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is Filip Girardi geraldi excuse me Phillip Phillip is a former CIA counterterrorism specialists and military intelligence officer who served 19 years overseas in turkey Italy Germany and Spain he was the CIA chief of base for the Barcelona Olympics in 92 one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in 2001 he's the executive director of the Council for the national interest a Washington based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a u.s. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with what he describes as American values and interests second-rate ray mcgovern to my right your left after serving as an army intelligence officer McGovern joined the analysis division of the Central Intelligence Agency served there from the Kennedy administration to that of the first president Bush Ray was chief of the CIA's Soviet foreign policy branch in the 70s chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the presidential daily briefing for President Reagan's senior national security advisors in 2003 Ray McGovern helped create veteran veteran intelligence professionals for professionals for sanity VIP s to expose the intelligence fraud used to justify the 2003 US invasion of Iraq he protested the CIA's involvement in torture activities publicly questioned defense secretary Don Rumsfeld about misleading the American public in the run-up to the war and Gregory Copley to my left your right australian-born Copley is the president of the International Strategic Studies Association in Washington DC he serves as an advisor on strategic studies to a number of governments and leaders he's authored or co-authored 32 books on strategic and geopolitical issues history energy aviation and defense including uncivilized ation urban geopolitics in a time of chaos and and also a book called the art of victory so to begin this this issue of security or survey can the right to privacy and effective anti-terror security coexist in the digital age I'd like to start with Julian Assange you have been arguably one of the most influential people in the world on bringing forward I would say these issues these very very specific issues and we'd like to get your thoughts on the right of privacy how that is defined around the world and anti-terror security how we define that and what the relationship of those two are to each other and to this new digital world in which we live we're not hearing your audio Lynn sorry well first first of all I just there we get like thank you for putting together what is really an excellent panel I know several of the of the people on your panel and that's really quite an impressive collection look in thinking about this issue I want to take quite you know a different position perhaps than what you would expect me to have taken I have the 20 years being writing about the National Security Agency and mass surveillance and we've published even this year a lot of quite remarkable documents about the West spying policy on France and mass spying on previous presidents and on climate change and on Japan and so on but I think we should understand that the that the game for privacy is gone it's gone the mass surveillance is here to stay it is being deployed by every state that every medium sized state and above and some even some of the small states that the anglo-american Alliance which is formalized in the five eyes Intelligence arrangement which has an additional 35 states are feeding into that system is so pervasive in terms of mass surveillance of domestic and international telecommunications that while some experts can achieve practical privacy for themselves for a limited number of operations and terrorists are experts that it's it's gone for the rest of the population and we can talk about all the laws that we want and what policy should be in how society should behave and how it should work but it's gone and it will it will not come back short of a very regressive economic collapse which reduces the technological capacity of civilization the reason it will not come back is that the cost of engaging in mass surveillance is decreasing by about 50 percent every 18 months because it's the underlying costs are predicated on the costs of telecommunications moving surveillance intercepts around and computerization and storage all those costs decreasing much faster at a much faster geometric rate than the human population is increasing so in this competition between humanity and human values and mass surveillance and computerization mass surveillance and computerization is winning and it is going to continue to win at ever-increasing rate that's a reality that we have to deal with yet mr. Assange this you're essentially arguing that we have a disruptive technology that has devastated privacy if I can summarize that very quickly and yet I remember back in 1986 when I lived in Germany visiting East Berlin there was very much no sense of privacy there I mean we we have had societies where privacy pretty much you know has already been compromised by virtue of the state and that technology wasn't there I mean it was old-fashioned stuff I suppose you know you know listening devices and using networks of people and things like that what is that can you speak to that dynamic tension societies adapt in response to an understanding of the society is riddled with informants of various kinds there's very even if we if we remove ourselves from electronic surveillance by electronic surveillance if we look at the societal behavior in eastern Germany if we look at societal behavior in very conformist small isolated societies with reduced social spaces like Sweden like South Korea like Okinawa in Japan I like North