Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Harry Halpin & John Shipton: What Julian Assange Represents to the Crypto Movement

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Julian Assange, the creator of WikiLeaks, is currently in a maximum-security prison in London facing extradition to the US for violating the Espionage Act. This charge came, among other things, from exposing US war crimes in Iraq. This has put journalists around the world under fear of being prosecuted for exposing the truth. Opinions on Julian Assange are divided, unsurprisingly. But we can assume that a conviction would set a dangerous precedent for journalism, free press, and freedom of speech. John Shipton, Julian's father, is seeking support from the crypto community to help fund Julian's legal defense. Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym Technologies and friend of Julian's, teams up with John to discuss how a conviction could jeopardize the values of censorship resistance, permissionless innovation, and privacy.Topics covered in this episode:John and Harry's backgrounds and their connection to Julian AssangeThe extradition case against JulianHow the outcome of the orders could impact the Ethereum communityThe negative effects of WikiLeaksMaking changes to journalism and legacy mediaThe effects of Social MediaHow this case could open the gates for more prosecutions within the crypto/technology communityContributing to Julian's legal fundEpisode links: Nym TechnologiesState and Terrorist Conspiracies & Conspiracy as Governance, Julian AssangeWikiLeaks on WikipediaCourage FoundationHarry Halpin TwitterNym Technologies TwitterSponsors: ShapeShift: ShapeShift is the leading crypto platform offering zero-commission trading - https://shapeshift.com/This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/339

This is Epicenter, Episode 339 with guests, Harry Halpin and John Shepton. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Gujarum. Today, my guests are Harry Halpin and John Shepton. Harry is the CEO of NIM technologies. They're building privacy infrastructure that's decentralized, permissionless, and incentivized, and it allows developers to build privacy preserving applications that protect people's data, but also the metadata. And John Shepton is Julian Assange. father. Now, you might be wondering why John Shepton is going to crypto conferences, while he regularly attends crypto conferences, hacker conferences, and alike, to build a base of support for the legal defense fund that is fighting the extradition of Julian Assange to the U.S.

So, as you know, Julian Assange was in the Ecuadorian embassy for the last seven or eight years, and about a year ago was arrested in London and is now in a maximum security prison facing extradition to the U.S. And one of the organizations that is leading this funding campaign is the Courage Foundation. They are also defending other people who have been accused of various computer crimes, hacking, leaking of information, people like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown. And opinions about Assange are divided.

I recognize that. But I think there's one thing we can all agree on. And that is that if he is convicted of violating the Espionage Act, as is the case that's brought on against him by the U.S., this sets a really dangerous precedent for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. You know, one of the things which brought WikiLeaks a lot of attention is the fact that they exposed war crimes committed by the U.S. in Iraq. I think we can all agree that a world in which journalists are under constant fear of prosecution for exposing. this kind of information is undesirable. And, you know, it's also important to recognize that WikiLeaks and crypto have the same roots, the cyphorpunk movement.

You know, we talked about it in the interview. Julian was in the cyphor punk mailing list early on and perhaps even had exchanges with Satoshi. And I think, you know, the crypto community really needs to step up here and support, you know, these fundamental rights of free speech. because it could be your project next. Harry mentions it at the end of the conversation and says, you know, it could be your project.

If you're building something that the U.S. government, for example, deems to be a threat, well, you could be facing prosecution for violating the Expionage Act too. And you could be facing extradition to the U.S. no matter where you are in the world. You know, they have very broad reach, as we've seen here. So I think this is a really relevant conversation for people that are in crypto and for the types of technologies that we're trying to build. So yeah, this was really fun conversation, really unique, very different from what we usually do.

It was great to sit down with Harry and John. And we're going to have Harry on at some point to talk about NIM and everything that they're building. He was speaking at reset everything on the privacy panel. And yeah, I think we really align on a lot of things here. So I'd love to have him on the podcast as well. Before we go to the conversation, I've got a favorite ask you. Whatever you're doing right now, whenever you have a minute, I'd like you to leave us. an Apple podcast review. Apple podcast reviews are the fuel that power SEO rankings for podcasts. So when we have a steady flow of reviews coming in, when people search for crypto podcast or blockchain podcast on Apple podcasts, well, we'll show up. We'll show up higher in the rankings, which means we get to reach more people, we get to have more of an impact, and we get to attract sponsors, which helps us keep the show running. And I just love to read them. Like, I actually have a Slack

notification whenever we get a new review and it shows up on my Slack and I'm always excited when I read these reviews because I know that someone spent the time to show their love for Epicenter. That's the favor of that I'm asking. If you want, just go to epicenter.com slash Apple that will take you straight to our page in Apple podcast or if you have the app already, you can just go straight in there and it would really help us out a lot and I really appreciate it. And as a gift, if you want one, I'll give you a discount code for a free keep you hardware wallet. All you got to do is just email me, Sebastian at epicenter.tv, subject line keep key and just say like, hey, I love for your review. Can I get a keep key? I'll send you a discount

