Transcript

Julian Assange's last video

before communications cut at Ecuadorian Embassy


Contents

The following links take you to the corresponding text passages

Inhalt

The following links take you to the corresponding text passages

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1. The purpose of Wikileaks

I started WikiLeaks to solve a very interesting problem to me, which was

  • to know the fate of man, the fate of mankind,
  • so far as that development of man is revealed by the development of its institutions and
  • how they actually behave in practice internally;
  • the great political struggle of mankind insofar as it has been rational.


And we all know politics is largely irrational.

  • But the irrational part I feel is sort of random
  • and the rational part is based on what we know,
    • what we know about ourselves or
    • what we know about each other and
    • what we know about how human resources are distributed and
    • how human institutions behave and
    • what sort of internal and external rules we engage in.


That's the purpose of WikiLeaks, to try and understand mankind, and from that we can perhaps produce a better, or more realistically put, less worse human civilization.

But that is changing.


Mankind in some sense just having small grasp of understanding about how it is progressing through the world I think is now almost completely eliminated. And not in the way that I expected. We actually have access to much more knowledge about how we work than we ever did before. But it has been eliminated through the speed of information-processing and therefore the speed of the change of knowledge.


And that is rapidly moving into - well - that algorithmic processing of knowledge is moving into Artificial Intelligence. And while Artificial Intelligence is just another kind of algorithm,

  • I think the scale changes that have occurred in the last seven years are significant enough to classify as a qualitative change.
  • And that qualitative change means a very serious threat
    • to the stability of human civilization -not that they should be too stable- and
    • to the ability of human beings to organize their fate in an intelligent manner.


So I think you guys in both these two dimensions are able to do something.

1. Der Zweck von Wikileaks

Ich habe WikiLeaks gestartet, um ein fŸr mich sehr interessantes Problem zu lšsen:

  • das Schicksal des Menschen, das Schicksal der Menschheit in Erfahrung zu bringen,
  • soweit sich die Entwicklung des Menschen durch die Entwicklung seiner Institutionen offenbart
  • und wie diese sich in der Praxis tatsŠchlich intern verhalten:
  • der gro§e politische Kampf der Menschheit, soweit er rational war.

Und wir alle wissen, dass Politik weitgehend irrational ist.

  • Aber der irrationale Teil, den ich fŸhle, ist irgendwie zufŠllig,
  • und der rationale Teil basiert auf dem,
    • was wir wissen,
    • was wir Ÿber uns wissen oder
    • was wir voneinander wissen, und
    • was wir Ÿber die Verteilung der menschlichen Ressourcen wissen, und
    • wie sich menschliche Institutionen verhalten, und
    • welche Art von internen und externen Regeln wir anwenden.

Das ist der Zweck von WikiLeaks, zu versuchen, die Menschheit zu verstehen und daraus vielleicht eine bessere -oder realistischer ausgedrŸckt- weniger schlimme menschliche Zivilisation hervorzubringen.

Aber das Šndert sich.

Eine Menschheit, die in gewisser Weise einwenig versteht, wie sie sich in der Welt entwickelt, ist -wie ich denke- fast vollstŠndig beseitigt worden. Und das ist nicht so geschehen, wie ich es erwartet hatte. TatsŠchlich haben wir Zugang zu viel mehr Wissen Ÿber unsere Arbeitsweise als jemals zuvor. Unser VerstŠndnis wurde jedoch dadurch eliminiert, dass Informationen schnell verarbeitet werden und dementsprechend sich unser Wissen schnell verŠndert.

Und das bewegt sich schnell dahin, dass die algorithmische Verarbeitung von Wissen in kŸnstliche Intelligenz Ÿbergeht. KŸnstliche Intelligenz ist zwar auch nur eine andere Art von Algorithmus.

  • Ich denke aber, das Ausma§ der VerŠnderungen in den letzten sieben Jahren ist so bedeutsam, dass wir von einer qualitativen VerŠnderung sprechen kšnnen.
  • Und diese qualitative VerŠnderung bedeutet eine sehr ernste Bedrohung fŸr
    • 1. die StabilitŠt der menschlichen Zivilisation - nicht, dass sie allzu stabil sein sollte - und
    • 2. die FŠhigkeit der Menschen, ihr Schicksal auf intelligente Weise zu organisieren.

Ich denke, ihr kšnnt in diesen beiden Dimensionen etwas erreichen, bei der StabilitŠt und bei der Selbstbestimmung.

(Time 2:50)

2. What's it like spending every day in the Embassy?

The interesting stuff I can't describe because of, I mean,

  • the adversarial relationships with a number of states, really - serious adversarial relationships. And then
  • the situation for the detained people.


And I have been detained in prison, under house arrest, and in this Embassy, without charge at any time in this country, for almost 8 years now. The difficulty for people who are detained in one form or another is monotony. Absolutely! So I try and make each day as different as possible, as it possibly can be. And it is never different enough for me.


(Time 3:50)

3. If you get your freedom, what will be your plans? Will you return to Australia?

There is a shifting geopolitical constellation, as far as the operation of WikiLeaks and other publishers are concerned that are trying to push the envelope, WikiLeaks is designed in its structure, well, because it kind of suits the things I like doing, to be the boldest but still credible publisher. It's an interesting tension that box "still credible". By that I mean we are very bold, not so bold that we publish child pornography. That would certainly be bold, but it's not I think interesting and credible.


(Zeit 3:50)

3. Wenn du deine Freiheit bekommst, was werden deine PlŠne sein? Wirst du nach Australien zurŸckkehren?

Es gibt eine sich verŠndernde geopolitische Konstellation, was die Arbeitsweise von WikiLeaks und anderen Verlagen angeht, die versuchen, die Grenzen zu erweitern. WikiLeaks ist in seiner Struktur so konzipiert -nun, weil es auf die Dinge passt, die ich gerne tue- der kŸhnste, aber immer noch ein glaubwŸrdiger Verlag zu sein. Da ist eine interessante Spannung in dieser Schablone "immer noch glaubwŸrdig". Damit meine ich, dass wir sehr mutig sind, nicht so mutig, dass wir Kinderpornografie veršffentlichen. Das wŠre sicherlich mutig, aber ich denke nicht, dass es interessant und glaubwŸrdig ist.

