To really understand where Assange is coming from I always found this to be one of the most useful descriptions of his goal.
"... ccording to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary. ..."
The essence of the Assange and WL strategy is to force their opponents to build elaborate defenses against leaks. These defenses will then degrade the effectiveness and potency of their opponents.
From the source[1].
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks
induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie.
This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications
mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent
system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability
to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.
Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust
systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems.
Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in
many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves
them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with
more open forms of governance.
"Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency. They collect a vast amount of information about people, store it, integrate it and use it to predict individual and group behavior, which they then sell to advertisers and others."
But I'd like to point out an important difference: Google doesn't have the authority to arrest someone (or incite someone else, like FBI or EPA, to arrest someone). The NSA does. Further, the NSA has a vested interest in arresting people to justify its existence.
The NSA cannot arrest people either. Hence the big hoohaa about whether they were tipping off the people who can.
A bigger problem is not the NSA leading to arrests. The bigger problem is metadata driven drone strikes. That's a uniquely horrible phenomenon.
Google and Facebook look like fluffy kittens in contrast. Though I wish Assange wouldn't continue confusing and deceiving people by claiming these companies sell your information to advertisers. I don't understand how such a trivially debunked idea has turned into a global meme/conspiracy theory.
You don't have to arrest people to break them. You don't even have to touch them, or be on the same continent.
That's the essential "evil" of total surveillance: knowing is already enough to effectively take most people's freedom away.
You don't even have to threaten or blackmail. As long as they know you know all about them, you can control 99% of the population.
Blunt instruments like internment and torture are just tools. The essence of repression is fear, and fear of information will do just as well as fear of internment or violence.
Put such power into the hands of mere mortals, and it really doesn't matter if those mortals represent corporations or nation states.
Google can not take my information unless I give to them willingly which I do because they are offering something useful in return. NSA on other hand draws a salary by taking away 30% of my income from me.
Google also isn't (mostly) funded by taxes. It makes sense to be more concerned with what someone does with my money than what they do with their own money.
Also, Google seems just as useful and accurate on a public computer, or a friend's laptop, as on my own (Android) phone. I read somewhere that user input, location, and searches immediately before do all the heavy lifting when it comes to returning good results, whether organic or ads. And it rings true when you use Google.
Frankly, I don't think they have actually figured out how to use all that personal info for anything (yet?).
"I am more impressed with another of his oracles: the 1945 essay “You and the Atomic Bomb,” in which Orwell more or less anticipates the geopolitical shape of the world for the next half-century. “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make,” he explains, “will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance ... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”
Prophetic is the word for Orwell. Think about the power of the simple AK-47 and how it fueled a half century of chaos in the 3rd world and compare it to the discipline enforced by the possibility of nuclear annihilation in the developed world.
Thomas Friedman book title generator: "The Hoplite and the Drone".
This is similar to History Professor Carroll Quigley's claim that a necessary condition of Democracy is citizen armies which require simple weapons. Since Computer Network and Automated warfare seems to offer the most complex and specialized warfare in human history, we will soon learn if this theory is correct.
"Quigley concludes, from a historical study of weapons and political dynamics, that the characteristics of weapons are the main predictor of democracy. Democracy tends to emerge only when the best weapons available are easy for individuals to buy and use. This explains why democracy is so rare in human history." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley
Think about the power of the simple AK-47 and how it fueled a half century of chaos in the 3rd world and compare it to the discipline enforced by the possibility of nuclear annihilation in the developed world.
... Which is an interesting contrast to the implicit value judgement of Orwell's statement, that giving claws to the weak is the more righteous path.
So how exactly are we meant to "fight for it" in a world where everything we own will be soon talking to each other? Is Assange arguing for stasis? What is his vision for a commercial internet? The holocene is over Mendax. The internet has gotten too complex to speak about in the language of 1995 cyber-utopians. I can't see how privacy will be an add-on in the next few years. I wish I could, but it would be foolishly naive.
You may say "well what about more transparency from government?". 2 years we were more or less being told everything is rosy by government: then PRISM leaks. You may fight for transparency, but it is not within citizens "best interests" to know what's going on. ∞
After reading PG's post "Why would a government have created Bitcoin?"[0], I've asked myself the same question about the Internet. I admit it's going into paranoia-land, but that's healthy in moderation. Assange hits this point:
"The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored."
Has anyone else considered that the Internet was possibly a long-term plan to build a worldwide network that the US government could then monitor? I know I can't be the only one to have wondered this.
> "The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored."
I find that idea hard to believe for two reasons. First, because I don't think there's any evidence the government ever foresaw the internet coming into widespread civilian use. Second, and more importantly, the structure of the internet is so easily explained by private sector programming culture. Did you know that /etc/passwd originally contained actual plain-text passwords? Is it any surprise that the core internet protocols, which arose in the same era, are based on plain text with no deep authentication, encryption, etc?
Apparently, Google didn't encrypt the traffic between its data centers until news of the NSA undersea tapping broke out. Apparently in its early days, everyone at Facebook had access to user data. The same programming culture that gave us plain-text protocols like SMTP are alive and well today, and the idea that the government had something to do with why the internet is so easy to surveil is hard to reconcile with history.
