Spring a leaker: Assange goes free

This episode explores the release of Julian Assange from a British prison and his subsequent plea deal with American prosecutors, concluding a tumultuous saga involving WikiLeaks and its significant impact on global information transparency and press freedom.

1. Julian Assange avoided further imprisonment by making a plea deal with U.S. authorities, marking the end of his legal battles.
2. WikiLeaks' publication activities sparked a global debate on the balance between national security and press freedom.
3. Assange's case highlighted the challenges and potential risks involved in prosecuting individuals under the Espionage Act.
4. The episode revisits significant leaks by WikiLeaks, discussing their impact on public awareness and policy.
5. The moral and legal complexities of Assange's actions and their implications for journalists and whistleblowers are explored in depth.

1. Assange's Release

Assange's release and the plea deal conclude his lengthy legal struggle, highlighting the international pursuit and the diplomatic complexities involved. Shashank Joshi: "Assange's departure marks the end of what has been a very long, very complicated saga."

2. The Impact of WikiLeaks

Discussion on how WikiLeaks reshaped norms around transparency and the release of classified information. Sean: "WikiLeaks normalized mass leaking and showed that it could be done beyond the jurisdiction of any one country."

3. Legal and Ethical Challenges

Analyzes the legal ramifications of Assange's actions and the ethical debate surrounding the publication of sensitive information. Sean: "Drawing the line isn't always legally as easy as it might seem."

4. Press Freedom and National Security

Explores how Assange's activities have influenced the global conversation about press freedom versus national security concerns. The Economist: "Assange has been an incredibly poor advocate for press freedom."

1. Stay Informed: Regularly update yourself on issues of press freedom and national security to understand their interplay.
2. Critical Analysis: Practice critical thinking when evaluating news sources, especially those handling leaked information.
3. Advocate for Transparency: Support organizations and laws that promote transparency while respecting privacy and security.
4. Educate on Media Literacy: Learn and teach about the responsibilities involved in disseminating and consuming information.
5. Engage in Dialogue: Participate in discussions about the balance between national interests and the public's right to know.

As Julian Assange is released from prison our correspondent reflects on how the work of Wikileaks changed whistleblowing in the internet era, for good and for ill. Meanwhile Peter Navarro, Donald Trump’s trade hawk, remains behind bars—but is plotting for a second Trump term (09:25). And the social-media trend changing tinned fish from frumpy to foodie fare (18:33).

People

Julian Assange, Shashank Joshi

Companies

WikiLeaks

Content Warnings:

None

Matt
Hi, this is Matt and Sean. From two black guys with good credit. From a local business to a global corporation. Partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com banking for business to learn more.

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The Economist
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello, and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

What could we expect from a second Trump term? To find out, we turn to a novel source, a prisoner at the federal Correctional Institution of Miami who just happens to be one of Trumps former economic advisors. And for most people, tinned foods are little more than pragmatic, cheap, long lasting, handy prepper rations. Yet theres a social media trend thats rebranding tinned fish as a luxury item, and sales, online and off, are going swimmingly.

The Economist
First up, though, after five years in a british jail, Julian Assange, the co founder of WikiLeaks, has been released and is heading home to Australia. The whistleblower has made a plea deal with american prosecutors who have spent the past few years chasing him through the high court in London. As part of that deal, Mister Assange is pleading guilty to one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified american documents. But he wont face prison time or be extradited. Its been a long journey for Mister Assange and for WikiLeaks.

Light em all up. Come on, fire.

That journey began in 2010, when WikiLeaks released a classified video of an american military attack in Baghdad in which two Reuters journalists were killed, among others. If those killings were lawful under the rules of engagement, then the rules of engagement are wrong, deeply wrong. WikiLeaks went on to release thousands of documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For press freedom absolutists, Mister Assange was a maligned hero. For national security hawks, he was simply a traitor.

He dodged his international pursuers, faced sexual assault allegations that were later dropped, lost his appeals for extradition, and holed up for nearly seven years in Londons ecuadorian embassy, where he was eventually arrested, even as other leakers in America, such as Chelsea Manning, were charged and released. And now he too, is free. Assange's departure marks the end of what has been a very long, very complicated saga. Shashank Joshi is our defense editor. It's involved the war in Afghanistan.

Sean
It's involved the russian interference in american elections. This is an incredibly emotive and difficult case, and now it seems to be reaching its conclusion. Well, let's wind back to the beginning of the story. How is it that Mister Assange came to be in the news to begin with? What did WikiLeaks do?

