Enhance Your Quote Experience
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of … - Julian Assange
" "There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest.
At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side — that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies.
Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find them
English
Collect this quote
About Julian Assange
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
Also Known As
Birth Name:
Julian Paul Hawkins
Native Name:
Julian Paul Assange
Alternative Names:
Assange
•
JulianAssange
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Julian Assange
The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government.
This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades. Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.
We all speak about the privacy of communication and the right to publish. That’s something that’s quite easy to understand — it has a long history — and, in fact, journalists love to talk about it because they’re protecting their own interests. But if we compare that value to the value of the privacy and freedom of economic interaction, actually every time the CIA sees an economic interaction they can see that it’s this party from this location to this party in this location, and they have a figure to the value and importance of the interaction. So isn’t the freedom, or privacy, of economic interactions actually more important than the freedom of speech, because economic interactions really underpin the whole structure of society?
PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
Loading...