Defending the Leaks: Q&A with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

The Frontline Club in London has long been where foreign correspondents gather to swap boozy stories about far-flung adventures and bravado. But on Monday, the venerated club hosted a new star in international journalism — one with a decidedly different temperament. Tall, wan and with wispy, prematurely gray hair, Julian Assange told the gathered reporters about the 90,000 classified documents from the war in Afghanistan that he released through his website WikiLeaks.org. Assange, a former computer hacker who has never traveled to Afghanistan, met up with TIME’s Eben Harrell in the attic of the Frontline Club to discuss the site, his motivations and a set of documents that has upset the game plan of the Obama Administration.

There’s a collection of newspapers with your picture on the front page. Who is Julian Assange?
I am a journalist and publisher and inventor. In the case of WikiLeaks, I have tried to create a system which solves the problem of censorship of the press and censorship of whistle-blowers across the whole world. As a public spokesman for the organization, I take all the heat and get all the credit.

(See the top 10 leaks.)

You have been called “the Robin Hood of hacking,” and it has been reported that you don’t spend more than two days in same place. What is your lifestyle like?
There is a bit of a desire to romanticize what I do. But like war correspondents who go to various countries, I do the same thing. I travel to different countries where we have supports and where I need to follow stories. Most of what any leader of an organization does is logistics, and that’s what I do.

Do you have a home base?
We have different bases in different places. There are four places where I would personally feel secure.

What do you mean by secure?
It’s where we have strong political support.

A lot of newspapers have described you as a pacifist.
Not at all. I’m an extremely combative person. That said, of course the death of children and conscript soldiers should be avoided if it can be avoided. We are more interested in looking at whether abuses are occurring, understanding where they have occurred and getting that out to the public, to investigate it for police and policy people, so that justice is done in relationship to past abuses and that future abuses do not occur because of a deterrence effect.

(See the top 10 news stories of 2009.)

But you say that many of the abuses are just part of war?
That’s right. When we go back to look at descriptions of Vietnam and World War II, it’s just one thing after another. That’s why, when you go into a war, you have to make it as brief as possible. No matter how good your intentions are, war starts corrupting the people involved in it. It corrupts the social and economic fabric of the country where the war is taking place. That seems to be what is happening in Afghanistan.

(See what hard truths were revealed in the Afghanistan documents.)

So you’re not antiwar?
If a country which is surrounded by other countries does not have an army or security sector, opportunistic groups invade and take over. A military is important to defend the security of a country. But that said, how can we support a war that isn’t about defense? The war in Afghanistan seems to be slowly turning into something that is not about defense. It’s an ongoing mire for all parties.

Do you believe in total transparency? Should governments and individuals be allowed to hold secrets, or should we put everything out there?
Of course there are legitimate secrets. But we must make the default assumption that each individual has the right to communicate knowledge to other individuals. We call up our grandmother, and the government doesn’t listen in. Your mail can be sent, and the government doesn’t open it up. That is our default assumption. There is a community assumption that we can talk to one another freely and that it is right to exchange knowledge about what is happening in the world. Those assumptions are embodied in good jurisprudence.

What we see coming out of the U.S. First Amendment is that Congress shall make no law in relating to restriction of freedom of speech or press. It doesn’t say Congress should make a law to protect the press. It takes the function of political debate and exchange of ideas outside the legislature. There’s a very good reason for that. It was the Federalist papers and the swapping of information that led to the U.S. Constitution and in an ongoing sense to the social structure that creates laws and legislation. It is the communication of information that regulates politics and the legislature, the judiciary and the behavior of the police. It’s quite important to have the default assumption that the free exchange of information should not be regulated except in specific and clear circumstances.

But doesn’t a soldier reporting from the ground in Afghanistan have to feel he is typing up a confidential report? How do you square that? Why is he an exception?
A soldier may not have the right to do that. It depends on whether he is engaged in legitimate action. Just because there’s a soldier somewhere doesn’t mean his action is legitimate. We have seen an increasing number of dissidents in the U.S. military during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a divisive issue within the U.S. government and within the people on the ground who are seeing firsthand what is happening. Do those people have the right to express their dissent? We can say maybe or maybe not. Maybe they personally do not have the right … The First Amendment is clear that publishers do have the right to tell the people what is going on.

Watch TIME’s video “Julian Assange Reviews TIME’s Top 10 Leaks.”

See “Does Disputed NATO Attack in Afghanistan Underscore WikiLeaks Report?”

In preparation of the WikiLeaks video posting of a fatal U.S. helicopter attack, you worked in a so-called bunker in Iceland. How was your prep work done this time?
We had a bunker in the Guardian offices where we — [including] Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel reporters — were. It wasn’t quite as aesthetically pleasing as the one in Iceland, but we did get a lot of work done.

