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(CBS) Assange is not your average journalist or publisher,
and some have argued
that he is not really a journalist at all.
He is an anti-establishment ideologue with conspiratorial views.
He believes large government institutions use secrecy
to suppress the truth and he distrusts the mainstream media
for playing along.
Some people have called him an anarchist, which he denies.
Assange prefers to be called a libertarian,
and believes that the only people who can adequately police the system
are those on the inside who are in a position
to notice the abuse and blow the whistle.
While most reporters pride themselves in gathering information
and interpreting it for a larger audience,
the WikiLeaks model is different -
it prefers to take raw data, make it available a
nd let others decide the meaning.
Regardless of whether you agree with this idea or not,
it beats close to the heart of the Internet,
and a younger generation, and it runs through the life of Assange.
Kroft: You obviously have a mistrust of authority.
Where does that come from?
Assange: I think it comes
from experience with various types of authorities.
Assange gave us an example from his childhood,
a story about him and his mother Christine,
who was present at one of his recent court hearings.
She was a political activist who helped scientists gather information
about nuclear tests
conducted by the British in the Australian outback.
He remembers them being stopped late one night
and questioned by authorities, one of whom said:
Assange: Look lady,
you're out at two o'clock in the morning with this childů
it could be suggested that you're an unfit mother.
I suggest you stay out of politics.
And which she did for the next ten years
in order to make sure nothing happened to me.
So that's a very early abuse of power and the secrecy that I saw in my life.
His was an unconventional and sometimes tumultuous childhood
in which he was frequently uprooted and moved around the countryside.
He attended 37 different schools.
Kroft: So you've always been a little bit of an outsider?
Assange: I've certainly, when I was a child,
going from one school to another,
you are the outsider to begin with and you have to find your way in.
But in most of the places where I stayed long enough, I did find my way in.
One of the first places Assange found his way into
was populated by teenagers and computers.
And he knew how to program them before most people had them.
Kroft: You got involved with computers pretty early? With hacking?
Assange: Well,
I first became involved with computers when I was 13 or so.
And I was unusually adept
and I saw a sort of intellectual opportunity
understanding how to program,
understanding how these complex machines work.
And that was part of a social culture in cracking codes
to prove that you could do it.
And this is something that is very actually normal and healthy
amongst young men.
You see it in skateboarders competing to show
that they are capable in learning the best tricks.
Kroft: And your tricks were like
breaking into computers at the Department of Defense
and Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA and NORTEL, some Canadian banks.
Assange: Yeah. All that happened.
At age 20, Assange was arrested by the Australian Federal Police
and eventually pled guilty to multiple counts of computer hacking.
He managed to get off with no jail time because the judge concluded Assange
hadn't stolen any information or done any damage.
Kroft: Is that still one of your skills?
Assange: Not really.
Unfortunately, I've been sort of, you know,
promoted up into management, so I don't get to do that so much.
But I know the terrain which means I know what is possible.
I mean, Bill Gates could program but he certainly doesn't program anymore.
But he knows what is possible for other people to do.
Except that Assange is not Bill Gates and WikiLeaks is not Microsoft.
The shoestring operation that created all the havoc
has no permanent offices and is headquartered
wherever Assange happens to be.
WikiLeaks is a small non-profit organization
with a handful of anonymous employees,
a secret cadre of international programmers,
and a legion of worldwide volunteers.
(CBS) Its finances are administered by the Wau Holland Foundation
based in Berlin and named after a famous hacker.
According to the ledgers,
WikiLeaks took in $1.3 million last year in donations,
with expenses of about $500,000.
Kroft: For somebody who abhors secrets, you run a pretty secret organization.
Assange: That's not true.
What we want is transparent government, not transparent people.
We are an organization who one of our primary goals
is to keep certain things secret
to keep the identity of our sources secret
so secrecy is an inherent part of our operation.
Kroft: The State Department would make the same argument.
They haveůdoing very sensitive work that they're trying to make peace
and negotiate situations around the world. Very delicately.
It's very important that they do this in secrecy. What's the difference?
Assange: We don't say that
the State Department should have no secrets.
That's not what we're saying.
Rather, we say that
if there are people in the State Department
who say that there is some abuse going on,
and there's not a proper mechanism
for internal accountability and external accountability,
they must have a conduit to get that out to the public.
And we are the conduit.
Given all the attention that Assange has received,
we were curious about how he thought
he was being perceived in the United States.
He told us that he hasn't had the time to give it
much thought.
Kroft: Do you want me to give you
my characterization of what I think people think?
Assange: Sure.
Kroft: Mysterious. Little weird. A cult-like figure. Little paranoid.