Korea when you see that society dubs and it becomes everyone becomes incredibly timid they start to use code words you start to use a lot of subtext you try and sneak out your controversial views in art and so on so that's what is going to happen we are hurtling towards that kind of society when the one the one good thing about mass surveillance is that people don't realize people don't fully believe it's on it's happening to everyone here in the surveillance debates in the UK the UK government well let me first tell you how legislation really works how legislation really works is that a practice exists already and then in response to certain uncertainties about legal threats or potential prosecution legislation is introduced to codify what the practice already is and that is what has happened here in the UK in response to Edward Snowden's revelations which included documents about GCHQ now that has led not to a reform of the of mass surveillance here in the United Kingdom rather it is led to Omnibus legislation to completely legalize everything that had already occurred and in fact to expand it and during this debate about that legislation there hasn't been that much frankly two weeks ago sorry just over two weeks ago Teresa made the Home Secretary made a remarkable admission and that admission was that all UK telephone and data and eat and most emails over the last 10 years have been secretly intercepted domestically now everyone knew well experts knew about the overseas component of that information transiting the UK for those from UK citizens or from cables going in and out of the UK but there's being these domestic intercepts going on you hear this big debate in the US about the Freedom Act and the the section the Patriot Act that permits mass collection of US domestic call records it's been happening in the UK for ten years on mass it's going and it's proposed to continue it will continue that's the reality of the technology states are powerful the deep state is powerful the technology is hard to manage it is getting cheaper it's going to be here so we need to we can't think in these quaint notions of privacy and the right to privacy and that we should fight for that in some way it's gone as far as mass surveillance is conservative all we main gone so instead we need to turn our attention to what sort of society is that going to produce and are there other mechanisms to counteract the societal effect to that leads towards authoritarianism conformism conformity and heavy integration between the deep state and the rest of society that's where we are now and and I encourage people to try well I don't want to put my views on everyone but I encourage people that we've got to we've got to step ahead of the debate we've got to get on the other side of this debate where it's going and not try and hold on to values that simply are unsustainable values in the US Constitution or the European Charter these values are simply unsustainable in the face of the reality of technological change the reality of the nature of the deep state or the military-industrial complex in various states and the reality of Islamic terrorism which is legitimizing that sector and the way it is behaving and thank you Julian Gregg Copley as as a as an historian I'm curious about the intersection between the loss of privacy at the government level and the loss of privacy at the commercial level it's muammar suggesting that amazon may know more about your or my personal habits than the CIA does to what extent is McCleary defining what we used to call privacy let's let's assume that what Julian Assange just said is is right and I think I think it probably is that this you know we're we've we've passed the Rubicon here do we do you see a relationship between these two and and and then and then you see the president of Amazon buying the Washington Post and now we're into the media realm and what does this have you know how do and but it hasn't at least in the United States anyway bled into government or has it once the technology existed on this scale and capability privacy was gone and expectations of privacy should be gone it gets us back to the to the situation where we are being technology driven rather than strategy driven because we as we see with with the responses to terrorism whether we - and to it almost everything else internationally the American experience when you're a hammer everything is a nail so you use either the military to respond to every strategic situation you use surveillance to respond to questions of societal conformance the reality is though that we talk about can you get privacy in a counterterrorism environment the reality is that the prevention of terrorism should start with strategy and it shouldn't be a reactive response using the technologies available good counterterrorism staff before there is terrorism by addressing that the sources and we see of course this terrorism is often artificially generated because of government sponsorship but it uses if you like disenfranchised societies as the the soldiers of your lack of terrorism the reality is that when your is when you are forced to respond as we as Western society is today or global societies today to using surveillance as a means of reacting to or preventing tactical operations then you've already lost the battle so the reality is that the surveillance state is has nothing to having to do with it with the water prevent terrorism but the reality is that if you do have a surveillance state it will be used for everything whether it's Amazon selling books and records to tax monitoring and the like the state having found the form of coercion will not willingly surrender it then let's not forget the collaboration between for