If you’re a whistleblower and you have information that’s important, we will accept it, we will defend you and we will publish it.
This was the message from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an interview on CBS News’ 60 Minutes, where he also insisted that the US does not have the technology to take the WikiLeaks site down.
Just the way our technology is constructed, the way the internet is constructed. It’s quite hard to stop things reappearing. So, we’ve had attacks on particular domain names. Little pieces of infrastructure knocked out. But we now have some 2,000 fully independent in every way web sites, where we’re publishing around the world.
In the interview, Assange also challenges the idea that WikiLeaks goes after certain parties.
We don’t go after. That’s a bit of a misconception. We don’t go after a particular country. We don’t go after a particular organizational group. We just stick to our promise of publishing the material that is likely to have a significant impact.
He also defended the organisation’s harm minimization process, although admitted that “it is absolutely impossible” to say that nothing WikiLeaks ever publishes will result in harm.
Again, the usual Assange Bull right there. Has it occurred to him that it’s this kind of libertine egotistical arrogance that has alienated former Wikileaks employees into creating the Openleaks group without him weighing them down? The more Assange speaks like the untouchable, the more efforts will be made to shut his organisation down. He is mistaken if he thinks the US couldn’t do that in the end.