Well, back in 2010, Julian Assange and his organization, WikiLeaks, published a series of very revealing images, videos that showed events in Afghanistan, including what he described as american wrongdoing in Afghanistan. And then over the coming years, they published more and more documents, including leaked american cables. Some of them were very, very sensitive indeed. And then in 2016, Assange also published information about the us elections that were sourced from russian intelligence. So he's had a very varied career, and it began as a sort of icon of press freedom, and I think culminated with a much more mixed picture of his intentions and his conduct.

The Economist
Because much of what came out from the very beginning was somewhere on the line between journalism and treason. Well, I think the question was sometimes the newsworthiness of what he published, the philosophy of WikiLeaks was that information should be free, that there should be no sort of limits on this. It was not the same as a kind of editorial judgment a newspaper might apply. Famously, they published video of an airstrike in 2007 in Baghdad that was seen as a war crime, and that was widely praised. But afterwards, they also published information on informants in Afghanistan who gave information to the Americans.

Sean
And when Assange was asked about this, the response was, well, they're informants, so if they get killed, they've got it coming. They deserve it. And of course, no responsible newspaper or news outlet would ever have done that. So I think he really blurred the line between journalism and activism and was the most prominent of a breed of people who would later become more common, of people who were doing a sort of news reporting type activity without any of the traditional confines or structures or norms of a conventional newsroom. And when you say he blurred the line, that is to say that with all the big leaks that we've seen since the original WikiLeaks, one, everybody's just kind of more okay with hearing that kind of information with a little less prejudice as to where it came from.

I think there's a few things happen, Jason. One of them is that the WikiLeaks process normalized mass leaking, and it showed everyone that you could publish this stuff on the Internet beyond the jurisdiction of any one country, and that it would spread. And it's not the first time that it happened. I can think of other occasions in which, for example, a former MI six officer had published names of intelligence officers on the Internet prior to that point. But the sheer scale of it, the publicity, the fact that he was a very colorful figure, a very controversial figure, I think it kind of put leaking in the public spotlight.

And indeed, there was a connection to Edward Snowden, the american contractor for the National Security Agency, who later leaked a number of very sensitive american intelligence files in 2013. Assange would say that WikiLeaks had paid for Edward Snowden's accommodation in Hong Kong when he fled to Hong Kong in 2013. And I think it showed that America couldn't contain this kind of very sensitive information and that it didn't need to go through newspapers or kind of gatekeepers. It could just be dumped on the web for better, or I think, in many cases, for worse as well. Well, certainly that would be the view of american intelligence officials who have been chasing him for all of these intervening years.

The Economist
Explain where things have landed today with him essentially walking free for the moment. Well, I think the first thing to note is that his prosecution was controversial. It was done under the Espionage act, which is a kind of over 100 years old. It's an american law that hasn't been used very much in recent times. And it was controversial because people argued that if you prosecute Assange for this, yes, he may have divulged terrible secrets, it should never have been published.

Sean
Yes, he may have helped a whistleblower hack american military computer systems, and yes, he may have been in touch with russian intelligence soliciting information in 2016. But if you prosecute him for these things, you could also prosecute Jason, people like me, who also occasionally publish state secrets in a newspaper because they're newsworthy. And drawing that line isn't always legally as easy as it might seem. So we got to this point with successive american prosecutors deciding that this was something they had to pursue, that this was such an egregious case, they had to go after Assange, but realizing it was going to be very difficult. And, of course, then he took refuge in the ecuadorian embassy in London for many years.

He was then subject to an extradition process that was also quite contentious. But I think there's a recognition had they pursued this, it's by no means clear that it would have come to a successful legal outcome in the courts, and that in some ways, he has served a lot of time effectively in detention. That kind of sends a signal in itself. I mean, there's another view that he has simply outweighed or outfoxed authorities here. And this whole story has a sort of moral ambiguity to it.

The Economist
On balance, without thinking too hard about the details, has the whole WikiLeaks story been good or bad for press freedom, about speaking truth to power and so on? I think it's been a powerful reminder that states can't control the flow of information in ways that they could previously, and that's a good thing. That's great. But I think the way that Assange has done it, disclosing incredibly sensitive details that have put people at risk for little news value, attempting to collude with russian intelligence officers posing under aliases in 2016 to influence the american election, I think that in that sense, he's been an incredibly poor advocate for press freedom. And whilst I have real reservations about prosecuting somebody under the Espionage act for these things, I think that Mister Assange ultimately is not someone I particularly respect as an icon of that kind of press freedom and liberty.

