 Yn ymdweud, wrth gwrs, a bwysig yw'r sefydliad hon. Yn ymdweud, Ibargol Dyn Ddewragin, ac mae'r ddweud o'r profesor Ian Monroe, yn ymdweud y panel hynny, yn ymdweud yma sy'n ei ddysgu. Mae Mark, y 9 yma sy'n ymdweud, ymdweud ymdweud a'r ffyrdd yn ymdweud a'r ffyrdd yn ymdweud. A ydych yn y panel ydy, rydyn ni'n meddwl fanolistau. Rydyn ni'n dr Solaid Braifers, rydyn ni'n cyd-rhyw ysgol, a'r expert yw whistleblowing. Rydyn ni'n meddwl. Rydyn ni'n John Kiriachl, rydyn ni'n meddwl yng Nghymru Ciaidwyr yw whistleblwr. Rydyn ni'n meddwl Lourie Loughb, rydyn ni'n meddwl yng Nghymru Ciaidwyr, a rydyn ni'n meddwl yng Nghymru Ciaidwyr. Rydyn ni'n meddwl yng Nghymru Ciaidwyr, a rydyn ni'n meddwl yng Nghymru Ciaidwyr yw whistleblowing. Felly, y sefyllwyr hwnnw, rydych chi'n meddwl yw'r hefyd, dyma'r Llywodraeth, a'r Llywodraeth Cymru, ond mae'r Llywodraeth yn byw i'n gweithio amser. Mae'n meddwl o gyrfa cyntaf o gwybr â chyfodig, cyd-rhywb i'r gweithio ar yr event ac yn gweithio ar yr ysgol. It is a big thank you to the Committee to Defend Julina Sange, whose grassroots supporters have contributed towards the cost of the Zoom and as they have done in ordinary times outside of Covid to the costs of the Hall that we used to book. We have speakers today from across the world, from Australia to America and we are going to talk about issues that affect both the global south and the global north. As we go into this, one of the things that sticks in my head is Mike Pompeo talking about WikiLeaks being a hostile non-state intelligence service. And it seems quite apt that it was this hostile non-state intelligence service that was supposedly abetting the government of Russia. That at nine years ago, through the ingenuity of people like Julian Assange and those who were behind WikiLeaks, brought to light the way in which a private, unaccountable firm was essentially engaging in all kinds of activity, including bribery and manipulation, and would it literally stop at nothing, including in order to boost its bottom line, so that it kept information a privileged commodity that was only available to the few. And this was, of course, highly manipulated tailored information. And rather than a source of knowledge and information for the many, which is what WikiLeaks ought to do, and WikiLeaks, of course, did this through being pioneering in offering what was an electronic dropbox, so to speak, for whistleblowers that provided anonymity both to the source, as well as a certain level of security for the documentation. A level of security that means that to this day WikiLeaks has 100% record of accuracy. In contrast, what this private intelligence firm Stratfor was doing was providing information to governments, to the Marines, to lots of quite dubious regimes around the world, as well as to companies like Dow Chemicals, and the, for example, with Dow, they were reporting information in relation to activists who were reeling from the Bokephal gas tragedy in India in Madhya Pradesh, where, you know, so many people, over 500,000 people were injured as a result of a gas league. And I always remember the story of this particular trade unionist, a worker who was carrying a gas called Phosgene in a container and managed to drop it on himself and then pulled off the gas mask that he was wearing and died within 72 hours of inhaling this information. Now, not only was Dow involved in this huge tragedy which went under the union garbage overhanging company, but it also was involved in contaminating the water after that. And Stratfor was also involved in relation to the Vancouver Olympics on advising Coca-Cola about Peter activists and what they were involved in. So for those of you who are activists sitting in the audience wondering what Julian Assange's case has to do with you, a lot of what WikiLeaks revealed was about the ways in which governments and private actors were colluding to essentially clamp down on activism and whistleblowing on the public right to know. Now Stratfor quite interestingly describes itself, and I'm trying to read the words here, as the world's leading geopolitical intelligence platform. And this world leading geopolitical intelligence platform is actually trying to make money for a small bunch of shareholders. And it is actually public money that is being used in the pursuit of many of the activities that Stratfor was trying to get into, which is quite to a large extent disconnected from the socio-political and economic realities of the jurisdictions in which companies like Stratfor operate. In a way what they do is entrench some of the structural inequalities, including racism that comes from the kinds of perverted information that is leaked in relation to some of these sources. And when governments and intelligence agencies and public bodies rely on this kind of information, which is flawed, biased and often inaccurate, and where the customers of this information within these governments often become assets, often become people who work within intelligence firms like Stratfor, it creates a situation where the people who are using this information or the people who are providing this information are largely unaccountable to the ordinary public, while benefiting hugely from public money. And this is something that many of you, especially those of you who are interested in holding the state accountable for its criminality, will be really interested in. So I'd like to stop there and invite our first speaker, John Kiriaku, to tell us a little bit about what, for those of us who don't know very much about what firms like Stratfor do, could you tell us about who they are, what they do, what their clients are, and how this affects the quality of the intelligence that we get. Over to you, John. Certainly, thank you. Thanks for having me first off. I'm very happy to talk about Stratfor, because I think it's a very important issue that most people don't talk about. It's certainly an issue here in Washington. And I've always gotten a little bit of a kick out of the conversation about Stratfor, because I never took Stratfor seriously as a serious organization. And frankly, I don't know any intelligence professional that did, or that does. Stratfor, the joke about Stratfor for many years has been about Stratfor's so-called secret sources. They talk about what a great intelligence platform they are because they have these sources all over town. Well, the joke is that their sources are the press officers of every embassy in the city. And their other special sources are the Washington Post and the New York Times. So really what Stratfor is, what Stratfor has always been, is a group of underpaid, very attractive young women, and we can talk about that separately if you'd like, because that's who George Friedman, the co-founder of Stratfor, always hired, was very attractive young women. Sitting around and reading newspapers, and watching CNN and MSNBC, and jotting down notes, and then calling the Embassy of Yemen or the Embassy of Saudi Arabia, the Embassy of Jordan, and talking to the press officer there, and then writing up a report like it's some special secret insight that nobody else could possibly come to. And that's why when Jeremy Hammond, God bless him, did what he did, I was so shocked at the way the boom was lowered on him because he didn't reveal anything. He didn't reveal anything that was dangerous. What he did though was expose a very Washington kind of phoniness that that was Stratfor and its business model. Now, what firms like Stratfor try to do, what they try to market is a certain level of political and strategic insight that nobody else has. What they say is that they're full of former CIA people, former NSA people, former FBI people, that's just simply not true. They can't afford those people. So they hire these young college graduates, researchers, writers to just press pieces and send out their bulletins. Mostly, their subscribers were individuals. Now they brag, or they used to brag on their website about how their subscribers were mostly Fortune 500 companies that was largely not true. They were mostly individuals, LLCs, sole proprietorships with very specific questions. Should I do business in Yemen? Should I buy that silver mine in Romania? And then you would need to know things like, well if I do want to buy that silver mine in Romania, who's going to win the next election, the conservatives who are going to let me mine the silver, or the socialists who are going to not let me mine the silver. And that's it. This was all about, this was all about capitalism. It was all about making money. It wasn't about strategic thinking. It wasn't about long term prognostication. It wasn't about secret clandestine sources. This was all about money. And that's why Stratford didn't pay its people anything, because it was all about money for the principles and putting money into the pockets of those people who had negotiated favorable terms with the government and with other investors. So in my view, Stratford has always just been a fake, phony, underachieving organization whose sole purpose was to make money for its initial investors. It provided nothing to the greater context of intelligence collection or intelligence analysis in Washington or even in the business community. Thanks, John. Can I just stay with you there and ask you to tell us a little bit about how organizations like Stratford, if they are, you know, I heard somebody describe them as half clown, half intelligence agency. I'm really curious if they are indeed who has described it. Why is it that they are so powerful? Could you tell us a little bit about that and also your general understanding of how their information is used by organizations within the establishment in addition to, you know, in addition to furthering the interests of capitalists. Sure, let me answer your second question first. The information is used by insiders to either confirm or to refute the information that the insiders have, because their sourcing is going to be different. Insiders, you know, at the CIA we had this mantra, and it was recruit spies to steal secrets, period. That's how you get promoted by recruiting spies to steal secrets. Stratford doesn't recruit spies to steal secrets, that's espionage, and they don't have