 Get out your notebook, please, Mark. Welcome to CN Live, season two, episode 12, The Most Dangerous Man. I'm Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Ross. The Most Dangerous Man. That's the title of the biography of Julian Assange, written by veteran investigative reporter and TV correspondent Andrew Fowler. Andrew has just launched his updated version of his 2011 book. We've just heard Andrew in conversation with Mary Costekidis at Glee Books in Sydney. We are pleased to have Andrew Fowler joining us now. Andrew, welcome to CN Live. Hi, Joe. Andrew, thank you for joining us. After your long conversation with Mary, there are plenty of questions answered, but I can assure you that we have some more. I'd like to just start by asking how you got on to the Assange story to begin with. Were you a correspondent in London at the time when his case with Sweden was happening when he went to the High Court and then the Supreme Court? No, I was working for foreign correspondent in Sydney. And I was investigating the crash of an Air France plane in the South Pacific. And I saw this new website, which was promising that it had some documents about the various manuals that pilots used and what was the some conflict between the Airbus manual and the Air France manual. So I contacted WikiLeaks and we made a contact there. Then came the collateral murder video. And I realized that this was a very different kind of organization. We made contact with during Assange and interviewed him. And I made a program for foreign correspondent as a result of that. When was that Air France crash? 2010, I think, or nine. Was it hard for you to get your editors interested in this story? And how has that changed over time, the editor's response to your interest? Look, I mean, I must say the original story wasn't that easy to get up as an idea, because it was a little abstract. That was the foreign correspondent story. But once we engaged the editor, he was very keen. And we got a good run and they put resources into it. So that was fine. I mean, in fact, Assange has been through that whole thing of being extremely popular and winning dozens of awards and being heralded as a great savior of journalism to now, by at least some accounts, being treated like a pariah. Well, that's what I want to ask you, did your editors in the last few years, for example, you were able to update this book? Was there any difficulty in getting Melbourne University Press to do that? No, not whatsoever, Joe. In fact, they were very, very keen. In fact, they rushed me to get it out as soon as possible. And, you know, I'm working, I try to do 20,000 words and tell this story. So it was very much embraced by them. And they put a lot of resources into it to get it out. They really, he's a Melbourne person. I know the Melbourne University Press, I would say, without speaking out of school, think that they support the work. The problem with updating a story like this is it's constantly moving. I mean, you could already add another chapter right now, perhaps. And I'm referring to the superseding indictment, which Mary mentioned. I have a specific question about that. They're trying to set him up as being someone who directed hackers to hack as somehow committing a crime. Now, Robert Perry, who founded Consortium News in 2010, wrote a piece about Assange in which he said, and of course, Bob Perry was a great investigator of generals who broke many of the Iran Contra stories. Bob said that he would encourage his sources to even commit a small crime in order to prevent a larger crime. In other words, he would, say, ask them to break their non-disclosure agreements to leak classified information to him. In this case, what the government is saying is that there were maybe two crimes once. That Assange encouraged hacking, and then the classified information was also given to him, and he's an unauthorized person. In your view, is this a crime to encourage or direct hacking? No, I think, Joe, that the first charge that they bought when Assange was dragged out of the embassy was quick, and I think it was weak. And I think they realized how weak it was because what he was doing was what any journalist does. To protect the source. So when Chelsea Manning was trying to access the computer but to hide her identity, to access material that she had every right to get through, what Assange was doing, if this is what happened, in my opinion, is to actually help her hide her identity. So what they've now done is realizing that that's a really, that's not a very strong argument. They've now widened the net to include basically just standing up at a hall and saying, I reckon you should give material to WikiLeaks or encouraging people to talk to journalists and to talk to WikiLeaks, which is much lower, but it's a much easier get to get into America. And I think all of it is about one thing, to get him to the United States. I think the other stuff, the espionage stuff and all that, yeah, that's okay, but they really just want to get in there. And that's why this thing has been changed. The charge hasn't been changed, but the definition and the explanation of it has. Well, the funny thing is about the espionage act is that they only have them on a small part of the act, which says that no one is allowed to possess or disseminate classified information, including you and me and anyone else listening and watching. If they retweet or email a WikiLeaks document that's still classified, they have also possessed and disseminated classified information. It's something that should be challenged as unconstitutional, but it's still in the espionage act. That's the narrow crime that they can get them on, but they didn't bring that up yet, at least in the first week of the extradition process. They have only talked about this idea that Assange was involved in the hacking and also the informants issue, which I could bring up later, that he's so-called endangered their lives. But the fact is that that's why I asked you whether he indeed broke a law by just asking someone to hack something. And he was protecting Chelsea Manning's identity, as lawyers said in open court, because she was downloading music videos and computer games that were forbidden to American soldiers to have. It wasn't even that she had helped him get classified information, which she already had legal access to. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think that that's the issue you raise really is about the implied, and this isn't something that's not really understood either, you may have a very good explanation, the implied protection of First Amendment kids journalists. It's not complete. It's an argument. And what you're saying is they're running a very narrow definition about information being shared. But if they're going to prosecute Assange, they have to prosecute the New York Times. They don't have to. So this isn't about equality. This is about silencing somebody who stood up and spoke out and didn't play the game according to American rules, which is that if you worked in New York Times, you get a story, you run it past the Pentagon first. You don't just broadcast it. The Guardian had this problem when they published material from Assange. They had problems in dealing with that issue because the FBI was saying, you can't say that. And the Pentagon was saying, you've got to come and talk to us about this. And the Guardian said, well, we're not an American company. We're based in the United Kingdom. We don't have to. So they then published material. So that was the argument, not with Assange, but with Greenwald and the Snowden papers. So it's a very narrow line. I think the protections that the journalists have in America are given or allowed, provided they play by American rules, which means that you don't publish material without first running it past the state. And Assange objected to that. Elizabeth. Thank you. Andrew, in your book, you write that in the turbulent aftermath of the Vault 7 disclosures, that the little United States turned its full attention and power on destroying WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. And I just wanted to ask, to what extent would you say that you see global spying for the U.S. relates to WikiLeaks publication in Vault 7? Can you explain that a little bit? Well, look, I'm not sure. It's a good question of the direct connection there. I think that they did not know about that until later. I think that they knew about, obviously they had why Assange released the Vault 7 documents at that time. You'd have to say that the change of government in Ecuador would be an important point. And he would be thinking that time was running out. He also, in the back of his mind, was combing trying to stop the talks between Waldman and Kaufman. And so I think that he was thinking, if I don't get it out now, it may all go, it may all disappear. So, you see, it wasn't until the extortion attempt in April of 2019 by some employees of another security company, not the ones who did the spying but the other guys, trying to stand over WikiLeaks for 3 million euros, that they realized that they'd been spied on. And in fact, they then went back to London having got access to these documents, held a press conference. Within 24 hours, the Metropolitan Police had come in the door and taken Assange out. So the connection is more to do with the extortion attempt and then the revelation that they had been spied on, WikiLeaks had been spied on, and the action then by the Ecuadorians and the Metropolitan Police. Switching gears a little bit on Goose for Two and the DNC leak, DNC hack. You explained it's unlikely that Goose for Two was the source of the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks. What do you make of Goose for Two as a persona? Do you have any opinion on who or what interests may have been behind it? I mean, you can speculate about Goose for Two, but I think that any organization that puts his hand up and says, we were responsible for the leaks. It's either a disinformation system or it's being run by people who are clowns, basically. I mean, and what did Goose for Two actually reveal? A few bits and pieces. Material that I think my recollection is when they wrote to the Republican Party and said, what do you think of this stuff we've just released? And they said, not much. I mean, it was all third-rate stuff. So I think that, yes, they were up to no good. They may well have been Russian. They may well have been as the FBI documents and charges say they may have been working out of Russia. But whether they were the source for the documents, the Podesta files and the Hillary Clinton files, I don't know. I'm more inclined to think that, I mean, it's possible that Craig Murray, the ambassador who pointed out that it's possible that it was an inside job. I mean, he says that John Podesta, who was working for the Saudis at the time as well as being chair of the DNC, would have been a target to check on him, to check on, to see what he's up to. And that it might have been a Bernie supporter inside the CIA who decided, I've had a gut for this. I don't know. But Goose for Two struck me as being a bit of a sideshow, but up to no good. Did the Russians interfere in the US election? Certainly, they certainly did. I find it a little bit strange for the Americans to be upset about a foreign country interfering in their elections, quite frankly, from Australia because it's happened before, not only here, but elsewhere. But I think that's an area that will eventually, I suppose, be revealed by. I can't say more than that. Andrew, on just one other point on Goose for 2.0, WikiLeaks has stated that they use none of the material that he provided to them. It could be that they already had all the material that Goose for Then duplicated by sending