
Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society - tysone
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/julian-assange-on-living-in-a-surveillance-society.html
======
ThomPete
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...](http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-and-the-
computer-conspiracy-%E2%80%9Cto-destroy-this-invisible-government%E2%80%9D/)

~~~
panarky
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](http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf)

~~~
webnrrd2k
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#Strategy)

~~~
chii
i read nothing similar - what is this similarity you're suggesting?

------
MattyRad
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_hearn
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.

~~~
chestnut-tree
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?

~~~
mike_hearn
I guess it's a question of perspective.

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/](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.

~~~
chestnut-tree
Yes, I've read their privacy policy. Where does it tell you how long they
retain your data? Or whether your data is disassociated from your identity?
This is important when you consider how personal your online activity can be.
Who sees your data at Google? All the privacy policy states is _" We restrict
access to personal information to Google employees, contractors and agents who
need to know that information"_

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?

------
Spooky23
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.

~~~
EthanHeilman
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](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...](http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Weapons%20Systems%20and%20Political%20Stability.pdf)

Full Text of George Orwell's "You and the Atomic Bomb":
[http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb](http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb)

~~~
Zigurd
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...

~~~
Spooky23
The Iraq invasion was both a masterpiece of military execution and complete
failure of leadership. Magical thinking at the top believed that spontaneous
joy re: liberation would magically make all problems vanish.

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.

~~~
the_af
Note that if you believe people like Naomi Klein (and I accept that you might
not), the US actively worked to prevent spontaneous democratic movements
within Iraq, in favor of a centralized government not chosen by the Iraqis.
This isn't too hard to believe because it's historically what the US did in
the past (see: Korea, Vietnam, etc). In this alternative explanation,
democracy didn't appear in Iraq not by a "failure" of US planning, but by
design. At least initially.

------
l33tbro
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. ∞

------
clamprecht
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423)

~~~
rayiner
> "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_hearn
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.

------
CyberDildonics
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.”"

------
api
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?

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
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.

------
CyberDildonics
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
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/IPsec)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcpcrypt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcpcrypt)

~~~
hdevalence
There's also DJB's CurveCP.

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

Can someone mirror it?

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

------
pc2g4d
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
Hmm clearly the timestamp has been set to 0 in unix time

~~~
jdumblauskas
or has it? :)

------
dumadoo
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
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
True

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

