Julian Assange: the fugitive
Julian
Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for six months. In a
rare interview, we ask the WikiLeaks founder about reports of illness,
paranoia – and if he'll ever come out
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Julian Assange: 'I suppose it’s quite nice that people are worried about me.’ Photograph: Gian Paul Lozza for the Guardian
The Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge looks rather lavish from
the street, but inside it's not much bigger than a family apartment.
The armed police guard outside is reported to cost £12,000 a day, but I
can see only three officers, all of whom look supremely bored. Christmas
shoppers heading for Harrods next door bustle by, indifferent or
oblivious to the fact that they pass within feet of one of the world's
most famous fugitives.
It's almost six months since Julian Assange took refuge in the embassy, and a state of affairs that was at first sensational is slowly becoming surreal. Ecuador has granted its guest formal asylum, but the WikiLeaks
founder can't get as far as Harrods, let alone to South America,
because the moment he leaves the embassy, he will be arrested – even if
he comes out in a diplomatic bag or handcuffed to the ambassador – and
extradited to Sweden
to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. Assange says he'll
happily go to Stockholm, providing the Swedish government guarantees
he won't then be extradited on to the US, where he fears he will be
tried for espionage. Stockholm says no guarantee can be given, because
that decision would lie with the courts. And so the weeks have stretched
into months, and may yet stretch on into years.
Making the whole
arrangement even stranger are the elements of normality. A receptionist
buzzes me in and checks my ID, and then a businesslike young woman,
Assange's assistant, leads me through into a standard-issue meeting
room, where a young man who has something to do with publicity at
Assange's publishers is sitting in front of a laptop. There are pieces
of camera equipment and a tripod; someone suggests coffee. It all looks
and feels like an ordinary interview.
But when Assange appears, he
seems more like an in-patient than an interviewee, his opening words
slow and hesitant, the voice so cracked as to be barely audible. If you
have ever visited someone convalescing after a breakdown, his demeanour
would be instantly recognisable. Admirers cast him as the new Jason
Bourne, but in these first few minutes I worry he may be heading more
towards Miss Havisham.
Assange tells me he sees visitors most
days, but I'm not sure how long it was since a stranger was here, so I
ask if this feels uncomfortable. "No, I look forward to the company.
And, in some cases, the adversary." His gaze flickers coolly. "We'll see
which." He shrugs off recent press reports of a chronic lung infection,
but says: "I suppose it's quite nice, though, actually, that people are
worried about me." Former hostages often talk about what it meant to
hear their name on the radio and know the outside world was still
thinking of them. Have the reports of his health held something similar
for him? "Absolutely. Though I felt that much more keenly when I was in
prison."
Assange spent 10 days in jail in December 2010, before
being bailed to the stately home of a supporter in Suffolk. There, he
was free to come and go in daylight hours, yet he says he felt more in
captivity then than he does now. "During the period of house arrest, I
had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for
someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that
is absolutely intolerable. And I had to go to the police at a specific
time every day – every day – Christmas Day, New Year's Day – for over
550 days in a row." His voice is warming now, barbed with indignation.
"One minute late would mean being placed into prison immediately."
Despite being even more confined here, he's now the author of his own
confinement, so he feels freer?
"Precisely."
And now he is the author of a new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom And The Future Of The Internet.
Based on conversations and interviews with three other cypherpunks –
internet activists fighting for online privacy – it warns that we are
sleepwalking towards a "new transnational dystopia". Its tone is
portentous – "The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been
transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we
have ever seen" – and its target audience anyone who has ever gone
online or used a mobile phone.
"The last 10 years have seen a
revolution in interception technology, where we have gone from tactical
interception to strategic interception," he explains. "Tactical
interception is the one that we are all familiar with, where particular
individuals become of interest to the state or its friends: activists,
drug dealers, and so on. Their phones are intercepted, their email
communication is intercepted, their friends are intercepted, and so on.
We've gone from that situation to strategic interception, where
everything flowing out of or into a country – and for some countries
domestically as well – is intercepted and stored permanently.
Permanently. It's more efficient to take and store everything than it is
to work out who you want to intercept."
The change is partly down
to economies of scale: interception costs have been halving every two
years, whereas the human population has been doubling only every 20. "So
we've now reached this critical juncture where it is possible to
intercept everyone – every SMS, every email, every mobile phone call –
and store it and search it for a nominal fee by governmental standards.
A kit produced in South Africa can store and index all
telecommunications traffic in and out of a medium-sized nation for $10m a
year." And the public has no idea, due largely to a powerful lobby
dedicated to keeping it in the dark, and partly to the legal and
technological complexity. So we spend our days actively assisting the
state's theft of private information about us, by putting it all online.
"The
penetration of the Stasi in East Germany is reported to be up to 10% of
the population – one in 10 at some stage acted as informers – but the
penetration of Facebook in countries like Iceland is 88%, and those
people are informing much more frequently and in much more detail than
they ever were in the Stasi. And they're not even getting paid to do it!
They're doing it because they feel they'll be excluded from social
opportunities otherwise. So we're now in this unique position where we
have all the ingredients for a turnkey totalitarian state."