It depends on what you mean by "built." Internet protocols are not designed to make surveillance easy (or hard, for that matter). So the Internet, in principle, is not built for surveillance.
But the US ISP market, data centers, backbone routers, backbone layer 2 technologies, and the "TV-izing" of the Internet are very friendly to the surveillance state.
A plot from the beginning? Probably not. But do the NSA and other agencies put their thumb on the scales to influence commercial outcomes in their favor - they admit it openly.
I think it probably crossed people's minds from time to time, with some directing their underlying intent for and some directing their underlying intent against, others neutral or ignorant. I don't know whether things like that that guide the construction significantly, or whether it's a law of perpetual averages.
In that case, it doesn't really matter whether it's an explicit plan or an implicit one. Things move with the people. That's why there is supposed to be a system of balancing and checking, at least from what I recall in elementary school.
> I admit it's going into paranoia-land, but that's healthy in moderation.
I prefer to be overly analytical. Paranoia is not my cup of tea.
Really fantastic article. He emphasizes the fact that the death of privacy is not the real problem. The real problem is the death of privacy for citizens, but not for their government, when it should be the other way around to have a balance of power.
"The real reason lies in the calculus of power: the destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else, leaving “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes,” as Orwell wrote, “still more hopeless.”"
I've wondered for a while about the idea of treaties to limit deception/propaganda and surveillance; "strategic intelligence limitation" treaties.
We were able to do this successfully with nuclear weapons during the cold war in order to ratchet down on "mutually assured destruction." Otherwise we could have had the runaway production of bigger and badder nukes until something really awful happened.
Might it be possible for the world's major powers to do this with the use of deception and surveillance? Negotiate treaties to ratchet down spying, eavesdropping, and propaganda activities?
I don't believe treaties are viable. That's not to say that governments look upon the idea unfavorably... just as they'd be willing to limit nuclear weapons if the other country will also do so, they'd probably do as much about espionage.
The trouble is that it's not an enforceable treaty. We can plainly see how many nukes the USSR has, and we can call them on it. Kruschev can't just say "Oh, that's not our nuke in a big silo in the middle of Siberia, it must be some rogue general's!".
But if we catch spies, they can certainly claim that those spies aren't theirs. With the nukes, the Soviets would (in theory, don't believe this ever happened for real) either dismantle those weapons that were prohibited by the treaty, or we'd arm up ourselves in retaliation (since the treaty was broken).
How do you do that with spies, if they don't back down? You've gutted your intelligence networks, it will take decades to get assets in Moscow once more.
The world already saw what nuclear warheads could do, so I think the threat was more more "real" and caused more caution. If there is a mass casualty (or financial?) event tied to cyber-espionage than you might see some calls for deescalation.
So it seems to me that a huge step forward would be to develop an IP standard that is always encrypted possibly through multiple asymmetric schemes. Is anyone working on this? Is it even an idea that is commonly known?
I believe it is the former, as one of the core ideas of 1984 (arguably the core idea) is that when a tyrannical power has control over language, they have control over history, and when they have control over history they have control over the present and future.
Decrying. In, IIRC, his discussion/interview with Schmidt, he discusses takedowns of Guardian and other newspaper articles as how scandals of powerful figures can go 'down the memory hole'. I believe the right-to-be-forgotten is already being used that way, to cover up frauds and whatnot.
[+] [-] ThomPete|11 years ago|reply
"... ccording to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary. ..."
http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-an...
[+] [-] panarky|11 years ago|reply
From the source[1].
[1] http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf[+] [-] pekk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattyRad|11 years ago|reply
"Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency. They collect a vast amount of information about people, store it, integrate it and use it to predict individual and group behavior, which they then sell to advertisers and others."
But I'd like to point out an important difference: Google doesn't have the authority to arrest someone (or incite someone else, like FBI or EPA, to arrest someone). The NSA does. Further, the NSA has a vested interest in arresting people to justify its existence.
[+] [-] mike_hearn|11 years ago|reply
A bigger problem is not the NSA leading to arrests. The bigger problem is metadata driven drone strikes. That's a uniquely horrible phenomenon.
Google and Facebook look like fluffy kittens in contrast. Though I wish Assange wouldn't continue confusing and deceiving people by claiming these companies sell your information to advertisers. I don't understand how such a trivially debunked idea has turned into a global meme/conspiracy theory.
[+] [-] freshflowers|11 years ago|reply
That's the essential "evil" of total surveillance: knowing is already enough to effectively take most people's freedom away.
You don't even have to threaten or blackmail. As long as they know you know all about them, you can control 99% of the population.
Blunt instruments like internment and torture are just tools. The essence of repression is fear, and fear of information will do just as well as fear of internment or violence.
Put such power into the hands of mere mortals, and it really doesn't matter if those mortals represent corporations or nation states.
[+] [-] tn13|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blfr|11 years ago|reply
Frankly, I don't think they have actually figured out how to use all that personal info for anything (yet?).