Shishong, thanks very much for your time. You're very welcome, Jason. Thank you.

Janice Torres
Hi, this is Janice Torres from Yokiero di Nero. From a local business to a global corporation, partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com bankingforbusiness to learn more. What would you like the power to do? Bank of America nA Copyright 2024.

Simon Rabinovich
Like many journalists, diplomats, businesspeople, I've been spending a fair bit of time around DC these days, speaking to think tankers in the Trump world, former officials trying to get a handle on what policy might look like if Trump is reelected. But by far the most fruitful set of exchanges I had was with prisoner number 0437-0510 at the Federal Correctional Institution of Miami. Simon Rabinovich is our us economics editor. His name is Peter Navarro. He was a top economic adviser in the first Trump administration.

He'll be released from jail in a couple of months. He's currently serving four months for refusing to cooperate with Congress and its investigation into the January 6 riots. And when he is released, there's good reason to believe that he will once again be a key economic figure in Donald Trump's next administration if he is elected. I'm impressed that you would access a prison for a source, Simon, dedicated as ever. Tell me about Peter Navarro.

Navarro is a really interesting, and some might say horrifying figure. He was a tenured academic at the University of California in Irvine, an economist with a Harvard PhD, but he was never published in any serious journals and he really, over his career, gravitated towards being a bit more of a China bashing eccentric. Probably his biggest claim to fame before entering the Trump administration was a book and a documentary that he'd put out called Death by China. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it promised to stop cheating and play by fair trade rules. That meant abandoning unfair trade practices like currency manipulation, illegal export subsidies.

So he's a strong believer that China has eaten into America's industrial muscle and that it was high time for America to fight back. He actually had been a Democrat back in the nineties and early two thousands, but over time, he moved into the republican orbit, and then the Trump camp believed that he was somebody who had helped to animate trumpian economic policy. He was brought into the White House, he was running something called the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. It was really a one man shop. And Navarro himself is not a very effective manager.

He's extremely acerbic. He was at the center of many different controversies and spats in the Trump White House. But all the way through it, he always managed to stay on Trump's good side, and that has given him a lot of power, especially given that he went to prison, in part for not ratting out Donald Trump. This is something that has only earned him more favor and better standing in Trump's books. You said he'd been a useful source for you, and that he's obviously an important source of the vision for Trump.

Rosie Blore
What's he actually been telling you? Well, Navarro's views are in many respects quite similar to what they were five years ago. First and foremost, he has a deep and abiding belief that the most effective economic policy is tariffs. High tariffs on just about everybody. Now, I was corresponding with Navarro by email.

Simon Rabinovich
Turns out there's a very good prison email system. So I got prompt and quite extensive replies from him. We've had some of his messages read aloud for you to hear things. In his words, the most economically efficient and strategic response is Trumponomics. Countervailing and defensive tariffs that raise government revenues, re shore production, and reduce the trade deficit through less distorted price signals.

Matt
The worst response by nomics is massive government subsidies. Of course, Trump began to erect a tough tariff wall against China. Joe Biden has actually added to that. So heaping on yet more tariffs on China is part of his plan. But there's a real concern, and this is not just Navarro's concern, shared more broadly in DC, that China has been routing more of its goods and exports and investments through countries that are not subject to these tariffs, such as Vietnam and Mexico.

Simon Rabinovich
Navarro is pledging to crack down on that. Not just on that, though. There's more he wants to do. Too many european nations are compromised by communist chinese influence to ever project a united front. The UK is addicted to chinese capital.

Matt
Greece and Italy have mortgaged their ports and other public works to China. Germany is overly dependent on China for its exports, and so it goes. Now, I think it's really important to emphasize Navarro's message here, because one of the things that you'll hear sometimes is that there's not all that much to distinguish Joe Biden from Donald Trump. They've both put tariffs on China. They're both trying to promote manufacturing in America.

Simon Rabinovich
But you can really gather from the tenor of Navarro's comments that the trumpian vision is much more aggressive. Biden has tried, has not fully succeeded, but he's tried to create a united front against China, trying to get european countries on side, trying to build bigger trading networks with closer american allies. In Navarro's harsher view of the world, there are no other countries that America can really trust. He wants to bring back aluminum and steel tariffs. Trump has been talking about a 10% across the board tariff against imports from all over the world.

