Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt talking about Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt talking about Bitcoin

wikileaks.org

60 pointsdaraosn35 comments

While talking about using bitcoin for DNS management, Assange mentions a source told him VeriSign handed over CA keys to the US government:

ES > The average person does not understand that RSA was broken into an awful lot of private keys involving commerce were taken,

JA > Yes

ES > so...

JA > The public key structure is a tremendous problem, so in the same way that domain name structures are a tremendous problem. The browser based public key system that we have for authenticating what websites you are going to, it is awful. It is truly awful. The number of people that have been licensed to mint keys is so tremendous.. there's one got bankrupted and got bought up cheaply by Russian companies, you can assume, I have been told actually that VeriSign, by people who are in the know, although I am not yet willing to go on the public record, cause I only have one source, just between you and me, one source that says that VeriSign has actually given keys to the US government. Not all, but a particular key. That's a big problem with the way things are authenticated presently.

http://www.wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt....

They sure seem friendly but later Assange became disenchanted with Schmidt:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banalit...

I never understood this. As a sorry admission of both laziness and not knowing where to look, could someone give the TL; DR of the reason for this? I read this when it came out as well and found it really odd in contrast to their chummy chat.

http://wikileaks.org/Op-ed-Google-and-the-NSA-Who-s.html << This is really worth the click but here is an excerpt.

"So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then-Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side..

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age.

Two months after my meeting with Eric Schmidt, WikiLeaks had a legal reason to call Hillary Clinton and to document that we were calling her. It is interesting that if you call the front desk of the State Department and ask for Hillary Clinton, you can actually get pretty close, and we have become quite good at this.

..eventually we got up to Hillary Clinton’s senior legal advisor, who said that we would be called back.

Shortly afterwards another one of our people, WikiLeaks’ ambassador Joseph Farrell, received a call back to discuss the parametres of the call with Hillary, not from the State Department, but from Lisa Shields, the then-girlfriend of Eric Schmidt, who does not formally work for the US State Department. So let’s reprise this situation: The Chairman of Google’s girlfriend was being used as a back channel for Hillary Clinton. This is illustrative. It shows that at this level of US society, as in other corporate states, it is all musical chairs.

That visit from Google while I was under house arrest was, as it turns out, an unofficial visit from the State Department."

Very impressed with Assange's technical chops in this discussion. I only read about a third of the discussion, but I kept getting the feeling that he was trying to dumb the topic down to a level Schmidt would understand.

Schmidt is reasonably technical. He wrote the original "lex" lexical analyzer generator program.

Eric Schmidt has a PhD in Computer Science and was an engineer and engineering director for many years before becoming the President of Sun. I would say he's somewhat more than reasonably technical.

Its possible they were both aware that this would be published in part or in full at some point. They may have speaking to an unknown audience as much as each other.

> Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for "The New Digital World", their forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.

Assange wrote some code for a pre-nmap port scanner. If he'd chosen a different path I think he would've been a pretty decent security researcher.

Pretty interesting meeting.

Seems to cover more than just bitcoin, and includes the reasoning behind Assange's drive.

Highly recommend listening to the actual audio file (its linked in the article): http://wlstorage.net/file/cms/assange-schmidt.mp3

I found this conversation to be a really worthwhile read (when it came out). It's a refreshing demonstration of the 'empirical journalism' that Assange describes in this conversation.

As time goes on I find it even more interesting in contrast to the public images of both Assange and Schmidt. I'm much more interested in the raw, unedited dialogue between these people than the way they are reported on.

I like how the guy who editorializes with terms like "Collateral Murder" and carefully edited video considers himself doing "empirical journalism."

I know! It really doesn't make any sense!

That's what's so intriguing about it. If I forget about all the awkwardness of WikiLeaks, I'd be so excited about this brilliant guy who's going to change the way we consume current events. But...

The gun camera video at http://www.collateralmurder.com/ is 39mins long and is described as 'unedited' - it looks continuous to me - are you saying this is untrue?

'Carefully edited' does not appear to be an accurate description.

IIRC they released two versions simultaneously - one was edited for "maximum impact" and the other was the complete, uncut footage.

I think the former is good in a TL;DR sort of way as long as the full material is made available for scrutiny by the public as well.