diplomatic immunity or diplomatic cover to protect themselves, so they don't steal the secrets. They just read the papers and analyze the media and see if the results are the same as what the intelligence organizations are getting in their own analysis. So that's easy. It's just to either refute or to support conclusions based on different sourcing. How did they get started? Well, you know, every retiring or former CIA officer, especially from the Directorate of Intelligence, which is the analytic organization inside the CIA, wants to keep doing what he's doing. See, at the CIA part of the culture is to convince you that your job is so specialized that you can't do anything else, right? You can't market that skill outside the CIA. And that's one of the reasons why turnover is so low at the CIA. It's actually under 2%, and has been for decades. It's because they convince you that you can't do anything else. Where are you going to go? Are you going to go to the Washington Post? You can't, because then everything that you write has to be cleared by the CIA. You'll never get anything published. So what you do, if you do leave the CIA, is you create an organization like STRAT4, or join an organization like STRAT4, which is trying to do exactly what the CIA has always been doing, but without the sourcing. So, like I say, it's an empty shell of what a real intelligence organization would do. Thanks, John. Lauri, thank you very much for being here. Could you tell us a little bit a lot of what we're talking about in relation to the STRAT4 leagues also has a lot to do with the work done by anonymous. Could you tell us a little bit about the hacktivism that sits alongside these leagues and what the people who were involved and what the circumstances that were surrounding this were about. Lauri, you're still muted. I'm just going to make sure you're unmuted. I can try and fill in a little bit of those blanks. Unfortunately, the passage of time and the several assaults on my brain made it harder to remember the exact details. The way STRAT4 came into my radar is an online activist exploring how to do activism online, the modalities of activism and the emergence of anonymous as this kind of network decentralized chaotic actor, the internet developing a conscience and trying to exert the power of the network to try and make the world a better place. It came on our radar because we found out that there was a dirty tricks campaign against us and not just us, a dirty tricks campaign against online activists against WikiLeaks against Glenn Greenwald and some other journalists who were reporting on information that was coming out of online activities and this idea that this was something that could be solved by the right kind of strategic interventions. So STRAT4 were indicated with HB Gary and Palantir and some other of these private sector intelligence adjunct, shall we say, in attempting to disrupt these activities similarly to how you mentioned earlier deeper the activism to do with the chemical atrocities in India and attempts to kind of nail that activism and control similar thing was being perpetrated against this new emergent tendency of online protest. As John said, these were not professionals, these are cowboys in a clown car selling Lisa Simpson's magic rock that makes the tigers go away, you don't see any tigers here so the rock must work. And then you can get away with this, because if you claim to just have a little bit of intelligence, then maybe a few law firms or a few other firms are going to hedge their bets, because they just want to, you know, potentially get that bit of intelligence before making the wrong business decision, etc. In some part of the world that they don't have full insight into. But the actual activities that were exposed were, and yeah, I mean it's to say that they were they were not contributing to strategic analysis or prognostication or planning is two diplomatic they were people trying to make a quick buck by being the cyber version of the Pinkerton's, you know, and some adjunct to the state that can come in and throw a little muscle around and act very unprofessionally and try and ensure things go the way that they ought to go. Thanks, Laurie. While we're with you, can you tell us a little bit about what motivates the kinds of people who get involved in anonymous and who are, who are seeking to reveal such information before we go on to select to talk a little bit about how that differs from whistle blowing or how that is similar to whistle blowing so Are you able to tell us a little bit about anonymous and what what kinds of people get involved, why they get involved, what what motivates them what kinds of activism they're involved in, etc. I mean, speaking solely through the lens of my own perspective and my own experiences and the emergence of this entity anonymous or this collective dynamic of people on the internet and was liberating and empowering pivotal change in how people that were on the internet or some small subsection of them were able to view their ability to relate to the world and it's not just a place that you go to escape these things that you were never really particularly on board with but it's a means by which you can actually envision a better world and try and bring it about and it was it was vastly liberating in small symbolic gestural token actions such as helping protesters out who are being suppressed by authoritarian regimes and more revealing information about corporate and civic malfeasants in office and it suddenly became apparent that there was a power here for a large number of people collaboratively to exercise a form of oversight I would say that hadn't emerged previously and we were playing around with that role and what what our ability could be to to to to agitate for justice in that capacity. Thanks, Lauri. I wonder if we could now move to Suilet to talk to you a little bit about what what it means to hold power to account and how whistleblowers do that and where the boundaries lie between those who are outside the organization and those who are inside the organization when they whistleblow and also perhaps also talk a little bit about how this relates to the case of Julian Assange and the current situation in relation to how the state is going after him so over to you Suilet. So it's interesting, I mean we have this anniversary on the February 27 2012 WikiLeaks began publishing the global intelligence files of over 5 million emails from the Texas headquarters of this company, and the emails are from 2004 to December 2011. And this, this act was one of a number of acts in the activities of WikiLeaks that have really helped expand the definition of whistleblower. So, traditionally whistleblower has sort of evolved really from the 1980s and 1990s as being primarily about employees revealing serious wrongdoing often fraud financial fraud from inside a company. But what we've seen is a movement over the last decade and WikiLeaks was certainly a major causative factor in this to broadening that definition. And, and that now includes in many definitions, many protections, contractors, subcontractors. It's now been expanded to say volunteer board members of a church or school. And so these are people who are not just employed by or subjugated if you will by a boss in the organization, but have some role in that community. And I've seen debate in academic circles about whether or not university students might be considered whistleblowers by virtue of being inside a university community even though they don't hold a official role as an employee or an oversight person like a board manager. For those people who are entirely outside of a community. And again, the lines of community blur and electronic setting. For those people who are outside entirely outside of an organization. The term that I and some other academics have used to describe people who reveal serious wrongdoing is is bell ringers and bell ringers and particularly public interest bell ringers, which I think you would say this. The people who provided this information to WikiLeaks as a publisher to publish or acting in the public interest, and we can talk about what it's revealed in the public interest. Both of those sorts of people need protections and particularly one of the things that they need protection from is a kind of ugly threat that's been emerging from the onward push towards better protection for whistleblowers. And so that better protection has been exemplified by a huge growth over the last decade. In the number of laws and implementations of policy that protect whistleblowers, including by the end of 2021. Some 27 countries in the European Union who will all have to adopt a minimum standard set of laws in national transposition of the EU directive protecting whistleblowers. That's a massive thing. It's fantastic. So, so why, you know, why is this important when you've seen this move, but there are threats to this move. And one of the, you know, threats to it is a risk that whistleblowers and we've seen this in Julian Assange's case, and in other cases, will be charged with data misuse or unauthorized access of data charges. And that this will be the side door channel that is used to attack the whistleblower or, or someone who reveals the, you know, makes a disclosure in the public interest. Well, why is that. Okay, it's because most things are actually stored in electronic form these days. We are reverting to paper very much. And so, a lot of the computer misuse acts internationally have a very broad scope. And they basically refer to either using any telecommunications facility where we all use those every day they follow us around my tracking devices with our phones at, you know, or any online technology or any data that's stored in a technological basis. So that, you know, that is a, that's a pretty serious concern. That's a threat to, to the whistleblower and the kind of general movement that happened from 2010 to now and that is a push towards more transparency. So, I think one thing that's really important about the role of public interest bell ringers, as well as whistleblowers. And this is an emerging thing that has happened really over the last decade to 15 years is that we once in our, in our free and open