Slashdot Mirror
Julian Assange: "Online Totalitarianism Is Near, Entire Nations Are Intercepted"
dryriver writes "Russia Today's correspondents have visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Assange has been holed up for nearly 6 months now. In the 12 minute long interview with RT, Assange has many interesting things to say about privacy, and government data interception in particular. A small excerpt: 'The people who control the interception of the Internet and, to some degree also, physically control the big data warehouses and the international fiber-optic lines. We all think of the Internet as some kind of Platonic Realm where we can throw out ideas and communications and web pages and books and they exist somewhere out there. Actually, they exist on web servers in New York or Nairobi or Beijing, and information comes to us through satellite connections or through fiber-optic cables. So whoever physically controls this controls the realm of our ideas and communications. And whoever is able to sit on those communications channels, can intercept entire nations, and that's the new game in town, as far as state spying is concerned — intercepting entire nations, not individuals. ... So what's happened over the last 10 years is the ever-decreasing cost of intercepting each individual now to the degree where it is cheaper to intercept every individual rather that it is to pick particular people to spy upon.'"
it spies on everyone
but Russia Today? seriously?
there's no sincerity here
just Russia sniffing out that they can use this issue as a political football
Russia's track record shows that it clearly stands far less for the principles Assange talks about than the West
but this won't stop Russia using Assange as a club against the West
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Here is an interesting bit from the article about what Julian thinks we should actually do and what will happen if don't do it:
"So this is where we are at now, which is we've got to create education amongst people, so there can be a market demand, so that others can be encouraged to produce easy-to-use cryptographic technology that is capable of protecting not everyone, but a significant number of people from mass state spying. And if we are not able to protect a significant number of people from mass state spying, then the basic democratic and civilian institutions that we are used to – not in the West, I am no glorifier of the West, but in all societies – are going to crumble away. They will crumble away, and they will do so all at once. And that's an extremely dangerous phenomenon."
I like this idea a lot, and wonder how this could occur.. But I am more interested in the answer to the question of... How much is being stuck in a building for 6 months affecting Julian psychologically?
2 Good reasons: first, because he is a world class attention whore, which means that when he says something, it's news and it's being listened to. Second, because it is not elementary to many. I think few people out there know of the scope and capabilities of current and upcoming surveillance technology.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
You gravely overestimate the knowledge levels of the average internet user.
Absolutely!
A lot of laymen that I talked to about ECHELON think that I am some kind of crazy conspiracy theorist even though it is very well documented. Even in a report to the European Parliament. Source: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN
And the somewhat smarter people obviously know that nothing on the internet is untraceable, though you can make it really hard, but they do not realize and/or accept that it is commonplace to intercept, datamine and record all online communications. And that it is kept till the end of days. Sadly enough datastorage is just that cheap these days.
Now the question arises will that information harm you now, in one year, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years...
The best response that I've heard to people saying that they have nothing to hide: Just tell them to give you all their passwords, to their Mail Account, Facebook, Dropbox, etc. If they argue that they do not trust YOU, tell them to send it in an envelope to the FBI, NSA, etc.
You have an excellent point, but unfortunately, even encryption provides far less protection than it used to. The original vision for the Internet was a decentralized network where individuals controlled their own information, but today's reality is that the Internet is increasingly centralized, with tremendous amounts of personal information held by a relatively small number of players. Combine this with the fact that the vast majority of people are willing to pay for services with their privacy, and you have a situation where point-to-point encryption doesn't help much, at least not as far as state-sponsored privacy invasion goes.
For instance, Facebook is moving to require SSL for all of its users (or has already done so), but does this really do anything to allay concerns about institutionalized survellance? I would say, "no," because all of the users' personal information is still being neatly filed away in Facebook's storage facilities, same as before, and it is just as accessible to those with enough power as it ever was.
It is interesting how in the early days, before governments knew what do with it, the Internet really was a bastion of free speech and thought. Now, it is not much of a stretch to say that it has become one of the most powerful surveillance tools ever devised.
RT knows all about freedom of press, hm?
You are of course carrying out argument ad Hominem. If you can't answer the critique except by insulting the person criticising you then you have failed already. but you do require an answer:
Whilst Russia is far down the world press freedom index other countries like the USA have been falling fast. It's most likely a mistake to think that wherever you come from is definitely going to stay superior without your working for it. I think Russians who have been having to fight for their freedom recently and can frankly and clearly see that they often aren't winning that fight may have plenty to tell those of us who just sit and assume that we are free.
Lots of the freedom in the US and other liberal democracies used to be based on the idea that individuals can privately and quitely act on their beliefs and discuss them with friends without fear. Occasionally someone comes up with a new idea which convinces other people. If that new idea gets around to many people then we get a change in the whole society. In totalitarian countries some time early in that process an informer will report the idea to the government. If the government doesn't like the idea then they nip it in the bud and silently arrest all the people related to the idea in a way which causes no disruption to the society.
Similar attacks ideas do happen in the USA; look at some of the things that happened to the occupy movements. Look at recent scandles with undercover policemen infiltrating environmental movements in the UK. If the only thing which was different between us and the totalitarian countries - the lack of right for the government to spy on everyone - goes away, then there's no reason to think that this won't end up being abused.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Yes recall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
They used a splitter, not at some optical landing site on the coast where you could say it was "international' traffic - the US gov went for domestic traffic in bulk.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html
What was once for Soviet interests, corrupt Europeans, Soviet influenced journalists, academics, political and peace groups is now aimed at all in the USA with all the legal options that a "battlefront of the future" offers.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's not just the knowledge levels, it's also the care factor.
Concerned Citizen: The government is tracking your activities on that site!
Internet User: How dare they?!
Webmaster: But there's kittens!
Internet User: OMG! So cute!
There's nothing recent about the tactics: Ask anyone old enough to remember the McCarthy era, or the hippie era, or the "war on drugs", for US attempts in living memory to control freedom of speech in the name of blocking some force that threatens "America". What's recent is the ease and scale of widespread, indiscriminate monitoring.
The monitoring in the US is particularly bad given how it's been combined with reduced right to legal process, all under the banner of fighting terrorism. That's not new either though; the parallels between Guantanamo Bay and the 1942 Japanese American internment are very obvious.