Julian Assange: The Web can create revolutions — or jail revolutionaries
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/02/julian_assange_the_web_can_create_revolutions_or_jail_revolutionaries/
Sunday, Dec 2, 2012 10:00 AM PST
Julian Assange: The Web can create revolutions — or jail revolutionaries
The WikiLeaks editor argues that the Internet makes revolution possible, but also massive government surveillance
By Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann
Excerpted from "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet," a collection of conversations between Julian Assange and three colleagues while under house arrest.
Julian Assange: If we go back to this time in the early 1990s when you had the rise of the cypherpunk movement in response to state bans on cryptography, a lot of people were looking at the power of the Internet to provide free uncensored communications compared to mainstream media. But the cypherpunks always saw that, in fact, combined with this was also the power to surveil all the communications that were occurring. We now have increased communication versus increased surveillance. Increased communication means you have extra freedom relative to the people who are trying to control ideas and manufacture consent, and increased surveillance means just the opposite.
The surveillance is far more evident now than it was when bulk surveillance was just being done by the Americans, the British, the Russians and some other governments like the Swiss and the French. Now it is being done by everyone, and by nearly every state, because of the commercialization of mass surveillance. And it’s totalizing now, because people put all their political ideas, their family communications, and their friendships on to the Internet. So it’s not just that there is increased surveillance .....
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