them. Do you think that's possible? I believe that they may well be telling the truth. They may well not have got the information from Goose for Two. It seems that that's the conclusion that I've reached, but it's not a full picture. It's possible that WikiLeaks is lying, but from what I can see of it, they're not. It's possible that Craig Murray is dissembling and is not being straight, but from what I can see of it, he's not. So you work these things out on the balance of where you might go. I mean, there's a whole investigation to be carried out here and there's not enough time in the present circumstances. Time is of the essence right now because of the impending extradition hearing in September the 7th, but certainly it would appear that it's not the way that the American establishment is painting the picture from what I can see of it. Now, you said that Assange was offering evidence that it wasn't Russia, but not who the source was. I'm not sure how he could have done that, but also why do you think, why do you think Comey tried to shut this down? Good questions, Joe. I don't know. I don't know why. I mean, look, you can speculate about it. He certainly believes that WikiLeaks was a Russian actor of some description. He said that in his book. Right. That's what he said. What he said he said. Right. That's what he said he believed. Why he came in and said cut the talks out. It may well have been because I mean, it's just be speculation about this that if Julian Assange was going to point away from Russia, that's not what Comey wanted. Yeah. I mean, that's possible. But, you know, I just haven't got enough information to form a conclusion on that. Right. Why did those talks eventually fail? Because Comey wasn't listened to by the men involved in the negotiation. Well, I think they failed in the end because Assange was worried about Ecuador, about being bounced out of the embassy because Marano was going to come in and he was, you know, he was on the same body as Raphael Kiera, but he was certainly to the right and he was certainly in the thrall of the Americans from what we can see. And he had this extraordinary case of information. I think he was frightened of losing it. You know, frightened of losing control. And he harkened back to Comey saying, you know, bang, we're not going to talk to him anymore. So it's happening at a much lower level with negotiations going on between the Justice Department, although the guy was counterintelligence, head of counterintelligence, Kaufman, sorry. So it's unclear, but certainly if I was in his position as a journalist, I'd be going, well, we've got this great story. I guarantee impact. Someone's risked everything to give this to me. I've got to honor that part of my agreement. I've got to get it out there. And of course, when it came out, I mean, it was explosive. I mean, I mean, it's just extraordinary what it revealed. You know, the antivirus companies that say, this is like Kopersky and the others, they say this actually shows the fingerprints of attacks on Chinese companies and systems. And this is coming from the CIA, identified it like a virus. Bang, that's it. Say one. So that gives a lie to the whole argument that, hey, China spies on America. China spies on the United States, but we don't spy on them or we don't steal their secrets. Well, I mean, it's naive to say that we don't, but it's really interesting to actually have the evidence that we do. Absolutely. Love to go on that. But I want to take you back to the superseding indictment, which unfortunately came too late for the first update. This superseding indictment talks about Sabu, who they name in this indictment as a FBI format. We learned from a rolling, extremely interesting, rolling stone article, which we focused on teenager. That's how he's identified the superseding indictment, who we now know is Siegfried Thordensum. And Siegi's story was that Stratford files were given to WikiLeaks from Sabu when Sabu was already an FBI informant. That worried Siegi to the point where he contacted, he thought that was breaking the law. So he contacted the American Embassy in Reykjavik, and then he himself became an FBI informant. My question to you is, was this an FBI sting operation, and it failed, obviously, to try to, and they gave up Stratford's files on purpose and tried to entrap Dooling. Is that what you think was going on? It's possible. That's a very good piece of analysis, Joe. I think that they would do anything to get him under this double sting operation. Absolutely right, because they're going to have an explanation as to why he actually turned away, he did. And the actual consequence of that is that they've got this guy, which I think is kind of questionable, the evidence that he gives. But again, I come back to this thing. It's not about prosecuting the case. It's just about getting a silence to the United States. So although it's wonky stuff and questioning, it's enough to persuade the judge. And the judge that oversees this whole thing is deeply compromised. I mean, I'm not happy saying these things about a judge, a UK judge. But I just don't see how this judge can sit over this case when the relationship she has with the intelligence community and Parliament, it's too close. The case should not go here. The case should be thrown out on that basis alone. Yeah. And her husband had stuff revealed about him in WikiLeaks, I believe. But in support of what you're saying is that they just want to get him to the US. The timing of that sting operation was right after the Obama administration decided that they weren't going to pursue the Espionage Act because of what they called the New York Times problem, that if they were going to get Assange on Espionage, they'd have to also indict the New York Times who published the same material. So it seems to me that once they gave that up, they moved to Plan B, which was to try to get