code. So yeah, thanks a lot in advance. And now here's our conversation with Harry Halpin and John Shepton. I'm here with Harry Halpin, who's the CEO of NIM technologies. I must admit, I don't know that much about NIM yet, but I'm looking forward to learning more about it so that we can do a proper long-form conversation, but you're working on privacy-preserving technologies. It's like a next-generation tour, which is the same technology that kind of gave birth to, for example, hidden services like WikiLeaks. Cool. And also, John Shepton, who is Julian Sonsis' father.

I'm here to conjure up substantial help and enthusiasm for Julianne's fight against extradition to the United States. Well, I think there's a lot to talk about here in this episode. I'd like to first get some background on why you're here at an Ethereum conference. And I think it would make sense because Julian Assange is obviously very well known. Everybody knows his name. Everybody knows at least sort of his trajectory. But I think for context, it would help to sort of understand what,

got him to where he is today and what brought you here to this Ethereum conference. So give us a bit background on this story. Okay. Just to start from the end, Julian is a part of the crypto movement or community from the beginning, being very much involved in blockchain. Christmas before last, he was playing successfully Crypto Kitties and has a strong enthusiasm for smart contracts as further to that

my involvement comes because Julian is locked up and can't speak for himself so I wander around trying to assemble support of a financial nature a political nature and a communal nature.

So I've been to Oslo, Berlin, Spain, France a few times, Strasbourg, Brussels, and London building a coalition of support, which I hope the supporting community of Ethereum can reach out to Julian and assist. And what is it about the Ethereum community that, why the Ethereum community, or is it one of many communities that you're sort of seeking support from, or are you seeking support also from other non-crypto communities? Well, every community, but to answer your question in particular, the Ethereum community has a notion of public goods,

which Vitale spoke of today. So it's a community, a foundation. Also, it seems to be contemporary communal effort to establish a means of communication, a means of contract and a means of developing capital in a more communal and a better spread on the base. So if there's preventative measures within the community to prevent the accumulation of singularly large, amounts of capital, we call a plutocracy, and divert the course of Ethereum. There's preventative measures within the community and within the structure of Ethereum, which make it very, very attractive to me and to Julian and other supporters. Yeah, so I think one of the most important

things to realize about Julianne, and I consider myself as friend, is that effectively Julian's project for WikiLeaks was to large extent had a heavy intellectual basis. He has a paper, which is very rarely read, called State and Terrorist Conspiracies, where he's looking at the U.S. government programs to map the social networks of political radicals, people that they considered undesirable. And he said, actually, the real problem is corrupt governments, plutocracy, the centralization power. And he said, and they also form a network. They have a powerful network that then asymmetrically hurts people who are weaker and not as well connected into their elite network.

So in his paper, he says, couldn't we imagine a case where we, the reason why this elite power has so much power is because they control the flow of information and they keep it secret between themselves, what, for example, trade deals are going on, or war crimes. And so Julian theorized, and this is before WikiLease, he said, if we could somehow overload this network with excess information and prevent them from being so much in control because they themselves could no longer maintain their own secrets, then these centralized corrupt powers would become paranoid about each other. It would be no longer capable of community. communicating in secret. And at the end of the paper, he says, I'll explain more in part two. And then he

doesn't actually finish the paper, but he creates WikiLeaks. And I think, DDoSing the system. It's essentially a DDoS of the global centralized elite. And it's a very political act. And at the same point, I think it's very bright. People often don't understand how intelligent that move was. And he was trying to kind of flip the tables because, for example, many people would be paranoid, you know, talking to Julian, hang out Julian's father in an Ethereum conference, paranoid about donating to WikiLeaks. Even Nakamoto was a little bit paranoid. But the fact that matter is he said the real goal, our goal should be, is to make those who are in power who are enforcing corrupt economic structures, they should be paranoid. And that was the goal to some extent,

WikiLeaks. And we can make them paranoid not by doing propaganda, but by just showing the truth of their actions in the world through journalism and releasing sources that they would otherwise, them and their crony corrupt journalists would never reveal otherwise. You mentioned Satoshi. Does Satoshi ever written about WikiLeaks? Did he ever talk about that? Satoshi was a little nervous. So if you remember correctly what happened, the payment processor of WikiLeaks was actually

under financial blockade, PayPal, Visa, everyone had shut them off. You can no longer donate to WikiLeaks. And of course, at the same time, over in the Cypher of Punk's mailing list, Hal Finney and a bunch in Nakamoto and all these people were working on a decentralized censorship-resistant cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. And when the blockade took place, Bitcoin, I think, was the lifeblood of donations to WikiLeaks And Nakamoto himself, I believe, was supportive. But if I remember the email correctly, he was nervous because he was afraid that Bitcoin became too well known too quickly.

