ShortHand: Julian Assange

0:00MUSIC Hello and welcome to Shorthand, where order has been restored. We are back in our correct seats. Thank God for that. I'm guessing anyone's wondering why we were spotted around. And probably in the episode that came out ages ago, because we are in a jumble of one more recorder. We were thinking someone were releasing them because of all of the bloody reactive episodes we keep doing. Because we're crazy. It was just because Hannah's laptop wasn't charged. That was it. But we're back in the right places now. Where are we belong? And we've got a case. A companion, one might say. Yes. For a case is coming out this week on Main Feed Right Handed. Because we can do what we want. For centuries. Politics has happened behind clothes, doors with people like Macchi Valley's wishing his cape all over the place.

1:02A government secrets would consist of assertive conversations and reams of physical documents sealed in impenetrable vaults. And then the internet happened. And thank God it did, or we'd both be out of a job. Quite. And with the dawn of the interwebs, the amount of information that could be stored and the likelihood of it spilling out significantly increased. And I know this is nothing to do with anything. Well, it does, but nothing to do with this particular case. Just much better fire safety. Now that we have the internet. Very good point. Because offices just filled with reams and reams and boxes and boxes and cupboards for a paper is one of the reasons that other than the fact that, you know, two planes flew into those buildings. Like Y911 was like such an inferno. Because the offices were just filled with paper. And paper likes to be satinized. It certainly does. Please continue. And for some people, the dawn of the internet and the likelihood of spillage spelled opportunity.

2:04Today we've got the story of one organization that sought to rewrite how states interact with their people forever. And one man who outsmarted humiliated and exposed the most powerful institutions in the whole world. Here is the short-hound. Julian Paul Hawkins was born on the 3rd of July 1971. Into a cult. Go listen to our episode on the family, which I have helpfully put in here. A story we covered years back in episode XXXXXX because I was going to go look up which episode number it was and I forgot to do that. But yes, we'll get back to that. He was born in an even more fucking mental sounding place than how the cult the family sounds. Because he was born in the definitely not made up town of Townsville, Queensland, Australia. Australia, this I feel like is just a flex on how big you are. Yeah, they weren't trying. Townsville. My name's, it's just called Townsville.

3:05And young Julian's parents were a visual artist and a builder who separated before he was even born. So when he was just a year old, Julian's mother married actor Brett Assange. And they started a traveling theatre troupe like the people from the sound of music. Is that what happens in the sound of music? No. I've never seen the sound of music. It's not what happens in the sound of music at all. Is it not even a side plot? No. Well, no, they escape the Nazis. Well, I think it off. Who are the one traps? That's that sound of music. Are they not a tragic theatre group? No, no, she just teaches them songs. OK, whatever. And then they're like, thank you for my blossoming personality. Let's not take the show on the road because there are Nazis. I see. They were never a troupe. They're far too high class to be a traveling troupe. Never mind. So Julian Assange, unlike the one traps, was it in a family of traveling theatre people?

4:08And this woman, his mother, stayed with actor Brett Assange until Julian was nine years old. By which time Julian had decided that Assange was a much better name than Hawkins. And so he took it. And his mom actually went on to marry. Lafe may now. A member of the new age cult that we've already alluded to, the family, which you don't need the episode number. Just go search, red-handed the family, and you'll find it, and they are bucking nuts. So anyway, Julian lived in more than 30 towns and cities across Australia before he left home. And this dad's whopping theatre troupe following lifestyle. Had a dramatic effect on him. Still, he found solace and community in the nascent 1980s internet. And by his mid teens, Julian was a pretty nifty hacker. And on the internet, Assange went by the name Mendax. From the Latin, splendid Mendax, meaning noble liar.

5:10Kill me, she mad. LAUGHTER What would be your hack at home? LAUGHTER What would my hackename be? Mine's Susie Q and on. Yeah, of course it is. Susie Q and on. Good. I was a good one. I keep her forever. I love pandas. LAUGHTER So in 1987, when Julian was just 16 years old, the police turned up at his front door. They raided his house and took all of his equipment. Assange stood accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Citibank. Now nothing was proven, and all of his hacking equipment was soon returned. But Julian was obviously competent enough to gain access to places he really shouldn't. And he'd learned a lesson in subtlety. In October 1989, days before the launch of a NASA space shuttle, a computer worm tore through computers in one of the space agencies' networks.

