[Video] Julian Assange, Over One Decade Ago, Cautioning About What the Internet Had Truly Become

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 15, 2024

WebM: Julian Assange on the Net

THIS video is not new, but it is annotated a bit and circulated online. This was all known before the Edward Snowden leaks and when merely suggesting (in public, in the mainstream press) what had gone on for years would seem unthinkable, almost ludicrous.

Text:

Now, we might think that the internet is a place where we are all equals. It is a new world for civilians, where we can develop our ideas and we are all equal because we can all communicate to everyone. But it is not an equal place. This weeks revelations have proven that is it very far from an equal place and it is very far from a civilian place.

The internet has been transformed into a militarily occupied state. When all of our private communications, the intercore of our life, communications between boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, between business partners even between bureaucracies and states — all those communications are swept up, hoovered up into a vast collection apparatus, indexed and stored for all time and available only to a select few.

When that happens, we are in the situation that we [as good as] have a tank on the street, where we have a soldier under our bed listening to everything that we say.

The penetration of the digital aspects of civilian life is also the penetration of the military and intelligence agencies into civilian life.

The internet — our greatest tool of emancipation — has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism that we have ever seen. The internet has become a threat to human civilisation.

These transformations have come about silently because those who know what is going on in the global surveillance industry have no incentive to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, in some years global civilisation will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia from which escape will be impossible. We must communicate what we have learned while there is still a chance to act [on] what is happening.

Now, that seems like a very negative description of the state of the world, but I want to talk about another phenomena. Simultaneously, as the internet has penetrated society and military and security agencies have penetrated it, we have developed a new body politic.

The internet in bringing people together, it has created a new realm were political discussion, discussion about values, has developed. The transition over the past four years has taken the internet from a politically apathetic space into a political space, where those people who are engaged with it understand that decisions that affect their lives online also affect their lives offline.

They want to fight to preserve the things they find important [such as the right to communicate freely]. Manning and Snowden and many others are part of this phenomenon.

We need to remind ourselves what the Net is. Things only got worse since the NSA and GCHQ leaks. █