Bitcoin, Julian Assange Fight For Freedom – Bitcoin Magazine
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Stella Assange, the wife of Julian Assange, the founder of classified documents publisher WikiLeaks who has been locked up in a London prison since 2019, took the stage at the Bitcoin Amsterdam event today in a keynote presentation titled “Free Assange.” She described the parallels between Bitcoin as a permissionless form of value transaction and WikiLeaks’ mission to disseminate important information to the public, and outlined that Julian’s fight for freedom is one that should resonate with Bitcoin users.
“I was thinking about how to talk about freeing Julian here and Julian told me that he explained Bitcoin to me back in 2011,” Stella Assange began, adding that Julian had been moved to isolation last weekend after testing positive for COVID-19. “He explained the technology behind it, but he also gave me a great understanding of the meaning of Bitcoin … I think (that explanation) is also a way to understand the kind of parallel tracks of WikiLeaks and Bitcoin, and the future of Bitcoin and how it is connected to what is being done to Julian.”
Stella went on to talk about the most infamous publications from WikiLeaks, including the “Spy Files” and files related to the US prison at Guantanamo Bay from 2011. She outlined the role Julian and the publishing platform played in spurring the Occupy Wall Street movement, saying that Julian called Bitcoin “the real Occupy Wall Street.” In 2013, WikiLeaks helped former NSA contractor Edward Snowden release mass surveillance revelations, while Snowden himself continued to advocate Bitcoin as a tool of freedom.
She emphasized the ground-breaking changes that WikiLeaks brought to the field of journalism in the Internet age through its ability to protect anonymous sources online and its decisions to publish large amounts of information quickly and freely.
“In that sense, Bitcoin and Bitcoin technology are trying to fight censorship in a very similar way to how WikiLeaks has fought censorship using cryptography,” she explained. “(Julian) was an incredible pioneer and changed the way journalism is done. And he did it because of course Julian was a Cypherpunk, he’s a cryptographer and he understood that the big newsrooms had no idea how to protect their sources when they were operating on the Internet.”
Stella also outlined the role that Bitcoin played in supporting WikiLeaks when centralized financial institutions tried to silence them after the major document releases in 2011.
“Overnight practically, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, they just shut WikiLeaks off from 97% of the revenue that came through (donations through the platforms),” she recalled. “And how was it done? It was done completely illegally. There was a phone call from a few United States senators to these companies, and they just hung up on it.”
She added that by enabling freedom of information, Bitcoin is one of the new tools that can protect against the erosion of freedom of information in the digital age.
“Bitcoin violates Orwell’s dictum, ‘He who controls the present controls the past. And he who controls the past controls the future,'” she said.
Finally, in an appeal for support in Julian’s ongoing legal battle, Stella argued that the United States is relying on vague and outdated language from the Espionage Act of 1917 to pursue a 175-year sentence if he were extradited there. She suggested that those who similarly challenge authority with a permissionless monetary system like Bitcoin may one day face similar fates.
“What is being done to Julian is not a legitimate use of the justice system,” she said. “It bends the rules, it corrupts the rules to keep him there, and in doing so it corrupts the whole system … Anyone who challenges the hegemonic order with innovation is up against that level.”