democracies believed that transparency was a corrective mechanism in its own right to have FOI laws, for example, and freedom of the press, and that's great. But we're drowning in data. Right. We have more data. I can't even keep all the files straight on my computer, you know, let alone all the other data that's on the internet we are drowning in data, which is probably why some people pay a lot of money to places like Strathbwrth. The problem with that is that what's in short supply now is less the data and more the guides and the signposts. The signposts are incredibly important. Those that do so in the public interest are doubly so. And so punishing the whistleblower, or punishing the public interest bell ringer is, is taking away that kind of key junction in the process that you need to have a protective umbrella for in the public interest. And that process looks like the whistleblower, the public interest bell ringer to, for example, for the journalist to the publisher to the public. If you break down any element of that chain, the people who lose are the public. And, and, and we've seen, you know, for example, you know, significant whistleblwn case, Alton del Torre's case, the Luxley case, you know, he was initially charged with a computer going to be charged with a computer crimes related charge. And this is not unusual at all. So, so I think those those that's where we've got a kind of nexus point that's very relevant to to this case. And I might just add that, in terms of some big headline observations about why this case is so important. It's quite funny. You could you could make an observation that strat for, you know, we thought that they were all connected to the CIA, as John said, but really they were sitting in the desk doing Google searches all day long. And as John, and it's not only a question the CIA has access to information that obviously they don't have but CIA actually does operations they don't just do Google searches right. And that's really, I mean you could say that's the difference as well between I don't know black water and the economist. So I think it was the Atlantic might have quoted someone at the time that the strat for documents were publishing something like what you got in the intelligence reports from strat for is what you could have gotten from the economist the week before. You know, and, and I think, you know the observation that strat for has paid sources which came out of this is interesting because I think I believe the Atlantic also said, yes we have people like that they're called reporters. And, but the difference is their reports go to the public. So that that those are kind of my observations on on this. Thank you very much. I'd just like to move very briefly if I may to introduce Professor Ian Monroe who is one of the co-founders of free the truth and to ask if Ian, would you like to add to this discussion of whistleblowing because you are a highly regarded whistleblowing expert and I wonder whether you wanted to add to the common soullet soullet has just made before we go to questions just to warn everybody who's watching in the audience if you wouldn't mind posting your questions if you're on the zoom if you can post it within the q&a tab. Then we can pick it up for I can pick it up for the speakers and if you're watching on one of the other channels are our experts our tech experts who are beavering behind the scenes will post them back to me so hopefully we will capture many of the questions that you want to ask. So if you can please post your questions now while Ian is speaking then we can try and pass them out to the right speakers. Ian over to you. Thanks Deepa and thanks very much for the speakers and their very valuable insights into the stratfor leaks and more generally into the role of these private security in inverted commas or private intelligence firms, regardless of their competence. And of course if you read the global intelligence files or some of them, they're ridden with prejudice mistakes and of course the basic errors, all coming probably from the newspapers that they're reading I suspect rather than intelligence work as this has been pointed out already. And I would like to, I completely agree with what Sulepta said, if you think of a whistleblower Chelsea Manning. She was charged with a whole bunch of things but she was actually only convicted of computer fraud and misuse. I think it was three counts and five counts and put in prison for 35 years. And then what they do, if what the judge did in that case was of course, give the maximum possible sentence for a relatively mundane, what apparently mundane crime because they couldn't be a convictor of anything else because he or she'd done the public interest disclosure she'd revealed the existence of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Julian Assange of course has been prosecuted more or less the same thing using based on similar laws, except he's being, even though he wasn't the whistleblower. He was the public journalist who handled the disclosures, Chelsea Manning's disclosures. He's up for 175 years. And of course it's as many people have already pointed out this is criminalization, not only of whistleblower but on the one hand we've got these new whistleblower laws being created for whistleblower protection which is all great. But on the other hand, we've got other other laws being used or misused for very severely to try and deter whistleblowers and also whistleblower journalists and people who support whistleblowers. But yeah, I think it's a very serious problem, not just amongst the whistleblowing problem that the community but also in the activist community more generally. I think last year or the year before last Amnesty International produced a major report on the role of private intelligence firms that were tracking activists, its activists and I think they're particularly focused on a firm called the NSO. But this is obviously a growing problem and I remember, as well as WikiLeaks, I remember Mr Robert Thibault raising the issue that activists were being tracked by the intelligence community as well. Journalists and so on. He gave the example of a police whistleblower in Canada. And the journalist was being, was asked by the Canadian police force to, can you get information on this on the journalist so we can find out who the whistleblower is. But yeah, I think that this is a serious problem. I just want to, even though the company is it we're strapped for maybe clownish and not particularly professional or if you look at UC global of course that seems to have had much more of an effect as it were in the sense that it seems to have had more very close links with US intelligence. And also with the type of information surveying lawyers, journalists whistleblowers, anyone talking to WikiLeaks staff and also possibly providing information or misinformation, which is then being circulated in the within the media, but I was just wondering what in, I would like to ask the question of the speakers what you do about it. How do you, in the course of that brilliant in the HB Gary case and not anonymous basically revealed how incompetent HB Gary was and then this led to decline in its reputation and its insolvency, but how do we deal with this how do we address this this issue does anyone have any speakers have any particular I could, I could jump in at this point. And I, I think we actually ought to take seriously Mike Pompeo's suggestion of what the world needs and that that is a public intelligence agency that is not beholden to the partisan interests of a particular region, or particular corporation or a particular demographic, but is beholden to the interests of humanity at large. And the reason we need to have a public distributed decentralized intelligence agency is because as Sue let said, our gweithus, our responsibility our duty to act as the overseers of power, which is of in anestimal importance for civic society is the reason we have a court in public is the reason why the king deliberate at the court in public is the reason why the administration of law is done in public. It's the reason why democracy is done transparently and publicly as far as possible. And that's because power when it is not under oversight that is effective tends inevitably towards corruption and unpleasant things happen. And the problem is, we, it's not a lack of information that we have it's a lack of ability to analyze that information understand the import. And so we need to need to bootstrap the structures. So that the public can continue to to to see what is being done with the power that is seeded. We must remember this that all power is seeded by the public to governments and to private corporate entities, etc, to ensure that they are not crossing some lines in the sand that we should, you know, retain the right to draw. And I think we've lost that and as we transfer into this digital age we have to think to ourselves very carefully how do we continue to have that faculty to exercise that oversight. Entities like WikiLeaks, but it's not just the ability to source documents and to to get to offer source protections and to publish them without fear or favor, but it's also meaningful analysis and implications. And, and so this speaks to the way that whistleblowing and bell ringing intellects fantastic extension of that analogy become now an integral part of the role of journalism society that it's inextricable is not no longer just this separate class of journalists whose job it is to report on the news but anyone in any position where they interact with a system where some information about the inner working to that system is necessary to be known by the greater greater whole. And now puts on the hat of that that that that duty to disclose, and we need to make it as frictionless. We to eliminate all the barriers of entry to do that we need to make it safe, and we need to make it effective because without that power will continue to tend towards tyranny. Thanks, lauri. And there are a couple of questions which are surfacing in the chat and before we go into that what one of the things that it's worth probably picking up is a question about Julian and the way you know lauri talked about holding power to account and how a