Assange: Well, you're repeating all the ad hominem attacks
by our critics.
My role when I do something like speak about that we have discovered
the deaths of 109,000 individual people in Iraq,
15,000 civilian casualties never before reported anywhere,
that's a very serious role.
That is not a role where I can engage in humor.
So I'm not used to performing under the spotlight.
And I am learning this as time's going by.
Kroft: You have shown a fair amount of contempt
for the mainstream press over the years.
Why did you decide to as you used, the word "partner" with them,
in some of these most recent releases?
Assange: We're a small organization.
We're in a position, say, with Cablegate,
where we have 3,000 volumes of material that are very important to get
out to the public in a responsible manner that have
the potential for great change - for example,
this recent revolution in Tunisia.
It is logistically impossible,
so instead our organization delegates its excess source material
to other journalists, who will have more impact.
Who will do a better job.
Kroft: There is an element of the press, most of the mainstream press,
nobody wants to see you prosecuted,
because it could affect the way that they do their business.
But there's also a feeling within the community
that you're not one of them, that you play a different game.
Assange: We do play a different game. And I hope we're a new way.
Kroft: The point that they're making I think is that you're not -- you're --
you're a publisher, but you're also an activist.
Assange: Wait, whoa. We're a particular type of activist.
In the U.S. context,
there seems to be communist activists or something, so it's aů
Kroft: Right. Agitator.
Assange: It's a dirty word in the U.S.
Kroft: It's a dirty word. And people think that
what you're trying to do
is to sabotage the workings of government.
Assange: No. We're not that type of activists.
We are free press activists. It's not about saving the whales.
It's about giving people the information they need
to support whaling or not support whaling.
Why?
That is the raw ingredients that is needed
to make a just and civil society.
And without that you're just sailing in the dark.
(CBS) There have been clear signs that Assange -
under the threat of possible indictment by the Justice Department -
has moderated some of his views.
Before releasing the last two batches of classified documents,
Assange and his lawyers contacted both the Pentagon
and the State Department offering to explore ways
to minimize potential harm.
In both cases their offer was rebuffed.
Assange acknowledged that his fundraising has been hurt
by the decision of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America to
cease handling donations.
But he dismissed reports that WikiLeaks is wracked by internal dissention
and mass defections.
Assange: We're talking about Daniel Domscheit-Berg,
who was a German spokesman, had a limited role in the organization.
We had to suspend him some five months ago.
Kroft: Describes you as being authoritarian, secretive, punitive.
Assange: I'm the boss that suspended him, that's correct.
Kroft: You don't care to elaborate?
Assange: I think I just did.
Kroft: You said you have this package of very damaging documents,
sort of a poison pill, that's going to be released
if anything bad happens to you.
Assange: No, that's not at all true. That's some kind of media hype.
What we do have is a system whereby we distribute encrypted backups
of things we have yet to publish.
There are backups distributed amongst many, many people,
100,000 people and that all we need to do is give them an encrypted key
and they will be able to continue on.
Kroft: This wasn't intended to be a blackmail threat.
Assange: Not at all.
Kroft: What would trigger that encryption code being released?
Assange: Anything that prevented us from our ability to publish.
So not just for a second, but preventing us significantly
from being able to publish.
Kroft: Your imprisonment, for example.
Assange: If a number of people were imprisoned or assassinated,
then we would feel that we could not go on and other people
would have to take over our work, and we would release those keys.
Kroft: One bank, Bank of America,
had its stock go down three to five percent based on a rumor,
maybe it's a rumor, maybe you know more about it,
that you had the contents of a five gigabyte hard drive
belonging to one of its executives.
Do you have a five gigabyte hard drive?
Assange: I won't make any comment in relation to that upcoming publication.
Kroft: You're certainly not denying it.
Assange: You know, there'll be a process of elimination
if we denied some and admitted others.
Kroft: So it might not be Bank of America
and you're just gonna let them squirm until you get ready toů
Assange: I think it's great.
We have all these banks squirming, thinking maybe it's them.
Kroft: You seem to enjoy stirring things up.
Assange: When you see abusive organizations
suffer the consequences as a result of their abuse,
and you see victims elevated, it's, yes,
that's a very pleasurable activity to be involved in.
Kroft: I mean you see yourself as a check on the power
of the United States and other big countries in the world.
And in the process of doing that, you have now become powerful yourself.
Who is the check on you?
Assange: It is our sources who choose to provide us
with information or not, depending on how they see our actions.
It is our donors who choose to give us money or not.
This organization cannot survive for even a few months
without the ongoing support of the public.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community