In
this dystopian future, Assange sees only one way to protect ourselves:
cryptography. Just as handwashing was once a novelty that became part of
everyday life, and crucial to protecting our health, so, too, will we
have to get used to encrypting our online activity. "A well-defined
mathematical algorithm can encrypt something quickly, but to decrypt it
would take billions of years – or trillions of dollars' worth of
electricity to drive the computer. So cryptography is the essential
building block of independence for organizations on the internet, just
like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because
otherwise one state just takes over another. There is no other way for
our intellectual life to gain proper independence from the
security guards of the world, the people who control physical reality."
Assange
talks in the manner of a man who has worked out that the Earth is
round, while everyone else is lumbering on under the impression that it
is flat. It makes you sit up and listen, but raises two doubts about how
to judge his thesis. There's no debate that Assange knows more about
the subject than almost anyone alive, and the case he makes is both
compelling and scary. But there's a question mark over his own
credentials as a crusader against abuses of power, and another over his
frame of mind. After all the dramas of the last two and a half years,
it's hard to read his book without wondering, is Assange a hypocrite –
and is he a reliable witness?
Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy: ‘It would be nice to go for a
walk in the woods.’ Photograph: Gian Paul Lozza for the Guardian
Prodigiously gifted, he is often described as a genius, but he has
the autodidact's tendency to come across as simultaneously credulous
and a bit slapdash. He can leap from one country to another when
characterising surveillance
practices, as if all nations were analogous, and refers to the
communications data bill currently before the UK parliament in such
alarmist terms that I didn't even recognize the legislation and thought
he must be talking about a bill I'd never heard of. "A bill promulgated
by the Queen, no less!" he emphasises, as if the government could
propose any other variety, before implying that it will give the state
the right to read every email and listen in on every mobile phone call,
which is simply not the case. It's the age-old dilemma: are we being
warned by a uniquely clear-sighted Cassandra, or by a paranoid
conspiracy theorist whose current circumstances only confirm all his
suspicions of sinister secret state forces at work?
But first, the
hypocrisy question. I say many readers will wonder why, if it's so
outrageous for the state to read our emails, it is OK for WikiLeaks to
publish confidential state correspondence.
"It's all about power,"
he replies. "And accountability. The greater the power, the more need
there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result
can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have
power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more
transparent."
Many people would say Assange himself is immensely
powerful, and should be held to a higher standard of accountability and
transparency. "I think that is correct," he agrees. So was WikiLeaks'
decision to publish Afghan informers' names unredacted an abuse of
power? Assange draws himself up and lets rip. "This is absurd
propaganda. Basic kindergarten rhetoric. There has been no official
accusation that any of our publications over a six-year period have
resulted in the deaths of a single person – a single person – and this
shows you the incredible political power of the Pentagon, that it is
able to attempt to reframe the debate in that way."
Others have
wondered how he could make a chatshow for a state-owned Moscow TV
station. "I've never worked for a Russian state-owned television
channel. That's just ridiculous – the usual propaganda rubbish." He
spells it out slowly and deliberately. "I have a TV production company,
wholly owned by me. We work in partnership with Dartmouth Films,
a London production company, to produce a 12-part TV series about
activists and thinkers from around the world. Russia Today was one
of more than 20 different media organizations that purchased a licence.
That is all." There is no one to whom he wouldn't sell a licence?
"Absolutely not. In order to go to the hospital, we must put Shell in
our car. In order to make the maximum possible impact for our sources,
we have to deal with organizations like the New York Times and the
Guardian." He pauses. "It doesn't mean we approve of these
organizations."
I try twice to ask how a campaigner for free
speech can condone Ecuador's record on press controls, but I'm not sure
he hears, because he is off into a coldly furious tirade against the
Guardian. The details of the dispute are of doubtful interest to a wider
audience, but in brief: WikiLeaks worked closely with both the Guardian
and the New York Times in 2010 to publish huge caches of confidential
documents, before falling out very badly with both. He maintains that
the Guardian broke its word and behaved disgracefully, but he seems to
have a habit of falling out with erstwhile allies. Leaving aside the two
women in Sweden who were once his admirers and now allege rape and
sexual assault, things also ended badly with Canongate, a small
publisher that paid a large advance for his ghosted autobiography, only
to have Assange pull out of the project after reading the first draft.
It went ahead and published anyway, but lost an awful lot of money.
Several staff walked out of WikiLeaks in 2010, including a close
colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who complained that Assange was
behaving "like some kind of emperor or slave trader".
It clearly
isn't news to Assange that even some of his supporters despair of an
impossible personality, and blame his problems on hubris, but he isn't
having any of it. I ask how he explains why so many relationships have
soured. "They haven't." OK, let's go through them one by one. The
relationship with Canongate…
"Oh my God!" he interrupts angrily,
raising his voice. "These people, we told them not to do that. They were
wrong to do it, to violate the author's copyright like that." Did he
ever consider giving his advance back? "Canongate owes me money. I have
not seen a single cent from this book. Canongate owes me hundreds of
thousands of pounds." But if he hasn't seen any money, it's because the
advance was deposited in Assange's lawyers' bank account, to go towards
paying their fees. Then the lawyers complained that the advance didn't
cover the fees, and Assange fell out with them, too.
