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Dec. 9, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

12:42

1803 True News: Wikileaks: The Hammer Comes Down

The US government thinks it is attacking Assange, but it is only striking at its own reflection.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Some interesting updates on this WikiLeaks situation.
	Now, according to Assange's lawyer, Mark Stevens, the U.S. is preparing spying charges under the Espionage Act against Julian Assange, who is currently in jail in Sweden.
	Sweden does have extradition treaties with the U.S., but is very committed to freedom of the press, and it could take months, or quite likely years, for any of this stuff to materialize.
	Now, the Espionage Act has never been applied to a third party publication, but I think it's really important to understand the sequence of how this information came out, because you're not hearing a lot about it at the moment from the mainstream media.
	Since the publication of the Afghan war information and the Iraq war diaries and now the cables from the diplomatic circles and forward to what's going to come on from presumably the Bank of America early next year, the sequence of publication has been very, very precise and not a solo mission.
	You'd think that WikiLeaks just up and published all of this information on its own, which is why the U.S. government is going after it.
	Well, this is not the case at all.
	Assange is a brilliant publicist and a brilliant man, of course, and he very quickly realized that if you just publish all the information, the news outlets aren't that interested in it because everybody can go and rifle through it and figure out whatever they want to learn from it.
	So he realized that if he gives major news organizations prior and priority access To the information that he has, then they will write up the stories, generate publicity, generate controversy, which will then help the documents get out to a wider audience.
	So, for instance, with these classified State Department cables from the U.S. government, WikiLeaks turned them all over to Le Monde in France, El País in Spain, The Guardian in Britain, and Der Spiegel.
	In Germany, these are major, major news outlets.
	And what happened was he turned all of these cables over and they all sat down with Assange and his team and said, okay, well, you can publish this, you can publish that.
	You should redact this, you should redact that.
	And they all come through it.
	And he was receiving advice prior to putting the information out from major news organizations about what he was allowed to publish and what he was not, or what would be dangerous and what would be safe.
	And then what happened was these major news organizations...
	Published this information first, right?
	It's very very important to understand, right?
	So he gets the information he sits down with the major news organizations They advise him based on their experience what can be published and what can't be published They publish it first and then using their advice he puts the information out on the web The information that was put out by these major news organizations is mostly available on the web anyway So it's very, very important to understand that the U.S. government is leapfrogging over the news organizations to get to Assange, which is exactly and entirely what you would expect.
	The American government is such a clusterfrag of monkey-bane chicken shits that they're never going to go after these major news organizations.
	Why? Because governments around the world need these news organizations to shower you with the purple fog of traffic Transient bullshit to keep you distracted from the system coming down around your ears.
	So they're not going to go after these because then the howls of protest and these news organizations may turn against the government if the government has them in their sights and so they don't want to do that.
	They want to scurry past the major news organizations and go after One lone Aussie with a laptop.
	So I think that's really important to understand.
	It's got nothing to do with any morality or any law or anything like that.
	It's just a punitive hit out on someone.
	Because, you know, it's really important to remember.
	You see, the government can look at your emails.
	The government can give you a nude body scan.
	The government can shove its digital or physical finger up your digital or physical rectum.
	But it's not supposed to be two-way.
	The government is supposed to scan your bank accounts and your health records and your emails and your phone logs and everything like that.
	That's a one-way street.
	You're never supposed to actually do it back to the government.
	It's crazy. That's like going to the farmer and say, hey, let's ground up your children and feed them to the cows.
	He would look at you like you're crazy.
	No, no, no, no, no. This turning people, this turning meat into paste is a one-way street.
	It's cows to us. It's never us to cows.
	So I think that's really, really important to understand that the government is claiming that its secrecy has been violated.
	And the other thing that's completely ridiculous, and I'm sorry, I mean, it is a tragic situation in many ways, but it's incredibly funny in a way.
	I mean, the government...
	This was not brain surgery to lift these documents.
	Just some guy posted them somewhere or wandered out with a USB key.
	I don't know, but he just wandered out. No problem, right?
	I mean, the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, trillions of dollars spent over the past couple of decades on keeping America safe, and they couldn't predict 9-11 to save their lives.
	They had no idea whatsoever that the USSR was about to collapse in the late 90s.
	I mean, you could go on and on. We have no clue whatsoever about what's going on in the world.
	And people can just walk off with whatever information that they want.
	I mean, it's funny and it's ridiculous and it's embarrassing.
	It really is. I mean, the governments are like the keystone cops when it comes to just about any form of human protection.
	Unless and until you harm their particular interests or prick their vanity or show them, turn the light on to show them who they really are.
	The government is like a cockroach-infested kitchen when you flip the lights on, except that they grow big and try to attack you.
	So I just wanted to point out that that's the reality of that.
