How Julian Assange and Wikileaks helped to drive the quantum industry.

So often in the history of the world we see a series of fortunate (or unfortunate) events invisibly influence or drive political, economic, social or technological development. One little known story is how the worlds most famous leakers helped to drive the development of the worlds most powerful security systems.

The history of quantum information technology is long and complex and is shaped by many brilliant individuals since the first work was produced in this field in the 1970’s. There are many people, more informed than I, that can give a rigorous accounting of how we have gotten to our current level of development at this point in history.

Instead I want to tell a story that is not in the front of peoples minds when they talk about the history of quantum technology development and instead of being a tale about a group of pioneering visionaries, is rather a story that revolves around a confluence of events that many would not generally associate with quantum technology. I have no overarching point to make, but rather write this to enter into the record a group of people and a series of global events that may have influenced the acceleration of quantum technology to a degree that has not been appreciated before.

I began my graduate degree at the University of Melbourne in 2004, in the Center for Quantum Computing Technology (CQCT). An Australian government funded centre that brought together researchers from half a dozen universities across the country. The first research centre set up in the early 2000’s to build the theoretical and experimental framework surrounding quantum computing and communications technology.

While I was a graduate student, I worked part time in the physics department as a tutor and teaching assistant for the undergraduate physics major — as almost all graduate students do. In 2005 I was a teaching assistant for some second and third year undergraduate courses in thermal physics, electrodynamics and quantum mechanics.

In one of those courses, if I recall correctly it was third year thermal physics, there was a quiet mature-age student that was always in class. Aside from being obviously older than the other students, I remember him as quite a noticeable student due to his hair, which was as white as my grandfathers.

At the time, there was nothing more to say about him. He showed up to class, participated in the same way as everyone else and was suitably engaged in the material as anyone who makes it to third year physics at the University of Melbourne. It wasn’t until a few years later did I see him again, not in person, but on the Web.

He was giving a talk at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin on a new model in what was called ‘scientific journalism’, and was promoting a whistleblowing website, Wikileaks 1.0, that solicited secret or otherwise restricted material from places around the world to publish. The naming of his website gave away his initial model — which he talked about more during a panel discussion in Berkeley in 2010. If fresh, secret documents, that have never been seen by the public were made available to the growing internet community, perhaps a wikipedia model could be born, where individual citizens would report and talk about these revelations without the traditional media gatekeepers.

I was certainly curious and occasionally logged on to the Wikileaks website and searched up anything related to them on Google and Youtube. During their initial years, they were not focused much on the western world. Instead, many of their initial successes were restricted to corruption in Africa, Eastern Europe and other locals that is of little interest to CNN or the New York Times. I vaguely recalled their efforts in Kenya and their work releasing the “bibles of Scientology.”

At the time it was a minor curiosity, and to be honest, while Assange looked familiar, I couldn’t quite place where I had seen him before. This changed in 2010 with the release of the collateral murder video. Footage from a US attack helicopter in Iraq that notoriously showed the gunning down of multiple people, including two Reuters journalists.

This one video propelled Wikileaks into the mainstream. Followed up shortly with the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and then Cable-gate. There was now a flurry of information about Wikileaks and Assange and their antagonism towards the US even though roughly the first four years of their operations had nearly nothing to do with western secrets and was broadly ignored.

Media organisations began to contact people at Melbourne University, and when this started the penny dropped and I immediately remembered where I had seen this white haired man before.

The rest, after 2010, is somewhat history, for both Wikileaks and Assange. Even though it is very poorly written history. The influence that Wikileaks and Assange has had, in my opinion, cannot be matched by any journalistic entity or individual in contemporary times and it will be a long lasting shame that what Wikileaks managed to achieve may be a ‘flash in the pan’ moment that barely lasted a decade. It is always a source of confusion to me that the baton has not been picked up by anyone else, especially since the technological solutions that Wikileaks pioneered are even easier to adopt today compared to 2006–2010. This is also accentuated by the utter lack of journalistic expertise, trust and integrity, except for a very small group of criminally underfunded people, in a moment in history which desperately needs good people trying to untangle the shenanigans of the world, rather than scrolling through Twitter.

But, you may ask… what does this have to do with quantum technology? I could go on and on regarding my opinions of the Wikileaks and Assange saga. However, the even lesser known story is how Assange’s presence at Melbourne University in the mid 2000’s may have spurred some of the largest investments into quantum technology development by countries and companies worldwide in the past five years.

After Wikileaks exploded into the mainstream, the internet does what the internet does and found many of Assange’s writings during the time he was formulating and building Wikileaks. As a hacker, Assange also had a trail of blog posts and forum writings, which he later included in an autobiography in 2011. Part of his writings was during his time at Melbourne University and his attendance at the Australian Institute of Physics (AIP) National Congress in early 2005.

The AIP national congress is a biannual gathering of physicists in Australia, similar to the American Physical Society March Meeting. The congress is a gathering of plenary, keynote, invited and contributed talks on research that is happening throughout Australia on all areas of physics. It is generally an event that most academics and students, within Australia, participate in and in early 2005 it was no different. I was also in attendance, mostly to see if someone senior in my field recognised my name — unfortunately no one did.

