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(CBS) Just a few months ago, most people had never heard
of a Web site called WikiLeaks, or of its mysterious
and eccentric founder, Julian Assange.
But in that short period of time both have managed to rattle
the worlds of journalism, diplomacy, and national security.
WikiLeaks, which solicits and publishes
secrets and suppressed material from whistleblowers around the world,
has been under cyber attack from governments
that want to shut it down.
And Assange is currently under legal attack from the U.S. government
which would like to charge him with espionage
for publishing volumes of classified material
from the Pentagon and the State Department.
"60 Minutes" and correspondent Steve Kroft spent two days with him
in Great Britain where he is under house arrest,
while fighting extradition to Sweden for questioning in two
*** assault cases,
which he's called part of a smear campaign against him.
In his most extensive television interview to date,
Assange talked to us about his work, his vision and the prospects
of facing criminal charges in the United States.
Steve Kroft: You've been called a lot of names.
You've been characterized as a hero and as a villain. A martyr. Terrorist.
Julian Assange: I'm not yet a martyr.
Kroft: Right.
Assange: Let's keep it that way.
For now, Assange is holed up on a bucolic 600-acre English estate
with an ankle bracelet, a 10 p.m. curfew,
and a slow Internet connection.
He declined to talk to us about the allegations in Sweden,
on the advice of his attorney.
He has not been charged and proclaims his innocence.
Kroft: Well, I suppose if you have to be under house arrest,
there could be worse places.
Assange: Well it's a gilded cage. It's still a cage.
But when you are forced to stay somewhere
against your will, it does become something
that you want to leave.
It's a radical departure from the lifestyle that the peripatetic
Internet muckraker is used to - bounding from city to city,
country to country, and regularly changing his cell phones,
hair styles and general appearance, he says, to elude surveillance
and avoid being killed, kidnapped or arrested.
And there are reasons for his paranoia: in the last four years,
WikiLeaks has released information that played some role in deciding
the 2007 election in Kenya, and fueling the anger
that recently brought down the government in Tunisia.
It has also divulged the membership rolls of a
neo Nazi organization in Great Britain,
and secret documents from the Church of Scientology.
And that was before Assange began publishing U.S. secrets,
provoking what he calls threatening statements from people
close to power.
Kroft: What statements are you referring to?
Assange: The statements by the Vice President Biden saying,
for instance that I was a high-tech terrorist.
Sarah Palin calling to our organization
to be dealt with like the Taliban, and be hunted down.
There's calls either for my assassination
or the assassination of my staff or for us to be kidnapped
and renditioned back to the United States to be executed.
Kroft: Well as you know, we have a First Amendment
and people can say whatever they want, including politicians.
I don't think that many people in the United States took seriously
the idea that you were a terrorist.
Assange: I would like to believe that. On the other hand
the incitements to *** are a serious issue.
And unfortunately there is a portion of the population that will believe
in them and may carry them out.
(CBS) If nothing else, WikiLeaks is the latest demonstration
that a small group of people with a powerful idea
can harness technology and affect large institutions.
In WikiLeaks' case it was the idea to aggregate state and corporate secrets
by setting up an online electronic drop box
where whistleblowers around the world could anonymously upload
sensitive and suppressed information.
The secrets are stored on servers around the world,
beyond the reach of governments or law enforcement,
then released worldwide on the Internet.
Assange: The U.S. does not have the technology to take the site down
Kroft: Because?
Assange: 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.
WikiLeaks first caught the attention of most Americans last April
when it released a video which shows a U.S. Apache helicopter crew in Iraq
opening fire on a group of suspected insurgents
who were standing on a street corner in Baghdad.
Some of the men were armed, but two of them were journalists
from Reuters.
At least a dozen people were killed in the attack,
some of them innocent civilians.
Then last July,
WikiLeaks released 76,000 classified field reports
of U.S. operations in Afghanistan that provided
a chaotic and bleak ground level view of the war.
In October there were another 400,000 classified documents released from Iraq
showing that civilian casualties there were much higher
than the Pentagon had claimed;
and finally in November, thousands of State Department cables
that lifted the veil on highly sensitive back room diplomacy.
The documents revealed that Arab leaders were lobbying the U.S. to attack Iran,
and that the State Department had been
secretly collecting intelligence on leaders at the United Nations.
It triggered outcries that Assange was a political actor
trying to damage the U.S. government.
Kroft: Are you a subversive?
Assange: I'm sure there are certain views amongst Hillary Clinton and her lot that
we are subverting their authority.
But you're right, we are subverting illegitimate authority.
The question is whether the authority is legitimate or whether it is illegitimate.
Kroft: Do you consider the U.S. State Department a legitimate authority?
Assange: It's legitimate insofar as its actions are legitimate.
It has actions that are not legitimate.
Kroft: And you've gone after the ones that you think are illegitimate?
Assange: 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.
(CBS) To increase the impact of the U.S. documents,
Assange decided to share them with some of the leading news organizations
in the world,
including The New York Times - a relationship that grew testy
when Assange published the first set of war logs
without removing the names of Afghans who were cooperating
with U.S. forces.
Kroft: The most persistent criticism from within the press has been that
you have behaved recklessly from time to time.
And the example that they cite is the fact that you've decided
to release Afghan documents without redacting the names of people
who had provided intelligence to the U.S. government.
