Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks.
— Julian Assange
So far, we have a perfect record of WikiLeaks having never revealed information that exposed a source over 10 years.
WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars and broken stories about corporate corruption.
Being editor of WikiLeaks was always a pretty difficult job.
To be alive as a human being is to know, in the same way as it is to have a heart that beats.
You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in.
Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers.
I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.
Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another.
It's interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring.
I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform.
Every law, every constitution, every regulative decision is based upon what people are discussing in their community. It's based upon our sum knowledge of history and the present.
Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times.
We like to engage in a normal publishing effort, which is to act in a responsible manner and make sure the material is not likely to harm anyone, that it is properly investigated by quality news organizations, and by lawyers and human rights groups and so on.
Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.
True information does good.
In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic.
Often it's the case that we have to do a lot of exploration and marketing of the material we publish ourselves to get a big political impact for it.
By bringing out into the public domain how human institutions actually behave, we can understand frankly, to a degree, for the first time the civilization that we actually have.
The media helps keep government honest.
The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation.
Through the confessional system, the Catholic church spied upon the lives of its congregants. While Latin mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.
All over the world, the barriers between what is inside an organisation and outside an organisation are being smoothed out. In the military, the use of contractors means that what is the military and what is not the military is smoothed out.
I always believed that WikiLeaks as a concept would perform a global role, and to some degree it was clear that it was doing that as far back as 2007 when it changed the result of the Kenyan general election.
I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.
During the period of house arrest, I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable.
We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure.
My family has had to move and change their name and have been subject to threats from right wing blogs calling for my son, for example, to be killed to get at me.
The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.
You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.
It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in.
We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.
Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.
We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod ... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit.
It raises questions about the natural instincts of Clinton that, when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, et cetera.
I believe that the way to justice is education.
Democratic societies need a strong media, and WikiLeaks is part of that media.
To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.
Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.
Journalists always like an excuse for why are they talking about something now when they didn't talk about something a week ago. They always like to say something is new.
Although I still write, research and investigate, my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists.
The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.
I'm not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can't be.
When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.
I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them.
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison, we continue to release, our media partners continued to write stories. The important revelations from this material continue to come out. We have approximately 2,000 cables into 250,000.
If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature.
When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.
What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes.
