A lit­tle ways back, Christo­pher Hitchens field­ed ques­tions for 30 min­utes from Reddit.com users, answer­ing any and every ques­tion they threw his way. What his­tor­i­cal fig­ures, events or books have been under­em­pha­sized in Amer­i­can pub­lic edu­ca­tion? Has the Iraq War (some­thing Hitchens sup­port­ed) had a pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive impact on Islam­ic extrem­ism? What do social­ism and lib­er­tar­i­an­ism have in com­mon intel­lec­tu­al­ly, if any­thing? Oth­er fig­ures inter­viewed by Red­dit users include Richard Dawkins, Noam Chom­sky, and Ron Paul.

Let me pref­ace things by say­ing this will like­ly be our last Wik­iLeaks post for a while. Don’t want to slip into Wik­iLeaks overkill. With that said…

Yes­ter­day, Sir David Frost land­ed the first tele­vi­sion inter­view with Julian Assange since his release from a Lon­don jail. The 24 minute inter­view aired on Al Jazeera Eng­lish (where Frost hosts a show called Frost Over the World) and pret­ty quick­ly they dive into some impor­tant ques­tions: Do gov­ern­ments have the right to keep state secrets? And do media orga­ni­za­tions have the right to divulge such secrets? Assum­ing so, where (if any­where) must jour­nal­ists draw the line? Why has Wik­iLeaks recent­ly tak­en aim at the Unit­ed States? Is it fair to char­ac­ter­ize Wik­iLeaks as an anar­chic orga­ni­za­tion? The list of ques­tions goes on, includ­ing ones delv­ing into Assange’s legal prob­lems. Thanks for @eacion for the heads up on this one…

Ear­li­er this week, Swe­den’s pub­lic tele­vi­sion ser­vice, SVT (akin to PBS and the BBC), released a one hour doc­u­men­tary chron­i­cling the his­to­ry of Wik­iLeaks, start­ing with its ear­ly leaks of Sci­en­tol­ogy doc­u­ments and end­ing with its recent release of Amer­i­can diplo­mat­ic cables. Since July, SVT reporters have fol­lowed Wik­iLeaks, trav­el­ing near and far to inter­view Wik­iLeaks founder Julian Assange and oth­er top mem­bers of the whistle­blow­ing orga­ni­za­tion, some of who have since left the embat­tled inter­net site. All in all, a decent intro­duc­tion to Wik­ileaks and its con­tro­ver­sial mis­sion. Thanks to @eacion for the heads up…

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Try­ing to make heads or tails of Wik­iLeaks, which just released 250,000 US diplo­mat­ic cables this week? Then you may want to spend some time with one arti­cle and one video. First, The New York­er pub­lished this sum­mer an exten­sive pro­file of Julian Assange, the dri­ving force behind Wik­iLeaks. A key pas­sage explain­ing Assange’s world view appears below, and you can get the full pro­file right here. Next up, we have Chris Ander­son, the head of TED, in con­ver­sa­tion Assange. The inter­view, run­ning 20 min­utes, tells you essen­tial­ly “Why the World Needs Wik­iLeaks.” And then why not add to the list Forbes’ lengthy inter­view with Assange, pub­lished ear­li­er this week. (Thanks Avi for that.)

He had come to under­stand the defin­ing human strug­gle not as left ver­sus right, or faith ver­sus rea­son, but as indi­vid­ual ver­sus insti­tu­tion. As a stu­dent of Kaf­ka, Koestler, and Solzhen­it­syn, he believed that truth, cre­ativ­i­ty, love, and com­pas­sion are cor­rupt­ed by insti­tu­tion­al hier­ar­chies, and by “patron­age networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that con­tort the human spir­it. He sketched out a man­i­festo of sorts, titled “Con­spir­a­cy as Gov­er­nance,” which sought to apply graph the­o­ry to pol­i­tics. Assange wrote that ille­git­i­mate gov­er­nance was by def­i­n­i­tion conspiratorial—the prod­uct of func­tionar­ies in “col­lab­o­ra­tive secre­cy, work­ing to the detri­ment of a pop­u­la­tion.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion are dis­rupt­ed, the infor­ma­tion flow among con­spir­a­tors must dwin­dle, and that, as the flow approach­es zero, the con­spir­a­cy dis­solves. Leaks were an instru­ment of infor­ma­tion war­fare.