6:13The screen showed only a simple text-based message. And it's just the word, Wank, but spelled out with the word and backslashes. It is quite funny. It is very funny. It says worms against nuclear killers, and that typewriter font, and then Wank. Your system has been officially wanked. You talk of times of peace for all and then prepare for war. It is funny. It's like when people make little teddy bears out backslashes, but he's just written the word, Wank. No, I'm getting all sorts of them. Have you been wanked? I think I've been wanked. Oh no, Hannah's been wanked. It's about time. LAUGHTER OK, I'm back in. Oh my god, we should queue the red panda. That could be your... The red panda. That could be your hacking name. The red panda's been out, Wank. LAUGHTER So when a NASA user logged on to their computer, a message said, someone is watching you. Fault anarchist, exclamation mark.

7:13Activists had been campaigning against the space launch. They worried that if the spacecraft blew up, the plutonium on board could be devastating to the surrounding area. So every newspaper, documentary, and biography out there will only say that a sange has been closely linked to the Wank attack, but it has never really been proven. But listen, it was him. And you can come for us if you really have to. Especially when I thought it was quite funny. It's very funny, and the message contains a lyric from a sange's favourite song, and every time Wank does brought up, he does smirk and say, what a successful little worm it was. And if it was him, which it was, Wank was the very first iteration of a sange's so-called hacktivism, trying out ways to use his skills to further his political beliefs. Or rather, to achieve his political ends, I would argue. And that's the thing, right, is that people will be like, and this is quite like generally speaking

8:15for activists, for vigilantes, for anybody. I'm like, oh, yeah, I liked it when he did that. I'm not saying we shouldn't have whistleblowers. I'm not making comment on that. I'm just saying, some people will defend things that people do, activists do, activists do, vigilantes do, as long as they're on the side. And then when they're like, oh, you shouldn't have done that. Now I disagree. It's like a fine line, guys. So a sange never quite finished a degree at university. But in the early 90s, he was studying programming, mathematics and physics at both the Central Queensland University and the University of Melbourne. By this point, according to him, he had already hacked thousands of systems, including the Pentagon. While studying, a sange got into the slightly confusing early 90s venn diagram of ravers and hackers, like Neo in the Matrix. And he made a bunch of techie friends in the Melbourne Rave scene. Oh, that sounds horrible. I wonder what the connection is between tech nerd and tech raver. It is a fit.

9:15It dot, yeah, I mean, yes it is. I don't know. I don't know. I honestly don't know. Maybe it's something to do with people who can like hyperfocus and... Really like black and green. And listen to shit music. It's not for me. It's not for me. But I don't know. It makes sense. And during this time, a sange and two other young hackers known as tracks and prime suspect, just let that hang there, started a collective that they called international subversives. I would bet quite a lot of money that they didn't really have friends at school, probably. And from the start, a sange was militant about his ethics. First and foremost was the belief that there was no place in the world for secrets, that all information should be shared. In 1991, international subversives gained access to a secret data network used by the US military, called Milnet. They reportedly had access for more than two years

10:16and carried out frequent attacks. They attacked NASA, the Department of Defense, the Australian Federation Police, institution after institution that represented what they saw as the broken status quo. Eventually, a police investigation against international subversives called Operation Weather. It's not a good idea. Court them hacking into a telecommunications company and causing more than $160,000 of damage. A sange was arrested and charged with 31 counts of hacking and other related crimes. But they couldn't deny his skills. And by 1993, he was actually working with the police's charred exploitation unit to track down the distribution of CSAM, so child sexual abuse material. And that is a very common story. I don't think that law enforcement is able to automatically attract the kind of people that are like middle finger to the man, which also fits into that venn diagram of ravers hackers and middle finger to the manners.

11:19So what they do is they catch them and then they're like, you can go to jail for 50 years or you can just come work for us. They're like, well, I guess I'll just work for you. That is their recruitment, yes. Policy. Still, a soldier was trying out ways to use his nows to make things right. In December 2006, he wrote an essay entitled Conspiracy as Governance. In this essay, he describes political parties as wide scale conspiracies whose only goal is to conserve power and explains the need for radical change. Asana says that only secretive or unjust organizations have anything to fear from leaks. And that creating a world where leaking is easy makes organizations exquisitely vulnerable to more open systems of governance. I don't necessarily disagree with what has been said there, but it is a bit like when you're getting told off in the playground, you're like, well, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about.

