This is how politicians are blackmailed when they're bugged

The result was a series of legal issues, blockades, attacks and so forth. With a bank blockade, Wikipedia was cut off more than 90% of its finances. The blockade took place in a completely extra-trial way. We took legal action against the blockade and won the trial so people could send us donations again.

So can we expect new publications?

We have a lot of material now. Economically, the challenge for WikiLeaks is whether we can increase our income in proportion to the amount of material we have in the process.

Is the U.S. government personnel forbidden to use your library?

Wikipedia is still a taboo object for some parts of the government. Every federal government employee and every contractor who's got an e-mail asking them to read something from Wikipedia, even through “New The York Times”, they need to get it off their computer immediately and report it. This is a new McCarty hysteria.

Let's talk about politicians. Why did politicians who learned from Wikipedia and Edward Snowden, whose phones were tapped and e-mailed by American spies, react in such a timid, slow way to these findings?

Angela Merkel will not be seen as a weak leader, but I think she concluded that Americans will not change. All American intelligence information is very valuable to the German intelligence agency. Please imagine for a moment that the German government complains of spying and the Americans tell it: “Dact will give you more information about France. When the French complain, they get information about Germany. NSA spends a lot of resources getting information and throwing a few crumbs on France and Germany when they start complaining that they're victims, costing them nothing, digital copies cost nothing.

If it works this way, it would be completely embarrassing for German and French governments.

It's sad. German politicians seem to think that this debate makes us look weak and creates conflict with Americans. So they'd better leave the wiretap case. If you as a politician know that American intelligence agencies have collected intensive data on more than 125 politicians and other high-level officials over the decades, you'll remember some of the conversations you've been having all these years and then you'll realize that the United States has all these conversations, and that they can tear down Merkel's cabinet simply by giving some of those conversations to journalists.

See any potential blackmail situation?

They would never publish wiretap calls, because this leads to surveillance itself. The way intelligence services clean up surveillance is to reveal the facts expressed during conversation; for example, they tell their contacts in the media: I think you should do some research about this politician and that person, what they did on a certain day.

Do you have any documented example of the use of this type of tact?

We haven't published anything about any German politician yet, but there are examples of prominent Muslims in various countries who were found to be looking at pornography. The odds, or destruction of the image by wiretapping, are part of the material used.

Who uses these methods?

British Spy Agency, G CHQ, has its own department for these methods, called JTRIG. They include blackmail, video creations, SMS, and even create fake businesses with names the same as real businesses that Great Britain wants to marginalise in some regions of the world and encourage people to order from false business by selling products of a poor quality so that real business can earn a bad reputation. That sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, but it's actually documented in material G CHQ allegedly offered by Edward Snowden.

We talked about politicians and intelligence. But we didn't talk about big private corporations. You've met Eric Schmidt, the executive head of Google. You think he's a dangerous man?

If you ask me, does Google collect more information than the National Security Agency, then the answer is “this”, because NSA also collects information from Google. The same goes for Facebook and other companies. They still collect a lot of information and use a new economic model that academics call “capitalism surveillance”. General information about individuals is worth little, but when I bring together a billion individuals, it becomes a strategy, like an oil pipeline or gas.

You paid a high price for what you did and you're still paying, you're at this embassy for over three years and you've lost your freedom of movement. Have your political behavior or viewpoints changed these experiences?

It says you're less radical with aging. I'm 44 years old now, but I feel I've become less radical. Day