That is certainly something that Navarro would support. We've talked before on the show about how an important pillar of Biden's economic and industrial policy has been the inflation Reduction act. And based on what you're hearing from Navarro now, how do you think that Trump 2.0 might differ on some of these policies? Policies. There are some people within the Trump world who think that the kind of industrial subsidies that have been a key part of biodynomics might be something that should be maintained.

Support for american manufacturers, for semiconductor manufacturing, for EV production. This is helping to bring manufacturing back to America in this view. But there is another important viewpoint, which is Navarro's, and on some days is Trump's as well, which is that these subsidies are really wasteful. He believes that tariffs are a much more efficient way of effectively pushing the cost of subsidizing manufacturing onto other countries. The Biden administration's massive EV subsidies are driving american auto production offshore to communist China because China has a significant mercantilist advantage in the production of batteries, the engines of EV's and most costly component, the Biden EV tariffs, are a belated response to a perverse problem Biden himself created.

Now, I should be clear that from an economist standpoint, most, almost all would agree that all of these policies are suboptimal tariffs are really the worst in that they are a big tax on consumers. They don't actually support american exports or manufacturing. They make input costs a lot higher. Subsidies aren't great either. They're at least a little bit more defensible, though, than across the board tariffs.

Rosie Blore
Have you had any sense how he's found things in prison and whether it's influenced his thinking at all? Well, he said in his correspondence with me that, of course, prison is challenging. It's challenging mentally, physically, spiritually. It's a minimum security prison that in the last couple of weeks has actually had riots between rival prison gangs. Navarro has not been involved in those, but, you know, clearly he's brushed with a harder aspect of american life than I think most would like to see.

Simon Rabinovich
At the same time, he's really standing on principle that he's gone to jail for a good cause, which, in his view, is defending executive privilege. America has followed Brazil and Pakistan, where prosecutors and partisans in black robes have prevented populist leaders from regaining power under Joe Biden's law. Fair tyranny. America is nothing more than a banana republic, and the world, particularly communist China, is laughing at us, as you heard. This is classic Peter Navarro.

America clearly is not a banana republic, and Joe Biden is most certainly not a tyrant. But I think the thing about many of Navarro's most extreme views is that you might be inclined to dismiss them and say that's a load of nonsense. But you have to grapple with the reality that on trade, certainly he has a lot of influence. His voice and his opinions matter and will matter a heck of a lot more if he finds himself back inside Trump's White House. Simon, thank you so much.

Rosie Blore
Great to talk to you. Thank you, Rosie.

Lizzie Peach
Friday night, tin fish date night. Welcome back. It's been a while. I read on Reddit that peanut butter in a tuna fish sandwich was a tasty combo. So I am sent out today to test.

Janice Torres
Looks like I'm doing mine on a crust. Ever had canned butter? How about canned sardines and butter? Welcome back to tin fish talk with varinha. Sardines and butter with perseat.

Lizzie Peach
There's been an interesting foodie trend in the past couple of years that some of you might have noticed. A lot of young people have been talking online about tinned fish, and lots of videos like the ones you just heard have popped up on TikTok. Lizzie Peach is a researcher for the Economist. That last one was by a TikToker called Mei Liao. I started talking about canned fish on the Internet about two years ago.

Mei Liao
At the time I was a graduate. Student, she kept posting videos, trying new tinned foods, comparing different brands, and sampling some quite unusual products like gooseneck barnacles and tinned mussels in various different sauces. Frankly, it was mostly for myself and my friends, and it suddenly took off. Over the past six months, this thing is absolutely ballooned. I never would have imagined.

Lizzie Peach
May now has a 300,000 followers, and her videos have over 11 million likes. But this isn't just a social media fad. Sales are growing in America. For example, the overall tinned fish market is worth almost $3 billion and has been steadily growing. Data from spins, which is a research outfit, shows that from 2022 to 2023, sales of mass market products grew by 3.5%.

And sales of premium products, which are defined as tins priced higher than about $5, are going up by almost 10% year on year. And actually, if you look at just premium tuna, which is a pretty mild fish, most people are quite used to it. It's quite sort of ubiquitous in kitchens. That's been going up even more by 13%.

When I first came across this trend, I was pretty surprised by it. I feel like tinned fish has got so many associations, and none of them are particularly trendy. Since an english merchant named Peter Durand got the first patent from preserving food by canning back in 1810, it's been kind of gathering associations. Tinned foods were seen as a practical solution to the problem of how to preserve food. So not really the best version, not really the highest quality stuff, just the stuff that would last longest, which was particularly useful for military expeditions and times of war and hardship.