12:21And yes, some people will make the comparison to like when the government enforces rules on people to be like, well, why do you need privacy? If you're not a terrorist, what do you have to worry about? But the point is that it's not the little guy being oppressed by the fucking government, it's the government should be transparent to the public and to us. So it's about the power dynamics, but also again, like, we can come on to like discuss this in more detail as hard to get away from in this episode being the main question that we're asking. But it's a fine line, right? It's like, of course, I believe in this idealistic view that we should all know everything and the government should be held to account. Organizations should be forced into transparency and whistleblower should be allowed to leak whatever information they need to if they think something is untoward. Is it dangerous? Is it ethical? I don't know. Like, but does it matter? Is it more important that we have transparency? The libertarian in me is like, fuck the system. But I also understand it's not as easy as that. But when war crimes are being committed, which we'll go on to discover and talk about,

13:25fuck yeah, I don't know, it's complicated. We also know that the government is super fucking corrupt and doing all sorts of horrible shit. So I can't bring myself to say anything other than yes, full transparency. Yeah. So this essay also described the need for a Sange's new media organization. You know what I'm going to say. WikiLeaks. Inspired by the Pentagon papers, WikiLeaks would be a base for exposing secrets. Anyone could upload anonymously and untracably to a drop box. And I do have to say that is a good name. WikiLeaks is a good name. He's really thought about the branding. So the world had changed. Between word processing and the internet, the sheer amount of classified information that could be stored by governments skyrocketed. And the number of people with access to said documents grew as well. Because the governments need people to use, organize and file all of that lovely,

14:26delicious, valuable information. And for the founders of WikiLeaks, all of that information was owed to citizens. Soon, it claimed its first wins. WikiLeaks exposed the rotten tax dodging dealings of Swiss bank, Julius Bar. It also exposed government corruption that covered up a murder in Kenya. And it published a scientific report which exposed the dumping of hundreds of tons of toxic waste into the sea near the Ivory Coast. At the time, 30,000 victims were suing the company responsible in London for the damning report was protected by a super-enjunction. WikiLeaks took it upon itself to get the truth out. The organization was growing, but it wanted more. Assange was travelling the world, speaking a hacker conventions. He was directly encouraging anyone who had classified access or knew anyone who had classified access to leak whatever information

15:28they could to WikiLeaks. In 2009, the website published its first most wanted leaks list. It included requests for all sorts of things, from the editorial guidelines for Fox News, to information on the inner workings of the Mormon Church. But among the entries were calls for information on US military practices, dealings related to Iraq and Afghanistan, and to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. And it wouldn't be long before their calls were answered. In April 2010, a 39-minute video was published on WikiLeaks titled, Collateral Murder. Yeah, this is horrendous. And this is exactly the kind of thing that makes everybody, including me, think, yes, yes to everything being out there, all of the time because they're just lying to us. Yeah. This 39-minute video was taken by the on-board camera of an Apache Helicopter Ganship, flying through Eastern Baghdad. The crew opens fire on a group of 10 Iraqi men, none of

16:33whom are doing anything suspicious, and two of whom turned out to be journalists working for Reuters. When a van arrives to pick up the bodies, the helicopter opens fire again. Inside the van was a father taking his two young children to school. And apart from how senseless the killings were, the other thing that really stands out in the video was the gleeful commentary. You'll hear quotes like, light them up, keep shooting, and oh yeah, look at those dead bastards, and much more of that punctuates every gunshot. And the release of this video was the first time that WikiLeaks directly took on the US military. It wasn't very winning the hearts and mind z, and the White House were furious. Probably more furious there, they were when they found out about that video footage existing. Oh yes, absolutely. And I really wish I'd written this person's name down, but there is a Irish comedian who did a live tour. I want to say the live tour was

17:37called whistleblower. I can't remember. I'm so sorry. Someone will comment, I am sure. Somebody is commenting as you're listening to this about what this person's name is and what his tour was called. But in his tour, he basically the entire thing is about whistleblowing and it's about Julian Assange, it's about all of this and how he is like, he is a modern day hero and anybody who's saying the opposite is being willfully brainwashed by the government. And what he does is actually when everybody comes in the first thing he plays is that video for them, that helicopter footage. And he's like, now tell me that this shouldn't have surfaced. And he's like, might not sound like the natural start to a comedic set, but it works. And it's hard to argue with. Yep. So in the forerun that followed this video being released by WikiLeaks, a few government figures agreed that US citizens deserve to see these atrocities, but that other nations shouldn't. So they have to stay secret. So that's a very nice little