example the NSA and AT&T I mean a commercial company a government agency Philip you you looked like you wanted to jump into that conversation or was I miss reading that on your face yeah actually I wanted to respond more to what Julian would say terrorism is not going to stop or that or the tactic of terrorism is not going to stop so we can expect it no matter what responses we make to it terrorism will continue I'm not quite as pessimistic as Julian is about some other developments for example I don't think technological advances make anything inevitable they make things possible but not inevitable and I think that to a certain extent security and and private and privacy can coexist I think what we need to do as citizens of of all countries is to push back the inevitable response from bureaucracies to terrorist incidents like we've been seeing is to empower the police and the security services and this as you've noted is a false response in a way it's not the answer to what the problem is so I would say that what we have to do as citizens in various countries sitting here in this room is to insist that we restore a rule of law that we essentially say that the government has to obey a series of laws and rules that makes sense when it wants to tap my phone or look at my mail or check out my emails it has to go to a judge and and produce probable cause that I am actually involved in in supporting the terrorist group are creating an incident and I would further add there have been suggestions in the last year that when you go to that judge it's not just the judge who's going to be inclined to listen to the government's point of view you have the judge sitting there with something like an ombudsman who is not a government employee whose sole job is to represent the privacy interests of the person who's being accused so the government will have to jump through all these hurdles to be able to you know invade my privacy invade the privacy of any citizen and I think this is a common-sense approach to dressing and correcting what the government is been doing wrong certainly in the United States since the Patriot Act of 2001 and that would be my recommendation but there are fixes no we're not going to make government surveillance go away but there are ways to mitigate this and I really think this is what we should be thinking of but that's a I should say but and that's a rather Amero centric u.s. centric perspective you know for the Fourth Amendment all that sort of thing the rest of the world isn't necessarily there are you suggesting that you think that at least the United States could put the genie back in the bottle and to extend that what about other countries around the world that may claim to hold privacy as a high-value well other countries do you know fall into the same response as a United States which is essentially they make the police more powerful they make the intelligence services more powerful there whatever the specific formula for any one country and we're talking about Britain for example where invasion of privacy has been a fact of life since 1940 in these countries there has to be a consciousness by the people that this situation is out of balance that the the way that the government has been empowered is not in the interests of the average citizen and so the pushback in every country will be country specific but I think most of it those of us in this room probably share the belief that privacy is an important issue and that government has basically been intruding on that for ever since the war on terror began ever since certainly 2001 and and and that's what I would advocate if Ray one of one of the one of the things that Philip just mentioned was push back and you have been one of my heroes and push back you you you have you have been one of the most visible leaders one of the most successful leaders I would say in many ways and pushing back at least in the United States against a national security state or against the loss of privacy shall we say what's the state of that right now and where are we going and you've heard now three opinions on privacy versus the versus national security in an age of terrorism and in the digital age where do you think we're at you may have to grab your mic and hold it closer to your mouth I guess I need to be educated by people like Julian to be realistic this year is the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta well as very courageous Barons rested human rights from King John but we haven't had a requiem for that we haven't had a proper burial and so I'm confident that is not irreversible maybe that Plus Universal Declaration of Human Rights the anniversary of which is today that very gutsy later that's very gutsy Lady Eleanor Roosevelt hats off to Ellen our hats off to those barons hats off to Julian and especially it's nothing remindi
g us of the key value of privacy now what I like to do is say express a hope that Julian is wrong but having said that that might be the first time that Julia's been wrong it might in my experience so let me just address for a moment the the question of efficacy now the New York Times headline today says San Bernardino couple terrorists spoke online about such attacks in 2013 comma FBI says we know that one three years ago these two characters was speaking online comparing notes about such a terrorist attack well hello folks what does it mean that means that the advertised merits of bulk collection you know are dead I mean bulk collection doesn't do it and if there's further need for proof there it is what people have spoken about is the analysis of paralysis that comes of flooding the system with all kinds of information the by word is from Stasi collected all right well you