Its various enemies in the banking system and whatnot, the governments would try to shut it down. Nonetheless, it was, I think, maybe the first time Bitcoin really got out of the cypherpunk mailing list into mainstream news. Okay. Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. that sort of connection with Nakamoto and Wikileaks. They're all in the same mailing list as well, I might add. So I actually should troll through and see if they had some direct communication. You never know. So let's talk a little bit.

Let's bring it back somewhat and talk about your son. And for our listeners, just let's explain so the case that's being brought on against him. The United States has brought an extradition case against Julian from the United Kingdom to the United States. and try him there for 17 cases of espionage and one case of illegal use of a computer. That would accumulate to about 175 years. So now we're in the 10th year of the persecution of Julian Assange. It started off 10 days in Wandsworth Prison, arbitrarily detained,

then 18 months in Norwich under house arrest, arbitrarily detained. Seven and a half years in the embassy of Ecuador as an assailee, arbitrarily detained again. And now in the latest thing, 10 months in Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison, nine months of that at 22 hours a day solitary confinement. So it's an escalating intensity of persecution of Julian for simply publishing. news really, just truthful news leaked by Chelsea Manning and other people.

Are you in contact with him at the moment? Yes, I see Julian Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. I was there last Saturday and Sunday. So you're able to see him? Yes, that's the means of... Regardless of the maximum security prison and the solitary confinement. Oh, no, the maximum security prison procedures. We all must go through and we...

We all must be x-rayed, go through four separating portals and the sniffer dogs and all assemble in a room with high fidelity sound and high-definition cameras about 13, 1 every 3 metres. We sit with about 80 other prisoners who have visitors and the maximum of three adults per prisoners. So it's pretty crowded, noisy room. You can't, because of the high-definition cameras, you really can't, you have to hold your hands over your mouth so that the, you know, dull and muffled the sound a bit and stop lip reading. That surveillance of Julian has now, there's pictures of Julian consulting, audio and visual of Julian consulting, Julian consulting with his lawyers. So the intensity of surveillance went as far. as having listening devices in the ladies' toilet because at one stage they use the lady's toilet

as a private meeting room to discuss things with the lawyers. The intensity, it had an increasing trajectory which the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, describes as psychological torture and writes a report to that extent. So that's the situation presently. So I wanted to ask you, so you described the charges that are brought against your son, also the years of confinement. Do you think that what he did was right?

Oh, absolutely. You know, just to give you just one example of many, many hundreds, the cables released from the Iraq War, had within it a cable which describes the murder of an entire family, seven people altogether, children and parents and grandparents, seven of them murdered in their house. Now, that cable caused the rewriting of the status of forces agreement between the United States. Well, it's actually the cancellation of the status of forces agreement between the United States and Iraq, and consequently, United States forces remove themselves from Iraq,

only to come back under the auspices of fighting against ISIS and al-Qaeda. So that's one. The second thing is that the charges against Julian of espionage around the release of these Chelsea Manning's leaks, an oppression of journalism and a limitation of comment. It's so intense that there's about 100 lawyers working on Julian's case. About 100,000 of us, people like me, worldwide, working to ensure that Julian's freed. There's a cost of, I imagine, I don't know this for sure, but counting it up,

about $10 million over three years. This oppression and intimidation of publishers, publications and journalists mean that no other publisher in the West or publication in the West or journalist in the West will take upon itself this enormous burden of worldwide oppression, a global problem of a global problem

of enormous size that no longer will anybody be in a position. This is important for the Ethereum community. If the United States decides that it doesn't like Ethereum, it can issue an extradition order against the leaders of Ethereum and kidnap them, judicially kidnapped. And it has done so with the Hawaii Cesarian. the Omenguenzu from Canada in the United States. It has done so with Ola Bin in Ecuador,

who's an IT whiz. It has also done so with Mike Lynch, who's again another IT billionaire in the UK that they've issued an extradition order. So in two parallel lines, it covers technology that the United States wants or wants repressed and comment

that it doesn't want or wants repressed. The free association of us to talk easily amongst each other and discuss facts in order to come up with a solution to our daily lives or whether we support this government or that government action is completely suppressed. I'd like to add a little story. So I did my PhD in artificial intelligence, and as a consequence of that, and this is, you know, 10 years ago more, I became very worried about surveillance. And so I went to this event called Chaos Computer Congress, which at that time was in Berlin,

in order to learn more about what was actually, you know, I was going to academic conferences and publishing academic journals, but I really wanted to know what was going on on the ground with like the hackers and cypherpunks and consider them part of my larger community. And at that conference, Julian was... there with other WikiLeaks volunteers and gave this like wonderful talk about WikiLeaks. And I was, to be honest, very impressed. That being said, when a WikiLeaks volunteer approached me and he said, oh, we're looking for more volunteers. Do you want to join? I said, no way. He said, I said, everyone in WikiLeaks are all, the U.S. is going to try to send you all to jail.