him on computer intrusion and him aiding that by being a so-called director of the hacking. And yet the story, the issue remains whether that is illegal or not altogether, whether a journalist can ask someone to commit a small crime, even hacking or any crime, but does not participate in the hacking himself, which there's no evidence for. And this superseding indictment does not say Assange did. So I just wanted to make that point that it was right after they dropped the Espionage thing, which of course the Trump administration went forward with. Elizabeth. Yeah, I'd like to just return to the discussion you had earlier with Mary, where you kind of described the draconian state tightening its grip around the last vestiges of real journalism in Australia and the U.S. In this environment, do you think that the WikiLeaks model can really survive going forward or from another perspective, is it the only answer kind of that we have left in the independent journalism sphere? Yeah, I think the WikiLeaks model is it, is the everyone's copied it, everybody puts out on their web page, you know, drop your secrets here and the rest of it. So that can never be undone. And I think that that's one of the great services that WikiLeaks brought to journalism was to protect your sources in the internet age, to actually use the internet, the thing that can actually trap you and track you to actually allow people to be anonymous and to anonymize their, you know, their drops. And so I, sorry, that's the second part of the question. What was that? Well, just that, you know, is this something that can survive going forward or is it kind of the only way the independent journalism can move forward? Yeah, I think it's one of them. I would like, I would, I hate to say the only, but the problem that we have is the thing that Ellsberg pointed out is that, I mean, Julian is a great sort of crusader and a great, you know, thinker of what might be possible, your dreams of what might be possible. Who can understand that somebody in 2007 was dreaming of an idea of doing what he did and it worked? I mean, it's an extraordinary event to come out of Melbourne. You know, you haven't been to Melbourne, you know what I mean. So it's a really amazing thing to come out of Melbourne. And I think that the problem is that the greater you push, the greater the pushback. And that's what Ellsberg was saying. And so you get to a point where it fractures. And I mean, I'm not full of hope of fracturing countries. I don't like revolutions. I don't like changes taking place on the catastrophic level. But if you keep on driving people into a ditch and keep on pushing back against what I think is democratic rights and public interest journalism, you would eventually get a revision and you might not be a revolt that will suit even journalists. But this is unsustainable. You can't have a power for the executive controlling all information. And that's unfortunately what we're heading towards, which is what Ellsberg pointed to. So that's a potential catastrophe. But the idea that you can silence people by intimidating them is that I think a failure of faith in humanity. A science was prosecuted to stop, and Manning was prosecuted to stop Snowden. They prosecuted Snowden to stop the next person. You can keep on doing this. If you teach people, young people in America, the United States, the Constitution is what we stand for. These are the things that make us American. And you then send them out in the world and tell them, the Constitution doesn't matter. You're about listening to examples about listening to executive government. They will rebel against it. And that's the hope. That's the hope for the future. They will really rebel against tyranny and do what is their democratic and decent and journalistic right to do. That's what I think the positive conclusion with this would be. Yeah, well, one of the things that's so disappointing about many news outlets that have kind of tried to copy or implement WikiLeaks' secure dropbox is that many of them have ended up burning their sources sometimes repeatedly in a way that WikiLeaks has not. So I think that that really is disappointing. But so in your opinion, in this, your book really demonstrates the role of the Trump administration, obviously and aggressively prosecuting Assange in a way that exceeds the Obama administration. But yet this doesn't really get covered in the press and not just the left-wing establishment press, but also the right-wing wants to see Trump as sort of like bringing Assange over to maybe testify about Russiagate and all of this. How can we get this through to a larger audience that Trump is actively going after Assange in a way even Obama did not and that has nothing to do with justice or exposing corruption to do with Russiagate, etc., etc. You can think a number of things about Trump. You can think he's either an evil genius or an evil egotist. And I think that it's really simple and really too awfully simple. It is that whatever Obama did, he will undo. Whatever Obama did not do, he will do. So it's like hairy-chested macho nonsense playing with playing with our lives and our world for his personal whim. It's just appalling. The State Department, sorry, the Department of Justice decided not to prosecute after the 2010 grand jury investigation and then made a decision based on the way that the Constitution works in America, the way that you balance these things out. Sometimes it's not all right. New York Times buries the NSA's buying story, all that sort of stuff. But you kind of get it right. He came along and said they didn't do it, so we're going to do it, proving his macho sort of credentials. I think it's truly as appalling as that. Andrew, you mentioned rebellion against tyranny in the US. You may have seen that this is beginning already. Of course, beyond race, I think these protests, particularly the destruction of