Julian Assange: Why I founded Wikileaks

I looked at what is happening in the world today, and decided that there are too many injustices. And I would like to see it was less.

One might ask: "And what is your philosophy on this matter?". And I answer: "I do not need philosophy. The thing is my temperament. " And let's not delve further into the philosophical questions of "why I want to do it." It is enough that I want.

Figuring out how to create injustice, and that it generates, and that generates justice, I have noticed that people are essentially unchanged. Their biological inclinations and temperament have not changed for thousands of years. Therefore, we can only ask: what they are and what they know?

They have - so what resources they have, how much energy can get much they eat, etc. It is difficult to influence. But the fact that they know can affect - And nonlinear. You can say something to one person, and he will tell it to someone else, and so on.

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

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

I have decided that there are difficulties in carrying out observations and to efficiently run these observations in the distributing system to deliver this information to the people who will act on the basis of this information. It could be argued that the same Google is the most "middle" of the case of transmitting information from those people who have it to those who need it.

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

This whole process can be regarded as equity, generated by Четвёртой power (press, which affects the society). Description of the process, I made partly under the influence of my knowledge of quantum physics, studies the flows of specific types of information that lead to some changes in the system. Bottleneck - getting information that will lead to changes in the direction of justice.

From the perspective of the Fourth power, people originally receiving the information - it springs; people working and impart information - a journalist and publisher; and those acting on its reception - all people at once.

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

Technically, our first prototype was created for this unfavorable situation, when the publication of information is very difficult, and the only effective protection - anonymity, where the search for sources of information hindered (and it is still so in nats.bezopasnosti), and where the basis for this resource was a small team of trusted people.

I would say that the most important form of censorship, historically, was an economic - when to publish information is not profitable, because for her there is no market.

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

Remember, the volume of the pyramid increases as you move from top to bottom, and in this example, the number of attempts to censor also increases.

Very few people were killed, few people were exposed to legal attacks, and at the next level, there is already a huge amount of self-censorship. Self-censorship appears partly due to the fact that people do not want to be moved to the upper part of the pyramid. They do not want to experience the legitimate attacks and coercion they do not want to be killed. This prevents people act in a certain way.

There are other forms of self-censorship when people do not want to miss the good deals or promotions. They are even more important because they are still lower in the pyramid. And at the very bottom - and their most - all those people who can not read, does not have access to the media, communications, and where there is no market for the provision of such services.

We decided to deal with the two upper sections of the pyramid: the threat of violence and threats in the form of deferred action. This is in some ways the most difficult part, and in some other - the lightest.

This is the easy part, because once it is clear there is censorship or not. More because of the amount of censorship is relatively low, even if the importance of the event is high.

Initially, WikiLeaks had few friends. Although, of course, I had political ties, we did not have much support among politicians and the world did not have an audience that would watched our well-being. Therefore, we have taken a position in which the only protection of our activities was anonymity. We did not have financial protection, as well as legal and political. Our defense was purely technical.

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

Source: geektimes.ru/post/243511/