Thread by @FlickRubicon

What have we heard from Julian #Assange? Here is a thread from talks when he could still engage with audiences and answer questions to mark the #Unity4J #FreeAssange 50 hr/50 guest online vigil. I agree with the principles and ideas that follow.

"This from Proverbs is the earliest occurrence known to me of the well known idea that knowledge is power. To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage. Radio 4, New Years address 2 Jan 2014 bbc.com/news/uk-politi…

The Internet has become the most important device for revealing the truth since the printing press. It has become the number one antidote to TV. It has allowed one person with some truth to speak to every single person. Oxford Union, 1 Feb 2013

It’s a journalist’s responsibility to publish, inform the public and undo secrecy. Sometimes police have a necessity for secrecy for their operations. Just like we have a necessity to keep our sources secret. 12 March 2015 Mexico vimeo.com/122020098

It is good to seek to empower the powerless through knowledge, and to drag the machinations of the powerful into the daylight. We must be unapologetic about that most basic of humanities; the desire to know. Radio 4, New Years address 2 Jan 2014 bbc.com/news/uk-politi…

"Information from secret institutions reveals how powerful institutions in human society actually work. How on earth can we manage human society if we don’t understand how the place we live in actually works? It’s impossible." 12 March 2015 Mexico vimeo.com/122020098

"Transparency is necessary for powerful organizations that might abuse their power and cause damage to people. The state, military, banks are powerful and should be transparent. Individuals don’t have much power so they need privacy." 12 March 2015 vimeo.com/122020098

Who cares about privacy or transparency? These are not important in themselves. They are important because they lead to something else: increased justice. How? Because they are a way of balancing out information inequalities. 12 March 2015 Mexico vimeo.com/122020098

"The media isn’t just a shonky market, it’s part of the most important thing in the world, because the flow of knowledge is what creates the world." Splendour in the Grass, 26 July 2013 vimeo.com/70982502

"Can we trust the media that has called for my staff & me to be assassinated, droned, rendered & prosecuted for espionage, for our publications and for our involvement in the Snowden case?" Splendour in the Grass, 26 July 2013 vimeo.com/70982502

"I find it hard to imagine that any reporter in the US could have done better or been braver than Glenn Greenwald." SXSW 8 March 2014

Conformity is a serious problem. It produces an extremely constrained society where there is little tolerance for difference, all the way to extreme injustice for people who are not towing the line, whatever that line is. Clth Lawyers Assoc 15 April 2015

"The idea of intelligence is an optimistic one; it is that one can understand the world and apply inteligence to understand it better. The problem is the corruption of those agencies that comes about because of secrecy." Oxford Union, 1 Feb 2013

So we are living in an illusion, where the true history of the world, nature of our environment and how human institutions and power structures behave, about what we should and shouldn't do, is all obscured by some kind of fog. SXSW 8 March 2014

"How do you blow the whistle on the system itself when you see so many events revealing the same problem again and again, which is a cavalier approach to human life, a cavalier approach to the suffering of people?" Sydney Opera House, 16 Sept 2013 archive.org/details/youtub…

"When you have millions of documents, make them available so that not just a few but all the lawyers & police can look at them.. Scandals market the archive. It is the archive that has the scale to deal with the problem. The Listening Post 10 April 2016

"What happens when a small publisher does what all publishers say that they will do—publish fearlessly, bravely, not censor, put their readers first? What happens? Well, you end up in some giant international fight." SXSW 8 March 2014

"Maybe we will be able to preserve the ability to publish. The Internet has become largely a fixed target... State mechanisms have started to adapt to it and work out how to throttle." 26 May 2015 UN event 2015

It is time for the US to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks, our people and alleged sources. It is time for President Obama to do the right thing and join the forces of change, not in fine words, but in fine deeds. UN, Geneva, 26 September 2012 bit.ly/1r0s5Zd

If you say that your laws apply to the interior of a foreign country, this is the same as having effective control over the population of a foreign country, which is the same as annexing that foreign country. 26 May 2015 UN event 2015

Because of how media organizations work, once an allegation is taken against a single journalist for publishing information about the US national security, all others within that media organization can be embroiled. 26 May 2015 UN event 2015

"How is it that the Internet—perhaps the greatest tool of human emancipation—has been in fact co-opted and is now involved in the most aggressive form of state surveillance that the world has ever seen?" SXSW 8 March 2014

"We have a militarization of cyberspace, which equals the militarization of the number one civilian space of human social interaction, which equals a militarization of global western civilization. That is a serious problem." Sydney Opera House, 16 Sept 2013

Surveillance doesn't happen outside of us like nuclear weapons or global warming. It happens inside & between us, to all people simultaneously, how we speak to each other and how we consider the world, and this very problem. 12 March 2015 Mexico vimeo.com/122020098

This is the greatest transfer of wealth and information ever, from every single one of us that uses the Internet, into the bowels of secret agencies. If those secret agencies were working on our behalf, perhaps we could accept it. Oxford Union, 1 Feb 2013

"Google is an empire... It’s basic business model is the same as that of the NSA: collect the world’s information, store, it, index it, and work out how to predict people based on that." Imaginary Lines, 29 Sept 2014

"What can you do about Google? Understand that it really is a threat. Don’t continually feed it. It’s collecting vast reservoirs of data about humankind.. It’s mad to feed that thing." Logan Symposium 11 March 2016

The Internet has become a political space. I think that is the most important transition in the last decade. This communication is part of the revolution, leading to political involvement and a new community consensus forming. SXSW 8 March 2014

We are educating each other at unprecedented speed. People over 30 know 20 y/os are so more worldly and educated, largely due to lateral & horizontal transfer of information, maybe a little bit because orgss like WL spreading info down. SXSW 8 March 2014

We are now all involved in the state, whether we like it or not. We have no choice but to attempt to manage the behavior of it and that includes managing what laws and activities are acceptable. South by South West 8 March 2014

If we don’t make the sectors of the society that want to support liberty and freedom of communication win, then we are going to end up in a bad place. So I think we have no choice but to resist this direction. 3 October 2014 Nantucket Project

"In the fight for the rule of law in society you can never consciously & publicly give up ground. Even though you understand that it might be very hard to hold onto, because it will immediately be occupied."
Clth Lawyers Association 15 April 2015

"An old statement valid today as it ever was is “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere soon enough.” If we allow seeds of injustice to grow in one part of the population, soon enough they will be used to attack the rest. Logan Symposium 2014

Who are the most persecuted members of society? Prisoners are the most unrepresented because they cannot speak; they do not have access to much media at all. In England, and in Western Europe, Muslims are the most persecuted group. Logan Symposium 2014

It’s important not to get too self-pitying. People every day in Syria are having the shit blown out of them...One shouldn’t overstate the case of how difficult it is, including me Logan Symposium

"I’m pissed off about the interference in my family relationships, the situation with Manning being tortured and sentenced to 35 years. You can use that anger as a fuel and it can also help you see a situation clearly. 3 October 2014 Nantucket Project

Okay, okay, okay, I overdid this thread thing, but there's a lot of good ideas to ponder there. Also food for thought as to why this particular voice is silenced.