(Time 4.40)

4. What led you to start WikiLeaks?

Coming out of my experience in dealing with governments and the security industry, I go into encryption and became an encryption engineer.


I met a small number of companies I consulted to. And after a while I viewed that the universe was hard enough to understand for human beings without going around encrypting it all the time. And in some sense that was to make human life harder to understand. And while I understood and even come back, I suppose, to embrace that early philosophic position of mine, that in a computerized civilization encryption is the fundamental building block of liberty, I think that is clear, it's very interesting philosophically to why that is so, so then, well, I should really tackle to de-crypt physical reality.


That sounds mad, but that's what physicists do, right? We try and decrypt physical reality to understand time and space, beginning and end of things. And after a while I felt that I had - although physics is very wide - but I felt I had a decent enough understanding that the extra time put in wouldn't produce a great deal more understanding. And so then I came back taking some of these concepts that have been developed in quantum mechanics about understanding flows of causality -one thing causes another- and if you look at it for particular interpretation through the flow of information, of how one thing you are trying to measure goes on to cascade causality across others and then eventually to the person looking at it.


And so I thought, why not take that concept, which can perhaps be described in a way that WikiLeaks uses it as causality amplification,

  • some small amount of capital leading to a larger amount of information
  • leading to a cascade of effect


and try to put that into place to help understand human civilization.


And while that is in some sense a very ambitious and impossible project along the way - to have some fun and achieve some important flows for justice, which is satisfying if you do that. It is very very satisfying to see innocent people for example walk out of prison with one of our publications above their head.


(Zeit 4:40)

4. Warum hast du WikiLeaks gestartet?

Aufgrund meiner Erfahrung im Umgang mit Regierungen und der Sicherheitsbranche beschŠftige ich mich mit VerschlŸsselung und wurde VerschlŸsselungsingenieur.

Ich war im Rahmen von BeratertŠtigkeit in Kontakt mit einer kleinen Anzahl von Firmen. Und nach einer Weile stellte ich fest, dass das Universum fŸr Menschen schwer zu verstehen war, ohne es stŠndig zu verschlŸsseln. In gewisser Weise sollte folglich das menschliche Leben noch schwerer zu verstehen sein. Meine frŸhe philosophische Position verstand ich und kam auch zu ihr zurŸck, nŠmlch dass in einer computergestŸtzten Zivilisation VerschlŸsselung den Grundbaustein der Freiheit darstellt -ich denke , das ist klar. Die GrŸnde dafŸr sind demnach philosophisch sehr interessant, und daher sollte mich ernsthaft mit der EntschlŸsselung der physischen RealitŠt befassen.

Das klingt verrŸckt, aber genau das machen Physiker, nicht wahr? Wir versuchen, die physische RealitŠt zu entschlŸsseln, um Zeit und Raum, Anfang und Ende der Dinge zu verstehen. Und nach einer Weile hatte ich das GefŸhl - obwohl die Physik ein weites Gebiet ist - ich hatte das GefŸhl, dass ich ein ganz passables VerstŠndnis dafŸr hatte, dass zusŠtzliche Zeit da hineinzustecken nicht viel mehr VerstŠndnis bringen wŸrde. Und so bin ich auf einige dieser Konzepte zurŸckgekommen, die in der Quantenmechanik entwickelt wurden, um FlŸsse der KausalitŠt zu verstehen - eine Sache verursacht eine andere. Wenn man da nach einer bestimmten Interpretation sucht und sich den Informationsfluss anschaut, dann erkennt man, dass der Versuch, etwas zu messen, eine KausalitŠtskaskade zu anderen Dingen auslšst und schlie§lich zum Beobachter zurŸckfŸhrt.

Und so dachte ich: Warum nicht dieses Konzept verwenden? Man kšnnte es vielleicht so beschreiben: WikiLeaks verwendet es als KausalitŠtsverstŠrkung:

  • Eine kleine Menge an Kapital fŸhrt zu einer grš§eren Menge an Informationen,
  • was zu einer Kaskade von Effekten fŸhrt.

Und so kšnnte man versuchen, das VerstŠndnis der menschlichen Zivilisation zu erweitern.

Dies ist in gewisser Hinsicht ein sehr ehrgeiziger und unmšglicher Weg, sich Spa§ zu verschaffen und einige wichtige Gerechtigkeitsstršme zu erzielen. Dennoch ist es befriedigend, wenn man das tut. Es ist sehr, sehr befriedigend zu sehen, dass beispielsweise unschuldige Menschen mit einer unserer Publikationen Ÿber dem Kopf aus dem GefŠngnis kommen.

(Time 7:56)

5. What can be expect from WikiLeaks in the future?

Back in 2007 when I launched WikiLeaks - I don't know if people can bring their minds back to the cultural dynamics on the Internet at that time - it was in some sense far more controlling a space than it is now, and in other senses far more open, because there weren't the big players dominating it as they do now. But the fight as to whether a WikiLeaks was culturally acceptable, had not been had yet.


And through succeeding in that fight and defending our organization, we became in a very unsual way part of the status quo.


Not of the status quo of establishments obviously. Many establishments opposed us because of state secrets and all establishments are in some sense hypocritical and rely on keeping a different interior world to exterior presentatiion.


WikiLeaks became culturally established, such that there would be a tremor sent through the broader Internet culture which is now the broader Western culture, if WikiLeaks were to disappear. And that is a very difficult role to be in.


What would it mean? It would mean essentially that the envelope for publishers and freedom of speech and the rights of citizens vs. institutions and establishments would suddenly contract. So I personally and WikiLeaks are partly in the business of keeping the envelope wide, being that avangarde where we are constantly crashing up against icebergs, constantly trying to smash through the ice or at least maintain position, so that behind us there is a widened cultural space for liberty, broadly speaking.


(Zeit 7:56)

5. Was kann man in Zukunft von WikiLeaks erwarten?

Als ich 2007 WikiLeaks startete - ich wei§ nicht, ob die Leute sich heute die damalige kulturelle Dynamik im Internet vor Augen fŸhren kšnnen -, war es in gewisser Weise weitaus kontrollierter als heute und in anderer Hinsicht viel offener, weil es nicht die gro§en Spieler gab, die es beherrschten, wie sie es jetzt tun. Aber der Kampf, ob ein WikiLeaks kulturell akzeptabel sei, war noch nicht gefŸhrt worden.

