Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship.
If journalism is good, it is controversial, by its nature.
It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in.
Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.
You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.
WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.
Democratic societies need a strong media, and WikiLeaks is part of that media.
When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.
The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.
Journalism should be more like science. As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers.
Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks.
The media helps keep government honest.
Well, I mean, the real attack on truth is tabloid journalism in the United States.
What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes.
I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it - which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.
That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth. And that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber, but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.
You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in.
I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform.
I mean there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world - within the E.U., between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see.
