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In his most extended interview in months, Julian Assange speaks to Democracy
Now! from inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been holed up for
nearly six months. Assange vowed WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks
against it. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card
company Visa did not break the European Union’s anti-trust rules by blocking
donations to WikiLeaks. “Since the blockade was erected in December 2010,
WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of donations that were attempted to be transferred
to us over that period ... our rightful and natural growth, our ability to
publish as much as we would like, our ability to defend ourselves and our
sources has been diminished by that blockade.” Assange also speaks about his new
book, “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” “The mass
surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use
the Internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely
sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies,”
he says. Assange also discusses the United States’ targeting of WikiLeaks. “The
Pentagon is maintaining a line that WikiLeaks inherently as an institution, that
tells military and governmental whistleblowers to step forward with information,
is a crime. They allege that we are criminal moving forward,” Assange says. “Now
the new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the government is trying to
hammer into the legal system, and which the department of justice is complicit
in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States.”....."
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