Can You Believe What You Read on WikiLeaks?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2017
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Since 2006 the WikiLeaks website has been publishing secret documents and material obtained from whistleblowers and other sources. Many of the confidential files published by WikiLeaks have been revelatory. The site has frequently made news around the world. But in 2016 Wikileaks published hacked emails relating to Hillary Clinton and her presidential bid. Those leaks appeared to serve the interests of the Trump campaign and were – according to US intelligence – probably provided to Wikileaks by Russian sources. So, this week on The Inquiry, we’re asking: can you believe what you read on WikiLeaks?
(Photo: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange speaks to the press after appearing at Belmarsh Magistrates court in London, England. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for downloading the inquiry. We're going behind the scenes of one of the world's most controversial |
| 0:06.0 | organizations, which intriguingly claims to exist everywhere. in the last few days that WikiLeaks, the website that publishes classified information, |
| 0:25.0 | has interesting material on the three main candidates in France's upcoming presidential election. A Russian newspaper headline says Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is going to pour oil on the fire of the presidential campaign. |
| 0:42.0 | Oh, we thought, this again. |
| 0:47.0 | Wikileaks caused a big shock last year when it leaked thousands of emails from |
| 0:53.9 | inside Hillary Clinton's party during the US election. |
| 0:57.4 | E-mails the US Intelligence Services say were hacked by Russians trying to interfere in the campaign. |
| 1:05.0 | It's led some to question who WikiLeaks is really working for. |
| 1:10.0 | You are no media organisation, a Democrat campaign spokesman said in an angry tweet to WikiLeaks. |
| 1:19.0 | You're a propaganda arm of the we're asking can you believe what you read on WikiLeaks. |
| 1:35.0 | Part 1. A big idea. Our first expert witness is Soulet Dreyfus. |
| 1:53.2 | She was part of an online community in Melbourne, Australia in the early 1990s, before most of |
| 1:58.9 | us had discovered the internet. |
| 2:02.4 | Networks were so limited speeds were so slow. Internet. That's where she first met the man who would become a trusted friend and who would go on to found WikiLeaks |
| 2:18.1 | Julian Assange. He, like other people in that community, was quite rye, fairly anti-establishment, but he, I would say, |
| 2:29.1 | more than many others, had a strong innate sense of the importance of justice being done. |
| 2:38.9 | And he planned to act on that sense of justice. |
| 2:42.0 | We had had a conversation where he said he had thought a great deal about |
| 2:49.3 | what could you do to most help the world if you had only a little bit of money and I think that |
| 2:56.0 | WikiLeaks came out of that thought process. |
| 2:59.7 | Julian Assange set up the WikiLeaks website in 2006. |
| 3:04.2 | The wiki part describes the fact that it was intended to be a website where anyone could |
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