Aside from the talks, there are what are known as poster sessions. Large auditoriums that are packed with pin boards where mostly students present their work in the form of a large A0 sized posters. During poster sessions, drinks and snacks are provided and the attendees wander around the room to read and talk about the work presented with the students and/or academics and generally chat about the progress that is being made.

It is standard practise when, as a student, you prepare your poster for a conference, to have a small section — usually in the bottom right hand corner in the smallest font you can get away with — for acknowledgements. These acknowledgements can consist of people who have helped with the work to a level that does not rise to an authorship credit, but usually they consist of funding acknowledgements. Grants and agency acknowledgements that have provided the money for you and your co-authors to actually do the work.

At the time, the centre for quantum computing was heavily funded by the US government. This was not unusual for quantum computing at the time. iARPA, DARPA, the NSA and other agencies associated with US defence or intelligence community were large initial investors into quantum technology R&D. Consequently, posters presented by students and academics from Melbourne University had the obligatory acknowledgements from grants from the NSA and other agencies associated with the United States.

As Assange noted in his writings, he was discouraged by this. As he said in one of his posts,

Suffice it to say, he dropped out of Melbourne University soon afterwards.

Certainly, nobody would have expected that this decision would have had a much larger impact on the world than any of us quantum technology geeks in the coming years.

The development and rise of Wikileaks from its establishment in 2006 is occasionally well documented. Although their initial impact on non-western countries is routinely overlooked, they slowly developed a solid reputation as the outlet of choice for highly sensitive and secret material from locations around the world. Wikileaks explosion into the mainstream and the inevitable fallout from such a disruptive organisation was predictable, if not disappointing to still see actually happen.

The influence of Assange and Wikileaks on the broader population, especially on those who are embedded within institutions that often succumb to corruption and abuse is unarguable, and this influence leads to the next person in the story.

Edward Snowden, the former NSA and CIA contractor who leaked a trove of documents to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewan Macaskill in 2013 about how the United States was systematically intercepting a raft of data across the classical internet was directly influenced by the activities of Assange and Wikileaks. Although Snowden did not leak the documents to Wikileaks, instead hand picking a team of journalists to review and slowly publish excerpts from the leaked material, his departure from Hong Kong and his attempt to reach Latin America was facilitated by Assange and Wikileaks. This rose to the level of having a Wikileaks affiliated lawyer stay with him during his three month ‘holiday’ within the international transit lounge of Moscow International airport. Snowden has commented extensively on the influence Assange and Wikileaks had on him, although he does differ in several important ways. Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2014, Snowden said:

The Snowden documents revealed to the world the extent to which the US was infiltrating the classical communications networks that make up the global internet. The revelations included documents about data collection from most major internet companies. Attempts to circumvent security of networks associated with Google and Facebook in order to harvest data. In other revelations it was shown how the NSA physically intercepted hardware to implant surveillance devices to collect network traffic. This was a significant wake up call to not only the citizenry of the world, but also to other governments.

Unfortunately, the Snowden revelations did little to stem the tide of privacy abuses and surveillance activities that have afflicted the average citizen — US or otherwise — but only a fool would believe that non-US governments and agencies would be quite so happy with the idea of classical telecommunications being so vulnerable.

Consequently, it is not too surprising that beginning in 2013-2014, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began to massively ramp up their R&D investment into communications security. A major component of this is… guess what… Quantum Technology!!

While the CCP does not generally publicise the true reasons why they do anything, there have been several statements made in talks and to media outlets by Jian-Wei Pan — the physicist at the University of Science and Technology in China who is sometimes referred to as the “father of quantum” — attributing the Snowden leaks directly to the CCP’s interest in quantum computing and communications technology. This includes in a 2014 article in the South China Morning Post which outlined the motivations for increasing quantum investment significantly,

The development of the QUESS program, including the Micius satellite platform for space based Quantum Key Distribution and the Beijing to Shanghai QKD fibre optic network — which essentially follows the high speed rail lines with secure ‘trusted nodes’ located in highly secure facilities along the rail route — was directly spurred by Beijing’s desire to build a telecommunications infrastructure that is immune to attacks from foreign governments.

The Chinese investment into quantum technology has been astounding, and it has arguably spurred many of the recent investments into quantum technology around the globe. This includes the recent U.S. funding of a $1.2B national quantum initiative, which just this month launched five research centres dedicated to quantum technology development and more recent announcements of $237M in the 2021 US budget for quantum technologies.

Investment from China has certainly motivated governments, particularly the United States, to ramp up its efforts. As was stated in a 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment report from the US Director of National Intelligence,

As always, you can’t always identify the ultimate motives or breakdown the individual factors that lead to decisions at the policy level, but certainly the increase in Chinese investment into domestic quantum technology development has had a non-trivial impact on both US and global funding decisions in the quantum space.

So… those of us in the quantum community should drink a toast, not only for someone who has had one of the largest impacts on the media landscape in our lifetime, but someone who potentially, and inadvertently, tipped over one of the first dominos that has lead to the flood of interest and investment in the very technology he was concerned about. Perhaps we should re-double our efforts to discuss the implications of quantum technology for privacy, security, human rights and the general wellbeing of humanity and do so in a more holistic way than just always focusing on the upside.

- Simon J. Devitt, Co-founder, h-bar consultants.