hello and welcome to me sophie shevardnadze the internet has not only changed our work and the way we spend our free time it has changed for some the virtual reality has become the only reality of the extreme pervasiveness of the internet means that without it we can feel cut off and ineffectual for better or for worse it is a fact of life and today will be talking about how its power can be misused. when we make a coal or go. we like to think. when we walk the streets or drive on the roads we hope no one is from the. technological progress your right to privacy would be used to track.

is the internet an ocean. or a narrow street with a drug. where is freedom to be found in a world where every click is recorded. our guest today is jimmy wales free speech activist enter printer and as he's best known co-founder of we keep mr welles it's great to have you with us today thanks for having me so i'm going to start of with a quote the internet our greatest tool of emancipation has been transformed into the most dangerous especially tater of totalitarianism we have ever seen these are the words of julian assange from his book cyber facts freedom and the future of the internet do you believe there is an effort in left online. yes i do i think there's significant freedom left online. and i don't agree with julian assange says quote i think that although obviously we should be quite concerned about

a lot of the recent. revelations about spying and so forth the internet remains the most powerful tool for the spread of freedom in the world today are but in your estimation how much of internet is being controlled right now. virtually none of it you know in general the internet is a very open place where everyone is able to communicate and talk to each other governments try various ways to try to control it but they're almost completely unsuccessful but how are they unsuccessful evolve your personal data is actually being transferred to government agencies i mean everything you read on facebook or in any social media is not just yours or your friends to share with but it's also shared with the n.s.a. and the rest of the world. well i don't think that's true i mean certainly we should be concerned about the amount of data that the usa is collecting but in terms of what they've done with it so far it's you know it's very minimal it's more

of a potential danger than something that they've actually done anything for ordinary people you still have the ability to communicate to talk with others and organize and in fact organize to demand that the n.s.a. stop doing this you know the united states has long put itself forward ass champion of free internet that snowden as we know i nurse the troops on the matter of china on the other hand has been blamed for censorship but is that it very openly is there a third option between you know dictatorship and hypocrisy. of course there is and that's freedom i would say that it's very important that we continue to condemn all the countries who are involved in. searching the internet and that is a fairly large number of countries at this point and we also need to condemn unnecessary and invasive snooping into people's privacy but i think that we need

to. how do we do that and you know well it's a democratic country it's a democratic process i think it's time for us to demand change i mean if you look back in just two years ago we did a protest against proposed internet law in the u.s. people and we had over ten million people contact congress that day and it killed the bill in its tracks i think that it's entirely possible for the public to band together and say actually it's not ok these programs are intrusive in their own constitutional and it's time to shut them down but also is it doable to walk the line between keeping the internet free and preventing threats and abuses yeah absolutely it's not even difficult you know most of the things that we're talking about have absolutely nothing to do with threats and abuses we're talking about. you know large scale wholesale spying meanwhile things like. fraud

and a real crimes are going on and the government so devoted almost no resources to actually come about in those things you know to me this is an obvious things that if you want to spend money making the internet a safer place you don't spend money spying on everybody you spend money seeking out criminals and prosecuting them you know it's very funny because recently i was speaking to richard stallman i'm sure you know who he is he came up with a free proprietary software and he strongly believes that there is no freedom left in the internet. do you completely disagree with him he's rather yeah completely completely well here also when i'm paid consultant in public politics and openness with the british government right what did you advise. that u.k. government following the leaks that you know they were spying on russian president actually everyone else and trying to bring the data to the united states afterwards . so my very very tiny little role it was in the government is really about open

access to research it's about academic research and how to publish that so i don't have within you know sort of direct responsibilities to advise the u.k. government or anyone else on how they should handle this kind of thing at the same time of course as a public figure i do advise them quite a bit that this kind of spying is inappropriate and undemocratic. but what else do you advise them i mean i just wonder because for many these leaks you know we were suspecting that we were being listened to but these leaks really came as a shocker so for someone in your position i mean of course it's undemocratic and it's better not to listen to people and everyone but what else do you advise them because it was huge i mean you know a lot of people got really disappointed. oh yeah definitely i mean certainly as someone who who travels the world and advisors governments all around the world