Und durch den Erfolg dieses Kampfes und die Verteidigung unserer Organisation wurden wir auf sehr ungewšhnliche Weise Teil des Status Quo.

Offensichtlich nicht vom Status Quo des Establishments. Viele Einrichtungen widersetzten sich uns unter Hinweis auf das Staatsgeheimniss, und alle Einrichtungen sind in gewisser Weise heuchlerisch und bauen darauf auf, ihr Inneres der Au§enwelt gegenŸber zu verbergen [Anm. des †bersetzers: Daniel Ellsberg spricht sogar von "verleugnen"].

WikiLeaks ist nun kulturell etabliert, so dass die breitere Internetkultur, die jetzt die breitere westliche Kultur ist, erschŸttert wŸrde, wenn WikiLeaks verschwŠnde. Und das ist eine sehr schwierige Rolle.

Was wŸrde es bedeuten? Dies wŸrde im Wesentlichen bedeuten, dass der Raum fŸr Verlage und fŸr Redefreiheit sowie die Rechte der BŸrger gegenŸber Institutionen und Einrichtungen plštzlich schrumpfen wŸrden. Ich persšnlich und WikiLeaks sind zum Teil bestrebt, den Raum weit zu halten. Wir sind die Avangarde, die stŠndig gegen Eisberge stš§t, stŠndig versucht, das Eis zu durchbrechen oder zumindest die Position zu halten, sodass sich hinter uns sozusagen ein erweiterter kultureller Raum fŸr Freiheit šffnet.

(Time 10:21)

6. What are the biggest threats to businesses and governments today?

I mean you have had some very good speakers speaking at the kind of practical everyday computer security in the industry. So I am not going to do that, probably because I wouldn't be that good a it.


WikiLeaks has a threat model, that exceedingly ... it is a very high threat model. Absurd, in fact. The UK government, by the middle of 2015, admitted just one department to lowering having spent 12 million Pounds - it was very embarrassing trailing me - it was very embarrassing. So in response they classified the budget. So, the budget figures have not been released. They certainly have not been released for others. So - a high threat level environment.


It is very interesting, I suppose, all the means they have come up with to deal with that environment. But they are in some sense unique to small to midsize organizations operating at the highest levels of which - I am not sure there are any others than us - I suppose that there are some independence groups and terrorist organizations. But on the terror side, it's quite a different game, obviously.


Finite civilization lifetime

But there is a much bigger threat for everyone. And I see it like this:

At the time the Los Alamos project, physics, western physics, became harmonized, because you brought the different physics traditions from across Europe, the leading figures, to the United States and to Los Alamos, and then you had a harmonization of nomenclature and understanding. And those people then spread out. So one of those people was Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist, very interesting man.


One night Enrico Fermi was out walking in Los Alamos with some of his physicist buddies, and he looked up at the stars and said: "Where is everyone?" So - you are going to freak out a little bit, because, yes, I am bringing in the Aliens into this part of the talk, to answer this question. His question is very deep: There don't appear to be any, and by "appear" I mean there are no physical signs that we can detect in terms of what happens to stars, the energy seems to be constantly boiling off, being wasted into space. We don't hear radio signals, we don't see anything of civilized life. And yet, in the last ten years planetary astrophysics has shown that there is tens of thousands of extrasolar planets, which we have actually detected on an individual basis. And from that you can assemble the probabilities of there being earth-approximating planets. And there is hundreds of millions, maybe billions, just in this galaxy.


So the question then becomes: Where is the civilized life, why don't we see it. Why don't we see any signs of it anywhere? The answers to that are: Well, there isn't. We don't see signs of civilized life with our increasingly powerful measurement apparatus, because life simply doesn't evolve, life itself. That's why we don't see some life.


There is something very rare about the Earth, when life here evolved. But when we look at the Earth and when we look at extrasolar planets, we don't see any reason why that should be true. In fact, we see organic aminoacids in space dust and asteroids and so on. And we know asteroids cross-pollinate, for example there is asteroids here from Mars, bits of Earth is going to Mars, etc. So there is quite a lot of reason to believe that the basic building blocks of life have spread widely.


So, in my view, and I think it is the only view you can take so far until more data comes in,

  • there is something very unstable about civilization,
  • there is something very unstable about technologically advanced civilization, that means it doesn't go on for long.


And I think the answer to that is the very rapid competition, if you like, a lightspeed competition that occurs when you wire up the world to itself. And that very rapid competition can have two phases:

  1. It can produce very robust Artificial Intelligences
  2. that it then couples with their states.

You can see that panning out in the United States and China.

As each erupt,

  • those are going to take those two forces and are eventually taking all the market,
  • and the rapid competition between them with the backing and support of the states behind them,
  • and the exacerbation of the commercial competition and the political competition,
  • linked to uncontrollable desire for growth in Artificial Intelligence capacity,
  • leading to very severe conflict or stultification.


There are interesting trajectories in different ways, but that takes too long to describe.

So I think that's the biggest threat,

  • it is geopolitical competition removing what otherwise might have been sensible human controls on the development of Artificial Intelligence.
  • that geopolitical competition, harnessed by, and itself harnessing the largest Artificial Intelligence companies, to ratchet up a process which human beings can no longer control.
    • Not in the sense of there being killer robots although, of course, Google is outputting its AI in drones, and so on. So yeah, there are killer robots.
    • Not in this classic dystopian sense, but rather in a way that comes from understanding how human institutions behave, which is,
      • institutions built on competition and
      • growing their size and
      • dominating markets, etc.,
      • take any advantage they get,
      • and will continue to ratchet up competition
    • and everything they produce has that DNA in it.


And that is where we are headed. And that is a severe threat to human beings in general and all businesses. But, perhaps the answer to that threat is, people understand computer security, defensive computer security in particular, trying to work out what to do about it.


(Zeit 18:22)

6. Was sind heute die grš§ten Bedrohungen fŸr Unternehmen und Regierungen?

Ich meine, Sie hatten einige sehr gute Redner, die Ÿber die sozusagen praktische alltŠgliche Computersicherheit in dieser Branche sprachen. Also werde ich das nicht tun, wahrscheinlich kann ich das auch nicht gut.

