Julian Assandzh: Why I founded Wikileaks

I looked at what is happening in the world now, and decided that too much injustice was happening. And I would like it to be less.

You can ask: "What is your philosophy on this subject?". And I will answer: “I do not need a philosophy. It's my temperament. ” And we will not further delve into the philosophical questions of "why I want to do this." Enough of what I want.
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Thinking over how the injustice is being done, and what causes it, and what gives rise to justice, I noticed that people, in their essence, do not change. Their inclinations and biological temperament have not changed over thousands of years. Therefore, it remains only to ask: what do they have, and what do they know?

What they have means what resources they have, how much energy they can get, how much food they have, etc. To influence it is quite difficult. But the fact that they know, you can influence - and nonlinearly. You can tell something to one person, and he will tell it to someone else, and so on.

It turns out that a small amount of information can affect a large number of people. Therefore, you can change the behavior of many people by giving them some information. The question arises: what information will lead to the fact that the actions will be fairer, and the number of unfair acts decrease?

Around the world, people are watching different aspects of what is happening to them. And other people receive information about events that they have not seen with their own eyes. And in the middle of this stream there are people involved in the movement of information from observers to those who will act on the basis of the information received. These are three different problems related to each other.

I decided that there are difficulties in conducting observations and in effectively running these observations in a distribution system that delivers this information to people who will act on the basis of this information. One could argue that the very same Google is engaged in the very "middle" business of transmitting information from those people who have it to those who need it.

The problem is that the first step is imperfect, and often the last, when it comes to the information that the government is trying to censor.

This whole process can be viewed as justice generated by the Fourth Power (the press that influences society). The description of the process, which I did partly influenced by my knowledge of quantum physics, studies the flows of specific types of information that lead to some changes in the system. The bottleneck is getting information that will lead to changes in the direction of justice.

From the point of view of the Fourth Power, people who initially receive information are sources; people working and spreading information are journalists and publishers; and those who act to get it are all people at once.

The description of this system is made with a high degree of abstraction. But then it comes to the mechanisms and the development of such a system that solves our problem. WikiLeaks was, and still is, an attempt to make such a system (albeit very young).

Technically, our first prototype was created for such an unfavorable situation, when publishing information is very difficult, and the only effective protection is anonymity, where the search for information sources is difficult (and this is still the case in the area of ​​national security), and where the basis of this resource was small team of trusted people.

I would say that historically the most important form of censorship was economic — when publishing information is not profitable because there is no market for it.

I describe censorship in the form of a pyramid. Upstairs - the killers of journalists and publishers. The next level is legal attacks on them. A legal attack is deferred use of the power of persuasion, which does not necessarily end in murder, but can lead to the imprisonment or seizure of assets.

Remember, the volume of the pyramid increases when moving from top to bottom, and in this example, the number of attempts at censorship also increases.

Very few people were killed, few people were subject to legal attacks, and at the next level there is already a huge amount of self-censorship. Self-censorship is partly due to the fact that people do not want to be moved to the top of the pyramid. They do not want to experience legal attacks and coercion, they do not want to be killed. This prevents people from doing something.

There are other forms of self-censorship when a person does not want to miss a bargain or promotion. They are even more important because they are even lower in the pyramid. And at the bottom, - and most of them, - all those people who cannot read, do not have access to the press, communications, and where there is no market for the provision of such services.

We decided to deal with the two upper sections of this pyramid: threats of violence and deferred threats in the form of lawsuits. These are in some sense the most difficult parts, and in some other - the easiest.

These are simple parts, because it is immediately clear whether there is censorship or not. Also because the volume of censorship is relatively low, even if the importance of an event is high.

Initially, WikiLeaks had few friends. Although, of course, I had political connections, we did not have much support among politicians and there was no global audience that would monitor our well-being. Therefore, we took a position in which the only defense of our activity was anonymity. We did not have financial protection, as well as legal and political. Our defense was purely technical.

This meant a distributed system with many domains, and the ability to quickly change domain names, the caching system, and the system works through the Tor network and its hidden services.