http://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/transcript.pdf

Scott Shane: Hi. My question is I guess directed at Julian Assange and Michael Ratner.
Just to clarify, what aspects of the NSA surveillance do you object to?
Much of the criticism is focused on the phone metadata collection in the
United States and the false statement of the Director of National
Intelligence about that, and the question of invading Americans’ privacy.
Do you, either of you, separately object to the idea that a country, whether
it’s the United States or Russia or China or any other country, uses these
systems to spy on other countries - in other words, intercept foreign
communications, whether it is terrorist groups or foreign diplomats or any
other kind of foreign target because, of course, traditionally for decades
now, all the countries that are capable of doing that kind of spying do it.
So, that’s just to clarify. I’m asking you whether you object only to
violations of Americans’ privacy by the NSA, or do you object to the
whole concept that any country should go and spy on other countries?

Julian Assange: Okay. There are not multiple types of human beings, American human
beings and other human beings. There’s only one type of human being in
this world, and that’s why we speak about human rights. The UN
Conventions, which United States is a party to, protect human rights but if
we ‒ and the National Security Agency has been violating them en masse
‒ which is not a matter of the U.S. targeting terrorist groups ‒ everyone,
of course, would find that to be acceptable. It is conducting at least 1.7
billion interceptions per day and it is doing so en masse. It is hacking into
the civilian infrastructure of countries with which it is not at war, and in
that, it is violating the rights of organizations, governments and
individuals.
To my way of thinking, there is a larger, more significant political
problem, which is when an organization like the National Security Agency
has intercepted nearly the entire world’s communications at such scale and
is storing it, indexing it, processing it, it leads to a concentration of power
which is so dangerous that it must not be tolerated. The National Security
Agency whistleblower William Binney has referred to this as “turnkey
totalitarianism” where the infrastructure for an undreamt-of totalitarian
state has been built and it only requires a small shift in the political nature
of the U.S. Administration for that infrastructure to be so badly abused
that even more serious results can come about, both to people of the
United States and to the people of the rest of the world.

d States and to the people of the rest of the world.
Now, one may argue that we are already seeing that. It’s not that we just
have worldwide mass surveillance being conducted by the National
Security Agency but in the process of doing so, the National Security
Agency is violating United Nations agreements, American Law and the
laws of other countries and is doing so in secret. It seems in order to
protect the people involved in that spying from criminal prosecution, the
Obama Administration has further gone on to corrupt the oversight