democracy works and how it should be transparent and how we should understand that the the justice system works in a reasonable way. And I'd like to go to Suellette and lauri to talk to them a little bit about. Suellette, could you tell us about how this timeline of the Strathfor League sits with the broader timeline of Julian's indictments and particularly could you focus on the way the the superseding enlightenment were introduced and explain that a little bit to us because I think a lot of people don't understand the problems with due process, not just in terms of companies like Strathfor planning to hold Julian as one of the as some of the leaks revealed as a keep him as a bride in prison move him from country to country. So to talk about these things but then also perhaps go to lauri and talk about a little bit about what the extradition process feels like so because although this webinar is essentially commemorating the Strathfor Leagues I think we have to also talk about the organization and the people who were involved in in bringing the information that was of public interest to light and how much many of them have lost and have sacrificed in order for us to be able to know what's really going on. Whereas the people who are the war criminals, the Bush, the Bush is the blairs, the, the Obamas of this world are putting out new books and sitting free and enjoying their lives. So I think we do have to talk about what's happening in Julian's case and what's happening in Belmarsh prison where Julian, you know, he's been given his warm clothes in October, or rather they've been sent into him and yet the prison hasn't delivered them to him and he's been sitting freezing cold. Preparing for the trial of his life and this really brings a sense of urgency to our discussion. So over to you, Suellette, if you can tell us a little bit about the second suit proceeding indictment and the broader timeline and then we'll go to lauri about the extradition process. Yeah, I mean. So, you know, Julian is dragged out of the embassy there are initial charges laid against him in April 2019. And this has been due to a change of government in Ecuador and the US actively actively lobbying Ecuador and being instrumental in raising billions of dollars of loans to Ecuador. With I think, you know, one of the price tags being Julian massage. So in late May 2019, the, you know, espionage act charges are unveiled against Julian, and normally when those charges are unveiled that's that's the last word, and that's because the UK as the kind of men in the middle of all this has to go through a set of processes to start this proceeding because he's not being tried for these crimes in the UK. He's being, you know, the debate is one of extradition, not whether or not he's guilty of those particular cons this time. So the hearing opens itself in February 2020. And that's because the US is pushing to speed things up they want things to happen quickly. And, you know, there are a set of hearings that are held, and then in June 2020, June 24, all of a sudden the US is like, well, actually we've got additional charges that we want laid. And the charge sheet is superseding, hence the name superseding indictment, the previous charges so it replaces the previous indictment. Now, this is so confusing to the process, and probably unprecedented in the UK extradition proceedings that have gone before for anyone, certainly in my knowledge I don't know of any case, but this has been done sort of halfway through when the cake is half baked. The UK is is flounding around for four to six weeks after this has happened, because they don't know what to do with it they're not sure how to process it. It's actually a very outrageous thing for the USD DOJ to have done at that time. And at the time these these superseding indictment is the list of new charges are just kind of plonked on the website of the DOJ. No articles so fanfare just one day it kind of appears. Who knows possibly that was how the UK government learned about it we don't know. It, you know, from then September, there is the hearing and Julie Nassange is, you know, formally readdressed and on these new charges. Now, you just wouldn't normally do that. It's not, it's not normal behavior. He's now not having the opportunity to respond properly to a set of these new charges, which is completely outrageous in the justice system where he's about to be extradited. So, not having the challenge, not having the opportunity to challenge these new allegations is really an abuse of process. But that's what has gone on here. It's possible that the judge took a very dim view of this. In a sense, it's an insult to the British justice system. I don't think you could describe it as anything else it treats the British justice system with a kind of content. And, and I suspect that most British British judges would take a dim view of that. So, so that's, that's where, you know, that's where his case is, you know, is at the moment obviously the Biden administration has decided to appeal the finding of the lower court, which had what many people in civil society would would argue is a very bad set of decisions for freedom of the press and freedom of expression, and human rights, right up until the point on the decision where the judge rules not to extradite him, but really on the grounds of his mental health. So, you know, I'm not ruling. I'm not saying he's not bad, but he's mad. And therefore we won't extradite him. You know, it's kind of smeared. But at least he's not extradited but the US didn't have to actually fight those they could have just said is going to be a hard fight on legal grounds and therefore it's a waste of taxpayers taxpayers monies. And by the way, we have a whole new administration. Do we really want to spend the next years chasing the ghosts of the last four years administration. And so they could have just decided to not proceed with that. Instead they have decided to do so so will be interesting to see what happens. I think one of the important things that is come out of Julian's case but it's also come out of, you know, the other cases related to it for example Jeremy Hammond's case. Chelsea Manning's case is a is the biggest kind of existential threat to the nature of investigative journalism that we've seen in a long time. And that threat looks like this, where you have a journalist who finds information, a tip off that there is serious wrongdoing that is happening. It may be illegal. It may be just immoral. It may offend the public mores. And they ask for the disclosure of that information, whether it's a public interest bell ringer or a whistleblower for some evidence in support of that allegation. There is a tilt in the kinds of charges that have been laid against the people involved in this decade long saga. And that tilt is to ask for that evidence is becoming a criminalized act. It is criminalizing the act of verification and it's very ironic because many politicians around the world stand on their soapbox and say, oh my God, it's terrible, you know, Facebook publishes fake news, it's awful awful awful. But here you actually have something that will undermine the verification of the accuracy of news in reporting. But it creates a terrible precedent. It's bad for the whistleblower and integrity in society in the organization, and it's bad for journalism. And the last thing you want to have is journalists who don't ask for evidence, because then they're going to print things that are simply wrong. And I think we saw some of that when either because of journalists who choose not to ask for evidence or journalists who view the evidence only through a particular lens when they are, for example, embedded journalists doing war journalism. And like the journalist who was Pulitzer Price winning journalist who was unwilling to reveal what happened within the collateral murder with video until WikiLeaks revealed it and Chelsea's testimony came through, and it became more and more evident that he knew about this information so Yes, it is. It is really worrying, isn't it, to see how evidence gathering and the process by which we can penetrate some of the complexity and the opacity of these kinds of very complex institutions, which make very important decisions about our lives. And yet we have very little control over and where individuals in these institutions are hiding behind these facades to essentially enrich themselves, whether it is shareholders of strat for or whether it is the owners of organizations such as these who are who are hiring intelligence people who are sitting within the establishment to then come over and make money for themselves. But just to take a step back before we go into perhaps with you a little bit, John, in a second about how companies like strat force mere people and what kinds of information the the leaks actually revealed. Could I come back to Lauri and what I wanted to talk about this idea of holding power to account and we, we saw on the screen flashing by for those of you who were watching the live stream. The information provided by Declassified UK, which showed that there are serious questions about conflicts of interest in relation to Lady Emma R Buttsnot, who's the chief, who was the chief magistrate at Westminster Magistrate and how, you know, her son is involved with a company called Dark Trace, which seeks to shut down places like WikiLeaks, how her husband has a has a, is partnering with Richard Deolove in relation to things and how she herself receives financial benefits from secretive partner organizations of the UK Foreign Office. And looking at that and looking at, for example, a judge at a hearing where Julian is called in front of the court, he says his name and his date of birth and the judge brands him a narcissist. What does it feel like to go through this extradition process, particularly if you are somebody perhaps on the autism spectrum, who is expecting certainty. My understanding from the work of Professor Niels Meltzer, the UN Special Rapporteur, who has confirmed that Julian was being exposed to psychological torture, is that a big part of psychological torture is the arbitrariness of the process and also the inability to rely on institutions that are supposed to predict you. For