symbols of tyranny in these statues, you also said about going to Melbourne. Unfortunately, the border is closed. I hope that doesn't affect the books getting out to New South Wales because of the virus. I wanted to bring you back, if I can, or bring you into the bunker, the Guardian, where the Guardian had set up with the Sange there in London, a nerve center to publish the cable gate. Mark Davis, I'm sure you know a colleague of yours, a Australian journalist and lawyer as well, says that he was there, of course, doing a documentary. And he says that it was, in fact, only a Sange that cared about redacting the names of informants and that he stayed up the entire Friday night, did an all-nighter, before publication on Monday to remove some of the names in the first batch that was going to be published. And that the Guardian editors in the Times did not really care about that. And also that Davis says the New York Times set a trap for a Sange and that they were going to be publishing that a Sange released the documents first and that they were just going to report, even though they were partners, report that WikiLeaks had revealed them. And of course, we know WikiLeaks had a technical problem whether that was real or not, whether a Sange was being cagey there, then that the New York Times did publish first, in fact, but they reported that WikiLeaks did. I know, because I went back and saw the article they reported, it wasn't true. I wanted you to take on this. Do you see it the same way Mark Davis did? Look, I think a Sange, a student of a Sange, did try to redact, but the truth is he did also, WikiLeaks did also publish some material that has not been seen. He told that to Daniel Ellsberg and promised he wouldn't do it again. And I think that that was a low point. I mean, that was a problem. It was so much a problem that the British press went looking for the people who had died as a result of this disclosure on the Afghan war logs, which is what we're talking about, I think. And they looked a lot. The Times I recollect it was found a dead body. They found someone who had died. The problem with that particular story was the person that died a year earlier. They could find no evidence that the publication of the names of people that have been published without actually being seen, which a Sange recognized was wrong, told Ellsberg that. There were no dead bodies. There were no problems. And we now know, historically, that I know these arguments about whether or not Julie was there, whether or not the documents got out and the rest of it in the New York Times and the timing, all that. I mean, it obscures the basic fact that there was an error made. That we all make mistakes. No problem. Did anyone die? No. How do we know that? There were two reports by the Australian Defense Force looking at the Afghanistan and looking at our soldiers there. They found nobody had died. The Pentagon during Chelsea Manning's trial investigated all of WikiLeaks' documents and said that nobody had died as a result of that exposure. So this is a bit of a, I mean, to me it's a bit of a dead end argument because really the great good that WikiLeaks has done always gets picked up by this one thing. And basically, even when all the documents were dropped on the internet, they weren't dropped by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks did not drop all of its documents. What happened was David Lee, the Investigations Editor of The Guardian and a first-class journalist, wrote a book, came out slightly before mine. And one of the chapter headings was the cipher code that unlocked the documents. Lee says he didn't know that these documents were locked on the same cipher code as the ones that he'd used. So he publishes this thing and the free tag of German newspaper publishes the code that the Daniel Domsheitberg was the courier of that information to them. They then published it and people started dumping the information out on the net. Assange within a few hours, say two or three days, put out all the documents in WikiLeaks' name as well, saying that he felt that his people, people that followed WikiLeaks, should have access to that information rather than it being scattered around the world on various different servers published by other groups who used the David Lee passcode. I mean, I think that's a problem. I mean, Julian Assange should have just let it stand there. He said he was protecting people by warning them, okay, maybe he was also behaving like a journalist who didn't want to be scooped as well. Whatever the reason, Assange always has to answer that question about you dumped all the documents on the net. In fact, he was second to do it. He wasn't the first person to do it. Yeah, well, that's interesting that the Times understood that if they published first, they could be liable to prosecution, although I think it's unlikely that the government at least now would go after mainstream journals and because mainstream journals was on the side of the state for the most part and Assange certainly isn't. He's doing the job that journalism is not, that corporate journalism is not doing. No, that's right. But the point you make about the Times is that they did, they did wait to get the, to see the other side, take the heat if you like. And the thing is, it goes to the heart of the issue, which is that the American newspapers, they have a relationship, they're protected by the First Amendment, but they don't actually really, very often, the NSA stuff with the New York Times, they run to the establishment to ask permission to print it, and that's the deal, you get protected. Whereas what Assange was doing, and this is where it broke it open, he was saying, we're going to publish this stuff and it leads straight to your web page. So you are publishers of this material that hasn't been run past the Pentagon. And that was a significant point. Yeah, the