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.

Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.

The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

These megaleaks... They're an important phenomenon, and they're only going to increase.

What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes.

Although I still write, research and investigate, my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists.

Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.