18:39roundabout way as to explaining why they're not making public. And we understand why you should see it, citizens, but we can't let other people see it. We can't let those other spying governments see us. So that's why we have to keep it a secret. It's very good. Not the outsiders. Exactly. The government's take was that any government has tactics that have to be secret to be successful. And by publishing them for the world to see, WikiLeaks had crossed a line. But rather than run and hide, Assange stayed as public as possible, speaking out. And since the source of the leak had to remain anonymous, Assange became the figurehead. And he became quite the celebrity, which he absolutely loves. Of course he does. He became the poster boy for change to thousands of people across the world who were fed up with the brazenness of institutional corruption and brutality. Assange represented a new idealism. And most importantly, the impish way he ran rings around seemingly impenetrable and powerful institutions gave a lot of

19:40people hope. He's like the hacker from a movie. He's crowdsourcing these leaks. He's calling for them. He's asking for them and people are delivering because they can see now that there is a place for them to upload whatever horrible shit their institution has up to. But it comes across like one man is doing it because all of the leakers are secret. And so of course it makes him seem like this omnipotent wizard man. Wizard man. Exactly. And his message was simple. Again, it's like Anna said earlier, if you have nothing to hide, give us the truth. In October 2010, WikiLeaks gained access to almost 400,000 classified documents from the US military on its war with Iraq. And it did not look good for the US. These documents showed that the military had purposefully covered up information about civilian casualties and systemic torture. It showed criminal cover-ups by the US government and exposed a policy of using its diplomats to spy on other country's governments. It also showed that Obama himself had sanctioned a mass handover of the US's

20:46Iraqi prisoners of war to Iraqi authorities. Under the Geneva Convention, a state can't hand a prisoner of war over to another authority that they know commits torture. And the documents showed detailed knowledge of Iraq's brutal history of torture and murder of its prisoners. Let's, you know, put a very fine point on it. That's a war crime. And it's proven. Yeah, that it happened. And I think this whole idea of like, well, we just can't tell you because it's top secret information. It's like, well, if you're committing war crimes as one of the most powerful countries in the world, who is going to hold you to account? And that's why people could get behind WikiLeaks because it finally felt like somebody was doing something, yeah, to hold truth to power. And again, it's very, very hard to argue with that. So WikiLeaks had worked with a group of media

21:47collaborators on publishing its findings. But in that process, cracks were already beginning to show. A sandwich was black and white in his ethics. All information is useful and should be published. And if Iraqi civilians had given information to US forces and their lives would be threatened by publishing their names, that shouldn't stop them. So this is where you start to see Julian Assange's very black and white mentality. Like I said, on this, there's no nuance to him. There's no gray area. It's all on nothing. And it's because he has the idealism of a zealot. I know that's not the right phrase, but that's how it feels. I mean, it's not that far off. He is so convinced about his own righteousness in this. So if that wasn't clear enough, Assange also said that if an Afghan civilian helps coalition forces, he deserves to die. But the journalists were a bit more nuanced.

22:48They pushed for redactions to prevent any real-world harm. But after weeks of debate, the unredacted version was still published on WikiLeaks. And on the day the stories broke. Assange, naturally, became one of the most talked about people on the planet. Stories in the Guardian and the New York Times exposed the truth of the US military. They showed that the real numbers of civilian casualties were way higher than reported. It was the most important story in the world for a few days. But very soon, the White House played a PR blinder and they made a stinkall of their own. They painted Assange as a traitor, saying that he had blood on his hands. Because in releasing such a sense of information, illegally stolen from intelligence agencies, he was putting untold numbers of people in danger. And suddenly, the talking point around the world wasn't the USA's war crimes, of which there are many. It was the ethics of hacking sensitive information in the first place.

23:53It's very well played. It really is. Yeah, I mean, twist, twist, twist, twist. I'm not saying it's not a big question. In fact, there's a whole idea of the ethics of hacking sensitive information and then leaking it is of course like hard to get away from. It's the core question at the heart of this story. Is committing war crimes bad? Yes, of course. Is hiding it from your people? A terrible, atrocious thing to do? Of course it is. But the hacking and then publishing that information, is it safe? Is it ethical or is it even noble? Is the question that some people will have when they're thinking about Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, etc, etc. Can you force transparency on a government and should you? Because leaks anywhere near this scale had never ever happened before. It was the kind of new question that spreads that wildfire. And however you feel about it, there's no doubt that the size of that question, absolutely, very much intended by the White House,

