Julian
Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society
By JULIAN
ASSANGEDEC. 4, 2014
Turning
Point: The top E.U. court orders Google to grant the “right to be forgotten.'’
It is now
a journalistic cliché to remark that George Orwell’s “1984” was “prophetic.”
The novel was so prophetic that its prophecies have become modern-day
prosaisms. Reading it now is a tedious experience. Against the omniscient
marvels of today’s surveillance state, Big Brother’s fixtures — the watchful
televisions and hidden microphones — seem quaint, even reassuring.
Everything
about the world Orwell envisioned has become so obvious that one keeps running
up against the novel’s narrative shortcomings.
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.”
Describing
the atomic bomb (which had only two months before been used to flatten
Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as an “inherently tyrannical weapon,” he predicts that
it will concentrate power in the hands of the “two or three monstrous
super-states” that have the advanced industrial and research bases necessary to
produce it. Suppose, he asks, “that the surviving great nations make a tacit
agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only
use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate?”
The likely
result, he concludes, will be “an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires
of antiquity.” Inventing the term, he predicts “a permanent state of ‘cold
war,"’ a “peace that is no peace,” in which “the outlook for subject
peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.”
Julian Assange Credit Allen Clark Photography
The second
parallel is even more serious, and even less well understood. At present even
those leading the charge against the surveillance state continue to treat the
issue as if it were a political scandal that can be blamed on the corrupt
policies of a few bad men who must be held accountable. It is widely hoped that
all our societies need to do to fix our problems is to pass a few laws.
The cancer
is much deeper than this. We live not only in a surveillance state, but in a
surveillance society. Totalitarian surveillance is not only embodied in our
governments; it is embedded in our economy, in our mundane uses of technology
and in our everyday interactions.
Continue
reading the main storyAna hikaye okumaya devam edinContinue reading the main
story
The very
concept of the Internet — a single, global, homogenous network that enmeshes
the world — is the essence of a surveillance state. 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.
At their
core, companies like 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.
This similarity made them natural partners for the NSA, and that’s why they
were approached to be part of PRISM, the secret Internet surveillance program.
Unlike
intelligence agencies, which eavesdrop on international telecommunications
lines, the commercial surveillance complex lures billions of human beings with
the promise of “free services.” Their business model is the industrial
destruction of privacy. And yet even the more strident critics of NSA
surveillance do not appear to be calling for an end to Google and Facebook.
Recalling
Orwell’s remarks, there is an undeniable “tyrannical” side to the Internet. But
the Internet is too complex to be unequivocally categorized as a “tyrannical”
or a “democratic” phenomenon.
When
people first gathered in cities, they were able to coordinate in large groups
for the first time, and to exchange ideas quickly, at scale. The consequent
technical and technological advances brought about the dawn of human
civilization.
Something
similar has been happening in our epoch. It is possible for more people to
communicate and trade with others in more places in a single instant than it
ever has been in history. The same developments that make our civilization
easier to surveil make it harder to predict. They have made it easier for the
larger part of humanity to educate itself, to race to consensus, and to compete
with entrenched power groups.
This is
encouraging, but unless it is nurtured, it may be short-lived.
If there
is a modern analogue to Orwell’s “simple” and “democratic weapon,” which “gives
claws to the weak” it is cryptography, the basis for the mathematics behind
Bitcoin and the best secure communications programs. It is cheap to produce:
cryptographic software can be written on a home computer. It is even cheaper to
spread: software can be copied in a way that physical objects cannot. But it is
also insuperable — the mathematics at the heart of modern cryptography are
sound, and can withstand the might of a superpower. The same technologies that
allowed the Allies to encrypt their radio communications against Axis
intercepts can now be downloaded over a dial-up Internet connection and
deployed with a cheap laptop.
Whereas in
1945, much of the world faced a half-century of tyranny as a result of the
atomic bomb, in 2015, we face the inexorable spread of invasive mass
surveillance and the attendant transfer of power to those connected to its
superstructures. It is too early to say whether the “democratizing” or the
“tyrannical” side of the Internet will eventually win out. But acknowledging
them — and perceiving them as the field of struggle — is the first step toward
acting effectively.
Humanity
cannot now reject the Internet, but clearly we cannot surrender it either.
Instead, we have to fight for it. Just as the dawn of atomic weapons
inaugurated the Cold War, the manifold logic of the Internet is the key to
understanding the approaching war for the intellectual center of our
civilization.
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