That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth, and that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.

Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded.

We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod ... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand," he said, "I get undue credit.

Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don't call them political prisoners in China, they don't call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don't call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.

I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.

To keep a person ignorant is to place them in a cage.

In my situation, frankly, I'm a bit institutionalised - this [the embassy] is the world .. it's visually the world [for me].