example, in Julian's case, he thought asylum, he was granted asylum and then without grounds, his citizenship was revoked and without due process. Similarly, you know, when he goes to the court, everybody else gets treated a certain way, he gets treated differently when he, in fact, the law has to be changed after the cases taken in Julian's case in order to make the European extradition warrants, for example, run in an appropriate way or whether it is in relation to, you know, the treatment as Westminster Magistrate scores. And I say this as somebody who was a legal observer, Julian's hearings and how difficult it was to attend those hearings and how we were intentionally kept out of the process so that, you know, the right of the public to know as much as it is a right of Julian to have an extradition hearing or a judicial process where the public can understand what's going on in his case was totally trampled over in this case. So I'd like to move back to Lowry please and talk to you a little bit about your experience of the extradition process and what it feels like in terms of this arbitrariness within the process please. Over to you, Lowry. And yeah, I mean, if you haven't had the wonderful opportunity in your lives yet to read trans Kafka, I suggest you do. He wrote a book called The Trial and from that and some of his other writings, we have this adjective in the English language Kafkaesque and Kafkaesque basically means, as you describe it, it's a system of administration of so called justice or law that is that is arbitrary, that is undermining that is to some extent gaslighting the people that are involved in it. And all the expectations that things should proceed a certain way that there should be a sort of their fairness about their equality to it. You see these evaporators you participate in the system and it can be small things such as the when you put into Westminster Magistrates Court you are and you're not able to sit with council, you're not able to confer with council and help them represent you. It's their brief as is their responsibility and as is your right to inform them, you're putting a little goldfish bowl effectively segregated from the rest of the court and presented to the court as a guilty party. And then, you know, select reminded us that trial is not to establish guilt the judges in an extradition hearing should not allow themselves to form an opinion on the guilt of the or non guilt of the requested person. However, we see that it colors their decision making the way that the United States, in particular because of our unbalanced extradition treaty with the US is able to completely set the stage and frame the narrative and steal a march on the storytelling. By the way, the, the allegations are put together in the indictments that form the extradition request. And then, as I said, they can somehow laid in the game just decide to wipe that slate and put a whole bunch of new things on there. And the problem in an extradition hearing is you don't have a right to contest any of these claims say that again for the people at the back. You're sitting in a goldfish bowl in the dock being lied about by the most powerful organization in the world, the most powerful entity in the world indirectly, the soul remaining superpower in the world in front of a institution that in theory administers justice under truth that administers justice under truth that ensures the outcome by ensuring truth to ensure that justice is done. You said a new listen to people live out you and you can even raise your hand and say please miss. I'm a lady of not so few in any of our judiciary in particular but please can these people I haven't met from another country I've never been to stop lying about me so that they can lock me up in a small box for the rest of my life because that isn't the way I was raised to believe courts should work there should be an adversarial process of contesting evidence and an impartial panel of people who are not part of the establishment the same political entity that is embroiled in the abuses of power that you are bringing to light and there should be that at least that check and balance and all these things are not there in the extradition process so it is a little bit like you're being served a meal of justice but there's no nutrients in there there's just there's just psychological torture and it's not a pleasant process to be put through and it this is why it's so essential to have the have other people involved not to to accept themselves as passive observers but to actually participate as you attempted to do deeper as a observer legal observer in this process and so many other fantastic organizations around the world have attempted to do to say hold on a minute you can can't get away with this like we are here to watch and ensure that what's done is right and every effort has been made in Julian's case to obstruct that oversight faculty again to ensure that things can be done in a twisted and underhanded way and you know it's not very pleasant for anyone and I can only speak from my own experience but someone of my so we say personality typology or somebody in the kind of mold of mindset of viewing the world that I have have very strong sense of innate justice and what is right and then to be to be put into that, you know what should be a sacred and hallowed place for the administration of that justice and to see its integrity and its honor and besmerched by it by the way that process is not put together and orchestrated to ensure justice but put together and orchestrated to assure a particular outcome, a political outcome and that political outcome in this case is the suppression of the vital and necessary to the duty of journalists to report the truth without fear without fear and favor we say without fear and favor and you cannot say that anyone who is aspiring to be an investigative journalist or is working at a publication in in the in the capacity of an editor is not looking at this case and thinking about this now. I know how far I can go and not not any further before I come under the crosshairs, and I have myself detained in various forms extra legally for for decade, subjected to a vial character assassination campaign. I've been put into a sordid so popular mockery and facing withering away in a cell for daring to give the public what the public needs to know about things like war crimes and things like abuses of power in tension in Guantanamo and all the things that we absolutely must be able to see. We can say no, we can say this is not. And so, yeah, I guess to summarize, the extradition process is very, very, very flawed. And it is a simulcra, it is a simulation of justice in the sense of Baudrillard. It puts on all of the air as it puts on all of the costumes, and it goes through the motions, but when you're sitting there you can see that it is not bent towards the, the moral arc of this process is not bent towards justice as it should be. And, you know, that's harrowing. And I'm lucky being the first person for whom extradition to the United States was refused on the grounds of the foreign bar, and that it would be unjust and oppressive to put someone with any sort of mental physical health complications in such a barbaric system of detention. I was lucky to be able to be here and speak to you about this. But these situations haven't changed, the detention system is still barbaric, someone put in there with any psychological difficulties will not flourish, they will expect to have degradation of their physical and mental condition and an inability to provide meaningful care to them. And so we're still fighting that battle in Julian's case, and I just want to implore everyone to remember that it's like we're all in this fight, we can all play a role, we can all do something, even if it's just letting the power know that you are observing. So writing a letter, turning up a court, expressing opinion, sharing this, discussing it with friends and family and say, well, this does concern me, it does concern me. I want to live in a world where an organisation and a person takes great risk and exercises great courage to help the world see what is being done in their name, the power that they seed with the money that they give to the state. I want to live in a world where that person is not crushed mercilessly to send an example to others that power should not be held to account. It's so powerful, Laurie. Having spoken to you a couple of times, I just moved by what you have sacrificed and how deep your sense of justice is and what contribution you have made to the world in being able to do this. And how much you've been put through, which is completely and so utterly wrong and unjust. Carrying on with this sense of barbarism that you spoke about, Julian, if he is extradited to the United States, will face 175 years in a maximum security prison. For those of you who don't know what it feels like to be in the Alexandria detention centre, there is a clip available online, which we will try and share through the chat of what it feels like inside the prison. But essentially, even at pretrial stage, this is before any guilt has been established, Julian will be kept in a very small cell. And the US specialises in these really strange terms. For example, Julian will be kept under special administrative measures, which for anybody who's read the Centre for Constitutional Rights report on what they call the darkest corner of the world special administrative measures are essentially ways in which you are cut off and your lawyers are cut off from speaking to the rest of the world in relation to your trial. You are also placed in administrative segregation as they term it, which is essentially solitary confinement where you're in your cell 22 hours a day, which the UN has clearly defined as a form of torture. And Chelsea, of course, went through this, in fact, she was placed in a cage and at times was deprived of her clothing and the horrendousness of the process doesn't end there. They also talk about, you know, one of the things that really bothered me when I was listening to the hearings was the way in which, firstly, the prosecution, the CPS talked about mental health, and the way in which it was described and most