And at the time, I was actually having my own grand jury court case. So I knew a lot about a lot about that time. and then the WikiLeaks volunteer, he said, but we're not dissidents. We make tools for dissidents. And I said, I don't think the FBI will be able to tell the difference. And unfortunately, it's true. And what we saw over and over the course of years is that rather than focus on the substantial crimes, which were revealed by WikiLeaks, including the stockpilings of of zero days, which has since been weaponized.

They're very dangerous released in the Vault 7, which I think is the most important of the WikiLeaks release is the one which has really put Julian's head on the chopping block because there's no way the CIA would let someone who released a bunch of information about their ability to hack other countries and dissidents' phones and the public survive. The public good that Julian did for the world, regardless of what you think about the details, I think does not justify under any circumstances. extradition and torture and sets a terrible, terrible precedent for any kind of journalism

and also not as journalism, but technology, because that's what WikiLeaks really was a combination and is a combination of Tor, hidden services, the anonymized whistleblowers and sources, which journalists should do, but historically are very bad at doing, with a very sophisticated journalism operation. And by shouldn't think destroy that, you know, the extradition process is trying to destroy the future of not only journalism, but any technology, which they believe is a threat to the current reigning order. And this will definitely include cryptocurrency technology if it actually become successful. Anything which is decentralized, self-sovereign, censorship resistance, and enables transparency for the powerful and privacy for the weak. These are the exact kinds of

tools which will be under increased threat if Assange is extradited. It's interesting how in a lot of people's minds in the crypto space, the threat, sort of legal and regulatory threat comes mostly, I think, from things like financial crime, securities law, this sort of thing. I mean, this is what most people come on our show to talk about, for instance, when it has anything to do with some of the regulatory threats to crypto. And what you're seeing here is that the real threat to the crypto space, sort of people that work in the space, is, the ability for for crypto to become sort of this weapon against the state. And in the end, you know, when it comes to financial crimes, you know, people, you know, they can go after sort of the teams that are building, say, like doing illegal ICOs or this sort of thing. But when it comes to information, the potential repercussions of, say, wiki leech or something

like that is far, far, far more detrimental to, to a state power than, say, like, you know, a couple of investors getting defrauded or something like that. Do you get a sense that in the crypto space, people sort of grasp the gravity of this very notion that the crypto can be used as a tool against depression and a tool to contracept sort of the powers that you're talking about? Well, for myself, I like decentralized systems, and they're very attractive and give the capacity to independently act in your own interests and your family's interests. and the interests of your friends in a combination that in combination increases their power and decreases the power of those who wish to utilize our energies for their own ends, institutions that wish to do that.

So I find it very, very attractive. You might remember just a couple of days ago, the Taliban in Doha signed a peace agreement with the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, representing the United States. And this is very big. This is a victory of the Taliban over an invader of their country and the destruction of their country. It's about 10 years ago that the Afghan war files were released

and allowed us to penetrate and allowed us to penetrate and allowed that penetration to permeate through our societies as commentary opposed to the commentary that governments wanted to hear from, wanted us to hear. It is brought about the end of the Afghan war. So it's very slow to turn things around of that gigantic nature, you know. So 10 years is a tremendous moment. in the distribution of information across the internet

whereby all of us can participate simply just having a keyboard and knowing how to use a search engine. It's just simply fantastic. I want to ask you about sort of the information landscape and how it's changed since WikiLeaks came into the world. I think you can probably talk to the, you know, from your perspective, the positive aspects

of WikiLeaks? But have you thought of some of the negative aspects of WikiLeaks and how with regards to the changes to the information landscape? What are some of the positive and negative things that WikiLeaks has brought onto the world? Well, I can't see myself any negative aspects but technologically

I do see that the Red Queen's revenge exists and any advancing technology will have a repercussion. I don't know how intellectually you want to get today, but so I believe that Martin Heidegger's analysis is correct that technology has brought about a sort of pathocracy whereby we find

natural things that we relate to each other through have been fallen into disuse So it's really hard to recognize what is human and what is deeply human. For the most of my day is spent mediated contact. I use the telephone message services and all of that. Everything is mediated. The only thing that is unmediated in a very busy day is when you sit down in the evening and have dinner with a friend that's an unmediated.

