

Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt talking about Bitcoin - daraosn
http://www.wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html#688

======
dmix
While talking about using bitcoin for DNS management, Assange mentions a
source told him VeriSign handed over CA keys to the US government:

ES > The average person does not understand that RSA was broken into an awful
lot of private keys involving commerce were taken,

JA > Yes

ES > so...

JA > The public key structure is a tremendous problem, so in the same way that
domain name structures are a tremendous problem. The browser based public key
system that we have for authenticating what websites you are going to, it is
awful. It is truly awful. The number of people that have been licensed to mint
keys is so tremendous.. there's one got bankrupted and got bought up cheaply
by Russian companies, you can assume, I have been told actually that VeriSign,
by people who are in the know, although I am not yet willing to go on the
public record, cause I only have one source, just between you and me, one
source that says that VeriSign has actually given keys to the US government.
Not all, but a particular key. That's a big problem with the way things are
authenticated presently.

[http://www.wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-
Schmidt....](http://www.wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-
Schmidt.html#750)

------
recuter
They sure seem friendly but later Assange became disenchanted with Schmidt:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-
banalit...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-
googles-dont-be-evil.html)

~~~
state
I never understood this. As a sorry admission of both laziness and not knowing
where to look, could someone give the TL; DR of the reason for this? I read
this when it came out as well and found it really odd in contrast to their
chummy chat.

~~~
recuter
[http://wikileaks.org/Op-ed-Google-and-the-NSA-
Who-s.html](http://wikileaks.org/Op-ed-Google-and-the-NSA-Who-s.html) << This
is really worth the click but here is an excerpt.

"So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a
meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then-Chairman of Google, who came out to see me
with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that
coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were
secretly on our side..

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book,
a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age.

..

Two months after my meeting with Eric Schmidt, WikiLeaks had a legal reason to
call Hillary Clinton and to document that we were calling her. It is
interesting that if you call the front desk of the State Department and ask
for Hillary Clinton, you can actually get pretty close, and we have become
quite good at this.

..eventually we got up to Hillary Clinton’s senior legal advisor, who said
that we would be called back.

Shortly afterwards another one of our people, WikiLeaks’ ambassador Joseph
Farrell, received a call back to discuss the parametres of the call with
Hillary, not from the State Department, but from Lisa Shields, _the then-
girlfriend of Eric Schmidt_ , who does not formally work for the US State
Department. So let’s reprise this situation: The Chairman of Google’s
girlfriend was being used as a back channel for Hillary Clinton. This is
illustrative. It shows that at this level of US society, as in other corporate
states, it is all musical chairs.

That visit from Google while I was under house arrest was, as it turns out, an
unofficial visit from the State Department."

------
bstar77
Very impressed with Assange's technical chops in this discussion. I only read
about a third of the discussion, but I kept getting the feeling that he was
trying to dumb the topic down to a level Schmidt would understand.

~~~
markrages
Schmidt is reasonably technical. He wrote the original "lex" lexical analyzer
generator program.

~~~
shalmanese
Eric Schmidt has a PhD in Computer Science and was an engineer and engineering
director for many years before becoming the President of Sun. I would say he's
somewhat more than reasonably technical.

------
skloubkov
Pretty interesting meeting.

Seems to cover more than just bitcoin, and includes the reasoning behind
Assange's drive.

Highly recommend listening to the actual audio file (its linked in the
article): [http://wlstorage.net/file/cms/assange-
schmidt.mp3](http://wlstorage.net/file/cms/assange-schmidt.mp3)

------
state
I found this conversation to be a really worthwhile read (when it came out).
It's a refreshing demonstration of the 'empirical journalism' that Assange
describes in this conversation.

As time goes on I find it even more interesting in contrast to the public
images of both Assange and Schmidt. I'm much more interested in the raw,
unedited dialogue between these people than the way they are reported on.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I like how the guy who editorializes with terms like "Collateral Murder" and
carefully edited video considers himself doing "empirical journalism."

~~~
bainsfather
The gun camera video at
[http://www.collateralmurder.com/](http://www.collateralmurder.com/) is 39mins
long and is described as 'unedited' \- it looks continuous to me - are you
saying this is untrue?

'Carefully edited' does not appear to be an accurate description.

~~~
thecoffman
IIRC they released two versions simultaneously - one was edited for "maximum
impact" and the other was the complete, uncut footage.

I think the former is good in a TL;DR sort of way as long as the full material
is made available for scrutiny by the public as well.

~~~
cobrausn
Yeah, it's a great TL;DR that can cause people to hate you for misrepresenting
a situation forever. If he had just released the full, unedited video and a
shorter unedited snippet of the video, would we still be seeing attacks on his
credibility this long after the fact? The shorter video he released lacked
some much needed context as to why the pilot of the gunship chose to fire.

~~~
Crito
_" If he had just released the full, unedited video and a shorter unedited
snippet of the video, would we still be seeing attacks on his credibility this
long after the fact?"_

The number of times I have seen people either flat out lie and claim that the
39minute video does not exist, or lie by omission by never mentioning the
release of the 39minute version when criticizing wikileaks for releasing an
edited video leads me to believe the answer to your question is _" Yes."_

These people are already grasping for complaints, playing fast and loose with
reality to do it. No matter how wikileaks released that video, there would
always be a portion of the population with an interest in discrediting it.

~~~
cobrausn
Releasing the unedited video doesn't get rid of the fact that he released the
edited one for 'maximum impact' that happened to obscure the truth of the
situation a bit by omitting context and details. 'Lie by omission' indeed.

~~~
Crito
It's not exactly lying by omission if there is no omission, is it? By your
logic, headlines would be banned for not containing the entirety of the
content of the full article.

You people keep on clinging to the idea that the additional footage somehow
dramatically changes the narrative. Maybe in your mind it really does, but
most people who have _actually_ watched both would likely disagree.

~~~
cobrausn
Oh, you actually _watched_ the videos? Here I was just repeating shit I read
somewhere. Yeah, we're done here, believe whatever the fuck you want, I doubt
you could understand the context I'm talking about anyway.

------
wudf
I was really happy to read what Assange had to say about the political
education of the apolitical youth. What he says around #883 articulates some
strong feelings I think about often.

------
taylorbuley
This is my favorite Schmidt interview of all time thanks to this exchange:

ES: Can we start... I want to talk a little about Thor. Right. The sort of,
the whole Navy network and...

JA: Tor or Thor?

ES: Yeah, actually I mean Tor. Uh...

JA: And Odin as well.

------
infruset
this is really intriguing.. and awesome! You can download the audio file(3h)
at the top of the page.

------
josu
I haven't read the full conversation, but it shocks me that Eric Schmidt
didn't know about bitcoin. Am I completely biased and bitcoin really isn't as
big as I think it is, or has Mr. Schmidt been living under a rock?

~~~
scarmig
"On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural UK at
the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt."

Knowledge of bitcoin was very limited in 2011... I only recall hearing about
it by mid 2012.

~~~
josu
Oh, OK, I didn't realize that the article dated back to 2011.

I checked my email to see when I first registered on MtGox and I found out
that 23rd of June is just a few days after MtGox got hacked.