know I have an Irish grandmother that some of you know I talk about a lot but she used always say grasp it to about shine your lows all okay and the way ed Snowden says it is this way when you collect everything you understand nothing so let's be let's be really what was the word used before let's be frank and brutal yeah let's be brutal here these systems are worthless in preventing terrorist attacks we have to recognize that by now we should know that all right now are they totally worthless nothing really good this are like fingerprints you know I mean you can probably catch the guy who does the terrorists as they did in Paris one of them fingerprints were really a terrific invention but they never stopped at the bomb they'd ever stuff a burglary of a bank okay if they if the bank robber put his fingers on the teller window we usually could get them okay after the fact so let's own up to the fact that if this stuff in Britain and heat and in the United States and elsewhere is being funded funded funded and funded with taxpayer money there might be another reason for it and for that reason I would go to Stasi Lieutenant Colonel retired would come Schmitt who was asked right after ed Snowden came out with his revelations what do you think for Scotland of those who say I have nothing to fear I'm clean and Vostok said is incredibly naive to say you have nothing so feel this is by to collect this information the only way to prevent it from being who's against it it is to prevent it from being collected in the first place so there it is folks you know there are other there are the reasons behind this and we can no longer be deceived by the notion that bulk collection of the kind that we've witnessed and that is now thanks to Ed thanks Julie and others is up in the open week you know not never if we can no longer pretend that it's it's meritorious in terms of preventing really bad things like terrorist attacks thank you thank you very well sir um Jill Julian - to the to the point of I think pretty much everything everybody has said let's let's go back to first causes or first issues these words privacy and security and particularly security although because we've been discussing privacy up to this point largely there are there are those who suggest that you know and in fact we're seeing this in the US presidential elections right now you know the way to become secure is to ban all Muslims from the United States or to make the sand of the Middle East radioactive or all this kind of inflammatory insanely destructive rhetoric and yet in I believe it was his first inaugural address it might have been as his reen AMA nation in 1936 Franklin Roosevelt famously said a necessitous man is not a free man that you can't be secure if you're homeless you can't be secure or free for that matter if you're jobless if you're hungry if you don't have access to medical care we're seeing climate change and they're in across northern Syria driving people off their farms over a million people off their farms are many who are suggesting climate change in fact is driving much of the problems in the Middle East how are we defining security and and how big a mistake or maybe not mistake are we making by almost always particularly in the media almost always virtually exclusively defining security in military or intelligence terms when there are issues of economic security of social security of community and and and and also a religious commit as security the the right to practice religion or the right to reject the practice of religion well I've studied the inside of many institutions in many many states so I have quite a skeptical view about how things happen in large states there is the deep state which is essentially the military-industrial complex and the Intel the intelligence complex there are the major economic actors within a state then there are the cultural traditions of a state and I think it is really is these three factors interacting to decide what policies are enacted it it's interesting the culture is a limited sum at some point but when things can be kept secret or they're complex it is quite hard for the cultural sphere to activate to do anything do anything about them so you contrast military it's military security and security in relation to terrorism what we would only hold international security and other forms of internal security to do with climate change poverty and so on it's quite easy to explain why the world is as it is in terms of this disproportionate expenditure in relation to until it intelligence and counterterrorism if the security authorities can represent themselves to the establishment of a state and the United States has the most powerful intelligence industry it's about 60 percent the global expenditure intelligence if they can represent represent themselves to the establishment which controls the purse strings that that establishment personally its children its people are at risk then of course they can suck money off to themselves as opposed to others who are also begging for money here in the United Kingdom what's an example the UK government has been going through austerity it has been cutting the budget across the board between thirty and ten percent of each government Department huge budget cuts but week and a half ago it announced that the military and intelligence budget would be increased by 15 percent that fight over the pie is because the Tory establishment the bankers and the other major economic factions that contribute to deciding what policy is made themselves feel threatened by random acts of terror in the United Kingdom whereas if you have plenty of money and good connections you can completely protect yourself from most of the effects of climate