24:53rushed a whole lot of US war crimes under the rug. And while everyone thought about whether, like we said, it's ethical to leak information, the US government started working out how to prosecute Assange as a spy. And he became known as a stone in the shoe of powerful nations, something I'm sure he also very much enjoyed. But it wouldn't last. Because the same year, a warrant had been issued for his arrest on suspicion of rape and sexual assault. 2 Women Anna Arden and Sophia Willen both accused Assange of rape. They both said that sex started consensually, but then he became aggressive and refused to wear protection. Anna said the following. Julian is definitely not a monster, but he crossed my boundaries, and his conduct felt abusive. Assange fired back at first saying he didn't know who these women even were, and tweeting that it was just a conspiracy to bring him down. And here was another

25:58gigantic question for the world's media to now debate. Because wasn't it just a little too convenient that in the wake of history's biggest leak, its figurehead was suddenly under fire? That the US's public enemy number one faced being called in by the police, allowing him to be extradited to the US to face espionage charges? Well commentators and online commenters naturally took these pretty reasonable questions a few shades further, saying that Arden had actually been a CIA plant. The evidence being a master's thesis she wrote about Cuba, and her admiration for the former Argentine president, Nester Kirchner. So I don't know, like obviously conspiracy theories abound, this is a stitch up to bring him down. That's what he says. These women are like this is what he did. Look, like many things were Julian Assange, what this connects to in terms of like national security and whether the big question of should he have been leaking secretly obtained

26:58information, feel like separate issues. He fled the arrest and WikiLeaks supporters around the world rallied to protest what they saw as drummed up lies to bring down a brave truth teller. So whatever the truth is, it's how people perceived it. His supporters were like this is a conspiracy to bring him down and the people that hated him were like, look at him, he's a piece of shit. For a while Assange laid low, but after a week he turned himself into police in London and spent nine days in solitary confinement. But when WikiLeaks supporters raised hundreds of thousands of pounds in bail money, he was allowed out to stay under house arrest. Luckily for him, one of those supporters happened to be Vaughn Smith, an ex-journist and owner of Ellingham Hall, a grand country estate in Norfolk. Assange and the 15 other WikiLeaks staff moved in, I bet they couldn't believe their luck. Smith's housekeeper kept them all hot meals every night. Maybe that

27:59dry shepherd's pie from Blimeyman, that's what I've got in my head. They drank port, shot game and tapped away at their laptops protecting free speech. But soon the lines between WikiLeaks and Julian Assange started to blur. WikiLeaks was fundraising more than ever, but it was unclear how much of the money was actually going to enable whistleblowers and how much was going to get used to clear Assange as sexual assault. And in a very untransparent move from him, Assange became quite paranoid. And he insisted that every WikiLeaks member of staff sign an NDA, and for a lot of people, understandably, that was the last hypocritical straw. An organisation dedicated to transparency using red tape to guard secrets was the kind of hypocrisy that not many people, myself included, can move past. And Assange's legal battle was really draining the piggy bank.

29:00After a year at Elingham, WikiLeaks suspended operations. And Assange got an unexpected new address, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Essentially one day Assange turned up at the Ecuadorian Embassy, disguised as a motorcycle career asking for asylum. Apparently he had met the president, Carrera, on a TV interview, and the two had really hit it off because Carrera was like, I'm constantly persecuted too. So when he turned up, they're asking for asylum, Carrera agreed and took Assange in. Now the legality of what happened here when Assange was allowed to stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy is a little bit shaky, because let's take a look at what the rules say. You're not supposed to be able to arrest a citizen in another country's embassy, which is obviously why Assange has gone there because he's fleeing being arrested. But after a shooting in the Libyan Embassy, the UK does now allow its police to arrest in other country's embassies. It's also agreed, however, that if a country does allow you political asylum,

30:03it shouldn't be used to escape the courts. Quite tricky to enforce that one, I would imagine. Very tricky, especially if you're saying the first rule is that police can't go in there and arrest them. And the crucial point here is that Assange was definitely running from the courts, but he wasn't just running from the Swedes for those sexual assault charges, because it was very unclear after that happened, whether he would just be extradited to the US where he'd have to stand trial for being a spy. So that question very much hung in the air. And two met police officers were stationed pretty much permanently in front of the door of the Ecuadorian embassy, waiting to see if Assange ever left and if he did, they were to arrest him. So he stayed, his date put in an apartment block in Kensington within that embassy for almost seven years. With Assange tucked away, the powers that beaded everything they could to try and dismantle WikiLeaks for once and for all. A US grand jury served subpoenas targeting WikiLeaks supporters.

