Julian Assange TED Global Conference Interview

In an interview from the TED conference in Oxford in July of this year, Julian Assange was interviewed.


Check out the video of the interview here. 


The interview dealt with the Wikileaks leak of surveillance video relating to the killing of 18 Iraqi civilians, including 2 Reuters news journalists by US forces.'Collateral Murder', as it was known. In the inteview, Assange (pictured, right) also revealed his motivations for revealing information which is classified.


"There's a question as to what information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform", he told interviewer Chris Anderson, CEO of TED (pictured, left). "Information that organisations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when that information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good. Because the organisations that know it best, that know it inside out are spending work to conceal it. and that's what we've found in practice, and that's what journalism is."


Anderson also went on to ask about Assange's background and youth, commenting that he understood the hacker to have attended 37 schools as a child. "My parents were in the movie business, and then on the run from a cult, so the combination of the two (meant I had to go to so many schools)", he explained. Probed on his background as a hacker, Assange instead asserted that he I was a young "journalistic-activist". "I wrote a magazine, and was prosecuted when I was a teenager". He went on to suggest that the he disliked the "hacker" as it had had been devalued as it was being used for financial, fraudulent criminal purposes.


Asked further to explain his values, he said "capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims. That's something (I learned) from my father, and from other capable, generous men that has been in my life." He did go on to say that he himself was more confrontational than caring. "I'm a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurture. There is another way to nurture victims, and that is to police perpetrators of crime, and that is something that has been in my character for a long time".