whenever i have the opportunity that they need to respect freedom of speech online they need to respect people's privacy online it was always wonderful to be able to point to the stated policies of the u.s. as saying look you know there is a better way there is a right way to do it to find out that in many ways they're not living up to their stated policies is a huge disappointment in to some extent it gives a green light to people in very repressive countries to say well of course we spy on everyone in our country the sort of the british sort of the americans that's not completely accurate but it's the it's the statement people are making and it's very difficult to rebut when you've got these wildly inappropriate programs going on you know bradley manning julian assange now snowden they actually you know made a huge sacrifice do you understand their position or is it something weird for you . know i do understand their position you know i don't agree with everything that different people have said or done i don't want to give

a blanket endorsement but i absolutely do understand there is a time when people he wrote people have to take a stand and say of information of wrongdoing evidence of wrongdoing and if i go forward and i go public with it i can bring about positive change in the world it's a very courageous thing to do and it's something that we should all be thankful for but do you think snowden will see the change he hoped for or will people stand up against programs like prism yeah i think so i think it's having an enormous impact and we're we're going to see it in the next few election cycles as. politicians begin to really understand that this is not something they can get away with anymore the public is quite united in opposition to these things in a huge attack on privacy was not even that much government model made but also several stripping corporations want our information because they want to sell things. i said can that be resisted when big money is involved. well yes or no i mean parts of that are completely harmless i mean certainly if if i'm using

a service and it's a free service and they monitor what i'm doing on that service and they use that to deliver better quality advertising to me so those things i'm actually interested in i think most people don't have a problem with that that's not really an issue that people should be all that concerned about i mean some people are of course but that's very different from having all of your e-mails collected by the government because governments are very very different from private businesses and government can throw you in jail a private business can just try and sell you something also in recent years will witness a dramatic technological landscape change with their rival of online video all kinds of social networks and ability of information what will be the next wave of innovation in your opinion when i think mobile. is really were a lot of things are happening right now and particularly when we look at the growth of the internet particularly immobile in the developing world we're about to see

the next billion people come online from some of the poorest places in the world and i think that's going to have a really substantial impact on global culture but also culturally social media has grown into more than just an internet service it's almost like you're not if you're not on facebook you don't exist what would you have who would have expected actually our young face would you like that fact. yeah i think i'm just like any other user of facebook i'm on facebook but i try not to use it too much because it can be quite addictive looking at all your friends pictures and so forth and it's quite a useful service in many ways but is it a good thing or a bad thing because people stop seeing each other where you can just like drop a note to someone on facebook i am just trying to figure out is that good thing or a bad thing. what do you think it's a good thing and and i think i don't think people stop seeing each other i think people see each other more often they. keep up with old friends they keep up with family brings us together as a more interconnected society it allows us to know people all around the world as

people not just as a vision of something you know when i grew up. in a small town in alabama. our idea of russians and what russia is like was so far from the truth but today this wouldn't happen to people because they would say oh yeah actually i know some russians online we play this game together or we chat or so forth i mean it's allowing the globe to come together and few each other as human beings in a new way and i think it's a really there's almost. no downsides to that it's good to see someone who's optimistic about it actually what's your new project is it is it still we keep every hour or do you have something else coming up well i've got of course is now the number five website in the world with. my for profit company is now the number thirty website so those two things could be very very busy so that's what i'm working on right now all right thank you very much after a break nothing is sacred it's printed on line and everybody loves me to be about how much to retrack state states you.

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time but k.k. maybe we can see. you just meet the road is ours and i was in the hood. thirty round clip. but i said. i don't want to die i just really do not want to die young young. welcome back to the show we're talking about the internet and it's power over as with wikipedia co-founder jimmy well it's good to have you back now there's the internet keeps notes. secrets and if people want things to remain private they shouldn't put them online in any form but why do people keep doing that and then

they're surprised and upset that they get in trouble. well i mean i think in general people. use the internet to communicate with friends to communicate with family certainly young people are sometimes not really fully aware of all the implications of that but you know i think in general most people find it far more valuable and rewarding in their life than those small downsides now we keep a be at carries out quest national fund raising has it proved effective you know we are organized as a charity so we are nonprofit organization. the bulk of the money that we get comes from small donors giving small amounts of money from all over the world over a million people a year donate some small amount of money to wikipedia. and yeah it's working for us it's not. you know we always have to be very serious about the fund raising it is important but we do get enough and so we were very happy with our current model why

did you why you chose that strategy to start with. well we could be of something different. we think of it as being like a library or a public park school it's not our place for commercialism it's a place to go with think and learn and study and reflect and so it just has a very different nature were driven by a very strong community of passionate authors who like to share their knowledge with others. and well it's just who we are it's who we've always been will you ever allow advertising. we have we have no plans whatsoever to do that we don't see any reason why we ever would certainly it's something that i'm deeply opposed to myself so you know money oriented right now. i can ask you something so you don't want to go with the advertising because you think it's evil . no no i don't think advertising is evil generally my for profit company we keep