31:06After political pressure, Visa and MasterCard stopped processing donations to the WikiLeaks website, which is kind of illegal and pretty shitty, but they did anyway. That's so shitty. Fuck me. And WikiLeaks has never really recovered from that. So whether you believe that Assange's paranoid cult of personality ruined the pure message of WikiLeaks, or whether you believe that governments didn't like Assange and managed to successfully silence him. The sting was taken out of WikiLeaks' tail, but it did continue to do some important work. WikiLeaks revealed documents showing that the US had spied on three successive French presidents, even the leader's personal phone calls were recorded by the USA. In 2013, WikiLeaks helped protect whistleblower, of course, Edward Snowden after he leaked NSA documents to journalists, which showed the extent of the government spying on its own people. And in the meantime, Assange rattled around in the Ecuadorian embassy.

32:07He was visited by celebrity fans, including Vivian Westwood, Lady Gaga, and Pamela Anderson, who was apparently a regular. I remember reading that and thinking, what the fuck is going on? And according to Pamela Anderson's very own book, on her and Julian Assange's first meeting, they shared a bottle of mezcal and had a quote, slightly frisky fun alcohol-induced night together. So let that stay in your brain. No, thank you. It's there. It's like the wankworm. And it's in your brain now. But it wasn't all good times, because soon Assange's internet access was cut, for continuing to meddle in other states affairs. And it wasn't just politics, because there was some domestic problem, shall we say, staff at the Ecuadorian embassy were getting pretty fucked off with their houseguest. They complained of Julian Assange, an adult man, skateboarding around the halls at night,

33:08walking around in his underwear and playing loud music in his room. Apparently that room also stanked. No. He'd go weeks without showers. He looks the sort. He looks like a smelly man. And apparently this smell absolutely filled the office. Assange also had a pet cat called James, who he wouldn't clean up after. And he'd regularly accuse embassy staff of being US pies and gathering information. And allegedly a few times in protest at his living conditions. Dan, I have to say this is allegedly Julian Assange, smeared his own shit on the walls of the embassy. I mean, it sounds like you're causing the problem, Julian. Yeah, I have no words. By 2017, all of Assange's sexual assault allegations had been dropped because the evidence was not strong enough to form the basis for filing an indictment. And the Obama administration concluded that it would not be able to prosecute him without also pursuing the newspapers that had published the leaks. In March 2019, WikiLeaks published information suggesting

34:11the new Ecuadorian president's brother had been using offshore accounts. That's how they get you every single time. Would you do that while staying in his brother's house? That's a mistake. And so, finally, after spending an estimated $1 million a year protecting Julian Assange, Ecuador booted him out and I am not surprised. And so, he was taken into British custody. Julian Assange now resides in HMP Balmash, Fighting Extradition. And if you know anything about this story, you'll know that we are barely scratching the surface. There is so much to unpick and plenty of complicated legal wrangling going on. We haven't even mentioned Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked both the collateral murder video and the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs. Manning, Edward Snowden and the other whistleblowers that source this information

35:12are the ones taking immense personal risk, which for Manning included narrowly avoiding a dead sentence. So maybe we'll come back to those stories another time. But what the story of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange does bring up are a lot of new questions, but information and politics in the digital age. But maybe the main takeaway from it all is, you don't fuck with the US government. I promised nothing. I mean, look, with the whole Julian Assange thing, is he a dick? Yeah. Do I agree with what he's saying about transparency and holding truth to power? Also, yeah. Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Yeah. And I think that Julian Assange is the perfect example. Exactly. You know, I think it corrupted him. But also this idea that, well, he didn't leak everything. He leaked stuff for his own political gains, like with the Hillary Clinton stuff we talked about in the episode that is coming out later this week. Go listen to it on Seth Rich. Yes.

36:12But also all media establishments also do the same thing to pretend that different media establishments, when they get a story, don't then push it through their own lens of bias and then leave that information that makes you maybe think differently than they want you to. And include information that really hammers home their point is also being disingenuous. So yes, absolutely. People say, well, Julian Assange wasn't just publishing everything. He was holding back stuff. He only published stuff about Hillary Clinton that made her look bad because he wanted her to lose. That I'm not saying that's right. I'm saying all media outlets do exactly the same thing. Yes, I agree. You can read one article about the same story in multiple places and get various different information. And I think he is just as guilty of that as everyone else. But the core message at the heart of WikiLeaks is one that I can certainly. Get behind. That's about all I have left to say. Anything else? Red Panda? This is Red Panda signing off from the longest shorthand.

37:13I know. Let's go. Bye. Bye everyone. Red Panda out.