WikiLeaks hat [als Konzept] ein Bedrohungsmodell, das Ÿberaus ... das ein Modell sehr hoher Bedrohung ist. In der Tat absurd. Die britische Regierung gab bis Mitte 2015 zu, dass allein ein Ministerium [department] 12 Millionen Pfund ausgegeben hatte, um mich zu beschatten und zu verfolgen - es war sehr peinlich. Als Reaktion darauf stuften sie das Haushaltsbudget als geheim ein, sodass die Budgetzahlen nicht veršffentlicht wurden. Sie sind sicherlich auch fŸr andere nicht freigegeben worden. Also - eine Umgebung mit hohem Bedrohungsniveau.

Es ist wohl sehr interessant, mit welchen Mitteln sie mit dieser Umgebung [Wikileaks] fertig werden. Aber sie sind in gewisser Weise einzigartig fŸr kleine bis mittelgro§e Organisationen, die auf hšchster Ebene tŠtig sind. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob es andere als uns gibt. Ich nehme an, dass es einige UnabhŠngigkeitsgruppen und terroristische Organisationen gibt. Aber auf der Terrorseite ist es offensichtlich ein ganz anderes Spiel.

Endliche Lebensdauer von Zivilisationen

Aber wir haben eine viel grš§ere Bedrohung, und die zielt auf alle. Und ich sehe es so: Zu der Zeit, als das Los Alamos-Projekt, Physik, westliche Physik, harmonisiert [vereinheitlicht] wurde, ... Weil man die verschiedenen physikalischen Traditionen aus Europa, die fŸhrenden Persšnlichkeiten, in die Vereinigten Staaten und nach Los Alamos brachte, musste man eine Harmonisierung von Nomenklatur und VerstŠndnis herbeifŸhren. Und diese Leute verteilten sich dann. Einer dieser Leute war Enrico Fermi, ein italienischer Physiker, ein sehr interessanter Mann.

Eines Nachts war Enrico Fermi mit einigen seiner Physikerfreunde in Los Alamos unterwegs, und er sah zu den Sternen auf und sagte: "Wo sind sie alle?" Also - man wird jetzt einwenig ausflippen, denn ja, ich bringe die Aliens in diesen Teil des GesprŠchs, um diese seine Frage zu beantworten. Seine Frage ging sehr tief: Es scheint keine [Aliens] zu geben, und mit "scheint" meine ich, dass es keine physischen Anzeichen gibt, die wir empfangen kšnnten, Anzeichen wie die, welche uns erkennen lassen, was mit Sternen geschieht, wie sie ihre Energie bestŠndig abkochen und in den Weltraum abstrahlen. Wir hšren keine Funksignale, wir sehen nichts von zivilisiertem Leben. Und doch hat die planetare Astrophysik in den letzten zehn Jahren gezeigt, dass es zehntausende extrasolare Planeten gibt. Wir haben sie wirklich einzeln, jeden fŸr sich entdeckt. Und daraus kann man die Wahrscheinlichkeiten fŸr die Existenz von erdŠhnlichen Planeten ableiten. Da ergibt sich eine riesige Zahl: Hunderte von Millionen, vielleicht Milliarden allein in unserer Milchstra§e.

Dann stellt sich die Frage: Wo ist das zivilisierte Leben, warum sehen wir es nicht? Warum sehen wir nirgendwo Anzeichen dafŸr? Die Antworten darauf sind: Nun, es gibt keine. Wir sehen mit unseren immer leistungsfŠhigeren MessgerŠten keine Anzeichen von zivilisiertem Leben, weil sich das Leben einfach nicht entwickelt, das Leben selbst. Deshalb sehen wir kein Leben.

Die Erde erwarb sich etwas sehr Seltenes, als sich das Leben hier entwickelte. Aber wenn wir auf die Erde und auf extrasolare Planeten schauen, sehen wir keinen Grund, warum das so sein sollte. In der Tat sehen wir organische AminosŠuren in Weltraumstaub und Asteroiden und so weiter. Und wir wissen, dass Planeten sich Ÿber Asteroiden gegenseitig bestŠuben. Zum Beispiel gibt es hier Asteroiden vom Mars, umgekehrt wandern Teile der Erde zum Mars, usw. Es gibt also ziemlich viele GrŸnde zu glauben, dass sich die Grundbausteine des Lebens weit verbreitet haben.

Meiner Ansicht nach ist dies die einzige Sichtweise, die man bis zum Eingang weiterer Daten einnehmen kann:

  • Die Zivilisation hat etwas sehr Instabiles.
  • Die technologisch fortgeschrittene Zivilisation hat etwas sehr Instabiles, das hei§t, sie hat keine lange Lebensdauer.

Und ich denke, der Grund dafŸr ist der sehr rapide Wettbewerb, man kšnnte sagen: ein Wettbewerb mit Lichtgeschwindigkeit, der in Gang gesetzt wird, wenn man die Welt mit sich selbst verbindet. Und dieser sehr schnelle Wettbewerb kann zwei Phasen haben.

  1. Er kann sehr robuste kŸnstliche Intelligenzen [KIs] hervorbringen,
  2. die er [der Wettbewerb] dann mit ihren [der KIs] Staaten koppelt.

Man kann sehen, wie sich das in den Vereinigten Staaten und China entwickelt.

In diesem eruptiven Prozess [sehen wir, wie]

  • diese [KIs] diese beiden mŠchtigen Staaten Ÿbernehmen und schlie§lich den gesamten Markt erobern werden,
  • der rapide Wettbewerb zwischen ihnen [den KIs] mit den Staaten hinter ihnen und mit der UnterstŸtzung der Staaten,
  • die VerschŠrfung des kommerziellen und politischen Wettbewerbs,
  • verbunden mit dem unkontrollierbaren Verlangen nach wachsender LeistungsfŠhigkeit der kŸnstlichen Intelligenz
  • zu sehr schweren Konflikten oder VerkŸmmerung fŸhren wird.

Es gibt da interessante Entwicklungswege, aber die Beschreibung dauert jetzt zu lange.