But the phone still interrupts. demands that you have a mediated guest at dinner, even though they're not there. So the Red Queen's revenge has to be, well, we must take it into account and develop and continue developing means whereby we relate to each other face to face. And I'd like to make a quick point, which is towards the end of his life, Heidegger, German philosopher who was definitely at some point Nazi, but had an interesting analysis of what would happening in contemporary world. He said the contemporary world is sort of becoming fascist, but in a new way, wherein so it's becoming a giant system of control managed by cybernetics, by to some extent

feedback between humans and technology. And the goal of cybernetics is to maintain systems in what's called a steady state, homeostasis, not chaos, not moving too rapidly, jumping up and down, black swan style, but really a society which can be easily predicted. And I honestly think that from my memories of Julian, that he was more of what I would, I think he himself considered a almost kind of 19th century enlightenment kind of person where he believed a lot in individual freedom, individual agency, and the individual capacity to reason. And that, you know, the whole vision to some extent of WikiLeaks was that data would be published and they would be editing on it, sort of Wikipedia, and that from the sort of

crowd of individuals, a collective intelligence would emerge, which would sort out the truth from the fall. So that second part of WikiLeaks, unfortunately, was never as fully developed as I think Julian wanted it to be due to all of the repression that he encountered. attempts to do a sort of more decentralized WikiLeaks haven't really solved any of these problems. But I think it's pretty clear that it is definitely possible. You know, releasing information can have negative side effects. It can hurt people.

That's probably true. You know, if I'm doxed or if I have revenge porn, there's, you know, and governments, just as they monopolize propaganda with radios and televisions, as we all know from. you know, World War II are now doing the same on the internet. Not surprising. But what I think is important to remember about both what WikiLeaks did historically, and I think the philosophy that motivated it was inherently a nonviolent philosophy that was working very hard to reduce, if not end any possible, you know, I mean, Julian definitely redacted lots of files and worked very hard to redact files. But it wasn't just about the redactions. It was that the larger issues which is that if you have war, if you have secret governments that can arbitrarily kill or declare who can live, who's a citizen, who's not, and this sort of what a gobman call it kind of zone of legal indistinction, which is exactly where Julian is trapped now, if you have this kind of world, it's a very violent world. And the only way towards a nonviolent world, a world where there people exist in a cooperative, decentralized, peaceful fashion, based on mutual.

exchange would be to basically build a sort of way out of this world through spreading knowledge and spreading information and spreading technologies which enhance human freedom rather than enslave it. And I honestly think that that vision is, even though there are all sorts of particular instances which one can argue about, I think that vision itself is the same vision that motivates particularly a lot of, I would say, the libertarian influence on Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also the same vision that is behind smart contracts and much of the same vision, which is behind cryptocurrency as a whole. There is a sort of not particularly well articulated political and, I would say, exceedingly nonviolent vision behind these technologies.

I definitely agree that Bitcoin isn't in itself political. Ethereum is political. At least it has political motivations that are, as you said, they're not quite explicitly. or well. They're in email archives. They're in the results of the code in the world. They're not a big manifest.

There's not a manifest. I mean, you know, perhaps there are some manifest out there. But I don't know that most of the people, you know, attending these conferences, certainly not here, you know, really on a daily basis, think of how politically motivated

the vision of Ethereum is or the vision of Bitcoin is. Do you think it's important for, you know, the Ethereum community to sort of uphold that vision? Or do you think that, turns it into something that can be seen as detrimental by states, by, you know, the media. Because oftentimes what happens is, you know, the media will pick this up and try to vilify it.

Oh, yeah, they'll say, oh, everyone's a bunch of scammers. It's just penny stocks. You put your money and it will just disappear. Why don't you trust your local bank? Why don't you trust us? That being said, of course, like there will be as Ethereum, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and not just cryptocurrencies, but the entire sort of cypherpunk vision of privacy for the weak, but transparency for the powerful. As more technology has come into being, which lets that be a

possibility, there will, without any doubt, be more repression, both physical and violent repression by the state apparatus and, you know, propaganda, mental repression, stories against this kind of technology. There's no doubt that that will become more and more virulent as the traditional kind of state and banking infrastructure starts, I would say, probably declining as we're seeing now and we'll probably only get worse. That being said, it's important to say that it's important to work on these technologies regardless and stay true to their fundamental vision and what, at least in that vision, resounds true within oneself. But how do you do that, though? I mean, concretely, there are people here who are aligned with that vision and,

and build things for that vision. But there are people here also building businesses and seeing opportunities. And the vision for them is, you know, it's there. Maybe they recognize it. Maybe they're not even aware of it. How do you reconcile those two things? No, I don't think these things are not necessarily incompatible

if you do it correctly. So one of the things that Julian said, you know, I had this point in my life where I could have gone working for Silicon Valley. I could have become a professor and just kind of relaxed and taught working class kids how to code. But instead, Julian said, well, look, he says, you know, I would be happy to be a professor and hang out and teach quantum physics in Australia. He was very good at that. He could have done that in another universe. But he said it's important to do something that really changes the world.

