Harry Halpin & John Shipton: What Julian Assange Represents to the Crypto Movement #339

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 339 with guests Harry Halpern and John Shipton hi welcome to epicenter my name is Sebastian cutural today my guests are Harry Halpern and John Shipton Harry is the CEO of NIMH technologies they're building privacy infrastructure that's decentralized permissionless and incentivized and allows developers to build privacy-preserving applications that protect people's data but also the metadata and John Shipton is Julian

Assange his father now you might be wondering why John Shipton is going to crypto conferences while he regularly attends crypto conference's 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 US 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 US 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 them by the US 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 the cypherpunk movement you know we talked about the interview Julian was in the cyberpunk 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 these fundamental rights of free speech because it could be your project next you know Harry mentions it at the end of the conversation it says you know it could be your project if you're building something that you know the US government for example deems to be a threat well you could be facing

prosecution for violating the x-gen Oz Act - and you could be facing extradition to the US 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 is really fun conversation really unique you know very different from what we usually do but it was great to sit down with Harry and John and we're gonna have Harry on at some point to talk about NIMH you know and everything that they're building he was speaking at reset everything on the privacy panel and yeah I think we really aligned 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 favor to

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 podcasts on on Apple podcasts well will show up will 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 in my slack and like I'm always excited when I read these reviews because I know that

someone spent the time to show their love for epicenter so that's the favor that I'm asking if you want just go to epicenter doc rocks slash Apple that'll take you straight to Paige and 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 really appreciate it and as a gift if you want one I'll give you a discount code for a freaky hardware wallet all I gotta do is just email me Sebastiaan epicenter TV subject line keep ki and just say like hey I left you a review can I get a kiki I'll send you a discount code so yeah thanks a lot in advance and now here's a conversation with Harry Halpern and John Shipton I'm here with Harry Halpern who's the CEO of

NIMH technologies and then I must admit I don't know that much about name yet but I'm looking forward to learning more about it so that we can do a proper long-form conversation but you know were 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 Shipton who is Julian Assange his father I'm here to conjure up substantial help and enthusiasm for Julian's fight against extradition to the United States well I think there's a lot to talk about

here in in this episode I'd like to first get some background on why you're here at an aetherium conference and I think it would make sense because you know the only 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 and what brought you here to this aetherium conference so give us a bit background on this story okay just the stuff from the the end Julian is a part of the crypto movement or community from from the beginning and

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 aetherium can reach out to Julian and assist and what is it about the theorem community that why the etherion 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 non crypto communities well every community but to answer your question in particular the etherium community has a notion of public goods which Vitali spoke of today so it's a community of foundation also

it seems to be contemporary communal effort to establish a means of communication or means of contract and a means of developing capital in a more communal and a better spread on the base so if there's preventive measures - within the community to prevent the accumulation of singularly large amounts of capital we call a plutocracy and divert the course of aetherium there's preventative measures within the community and within the structure of aetherium which make it very very

attractive to me and to Julian and others yeah so I think one of the most important things to realize about Julian and I I consider myself his 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 US government programs to map the social networks of political radicals put people that they considered undesirable and he said actually the real problem is corrupt governments

plutocracy the centralization of power and he said and they also form a network they have a 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 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 WikiLeaks I said if we could somehow overload this network with X

information and prevent them from being so much in control because they themselves were so 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 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 ddossing the system it's essentially a DDoS of the global centralized elite and it's a it's a very political act and that's the same important 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 talk hang out Julian's father and a theory conference paranoid about donating to WikiLeaks even nakamoto's 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

that Satoshi ever written about WikiLeaks did he ever talk about Satoshi was a little nervous so if you remember correctly what happened there was a the payment processor of WikiLeaks was actually under financial blockade PayPal Visa ever gonna shut them off you can no longer donate to WikiLeaks and of course at the same time over in the cypherpunks mailing list Hal Finney and a bunch in Nakamoto and all these people were working on a decentralized censorship resistant crypto currency 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 to quickly its various enemies in the banking system and whatnot and the government's would try to shut it down nonetheless it was I think maybe the first time Bitcoin really got out of the cyberpunk mailing list the NT like mainstream news okay interesting I wasn't aware that that sort of connection with Nakamoto and WikiLeaks they're all on the same mailing list as well I might add so they I actually we should roll 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 what 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 in one case of illegal use of a computer that would accumulate to about a hundred and seventy five years that so now we're in the 10th year of the persecution of Julian Assange it started off ten days in ones worth prison arbitrarily detained then 18 months in norwich and the house arrest

