Julian Assange - When Google Met WikiLeaks

Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, about three hours drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention. But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.

In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior US officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.

I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.

***

The stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as Googles in-house think/do tank. I knew little else about Cohen at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the US State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking Generation Y ideas man at State under two US administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties. He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened Condis party-starter, channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into US policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as Public Diplomacy 2.0.

It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. His documented love affair with Google began the same year, when he befriended Eric Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohens natural habitat within Google itself by engineering a think/do tank based in New York and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.

Later that year the two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of US foreign policy. Schmidt and Cohen claimed that

Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies.... They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].

In the same piece they argued that this technology is overwhelmingly provided by the private sector.

In February 2011, less than two months after that article was published, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted by a popular revolution. Egypt had been a US client, its military dictatorship propped up by Washington to support Americas geopolitical interests in the region.

Under the surface, as a close reading of its internal cable traffic shows, the State Department had for years bet on both horses, supporting and co-opting elements of Egyptian civil society even as it helped to keep Mubarak in power. But when the US establishment realized that Hosni was on the way out, it scrambled for alternatives. It first tried to elevate its secretly preferred successor, Omar Suleimanthe much-hated domestic intelligence chief. But the State Departments own diplomatic correspondence from Cairo, which we were publishing in volume at the time, provided a frank appraisal of his background. Suleiman was Egypts torturer in chief, the CIAs main man in Egypt, and Israels approved choice for Mubaraks replacement.

Suddenly everyone wanted to be at the intersection point between US global power and social media, and Schmidt and Cohen had already staked out the territory. With the working title The Empire of the Mind, they began expanding their article to book length, and sought audiences with the big names of global tech and global power as part of their research.

They said they wanted to interview me. I agreed.

A date was set for June.

***

By the time June came around there was already a lot to talk about. That summer WikiLeaks was still grinding through the release of US diplomatic cables, publishing thousands of them every week. When, seven months earlier, we had first started releasing the cables, Hillary Clinton had denounced the publication as an attack on the international community that would tear at the fabric of government. She was, in a way, right.

In many countries, the fabric Clinton referred to had been woven from lies: the more authoritarian the country, the bigger the lies. The more a power faction relied on the US to prop up its power, the more it whispered into American ears about its factional rivals. This pattern was repeated in capital cities all over the world: a capricious global system of secret loyalties, owed favors, and false consensus, of saying one thing in public and the opposite in private. The scale and geographic diversity of our publications overwhelmed the State Departments ability to handle the crisis. Threads between players snapped, leaving gaps through which decades of resentment would pour.