assault charges, but he also faced the possibility of being extradited to the United States to face

4.2.12 WC: 191694 assault charges, but he also faced the possibility of being extradited to the United States to face charges that carried far more serious consequences than those in Sweden. It was the possible American prosecution that he wished to discuss with me. I first spent several hours with Assange and his legal team over the phone and by email. We worried about the security of our lawyer/client communications, which some might think ironic in light of Assange’s penchant for disclosure of secret communications, but he had little choice but to communicate about the legal issues. We decided that a face-to-face meeting was required and we met in his lawyer’s office. I found Assange to be an earnest person, deeply devoted to the principle of maximal transparency of governmental actions. He was, however, sensitive to the need to keep some secrets—if not from him, at least from the general public, which inevitably includes some very bad people determined to do some very bad things to innocent and perhaps not so innocent people. Assange insisted to me*’ that he was a journalist, in every relevant sense of that term. He published, and turned over to others to publish important and relevant material that others had provided to him anonymously. He and his colleagues had devised a technology for allowing “whistle blowers” to “drop” material to Wikileaks anonymously and with no possibility of it being traced to its source. This “dropbox” technology was the cyber manifestation that the best way to keep a secret is not to know it in the first place. He and his colleagues had devised a foolproof system, he believed, to keep them from learning who had “dropped” the material into “the box.” His job as a journalist was to authenticate the raw material, vet it for names and other life- threatening information which in his journalistic judgment should not be published (for example, the location of safe houses and the names of vulnerable people), and arrange for it to receive maximal reach by having it published by mainstream media outlets around the world, which would do further vetting to meet their own journalistic standards. When he finished explaining his journalistic modus operendi, two names immediately popped into my head: Seymour Hirsh of the New Yorker, and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Both are solid pillars of the journalistic establishment and both have made their reputations by publishing secrets the government—or at least some in the government—did not want to see in print. Hirsh specializes in publishing classified information about national security that has been provided to him by whistle blowers inside the government who disagree with particular governmental policies and want to see them exposed by someone who is believed to be sympathetic to their dissenting views. Some, if not most, of these whistleblowers are breaking the law by disclosing classified material to Hirsh. Hirsh and his publishers knew that they were publishing classified information before they published it. Yet neither he nor his publishers have been prosecuted. It is likely, moreover, that Hirsh has encouraged at least some of his more reluctant sources to become whistle blowers or, if they came to him without any prior encouragement, to continue to ‘7 T can only disclose material that is in the public record that he has given me permission to disclose. 125 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017212