concern me i want to live in a world where an organization and a person um takes great risk and

[1:00:38] exercises great courage to help the world see what is being done in their name with the power that they steed with the money that they give to to the state and i want to live in a world where that person is not crushed mercilessly to set an example to others that power should not be held to account that's so powerful laurie lowry and i mean i having spoken to you a couple of times i um just moved by what what

[1:01:10] you have sacrificed and how how deep your sense of justice is and what contribution you have made to the world and being able to do this and how much um how much you've been put through which is completely and so utterly wrong and unjust carrying on with this sense of barbarism that you spoke about julian if he is extradited to the united states will face 175 years in

[1:01:40] a maximum security prison for those of you who don't know what it feels like to be in the alexandria detention center there is a clip available online which we will try and uh share through the chat of what it feels like inside the prison but ins essentially even at pre-trial stage this is before any guilt has been established julian will be kept in a in a very small cell and the us specializes in these

[1:02:13] really strange terms for example julian will be kept under special administrative measures which uh for anybody who's read the center for constitutional rights report on what they call the darkest corner of the world special administrative measures are essentially ways in which you are cut off and your lawyers are cut off from speaking to the rest of the world in relation to your trial you are also placed in administrative segregation as they term it um which is essentially solitary

[1:02:45] confinement where you're in your cell 22 hours a day which the un has clearly defined as a form of torture and as chelsea of course went through this in fact she was placed in a cage and at times was deprived of her clothing and the the horrendousness of the process doesn't end there they also talk about um you know one of the things that really bothered me when i was listening to the hearings was the way in which firstly the the the prosecution the cps talked about mental health and the way in which it was described

[1:03:17] and most of this process has been around you know described around julian and his personality rather than in relation to the way in which states are stamping on citizens but in relation to julian they talked about you know even the judge talked about his mental health but actually this is not a case of mental health but a case of mental injury caused by five states stamping on his head collectively and repeatedly over a period of a decade and it's also about um how in julian's case um you know the the way in which in that

[1:03:50] court the united states was trying to pretend as though the u.s prison system is going to be a holiday where julian will have career development courses in relation to what he could potentially you know he would have access to this particular tv channel which would train him to think about what he could do once he was released from prison or how to improve his uh personal skills which of course you know um no no no um criticism of prison education but this was um in fact it was worse than any

[1:04:22] re-education camp you can imagine in some of the worst dictatorships and um i know john uh in in terms of your sacrifice you have been through the us prison system yourself and um experienced its brutality as has uh mumia abu jamal whom we heard from last week and on the assange defense um webinar but also as have the guantanamo prisoners many of whom have died in guantanamo without charge and we're never getting due

[1:04:53] process including children who were uh you know um arrested when they were 14 and then committed suicide when they were 21 while still inside guantanamo so the us prison system isn't known for um it's its excessive kindness or its uh superiority in fact the the rate of suicides in in the prison population and particularly those under uh these extreme solitary confinement measures is extremely high compared to um

[1:05:25] i mean but what else can you do if you're faced with 175 years where the you know at least at the cps he seemed to keep suggesting they would do everything to keep him alive so they can make sure he goes through the 100 years whatever or is left of his life so uh could i move to you john uh after getting off that soapbox about how this is and could you tell us a little bit where do i even begin there are so many things that are desperately wrong with the us prison system first of

[1:05:58] all everything that you said about solitary confinement is true the new york times did a uh did an expose in the spring of 2016 on one of the maximum security prisons in the state of california and they talked about how the united nations has determined that solitary confinement for any length of time beyond 15 days is a form of torture well in the united states we we keep prisoners in solitary

[1:06:28] confinement for as long as 44 years now imagine 44 years with no human contact this new york times expose in california was talking about a solitary confinement system where you literally have no contact with any other human being when you receive mail for example you don't actually get the mail there's a computer monitor uh hanging from the ceiling

[1:06:59] of your cell of your six foot by ten foot cell out of reach so you can't damage it in any way they'll put your correspondence on the screen for five minutes you stand there and read it and then it's taken off and that's it the only visitors you're allowed to have are your attorneys and even they are restricted to once a month you're allowed one phone call a month it's monitored of course live you're