Ich denke, das ist die grš§te Bedrohung,

  • der geopolitische Wettbewerb, der die ansonsten vernŸnftige menschliche Kontrolle Ÿber die Entwicklung der kŸnstlichen Intelligenz beseitigt,
  • dieser geopolitische Wettbewerb, der von den grš§ten Unternehmen auf dem Gebiet der kŸnstlichen Intelligenz zugleich genutzt wird und der sie [die Unternehmen] sich selbst zunutze macht, der beschleunigt einen Prozess, den die Menschen nicht mehr kontrollieren kšnnen.

Es gibt kŸnstliche Intelligenz zwar nicht in der Form von Killerrobotern, obwohl natŸrlich Google seine KI in Drohnen herausgibt, und so weiter. Also ja, es gibt Killerroboter, aber nicht in diesem klassischen dystopischen Sinne. Man erkennt sie erst, wenn man das Verhalten menschlicher Institutionen untersucht, also Institutionen

  • die auf Wettbewerb aufgebaut sind,
  • in ihrer Grš§e wachsen,
  • MŠrkte beherrschen,
  • jeden Vorteil nutzen, der sich bietet,
  • und fortwŠhrend den Wettbewerb anheizen.

Alles, was sie produzieren, trŠgt diese DNA in sich.

Und darauf steuern wir zu - was eine ernsthafte Bedrohung fŸr die Menschen im allgemeinen und die gesamte GeschŠftswelt ist. Aber vielleicht ist die Antwort auf diese Bedrohung, dass die Leute Computersicherheit verstehen, insbesondere defensive Computersicherheit, und [auf diese Weise] daran arbeiten, was man dagegen unternehmen kann.

(Time 18:22)

7. Borders

What is your view on cyber warfare as an offensive role, as a retaliatory action?

Nation States have not been around that long. Most people don't understand that. The Westphalian system has only been around 400 years and in fact most nations - not states, but nations - communities of people - were not even in the Westphalian system for a long time.


Now you can think about why the Westphalian system, the nation state system developed.

  • I think it is essentially that technology, including speed of transport, letters, radio communications etc. meant that a center of organization attracted smaller groups of organizations to it.
  • And they grew and grew and grew, and kept growing until they hit the boundaries of others also doing the same.
  • And then there was conflict and then borders were constructed (well, unless there were natural borders) that arose as a result out of trying to dampen down the expanse of that conflict. Ok.


There is clear physical reason why that arose. It's a geographical conflict, and geographical basically means two-dimensional spatial conflict. But the Internet has no two-dimensional spatial nature. So instead, what you see with the conflicts that occur through Internet based organizations and states increasingly moving on the Internet, is a kind of interdigitization conflict. There is no border and it's 220 milliseconds from New York to Nairobi. So why would there ever be peace in such a scenario. There is no border of peace, within which there is greater cooperation. That's not easy to construct.


Now, with cryptography, to the degree that it is well engineered, you can create some kind of borders, in fact that is what all institutions that are surviving on the Internet, and archaic international space, are doing. They are creating their own borders using cryptography. But the size of the attack-surface for any decent-size organization and the number of people and different types of hardware and software that has to pull inside itself means that that is very hard to establish. And things are moving so fast that I don't think it is really possible for organizations to come up with borders that are predictable enough and stable enough to eliminate conflict.


Therefore, there will be more conflicts. They are kind of sexy, because they have a lot of power and they conform to certain classical human models that were culturally absorbed over the last, at least a few hundred years, and a notion of a well-defined cultural Other. But I think they are small players, really small players in this game, as it goes forward.


You look at what Google and ? and Tencent and Amazon and Facebook are doing. In their basically mass-opencut harvesting of the knowledge of humankind, as we express it when we communicate with each other. Some people do on Facebook or upload YouTube videos or deals between different companies to get hold of the other.


That classical model - which people in academia have called surveillance capitalism, namely you acquire capital through surveillance, the capital is the data, and then you sell it to advertisers, basically. That has changed, now. It's really a very very interesting and important and severe economic change, which is:

  • to take the surveillance capitalism as a model and transform it instead into a model that does not yet have a name, but
  • record the AI-model, which is to use patented techniques which Google and others have done to provide enticing services to get hold of data and then using a vast reservoir,
  • train other Artificial Intelligence of a different kind, and
  • thereby
    • replacing not just intermediating sectors, which, most things you do on the Intenet's more efficient intermediations, but
    • to actually take over the transport sector, or
    • to create whole new sectors.


Even just the transport sector alone - this is worth trillions of Dollars more than the advertising, intermediation sector.


And to be a player in that game you have to have the vast reservoirs of data. And Europe doesn't even have one! It's incredible. It could have perhaps struggled forth with one.

  • But of course AI companies in the UK have mainly been bought out by US companies.
  • Similar with Germany.
  • I am not sure whether China has been buying up European companies.


But, if you look at things [like] the European privacy legislation and the tradition of privacy - not so much in the UK - but emanating from Germany and Germanic Europe culturally, while it's kind of dear to me as someone who understands about the importance of privacy. It has meant that a European company has not been able to emerge - although I think there is other reasons as well, why it hasn't - that

  • could harness all the data of Europe,
  • pull it together and
  • use that to train Artifical Intelligences in the way Chinese and American companies have.


(Zeit 18:22)

7. Grenzen

Was halten Sie von Cyber Warfare als Angriffsmethode, als Vergeltungsma§nahme?

Nationalstaaten gibt es noch nicht so lange. Die meisten Leute verstehen das nicht. Das westfŠlische System besteht erst seit rund 400 Jahren, und tatsŠchlich waren die meisten Nationen - nicht Staaten, sondern Nationen, Gemeinschaften von Menschen - lange Zeit nicht einmal im westfŠlischen System. [Anm. des †bers.: Nach diesem Konzept sind Staaten nicht nur die rechtlichen Monopolisten des Krieges, sondern auch die faktischen Monopolisten der FŠhigkeit zur KriegfŸhrung. Quelle Wikipedia]

Nun kann man darŸber nachdenken, warum das WestphŠlische System, das System der Nationalstaaten entstand.

  • Ich denke, es ist im Wesentlichen so, dass Technologie, einschlie§lich Transportgeschwindigkeit, Briefe, Funkkommunikation usw., dazu fŸhrte, dass ein Organisationszentrum kleinere Gruppen von Organisationen anlockte.
  • Und sie wuchsen und wuchsen, bis sie an die Grenzen anderer stie§en, die das auch taten.
  • Und dann gab es Konflikte, es wurden Grenzen konstruiert (nun, es sei denn, es gab natŸrliche Grenzen), die sich aus dem Versuch ergaben, die Ausdehnung dieses Konflikts zu dŠmpfen. Gut.