And I, that's what, you know, that's why he did what he did. And that's also, you know, I felt it's one of the reasons when I was finishing up my own academic research, I decided. that we should actually try to commercialize privacy enhancing technologies, another kind of cyphorpunk technology called MixNet, which hides who's talking to who, disguises metadata. I felt that rather than just hang out and write papers about it or try to do a get-rich quick scheme or join Silicon Valley, it made sense to really focus down and produce code because what the world needs more maybe than manifesto right now is it just needs working code

that can actually solve concrete problems. And privacy is a huge problem. transparency in journalism is a huge problem. And if you solve these problems, it's actually, I think, better, if I were going to critique WikiLeaks in one way, I would say it'd probably be better almost do it as a business than a nonprofit. You know, the amount of repression must be very financially damaging to everyone involved. And I can say, you know, Tor and a lot of technologies were very important for WikiLeaks.

They were, ironically enough, built on U.S. government grants to fund privacy. so the CIA agent in China can phone home or the CIA as known input, can do a Google search. It ends up being really useful for amazing stuff and general purpose stuff. And that's wonderful. And that's what gave birth to a lot of the technologies we see today around. But that being said, if you can create world-changing technology, which is financially sustainable, either is a business or a nonprofit,

or is just ideally even better at Dow, some Codas Law thing. But I think you'll have a better chance of surviving reports. and a better chance of accomplishing your vision. Just on Wikileaks, Wikileaks is a wiki, it's a collaborative effort. And so to be clear about it, when the cables were being released progressively by Wikileaks, there were 92 to 96 other publishers and publications. involved in the analysis. That is exactly a wiki, and all of their efforts would be feathered together, and the WikiLeaks would publish the cable and the analysis that accompanied it

so that you could refer back to the cables if you felt that the analysis required more thought, or if you want to confirm the analysis. A perfect system. It is the vision. Similarly, Ethereum, not looking for a vision, Ethereum and its community and the foundations are the vision, and it's very, very enticing in my view. Well, maybe I'll bring it back like smart contracts.

One of the things about Ethereum that people like is they can see the code, Bitcoin for financial transactions, You can read the transactions, the UTXO set. And this is an old open source principle, or better yet, free software principle, where when you publish software code of any type, you can see the code. You can change code. You can alter code. You can make it do what you want. You can exercise your freedom.

And I honestly think the vision of WikiLeaks as a collaborative platform, which is real today as well, and should be adopted by more and more journalists. organizations is that if you're publishing a story, you should publish the data behind the story. Because often your interpretation may not be the correct one. Other people may have other parts of that story. And like Wikipedia's collective intelligence, you can bring those stories together and get a more complete and true vision of the world. And this belief in truth is something that I think people, and this desire for truth is something that people need today. this is an interesting concept. So how would you structure that in a way?

Because I mean, most of the sort of data that goes into writing of stories, a piece on the New York Times, for instance, all that reporting, qualitative data. It's not quantitative data. It's not easily, you know, you can't put it in a spreadsheet. Maybe you can do sort of, you're the AI expert. Maybe you can do some kind of natural language processing stuff on there to extract things like sentiment or intention or this sort of thing. But how does one structure that and how does one make that into a viable system that people who are meant to interpret this information can do it accurately in ways that actually sort of convey the meaning of the data behind a story or a news report or publication?

So, I mean, to be honest, we did consider at various points running artificial intelligence, techniques, natural language processing over the cables because there was this belief that was very strong. by Julian that there were probably many stories in the cables, which the journalist and human volunteers, there's just too much data. So why don't we, could we find things that people glossed over and certain stories would be really big in India or Holland and would not be even noticed by the kind of American filter bubble or the British filter bubble? And there's a lot of room for a lot of innovation in that space. I don't think there's a clear and easy answer, but that being said, let's be very honest about things. The mainstream media has been spreading lies, which, you know,

WikiLeaks and journalists who are working with them help correct about things like, you know, the Iraq war and weapons of mass destruction. So I know, for example, that my parents and where I'm from everyone near me voted for Trump. And it's a very interesting reason why they voted for Trump. And I think that they said, well, Trump was the only candidate that came out against the Iraq war and that they had lost a tremendous faith in mainstream journalism because the mainstream journalists had been publishing lies and that most people I know are actually very for the existence of something like WikiLeaks because it could restore trust in journalism

if you had access to the sources and the data and even better yet if that was on a blockchain. The legacy media is at a fantastic disadvantage. First of all, it can, has limited resources, a limited reach. It only has a couple of arms. Whereas publications like Wikileaks can inquire in many, many different directions simultaneously. In that sense, legacy media is primitive. The next sense is that with certain IT techniques, you can constantly refer one fact to another, as you know, one fact,

has another fact on either side. So you can refer and research and create statistics, which will give you an insight into the spread and allow you to... Well, a good example of this is that when WikiLeaks published the order list, logistics lists for Afghanistan, you were able to see how many desks they were.

