The corruption in reporting starts very early. It's like the police reporting on the police.
— Julian Assange
We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.
As we've gotten more successful, there's a gap between the speed of our publishing pipeline and the speed of our receiving submissions pipeline. Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises, and our ability to publish is increasing linearly.
In my role as Wikileaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks. To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.
We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us. But we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up.
We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it - which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.
The supply of leaks is very large. It's helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It's protective to us.
WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.
Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship.
I mean there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world - within the E.U., between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see.
We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal - personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets - you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret. But we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well motivated.
Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.
These megaleaks... They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase.
These big-package releases. There should be a cute name for them.
That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth. And that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber, but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.
Well, there's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform. And there's a lot of information. So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good.