Wiki-fugitive wants you to code - DIFFICULTY OF BEING ASSANGE

Wiki-fugitive wants you to code

Julian Assange has spent half a year as a fugitive in a London embassy. Shrugging off reports about his chronic lung infection, now his latest mission is to get individuals to adopt the use of ciphers to protect their privacy

IN SPITE OF THE IMPRISONMENT, ASSANGE FEELS THAT IT HAS ALL BEEN WORTH IT. KNOWLEDGE THAT WE HAVE CONTRIBUTED TOWARDS THE IRAQI AND AFGHAN PEOPLE ARE ACHIEVEMENT IN ITSELF, HE SAYS

T he Ecuadorian embassy in London looks rather lavish from the street, but inside it's not much bigger than a family apartment. Christmas shoppers heading for Harrods next door bustle by, oblivious to the fact they pass within feet of one of the world's most famous fugitives.
It's almost six months since Julian Assange took refuge in the embassy. A state of affairs that was at first sensational is slowly becoming surreal. Ecuador has granted its guest formal asylum. But the WikiLeaks founder can't get to Harrods, let alone South America, because the moment he leaves the embassy, he will be arrested and extradited to Sweden to face allegations of rape.
Assange says he'll happily go to Stockholm, providing the Swedish government guarantees he won't be extradited to the United States. Stockholm says that decision would lie with the courts. So the weeks have stretched into months, and may stretch into years.
When Assange appears, he seems more like an in-patient than an interviewee, his opening words slow and hesitant, the voice so cracked as to be barely audible. If you have ever visited someone convalescing after a breakdown, his demeanour would be instantly recognisable.
Assange tells me he sees visitors most days. He shrugs off reports of a chronic lung infection. "I suppose it's quite nice, though, actually, that people are worried about me."
He spent 10 days in jail in December 2010, before being bailed to a home in Suffolk. He was free to come and go in daylight hours, but felt more in captivity then than he does now. "I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable."
And now he is the author of a new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom And The Future Of The Internet. Based on conversations with three other cypherpunks — internet activists fighting for online privacy — it warns we are sleepwalking towards a "new transnational dystopia". "The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen" - and its target audience anyone who has ever gone online or used a mobile phone.
"The last 10 years have seen a revolution in interception technology, where we have gone from tactical interception to strategic interception," he explains.
"Tactical interception is the one that we are all familiar with, where particular individuals become of interest to the state or its friends. Their phones are intercepted, their email communication is intercepted, their friends are intercepted, and so on. We've gone from that situation to strategic interception, where everything flowing out of or into a country — and for some countries domestically as well — is intercepted and stored permanently."

The change is partly down to economics: interception costs have been halving every two years. "A kit produced in South Africa can store and index all telecommunications traffic in and out of a medium-sized nation for $10 million a year."
"The penetration of the Stasi in East Germany is reported to be up to 10% of the population - but the penetration of Facebook in Iceland is 88%, and those people are informing much more frequently and in much more detail than they ever were in the Stasi. And they're not even getting paid to do it! So we're now in this unique position where we have all the ingredients for a turnkey totalitarian state."
Assange sees only one way to protect ourselves: cryptography.
"A well-defined mathematical algorithm can encrypt something quickly, but to decrypt it would take billions of years - or trillions of dollars' worth of electricity to drive the computer. So cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the internet. There is no other way for our intellectual life to gain proper independence from the security guards of the world, the people who control physical reality."
"It's all about power," he replies. "And accountability. The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent."
Assange himself is immensely powerful, and should be held to a higher standard of accountability and transparency. "I think that is correct," he agrees. So was WikiLeaks' decision to publish Afghan informers' names unredacted an abuse of power? Assange lets rip. "This is absurd propaganda. There has been no official accusation that any of our publications over a six-year period have resulted in the deaths of a single person - a single person."
Has he considered the possibility that he might live in this embassy for the rest of his life. "I've considered the possibility. But it sure beats supermax [maximum security prison]."
But it has all been worth it, he says, because of what he's achieved.
"Changes in electoral outcomes, contributions to revolutions in the Middle East, and the knowledge that we have contributed towards the Iraqi people and the Afghan people. And also the end of the Iraq war, which we had an important contribution towards. You can look that up. The documents we'd published directly were cited by Iraqis as a reason for discontinuing the immunity [for US soldiers]. And the US said it would refuse to stay without continued immunity."

DIFFICULTY OF BEING ASSANGE

Assange reportedly has a habit of falling out with erstwhile allies. His response to the charges:

THE PUBLISHER
Canongate, a small publisher that paid a large advance for his ghosted autobiography, only to have Assange pull out of the project after reading the first draft. It published anyway, but lost a lot of money. His response: "They were wrong to do it, to violate the author's copyright like that." Did he ever consider giving his advance back? "Canongate owes me money. I have not seen a single cent from it.”

THE COLLEAGUE

Several staff walked out of WikiLeaks in 2010, including a senior colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who complained Assange behaved "like some kind of emperor or slave trader". As for Domscheit-Berg, "he had a minor role within WikiLeaks, and he was suspended by me on 25 August 2010." He dismisses the event. "What we are talking about here in our work is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people that we have exposed and documented. And your question is about, did we suspend someone back in 2010?"

THE LOVERS
The two Swedish women who have pressed rape and sexual assault charges against Assange were his former admirers.

THE LEGAL HASSLES
Assange says he can't say anything about the allegations for legal reasons, but he predicts the extradition will be dropped. But in the next breath he adds: "Sweden refuses to behave like a reasonable state. It refuses to give a guarantee that I won't be extradited to the US." He describes Sweden's claim that the decision is up to the court as "absolutely false." The legal confusion, he says, arises "because there are enormous powers at play."