[1:07:30] allowed two showers a week your uh your meals are provided to you through a slot in the door and you know when when we talk about lock down for 23 hours a day and exercise for one hour a day it's not really exercising the conventional uh definition of the term every one of these cells and i know this because i was in solitary confinement but every one of these cells has a small door at the back

[1:08:01] and that door leads to a cage that's outside now the cage in my case was another six by ten feet and so you can either walk around in a circle or in an oval in your indoor six by ten cell or one hour a week i'm sorry one hour a day go outside into the cage and walk in a six by ten foot circle that's enough to drive the sanest man insane at this california prison things got so

[1:08:34] desperate that prisoners were smashing windows and eating the broken glass just so they could go outside for medical care and speak to another human being that's what these these special administrative measures are now there are there are sam units within prisons and then there's a sam unit that is a prison that's at the u.s penitentiary

[1:09:06] at terre haute indiana where the whistleblower uh marty goddesfeld is currently being held presumably if julian were to be extradited and i think he will not be he would go to the sam unit at terre haute indiana the thing with sam units especially at terre haute is the focus is to keep the prisoner away from the media it's all about communication you know i was in this modified sam unit at the uh at the u.s

[1:09:39] prison in loreto pennsylvania and i was not permitted to file a freedom of information act request about myself that was a part of my plea agreement that i could never file a foia request ever ever again in my life and i thought to myself one day you know these people are so stupid just by their nature they're just stupid people because who else would work in a prison than a dum-dum uh that i decided to file a foia request anyway just to see if they would catch it and

[1:10:10] they didn't catch it and they actually responded to it quite quickly most of what they sent me was uh stupid stuff my own medical records my own visitors list things like that but there were about a dozen pages that were very interesting and very important they were internal memos about how to deal with me and there was one that was very simple and very important and it was one page and it was written in very large block letters and it was from the warden to all personnel in the prison and it said

[1:10:42] caution inmate has access to the media and that's really what the nature of this of this problem for them was that i had access to the media well julian is the media and so imagine the links that they'll go to to silence julian now in my silly little position all i had to do uh was to smuggle my i wrote a blog uh regularly called

[1:11:12] letters from loretto that i i turned into a book when i got home but i i would just simply smuggle it out with other prisoners or i would smuggle it out through one of my attorneys the whistleblower attorney jessalyn radak and it was easy enough marty goddesfeld can't get anything out of that prison and certainly if julian uh were in the u.s penitentiary at terre haute they would be on him like white on rice as we stay here in the states he wouldn't be able to communicate with anybody but that's the point the point

[1:11:44] isn't just to punish him the point is to punish him and to silence him because when you silence him he can't get that message out and so people like us remain uninformed we don't know what's going on we can't push that message of truth and transparency and openness because we just don't have access to it that's the point now it we're lucky in the respect and julian is lucky in the respect that um

[1:12:17] that the justice department is going to have to justify legally justify its own prison system and it's unjustifiable and so i think that's where the victory is for julian i think the the us put itself in a corner that it can't get out of where they would have to convince the the court of appeals and perhaps the supreme court and perhaps the european court of justice that no there's nothing wrong with the us prison system not only will

[1:12:48] julian get a fair hearing in the united states they'll argue but when he's convicted and he will be convicted because you know the justice system isn't just uh in the u.s they'll lock him up in a in a sam unit so for for julian in the event that this that he's not able to protect himself and again i think that he will be uh the fix is in there's no justice here yep um

[1:13:22] thanks john one of the things um that was visible through the hearings was the fact that julian had been moved to the medical unit at belmar not because they were concerned seriously about his medical health although his medical condition was serious in itself they put him there to keep him out of reach of the kinds of cameras that were revealing for prisoners who had taken footage of him which got revealed on youtube um within balmarsh so um talking about

[1:13:52] segregating people in order to not let them access the medias is not something that is that appears now to be unusual in british prisons either um could i now take um i'm trying to draw in a couple of questions at a time from the audience but one of the questions that i think needs a standalone answer is um could you give us some quotes from the different stratfor leagues and i'm i'm hoping that sullette might be able to share some of this with us

[1:14:22] well yeah i mean um the emails do provide some insight into the psyche of the people in these privatized um pseudo intelligence providing firms so one of the messages reads assange is going to make a nice bride in prison screw the terrorist he'll be eating cat food forever unless george soros hires him and interestingly there's information

