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Reading back the official transcript of a secret five-hour meeting between Julian Assange and then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt — released 12 years ago this week — gives an equally eerie feeling.
Along with veteran global affairs fixer Jared Cohen, who was head of internal think tank Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), Schmidt was co-writing a book, The New Digital Age, about the intersection of US global power and social media. It was set in the backdrop of the so-called “Twitter revolutions” of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s.
The meeting was set under pretence of research for that book, with Schmidt and Cohen visiting a number of tech leaders around the same time. Assange published his account of the meeting in his own 2014 book When Google Met WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks was highly active in mid-2011, even with Assange under house arrest in rural UK as he fought extradition to Sweden. “Schmidt plunged in at the deep end, straightaway quizzing me on the organizational and technological underpinnings of WikiLeaks,” Assange wrote. WikiLeaks had just begun accepting bitcoin donations after a high-profile banking blockade cut them off from Bank of America, Mastercard, Visa, Western Union and PayPal.
Assange didn’t think much of the visit at the time, and had considered Schmidt “a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast.”
But he felt differently after some digging into Google’s confluence with US foreign policy. “While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the US State Department, the US State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch.”
Bitcoin came up a few times during that lunch. The first was a little awkward: Schmidt, a former director of software engineering at Sun Microsystems, curiously said he hadn’t heard of Bitcoin when Assange asked (Cohen otherwise said he “was reading about this just yesterday”).
What seems to have stuck most of all about Bitcoin — for both Schmidt and Assange — was that it was only one expression of the technology.
Maybe the global DNS regime could be overhauled to operate similarly to Bitcoin, freeing the internet from centralized control, censorship and manipulation. Like traditional financial institutions, DNS providers are prone to censorship by the state, with Assange telling Schmidt that the Chinese government was actively filtering WikiLeaks content from the country’s internet.
So, an internet routing system built on a global distributed ledger could allow WikiLeaks releases, for example, to be assigned to cryptographic hashes that were always accessible on a blockchain, just as bitcoins are.
Such a system would be especially effective during uprisings, when governments typically try to suppress citizen resistance by cutting off access to the internet. A truly peer-to-peer communications network would be, if it was decentralized enough, freedom technology for information in much the same way that Bitcoin is freedom technology for money.
Assange was describing Namecoin, the early Bitcoin fork based on the BitDNS concept initially entertained by Satoshi.
“I think we should study this quite a bit more so we generally understand it… so we might have a few more questions about it,” Schmidt told Assange, before wondering whether it would ever be possible to break that system’s encryption, undermining it completely.
Assange and WikiLeaks have meticulously detailed the links between Google and US foreign policy
Schmidt showed interest in Bitcoin’s proof of work and the scarcity of the currency, thanks in no small part to Assange’s lucid explanation of the difficulty setting.
“And scarcity will go up as time goes by, and what does that mean for incentives in going into the Bitcoin system? That means that you should get into the Bitcoin system now. Early. You should be an early adopter,” Assange said. “Because your bitcoins are going to be worth a lot of money one day.”