Es gibt eindeutige reale GrŸnde dafŸr. Es ist ein geografischer Konflikt, und "geografisch" bedeutet im Grunde zweidimensionaler rŠumlicher Konflikt. Das Internet hat jedoch keinen zweidimensionalen rŠumlichen Charakter. Stattdessen ist das, was man bei den Konflikten sieht, die durch internetbasierte Organisationen und Staaten auftreten, die sich zunehmend im Internet bewegen, eine Art Interdigitalisierungskonflikt. Es gibt keine Grenze und es sind 220 Millisekunden von New York nach Nairobi. Warum sollte es in einem solchen Szenario jemals Frieden geben? Es gibt keine Friedensgrenze, innerhalb derer eine engere Zusammenarbeit besteht. Die ist nicht einfach zu konstruieren.

Mit der Kryptographie kšnnen Sie nun, soweit sie technisch ausgereift ist, eine Art Grenze schaffen. Genau das tun alle Institutionen, die im Internet und im archaischen internationalen Raum Ÿberleben. Sie schaffen mit Kryptografie ihre eigenen Grenzen. Aber die Grš§e der AngriffsflŠche fŸr Unternehmen mit angemessener Grš§e und die Anzahl der Personen und der verschiedenen Arten von Hardware und Software, die in sich hineingezogen werden mŸssen, bedeutet, dass dies sehr schwer aufzubauen ist. Und die Dinge bewegen sich so schnell, dass ich nicht glaube, dass es Unternehmen wirklich mšglich ist, Grenzen zu finden, die vorhersehbar und stabil genug sind, um Konflikte zu beseitigen.

Daher wird es mehr Konflikte geben. Sie sind sexy, weil sie eine Menge Energie haben und bestimmten klassischen menschlichen Vorstellungen entsprechen, die in den letzten, mindestens paar hundert Jahren kulturell aufgegriffen wurden, sowie dem Gedanken eines genau definierten kulturellen Anderen. Aber ich denke, sie sind kleine Spieler, wirklich kleine Spieler in diesem Spiel, wie es weitergeht.

Sehen wir uns an, was Google und ? und Tencent und Amazon und Facebook machen bei ihrer im Grunde genommen massenhaften Tagebau-Ernte des Wissens der Menschheit, wie wir es ausdrŸcken, wenn wir miteinander kommunizieren. Einige Leute benutzen Facebook oder YouTube-Videos fŸr den Handel mit verschiedenen Firmen, um die anderen zu erreichen.

Dieses klassische Modell - das in der Wissenschaft als †berwachungskapitalismus bezeichnet wird, d.h. man erwirbt Kapital durch †berwachung -das Kapital sind die Daten-, und man verkauft es im Grunde genommen an Werbekunden. Das hat sich jetzt geŠndert. Es ist wirklich ein sehr sehr interessanter und wichtiger und schwerwiegender wirtschaftlicher Wandel, nŠmlich:

  • den †berwachungskapitalismus als Modell zu nehmen und ihn stattdessen in ein Modell zu verwandeln, das noch keinen Namen hat ...,
  • bei dem patentierte Techniken zum Einsatz kommen, mit denen Google und andere Unternehmen verlockende Dienste bereitstellen, um Daten zu erfassen und anschlie§end ein riesiges Reservoir zu nutzen,
  • andere kŸnstliche Intelligenz anderer Art trainieren und damit
    • nicht nur zwischengeschaltete Sektoren ersetzen - die meisten Dinge kann man auf den effizienteren Zwischenschaltungen des Internet tun, sondern
    • den Transportsektor tatsŠchlich zu Ÿbernehmen, oder
    • ganz neue Sektoren zu schaffen.

(Time 25:25)

8. New totalitarianism

ID theft is on the rise, why is this area increasingly attractive to criminals?

It's an interesting question. I think, you know, the answer is not terribly interesting and a bit obvious, which is, vast databases of IDs are economically interesting to institutions for other reasons. And the centralization of those vast databases then makes the marginal cost of stealing each ID lower, and the globalization of principally commerce, means, you can use IDs in more places.


But, let's kind of pull back and look at it at a more philosophical perspective.

  • I say, this generation -well maybe our generation- been born now, very shortly in most countries and has already happened in China, most European countries and the United States, is the last free generation.
  • You were born and either immediately or within, say a year, you are known globally. Your identity in one form or another, as a result of coming from your idiotic parents, plastering your name and photos on Facebook, or as a result of insurance applications, passport applications, transport on airlines, etc., you are known to all the world's major powers, all the world's major state powers, and all the world's major commercial powers.


That's a very different situation for individuals to be in, than they have previously been. That a small child now in some sense has to negotiate its relationship with all the world's major powers. Of course, in practice, it can't do anything. Its parents are not managing that negotiation. It puts us, I think, in a very different position, in a sense that very few, in fact maybe only a few people in this audience, very technically capable people, are able to live apart, to choose to live apart, to choose to go their own way. They MUST be part of not only the state, but the major state-like corporations, so the powerful, they may as well be states, and not just their own state, but other states as well.


That's a significant cultural change for humanity. It smells a bit like totalitarianism in some way. Obviously the world is different. But there is some feeling about it, which is totalitarian.

  • So what is the answer for nearly everyone in its inescapble conclusion?
  • So is the answer that we all have to be part of the state, you have to be part of managing the ongoing evolution of our cultural, national, commercial, international structures, because we can't escape them?


(Time 29:11)

9. Lies

What is your view on the media coverage of your activities?

Well, I mean (laughs), you know journalists have one of the lowest approval ratings of all professions. The last study in the United States was about 25%. I think, lawyers are slightly lower. Congressmen are way lower. And just about everyone else is higher. Why is that? It's a sad thing, it's a really sad thing. As someone who loves to document how human civilization actually works, we are in constant warfare with those people who are trying to distort the understanding of how human beings actually behave, including distortions by proxy, which is to come up with nonsense about WikiLeaks or me.