[1:14:56] in some of the other ones that's quite telling so one of them is reporting on um him being arrested and due to appear in a court in westminster soon to face charges of rape accused by two women in sweden quote charges of sexual assault rarely are passed through interpol red notices like this one so this is no doubt about trying to disrupt wikileaks release of government documents um and and then they talk about you know whether it could

[1:15:27] disrupt the long-term viability um of wikileaks then there's a a sort of long discussion between a set of people um about uh whether or not uh the the deaths in iraq are comparable to pearl harbor um and and they're actually putting counts in the email well there were you know pearl harbor had 2 400 you know and two military killed and 57 civilians killed whereas you know in or

[1:15:58] the u.s fatalities in iraq were 4 429 and 179 uk fatalities and and and the argument that goes back and forth in this email is but it took and i'm quoting i'm so excused by french but it took years of [ __ ] up to get to that point in iraq pearl pearl wasn't even a single day it was a single morning and and so the the mentality here is it seems very at odds with what the

[1:16:28] public would think i was you know acceptable about justifying um you know trying to to stop a war it's like well it took longer to kill all these civilians and people in iraq and therefore it's not okay to actually um uh report on it another amusing entry was um uh a comment really on how they view i guess their clients um in washington the foggy bottom bow ties

[1:16:59] have their panties in a knot over a specific iraq cable outed yesterday not sure which one may be yanked so that's a clearly not not very complimentary perspective they have on the people who pay their bills um did you have a couple of ones you wanted to mention john sorry i didn't need to jump in and cut you off no actually i was going to talk about some of the same things uh you know it seems to me that that these little embarrassing snippets

[1:17:30] of information that were released uh were not as embarrassing to them as uh as the fact that they lost all their their customers credit card numbers and they had to go back and apologize to everybody and they were they were embarrassed and they were humiliated and they wanted to take it out on uh on jeremy hammond so you know i should add to that that uh please do one of the one of the um companies whose credit card numbers was leaked was the law firm

[1:18:00] of um the judge's husband the judge who presided over jeremy hammond's um criminal conviction so in in any barely functioning world she would have had to recuse herself and and it kind of just speaks to the fact that it's such this incestuous relationship between these um entities and and the people that are supposed to be you know uh keeping an eye on them thanks uh lowry could i just move back to something we talked about with sullet

[1:18:31] which is the normalization of war that comes from the use of intelligence agencies such as this and what wikileaks did to kind of bash through that barrier and uh remind us about you know we talk about black lives matter but actually when people have died in iraq and afghanistan that doesn't seem to count so um i wondered ian if you would like to comment on some of the normalization of war and how whistleblowing and wikileaks helps to um help to surface that please thanks

[1:19:04] deeper yeah i think a really important aspect of uh this particular case uh if you look at stratfor the stratfor leaks a lot of it some of its clients of course uh are big companies but a lot of them are actually military uh companies uh lockheed martin uh ready theon and so on and a lot of these uh you know if you think of the not just the military budget but the intelligence budget a lot of it is outsourced to uh private contractors edward snowden for example was working

[1:25:44] health or public safety and she said that's what you did you're the poster boy for whistleblowing well that was a revelation to me and one of the other things that i learned in this whole process is that oftentimes well most of the time whistleblowing is not really a clean process sometimes the whistleblower is really not a compelling figure it's somebody who's hard to like but that shouldn't matter all that should matter is the information

[1:26:16] that is revealed one of the other things that i learned is motivation for whistleblowing is irrelevant all that's relevant is the information does the information meet those requirements of exposing waste fraud abuse illegality or threats to the public health or public safety once i understood that and accepted that it was far easier for me to appreciate what it was that so many different whistleblowers around the world were

[1:26:46] coming forward with you don't have to like the whistleblower you don't even have to agree with the whistleblower you just have to respect the information thanks john um so election did you want to come in on that or um should we move to final comments oh sorry ian would you like to go first after you select oh i think i might just

[1:27:18] sort of jump to some final comments if i if i might um and and and it's a little bit upbeat in this sense so one of the stratfor males in the publication wrote certainly the doj have a poster case for a range of criminal indictments to include the death penalty for assange manning will be deep fried uh i think it one of the other things