arbitrarily detained seven and a half years in the Embassy of Ecuador as a Masai Li arbitrarily detained again and now the latest thing ten months in Belmarsh maximum-security prison nine months of that 22 hours a day solitary confinement so it's a an escalating intensity of persecution of Julian for simply publishing news really of 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 you you're able to see him yes that's the means of arles of the maximum-security prison and the Psalter confinement although the maximum security prison procedures we all must go through and we all must be x-rayed and go through the for separating portals and the sniffer dogs and all assemble in a room with high fidelity sound and high-definition cameras about certain won't every three meters we sit with about 80 other prisoners who have visitors and a maximum of three adults per prisoner self 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 the you know dull and muffle the sound a bit and stop lip-reading that surveillance of julian has now there's pictures of julian consulting audio and visual of Joey Julian consulting with his lawyers so the intensity of surveillance went as far as having listening devices in the ladies toilet because a one-stage they used the ladies toilet as a private meeting room to discuss things with the lawyers the intensity it was had an increasing trajectory which the united

nations repeater on torture neilmel nils Melser describes as psychological torture and writes her a report to that extent so that's the situation and presently so I wanted to ask you it 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 and and absolutely you know just to give you just one example of many 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 of together children and parents and grandparents seven of them murdered in their house know that cable caused the rewriting of the status of forces agreement between the United States actually the cancellation of the status of forces agreement between the United States and Iraq and consequently United States forces removed 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 and Chelsea Manning's leaks an oppression of journalism and a limitation of comment it's so intense that there's about a hundred lawyers working on Julian's case about a hundred thousand of us people like me worldwide working to ensure that Julian's free there's a cost of I imagine I don't know this for sure but the counting it up about ten million dollars over three years this impression this oppression and intimidation of publishers publications and journalists mean that

no other publisher in the West or publication in the West or journalists in the West will take upon itself this enormous burden of worldwide oppression a global problem of enormous size that no longer will anybody be in a position this is important for the etherium community if the United States decides in that it doesn't like etherium it can issue an extradition order against the the leaders of a theorem and kidnap them a judicially kidnap and it has done so

with the Hawaii C oming when zoo from Canada in the United States and has done so with all of been in Ecuador who's a an IT whiz it has also done so with Mike Lynch is again another IT billionaire in the UK that they've issued an extradition order so it in two parallel lines it covers technology that the United States wants or once repressed and comment that it doesn't want or once 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 you know I would did my PhD in artificial intelligence and as a consequence of that this is you know ten 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 I really want to know what was going on on the ground with like the hackers and cypher punks 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 oh I said I said you everyone in WikiLeaks or all the US is gonna 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 law about that time and then we had 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 and unfortunately it's true and 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 you know the stock pilings of zero days which has since been weaponized are very dangerous released in the vault 7 which I think is the most important of the WikiLeaks releases the one which is really put Julian's head on the 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 survived what the public good that Julian did for the

world regardless of what you think about the details I think does not justify under any circumstance extradition and torture in sets eight terrible precedent for any kind of journalism and also those jurors about 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 bye-bye should they 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 becomes 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 crimes securities law this sort of thing I mean this this is what most people come on our show to talk about for instance when it has anything to do with so some of the regulatory threats to crypto and what you're seeing here is that the the real

threat to the crypto space so the people that work in the space is the ability for for crypto to become so 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 so 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 WikiLeaks or something like that's 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 you know do you get a sense that in the crypto space people sort of grasp the gravity of of this very notion that the crypto can be used as a tool

against oppression and a tool to contraception about 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 the 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 the United representing the United States and this is very big this is a victory of the Taliban over invader of their country and the destruction of their country it's about ten years ago that the Afghan war files were released 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 I wanted us to hear that 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 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 so the the information landscape and and how it's changed since WikiLeaks came into the world I think you could probably talk to

the you know from your perspective the the positive aspects of WikiLeaks but have you thought of some of the negative aspects of WikiLeaks and how you know with regards to the changes to the information landscape what did 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 intellect intellect you want to get today but so I'm believe that Martin heidegger's analysis is

correct that technology has brought about a sort of petha proceed whereby we find natural things that we relate to each other through being fallen into disuse so it's really hard to recognize what is human and what was deeply humans for the most of my day is spent mediated contact I use the telephone message services and all of that there everything is mediated the only thing that is unmediated in in a very busy day is when you sit down and in the evening

