Mediastan

Alan Rusbridger:
So this is... So essentially you are interviewing me.

Julian Assange:
Yes. Something that surprised us. The Guardian removed, redacted a substantial amount of US Government cables that we had provided the Guardian. For example in Uzbekistan, in Tashkent the US Government cable said that there was a connection between the Karimov family and the mafia. But the Guardian version of the cable which was then given to us protects the identity of the mob boss. So, why did the Guardian do that?

Johannes Wahlstrom:
The point as far as I see it is that there are boundaries to free speech in the same way as there are boundaries to our thoughts and to our language and 'newspeak' is basically what we are dealing with. And these boundaries they look different in different countries but they always exist in either one way or another and that is called either censorship or conformism or self censorship or whatever it may be. We have a unique opportunity to actually just show where these boundaries are.

Julian Assange:
Where you approached by the British Government or the US Government?

Alan Rusbridger:
Before November 29th ? We had... It was decided that the New York Times would approach the US Government proactively. Separately we had two sets of communication with the American Government. One was via the Embassy in London who came along to see what we could tell them which was not very much because we already had the channel through the New York Times. The second channel was a phone call setup by the State Department but also involved other agencies. Their primary aim was to discover what documents we were going to use.