advertising supported wikis and i think that advertising is a great way to cover the costs of different kinds of services and so forth and it's also just a great way to you know you get online and you go and buy things and normally you can get quite a good deal all that's perfectly fine and normal and wonderful what i always say is you know if you imagine. you know if you if you go to a library and you're trying to study you're learned something and somebody is blasting commercials in your ears it's just not the right time or place for it even though i don't think advertising is evil i think that it's better suited for some venues and for others and in some parts of life we don't need to have advertising it's certainly not necessary and we compete here but isn't it like you knowing to be able to be asking money all the time no i don't think so i mean certainly this year we've optimized our request process so much that we're not even going to

have to run our annual into the year. giving campaign people donate throughout the year and small amounts most people hardly ever even see notice about it and so we think it's really great that we're able to bother people as little as possible and still keep enough money to run so cross national fund raising can it become a standard way of funding new developments. in some cases yes certainly we live in a world that is increasingly global and so people are able to contribute to different kinds of projects all around the world sometimes that might take the form of a donation like with wikipedia but just as interesting is the form of crowd funding of people pre-buying something that will be produced if another people by are using kickstarter or indie go go sites like that whose customers might be all over the world and so maybe only a thousand people in the world care about some particular thing being made and they

can all sign up and say yes i'll buy it when it's when it's finished and then the person who might not have known if there was a market for good or not will be able to prejudge that market and then go ahead and produce the item so that kind of thing where we use the tools of technology in a more global world means that people can do much more individualized things. recently tried to block wiki pedia for a description of drug consumption techniques in irrational language article on mary who are now should there be forbidden information i mean something which shouldn't ever be published indicate a dia well there are lots of things that we deliberately not publish and we keep pedia just because they don't belong in an encyclopedia for example we you know we don't publish funny cat videos and we don't publish you know the falling works of shakespeare or something like this but for basic information you know to say look people do use marijuana and these are some of the ways that they use it i think

it's completely foolish to imagine that blocking the wikipedia entry is going to stop people from learning that kind of information instead they're going to learn it from much less responsible sources rather than having a clear encyclopedic description which would include questions about the dangers and so forth so you know i think that this was i mean it's silly it's not going to do any good. but we keep it can be made by anyone right so with this in mind it's credibility of the source is quite law ilo people would usually like laugh if you say quote we compare you however much they may be using it in their daily routine is it possible to bring credibility level to let's say what britannica enjoyed when it was the most quoted encyclopedia. already you know we have the best academic studies that have been done into the quality will. show that its quality is very much similar to that of a traditional encyclopedia so this idea that people will laugh if you quote we

could be is really five years old certainly today. is the highest quality it's ever been but even though we're not satisfied we want to be better than that we would have all of that today and we don't have that quality it's ever been how do you assess that. you can you going to search for yourself go to any turn random wikipedia entries and go and look at and if you click on the history you can see what it looked like and go back one year to your five years and you'll see the dramatic improvements over time our suzanne say that easy access to information and key pedia teaches people simply to copy and paste wiki beauteous articles instead of spending their time reading books in a library what a fact as we keep it i have been reading books. well i mean the most important thing to understand about wiki pedia and the easy access to information is that it's driving more readership of books and is driving more scholarly work by very young people i mean we see some amazing examples of

a young man recently was featured in the news who had developed a new test for cancer that was five thousand times cheaper than the previous test and he had done it by starting his research and we could and then he went on from there following the links to academic articles and studies and you know he was able to do this because he had that start he had an encyclopedia start that was free and easily accessible to him so this idea that people used to go back and go and read books in the library and so forth and they don't do that anymore it's just false i mean you look at the empirical data readership of all kinds is dramatically up across the board and a lot of it is driven by the fact that young people in particular are learning and reading and doing things on the internet in a way that they never did in the past but so who are the moderators of this because i know that anyone can do the editing but who model monitors it actually so we have a community and the moderators are elected from the community there are people who

