The NAmING oF ThINGs JA: e naming of things is very important. e naming of human intellectual work and our entire intellectual record is possibly the most important thing to be done. We all have words for dierent objects, like “tomato.” We use a simple word, “tomato,” instead of actually describing every little aspect of this goddamn tomato.152 Because it takes too long to describe this tomato precisely, we use an abstraction so that we can think and talk about it. And we do that also when we use URLs.153 ose are frequently used as a short name for some human intellectual content. We build all of our civilization, other than on bricks, on human intellectual content. We currently have a system with URLs where the structure we are building our civilization on is the worst kind of melting Plasticine imaginable. at’s a big problem. es: And you would argue a dierent namespace structure should evolve that more properly allows— 152. Objects on the table were used throughout the conversation to demonstrate concepts via their spatial relationships. 153. “URL” stands for “uniform resource locator,” another name for a human- readable web address, like https://www.wikileaks.org/donate 80 WhenGoogleMetWikiLeaks.indd 80 04/08/14 6:07 PM the nAmInG of thInGs JA: I think there is a fundamental confusion, an overloading of the current URL idea. es: Yep. Absolutely. JA: On the one hand you have live dynamic services and organizations that run those services—meaning a hierarchy, a system of control, be it an organization, a government, or some controlling group. And on the other hand you have human intellectual artifacts that can be completely independent from any system of human control. ey are out there in the Platonic realm.154 ey should be referred to in a way that is intrin- sic to their intellectual content, and not in a way that is dependent on an organization. I think that is an inevitable and very important way forward. I rst saw that this was a problem when dealing with a man by the name of Nadhmi Auchi.155 A few years ago he was listed by one of the big business magazines as the h richest man in the UK. An Iraqi, he worked for the Iraq Oil Ministry and grew rich before leaving for Britain in the early 1980s. He is alleged by the Italian press to have been involved in a lot of arms trading. He has over a hundred companies run out of his Luxembourg holding unit and several that we discovered under his wife’s name in Panama. He inltrated the British Labour political establishment to the degree 154. The “Platonic realm,” in this context, means the universe of possible knowledge. The phrase has its origins in Plato’s theory of forms, but the most enjoyable exploration is the famous short story “The Library of Babel” by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), available online at archive.today/Fm4fM 155. See the WikiLeaks page on Nadhmi Auchi at archive.today/BkT0D 81 WhenGoogleMetWikiLeaks.indd 81 04/08/14 6:07 PM eLLInGhAm hALL, June 23, 2011 that on his business’s twentieth birthday celebration in London he was given a painting signed by 130 ministers and members of Parliament, including the then prime minister Tony Blair. Nadhmi Auchi was a nancier of Tony Rezko, who in turn was a fundraiser for Rod Blagojevich from Chicago, the former governor of Illinois. Both Rezko and Blagojevich have now been convicted of corruption. Tony Rezko was also an intermediary who helped Barack Obama buy part of his residential home. is is detail but it will get to a point. During the 2008 presidential primaries a lot of attention was turned to Barack Obama by the US press, unsurprisingly. ey started to look into his fundraisers and discovered Tony Rezko, and then they started to turn their eyes toward Nadhmi Auchi. Auchi then hired Carter-Ruck, a rather notorious rm of London libel solicitors, whose founder, Peter Carter-Ruck, has been described as doing for freedom of speech what the Boston Strangler did for door-to- door salesmen.156 He started writing letters to all the London newspa- pers that had records of his 2003 extradition to France and conviction for fraud in the Elf Aquitaine scandal, in which he had been involved in channeling illegal commissions on the sale of Kuwaiti-owned oil rener- ies while Kuwait was under Iraqi occupation before the rst Gulf War.157 156. The Boston Strangler was a serial killer active in Boston, Massachusetts, during the early 1960s. He is said to have posed as a door-to-door salesman in order to trick women into letting him into their apartments. 157. The story would come full circle when the French investigating mag- istrate involved, Eva Joly, would go on to investigate corrupt Icelandic banks, run for president in the 2012 French presidential elections, lose, be elected to the European Parliament, and then come to the embassy in which I reside to try and find a solution to my four years of detention without charge in the United Kingdom. 82 WhenGoogleMetWikiLeaks.indd 82 04/08/14 6:07 PM the nAmInG of thInGs So the Guardian pulled six articles from 2003 without saying anything. ey had been in the Guardian’s archive for ve years. If you go to those URLs you will not see “removed due to legal threats,” you will see “page not found.” ere is also an article from the Tele- graph and a bunch from some American publications and bloggers, and so on. Important bits of recent history that were relevant to an ongoing presidential campaign in the United States were pulled out of the intellectual record.158 ey were also pulled out of the Guard- ian’s index of articles. So although the Guardian is published in print and you can go to the library and look up those articles, how would you know that they are there to look up, because they are not there in the Guardian’s index? Not only have they ceased to exist, they have ceased to have ever existed. It is the modern implementation of Orwell’s dictum: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past”—because all records of the past are stored physically in the present.159 is issue of preserving politically salient intellectual content while it is under attack is central to what WikiLeaks does, because that’s what we are aer. We’re aer those bits160 that people are try- ing to suppress because we suspect, usually rightly, that they’re expending economic work on suppressing those bits because they perceive that those bits are going to induce some change. 158. WikiLeaks has restored them to the historical record. See archive.today/oOCks 159. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker and Warburg, 1949). 160. “Bits” here is used in the sense of information theory—i.e., “those bits,” “that information.” 83 WhenGoogleMetWikiLeaks.indd 83 04/08/14 6:07 PM eLLInGhAm hALL, June 23, 2011 sm: So it’s the evidence of the suppression that you look for in order to determine value? JA: Yes . not precisely but that’s a very good— sm: Well, tell me precisely. JA: Well, it’s not always right. But it’s very suggestive— sm: It’s not perfect! JA: It’s not perfect but it is a very suggestive signal that the people who know the information best—i.e., the people who wrote it—are expend- ing economic work in preventing it going into the historical record, pre- venting it getting to the public. Why spend so much work doing that? It’s more ecient to just let everyone have it—you don’t have to spend time guarding it, but also you are more ecient in terms of your organiza- tion because of all the positive unintended consequences of the infor- mation going around. So we selectively go aer that information, and that information is selectively suppressed inside organizations, and very frequently, if it is a powerful group, as soon as someone tries to publish it, we see attempts at post-publication suppression. es: I want to know a little more about the technology. So in this structure, you basically can put up a new front very quickly and you have stored replicas that are distributed. One of the questions I have is how do you decide which ISPs?161 161. “ISP” stands for “internet service provider.” In this context an ISP is a company that provides communications links or server space with which to run an internet site. When choosing an ISP for a publisher like WikiLeaks it is necessary to consider some hard questions, such as, “Will 84 WhenGoogleMetWikiLeaks.indd 84 04/08/14 6:07 PM the nAmInG of thInGs JA: at’s a very good question. es: Yeah, it is a pretty complicated set of questions. JA: I will give you an example of how not to choose them. We dealt with a case in the Turks and Caicos Islands where there was a great lit- tle group called the TCI Journal (Turks and Caicos Islands Journal).162 ey are a bunch of political reformers, ecologically minded people who live there and saw that overseas property developers were com- ing in and somehow getting Crown land very cheaply and building big high-rises on it and so on.163 ey were campaigning for good governance and trying to expose these people. It’s a classic best-use case for the internet: cheap publication means that we can have many more types of publishers, including self-subsidizing publishers.