Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"... 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...
Does whistleblowing really need a gatekeeper?
Most of the leaks, the really ground breaking stuff, was done by other people more worthy of praise: Maning and Snowden. Assange is basically in the business of running a website and promoting himself, whilst antagonising people who actually support and believe him.
What bothers me the most, is how biased Wikileaks are. Sure, the U.S. does a lot of f'ed up stuff, but they are by far not the only players in the game.
I haven't heard that one, actually. It's probably the same anti-intellectual assholes who will praise e.g. Gates or Zuckerberg, et al, for dropping out of college to do some 'real work' too, rather than staying in the ivory tower or whatever.
Let me help you off your high idealistic horse and say, that it could be the case, that people do not actually want to attack the topic, but care for it. It might be the case, that these people see Assange as a liability to actual whistleblowing and a useful idiot for more authoritarian players out there.
He centralised whistleblowing in the public's mind, whereas it should be decentralised by definition.
However, the first time I heard of Wikileaks was after the 2007 election in Kenya when there was a significant change in the vote, suddenly, due to documents leaked there [0]. There are plenty of other examples where the US government was not the one being "attacked" but that is an early example, if not the first, which brought Wikileaks to the world's attention.
Maybe the US only seems to be the main target because it is US citizens who are most empowered and/or motivated to leak those documents to Wikileaks in the first place.
And sure, Manning is worthy of praise, but the point of Wikileaks presenting the information was to keep Manning anonymous - it was his own confession to Lamo at Wired which got him in trouble in the end. I don't see what Snowden has to do with it - does he have any formal relationship with Wikileaks? Other than fighting alongside each other for a similar/the same cause, and speaking at events together etc. I don't know how that is relevant. Wikileaks has had value to the world and hopefully will have a further positive impact in the time to come.
[0] http://www.dw.de/wikileaks-website-offers-promising-outlet-f...
The new wikileaks is not about leaks, it's about a particular agenda set by Assange.
Simple: he's an intelligent, charismatic individual working on and for the defining issue of our generation.
Like it or not, these issues need faces to humanize them. He's good at that.
A. The majority of Wikileaks' leaks are not related to the U.S. at all. Wikileaks is hardly biased.
B. Assange is directly responsible for the creation of Wikileaks and indirectly responsible for dozens of spin-offs. Hundreds of major cases of whistelblowing probably never would have happened if it weren't for Assange. So yes, wistleblowing needs Assange.
C. Assange set himself up to be the scapegoat. He's sacrificing himself for a greater cause. Your analysis of his motives are insulting.
But you really think, that the whistleblowers were just held back, because they didn't have a website to post their stuff to?
Furthermore, if Assange wanted, he could easily spread the leaks anonymously and be quite persistent about it. That would actually preclude him or anyone else of being a martyr. Sounds like a win-win to me, unless, of course, you want either to stroke your ego or follow your own political agenda.
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.
It provides a great historical context which Wikileaks fits into from a look at the old usenet groups where hackers were building early anonymity networks (ala Tor), early versions of cryptocurrencies, and writing the crypto-anarchy manifesto.
"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.
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.
a) You need a credit card, excluding large chunks of the world population that doesn't have one
b) Google/FB learn your real identity via the payment networks, verified to banking level
I get that advertising is annoying. Regardless, painting it as some kind of scary privacy problem doesn't make sense and worse, muddies the water. People end up dumping tech companies into the same boat as governments even though they have hardly anything in common.
One project I've been meaning to delve into is https://sandstorm.io/
That's pretty damned creepy.
On your last point; Tech companies and governments get put in the same boat for good reason- they actively work together on a regular basis. Even if the company is "compelled" to give the info- that's still only an issue because the companies are whoring and storing all the data they can get their hands on (for indefinite amounts of time).
For instance, Facebook lets advertisers show ads to users of age X, working at company Y, in location Z, etc. (without disclosing their identities). This is completely different from selling your information, and the companies' privacy policies and practices reflect this.
As mike_hearn says, these sorts of alarmist claims ("they're selling your info!") are easily debunked. And in this case they detract from the rest of Julian's essay, which is a shame because elsewhere he makes some good points.
How many of these have there been?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/signature-s...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secre...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-gr...
What Facebook and Google collect about you far exceeds a simple "advertising profile" of your likes. They know more about your online behaviour than you do. I've said this before, but Google omits basic facts in their privacy policy about the data they collect about you. Things like: how long they keep your data, whether the data is anonymised, whether your searches or activity are disassociated from your identity, and who sees your data inside the company. These are not minor or unreasonable questions to ask - they are exactly what you'd expect to find in a privacy policy (especially from a company that arguably tracks users more than anyone else online). Yet, Google does not answer any of these questions. Why do they get a free pass?