change you can protect yourself against the effects of poverty that when the security establishment sells to be a selfish and proper that it is at risk of being blown up randomly then of course you will see resources and legislation pumped into that sector that's how it works of course of course it's unjust of course it's stupid but that's how it works yeah it too if I'm a follow-on Julian to that question and then I'd also like to toss this out to the panel for discussion Naomi Klein has suggested on on my program and in many other venues that in this case in the context of climate change but I think more broadly perhaps the critique is often made and has been made for well almost two centuries now that capitalism is at the core of the problem that the pursuit of of cash as a as the ultimate value of profit is the ultimate value it was Dwight Eisenhower right is is are we at the point now that that essentially we started that trajectory after World War two and and and and if so any thoughts on how we recalibrate that or awaken the people to that or change the nature of that certainly describe Dwight Eisenhower Court about the military-industrial complex I'm for and its history better than I but if you go back before World War two the US federal government had 50,000 men at arms after immediately after World War two it had six million those men at arms were fueled by a massive growth in the military industrial complex of similar proportion from fifty thousand to six million and it didn't it didn't dissipate of course it fought to keep that money coming to keep its influence in society going so yes that was the moment that led to centralization of power in the United States around Washington a very powerful industrial and military group which has been tried trying to hang on to power ever since but I don't think it's capitalism it's not about cash it's about power different groups of always tried to pursue their power interests individuals try to pursue their power interests now that's not necessarily mean that's negative perhaps the mother feels of her power interest is very much coupled to the success of raising her children some people consider their power interest coupled to the success of their community it's not necessarily a bad thing but societies have always pushed for their power interest what what is changing is that the you know the technology with which power interests carried out during the Cold War and with invention of ICBMs of course the structure of societies and risks change as a result invention of thermonuclear weapons we have another situation now where we have the invention of the internet which has put all societies into the same communication space and naturally following that invention of mass surveillance both of those becoming cheaper and cheaper so mass surveillance is here to stay it was going to change the structure of societies globally in interesting and very disturbing ways on the other hand the same technology and it's all sorts of groups to organize so you don't just have Isis organizing and having the efficiencies of you know Excel and its own database systems and so on and communication across borders you have the Scots organizing to be to defend their interests relative to England almost breaking away same thing with Catalonia becoming more Catalan almost breaking away the Labour Party here they become more Labor Party and elected Corbin who is a very strong anti imperialist and Labour Party Labour Party becoming more Labor the Tories have become more Tory and introduced this legislation arguably Russia as become more Russian more nationalists saying with the Turks the same perhaps with the Republican Party becoming more Republican so when you integrate societies when you integrate everyone together connect them all to each other yes you have globalization yes you have modernization yes you have mass surveillance of all that but you also have people speaking to the people that they're already speaking to faster and in a more organized fashion and as a result being able to come to new positions and that's creating conflict between these various groups part of that conflict is terrorism which feeds the mass surveillance cycle so we're in a very interesting dangerous dynamic time with lots of opportunities and lots of costs lots of very very high costs ray I'm sorry you can't expect you can't expect to change when we were mean to do so many nuclear weapons we change the balance of forces between different states so the only really big states so really big States could dominate all the other states and all the other states then had to pail up to essentially either the United States or the Soviet Union we have now introduced a new technology that not only change changes relative balance of forces of different groups and States but even changes how we think because it is it changes how we communicate with each other it changes the very system with which we will think through this problem so it's it's much more invasive and to a degree threatening because even if there was a thermonuclear war in the northern hemisphere the southern hemisphere would remain essentially intact what has happened with the internet it has penetrated every society the command structure does the the all the leading actors in every society even Bhutan now has 20% Facebook penetration so we are hurtling into a particular direction we don't know exactly what that what that direction is that it's happening to all societies at once if very very well said rate to that to that point of and and and and you know hopefully I'm not stepping on the previous panels arena but you and I both live in Washington DC and environments and I am constantly seen advertisements on