question of the informants is really a red herring for two reasons, I think. One, because as you say, Robert Gates said, and I think General Robert Carr, I believe, they've stated that no one was killed because of the release. And number two, if you look at the indictment, the Espionage Act indictment, there is no statute at the top where they list all the statutes that are supposedly broken for revealing the name of an informant. It's a crime to reveal the name of a covert intelligence agent, but it's not as far as I know, even a crime to reveal, it may be unethical, but it's not a crime to reveal the name of the informant. So I find that whole issue, but the indictment has so much about that in there that it seems, Andrew, if you agree with me, that this is what's called window dressing, just a PR move, basically, to smear Assange first as rapist, as we know is not true, and secondly, as a guy who's so cavalier that he didn't care if people died. Yeah, absolutely right. I absolutely agree with that analysis. And the smearing has been going on, well, for a long time, and we now know through other documents, of course, released by WikiLeaks from 2007, 2008, which was a counterintelligence, army counterintelligence unit, talking about how to deal with WikiLeaks and how to destroy the center of gravity, which of course means to smear Assange, and it's been going on for now, what, 12 years or 10 years plus. How you undo it going to the other question about how you actually undo this stuff and bring people back on side is very difficult, but I think that programs like this and discussions like we had here this evening help to have a broader discussion about how executive government needs to be dealt with and the increasingly executive government dealt with. I'm sorry, I'm getting a little a bit husky. Oh, that's quite all right. Listen, I have two more questions, because I'm going to turn it back to Elizabeth. No. All right, I just wanted to ask you in general about your views basically of Assange and WikiLeaks and whether they've changed in the years between initially writing your book and now revising it and updating it. And if so, how have they changed or have they just kind of solidified for you? Well, my views have I think probably solidified now that Julian Assange said to me years ago that this was the, they were about to try to get him to drag him to America. And one of the infuriating things about Assange is that he is so often right. And so he's so often right about pointing out what the end game is. What he didn't understand was that his theory that information would make us free was, had a few transit points to go through, one of which was getting past the people with the keys to the gates. And that's the problem that we're going to do with, as a society. Now, I just have to say, by the way, that this bookshop has been very kind to me tonight and allowing me to talk now for quite a while, but they are kind of keen to go home pretty soon, just to point that out. I must apologize, but it's getting very late here. Okay, Andrew, I will just close it off by, well, I was going to ask you at UC Global and the Arthur Schwartz role, and Rick Grinnell. I happen to have known Grinnell rather when he was the spokesperson for John Bolton at the UN, where I was a correspondent for 25 years and he was not a very pleasant. Charity called me and other journalists up on the phone to chew us out when we didn't like a question we'd asked. But I'll skip that unless you want to, let's just time for you to answer that and just finish by asking this, you've written two books about attacks on journalism in addition to the Assange book. Now, I just wanted to know if you think that the Assange arrest opened the way for the raid that you mentioned with Mary on the ABC and that is now leading the Australian Federal Police to ask for the arrest of these two ABC journalists and the David McBride case, that of course is publication very much like WikiLeaks of evidence what appears to be war crimes possibly committed by Australia in Afghanistan. It happened seven weeks after Assange's arrest, June 5, and he was arrested June 11. Do you think that Assange's arrest opened the way, made it easier for the attack, for this Australian attack, direct attack on journalism? Well, I think without doubt the increasing pressure on journalists and the increasingly hawkish positions of government and their political enforcers without doubt connect those two dots. That Assange being dragged out of the embassy would have encouraged anybody who was doubting about raiding the ABC because in this country we actually have a very right-wing home affairs minister and a very right-wing bureaucracy in that particular department and they would have taken great delight in seeing what happened to Assange and it would have actually emboldened them to do that. But this was a long time coming going for a major institution like the ABC but it would have definitely, I think, put wind in their sails. These decisions aren't made without context. They're not made without, particularly with Assange, without having some other motive or his arrest or his activities causing people to react here in Australia to play the game, if you like. Well, thank you, Andrew. In fact, I understand that AFP asked for the fingerprints of those two journalists on April 1, 10 days before the arrest. That probably was a greenlight, it seemed to be. Andrew, I want to thank you very, very much for joining us. As you say, you've had a long night there. I want to also thank Mary Kostakitas for her interview of you previous to this and thank you Elizabeth Voss, my co-host and our audience for listening to Andrew Fowler talking about his updated biography of Julian Assange called The Most Dangerous Man in the World. Thanks again and you've watched CN Live. Goodbye. Thanks. Let you go home. Let you go home now. It's the guys here.