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" "The issue of preserving politically salient intellectual content while it is under attack is central to what Wikileaks does, because that's what we're after. We're after those bits that people are trying to suppress because we suspect, usually rightly, that they're expending economic work on suppressing those bits because they perceive that those bits are going to induce some change. (p. 83)
Julian Paul Assange (born Julian Paul Hawkins; 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer. He founded WikiLeaks in 2006, and came to international attention in 2010, when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks provided by Chelsea Manning. These included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and CableGate (November 2010). In August 2012, he was granted political asylum by Ecuador and remained in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. After Ecuador withdrew its granting of asylum, Assange was arrested by British police on 11 April 2019 and imprisoned, initially for jumping bail when he entered the embassy. The United States attempted to extradite Assange, but in June 2024 he was released; he flew to a US territory in the north Pacific for a court hearing in which he admitted guilt to one charge. He did not serve any further time in prison and returned to Australia.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Similarly, the universe, our physical universe, has that property that makes it possible for an individual or a group of individuals to reliably, automatically, even without knowing, encipher something, so that all the resources and all the political will of the strongest superpower on earth may not decipher it. And the paths of encipherment between people can mesh together to create regions free from the coercive force of the outer state. Free from mass interception. Free from state control.
The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.
While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.