So you could search a vast, array of papers really quickly and see how many desks they were ordered or how many computers they would. Then you could compare that to the statements that politicians and generals were making that they were winding down when in fact they were buying 2,000 more desks and 400 computers and 500 trucks and so on. So the primitive aspect of legacy media cannot compete with a a site with an organization like WikiLeaks which utilizes the fantastic power of the engineering that lies behind the internet. The most solid aspect of our conversation is that legacy media is technologically primitive and the organisms within the those organizations, that is the people, are shaped by those organizations.

They have quite a technologically primitive relationship with the pace of unfolding events. Whereas WikiLeaks and, say for example, if you combine WikiLeaks and Ethereum, not combine the two organizations, but combine the institutions, but combine the internet, insights of those organizations. Wikileaks has spread, many different arms, access to instantaneous research, can manipulate its statistics, find out whether information is true, publish all those statistics for others to review,

and then an organization, sorry, the foundation of Ethereum, can feel the minute-to-minute pulse of its take-up, and the minute, sorry, the nano- second to nanosecond pulse. The block time pulse. Sorry, I'm of the legacy media, you know, so I think in minutes, it's ridiculous. I think I agree with you on the point that legacy media is very much lagging behind.

But on the other side of that, if you take sort of the opposite side of that, social media platforms are highly technological. And, you know, one must look not very far to see the sort of damage that that has done. to spreading truthful information, and that's getting worse, I think, by all accounts. What role do you think platforms like WikiLeaks can play in leveling, so the playing field, I guess, or providing more truthful information on social networks and, I guess, more importantly, stopping the flow of faulty information,

as we've seen in these last couple of years? Just quickly on face. Facebook, I have very much respect for people who make the effort to exchange information and keep their level of interflow with their friends and relatives. The corrupt use of Facebook by its owners and by its owners giving access to governments or people like CloudStrike, that is a matter of regulation. It's two distinct ideas, and we tend to mix, well, I do myself anyway, mix the class of ideas. The class of ideas of people exchanging information rapidly and quickly across Facebook with their friends and others is great.

That it's corrupted by its owners and the government is a matter of administration, and that can be fixed. In my own country, Google collects all sorts. sorts of information. Lawyers advise me if I raise $300,000, we can ensure that Google doesn't collect it any longer, but there's no support for that in government. Government currently makes bad company with gigantic organisations like Google. In the EU, though, are going to break it up, but I don't think it's going to happen. But the proper administration of giant social media companies and Google is the problem, not our liking of talking to each other. So let me say like the fundamental technology of crowdsource collective intelligence

determine truth, some notion of collective truth, maybe not big T capital truth, but at least a lowercase truth that we can all agree on and that can be diverse and divergent as people do more more research and change over time and be archived. This is not only valuable for journalism, but this is valuable for the larger society. Our libraries, our public institutions where we maintain knowledge, should be building this kind of technology right now in order to maintain relevance and become an important part of society in the future.

And I'm very nervous, both around the centralization of communications, which I think, not because I think the platforms themselves are inherently bad, but they are more easily backdoored. We know Gmail handing over WikiLeaks volunteers' emails. I'm sure a lot more has been handed over by various platforms, but also because one person's fake news is another person can be another person's truth. And the question is, who do we believe should have the power not only to inflict physical violence, which is classically what states do.

But who has the power to control the flow of information? And by centralizing communication, both in newspapers, but also in Facebook and Twitter, we've created a censorship vehicle. And that censorship vehicle, there's a fundamental bet with censorship. So it's possible, and I think even likely that propaganda, which I think is a better term than fake news, has been spread through Facebook and Twitter. It's mostly enabled, to some extent, by the demand for advertising dollars, which I actually think a lot of this work around tokenization going on the blockchain community could help address. That being said, who is the gatekeeper?

Sorry, but it's not just advertising dollars. It's also political interest. And political interest, yeah. You know, the Trump campaign and everything that happened around there was mostly a result of misaligned political interest. And even this week, they said, you know, a Trump investor might over there. get rid of Jack Dorsey and put a Trump supporter, a CEO of Twitter. Imagine what the repercussions would be there. But that being said, the vision that a small group of experts have a better grasp of truth than wider humanity is, I think, very dangerous.