There have been reports about your evasive measures, with regard to surveillance. Can you describe those?
We have ongoing security concerns in relation to surveillance. The U.K. is quite an aggressive surveillance state, but it is also liberal — while it likes to surveil people, it doesn’t tend to arrest them. We can’t describe our security procedures in relation to surveillance for obvious reasons, but there has been a step-up in surveillance activities against us in the past two months.

Can you describe those?
Not yet, because that would reveal which ones we have seen and which we have not. But we have noticed many concrete things, not just suspicions.

Have you been tailed, for example?
Yes.

Any idea by whom?
We have some ideas.

Can you be more specific?
We assume that sort of thing goes on because we have had proof of that since at least early 1998. We just assume that that happens as part of our work: that we are tailed by private investigators working for big banks or cults we have offended and by state intelligence organizations.

Some commentators have described you as anarchic.
Which commentators?

The Daily Mail.
You have to be careful. The Daily Mail is a London tabloid.

So you believe in government, just open government?
There cannot be good governance without good information given to good people. It’s impossible in a democracy. Physicists [Assange was trained at the University of Melbourne in physics] look at extreme circumstances to understand a situation. The extreme situation of ignorance would be if everyone were deaf, dumb and blind tomorrow. [Nobody could] communicate. Every form of society would collapse in an instant — democracies, monarchies and dictatorships alike. But if we look in the other direction and ask what if we maximize the reliable, verified information about how the world is working, then we start to produce more sophisticated and intelligent structures that respond to the abuses in societies and also the opportunities there may be in society.

(See the top 10 scandals of 2009.)

How did you get into this work?
It’s a combination of personal temperament and specific skills and opportunity. My personal temperament is that I like protecting victims and I like to engage in intellectual combat. In terms of personal skills, early on I became interested in cryptography: I became a cryptographic engineer, and I became involved in free speech. I set up one of the first free-speech ISPs [Internet service providers] in Australia. That combination of skills has proved coincidentally extremely effective in what WikiLeaks does in terms of protecting people, using encryption technology and being engaged in political and policy debate and producing information that will push reforms.

Any idea how that personal temperament developed?
In the East Coast of the U.S., there’s a desire to perceive everything as coming from the childhood — probably due to the popularity of Freudian psychology. I don’t see things that way. Personal temperament is genetic. It’s there from when you are a child because it’s your shuffle of genes — maybe environment draws it out a bit — but I’m just an amalgam of the genes of my parents.

Do you feel that no one’s security will be threatened by the publication of this material?
We feel confident. The material is seven months old; we reviewed it extensively. We held back 15,000 documents that we felt needed further review because the type of classifications they had. We’ve been publishing for four years a range of material that has caused the changing of constitutions and the removal of governments, but there’s never been a case that we are aware of that has resulted in the personal injury of anyone.

Removal of governments?
The Kenyan government. The suspension of the Prime Minister of Tanzania.

Tanzania?
We published a corruption report.

The Daily Mail said you would have made public information about the D-Day invasion if it had fallen into your hands. Is that true?
That’s just nonsense. We have a standardized policy of “harm minimization.” I believe we are the only media organization that has a [clearly stated] public policy about the materials that we will accept. If we take a case on, then we do it. We don’t do things ad hoc. We communicate entirely the material our whistle-blowers give us to the public. We may go through a harm-minimization process that delays publication while people are notified. In the example of Operation Overlord [World War II’s D-Day], we would have delayed and notified the authorities.

What is to come from the 15,000 documents that you plan to release later?
Some may be more explosive. They are intelligence reports, so [they] come from a little higher level. A lot comes from informers, so they are hard to read sometimes, or they are trying to rat out a family enemy. War causes people to inform on one another — it’s the corrupting influence of war. A family informs on its enemy, the U.S. kicks down the door the next day, and there may be shooting because of the raids. That sort of material may be in there.

Is it true you travel only with a computer, backpack and change of socks?
No, we have a lot of gear. We put together a strong journalistic team to study this material, but there are 90,000 reports. Our groups — the New York Times, Der Spiegel, the Guardian and WikiLeaks — covered about 2,000 reports in detail. The vast majority of this material is going to require soldiers who were there to have a look at it. It’s going to require Afghan refugees to take a look at it. It’s going to require computer programmers and statisticians to take a look at it. We call on the general public to come forward and go to wardiaries.wikileaks.org and tell the local press what you see and tell your local friends what you see.

Read “WikiLeaks Founder: I Don’t Know Source of Afghan Leak.”

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.