[1:27:49] that comes out in these emails uh is stratfor saying we might we could maybe take the man down but it it may not be possible to kill off this thing he's created this wikileaks thing that he's created and by that they meant not just the organization but a way of thinking um a new way of thinking and a new set of actions uh and i and i think that in a positive sense their fear was well founded uh and

[1:28:21] that's because although julian has spent more than seven years in one form or another in either prisons or um not having his freedom and under deep constraint in that time we've seen things like italian journalist stephanie marazzi running a court case around wikileaks related information that was being sought through foi the mid had been blocking just as a tactic

[1:28:52] and took the matter to an upper court on appeal and one overturning a lower court's bad decision and that resulted in an important finding for all journalists access to information we've seen more than a hundred secure drop boxes rolled out around the world not just in support of anti-war movements or general reporting about corruption but protecting environmental crimes

[1:29:22] protecting um covid uh related i mean not crimes but you know fighting environmental crimes fighting uh coveted supply chain and uh other crimes um immediate threat to safety political corruption um all sorts of of areas of both specialty and field specialty and geography um that that is now such a mainstream idea that it's it's de rigueur in most major reputable media organizations that was

[1:29:53] julian assange and wikileaks they invented that um dozens of countries around the world have in the last decade adopted whistleblower protection laws and thousands of organizations have done so often required by law including uh first laws that applied federally here in australia in 2012 13 and then most recently in the last two years laws that apply to the private sector um and and then we'll see these 27 countries

[1:30:23] rolled out by the end of 2021 across all of the eu with whistleblower protection laws some of them such as in countries like spain where there has been literally no stand-alone whistleblower protection law anywhere in spain in fact what we've seen is improved cyber security for journalists both in awareness of their own need for cyber security training that's offered through civil society specialist education universities reaching out to journalists i set up training for uh journalists in the master's program

[1:30:54] at my university and and a growing awareness that the fact that the journalists not only have to defend themselves they've got to defend their sources when it comes to the technology as well and and a lot of information laid bare so that the public is not only less deceived but less trusting of these information companies that are linked to the defense industry to the lies that politicians may tell us to get reelected in support of going to

[1:31:25] war yet again to cover up some financial or other malfeasance they would like the attention diverted from and finally and most importantly the profound change that has happened over the last decade whereby whistleblower is no longer a dirty word it is no longer a dibby dauber it is no longer a rat it is actually a justice seeker you know and increasingly uh i'm i make the argument and i hear it reflected back in what people are saying

[1:31:57] that whistleblowing is seen as an emerging type of human right within the freedom of expression right that we have um uh declaration of human rights it is the right to dissent from wrongdoing it's a right that was established not for whistleblowers per se but for people as a whole after world war ii in europe when we decided that no it was not okay to just stand by and say i didn't say anything about what i saw that was happening that was so awful no that wasn't acceptable say the courts

[1:32:29] say the people and and now we see this translated into a different mentality in how whistleblowers are viewed and i think that wikileaks and indeed these uh these publications as a part of wikileaks's activities have played a role in that transition in all of those key achievements thank you so elect um ian did you want to continue there and then we'll go to lowry and john yeah very

[1:32:59] quick point uh so michael clark does make very clear in his comment that um he very strongly supports uh the work of julian assange and the uh because he revealed uh evidence of criminal behavior by the u.s government in its conduct of war and other matters so so that's very important and uh and then he subsequently said what about uh but what happens when a whistleblower that gets it wrong which which may be the case and in fact there has been a recent case quite an interesting one

[1:33:30] that came with analytica scandal where there were two sort of the initial whistleblowers chris wiley who was uh briefly i think director of search for it and then there was another whistleblower who the documentary the great hack was done on brittany kaiser uh and they both have very different versions of events in fact but uh which is quite interesting because having you can sort of compare and contrast there they both wrote memoirs about it um but the information commissioner's office uh i think

[1:34:00] uh late last year uh published a report where basically they said in fact cambridge analytica didn't work for the brexit campaign for example uh that was their finding although they've been a huge number of front-page uh sort of stories about cambridge analytica's role in brexit the the uk information commissioner's office found well that wasn't the case and and you do get uh but i think uh these are these are interesting peculiarities but on the whole the work of whistleblowers