and have dinner with a friend that's an unmediated but the phone still interrupts and demands that you have a mediated guest at dinner even though they're not there so the 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 a Heidegger German philosopher who was that definitely at some point Nazi but had interesting analysis of what would

happening in contemporary world he said the contemporary world is sort of becoming fascist but in a new way we're and so it's becoming a giant system of control managed by cybernetics by to some extent feedback between humans and technology in the goal of cybernetics is to maintain systems of 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 kick himself considered a

almost kind of 19th century enlightenment kind of person well he believed a lot an individual freedom individual agency in the individual capacity to reason and that you know the the whole vision to some extent WikiLeaks was that data would be published and they would be editing all that destroyed like Wikipedia and that from the sort of crowd of individuals that collective intelligence would emerge which would sort out the truth from the fall so that second part 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 docstore if I have a revenge porn there's that you know in government's just as they monopolize propaganda with radios and televisions as we all know from you know the world war two are now doing the same on the Internet not surprising but what I think is important to remember about both what WikiLeaks did his store perkele and I think the philosophy that motivated it was inherently a non-violent philosophy that was working very hard to reduce if not in 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 redaction so that the larger issues which that if you have war if you have secret government's back in arbitrarily kill or declare who can live who's a citizen who's not and this sort of what a government call that kind of zone of legal in distinction which is exactly where Julia strap now if you have this kind of world it's a very violent world and the only way towards a non-violent world a world whether 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 incidences was one can argue about I think that vision itself is the same vision that motivates particularly laws I would say the libertarian influence on Bitcoin and a theorem but also the same vision that that is behind smart contracts and much of the same vision which is behind cryptocurrency as a whole that there is a sort of not particularly well articulated political and I say exceedingly nonviolent vision behind these technologies I definitely agree

that Bitcoin isn't in itself political aetherium is is political at least it has political motivations that are as you said like they're not they're not quite explicit or well email archives are in the results of the right in the world a big manifesto there's not there's not a manifest I mean you know perhaps there was some manifests out there but III don't know that most of the people you know attending these conferences certainly out here you know really on a daily basis think of how politically motivated the vision of aetherium is or the vision of Bitcoin is do you think it's for you if you're in community to sort of uphold that vision or do you think that turns it into something that can be

seen is detrimental by by States by you know the media because oftentimes what happens is you know that the media will pick this up and and 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 you trust your local bank why don't you trust us that being said of course like there will be as aetherium Bitcoin cryptocurrencies and not just cryptocurrencies but the entire sort of cyberpunk vision of privacy for the week but transparency for the powerful as more technologies 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 well so 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 versus true within within oneself but how do you do that though I mean concretely there are people here who who are aligned with that vision 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 see it maybe they maybe they're not even aware of it how do you reconcile those two 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 of 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 the people oh 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 he said it's important to do some 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 one of the reasons when we I was finishing out my own academic research I decided that we should actually try to commercialize privacy enhancing technologies another kind of cyberpunk technology called mix net which hides who's talking to who this guy is metadata I felt that rather and just hang out and write papers about it or try to do a get-rich-quick scheme or join Silicon Valley it made sense the 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 and journal is a huge problem and if you solve these problems it's actually I think better if I ever got a critique WikiLeaks in one way I would say it probably better almost do it as a business than a non-profit you know the amount of repression must be very financially damaging to everyone involved and I can say you know tour and novel technologies were very important for key leaks they were ironically enough built on US government grants to fund privacy so the CIA agent in China can phone home or the CIA as Snowden put it can do a Google search and it ends up being really dutiful amazing stuff and general purpose stuff that's wonderful 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 are there's a business or a non-profit or is just ideal even better a dhow some code is law thing that's I think you'll you'll have a better chance of surviving repression and a better chance of accomplishing your vision I'm just on Wikileaks WikiLeaks is a wiki that'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 they they're 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 wanted to confirm the analysis a perfect system it is the vision similarly a theory 'im not looking for a vision theory 'm and its community and the foundations are the vision and

that's very very enticing in my view so maybe i'm bring it back like smart contracts one of things about theorem that people like they can see the code bitcoin for financial track says you can read the transactions for the you take so set and it's as 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 it you can all the code you can you can make it do what you want you can exercise your freedom and I honestly think the vision of WikiLeaks as a klabo platform which it Israel today as well and should be adopted by more and more journalistic

