PR.com (Allison Kugel): I have to get your take on an article that was just posted this morning. The article states, “WikiLeaks founder demands Obama’s resignation over UN Espionage.” Julian Assange is inferring that President Obama is solely to blame for our American diplomats apparently doing double duty as spies. What do you think about that?

Eliot Spitzer: Whatever one thinks of the benefits to society in the long run of WikiLeaks’ documents being out there, and obviously many people have different views of [Julian] Assange, for him to demand the President’s resignation is kind of silly and frivolous on its face. I think the larger conversation is, what have we learned from these documents? How do they reflect on U.S. diplomacy, and what does it mean in the longer term in terms of our ability to conduct diplomacy within the appropriate code of silence, but also subject to the appropriate public scrutiny.

PR.com: Do you think that our rapidly advancing information age and the power of the Internet is going to increasingly put our national security and well being at risk, especially now with this new precedent set by WikiLeaks?

Eliot Spitzer: It cuts both ways. There are elements like these leaks which would obviously make diplomacy much more difficult. But the long run value of the openness and transparency to a democracy is also enormous. It is technology such as the Internet which brings pressure to bear on totalitarian regimes or autocratic regimes to become democratic in nature. China is struggling with this right now, desperately trying to control its population’s access to information, and the Internet is what permits us as a democratic society to say to the citizens of China, “Look what you don’t know and look what you should know.” So technology changes many things. It makes diplomacy more difficult, but it also has led to the spread of democracy over the last hundred years; I don’t mean just the Internet, obviously, but the printing press, the fax machine, all of these things have changed the world. So I think [some of it] has been enormously beneficial to us as a democratic society.

PR.com: Do you view Julian Assange as a criminal, and the Swiss company that is currently hosting his website as aiding and abetting a fugitive of justice, or is he someone who is expressing his First Amendment rights and his rights to use the Internet to share relevant information?

Eliot Spitzer: I’m going to defer to Eric Holder and the Department of Justice to make that decision at this point. I don’t know enough about where he got the information, how he got it or from whom to determine whether or not he can or should be charged. Those are fact-based decisions that need to be made from specific information which I certainly have not seen, and frankly a lot of people are expressing views that aren’t yet founded in those facts sufficiently. I’m going to wait to see what the Justice Department tells us. Then we’ll certainly have a chance to weigh in on it. What we do know is what is in the documents, and that’s why we’ve been talking about that a fair bit (referring to his nightly round table discussion program on CNN, “Parker Spitzer”). I think they’ve been a mixed bag. There is a mixed storyline which has shown U.S. diplomacy to be effective, smart, wise, struggling with many difficult, probably impossible situations but doing a very good job under the circumstances.

click to read interview with Eliot Spitzer