television now you would presume that when somebody buys a television ad it's because they want you to buy something right you know it's a here check this new soap I've seen ads on television for weapons systems you know we make the F fill-in-the-blank you know we make the and and I really don't think they want me to call him up and say you know I'm really interested in buying five abrams tanks what is what is the relationship between the media and these definitions of security and privacy and to what extent Julia made the point earlier that when I brought up capitalism he said it was about power I was talking about money I would respectfully suggest and I suspect Jillian would agree with me that there's a huge relationship between the two the Koch brothers have enormous power for example because of their money what is what is the impact of all of this on the media or and not even on the media on the on the on the conversations on the message that that we're having in in the developed world around around the world about privacy and about security the American people I mean how is that affected by players who make a buck diminishing our security and our privacy well these full-page ads are not only on TV they were the Washington Post in the New York Times Rockwell you know all these defense industries now I spent a whole career analyzing Soviet propaganda and one of the things that made me laugh most was the diversified expression Wall Street skier could have up easily Wall Street bloodsuckers used to say what what fruit what fruit propagated it well look what's happened look at 2008 look who profits from these wars it's not only the military-industrial complex Eisenhower most people don't know this Eisenhower wanted to add congressional okay so it's the military industrial congressional media okay deep state intelligence folks and of course the rest of the corporations so well against it you know and votes aditya cut up a bit see is is being revealed before our eyes when you look now why why have some previous speakers been so chary about saying something untoward about Saudi Arabia well folks is easy with that agreement with them to sell 100 billion be with a billion with B right arms over the next five years to Saudi Arabia that means lots of money lots of arms production lots of arm sales and it's the same with this ABM system and it's the same with the new generation of ICBMs and so forth that we don't need so yeah it's real it's not a hackneyed expression I have to later in my life understand that and admit it and try to persuade people that it's a real problem Phil Philip exceeding Gerald Gregory you were born in Australia you live in the United States now but for most of us other than Julian here are Americans from a little more international perspective how do you how do you see this issue of security versus privacy playing out country by country around the world and and where you see it where do you see any green shoots of hope or do you see collapse spreading like a cancer we see widespread transformation of global society largely because of population shift thinking and troughing of global population levels the increase in transnational and and urban rural urban migration what we're seeing also is a redefinition globally but particularly in the major industrial states of the definition of democracy where as we had in the last couple of hundred years attempted to ensure that government was subject to the people we are now seeing in the West almost universally and particularly in the surveillance approach that people are now subject to the state and I do believe that this was the reason for the American Revolution in the first place but what we do see with urban societies is a totally new mentality where where people are more comfortable with the tyranny of oppression and this and the stability that they have in under oppression than they do th
n they have with a free society I mean freedom actually disturbs and threatens most urban population so they're very happy to go along with surveillance with excessive or intensive government control so we're not seeing a massive outburst of protest against the surveillance state the real question shouldn't be whether societies are happy to have their privacy compromised but rather is this an effective way to make the society productive and free and in fact I almost have to say since I started coming the United States fifty five years or so ago I've seen less and less emphasis on freedom and more and more emphasis on what is called democracy and democracy is about votes every seven 70 years and not about accountability of government to the electorate Philip the Euro former CIA counterterrorism expert and it's been said that had had there been on national security State in 1776 there would have been no American Revolution that privacy was actually essential for that kind of a transformation both societal and government governmental and and at the same day at the same time we're also seeing this this will push you will you push back kind of weird dance I'm seeing it most visibly right now between ISIL and virtually the entire Republican field that's running for president while actually an at least one Democrat who's also trying to talk tough what is you know I want to ask this in a way that sounds a little more sophisticated but I think the easy way to say it you know is our Donald Trump and Ted Cruz doing isil's work and and you know what does what does anti-terror security effective anti de cetera security in the digital age really mean what what should we be looking at in terms of strategy particularly inside the larger frame of the ideal at least of privacy well well Donald Trump and Cruz are are not worried about the truth