"I was in a
position last year where everybody thought they could have a free kick.
They thought that because I was involved in an enormous conflict with
the United States government. The law firm was another. But those days are gone."
What
about the fracture with close colleagues at WikiLeaks? "No!" he
practically shouts. But Domscheit-Berg got so fed up with Assange that
he quit, didn't he? "No, no, no, no, no. Domscheit-Berg had a minor role
within WikiLeaks, and he was suspended by me on 25 August 2010.
Suspended." Well, that's my point – here was somebody else with whom
Assange fell out. "Be serious here! Seriously – my God. What we
are talking about here in our work is the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of people – hundreds of thousands – that we have exposed and
documented. And your question is about, did we suspend someone back in
2010?" My point was that there is a theme of his relationships turning
sour. "There is not!" he shouts.
I don't blame Assange for getting
angry. As he sees it, he's working tirelessly to expose state secrecy
and save us all from tyranny. He has paid for it with his freedom, and
fears for his life. Isn't it obvious that shadowy security forces are
trying to make him look either mad or bad, to discredit WikiLeaks?
If that's true, then his flaws are either fabricated, or neither here
nor there. But the messianic grandiosity of his self-justification is a
little disconcerting.
I ask if he has considered the possibility
that he might live in this embassy for the rest of his life. "I've
considered the possibility. But it sure beats supermax [maximum security
prison]." Does he worry about his mental health? "Only that it is nice
to go for a walk in the woods, and it's important – because I have to
look after so many people – that I am close to the peak of my
performance at all times, because we are involved in an adversarial
conflict and any misjudgment will be seized upon." Does he ever try to
work out whether he is being paranoid? "Yes. I have a lot of experience.
I mean, I have 22 years of experience." He'd rather not say to whom he
turns for emotional support, "because we are in an adversarial
conflict", but he misses his family the most. His voice slows and drops
again.
"The situation is, er, the communication situation is
difficult. Some of them have had to change their names, move location.
Because they have suffered death threats, trying to get at me. There
have been explicit proposals through US rightwing groups to target my
son, for example, to get at me. The rest of the family, having seen
that, has taken precautions in response." But it has all been worth it,
he says, because of what he's achieved.
"Changes in electoral
outcomes, contributions to revolutions in the Middle East, and the
knowledge that we have contributed towards the Iraqi people and the
Afghan people. And also the end of the Iraq war, which we had an
important contribution towards. You can look that up. It's to do with
the circumstances under which immunity was refused to US troops at the
end of 2011. The documents we'd published directly were cited by Iraqis
as a reason for discontinuing the immunity. And the US said it would
refuse to stay without continued immunity."
Assange says he can't
say anything about the allegations of rape and sexual assault for legal
reasons, but he predicts that the extradition will be dropped. The
grounds for his confidence are not clear, because in the next breath he
adds: "Sweden refuses to behave like a reasonable state. It refuses to
give a guarantee that I won't be extradited to the US." But Sweden says
the decision lies with the courts, not the government. "That is not
true," he snaps. "It is absolutely false. The government has the final
say." If he's right, and it really is as unequivocal as that, why all
the legal confusion? "Because there are enormous powers at play," he
says, heavy with exasperation. "Controversy is a result of people trying
to shift political opinion one way or another."
And so his
surreal fugitive existence continues, imprisoned in a tiny piece of
Ecuador in Knightsbridge. He has a special ultraviolet lamp to
compensate for the lack of sunlight, but uses it "with great
trepidation", having burned himself the first time he tried it. His
assistant, who may or may not be his girlfriend – she has been reported
as such, but denies it when I check – is a constant presence, and by his
account WikiLeaks continues to thrive. Reports that it has basically
imploded, undone by the dramas and rows surrounding its editor-in-chief,
are dismissed as yet more smears. The organization will have published
more than a million leaks this year, he says, and will publish
"considerably more" in 2013. I'm pretty sure he has found a way to get
rid of his electronic tag, because when I ask, he stares with a faint
gnomic smile. "Umm… I'd prefer not to comment."
Assange has been
called a lot of things – a terrorist, a visionary, a rapist, a freedom
warrior. At moments he reminds me of a charismatic cult leader but,
given his current predicament, it's hardly surprising if loyalty counts
more than critical distance in his world. The only thing I could say
with confidence is that he is a control freak. The persona he most
frequently ascribes to himself is "gentleman", a curiously courtly term
for a cypher–punk to choose, so I ask him to explain.
"What is a
gentleman? I suppose it's, you know, a nice section of Australian
culture that perhaps wouldn't be recognized in thieving metropolises
like London. The importance of being honorable, and keeping your word,
and acting like a gentleman. It's someone who has the courage of their
convictions, who doesn't bow to pressure, who doesn't exploit people who
are weaker than they are. Who acts in an honorable way."
Does that describe him? "No, but it describes an ideal I believe men should strive for."
•
Cypherpunks: Freedom And The Future Of The Internet, by Julian Assange,
is published by OR Books at £11; available exclusively from orbooks.com.