organizations is that if you're publishing a story where 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 a Wikipedia's collective intelligence you can bring those stories together and get a more complete and true vision the world and this belief in truth is something that I think people and its desire for truth is something that people need today this is an interesting concept did you so how would you structure that in a way because I mean most of the sort of data that goes into writing of stories say 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 your the your the AI expert maybe you can do some kind of natural language processing stuff on there to extract things like sentiment or 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 lines 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 journalists 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 is a clear and easy answer but that being said let's be very honest about about things the the the mainstream media you know has been spreading lies which you know WikiLeaks and journalists working with them how

correct about things like weapon you know that Iraq war 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 journal major journalists had been publishing lies and that most people I know are actually very for the existence living 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 in a 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 as well another fact on either side so you can refer and research and create statistics which will give you an insight into the spread and in allow you to well a good example

of this is the when WikiLeaks published the order list logistics lists for Afghanistan you are 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 order 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 site with an

organizational like WikiLeaks which utilizes the fantastic power of the engineering that lies behind the Internet that's the most solid aspect of our conversation is that legacy media is technologically primitive and the organisms within those organizations that is the people are shaped by those organizations they have a quite a tell the technologically primitive relationship with the unthought the pace of unfolding events whereas WikiLeaks

and say for example if you combine WikiLeaks and aetherium not combine the two organizations but combine the insights of those organization 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 aetherium can feel that minute-to-minute pulse of its take up and the minute sorry the nanosecond and then our second pulse I'm of the little time bolts sorry

I've no I'm of the legacy media you know so I think in minutes it's ridiculous I think you I think I agree with you on on the point that legacy media is is very much lacking behind and but but on the other side of that if you take so 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 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 quickly on on Facebook know I have very much respect for people who make the effort to exchange information and in keep keep their level of interflow with their friends and relatives the corrupt use of Facebook by its owners and by the its owners giving access to government's or people like cloud strike that is a matter of regulation that'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 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 organizations like Google in the EU they 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 let me say like the good boy 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 a not only valuable for journalism this is valuable for the larger society our lie barry's 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 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 than hand over our various

platforms but also because one person's fake news is 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 is 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 blotchy committee could help address that being said the who is the gatekeeper do it sorry it's not just advertising dollars it's also political interest like interest you know that the Trump campaign and everything that happened around there was was mostly a result of like misaligned political interest and even this week they said you know a Trump investor might over 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 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 futile vision a Divine Right of experts while I and I think Julian I think many people the cryptocurrency space would think that there is such a thing that humans 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 or to basically understand the sources of data analyze

the data and come to their own possibly collective conclusions about what is true and what's not that's a much healthier and much less dangerous ism 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 technology's 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 few questions here and bring it back to your cause which is helping your son in this current situation and so what do you think the effects of prosecution on Julian 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 and there's only six corporation 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 you know I'm an older man it's such a thrill to be able to read actual fact about large events in the

world because I had grown up on a diet of newspapers where you sort of have to read between the lines or newspapers in my involvement in the early days in politics aware you you who was a tool you used to stick the knife in the back of your enemy this wasn't always the case the Daily Mirror in John Pilger and the Vietnam War were tremendous is not always the case that's for what will happen to our capacity to make decisions are based on what we speak to each other about will be gone altogether will be it 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 IVA Jolie who's an ex judge he is an expert on visa arrangements that the oppression in that I described in technology with Michael in choler Ben and Ming Wing zoo and the oppression of Julian and journalism and publication that I described also extends into the trade agreements the phaser agreements whereby national prerogatives

for example pharmacy pharmaceutical benefits in France or in my country will be suborned and of a lower perogative legally than the national prerogative 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 that this would not be able to be defended so it follows those three avenues there's a fourth Avenue if I could just run it quickly past you

that the fourth Avenue of this oppression is assassination and murder under Obama they 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 vessels 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 at least however to put it in a more positive way please who is this we are here at the etherium 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 where that you're operating and to to raise money for a jillion sorry I wore myself out on that last statement the the courage foundation has the cash bitcoin and other sort

of donation portals that and that would help this Julian and us fight this extradition order to victory so do your best please now I would like to add I mean I did actually discuss this once with with Julie and I said well you know a lot of people donated Bitcoin to you you know ten years ago the fact that 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 so any and and when I know when Jillian I was the

last guest to visit him before he tweeted back catalonia and got his guest list turned off and he he you know one of the discussions he was very depressed that he felt that people were due to the medias campaign against them and yeah people are gonna abandon WikiLeaks abandoned supporting him and I think it's really important people do come together and I did argue no 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 you know 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 too to end on I want to thank you guys for joining me today I wish you the best of luck in this will be a very important fight I think thank you thank you for joining us on this week's episode we released new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you

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