I mean there has been, there is a lot of amazing plots that we have uncovered in one form or another. I think my favourite allegation is that I am a cat torturer. No seriously, AFP (Agence France Presse) put that everywhere. It made it even into the New York Times. I don't really know where to start for people who are not familiar with this kind of disgusting machine that the media is, and how it works.


Perhaps it's enough to say that most human wars have come about as a result of lies. And that seems absolutely clear in democracies. Democracies have to be lied into war. It is a very serious ongoing problem. It resulted in the deaths of millions of people over the last fifty years. And you can do a calculation: How many deaths are journalists responsible for? And I did it in the United States, because, not meaning to pick on it, but these figures for the total number of political journalists is about five thousand. It's something like 200 kills per journalist in the last twenty years. Just the US journalists alone, because they would not do their job, they would not be accurate, and because they lacked courage.


(Time 13:52)

10. Do you have any regrets about releasing sensitive information that could have endangered lives?

No. This is another one of these propaganda talking points. Not to criticize you - I know you are trying to give me something to bounce off. But the United States government had to admit under oath in the trial against Chelsea Manning in 2013 that it could not find a single instance of someone who had been physically harmed as a result of our publications to that point. Now, I should say, if you work on an industrial scale - everyone knows you work on an industrial scale - then the world is big and there is a lot of reverberating dynamics that you can never properly play out. It's the same for car manufacturers, the same for big publishers. But thus far there is no example of that happening for us.


(Time 32:55)

11 States define themselves in significant degree as having power by violating their own rules.

When you eventually leave the Embassy, do you plan to continue your activities?

Yeah, I don't know, it's a - no, I mean I do know, what I should answer in response to that question. It's an interesting diplomatic back and forth about, well, really about the - in my view- the alliance structure, the Western alliance structure between the United Kingdom and the United States. That has caused problems for many people in the U.K. for a long time in justice and related extradition cases, and quite a bit of prestige as well. Quite a bit of state pride. In both, states never liked to be forced to follow their own rules. In fact, they define themselves in significant degree as having power by violating their own rules. That's one of the key ways in which states demonstrate this as a primacy of their power that they are the one group having to obey its own rules. And that is true in my situation.


(Time 34:12)

12. Surveillance and strategic interception

How do you see things changing in the next 5-10 years in terms of the types of cyber threats?

In the detainee period it's hard to predict and that's the big problem. I don't see the National Security Agency (NSA), GCHQ, Five Eyes, DGSE France a bit, Russia a bit, China mostly domestically, have been engaged in mass surveillance and the Five Eyes countries for, well serious computational mass surveillance, about twenty years. That is something - on such scale, that it strategically affects the development of human civilization. In fact, it's called strategic interception for exactly that reason.


Now, strategic interception is slowly being degraded. And that was a very important thing to do, because - and I guess some people can't see the reasons - but as the majority of the world's population threw itself onto the Internet, we merged our human societies with the Internet. So the result is that, whatever the security structure of the Internet, our human societies also became part of that. And that structure was in part mass strategic interception.


I worked on this for years, many other people as well, and we had a really big hit in 2013 with Edward Snowden's revelations that smashed that into the consciousness - not of the average person, I think that was a negative actually, because they all became paranoid about what they were saying and became fearful and conformist - that we smashed that into the minds of engineers.


And engineers thereby felt enobled that they were part of the flow of human destiny by including encryption into the communications protocols. So that has checked a very dangerous development. And we are left then with the other dangerous developments of which some are the ones that I described. I don't think that now and perhaps in the next three years we are going to see computer hacking at scale. People talk about it as if it is happening at scale at the moment. It is not happening at scale, not compared to strategic interception. But the AI'ification of computer hacking is something that will happen at scale, because we are automating it.


Now, within AI - how you train AIs for discrete problems, computer hacking, many aspects of it is a discrete problem. There has not been significant progress on it, in my view. But there has been enormous progress on how you can map through a space which is in between a fluid problem and a discrete problem.


An example of the space like that is the Game of Go!. That's a very good example for space, where each step in Go is discrete, but you have got enough pieces and enough board, that it almost starts to become a fluid.


When you assemble all the computer hacking techniques together, there is so many, and so many targets, that now you are starting to look like - now you have a search space that starts to look more like a fluid. And these search spaces we can increasingly conquer. And when you have very large computer programs, and I suppose when you fuse large computer programs, if they are large enough, you have enough discrete chinks in the attack surface, that altogether they are more like a fluid.


So I think inevitably we are going to see this AI'ification of computer hacking attacks and that will then be merged with other search spaces. And those other search spaces look like what is the informational space. Because in the end what you really want is machines and human beings to make particular decisions. So you bring to bear - you acquire - as much knowledge as possible, and then map it back in onto that actors whose decisions you want to affect.


So there is a lot of talk about hybrid warfare, some of it legitimate, some of it overblown, it's actually been something that has been around for many many years. But I think this notion of bringing together different search spaces in AI that are large enough to have a semi-fluid property, means that you can then go through the search spaces of all of them together. And that can produce something very powerful and from a human perspective completely incomprehensible.


(Time 40:27)

13. Lawless UK

Is there a point at which you may decide to walk ouf of the Embassy and see what happens?

Yeah, I mean, I guess there is a - human beings are very adaptable. It is their best quality and their worst quality. They adapt to doing nasty things. They adapt to being on the receiving end of injustice, and they cease complaining about it.


The real question is: When, not whether, but when the UK government will follow its treaties that it has signed up to.


If we look in my particular situation, well, yes, everyone understands there is a vast political and geopolitical dynamic that is intimitely connected with the United States. But it is instrumentalized in practice by UK intelligence services and police, who will physically arrest me and hold me for whatever the US wants to do with me. So, what is the excuse to actually do that, to enable those budget expense. The excuse is, in a case that I was never charged for, the extradition order has already been dropped where I repeatedly won. They say they are going to keep around the warrant, the UK altered the warrant for the Swedish extradition which I won. They are going to keep around that warrant despite me winning that. Because I came in here and perhaps they might want to, they haven't, but they might want to charge me with a bail violation. This is the technical excuse.