[1:34:31] if you think of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 much of what we know about the financial crisis came from whistleblowers um who were whose lives also were destroyed as a result of their blowing a whistle on their companies often they were quite senior people uh if you think it's a financial misconduct uh military misconduct intelligence uh misconduct edward snowden's whispering all sorts of forms of corporate and uh government misconduct that we now know of we know of we only know of

[1:35:02] but we know the details because of the worker whistleblowers so you can't you know it's it's impossible to undervalue that huge public service the public interest whistleblowers provide to us thanks ian and over to you lowry now for some closing comments larry i'm saying i know i know i've got it i've got it and yeah so uh you know how can i wrap up um we we we are aware i think painfully aware of

[1:35:33] the emergence of the national security state um the normalization of war the uh normalization of conflicts elective conflicts of aggression and the um subordinate the co-option of the press into supporting these um but we are aware of the countervailing tendency and that is the the um the wider network the the public the networked individuals that form the policy that form civil society realizing that they retain a role and they can participate in this

[1:36:03] oversight capacity and and um where there is a concerted will to shine the light of transparency on um the doings that would like prefer to be done in back rooms and uh in in the smoky darkness where they can get away with all sorts and that concerted will will bring things to life um and you know it's um we we will continue to fight for julian assange and i'm confident he will not be extradited and they will not win this um uh victory and exert this

[1:36:36] chilling effect um against um the public's uh involvement in transparency and its requirements to have transparency but um you know i always just want to say to the you know the powers to be and and to the media that um in general that are well i want to use the analogy of one of the pioneers of cyberspace um uh john gilmore who famously said um the net the network interprets censorship as damage

[1:37:06] and roots around it and um so if you're in the press if you're willing to um take on that responsibility then the the network the the internet will work with you and if you're not willing to take on that responsibility we'll work around you and that's what wikipedia did and i'll i'll leave with the uh words of my revolutionary comrade who goes by the name of ice tea in a song that you wrote called ain't a damn thing changed and he says um behind me try it you might cause a riot

[1:37:38] what the radio won't play the underground will supply it for some final comment i i think i'll i'll close by saying that uh in 2015 uh soulette hired me to uh help the greek government write a new whistleblower protection law and in my very first trip

[1:38:08] that year in a meeting with the minister of justice we were speaking in greek and there is no word in greek for whistleblower and so finally the minister said to me what exactly is this word you keep using whistleblower so i explained to him what i meant and he said ah like a rat or a snitch and i said no not at all like a rat or a snitch and so we had a long conversation and we

[1:38:39] came up with the term sentinel of the public trust which is a very pretty word in greek um sentinel of the public trust and that's the word that we continue to use throughout the process so my my point here is we have a lot of work to do a lot of work we can't let up we can't stop we have to look we're we're right and we're the good guys and so we have to keep the fight up whether it's in support of julian

[1:39:10] or in support of jeremy hammond or in support of anonymous or wikileaks as an organization we have to we have to keep up the fight thanks john thank you very much and to all those of you who um we hadn't expected to go for 90 minutes and we've gone for slightly longer than that thank you for those who've stayed throughout uh we haven't had a single drop in viewing um but also um you know the free the truth events were intended to bring people

[1:39:40] like sullette john and lowry to uh to the public to allow us to hear and understand what's really going on in the world and to look beyond the superficial narratives that are spun in in some of the media and to look to understand what true journalism true is for blowing in the true public interest is about and we will continue to have these events the next event is likely to be about guantanamo um it's a it's a rishi yield event which was going to mark um 19 years

[1:40:10] of uh guantanamo being open um and so that's going to um take place next and um i urge you to please follow us follow the don't extradite assange page please support stella's campaign to raise funds for the um for the defense of julian and uh first also a big thank you to gareth pierce and those at burnburg pierce who are and in the other legal teams including um at darty street and elsewhere who are doing a huge amount of work um not at the extraordinary rates that

[1:40:43] some of these people charge but at very reasonable rates in order to be able to push forward this case and who've been working day and night to get julian released we are behind you we support you and uh we hope to see julian amongst us and perhaps speaking on at one of the free the truth panels very soon and uh on that note thank you to all our speakers and to the committee to defend julian assange who helped uh fund this zoom to our technical experts and to our um

[1:41:14] to the i i hesitate to call them this with media partners we're actually retweeting and sharing the information to all of you who are viewing and have supported these events and we look forward to having many more such discussions thank you bye bye