Assange: There's no evidence, or any credible allegation,
or even any allegation from an official body
that we have caused any individual
at any time to come to harm in the past four years.
Kroft: The Pentagon said that they've gone through all
of these documents and they found the names of 300 people.
Assange: Well, that's new public information to us.
It's possible that there are 300 names
in the publically released Afghan material.
We don't pretend that that process is absolutely perfect.
We did hold back one in five documents for extra harm minimization review
and we also improved our process.
So, when Iraq came around there was not even a single name in it.
Kroft: I mean, there have been reports of people quoting Taliban leaders,
saying that they had the names of these people
and that they were going to take retribution.
Assange: The Taliban is not a coherent outfit.
But we don't say that it is absolutely impossible
that anything we ever publish will ever result in harm.
We cannot say that.
Kroft: There's a perception on the part of some people
who believe that your agenda right now is anti-American.
Assange: Not at all. In fact, our founding values
are those of the U.S. revolution.
They are those of the people like Jefferson and Madison.
And we have a number of Americans in our organization.
If you're a whistleblower and you have material that is important,
we will accept it,
we will defend you and we will publish it.
You can't turn away material
simply because it comes from the United States.
After the release of the State Department cables,
Attorney General Eric Holder
condemned WikiLeaks for putting national security at risk.
"There's a real basis.
There is a predicate for us
to believe that crimes have been committed here,"
Holder announced
that the Justice Department and the Pentagon
were conducting a criminal investigation.
They are reportedly looking at the Espionage Act of 1917
and other statutes to find a way to prosecute Assange
and extradite him to the U.S.
Assange: It's completely outrageous.
Kroft: Are you surprised?
Assange: I am surprised, actually.
Kroft: But you were screwing with the forces of nature.
You have made some of the most powerful people in the world your enemies.
You had to expect that they might retaliate.
Assange: Oh, no. I fully expected they'll retaliate.
Kroft: You took, you gathered, you stored all sorts
of classified cables and documents.
And then released them to the world on the Internet.
They see that as a threat.
Assange: They see it as highly embarrassing.
I think what it's really about is keeping the illusion of control.
I'm not surprised about that.
I am surprised at how the sort
of flagrant disregard for U.S. traditions.
That is what I'm surprised about.
Kroft: You're shocked?
Someone in the Australian government said that,
"Look, if you play outside the rules
you can't expect to be protected by the rules."
And you played outside the rules.
You've played outside the United States' rules.
Assange: No.
We've actually played inside the rules.
We didn't go out to get the material.
We operated just like any U.S. publisher operates.
We didn't play outside the rules.
We played inside the rules.
Kroft: There's a special set of rules in the United States
for disclosing classified information.
There is longstanding…
Assange: There's a special set of rules for soldiers.
For members of the State Department,
who are disclosing classified information.
There's not a special set of rules
for publishers to disclose classified information.
There is the First Amendment. It covers the case.
And there's been no precedent that I'm aware of in the past 50 years
of prosecuting a publisher for espionage.
It is just not done.
Those are the rules. You do not do it.
(CBS) No one has accused Assange of stealing secrets.
The Apache video and the classified documents
were allegedly provided to WikiLeaks by Private First Class Bradley Manning,
a low-level intelligence analyst in Iraq
who is accused of copying them
from a classified government network that a half a million people have access to.
Manning is now in solitary confinement at a military prison in Virginia,
facing charges that could put him away for 50 years.
Kroft: You've called him as a prisoner of a conscience, correct?
Assange: I've said that if the allegations against him are true
then he is the foremost prisoner of conscience
in the United States.
There's no allegation it was done for money.
There's no allegation it's done for any other reasons
than a political reason.
Now, I'm sorry if people in the United States
don't want to believe
that they are keeping a political prisoner.
But in Bradley Manning's case,
the allegations are that he engaged in an illegal activity
for political motivations.
Kroft: People in the United States think he's a traitor.
Assange: That's clearly not true.
Regardless of what happens to Private Manning,
any prosecution of Assange will be fraught with problems
because WikiLeaks wasn't alone in the publishing the classified material.
The New York Times also published some of it.
If the government were to try and prosecute WikiLeaks
and not The New York Times,
it would likely need to prove that Assange was actively involved
in a conspiracy to illegally obtain the documents.
Kroft: Did you encourage anyone to leak this material to you?
Or have you done anything in connection with the U.S. cases
in terms of encouraging an individual to provide you with material?
Assange: No, never.
Kroft: There are people that believe that
it has everything to do with the next threat.
That if they don't come after you now that what they have done
is essentially endorsed small, powerful organization
with access to very powerful information releasing it outside their control.
And if they let you get away it, then they are encouraging…
Assange: Then what?
- They will have to have freedom of the press?
Kroft: That it's encouragement to you…
Assange: And? And?
Kroft: …or to some other organization?
Assange: And to every other publisher. Absolutely correct.
It will be encouragement
to every other publisher to publish fearlessly.
That's what it will encourage.
Kroft: To publish information much more dangerous than this information.
Assange: If we're talking about creating threats to small publishers
to stop them publishing, the U.S. has lost its way.
It has abrogated its founding traditions.
It has thrown the First Amendment in the bin.
Because publishers must be free to publish.
When we come back ...
Julian Assange starts to talk about his background
his political beliefs
and some of the things he says is stored in a WikiLeaks computer
including potentially damaging information,
about american banks.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community