Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/julian-assange-on-living-in-a-surveillance-society.html

by tysone • 12 years ago

259 111 12 years ago

ThomPete2• 12 years ago

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. ..."

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-an...

pekk• 12 years ago

Every entity working a PR angle emphasizes their own ethics. That's not unique.

scott_karana• 12 years ago

Including Assange, of course.

jevgeni7• 12 years ago

I'm surprised, how Assange is at all relevant. Frankly, I have a growing suspicion, that he's a sham.

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.

panarky• 12 years ago

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.

[1] http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

ThomPete2• 12 years ago

Yup thats what the quote is talking about in a more abstract manner.

dmix2• 12 years ago

There is a long history of this line of thinking among cypherpunks in the 1990s. If anyone is interested in the topic I highly recommend reading: This Machine Kills Secrets http://www.amazon.com/This-Machine-Kills-Secrets-WikiLeakers...

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.

omouse• 12 years ago

It's funny when you work in a corporate environment of any sort and you read this and you realize that openness is the only way to be safe. Lack of transparency lets people hide corrupt activities which degrade the organization at some point.

webnrrd2k• 12 years ago

I didn't know this, and it strikes me as ironic that Assange & WL are using a strategy similar to Al-Qaeda.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#Strategy

alecco• 12 years ago

An Assange story above the fold. Let's see for how long.

Spooky232• 12 years ago

I found this section interesting:

"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.

EthanHeilman2• 12 years ago

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

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

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

Both can be correct.

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...

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

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.

webjprgm3• 12 years ago

Was Orwell's point one of ethics? Or just powerful government versus weak, with the idea that a powerful government will be tyranical rather than benevolent.

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?

pdkl95• 12 years ago

"Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal."

dumadoo• 12 years ago

I'd like some clarification to the opening line: Turning Point: The top E.U. court orders Google to grant the “right to be forgotten.'’

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• 12 years ago

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.

calimac• 12 years ago

True

gwern• 12 years ago

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.

api• 12 years ago

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?

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 12 years ago

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.

josefresco• 12 years ago

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.

clamprecht• 12 years ago

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

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.

drcomputer• 12 years ago

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.

rayiner3• 12 years ago

"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.

mike_hearn5• 12 years ago

I don't think that's "culture". It's just pragmatism. Encryption has historically been extremely expensive, both in terms of CPU time and software complexity. Encrypting everything is not a no-brainer walk in the park. Even now most websites aren't using SSL and that's easy to set up.

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.

xenophonf• 12 years ago

Apparently, Google didn't encrypt the traffic between its data centers until news of the NSA undersea tapping broke out.

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.

MattyRad• 12 years ago

I like his point here

"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_hearn5• 12 years ago

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.

webjprgm3• 12 years ago

Google/Facebook don't have to sell your info to advertisers because the are advertisers. Either way it is used for commercial advantage.

avoutthere• 12 years ago

metadata driven drone strikes

How many of these have there been?

chestnut-tree2• 12 years ago

Google and Facebook may not sell personally identifiable information to advertisers, but they track users relentlessly and insatiably. Google, in particular, has it's tracking tentacles in every conceivable corner of the web: whether it's tracking school kids through Google Classroom, or tracking users through the entirety of an OS (ChromeOS), or tracking your behaviour on your Android smartphone - the list is endless. No, I don't think they do sinsiter things with your data but they have amassed (and continue to amass) an absolutely gargantuan volume of date about users.

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?

rhino3692• 12 years ago

A bigger problem is not the NSA leading to arrests. The bigger problem is metadata driven drone strikes. That's a uniquely horrible phenomenon.

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.

sneak• 12 years ago

You said:

"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.

alexqgb• 12 years ago

The NSA may not arrest people directly, but considered in relation to other agencies, their work becomes distinctly sinister (e.g. "You track 'em we whack 'em" with regard to the CIA). The practice of collaborating with the FBI on "parallel reconstruction" in order to convincingly lie about the sources of evidence presented in court cuts even closer to he very dark heart of the matter.

webjprgm3• 12 years ago

Are we saying the power to cause harm is what makes surveillance bad?

Google has the authority to blacklist webpages so that they drop off Google search results and destroy the income of those websites.

dublinben• 12 years ago

Beyond income even, if you can't find a site on Google, it may as well not even exist. Regulators in China and the EU are so focused on censoring search results, because they know it's the most efficient way to control information.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 12 years ago

Google has the power to decide what it will display to you on its own webpage?

tn13• 12 years ago

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.

baddox5• 12 years ago

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.

twobits• 12 years ago

It may not have to do with your money, but it has to do with your life. And the future of society too.

te_chris2• 12 years ago

I'm just never going to understand libertarians.

freshflowers2• 12 years ago

I doubt whoever funds it makes much difference to the victims.

freshflowers2• 12 years ago

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.

cryoshon• 12 years ago

Your observation on the essence of repression is quite prescient.

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.

lukifer3• 12 years ago

If the greatest warrior is the one that need never fight (due to a perceived predetermined outcome), then the most oppressive despotic regime is the one that need never oppress.

blfr• 12 years ago

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?).

l33tbro• 12 years ago

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. ∞

CyberDildonics4• 12 years ago

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.”"

CyberDildonics4• 12 years ago

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?

bdhe• 12 years ago

There are existing works on encryption-as-a-standard at both the IP and transport levels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPsec

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcpcrypt

hdevalence• 12 years ago

There's also DJB's CurveCP.

jordigh• 12 years ago

Ironically, I can't read this article without letting the NYT set a cookie on my machine.

Can someone mirror it?

burkaman• 12 years ago

Can you just open it in an incognito window, or whatever the equivalent is for your browser? That worked for me.

pc2g4d• 12 years ago

At the bottom of the article: "A version of this special report appears in print on December 31, 1969, in The International New York Times."

Whaaa?? There's a headline for you: "Assange pens NYT opinion two years prior to own birth"!

MarkMc• 12 years ago

Hmm clearly the timestamp has been set to 0 in unix time

jdumblauskas• 12 years ago

or has it? :)

Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society

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