Assange: Why I Created WikiLeaks' Searchable Database of 30,000 Emails from Clinton's Private Server
In March, WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for over 30,000 emails
& email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server
while she was secretary of state. The 50,000 pages of documents span from June
2010 to August 2014; 7,500 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The
State Department released the emails as a result of a Freedom of Information
Act request.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Julian, I want to mention something else. In
March, you launched a searchable archive for over 30,000 emails and email
attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she
was secretary of state. The 50,547 pages of documents span the time from June
2010 to August 2014; 7,500 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton
herself. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the
U.S. State Department as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request.
Why did you do this, and what’s the importance, from your perspective, of being
able to create a searchable base?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, WikiLeaks has become the rebel library of
Alexandria. It is the single most significant collection of information that
doesn’t exist elsewhere, in a searchable, accessible, citable form, about how
modern institutions actually behave. And it’s gone on to set people free from
prison, where documents have been used in their court cases; hold the CIA accountable
for renditions programs; feed into election cycles, which have resulted in the
termination of, in some case—or contributed to the termination of governments,
in some cases, taken the heads of intelligence agencies, ministers of defense
and so on. So, you know, our civilization can only be as good as our knowledge
of what our civilization is. We can’t possibly hope to reform that which we do
not understand.
So, those Hillary Clinton emails, they connect together with the cables
that we have published of Hillary Clinton, creating a rich picture of how
Hillary Clinton performs in office, but, more broadly, how the U.S. Department
of State operates. So, for example, the disastrous, absolutely disastrous
intervention in Libya, the destruction of the Gaddafi government, which led to the
occupation of ISIS of large segments of that country, weapons flows
going over to Syria, being pushed by Hillary Clinton, into jihadists within
Syria, including ISIS, that’s there in those emails. There’s more than
1,700 emails in Hillary Clinton’s collection, that we have released, just about
Libya alone.
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