	Now, I've done a bit of reading which may be of interest to you on Julian Assange's history.
	You know, if you're watching someone take a kamikaze suicide run at the aircraft carrier called DeState, it can be interesting to have some knowledge of his motives.
	And who can speculate?
	I guess I can, but there's no proof in this.
	I mean, the man had a wretched and abominable childhood.
	And anybody who knows the way that I've reasoned through the world understands that the first place you look to understand anybody's mode of thinking is their childhood.
	That's just a given. Anybody who doesn't do that is wandering into traffic blindfolded.
	So, Assange, his father left him shortly after he was born.
	His mother married. He had this incredibly unstable life in and out of dozens of schools.
	Sometimes he was in school, sometimes he wasn't in school.
	And he was mostly self-taught in hacking and other sorts of things.
	When I think he was about nine, his mom divorced his stepfather and took up with a musician, who Assange has described later on, he described this time, living with this dangerous and violent psychopath.
	So his relationship to authority would be formed by, you know, basically three dads, one of whom he didn't know, one of whom was obviously not very stable, the other of whom he described as a violent and dangerous psychopath.
	From this lunatic who was stalking and threatening to maim or kill them.
	They were on the run through Australia trying to get away from this guy as he was hunting them down.
	Not a very relaxing and enjoyable childhood to say the least.
	This is going to have a relationship to his relationship to authority and what it is that he is trying to do.
	I think what's Also fascinating about this, I think it really does reveal the degree to which the internet is making states obsolete.
	If you look at, I mean, one of the largest employees, if not the largest employer in the world, with hundreds of thousands of, quote, employees, is eBay.
	And eBay operates in a state of, in a stateless state.
	It operates in an anarchic state, which doesn't mean chaos.
	It simply means self-organizing, spontaneous rules enforced not through violence, but through social ostracism, economic ostracism, acceptance, and rejection.
	These are the most powerful tools That we have to enforce social norms without the enforcement of those social norms turning into wars and genocides and mass imprisonments and massive debts.
	So whenever you choose the government to solve a problem, you're setting yourself up for a crumble, massive death, destruction, end of the empire, a decadent fall of fascist imperialistic catastrophes.
	Put that on a t-shirt if you dare.
	And that's what you choose when you choose the government.
	You're always choosing that. And this is why people who have some brains and some historical knowledge and are working from first principles, particularly the non-aggression principle, are constantly on the lookout for alternatives to hierarchical violence in terms of how we're going to solve social problems.
	eBay rests on reputation, right?
	I mean, you can... Sell whatever you want on eBay, but if you start screwing around with people or defrauding them, then you're going to go out of business very quickly.
	This is without fraud charges, right?
	I was just reading about this.
	This guy was called.
	He saw an ad in the newspaper, and he'd been unemployed for a while.
	It looked like a good job. And they said, hey, we want to fly you out here, but you just need to wire us half the AFM money so that we can hold it as a security to make sure that you show up.
	He quickly figured out it was a scam, began tracking these guys down, gathered together a huge dossier of who these people were, took it to the police and said, you've got to go after these guys, they're preying on the unemployed.
	The police said, ah, we don't have the resources, right?
	Because it's one-sided, right?
	If you don't pay your taxes to support the police, you're in jail relatively quickly, certainly facing significant sanctions relatively quickly.
	If you need the police to do something for you, eh, they're pretty busy.
	They've got to polish off a donut.
	They have to practice not running.
	They have to loosen their bowels by sitting in their squad cars and downing nine acres of coffee.
	Eh, it's a one-way street.
	It's never a two-way street with the state.
	So, how are people going to behave better?
	It's through the revelation of their misdeeds.
	I mean, this is how people are going to behave better.
	The government does not want its deeds to be shown.
	It does not want the...
	I mean, you can't even get a financial order over the Federal Reserve, for Christ's sakes.
	I mean, the government doesn't want to have...
	Anybody poking it around its innards.
	That's for the government to do to you.
	That's for those people to do you.
	Never for you to do the government in return.
	I think that's just really really important.
	There is an amazing opportunity for human freedom and progress in the form of the internet.
	Because if you screw with people, if you cheat people, if you don't fulfill your contracts, that information can be available to everyone around the world at the click of a button.
	This is a significantly unprecedented development in Human history.
	And it is this kind of spreading of information that cracks and shatters A pyramid-style hierarchy.
	It's what happened with the Gutenberg press when the average person got his or her hands on the Bible in the vernacular, which Martin Luther translated and published.
	That broke a Christendom up because information was now available that before had been hoarded and secret and unavailable.
	And now information about reputation and past dealings and economic integrity and maybe even personal integrity, this is all available around the world.
	Rendering governments and the necessity for violence and laws to persecute people who behave badly in an economic sense completely unnecessary.
	Absolutely completely and totally unnecessary.
	You no more need a government to run your economy than you need a government to run eBay.
	I think this is a very very important thing to understand.
	So That's something that I would get out of this.
	I will keep you posted if you all stay very interested in this.
	I think it is an interesting thing to follow.
	Thank you so much for supporting this conversation.
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