basically they're speaking to a domestic audience which demands a very hard line response to what they see as this other threat coming from the Islamic world and and so they're speaking to that audience I would I would note in terms of what is the proper response to terrorism following up my comments earlier a law-and-order responses the proper response to terrorism that's how terrorists were defeated in Europe in the 70s and 80s that's how they were defeated in Britain it wasn't the military response never works so I would say in conclusion that the entire anti-terrorism anti privacy tendency of the American government certainly over the last 15 years is based on two lives the first lie is that groups like Isis threaten the world order that they are an existential threat against any number of countries they are not that's a gross exaggeration about the capabilities of these various groups the second lie is that by giving away your freedoms and getting quote more security and which means spending more money and giving more of your rights away to the government is a solution it will make you more safe Benjamin Franklin one of the founders of the United States said that by trading away your Liberty for security you will wind up with neither and I think that that very is very true and that's what our politicians should be thinking about when they're debating the issue of terrorism they should put it in a proper context and they should be aware of the fact that our fundamental liberties is what once upon a time made us great as a nation and they've been bartering this away for years and years Julian Assange WikiLeaks you you you started this organization and I don't want to put words in your mouth but it seemed to me that when I was watching this this entire process that or at least my hope was that you were helping enhance both security and privacy by exposing frankly the abuses of both can you speak to that and to and and and feel free by the way to add on to any of the other comments that you've heard up to this point or any of these issues I know it's off topic but Phillip has a background in Turkey and can speak Turkish so at some stage I would maybe you have it scheduled but I would like very much to hear what he has to say about Turkey and what's happening in Syria I don't know maybe maybe we can somehow come at it from surveillance and privacy perspective well I mean wickets is quite simple it's really just the pursuing and enlightenment ideal which is we can't get anywhere without education we can't get anywhere unless we understand what's actually happening with the world and that intelligence agencies have an important function in understanding the world for their governments but because of their secretive nature they are often able to corrupt that understanding for their own ambitions and their understanding is that properly checked by outside analysis so WikiLeaks by creating privacy for sources in fact which is also a form of security for sources we enable a greater conduit of information to come out where we can analyze it and other journalists that we work with can analyze that material and so we're able to if you like construct a not an alternative narrative but a more accurate narrative that enters into the our common intellectual wealth is for what we understand to be the recent history of the world and how it is working and with that we can actually get somewhere we that we can't get any without that we can't believe we can't get anywhere we have private actors with their own private information or wealth intelligence agencies or corporations where that private understanding of the world is distorted and often in conflict all we simply have a media churn so yes as as part of that it's part of understanding how to protect our sources we've had to understand the surveillance state as well and also to protect our journalists and eventually as we got into very significant conflict with the United States and its allies as a result of our publications and were subject to banking blockades like Cuba has been subject to we had to understand a lot about various forms of censorship and the international financial system and it cut it ground and grounded our understanding when you when you make decisions and you can just see those decisions play out in the real world you can see whether you defendants can defend yourself or not that your understanding is really tested so we we have a an interesting perspective as an an organization because it's not just based on theory it's based on some intellectual observations that have been tested by the reality of our operations thank you I'm we're about out of time but but we started a little bit late so I'm gonna take moderators privilege to extend this may I for a few moments Julian before I turn to Phil to ask him the question that you suggested about Turkey I'm curious if you and/or WikiLeaks have anything that you'd like to share with us about recent events both with regard to the the turkeys shooting down of the Russian plane and just in general this whole issue of Turkey NATO Syria that that the region please it's a book that's out by but by verso there's some quite important material that web released other material by sy Hersh which is also quite interesting he published an article called the red line and the red line which in 2012 which was very early and had a lot of foresight into what is happening now but you know I want to say something which I hope is a bit unexpected which is that northern northern Turkey can be looked at as no very turkey it's a similar situation to which Russia was dealing with in the Ukraine and that if we imagine a situation where let's say the United Kingdom came in and bombed rebels in