I found in investigative journalism it is always best, if you have any language skills, not to admit them.
You can’t do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you’re in.
Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another.
The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.
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.
The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation.
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.
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.
I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort, but I’m no rapist.
The goal is justice, the method? is transparency. It’s important not to confuse the goal and the method.
I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform.
To be alive as a human being is to know, in the same way as it is to have a heart that beats.
I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable.
Transparency in government leads to reduced corruption.
Censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think.
The attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts and continues long after a war ends.
Bitcoin actually has the balance and incentives right, and that is why it is starting to take off.
Although I still write, research and investigate, my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists.
I always believed that WikiLeaks as a concept would perform a global role, and to some degree it was clear that it was doing that as far back as 2007 when it changed the result of the Kenyan general election.