In the past few years I've been working a lot on Bitcoin, so I've become quite familiar with how the banking world works and what they collect and track about you.
If you really think Google and Facebook "track users relentlessly and insatiably" then I suggest you take a deep breath, and then go review what banks do in the name of anti-money laundering. It makes social networks look like quasi anarchist chaos camps. I mean, you can tell Google and Facebook your name is literally anything - they aren't going to check. They barely even care beyond trying to nudge you away from picking pinkponies_78, so the search function works. Google isn't going to suddenly suspend your email account and demand you provide documentary proof of where your business is getting its income.
WRT this: Google omits basic facts in their privacy policy about the data they collect about you
I don't think they do:
http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/
Just go read that page and it covers a huge number of topics including things like "who sees your data inside the company". I'm sure you would want even more info, but these sites represent a trade off - earlier privacy policies were dinged (by governments, lol) for being too large and complex.
While Google automates scanning of your emails in GMail, they don't tell you if that is the case with the other personal and private data they hold about you. Yet your activity across the web is arguably just as personal and private as your emails. That is why anonymising or disassociating your data from your identity is a legitimate concern, as are questions about whether your online activity is anonymous when viewed internally by Google.
Let me put it another way, if I ask you to give me your name, gender, date-of-birth and mobile phone number (as Google does), then proceed to record the searches you undertake as well as sites you visit and videos you watch, would you not expect me to tell you how long I keep that information for? Or whether it's anonymised before internal staff pore through it? Or whether it's aggregated in a way that isn't personally identifiable?
What is so horrible about using metadata to target drone strikes against people we already want to drone strike? That is just good intelligence collection.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/signature-s...
Collateral damage?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan
http://rt.com/usa/drone-yemen-dozens-dead-880/
Signature strikes are particularly troublesome. The level of identification is lower. Identification is replaced by behaviour. Less verification translates to greater efficiency. Where is the accountability?
In Vietnam, the Pinkville massacre [0] occurred where approximately 500 unarmed civilians were killed. A cover-up attempt was made. When it became public, accountability became a necessity. The participants were questioned. There was dissent. Enough Men (grunts) on the ground not being fired on, refused to kill civilians [1] resulting in political embarrassment to both Nixon and the military.
The Military learns and got smart. You don't need to invade like the old days or have SF's on the ground for man in the loop missions. You can do all this from a tin sheds on home soil using remote drones. The control loop is smaller, the job gets done. No dissenters with only unverified reporting of collateral damage and no messy pictures in TIME-LIFE.
[0] http://life.time.com/history/my-lai-remembering-an-american-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre#Participants
"Though I wish Assange wouldn't continue confusing and deceiving people by claiming these companies sell your information to advertisers."
To quote the article:
"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."
I am saying now:
They use that information to make predictions, which are sold to advertisers. That statement is true.
Can you give me the phone number of the sales representative that I can call to buy a prediction?
The only predictions AdWords does is predict the likely volume of impressions/clicks you'll get.
Google is predicting that the person speaks German or is a Male between the ages of 26-30 who is interested in Technology and Wine-making, or what have you. Google sells "we can display your add to someone we predict meets such and such criteria." They make those predictions based on gathered data.
The prediction is what makes a million AdWords views more valuable than a million random people seeing the same content in a tweet. Both are "real estate." But it's the predictions (based on gathered data) that make AdWords more valuable.
Google has the authority to blacklist webpages so that they drop off Google search results and destroy the income of those websites.
Yet money is the product of a social contract, both in its very existence, and in society's defense of private property. Moreover, it only has value relative to the social ecosystem that can exchange it for tangible value. Countless agents, whether public or private, are capable of increasing or decreasing the value of "your" dollar without ever removing it from under your mattress. If the value decreases due to a market failure, did they steal from you? Hypothetically, if someone took 10% at gunpoint, but invested it in a way increased the net value of the remainder by 50%, how about then? It is effectively impossible for private property to live in a social vaccuum in an industrialized economy.
All that said, I'm sympathetic to that knee-jerk feeling. Writing large checks to "United States Treasury" is merely unpleasant. Knowing that those checks pay for missiles that murder children is infuriating.
By "my money," I only mean money which my employer agreed to pay me for performing certain tasks. Obviously the philosophy of property rights can get really complicated, but I'm not making some deep philosophical argument. I believe this phrase in this context is pretty standard and likely to be understood by the vast majority of readers: it's money that my employer agreed to pay me if I perform certain tasks.
