Imaginary Interview with the Future of Transparency, Julian Assange

A discussion of cyber security, geopolitics, and their importance.

Mr Julian Assange

A Collective Project by

• Agomani Das, Class-XII
• Yunus Parvez Khan, Class-XII

Published on

Chatra Ganeshlal High School (HS), Chatra, WB

In the academic year 2022, as a class XII English Project.

Introduction

Hello, I am Yunus Parvez Khan, a class 12th scholar from CGLHS. I and my classmate Agomani Das conducted this project named “Imaginary Interview with the Future of Transparency, Julian Assange”. This project is an imaginary interview project, where we chose Wikileaks founder and social hero Mr. Julian Assange as our guest. This is a group project, intended to have knowledgeful outcomes. We have arranged fascinating and original-sounding questions and tried to answer them in a similar way that Mr Assange would have done.

Purpose

Our purpose for this project is collective learning, leaning towards cyber security and political & democratic transparency. We as a team tried to learn something new in every part of this project. Another purpose of doing this project is to improve our spoken English, as we have talked in English during the entire project time. We also focused on improving our writing(s) and formal English as well. We also had the purpose of improving our vocabulary, as we have gone through a lot of documentary videos and articles.

Ideology & Methodology

The ideology of Imaginary Interview as an academic project:-

The ideology behind Imaginary Interview as an academic project is that the student(s) will select a notable person as their interview guest and then they will know about the person deeply to be able to give answers to simple questions like the person would give. Then the student(s) will write down the interview questions and will also answer them according to how the guest would have answered them if they were there. Imaginary Interviews as projects can be great learning opportunities for young students. Any student, given the purpose of finding a notable person and learning about them to be able to conduct an interview where they will write the questions and answers both with being very close to exactly what the person would have said, will go through a lot of knowledge resources which are fast enough to provide them with exact information in exact quantity. Those resources oftentimes will be digital information, stored on the internet. Students with this kind of project will learn to use the internet for learning purposes and will realize the true power of the Internet. Also, this type of project will enlighten students enough to understand the modern and complex world.

Methodology of this project:-

Our methodology of this project is very simple and went through the methodology of any other normal “Imaginary Interview project”.

About the Guest

Julian Assange is an Australian-born journalist and programmer/hacker who created the concept of anonymous journalling and created a website named WikiLeaks. Spy volunteers from around the world send WikiLeaks stolen or hacked confidential documents and the admin panel of WikiLeaks goes through all those documents. They review them to determine if they need to be public or not. WikiLeaks publishes those documents which should be public and those which will expose big disasters or corruption. Julian Assange and his team leaked a lot of secret military documents from the United States in 2010, which contained Afghan War logs, Iraq War Logs, and a controversial video of a Baghdad Airstrike that killed civilians and journalists. After leaking the US files, Wikileaks was charged with criminal charges. Also, Assange and one of his prime volunteers, US Army intelligence analyst Chelsa Manning were charged with the Espionage Act and were sentenced to lifetime prison. Before the Americans could have arrested Assange, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London gave him political asylum in 2011.

The Interview

Interviewer: What is WikiLeaks?

Mr. Assange: Wiki Leaks is an international nonprofit organization, founded in 2006, solely focused on free journalism. We publish secret files from around the world which may affect normal people. Our volunteers are spread across the world and they are activists, normal people, students, government employees, and even members of the military. Our volunteer sends us the documents anonymously whenever they think that that document needs to be public. Then our team reviews the documents and we discuss how this will impact at the ground level. If the document should be public, we make it public, otherwise, we ignore it.

Interviewer: What is your purpose behind publishing secret files?

Mr. Assange: Our purpose is to create transparency between, the government to people or organizations to people.

Interviewer: What about the things that need to be secret? Like military positions, Nuclear launch codes, Prisons of high-value criminals/targets, passcodes, etc.

Mr. Assange: We are not saying that governments or organizations should not have secrecy, rather we are saying that sometimes there are miserable things done by governments and private organizations too that can hugely affect normal people. Sometimes governments do not give the right number of casualties in any incident. Sometimes militaries suppress people. Sometimes organizations plan to build big disasters. Some organizations plan terror activities and so on. Our purpose is to publish and leak those kinds of documents, where these plans and activities would be exposed.

Interviewer: How much control do governments have over their people?

Mr. Assange: It depends from government to government and their policies. The government of Iceland is considered the safest, as they do not interfere with people’s personal lives. It is considered the freest internet country, where “free” means “freedom”. There are other governments that to some extent monitor the internet traffic all the time and filter through data packets. Then there are governments who control their internet completely, one example of that would be China. If someone is looking through the data packets that you are sending and receiving from the web, with some skills they must understand and see sensitive information like what you are browsing, your screen size, your location, your operating system, your device name, your username, your passwords, your information that is copied to your clipboard, etc. A solution to that is encryption of Data, and another layer to secure this is VPN, where you route your data packets through another Node (computer) from any other corner of the world. In this case, it almost becomes unhackable and untraceable. However the Chinese government has banned VPNs, therefore they can monitor every piece of information about their people. With a lot of data and some research on them, the government can know, where people are going, why they are going, what is their mood, and at what time and they even can tweak your mind & mood according to their choice.

Interviewer: Whoa! it sounds really scary.

