The post WikiLeaks, Google and Bitcoin: What happened in 2011 appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. Reading back the official transcript of a secret five-hour meeting between Julian Assange and then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt — released 12 years ago this week — gives an equally eerie feeling. Along with veteran global affairs fixer Jared Cohen, who was head of internal think tank Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), Schmidt was co-writing a book, The New Digital Age, about the intersection of US global power and social media. It was set in the backdrop of the so-called “Twitter revolutions” of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s.  The meeting was set under pretence of research for that book, with Schmidt and Cohen visiting a number of tech leaders around the same time. Assange published his account of the meeting in his own 2014 book When Google Met WikiLeaks.  WikiLeaks was highly active in mid-2011, even with Assange under house arrest in rural UK as he fought extradition to Sweden. “Schmidt plunged in at the deep end, straightaway quizzing me on the organizational and technological underpinnings of WikiLeaks,” Assange wrote. WikiLeaks had just begun accepting bitcoin donations after a high-profile banking blockade cut them off from Bank of America, Mastercard, Visa, Western Union and PayPal. Assange didn’t think much of the visit at the time, and had considered Schmidt “a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast.”  But he felt differently after some digging into Google’s confluence with US foreign policy. “While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the US State Department, the US State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch.” Bitcoin came up a few…

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Filed under: News - @ April 21, 2025 4:25 pm