I was recently contacted by Stefan Mey, who interviewed Julian Assange. Assange, an Australian, is the spokesperson of Wikileaks. The interview makes for interesting reading. In discussing how Wikileaks is financed, Mey elicits some interesting comments on the controversial auction of Venezuelan government email that I’ve previously covered on this blog.

Back in September 2008, there was widespread discussion of a collection of 8000 diplomatic emails from the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that found its way to Wikileaks. They turn out to be from Hugo Chavez’ former speech writer, Freddy Balzan. At the time, Wikileaks tried to auction off access to the email messages to the highest bidder. The auction was ultimately cancelled.

Stefan Mey’s interview with Julian Assange was actually conducted in German English; English and German transcripts are available on Stefan’s blog. Below are some extracted comments regarding the Venezuelan email messages:

…
[Stefan Mey:] In Germany you made an exclusivity deal with two media companies, the Stern and Heise. Are you satisfied with these kind of deals?

[Julian Assange:] We did this in other countries before. Generally we have been satisfied. The problem is it takes too much time to manage. To make a contract, and to determine who should have the exclusivity. Someone can say, oh, we will do a good story. We are going to maximize the political impact. And then they won’t do it. How do we measure this?

You want to make sure that if you give them the exclusivity that they really do what they promise to do …

Yes. One thing that can’t be faked is how much money the pay. If you have an auction and a media organisation pays the most, then they are predicitng, that they will benefit the most from publishing the story. That is they will have the maximum number of readers. So this is a very good way to measure who should have the exclusivity. We tried to do it as an experiment in Venezuela .

Why Venezuela?

Because of the character of the document. We had 7.000 Emails from Freddy Balzan, he was Hugo Chavez’ former speech writer and also the former ambassador to Argentinia. We knew that this document would have this problem, that it was big and political important, therefore probably no one would write anything about it for the reason I just said.

What happened?

This auction proved to be a logistical nightmare. Media organisations wanted access to the material before they went to auction. So we would get them to sign non-disclosure agreements, chop up the material and release just every second page or every second sentence.That was too distracting to all the normal work we were doing, so that we said, forget it, we can’t do that. We just released the material as normal. And that’s precisely what happened: No one wrote anything at all about those 7.000 Emails. Even though 15 stories had appeared about the fact that we were holding the auction.

The experiment failed.

The experiment didn’t fail, the experiment taught us about what the burdens were. We would actually need a team of five or six people whose job was just to arrange these auctions.

You plan to continue the auction idea in the future …

We plan to continue it, but we know it will take more resources. But if we persue that we will not do that for single documents. Instead we will do a subscription. This would be much simpler. We would only have the overhead of doing the auction stuff every three months or six months, not for every document.

So the exclusivity of the story will run out after three months?

No, there will be exclusivity in terms of different time windows in access to the material. As an example: there will be an auction for North America. And you will be ranked in the auction. The media organisation who bids most in the auction, would get access to it first, the one who bids second will get access to it second and so on. Media organisations would have a subscription to Wikileaks.

…

I haven’t ever actually seen the Venezuelan emails, but in the extract above, Assange seems to indicate that they were eventually made freely available from the Wikileaks site. The Wikileaks site is currently unavailable (though the page states it was to be available again after 11th Jan 2010), instead showing a page requesting funds from supporters, so I can’t confirm whether the emails are actually available for download from the site.

Regardless, it seems that like the infamous MediaDefender emails, it seems unlikely that the email could be ethically used for research purposes.

Update 13/01/10: I mistakenly stated that the interview was conducted in German. Stefan Mey has confirmed that the interview was in English, and translated into German.