Speech by Sarah Harrison at 30C3, 29 December 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2EDgn5i78

Thank you. Good evening. My name is Sarah Harrison, as you all appear to know. I'm a journalist working for WikiLeaks. This year I was part, as Jacob just said, of the WikiLeaks team that saved Snowden from a life in prison. This act and my job has meant that our legal advice is that I do not return to my home, the United Kingdom, due to the ongoing terrorism investigation there in relation to the movement of Edward Snowden documents. The UK Government has chosen to define disclosing classified documents with an intent to influence government behavior as terrorism. I'm therefore currently remaining in Germany.

But it's not just myself personally that has legal issues at WikiLeaks. For a fourth Christmas, our editor Julian Assange continues to be detained without charge in the UK. He's been granted formal political asylum by Ecuador due to the threat from the United States. But in breach of international law, the UK continues to refuse to allow him his legal right to take up this asylum.

In November of this year, a US Government official confirmed that the enormous grand jury investigation, which commenced in 2010, into WikiLeaks, its staff, and specifically Julian Assange, continues. This was then confirmed by the spokesperson of the prosecutor's office in Virginia.

The Icelandic Parliament held an inquiry earlier this year, where it found that the FBI had secretly and unlawfully sent nine agents to Iceland to conduct an investigation into WikiLeaks there. Further secret interrogations took place in Denmark and Washington. The informant they were speaking with has been charged with fraud and convicted on other charges in Iceland.

In the Icelandic Supreme Court, we won a substantial victory over the extralegal US financial blockade that was erected against us in 2010 by VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and other US financial giants. Subsequently, MasterCard pulled out of the blockade. We've since filed a $77 million legal case against VISA for the damages. We filed a suit against VISA in Denmark as well. And in response to questions about how PayPal's owner can start a free press outlet whilst blocking another media organisation, he's announced that the PayPal blockade of WikiLeaks has ended.

We filed criminal cases in Sweden and Germany in relation to the unlawful intelligence activity against us there, including at the CCC in 2009.

Together with the Center for Constitutional Rights we filed a suit against the US military against the unprecedented secrecy applied to Chelsea Manning's trial.

Yet through these attacks we've continued our publishing work. In April of this year, we launched the Public Library of US Diplomacy, the largest and most comprehensible searchable database of US diplomatic cables in the world. This coincided with our release of 1.7 million US cables from the Kissinger period. We launched our third Spy Files, 239 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors exposing their technology, methods, and contracts. We completed releasing the Global Intelligence Files, over five million emails from US intelligence firm Stratfor, the revelations from which included documenting their spying on activists around the globe. We published the primary negotiating positions for fourteen countries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a new international legal regime that would control 40% of the world's GDP.

As well as getting Snowden asylum, we set up Mr Snowden's defence fund, part of a broader endeavor, the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund, which aims to protect and fund sources in trouble. This will be an important fund for future sources, especially when we look at the US crackdown on whistleblowers like Snowden and alleged WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced this year to 35 years in prison, and another alleged WikiLeaks source Jeremy Hammond, who was sentenced to ten years in prison this November.

These men, Snowden, Manning, and Hammond, are prime examples of a politicized youth who have grown up with a free internet and want to keep it that way. It is this class of people that we are here to discuss this evening, the powers they and we all have, and can have, and the good that we can do with it.

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