of this process has been described around Julian and his personality rather than in relation to the way in which states are stamping on citizens. But in relation to Julian, they talked about, you know, even the judge talked about his mental health. But actually, this is not a case of mental health, but a case of mental injury caused by five states stamping on his head collectively and repeatedly over a period of a decade. And it's also about how in Julian's case, you know, the way in which in that court, the United States was trying to pretend as though the US prison system is going to be a holiday where Julian will have career development courses in relation to what he could potentially, you know, he would have access to this particular TV channel, which would train him to think about what he could do once he was released from prison or how to improve his personal skills, which, of course, you know, no criticism of prison education, but this was, in fact, it was worse than any reeducation camp you can imagine in some of the worst dictatorships. And I know, John, in terms of your sacrifice, you have been through the US prison system yourself and experienced its brutality, as has Mumia Bujemal, whom we heard from last week on the Assange Defence webinar, but also as have the Guantanamo prisoners, many of whom have died in Guantanamo without charge and were never getting due process, including children who were, you know, arrested when they were 14 and then committed suicide when they were 21 while still inside Guantanamo. So the US prison system isn't known for its excessive kindness or its superiority. In fact, the rate of suicides in the prison population and particularly those under these extreme solitary confinement measures is extremely high compared to, but what else can you do if you're faced with 175 years, where the, you know, at least at the CPS seem to keep suggesting they would do everything to keep him alive so they can make sure he goes through the 100 years, whatever is left of his life. So, can I move to you, John, after getting off that talk box about how adorff this is, and you can you tell us a little bit. Thank you. Where do, where do I even begin? There are so many things that are desperately wrong with the US prison system. First of all, everything that you said about solitary confinement is true. The New York Times did a did an expose in the spring of 2016 on one of the maximum security prisons in the state of California. And they talked about how the United Nations has determined that solitary confinement for any length of time beyond 15 days is a form of torture. Well, in the United States, we, we keep prisoners in solitary confinement for as long as 44 years that imagine 44 years with no human contact. This New York Times expose in California was talking about a solitary confinement system where you literally have no contact with any other human being. When you receive mail, for example, you don't actually get the mail. There's a computer monitor hanging from the ceiling of your cell of your six foot by 10 foot cell out of reach so you can't damage it in any way. They'll put your correspondence on the screen for five minutes, you stand there and read it, and then it's taken off. And that's it. The only visitors you're allowed to have are your attorneys, and even they are restricted to once a month. You're allowed one phone call a month. It's monitored, of course, live. You're allowed two showers a week. Your, your meals are provided to you through a slot in the door. You know, when, when we talk about lockdown for 23 hours a day and exercise for one hour a day, it's not really exercise in the conventional definition of the term. Every one of these cells, and I know this because I was in solitary confinement, but every one of these cells has a small door at the back, and that door leads to a cage that's outside. The cage in my case was another six by 10 feet. And so you can either walk around in a circle or in an oval in your indoor six by 10 cell, or one hour a week, I'm sorry one hour a day, go outside into the cage and walk in a six by 10 foot circle. That's enough to drive the sanest man insane at this California prison. Things got so desperate that prisoners were smashing windows and eating the broken glass, just so they could go outside for medical care and speak to another human being. And that's what these, these special administrative measures are now there are, there are Sam units within prisons, and then there's a Sam unit that is a prison that's at the US Penitentiary at Tera Hode Indiana, where the whistleblower Marty Goddisfeld is currently being held. Presumably, if Julian were to be extradited and I think he will not be. He would go to the Sam unit at Tera Hode Indiana. The thing with Sam units, especially at Tera Hode is the focus is to keep the prisoner away from the media. It's all about communication. It's modified Sam unit at the, at the US prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, and I was not permitted to file a Freedom of Information Act request about myself. That was a part of my plea agreement that I could never file a FOIA request ever, ever again in my life. And I thought to myself one day, you know, these people are so stupid, just by their nature, they're just stupid people because who else would work in a prison than than a dumb dumb that I decided to file a FOIA request anyway, just to see if they would catch it. And they didn't catch it. And they actually responded to it quite quickly. Most of what they sent me was stupid stuff, my own medical records, my own visitors list, things like that. I got a dozen pages that were very interesting and very important. They were internal memos about how to deal with me. And there was one that was very simple and very important, and it was one page and it was written in very large block letters, and it was from the warden to all personnel in the prison, and it said caution inmate has access to the media. And that's really what the nature of this, of this problem for them was that I had access to the media. Well, Julian is the media. And so imagine the lengths that they'll go to, to silence Julian. Now in my silly little position, all I had to do was to smuggle my, I wrote a blog regularly called Letters from Loretto that I turned into a book when I got home. But I would just simply smuggle it out with other prisoners, or I would smuggle it out through one of my attorneys, the whistleblower attorney Jaisalyn Radack. And it was easy enough, Marty Goddisfeld can't get anything out of that prison. And certainly if Julian were in the US Penitentiary at Terre Haute, they would be on him like white on rice. He wouldn't stay here in the States, he wouldn't be able to communicate with anybody. But that's the point. The point isn't just to punish him. The point is to punish him and to silence him. Because when you silence him he can't get that message out. And so people like us remain uninformed. We don't know what's going on, we can't push that message of truth and transparency and openness. Because we just don't have access to it. That's the point. Now it we're lucky in the respect and Julian is lucky in the respect that that the Justice Department is going to have to justify legally justify its own prison system, and it's unjustifiable. And so I think that's where the victory is for Julian. I think the US put itself in a corner that it can't get out of, where they would have to convince the Court of Appeals, and perhaps the Supreme Court and perhaps the European Court of Justice that no, there's nothing wrong with the US prison system. Not only will Julian get a fair hearing in the United States they'll argue, but when he's convicted and he will be convicted because you know the justice system isn't just in the US. They'll lock him up in a, in a Sam unit. So for Julian in the event that this that he's not able to protect himself. And again I think that he will be the fixes in. There's no justice here. Thanks John. One of the things that was visible through the hearings was the fact that Julian had been moved to the medical unit at Belmarch, not because they were concerned seriously about his medical health although his medical condition was serious in itself. They put him there to keep him out of reach of the kinds of cameras that were revealing for prisoners who had taken footage of him which got revealed on YouTube within Belmarch. So talking about segregating people in order to not let them access the media is not something that is that appears now to be unusually in British prisons either. I'm trying to draw in a couple of questions at a time from the audience, but one of the questions that I think needs a standalone answer is, could you give us some quotes from the different stratfor leagues and I'm hoping that Suellette might be able to share some of this with us. Well, yeah, I mean, sorry, go ahead. The emails do provide some insight into the psyche of the people in these privatized pseudo intelligence providing firms. The messages reads Asand is going to make a nice bride in prison screw the terrorist, he'll be eating cat food forever, unless George Soros hires him. And interestingly, there's information in some of the other ones that's quite telling so one of them is reporting on him being arrested and due to appear in a court in Westminster soon to face charges of rape accused by two women in Sweden quote charges of sexual assault rarely are passed through interpol red notices like this one. So this is no doubt about trying to disrupt WikiLeaks release of government documents. And, and then they talk about, you know, whether it could disrupt the long term viability of WikiLeaks. Then there's a sort of long discussion between a set of people about whether or not the deaths in Iraq are comparable to Pearl Harbor. And they're actually putting counts in the email. Well, there were Pearl Harbor had 2400, you know, and two military killed and 57 civilians killed, whereas, you know, in the US fatalities in Iraq were were 4,429 and 179 UK fatalities. And, and, and the argument that goes back and forth in this email is, but it took and I'm quoting I'm so excuse my French, but it took years of fucking up to get to that point in Iraq. Pearl Pearl