Julian Assange, Politician, Wants To WikiLeak Australian Politics: Interview

In the buildup to Julian Assange’s run for the Australian senate, VICE was invited to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for a rare in-person interview. Our visit coincided with the conviction of Bradley Manning, the young US Army private whose alleged espionage put WikiLeaks on the map. Assange spoke to us about political payback, his plans for freeing the most famous whistle-blower in history, and why the world needs a WikiLeaks political party.

One target of his campaign is information asymmetry. As he describes it, this "is when you go to a drug dealer and you're looking for some pure drug—but you get something that's cut with some poison. That's the case with government secrecy. You have government agencies accumulating information and restrciting it. The result of their accumulation [of information] and restriction is that they have an increase in power. Every issue flows from this.

"I started WikiLeaks because I understood that simple direct engagements with politics don't work," he added. "Everything that is politically possible is what is possible to report in the media. Presently, spin masters are those people that rise to the top."

If the WikiLeaks Party is successful, Assange would have to take his senate seat within a year of being elected, per Australian law. He could possibly get an extension, but the British government has pledged to detain him as soon as he steps outside of the embassy in compliance with the European Arrest Warrant issued against him. That hasn't deterred him.

"I've been in business for many years of understanding states, bureacracies, quite complex, that involve millions of documents, really big organizations and their interlinkages," he said. "To bring the professionalism we've developed in WikiLeaks to the Australian senate, that's very exciting."

More about Bradley Manning and Julian Assange:

Snowden Wasn't Lying: The NSA's XKeyscore Program Can Spy on Everything You Do Online

Bradley Manning Was Convicted of Espionage, and We Protested at the White House

This Is a Defining Year for Wikileaks

The Torture of Bradley Manning

Julian Assange Isn't WikiLeaks

The "Secrets" War