[+] [-] webjprgm|11 years ago|reply
Google has the authority to blacklist webpages so that they drop off Google search results and destroy the income of those websites.
[+] [-] Spooky23|11 years ago|reply
"I am more impressed with another of his oracles: the 1945 essay “You and the Atomic Bomb,” in which Orwell more or less anticipates the geopolitical shape of the world for the next half-century. “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make,” he explains, “will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance ... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”
Prophetic is the word for Orwell. Think about the power of the simple AK-47 and how it fueled a half century of chaos in the 3rd world and compare it to the discipline enforced by the possibility of nuclear annihilation in the developed world.
[+] [-] EthanHeilman|11 years ago|reply
This is similar to History Professor Carroll Quigley's claim that a necessary condition of Democracy is citizen armies which require simple weapons. Since Computer Network and Automated warfare seems to offer the most complex and specialized warfare in human history, we will soon learn if this theory is correct.
"Quigley concludes, from a historical study of weapons and political dynamics, that the characteristics of weapons are the main predictor of democracy. Democracy tends to emerge only when the best weapons available are easy for individuals to buy and use. This explains why democracy is so rare in human history." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley
Full text of Quigley's book "Weapons Systems and Political Stability": http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Weapons%20Systems%20and%20...
Full Text of George Orwell's "You and the Atomic Bomb": http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
... Which is an interesting contrast to the implicit value judgement of Orwell's statement, that giving claws to the weak is the more righteous path.
[+] [-] pdkl95|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l33tbro|11 years ago|reply
You may say "well what about more transparency from government?". 2 years we were more or less being told everything is rosy by government: then PRISM leaks. You may fight for transparency, but it is not within citizens "best interests" to know what's going on. ∞
[+] [-] clamprecht|11 years ago|reply
"The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored."
Has anyone else considered that the Internet was possibly a long-term plan to build a worldwide network that the US government could then monitor? I know I can't be the only one to have wondered this.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
I find that idea hard to believe for two reasons. First, because I don't think there's any evidence the government ever foresaw the internet coming into widespread civilian use. Second, and more importantly, the structure of the internet is so easily explained by private sector programming culture. Did you know that /etc/passwd originally contained actual plain-text passwords? Is it any surprise that the core internet protocols, which arose in the same era, are based on plain text with no deep authentication, encryption, etc?
Apparently, Google didn't encrypt the traffic between its data centers until news of the NSA undersea tapping broke out. Apparently in its early days, everyone at Facebook had access to user data. The same programming culture that gave us plain-text protocols like SMTP are alive and well today, and the idea that the government had something to do with why the internet is so easy to surveil is hard to reconcile with history.
[+] [-] Zigurd|11 years ago|reply
But the US ISP market, data centers, backbone routers, backbone layer 2 technologies, and the "TV-izing" of the Internet are very friendly to the surveillance state.
A plot from the beginning? Probably not. But do the NSA and other agencies put their thumb on the scales to influence commercial outcomes in their favor - they admit it openly.
[+] [-] drcomputer|11 years ago|reply
In that case, it doesn't really matter whether it's an explicit plan or an implicit one. Things move with the people. That's why there is supposed to be a system of balancing and checking, at least from what I recall in elementary school.
> I admit it's going into paranoia-land, but that's healthy in moderation.
I prefer to be overly analytical. Paranoia is not my cup of tea.
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|11 years ago|reply
"The real reason lies in the calculus of power: the destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else, leaving “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes,” as Orwell wrote, “still more hopeless.”"
[+] [-] api|11 years ago|reply
We were able to do this successfully with nuclear weapons during the cold war in order to ratchet down on "mutually assured destruction." Otherwise we could have had the runaway production of bigger and badder nukes until something really awful happened.
Might it be possible for the world's major powers to do this with the use of deception and surveillance? Negotiate treaties to ratchet down spying, eavesdropping, and propaganda activities?
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|11 years ago|reply
The trouble is that it's not an enforceable treaty. We can plainly see how many nukes the USSR has, and we can call them on it. Kruschev can't just say "Oh, that's not our nuke in a big silo in the middle of Siberia, it must be some rogue general's!".
But if we catch spies, they can certainly claim that those spies aren't theirs. With the nukes, the Soviets would (in theory, don't believe this ever happened for real) either dismantle those weapons that were prohibited by the treaty, or we'd arm up ourselves in retaliation (since the treaty was broken).
How do you do that with spies, if they don't back down? You've gutted your intelligence networks, it will take decades to get assets in Moscow once more.
[+] [-] josefresco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdhe|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPsec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcpcrypt
[+] [-] jordigh|11 years ago|reply
Can someone mirror it?
[+] [-] burkaman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc2g4d|11 years ago|reply
Whaaa?? There's a headline for you: "Assange pens NYT opinion two years prior to own birth"!
[+] [-] MarkMc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dumadoo|11 years ago|reply
Is he decrying that development as indicative of Orwellian reality or praising it as a positive development? (my understating is he meant the former)
[+] [-] john_b|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Stefanrio|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] alecco|11 years ago|reply