have shown experience in that it is a level head it here is to neutrality policies and so they tend to be quite geeky they're mostly tech geeks people who are very obsessive about knowledge and information you can imagine what kind of person thinks of writing an encyclopedia as their main hobby they tend to be very passionate about knowledge and information and that's who they are really really quite. intelligent group of people so i look myself up in wikipedia before and it is interior just to see if i was there and turns out there so they were like a bunch of false facts about me and my law. i have which i had to because it is pretty easy but you know you can come back tomorrow. i won't be able to follow it every day and i'm not going to go and we can read it every day and see if someone put something wrong about me in my life so how does that happen lake who how does

the how does a control that. yes of the generally what happens is the community if there is a problem biography they'll place it under similar protection so that it can't be edited by just anyone it can be only added about people who have havoc and account for a while and then if you anybody who has a problem with anything in wikipedia you can just send us an e-mail and a team of people will look at it and try to solve the problems one of the things that we really focus a lot on is the need for reliable sources and so something's in the p.d. that doesn't have a source anyone can take it out immediately. so do you think wikipedia will ever be accepted as a valid academic source for scientific research for example and reference no i don't think so and i don't think we should try to be and that's not a question about quality it's a question about what is the role of an encyclopedia in the research process you would never of been able to cite for example in an academic paper at the university

level. you know maybe for younger children you know we should be happy if they wrote something and cited anything you know but once you're at the academic level of of the university the role of the encyclopedias to help you get oriented to give you background information to fill in gaps in your knowledge and to show you the route to go and find deeper materials and other materials for further study and encyclopedia is always going to be a basic summary of human knowledge not an in-depth study and in that capacity it's not the type of thing that you would cite in an academic study but different nations have different views in history and not rare that this same historic event is described differently in wikipedia if you flip through different languages because i speak many languages is it possible to find a natural version is there such a purpose at all. yeah yeah it's something that we're very passionate about and of course human beings are human beings and people do come with the knowledge that

they have or what they've been taught one of the great things. it happens in wikipedia though is that people meet other people they discuss things with a wide variety of people and they really do seek out that kind of neutral presentation neutral presentation doesn't mean that we always tell you the ultimate truth we tell you that there are divergent views on this particular event and you know this group of historians say this and this group of historians say that and they put forward this evidence and that evidence for each view so that at the end of it when you when you finish reading something like that what you should come away with is a broader understanding of the controversy itself of what is in dispute and how that works of course it's not a perfect process it could never be human beings are human beings at the end of the day so but we do try we try very hard to make sure that we present things in a neutral and fair manner to the maximum degree possible. to leave it at that thank you very much that was jim away also free speech actually said well to be

a co-founder here where that's thanks for watching we'll see the next. he survived trial sorties. to make psychologists and she. has changed his life to the world around him. by giving. hope. and loves to so many children.

the real work on. on their way to and talk to the crew of the i can to make sure that face many challenges. here you have to look out for yourself crashing on to rocks trapped in pack ice in extreme conditions and the thing can happen and article always comes up with surprises you have to keep your eyes open because if there's always something going wrong the ship carries huge reserves of water food fuel as well as helicopters and people able to survive extreme conditions they're ready for anything even an apocalypse she's really an incredible ship calling all antarctica stations this is academic a field of radio check please respond. much if your advice is centered around the negative aspects of american culture

example mindful eating social inning avoiding of snacks how much of an influence do you think this american culture has on the rest of the incredible. six did it do things with me and the world this name of the food that invaded all the countries worldwide. why is the price of gold so high. demand global demand do you think gold is money. no of the value of the only place we have to live of the water that we need to survive it's not compared to i mean gold we're not going to eat gold we're not going to be. we're not going to drink we're clearly what i'm all is and it's in

a desperate economic situation absolutely right what we're wrong to do is. say therefore any kind of economic development from the outside is going to be a benefit their only purpose is to extract as much money as possible to feed into the global financial system. with we're a part of the geo political economic system it's extremely exploitive. first of all is a question whether mining should even be carried out altogether can it be done in a way which doesn't destroy people's lives resources environment and so on will you know those are pretty serious questions mining is not a what a moment problem it's happening in asia in africa and south america in central america in mexico and it's even happening in canada and the united states.

our teams are witnessing dead bodies on the streets every day as the central african republic stands on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe we speak to a member of doctors without borders who saw the rampage of violence despite the french led military mission. to struggle to save a three month old baby girl injured in one of those deadly blasts that hit the russian city of volgograd before the new year got the latest on the life and death battle unfolding in a moscow hospital for right now. and government troops now qaida battle for control of a two cities in central iraq as a u.n. report confirms twenty thirty as the deadliest year for the country since two thousand and eight.