wasn't even a single day it was a single morning. And, and so the, the mentality here is seems very at odds with what the public think I was, you know, acceptable about justifying, you know, trying to stop a war it's like well, it took longer to kill all these civilians and people in Iraq and therefore it's not okay to actually report on it. Another amusing entry was a comment really on how they view, I guess, their clients in Washington. The foggy bottom bow ties have their panties in a knot over a specific Iraq cable outed yesterday not sure which one may be yanked. So that's a clearly not not very complimentary perspective they have on the people who pay their bills. Did you have a couple of ones you wanted to mention john sorry I need to jump in cut your. No, actually I was going to talk about some of the same things. You know, it seems to me that that these little embarrassing snippets of information that were released. They were not as embarrassing to them as, as the fact that they lost all their, their customers credit card numbers, and they had to go back and apologize to everybody. And they were, they were embarrassed and they were humiliated and they wanted to take it out on on Jeremy Hammond. So you know that. Please do one of the one of the companies whose credit card numbers was leaked was the law firm of the judges husband, the judge who presided over Jeremy Hammond's criminal conviction so in any barely functioning world that she would have had to recuse herself and it kind of just speaks to the fact that such this incestuous relationship between these entities and the people that are supposed to be, you know, keeping an eye on them. Thanks, Larry. Can I just move back to something we talked about with Suellette, which is the normalisation of war that comes from the use of intelligence agencies such as this and what WikiLeaks did to kind of bash through that barrier and remind us about. You know we talk about black lives matter but actually when people have died in Iraq in Afghanistan that doesn't seem to count. And I wondered, Ian, if you would like to comment on some of the normalisation of war and how whistleblowing and WikiLeaks and helps to help to surface that please. Thanks, Steve, but yeah I think a very important aspect of this particular case. If you look at Stratford, Stratford leaks, a lot of some of its clients of course big companies but a lot of them are actually military companies, like Lockheed Martin, Ray Defion and so on. And a lot of these, you know, if you think of the, not just the military budget but the intelligence budget, a lot of it is outsourced to private contractors. Edward Snowden for example was working for a private contractor when he blew the whistle on a global mass surveillance and so on. WikiLeaks itself, as Laurie has highlighted, it's a public, it's an intelligence agency for the public, it's a public interest as it were intelligence agency. And that many of the whistleblowers who were going to visit WikiLeaks were in fact members of the former UK and US intelligence community, who had blown the whistle on corrupt actions that they had witnessed, such as Mr Kiriaku, and bravely come out and spoke about this and then got interested in the work of WikiLeaks subsequently. And I remember an event a few years ago which John Kiriaku and Robert Tybo and Craig Murray, all very courageous whistleblowers and so on, they talked about their own circumstances but they made a very big, an important message to the audience that the work of WikiLeaks is vital, even though their cases were not necessarily directly linked at that time. And I hadn't really made that link at that time, just it is a historic case because as has been mentioned before, it's related to the criminalised, you know, if this happens, if this goes through Julian Assange gets prosecuted, then this is the end of journalism, because this is a journalist that was actually doing what all the other newspapers weren't doing. And in 2001, I think there was been a massive sea change in global politics and it's associated with the war on terror and essentially it's the normalisation of war. I would describe it as you just said, and that means that if you look at The Guardian, for example, which generally does very good articles about things like climate change, gender discrimination and all sorts of good stuff. But if you look at it, it's published so many, it's given a lot of time to Tony Blair, I think 75 articles, either interviews or basically press releases. This guy was responsible for this whole way in which a very strange man, President George W Bush, decided to go and bomb a country unrelated to 9-11 in response to 9-11. And since then there's been a whole bunch of other racist wars of aggression against other countries and very few journalists are challenging this, but WikiLeaks challenges this. Not only that, through the work of whistleblowers, insiders who know what's going on, it reveals the dynamics which other journalists for whatever reason aren't doing. I think this is, it's crucial, this work is so vital, not just for investigative journalism generally, but also for this dreadful term from 2001 onwards. This sort of increased militarisation of the internet, this general normalisation of war in the media, and people who call out, are concerned about anti-war activists and human rights activists, they get tracked by these companies, they get smeared by these private intelligence organisations, they get tracked, surveyed by them, and they get, there's an attempt to discredit them. And again, Julian Assange has become this centre, the absolute epicentre of this struggle, and I think this really is of historic importance basically, this case. Thanks Ian. Can I just move back to you John, to ask, before I come round to all the speakers for closing comments, to ask a question which has come from the audience, which is not actually a question, it's a comment. And the writer sends greetings from the Peace and Neutrality Alliance in Ireland, and says that they, as a civil servant, as a retired civil servant, they don't share the general view about whistleblowers. And they have known cases where whistleblowers made mistakes. This particular individual knew the mistake her and the mistake he is here first to him. The reason he supports Julian Assange is because he exposed criminal behaviour by the US government. And he says that does require exposure, but, and this is the controversial, but at least for me, is that in general, I have reservations about whistleblowing and I'd like to bring in John Suellett and Ian about that if I may, and if you could comment on that. You know, on, on the, the day that I met Jesslyn Radack, it was about four days after my arrest. I had read some quotes that Jesslyn had given to the Washington Post, and I had never met her, and I wanted to thank her for supporting me in public. So I called her at something like six o'clock in the morning I thought I would just leave a message and and she answered her phone, and I introduced myself and she said oh my gosh I'm so sorry that you've been arrested. Why don't you come to my office and let's meet. So I went to her office a few hours later, I was there for two hours, and she agreed to take my case and to help me. And on the way out, I said to her, I want to thank you so much because I know that you only represent whistleblowers and I'm not a whistleblower. And she said but you are a whistleblower and I said no I'm not. I am just a regular guy who just happened to see something that I objected to, and, and I said something publicly. And she said, no whistleblower thinks he's a whistleblower, but there's a legal definition of whistleblowing, and that is bringing to light any evidence of waste few sorry of waste fraud abuse, illegality or threats to the public health or public safety. And she said that's what you did. You're the poster boy for whistleblowing. Well that was a revelation to me. And one of the other things that I learned in this whole process is that oftentimes. whistleblowing is not really a clean process. Sometimes the whistleblower is really not a compelling figure. It's somebody who's hard to like. But that shouldn't matter. All that should matter is the information that is revealed one of the other things that I learned is motivation for whistleblowing is irrelevant. That's relevant is the information. Does the information meet those requirements of exposing waste fraud abuse, illegality or threats to the public health or public safety. Once I understood that and accepted that. It was far easier for me to appreciate what it was that so many different whistleblowers around the world were coming forward with. But if you want to like the whistleblower, you don't even have to agree with the whistleblower. You just have to respect the information. Thanks john. So let Ian, did you want to come in on that or should we move to final comments. Oh, sorry. Ian, would you like to go first. After you select. I'm going to jump to to some final comments if I, if I might, and, and, and it's a little bit upbeat in this sense. So one of the strat for males in the publication wrote, certainly the DOJ have a poster case for a range of criminal indictments to include the death penalty for Assange. Manning will be deep fried. I think it one of the other things that comes out in these emails is strat for saying, we might, we could maybe take the man down, but it may not be possible to kill off this thing he's created this WikiLeaks thing that he's created. And by that they met not just the organization, but a way of thinking, a new way of thinking and a new set of actions. And I think that in a positive sense, their fear was well founded. And that's because although Julian has spent more than seven years in one form or another in either prisons or not having his freedom and under deep constraint. At the same time, we've seen things like Italian journalist Stefania Marazzi running a court case around WikiLeaks related information that was being sought through fi the met had been blocking just as a tactic, and took the matter to an un over turning a lower courts bad decision. And that resulted in an important finding for all journalists access to information. We've seen more than 100 