Yeah, it's a great TL;DR that can cause people to hate you for misrepresenting a situation forever. If he had just released the full, unedited video and a shorter unedited snippet of the video, would we still be seeing attacks on his credibility this long after the fact? The shorter video he released lacked some much needed context as to why the pilot of the gunship chose to fire.

"If he had just released the full, unedited video and a shorter unedited snippet of the video, would we still be seeing attacks on his credibility this long after the fact?"

The number of times I have seen people either flat out lie and claim that the 39minute video does not exist, or lie by omission by never mentioning the release of the 39minute version when criticizing wikileaks for releasing an edited video leads me to believe the answer to your question is "Yes."

These people are already grasping for complaints, playing fast and loose with reality to do it. No matter how wikileaks released that video, there would always be a portion of the population with an interest in discrediting it.

Releasing the unedited video doesn't get rid of the fact that he released the edited one for 'maximum impact' that happened to obscure the truth of the situation a bit by omitting context and details. 'Lie by omission' indeed.

It's not exactly lying by omission if there is no omission, is it? By your logic, headlines would be banned for not containing the entirety of the content of the full article.

You people keep on clinging to the idea that the additional footage somehow dramatically changes the narrative. Maybe in your mind it really does, but most people who have actually watched both would likely disagree.

Oh, you actually watched the videos? Here I was just repeating shit I read somewhere. Yeah, we're done here, believe whatever the fuck you want, I doubt you could understand the context I'm talking about anyway.

If I recall correctly, at the same time that video was released they also released a sort of "highlights reel". Detractors of wikileaks consider this a grave unforgivable crime of sorts, you are only allowed to editorialize if you are saying something that they like!

That's not the version people criticize. The 9 minute edited video is the one that people criticize.

The full 39min unedited version was released at the same time though, wasn't it? (eg the video on youtube, shown on the 'collateral murder' webpage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=is9s...) says it was uploaded 3April2010.

Releasing source material, in support of edited content, seems a reasonable way to do 'empirical journalism'.

I have not seen a 9minute edited video - could you link to it please? The wikipedia page mentions the 17minute edited video - as is on the 'collateral murder' website. I have watched it twice, and it seems consistent with the 39minute one. i.e. it has not been edited to grossly misrepresent the evidence in the full 39minute version.

>The full 39min unedited version was released at the same time though, wasn't it?

"Sir, how many times did you beat your wife"

but in the other room he said "Sir, how many times did you beat your wife at chess?"

So... that makes it alright? No, it doesn't.

Your example is of a 'gross misrepresentation'. I really do not think Assange did this. Maybe you dislike his editing, but surely you are not arguing that it was like your example?

I was really happy to read what Assange had to say about the political education of the apolitical youth. What he says around #883 articulates some strong feelings I think about often.

This is my favorite Schmidt interview of all time thanks to this exchange:

ES: Can we start... I want to talk a little about Thor. Right. The sort of, the whole Navy network and...

JA: Tor or Thor?

ES: Yeah, actually I mean Tor. Uh...

JA: And Odin as well.

this is really intriguing.. and awesome! You can download the audio file(3h) at the top of the page.

I haven't read the full conversation, but it shocks me that Eric Schmidt didn't know about bitcoin. Am I completely biased and bitcoin really isn't as big as I think it is, or has Mr. Schmidt been living under a rock?

Bitcoin wasn't that popular back in April. I think it's reasonable that Schmidt hadn't heard of it yet.

I think its a side effect of the division of labour at the top. Between Page & Brin I don't think its unreasonable for Eric to focus on the corporate aspect & trust that the duo will hold the fort on the tech front.

Naturally it would have been better if he could be current on both (/all?) fronts, but thats a big ask.

>bitcoin really isn't as big

It is to you & me, but they think on a billion people scale & the number of people thinking about bitcoins isn't quite there yet.

"On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural UK at the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt."

Knowledge of bitcoin was very limited in 2011... I only recall hearing about it by mid 2012.

Oh, OK, I didn't realize that the article dated back to 2011.

I checked my email to see when I first registered on MtGox and I found out that 23rd of June is just a few days after MtGox got hacked.

On 23 June 2011, it wasn't that unreasonable for Schmidt to know little to nothing about Bitcoin.

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