Julian Assange is a spokesman and advisory board member of WikiLeaks, a transparency website whose mission is to "open governments" and expose human rights abuses. It has a core focus on protecting dissidents, whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and bloggers who face state threats, and it largely operates by publishing leaks of sensitive documents. In 2011 Wikileaks attracted a storm of controversy for its publication of thousands of diplomatic cables, catapulting Assange into the white-hot center of an important debate about transparency and security in the 21st century.

About

Julian Assange is an Australian journalist, programmer, and Internet activist, best known for his involvement in Wikileaks, a whistleblower website. He is a prominent media spokesman and advisory board member of the Sweden-based Wikileaks, helping to publish anonymous submissions and leak sensitive documents from governments and other organizations to the public. He was awarded Amnesty International's 2009 Media Award for exposing extrajudicial assassinations, as well as the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award, among others. He has been featured by numerous news agencies, including Al Jazeera English, CNN, and MSNBC.

In his speech, Assange chooses to focus specifically on WikiLeaks's work against censorship and human rights abuses committed by Western governments. Paraphrasing Orwell, Assange explains that he who controls today's internet servers controls the intellectual record of mankind. He warns us that Western governments, large corporations, and certain wealthy individuals are increasingly able and increasingly trying to remove material permanently from the historical record using sophisticated methods. Assange reviews WikiLeaks's work in uncovering human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo, and discusses the dangerous irony in the U.S. military's conduct as it decorates its detention centers with "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom" signs. If the West doesn't reverse its course of increased censorship and rights abuses, Assange warns, it will lose all of the ideals that it once stood for.