I never mentioned the word "steal" in my comment. I'm not very interested in a semantic argument over that word, so I'll just describe my taxes very simply: if I had the option to keep everything that's deducted from my paycheck without facing the high likelihood of legal trouble, I would. I'm not making a moral argument about "stealing" or anything else, I'm just stating my preferences.
The stuff about value being subjective and money being potentially devalued through broader economic circumstances is true, but entirely irrelevant. I would still choose to keep my entire paycheck if given the option.
I disagree with your description of my preferences as "a knee-jerk feeling." It's not that, by a long shot.
> I would still choose to keep my entire paycheck if given the option.
Is this preference influenced at all by where the money goes? You seem to state that you want to keep your whole check regardless (which is reasonable), and yet you feel you have a stake in how it is spent after it has been taken from you against your will.
That's kind of a tricky question, because if I say I'm okay with my taxes being on used on things I approve of, that's equivalent to saying I want to keep my entire check and then use parts of it to pay for those things I approve of.
Anyway, whether or not my views constitute a belief that taxes are not "legitimate" is a largely semantic question. The very notion of legitimacy borders on moral arguments, which I try to refrain from making. I could point to some distinctly libertarian arguments for the morality of taxation, some of which seem convincing if taken on their own terms, but that's not really my thing.
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.
I might add that Americans are notorious for being wracked by fear/anxiety as a result of their mainstream media and lack of societal safety net.
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.
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
The US invasion of Iraq is a masterpiece of power projection to nearly the farthest point on the planet from the center of US military logistics. It might never be equaled. But the bulk of the trillions of dollars spent on the wars were spent in a futile effort to stifle insurgencies with no armor, no missiles, no aircraft, no artillery pieces, no ships, no fiber optics, no satellites...
Prior to the invasion there were no significant "insurgencies" in Iraq. The coalition invasion of Iraq eliminated the Baathist regime of Sadaam Hussein and that, together with the U.S.'s misguided concept of "nation-building", made political reorganization (including insurgencies) possible.
There was complete ignorance of sectarian and tribal societal overlays. The leadership claimed to believe that a democratic society would magically appear. As a result the US disbanded the army, which prevented an military junta from appearing, but also created a decade of mayhem.
>"This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon — or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting — not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant."
Guerrilla warfare represents "a method of fighting" not dependent on advanced capabilities.
... 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.
Is it not a common theme that a more powerful government offers greater stability with fewer freedoms while a weak government offers more freedom but also more chaos?
I lived for the first part of my life in Bangladesh. A relative was killed in a workers' strike, by an explosive device. Our house was the target of armed thugs who tried to break down our gate and rob us. Once, on a visit from the U.S., my family had to return from our hotel to the airport under armed guard because the streets were not safe during a strike.
That's not freedom! The fact that we could overthrow the government with small arms is not freedom. Especially in a democracy, because it represents political minorities imposing their will to overthrow a government that represents the majority. That's oppression! Any day of the week, I'd prefer a democratic government that can blow me away with a drone strike to one that can't keep criminals and radicals at bay.
I'm not saying guns are some sort of quick and easy solution, since there is clearly a problem of lack of many types of abundance that pushed people into radical positions, although you are making the case for one centralization of power over another. Given those two options I would agree with you, but the third option is to try to prevent centralization of power and the incentives to abuse it in the first place.
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. ∞
"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.
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.
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.
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.
The openness of the internet to surveillance reflects the fact that stopping governments doing it in secret is really damn hard. Not anything more complex than that.
I constantly struggle against my colleagues when it comes to internal use of encryption. These are smart people across diverse organizations/markets. I think it comes down to differing cost-benefit analyses---they think that any internal privacy threats either don't exist or already have access, so why pay the price (usually in terms of administrative overhead) to maintain a crypto layer? Compare it to always locking every door inside your house and having to successively lock/unlock doors as you move between rooms---most people (even myself) would think that the inconvenience of such a scheme would drastically outweigh any security benefits. And so it is with the implementation of strong encryption protocols (not just the right algorithms but also the right methods and practices and use cases) at every level of the computing/networking stack. Ultimately, I think this supports your thesis, that if there's a conspiracy when it comes to commsec, it's a confederacy of dunces.
"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.”"
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?
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.
Can someone mirror it?
Whaaa?? There's a headline for you: "Assange pens NYT opinion two years prior to own birth"!
Is he decrying that development as indicative of Orwellian reality or praising it as a positive development? (my understating is he meant the former)