secure drop boxes rolled out around the world, not just in support of the anti war movements, or general reporting about corruption, but protecting environmental crimes, protecting COVID related, I mean, not crimes, but fighting environmental crimes, fighting COVID supply chain and other crimes, immediate threat to safety, political corruption, all sorts of areas, both specialty in field specialty in geography. That that is now such a mainstream idea that it's it's durigur in most major reputable media organizations. That was Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. They invented that dozens of countries around the world have in the last decade adopted whistleblower protection laws, and thousands of organizations have done so often required by law, including first laws that applied federally here in Australia in 2012 13 and then most recently in the last two years laws that applied to the private sector. And, and then we'll see these 27 countries rolled out by the end of 2021 across all of the EU with whistleblower protection laws. Some of them, such as in countries like Spain, where there has been literally no standalone whistleblower protection law anywhere in Spain. In fact, what we've seen is improve cybersecurity for journalists, both an awareness of their own need for cybersecurity training that's offered through civil society specialist education universities, reaching out to journalists I set up training for journalists in the master's program at my university. And, and a growing awareness that the fact that the journalists not only have to defend themselves, they've got to defend their sources when it comes to the technology as well. And, and a lot of information laid bare so that the public is not only less deceived but less trusting of these information companies that are linked to the defense industry to the lies that politicians may tell us to get reelected in support of going to war yet again to cover up some financial or other malfeasance. They would like the attention diverted from. And finally and most importantly, the profound change that has happened over the last decade, whereby whistleblower is no longer a dirty word. It is no longer a dibby dobber it is no longer a rat. It is actually a justice seeker, you know, and increasingly, I make the argument and I hear it reflected back in what people are saying that was a blowing is seen as an emerging type of human right within the freedom of expression that we have UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is the right to dissent from wrongdoing. It's a right that was established not for whistleblowers per se, but for people as a whole, after World War Two in Europe, when we decided that no it was not okay to just stand by and say, I didn't say anything I saw that was happening that was so awful. No, that wasn't acceptable, say the courts, say the people. And, and now we see this translated into a different mentality in how whistleblowers are viewed. And I think that WikiLeaks and indeed these, these publications as a part of WikiLeaks is activities have played a role in that transition in all of those key achievements. Thank you so much. Ian, did you want to continue there and then we'll go to Laurie and John. Very quick point. So, Michael Clark does make very clear in his comment that he very strongly supports the work of Julian Assange in and the, because he revealed evidence of criminal behavior by the US government in its conduct of war and other matters. That's very important. And, and then he's subsequently said what about, but what happens when a whistleblower that gets it wrong, which, which may be the case and in fact there has been a recent case quite an interesting one that came with analytical scandal, where there were two sort of the initial whistleblowers Chris Wiley, who was briefly, I think director of search for it, and then there was another whistleblower who the documentary The Great Hack was done on Brittany Kaiser. There are different versions of events in fact, but which is quite interesting because having you can sort of compare and contrast there, they both wrote memoirs about it. But the information commissioners office, I think, late last year, published a report where basically they said, in fact Cambridge Analytica didn't work with the Brexit campaign, for example. That was their finding, although they've been a huge number of front page sort of stories about Cambridge Analytica's role in Brexit. The UK Information Commissioners Office found well that wasn't the case. And you do get, but I think these are, these are interesting peculiarities, but on the whole work of whistleblowers. If you think of the financial crisis of 2007 2008, much of what we know about the financial crisis came from whistleblowers, who were, whose lives also were destroyed as a result of their blowing whistle on their companies often they were quite senior people. If you think of financial misconduct, military misconduct, intelligence misconduct that was known as whistleblowing, all sorts of forms of corporate and government misconduct that we now know of, we know of, we only know of, but we know the details because of the work of whistleblowers. You can't, you know, it's impossible to undervalue that huge public service the public interest whistleblowers provide to us. And over to you, Lowry, now for some closing comments. Lowry, I'm sorry. I know, I know, I know, I've got it. Yeah, so, you know, how can I wrap up? We are aware, I think, painfully aware of the emergence of the national security state, the normalisation of war, the normalisation of conflicts, elective conflicts of aggression, and the subornment, the co-option of the press into supporting these. But we are aware of the countervailing tendency and that is the wider network, the public, the networked individuals that form the polity, that form civil society, realising that they retain a role and they can participate in this oversight capacity. And where there is a concerted will to shine the light of transparency on the doings that would like prefer to be done in back rooms and in the smoky darkness where they can get away with all sorts. And that concerted will will bring things to life. And, you know, it's, we will continue to fight for Julian Assange and I'm confident he will not be extradited and they will not win this victory and exert this chilling effect against the public's involvement in transparency and its requirements to have transparency. But, you know, I just want to say to the powers to be and to the media that, in general, well, I want to use the analogy of one of the pioneers of cyberspace, John Gilmore, who famously said the network interprets censorship as damage and roots around it. And so if you're in the press, if you're willing to take on that responsibility, then the network, the internet will work with you. And if you're not willing to take on that responsibility will work around you. And that's what Wikipedia did. And I'll leave with the words of my revolutionary comrade who goes by the name of ice tea in a song that you wrote called Ain't a Damn Thing Changed. And he says, ban me, try it, you might cause a riot, what the radio won't play, the underground will supply it. John, thank you now for some final comments. I think I'll close by saying that in 2015. Sulet hired me to help the Greek government write a new whistleblower protection law. And in my very first trip that year in a meeting with the Minister of Justice. I was speaking in Greek, and there is no word in Greek for whistleblower. And so, finally the Minister said to me what exactly is this word you keep using whistleblower. So I explained to him what I meant, and he said, ah, like a rat or a snitch. And I said no, not at all like a rat or a snitch. It's a long conversation and we came up with the term Sentinel of the public trust, which is a very pretty word in Greek Sentinel of the public trust. And that's the word that we continue to use throughout the process. So my point here is, we have a lot of work to do a lot of work, and we can't let up, we can't stop, we have to look where we're right, and we're the good guys. And so we have to keep the fight up, whether it's in support of Julian, or in support of Jeremy Hammond, or in support of anonymous or WikiLeaks as an organization, we have to, we have to keep up the fight. Thanks, John. Thank you very much. And to all those of you who we had expected to go for 90 minutes and we've gone for slightly longer than that. Thank you for those who've stayed throughout. We haven't had a single drop in the viewing. But also, you know, the free the truth events were intended to bring people like so let John and Lowry to the public to allow us to hear and understand what's really going on in the world and to look beyond the superficial narratives that are spun in some of the media and to look to understand what true journalism, true whistle blowing and the true public interest is about and we will continue to have these events. The next event is likely to be about Guantanamo. It's a reschedule event, which was going to mark 19 years of Guantanamo being open. And so that's going to take place next. And I urge you to please follow us, follow the don't extradite a science page. Please support Stellar's campaign to raise funds for the, for the defense of Julian. Also a big thank you to Gareth Pearson, those at Burnbuck Pierce, who are, and in the other legal teams, including at Doughty Street and elsewhere, who are doing a huge amount of work. Not at the extraordinary rates that some of these people charge, but at very reasonable rates in order to be able to push forward this case and who've been working day and night to get Julian released we are behind you we support you. And we hope to see Julian amongst us and perhaps speaking on at one of the free the truth panels very soon. And on that note, thank you to all our speakers and to the committee to defend Julian Assange who helped fund this zoom to our technical experts and to our to the hesitate to call them this media partners were actually retweeting and sharing the information to all of you who are viewing and have supported these events. And we look forward to having many more such discussions. Thank you. Bye bye.