"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"
About this Quote
Assange frames leaking as bureaucracy, not bomb-throwing: mail comes in, editors verify, designers format, lawyers brace. It’s a canny bit of brand management. By describing “regular postal mail” and “vet it like a regular news organization,” he tries to drag WikiLeaks out of the shadowy world of espionage and into the daylight of journalism, where sourcing, verification, and publication are legible civic functions. The insistence is strategic: if you can get the public to see you as a newsroom, then attacks on you look like attacks on the press.
The parenthetical “encrypted or not” quietly signals two things at once. First, that the pipeline is built for secrecy because secrecy is how whistleblowing survives. Second, that the organization claims neutrality about method: the moral emphasis is placed on what happens after receipt, not how the material arrives. That’s a rhetorical move meant to shift responsibility away from the leaker’s breach and toward the publisher’s supposed public-service duty.
The line about “giant databases” is the giveaway that this isn’t your grandfather’s Pentagon Papers. It nods to the modern problem of scale: raw data doesn’t automatically become truth; it has to be curated, structured, and made readable. “Release it to the public” sounds democratic, but the subtext is power: choosing what to format and when to publish is editorial control.
The closing clause is part warning, part self-justification. “Inevitable legal and political attacks” casts prosecution as persecution, pre-loading the audience to interpret accountability as retaliation. In the post-9/11 security state and post-Internet information economy, that framing is the fight: not just over documents, but over which institutions get to call themselves legitimate truth-tellers.
The parenthetical “encrypted or not” quietly signals two things at once. First, that the pipeline is built for secrecy because secrecy is how whistleblowing survives. Second, that the organization claims neutrality about method: the moral emphasis is placed on what happens after receipt, not how the material arrives. That’s a rhetorical move meant to shift responsibility away from the leaker’s breach and toward the publisher’s supposed public-service duty.
The line about “giant databases” is the giveaway that this isn’t your grandfather’s Pentagon Papers. It nods to the modern problem of scale: raw data doesn’t automatically become truth; it has to be curated, structured, and made readable. “Release it to the public” sounds democratic, but the subtext is power: choosing what to format and when to publish is editorial control.
The closing clause is part warning, part self-justification. “Inevitable legal and political attacks” casts prosecution as persecution, pre-loading the audience to interpret accountability as retaliation. In the post-9/11 security state and post-Internet information economy, that framing is the fight: not just over documents, but over which institutions get to call themselves legitimate truth-tellers.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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