They haven't. Twice the UK courts have refused to do so. Why - because if you move your house-arrest location to pursue a parallel legal process, a higher legal process, which is an asylum application, that's not a bail violation. OK. What if it was. What if you disagree with the analysis and say, there is a bail violation. Well, OK. Even before I came into this embassy, and applied for asylum, which is everyone's right, everyone in this audience, if you are generally being persecuted, even before I came into this embassy, you add up the time in prison under very gruelling house arrest for eighteen months, I have already done three times the maximum amount of time under UK sentencing legislation. The UK sentencing legislation values house arrest at 50% of prison time. That's the law.


So, not only is this a bogus warrant that has no purpose. If you, as the judge did a couple of weeks ago, say, well, maybe if he came to court I might want to charge him. That is why we need to keep that warrant around. OK. But if that occurred, there could be no possible prison time, because I have already served more than three times the maximum possible prison time even before I was awarded asylum. If you include the time in the embassy, which you should, because the UN has assessed that if you legally block someone from leaving the country, that is a form of detention. That would be ten times the amount.


So the real question is, when is the UK government going to uphold the treaty obligations that it has signed and uphold basic justice principles within UK law.


(Time 43:56)

14. Transparency of intelligence agencies

Governments are meeting with private sector companies to showcase their offensive cyber capabilities in secret. Is this something that should worry the public?

We have published a series - the "Spy Files" that documented these conferences, private-public conferences where the different mass surveillance vendors and target-hacking vendors, like GAMMAGroup present their wares. And actually, there is quite a lot to be gleamed from that.


Whenever you talk about a big, well a sizable industrial sector, it is impossible to really hide its shadows, now. You always see the shadow. You do not always see the thing, but -you know- a little shadow is squeaking out somewhere. And through that you can map out some of the contours. That is an indirect enough process and a conflict-free enough process that it is kind of hard to get the public really involved in it.


We had done all that for example before the Edward Snowden publication.The conflict in the Edward Snowden publications is what really drew people in, because it is not simply that what WikiLeaks was saying was important, what Greenwald was saying was important, and what the President of the United States was saying was important.


Look, this is an outrageous situation. So power is concerned about it, so therefore in itself it must be powerful. Yeah, I think it impinges on a deeper question which is:

  • The world is complex.
  • How much of it do you need to know about directly and
  • how much of it can you delegate?


Now, I love the idea of intelligence agencies. I am a fan of the idea of intelligence agencies, because it has the word "intelligence" in it. And I like that people know things. And may be they might make sensible decisions if they know things. Intelligence agencies when they are acting their best, reduce fear and reduce paranoia, because if there is something you don't know, hype merchants can fill this black box with the most terrifying possibility of what might be in there. But if you really do know another state's weapons systems and capacities, etc., it might reassure you that actually they are not as bad as the most catastrophic scenario. And so they can actually contribute to world's peace in that way.


The problem is: it is a principal-agent dilemma. This is a classical problem when dealing, say, with lawyers. You hire a lawyer to work for you and represent you and act in your interest. But of course, the lawyer is also always trying to act in their own interest and inject their own interest into your equation. So how do you police that? How do you police it with lawyers? Well, you police it by constantly looking at their work and try to do random samples, I guess, introspecting into their work to see, if the claims made are justified.


That is the fundamental problem with intelligence agencies, and it's the fundamental problem with delegation of assessment about how the world is working. You can't completely delegate. You can't delegate, because human beings inevitably are corrupt and cut corners and act in their own interest and not of the person who has appointed them. And in that case, for example, in the UK intelligence services, which have an important role, every state needs something like an intelligence service to protect it from interference by other states. But without insight, deep insight into how those organizations are acting, they go astray.


So intelligence agencies must be transparent. It is vital that they are transparent. And because they are deeply interconnected with industry, some of that transparency is provided by enforcing transparency on the industry itself, including at these conferences.


(Time 40:30)

15. Intelligent evil dust

What do you believe is the best way of tackling privacy by the Internet of Things?

I mean, (laughs!) it's a big dilemma. One of our lawyers - of course we have to educate them about, you know, different kinds of surveillance techniques - but they said:

"God dammit, you know what we should do, we should like buy up some chunk of Madagaskar, or Patagonia, or somewhere, and just ban every electronic device promised, like a high intensity radio wave-free area, because of that constant buffetting that we have by principally commercial organizations, trying to harvest our interactions with the world."


That's the principal economic model, that all these AI companies have had and the traditional surveillance capitalism companies have had.


And the number of degrees of interaction - so what do I mean by that - if you kind of imagine the space of interactions,

  • the number of types of interactions,
  • frequencies of interaction between you and everything else in this space


is dramatically increasing. And in a way you can consider each one of these degrees of freedom is kind of like a triangulation. So, to triangulate something into two-dimensional space, okay, you just need two directions, two-directional signals.


  • But we are giving off, if someone who is using a mobile phone, for example, is probably giving off a couple of hundred of these on average per second. Something like that. Maybe not quite as many. Maybe a dozen, perhaps.
  • But, well, if you do video, it's vast amounts more.


So anyway. Between dozens and hundreds of measurements we are emanating constantly. So, if you click those together you can effectively triangulate someones activities and behaviour. And I don't think by chopping at many of them or by adding kind of ? cover that you can make that much of a difference. And increasingly it is less.


In terms of the Internet of Things:

There is research prototypes now, which -I assume- being used by intelligence agencies are very small electronic circuits, that you can just put in paper or put in paint on the walls that are powered by the GSM stations, and they operate as the GSM radio wave passes through them. That gives them enough power for various small times to do things. Obviously, that tendency is going to continue.


It's not like the Internet of Things, it's like intelligent evil dust, scattered everywhere, like confetti, in everything.


16. Threatening power

So I think it is increasingly hard for human beings to work out how to deal with that. The only way I can see is that - we have got to securitize this problem. The computer security industry has been engaged in outrageous securitization for a long period of time, hyping up threats etc. I get how the game is played. It needs to be securitizing in a different way. We need to securitize the - by securitize I mean, you turn something into a threat and thereby change behaviour or get economic gain from it.


We need to securitize the threat to elites by these developments, the people who run these companies, that it's a threat to them; it's a threat to the most powerful people in society. Until we eliminate the notion that there is a place that powerful people can hide from, or skilled people can hide from this phenomenon. And that's the way to get all those people who have the ability to make a difference make a difference.



Version: 22.11.2018

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