I was generally pleased with the reaction I got last week when I published the full transcript of my interview with Julian Assange at the Chaos Communications Congress in 2009. The first surprise was that Wikileaks let their ~1m Twitter followers know about it, which I decided to interpret as a clue that the views Julian expressed during the interview – on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, for example – might not have changed all that much in the intervening years.
Politico.com, The Washington Post and the International Business Times all published stories referencing the transcript, my thanks to Heather Brooke for pointing out the WaPo story, which I’d originally missed, when I saw her at the book’s launch party. Predictably, they all went for the NOTW angle. By contrast Jonathan Kent, a freelance journalist and broadcaster with several years reporting from the Far East under his belt, took objection to the perceived labelling of Raja Petra by Assange as a “real journalist” in this appropriately headstrong post.
I’m grateful to the Anonymous commenter who let me know that the interview was not the first time Assange had made his views on the NOTW hacking scandal clear, pointing to a blog post which pre-dates the interview by nearly 6 months and expresses the same ideas.
So far, I’ve had four requests for the audio, so releasing it is yet to become my top priority. But I probably will eventually. In the meantime, I’m going to concentrate on getting a few edited clips of the Cory Doctorow material that went into writing the book, clips that I prepared with the help of Nightjar studios last year, out in the wild. And I think it might be fun to publish the Daniel Domscheit-Berg interview from 2009, given that I think – as I wrote in the book – it provides an interesting contrast with the Assange material (I basically asked them both the same questions). My interest in releasing this material is two-fold. First, I want to encourage as many people as possible to read the book. But second, and perhaps just as important, I want to see what life this material can have it its own right if I release it in a way that lets others repurpose it.
The Barefoot Technologist 