Great Throughts Treasury

"The supply of leaks is very large. It's helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It's protective to us."

"The west has fiscalized its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be free because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction."

"The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization. These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there. While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy."

"The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them."

"The West through its own corruption supports and extends corruption in developing countries."

"There is globalization occurring that is leading to interaction -fast interaction- between states and legal jurisdictions that was previously slow and non-existent. That pressure is driving the tendency to harmonization of legal regimes."

"There can be no useful reportage unless the journalist has a fresh source."

"There is a view that one should never be permitted to be criticized for being even possibly in the future engaged in a contributory act that might be immoral, and that that type of arse-covering is more important than actually saving people's lives. That it is better to let a thousand people die than risk going to save them and possibly running over someone on the way. And that is something that I find to be philosophically repugnant."

"These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them."

"There's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legistation around the world -within the EU, between China and the United States. Which way is it gonna go? It's hard to see. That's why it's an interesting time to be in because with a just little bit of effort we can shift it one way or the other."

"These megaleaks... They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase."

"This is not justice; never could this be justice, the verdict was ordained long ago. Its function is not to determine questions such as guilt or innocence, or truth or falsehood. It is a public relations exercise, designed to provide the government with an alibi for posterity. It is a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience."

"To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information. There?s the famous lemon example in the used car market. It?s hard for buyers to tell lemons from good cars, and sellers can?t get a good price, even when they have a good car. By making it easier to see where the problems are inside of companies, we identify the lemons. That means there?s a better market for good companies. For a market to be free, people have to know who they?re dealing with."

"True intellectual heritage can't be bound up in intellectual property."

"True information does good."

"Two dangerous runaway processes have taken root in the last decade, with fatal consequences for democracy. Government secrecy has been expanding on a terrific scale. Simultaneously, human privacy has been secretly eradicated."

"Vanity in a newspaper man is like perfume on a whore: they use it to fend off a dark whiff of themselves."

"We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards."

"We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod ... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit."

"We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us. But we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up."

"We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it - which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks."

"We got hold of NATO's master narrative for Afghanistan. Now this is something that may come as a surprise to you that NATO even has a master narrative?"

"We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal - personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets - you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret. But we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well-motivated."

"We deal with organizations that do not obey the rule of law. So laws don?t matter. Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior."

"We have protected people through technical processes, through legal processes, and most importantly through public sanction against attack."

"We have, in the process, become the publisher of last resort."

"We in the West have deluded ourselves into believing that we actually have a truly free press. We don't. And we can see that in the difference between what Wikileaks does and what the rest of the press does."

"We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage."

"We have values. I am an information activist. You get the information out to the people. We believe a richer intellectual and historical record that is fuller and more accurate is in itself intrinsically good, and gives people the tools to make intelligent decisions."

"We know for sure that one big media company in the US had the 'Collateral Murder' video for years and did not release it."

"We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter."

"We wanted to make the news, not be the news. But that produced extraordinary curiosity as to who we were? this attempt not to be the news, made us the news."

"We like to engage in a normal publishing effort, which is to act in a responsible manner and make sure the material is not likely to harm anyone, that it is properly investigated by quality news organizations, and by lawyers and human rights groups and so on."

"Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States."

"Well, there's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform. And there's a lot of information. So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good."

"We're the canary in the coal mine because we take the hardest publishing cases."

"What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I'm a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he's Man of the Year."

"What I have seen over the past two years of the way of being leaking and disclosing documents to the public en masse is very different to what I saw as a journalist before."

"What does Censorship reveal? It Reveals Fear."

"What is to be done? The answer is easy. It has always been easy. Stop saying "not in my name" and start saying "over my dead body". That's what we did. It works. Do it."

"What happens in the West is that there is no border between state interest and commercial interest. The edges of the state, as a result of privatization, are fuzzed and blurred out into the edges of companies. So, when you look at how The Guardian behaves, or how The New York Times behaves, it is part of that mesh of corporate and state interests seamlessly blurring into each other."

"What we know is everything, it is our limit, of what we can be."

"When countries and organizations fight to suppress things you know you have a foot in the door, you know you have a chance for reform. In other countries where information seems to be free maybe actually the basic structures are so locked up that it's going to be hard to make an effect."

"What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes."

"When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like."

"Where they couldn't pick holes in our arguments they would drive horses and carriages through my character."

"Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform."

"Which country is suffering from too much freedom of speech? Name it, is there one?"

"WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical."

"WikiLeaks will not comply with legally abusive requests from Scientology any more than WikiLeaks has complied with similar demands from Swiss banks, Russian offshore stem-cell centers, former African kleptocrats, or the Pentagon."