Assange: "WikiLeaks is the intelligence agency of the people"
The WikiLeaks chief discusses radical journalism and WikiLeaks's main threat in an exclusive New Statesman essay. In an exclusive essay for the New Statesman, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, argues that WikiLeaks is a return to the days of the once popular radical press. He also discusses why the New York Times dislikes the whistle-blowing website, and reveals the biggest threat to WikiLeaks today. Assange argues that the New York Times's hostility to WikiLeaks stems from the newspaper's illiberal tradition of failing to back organisations or figures which challenge established elites. He highlights the newspaper's failure to support the American pacifist and anti-war campaigner Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned for ten years for making an anti-war speech in 1918.
WikiLeaks is able to succeed because, unlike many of its forebears, it does not rely on advertisers, he continues. "As well as the hostility of governments, popular grass-roots publishers have had to face the realities of advertising as a source of revenue. [T]he Daily Herald...was forced to close despite being among the 20 largest-circulation dailies in the world, because its largely working-class readers did not constitute a lucrative advertising market."
WikiLeaks, however, has other problems, writes Assange: "How do we deal with an extrajudicial financial blockade by Bank of America, Visa (including Visa Europe, registered in London), MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, the Swiss PostFinance, Moneybookers and other finance companies, all keen to curry favour with Washington?"