It's essentially a feudal vision, a divine right of experts. While I and I think Julian, I think many people in the cryptocurrency space would think that there is such a thing that human, and all of our fragility and our problems can actually collectively determine truth, can argue, can have discussions, can sort information out. And the problem of, to some extent, propaganda and fake news and disinformation is really a problem of people needing more skills and better platforms. Platforms like WikiLeaks to basically understand the sources of data, analyze the data, and come to their own possibly collective conclusions about what is true. true and what's not. That's a much healthier and much less dangerousism because something which is built to stop fake news will be built to stop political dissidents next and then will eventually be built to track and kill people. It's kind of how we see technologies progress historically.

I think we could go on on this topic for for another hour, but we've already been here for about an hour and I'm conscious of your time here. So I'd like to ask you maybe a last few questions here and bring it back to your cause, which is helping your son in its current situation. and so what do you think the effects of prosecution on Gillian would be to the idea of free press? What would that change fundamentally? The change would be fundamental. There would be no free press. Legacy media is already unfree.

There's only six corporations in the United States, and each corporation runs on some sort of government warrant or other. So the very little freedom that there is now in legacy media would disappear altogether in alternative media in our stuff. You know, it was such a thrill. I'm an older man. It was such a thrill to be able to read actual fact about large events in the world because I'd grown up on a diet of newspapers

where you sort of have to read between the lines or newspapers in my involvement in early days in politics and where it was a tool you used to stick a knife in the back of your enemy. This wasn't always the case, the Daily Mirror and John Pilger and the Vietnam War were tremendous. It's not always the case. As for what will happen,

to our capacity to make decisions based on what we speak to each other about, will be gone altogether. It will just won't be there. There's a little more I could add in this. I'm not an expert on trade agreements, but there's a supporter of Julian's Eva Jolly, who's an ex-judge here as an expert on FISA arrangements, that the oppression that I described in technology with Mike Lynch-Olobin and Meng Wengzu, and the oppression of Julian and journalism and publication that I described also extends into the trade agreements, the FISA agreements, whereby national prerogatives, for example, pharmacy, pharmaceutical benefits in France or in my country, will be suborned and of a lower prerogative legally than the national prerogatives.

So corporations would be able to sue or would be able to involve themselves in the description of the pharmacopoeia and consequently begin to strip money out of the society. And this would not be able to be defended. So it follows as three avenues. There's a fourth avenue, if I could just run it quickly past you. The fourth avenue of this oppression is assassination and murder. Under Obama, there were 446 Tuesday. murders decided between Brennan and Obama.

446 extrajudicial murders. We saw the other day the Iranian general tricked into a peace conference and murdered on his way there, assassinated a man named Soleimani. So there's three avenues to how the hegemon wishes to discipline and get conformity from its vassals. The oppression of comment, the stealing of technology, and the murder of those that they can't oppress in either other way. That's a slightly depressing output.

However, to put it in a more positive way for you. is this. We are here at the Ethereum Foundation having a meeting of people who have invented a method of commerce that includes community. Last week, because of the WikiLeaks releases the Afghan war files, last week the United States admitted defeat, a defeat we all knew was 10 years old, because of the release of the Afghan war files. So the war in Afghanistan is over, brought about by our knowledge of what was actually happening there. Anyway, that's the positive side. Thank you very much.

So before we end it, please let us know that you're operating to raise money for Julian. Sorry, I warm myself out on that last statement. the courage foundation has Zcash, Bitcoin, and other sorts of donation portals that would help this Julian and us fight this extradition order to victory. So do you best, please. I would like to add, I mean, I did actually discuss this once with Julian. And I said, well, you know, a lot of people donated Bitcoin to you, you know, 10 years ago. The fact of the matter is I think most of that was spent on his tremendous legal cost, you know, 2013 through 2014. So I don't think the legal team has huge resources.

And when I know when Julian, I was the last guest to visit him before he tweeted about Catalonia and got his guest list turned off. and he, you know, one of the discussions, he was very depressed that he felt that people were due to the media's campaign against them. And, you know, people were going to abandon WikiLeaks, abandon supporting him. And I think it's really important people do come together. And I did argue, I'd like to see it be true that I said, well, you know, don't worry what the mainstream legacy media, as John puts. It's a great term. thinks about you. But I do think that the blockchain community is a natural home and base of support for this

court case. And it's important to have solidarity with this court case because it could be you and your project next. There is absolutely no doubt about it. So this is really a kind of either do or die moment, I think, for the kinds of technologies that people here want to create. and what is the most serious legal challenge against the broader crypto movement.

I think that's a great point to end on. I want to thank you guys for joining me today. I wish you the best of luck in this. It will be a very important fight, I think. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud,

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