And when it comes to tinned fish, one country has loomed particularly large, and that's Portugal, which became a key player during the second world war, not just because of its rich waters and abundance fish supply, but also because it was neutral, so it was able to keep production at relatively normal level. So how has something with these connotations of rationing, stockpiling hardship, become such a popular and actually quite expensive thing? I discovered just how much these tins can cost a couple of weeks ago when I went to visit a portuguese tinned fish shop in Times Square, which opened last summer. We have over 30 varieties of fish. So then we have, over here, we have sea bass in these cans.

So these are still in Portuguese, but you'll see it says sea bass. Then we have mackerel. Here is the eel. So this is how I was taken on a tour of the shop and was absolutely blown away by the variety of products on offer, as well as some of the prices. The prices here are outside of what normal places like supermarkets would sell.

A cannon. Tin fish. These are special. These are actually skinless balls in olive oil. Yeah.

$148. Right? Fits that for all four. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

So, luxury treat for someone. I spoke to Meli Bartelm, who's a global food analyst at Mintel. She does a lot of research into new food trends, but like, the ones that are, you know, coming from somewhere else, those are, like, very much global. These are very much like, this is super high quality, this is premium. This is like, it doesn't seem to be just online hype.

These products themselves are changing, as is. The marketing was like someone going to start an incredible tinfish company that will, like, rally this energy. And I got very motivated to work on it. So started. This is Becca Milstein, a co founder of Fishwife, which is a popular online tinned seafood brand in America.

They sell a really broad range of products. Our smoked fish products are currently our most popular smoked salmon, our smoked salmon with fly by jing, szechuan chili crisp, and our smoked rainbow trout. They also offer selection boxes, which are different types of tinned fish, designed particularly for beginners who aren't quite sure what their tastes are. And these go for $88 for eight tins. So this stuff is not cheap.

They're colorful. Tins are all over social media. So the mood board that I made when we were starting the brand was definitely the traditional spanish and portuguese conservas. Primary colors, really vibrant, really evocative graphics. But quite.

If you look around at the various premium tinned seafood brands that are out there, it becomes quite clear that a lot of them are using nostalgic, colorful packaging, which is really enhancing their appeal. And it gives a sense of repackaging something old fashioned, frozen in time, into something new and exciting. I asked Becca how important she thinks social media has been to her brand. I think, you know, unboxing is a popular format on social media, and tin fish products are inherently an unboxing experience. Now, there might be a sense of style over substance here.

Is this all just a bit of a PR job on the tinned fish industry? A lot of these products are either very similar or actually the same, and may have just been packaged up in different enticing branding.

So I have here a can of hot smoked peppered mackerel in cold pressed rapeseed oil, which says it's been caught in the north Atlantic and made in the UK. It wasn't too pricey. I picked it up this morning, but it's definitely not bottom of the shelf stuff either.

Rosie Blore
Wow. That's quite strong. Okay, it's a lot of oil. Don't I make too much of a mess here? Tinned fish might be getting a lot of attention at the moment, but it's pretty likely that other tinned products might be gradually coming to the fore as well.

Lizzie Peach
Things like tinned vegetables and tinned butter has even become a thing. It seems to me there might be other factors at play here. Covid was quite recently, a lot of us got through the pandemic by stockpiling tinned foods while we're trying to minimize shopping trips and things like that. And perhaps people are also starting to realize that the actual tinning process keeps food really fresh. It can be fresher than other options available.

So if people are increasingly looking to sort of spice up what they're cooking with, they might be spending more and more time in the tinned food aisle. Okay, here we go. Mmm.

Okay. There's a very strong fish flavor. I think I'd probably add some bread or some kind of cracker. It was quite a lot just by itself, but it's actually not bad. It's sort of got a layer of pepper on top, which is coming through better than I expected, actually.

The Economist
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. Well, see you back here tomorrow.

Janice Torres
Hi, this is Janice Torres from Joquiero di Nero. If you own or operate a business, whether it's a local operation or a global corporation, partnering with bank of America could be your smartest move. By teaming with bank of America, you'll enjoy exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Position your business to capitalize on opportunity in a moment's notice. Visit bankofamerica.com bankingforbusiness to learn more.

What would you like the power to do? Bank of America na Copyright 2024.