Mr. Assange: Oh yeah! but not all governments do it. Indian Government comes somewhere in the middle of safe and not safe governments. The Indian Government has put a ban on a lot of apps and they also required VPN providers to store the data of their users for a long period. So yeah governments always have a lot of control over their people.

Interviewer: How someone can be cyberly safe by themselves?

Mr. Assange: Another way to say being cyberly safe is “Making the Data safe”. Data is the key to everything. The Internet runs by data, social media companies create algorithms and strategies by researching data, and sometimes politics is shaped according to data collected from people. So in case, we want to be cyberly safe, we have to protect our data and enhance privacy. There are several things common people can do and there are several things people can avoid doing.

Things one should not do:-

• Sharing passwords
• Browsing websites with an unencrypted protocol (like — HTTP)
• Putting sensitive information on untrusted websites and application interfaces.
• Allowing every permission of your phone to any app or website
• Taking cyber security too lightly.

Things one should do:-

• Create strong passwords or passphrases or passsentences that possibly no one has ever thought about or written down.
• Understand how data transaction happens understand encryption and decryption and then know what website you’re using and what protocol they use.
• Always try to be anonymous if identity is not necessary for the thing you are doing.
• Always try to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) as it not only routes your data packets through another part of the world but also encrypts your data along the entire path.
• Regularly follow cyber security updates and news to enhance your knowledge in the interest of being cyberly safe and secure.

Interviewer: What are your views on corruption?

Mr. Assange: Corruption is a thing that existed among human beings from the beginning. Humans exchange values to run civilization and the economy. In the old days, people exchanged valuable things. We evolved and made us advanced and now we exchange valuable things with a certificate that assures of something valuable reserved, this thing is also known as money. Now the deal is, you provide someone some sort of value, and they give you money worth equal to the value you provided. Now goods are valuable, and so are services too. You give someone a potato, they will give you back money that is worth equal, now if you fix someone’s pipeline, they will pay you money that is worth your service. Now if someone has a duty to do, and you offer money to them to somehow hack their job and give something you want, then it’s also a kind of service, isn’t it? Therefore it existed from history to the present and it will exist in some form in the future as well. Corruption is one of the things that can trigger massive disasters as corrupt people don’t understand and sometimes don’t care about what the consequences can be. And we at WikiLeaks most of the time deal with corruption cases. Therefore we must say that we are shaping the world for the better.

Interviewer: What are your views on the Ukraine-Russia war?

Mr. Assange: You know as we are very active in political studies, we know a lot about the Ukraine-Russia war, but a lot of those things are confidential and they are purposeful, therefore they will remain classified from our ends as well. In terms of general discussion, I can say a lot about this war. This war has been triggered by Russia but it was not started by them. It is indeed started by the West, and by the West, I mean the NATO countries. Ukraine is a country with a bare minimum population and is located in the courtyard of Moscow. Russia would not have any problems with them if they didn’t show an interest in joining NATO. NATO was originally formed to counter the expansion of the USSR and they succeeded. Afterwards, their purpose became to counter the biggest country formed out of the Soviet Union, Russia. You see if Bangladesh remained a part of Pakistan, wouldn’t it be your security threat? Exactly like that, how come a so targeted and isolated country can allow enemy forces on their old courtyard? That’s how I justify the war. I am still sympathetic to the people that are the victims of this war. They are in this situation because of NATO and Ukraine itself.

Interviewer: What is your idea of a much safer, multi-polar modern world?

Mr. Assange: Alight, so my views of a much safer and multi-polar world is where there will not be any monopoly of one country or same-minded and biased union of countries. I want to see powerful and accepted countries with different kinds of approaches, cultures, and decisions. What I also want to see is transparency between people and authorities. I also want to see educated, smart, patriotic, honest, and rational politicians running the government. I want to see countries challenging the monopolious ideologies as India has done in recent years. I am sure that a safe and perfect world is an illusion, but what we have today can be further improved. That’s my take.

Interviewer: Thank you so much, Mr. Assange. We appreciate your efforts to make the world a safer place and your visions for the greater good.

Conclusion

We have discussed cyber security, current political challenges, and the vision of a multi-polar modern world with Mr. Julian Assange. As we already have discussed Mr. Assange is a journalist, who has read a lot of secret and confidential documents of many governments and organizations, and he has an incredible amount of insight to provide. Mr. Assange indeed created so much awareness through this interview. In conclusion, we may say that maybe we are being monitored by private companies, our governments, or even other governments. It is very scary how much control these institutes have over our lives. We definitely should practice the things that will keep us away from these spies. Mr Assange has enlightened us on how we can be cyberly safe and protect our data. Every one of us, who wants to be safe should immediately start practising that advice.

Data Collection

We have collected data about Mr. Assange from BBC News (www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-59053803), “Johnny Harris” YouTube channel, “Study IQ IAS” YouTube channel, “60 Munites” YouTube channel, Wikipedia(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange), etc.

Project Outcome

We as a team feel proud to have finished this project. We have learned so much about this complex world, journalism, various kinds of laws of different nations, international affairs, money and economy, war, geopolitics, technical things like ports and protocols, encryption, decryption, dark web, data packets, data routes and routers, networking, VPN, DNS, programming languages, IoT devices and a lot more. After completing this project we feel purposeful in our lives and can see our future going in technical streams. Now after researching that much about the internet and its functions, we are feeling passionate about learning more. We are truly happy and satisfied by doing this project as our class XII academic project for English.