Posts
Game for privacy is gone, mass surveillance is here to stay – Assange on #RT10 panel
10 December, 2015
Humanity
has lost its battle for privacy and must now learn to live in a world
where mass surveillance is becoming cheaper for governments to
implement, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said during a panel
dedicated to RT’s 10th anniversary.
Assange
addressed the panel on security and surveillance hosted by RT in
central Moscow on Thursday via videoconference from the Ecuadorian
embassy in London, where he has remained holed up for the last three
years in order to avoid extradition to Sweden.
When
offered a chance to comment on the session’s topic – “Security
or Surveillance: Can the right to privacy and effective anti-terror
security coexist in the digital age?” –
the whistleblower asked the moderator, and host of The Big Picture
Show on RT American, Thom Hartmann: “How
long have you got, Tom?” implying
he has a lot to say on the issue.
But
it was Assange’s only joke during the event, as his reply turned
out to be gravely serious and in many respects depressing.
“In
thinking about this issue I want to take quite a different position,
perhaps, from what you would expect me to have taken… I think that
we should understand that the game for privacy is gone. It’s gone.
The mass surveillance is here to stay,” he
said.
Mass
surveillance is already being implemented not only by major world
powers, but also by some medium and small-sized countries, he dded.
“The
Five Eyes intelligence arrangement [of Australia, Canada, New
Zealand, the UK and the US]… is so evasive in terms of mass
surveillance of domestic and international telecommunications that
while some experts can achieve practical privacy for themselves for
limited number of operations… it’s gone for the rest of the
populations,” the
WikiLeaks founder stressed.
International
terrorists are among those “experts” capable
of making their communications invisible for security agencies, he dded.
Privacy “will
not be coming back, short of a very regressive economic collapse,
which reduces the technological capacity of civilization,” Assange
said.
“The
reason it will not come back is that the cost of engaging in mass
surveillance is decreasing by about 50 per cent every 18 months,
because it’s the underlying cost that’s predicated on the cost of
telecommunications, moving surveillance intercepts around and
computerization and storage – all those costs are decreasing much
faster at a geometric rate than the human population is
increasing,” he
explained.
Mass
surveillance and computerization are “winning” the
competition with humanity and human values and they’re “going
to continue to win at an ever-increasing rate. That’s the reality
that we have to deal with,” the
WikiLeaks whistleblower added.
The
focus should now switch from defending privacy to understanding what
kind of society will be built in these new, changed conditions, he
said.
The
WikiLeaks founder reminded the panel of the historic examples of East
Germany and other societies, in which people adapted to living under
the scrutiny of the authorities.
“If
you look at societal behavior in very conformist, small, isolated
societies with reduced social spaces – like Sweden, South Korea,
Okinawa in Japan and North Korea – then you’ll see that society
adapts. Everyone becomes incredibly timid, they start to use code
words; use a lot of subtext to try and sneak out your controversial
views,” he
said.
According
to Assange, the modern world is currently moving “towards
that kind of a society.”
Privacy
is among values “that
simply are unsustainable… in the face of the reality of
technological change; the reality of the deep state with a
military-industrial complex and the reality of Islamic terrorism,
which is legitimizing that sector in a way that it’s behaving,” he
stressed.
Assange
encouraged those present on the panel as well as the general public
to “get
on the other side of the debate where it’s going” and
stop holding on to privacy.
The
panel discussion was part of an RT conference titled 'Information,
messages, politics:The shape-shifting powers of today's world.' The
meeting brought together politicians, foreign policy experts and
media executives from across the globe, among them former director of
the US Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn, the Green Party’s
Jill Stein and former vice president of the Parliamentary Assembly of
the OSCE, Willy Wimmer
Turkey
Made Plans to Shoot Down Russian Su-24 a Month in Advance - Assange
10
December, 2015
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that Turkey's government may have hatched plans to shoot down a Russian military jet over a month before the attack which downed the Russian Su-24M over Syria late last month took place. According to the activist, the nationalism and political ambitions of President Recep Erdogan's AKP party are to blame.
Speaking at a
media conference on security, surveillance and intelligence
organized by global news network RT on Thursday, Assange
suggested that the attack may have been the result of the
Justice and Development Party's electoral ambitions.
Suggesting
that Turkey's leadership had a "domestic nationalist imperative"
to shoot down the Russian plane, Assange noted that "there
is some other information which has arisen – that what occurred was
a plan that was set immediately before the [parliamentary]
elections [taking place November 1], which Erdogan's party won."
The
activist noted that the AKP had had effectively set up "a
national imperative to win that election" which included
"rules of engagement…such that if there was a technical
violation, even for a second, of Turkish airspace, or if it
could be suggested that there was, this could be a plan to ensure
winning that election, and those rules of engagement were not
taken down."
The
activist suggested that for their part, Russian intelligence
services should have take better account of the warning signals
coming out of Ankara, no matter how jingoistic they may have
been.
Pessimistically,
Assange noted that given Turkey's perceived interests in Syria,
Ankara is likely "to continue to push to have various
forms of control of at least northern Syria."
As
far as the Daesh terrorists are concerned, Assange is convinced
that "we're going to come to a point, in about
six months' time, where ISIS is almost completely debilitated as a
state [devolving] back to being a guerrilla group."
Once
that happens, several powerful regional players will be left in the
vacuum, which Assange worries will only result in further
conflict. "What are all those forces going to do then? Do
you think that they're just going to go home? Of course not.
They can just steer 70 kilometers into Damascus if they want. So
I think that it's a very dangerous situation."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.