eastern Ukraine in support of Western Ukraine Russian backed rebels what would the Russian response be would it be to shoot down those planes if it could find a technical excuse to do so and I think the answer is yes that the domestic nationalist imperative would be to do that and Turkey sent out many warnings sorry not many it sent out several warnings to Russia in the preceding week now there is some other information which is arisen that perhaps what occurred was a plan that was set in train immediately before the election where there was a Turkish election which began one and that was a national imperative to win that election and so rules of engagement were set up such that if there was a technical violation even for a second of Turkish airspace or it could be suggested that there was this would be a plan to ensure winning that election and those rules of engagement we're not taken down I'm not sure what the result is but you can see that that - I mean so it's quite a complex situation that I don't want to we don't have time to go into but that Turkey has historical interest in northern Syria it is also used the Kurds to create form of nationalism within Turkey it is going to continue to push to have various forms of control of at least northern Syria and that's a conflict with many different actors that I don't see going anywhere nice it's impossible to satisfy all those actors at once and I really think that while the just while shooting down Rush's jet was not justified we have we have to pause and consider what is perhaps a severe incompetence of Russian intelligence services severan incompetence in relation to Ukraine and severe incompetence in relation to Turkey because there were plenty of warning signals being given off by the Turks why why why weren't those warning signals properly understood this is not to justify what Turkey did but it in the kind of realpolitik analysis those messages should have been understood I think we should think about what is going to happen in about six months time that the West Russia Iran are committed in various ways to the elimination of Isis because the establishments in those countries do consider it a partial threat to their own interests that wasn't always the case and thankfully as many people know those were backed you know that Isis in various ways was fed I want to say constructed but fed by Western interests interests of Saudi and so on we're going to come to a point in about six months time where Isis is almost completely debilitated as a state effectively will not exist in won't have control organize control of some portion territory back to being a guerrilla group but we'll have had all that hardware from the West probably from about ten or twelve different countries bombing Syria practicing coordination all their logistics will have been done and constructed and then Isis will be will be practically eliminated as as a significant force what are all those forces going to do then do you think that that is going to go home of course not and they can just see a 70 kilometers to Damascus if they want so I think it's a very dangerous situation there's nationalistic imperatives in Turkey nationalistic imperatives in Russia Syria of course is fighting the Syrian regime is fighting for its life so I yes I'm very interested to hear what Philip has to say Philip I could probably talk about Turkey for about two hours but I won't I would just make a general comment that what has happened in Turkey is is very relevant to what we've been talking about here today air duan has very skillfully and sometimes clumsily fearmonger on a number of levels and on a number of issues to the turkish people and the fear mongering basically has enabled him to aggrandize power in both legal and illegal ways in turkey and now we have basically a head of state who's an autocrat who essentially is not limited by any rules and feels himself free to do whatever he wants so that's my take on air21 some people might disagree in terms of the shoot-down i would have to disagree with julian to a certain extent shooting down a plane is an act of war particularly in this case where the plane was not actually threatening turkey in any genuine way and the disturbing element for me is the fact that this was not a decision made by a colonel or in general on the border defending turkeys airspace this was a decision made by the at the highest levels of the Turkish government and that means that air tool on basically was provoking and setting up an act of war type situation with the Russians with two objectives one objective being to scuttle any plans for a grand alliance against Isis he does not want that for a number of reasons and the second reason would be to try to pull NATO in in in an attempt to support his view of Assad his view of Isis and most particularly his view of the Kurds the Kurds are central to the turkish thinking strategic thinking the Kurds are the enemy Isis is not the enemy Assad is the only the enemy because in a sense they see him as a surrogate for the Kurds so that's that's my analysis and I think that that everyone created a global crisis by shooting down this airplane it could have escalated it didn't thank God and I think the man is reckless and this was a manifestation of his recklessness marvelous we could we could go on for hours but we're out of time so oh so Phil Greg ray and Julian Assange thank you all thank you all so much for being with us and thank you all and thanks to our T for facilitating this thank you just a very short announcement it's lunchtime we're waiting for you at 1515 a quarter past three please be back we'll continue our talk today John says it's going to be downstairs yeah years all 0hq Vasquez new provideed
