Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt talking about Bitcoin

http://www.wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html#688

by daraosn • 13 years ago

60 35 13 years ago

wikileaks.org

infruset• 13 years ago

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

recuter2• 13 years ago

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

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

state3• 13 years ago

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.

recuter2• 13 years ago

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."

bstar77• 13 years ago

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.

markrages• 13 years ago

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

shalmanese• 13 years ago

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.

fudgekludge• 13 years ago

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.

gwern2• 13 years ago

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.

noobface• 13 years ago

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.

state3• 13 years ago

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.

drzaiusapelord2• 13 years ago

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

state3• 13 years ago

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...

bainsfather3• 13 years ago

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.

skloubkov• 13 years ago

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

wudf• 13 years ago

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.

dmix• 13 years ago

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....

taylorbuley• 13 years ago

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.

josu2• 13 years ago

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?

deelowe• 13 years ago

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

Havoc• 13 years ago

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.

scarmig• 13 years ago

"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.

josu2• 13 years ago

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.

gwern2• 13 years ago

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

Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt talking about Bitcoin

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