JULIAN ASSANGE

I always believed that WikiLeaks as a concept would perform a global role, and to some degree it was clear that it was doing that as far back as 2007 when it changed the result of the Kenyan general election.

Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the Internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another.

Wikileaks is a mechanism to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform.

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.

Although I still write, research and investigate, my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists.

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.

During the period of house arrest, I had an electronic manacle around my leg for 24 hours a day, and for someone who has tried to give others liberty all their adult life, that is absolutely intolerable.

To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.

My family has had to move and change their name and have been subject to threats from right wing blogs calling for my son, for example, to be killed to get at me.

As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison, we continue to release, our media partners continued to write stories. The important revelations from this material continue to come out. We have approximately 2,000 cables into 250,000.

We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod ... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit.

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.

Through the confessional system, the Catholic church spied upon the lives of its congregants. While Latin mass excluded most people who could not speak Latin from an understanding of the very system of thought that bound them.

We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.

Journalists always like an excuse for why are they talking about something now when they didn't talk about something a week ago. They always like to say something is new.

I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.

I'm not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can't be.

We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure.

All over the world, the barriers between what is inside an organisation and outside an organisation are being smoothed out. In the military, the use of contractors means that what is the military and what is not the military is smoothed out.

These megaleaks... They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase.

The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn't reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.

Well, there's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform. And there's a lot of information. So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good.

Every law, every constitution, every regulative decision is based upon what people are discussing in their community. It's based upon our sum knowledge of history and the present.