[D66] Fair Warning: Julian Assange's "Cyberphunks"

[Nord]

    http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1621&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint



    Adam Morris <http://lareviewofbooks.org/author.php?cid=641>onCypherpunks


      Fair Warning: Julian Assange's "Cyberphunks"

April 28th, 2013RESET 
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/Triptych image: Ali Prosch, "Ground," 2012/


WIKILEAKS FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE’S newest book /Cypherpunks: Freedom and 
the Future of the Internet/ is intended as an urgent warning, but it 
seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Despite boasting publicity blurbs 
from a curious medley of public intellectuals — Slavoj Žižek, Naomi 
Wolf, and Oliver Stone among them — /Cypherpunks /may just as well have 
sunk to the bottom of the sea. Although Assange is one of the most vital 
and polemical activists alive, nobody’s talking about /Cypherpunks/, and 
nobody seems to have read it. This is a pity, since the book//rings a 
justifiably strident alarm bell over the erosion of individual privacy 
rights by an increasingly powerful global surveillance industry.

Though /Cypherpunks /raises issues of pressing concern, its neglect is 
not all that mysterious. “This book is not a manifesto,” Assange begins. 
If only it were! The pretense of writing one — especially when widely 
rumored to be wanted by the US government and an international cause 
célèbre//— would probably have garnered Assange more attention. A good 
old-fashioned manifesto would have been more readable, too: /Cypherpunks 
/is irritatingly structured as a discussion between Assange and three 
coauthors, the digital activists Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, 
and Jérémie Zimmermann. The intention may have been to emphasize the 
sort of “messy” participatory democracy favored by Occupy, Anonymous, 
and other emergent political forces loosely affiliated with WikiLeaks 
and influenced by anarchist political theory. But the “discussion” 
occasionally slides into pedantic softball-lobs, ego-stroking, and 
phony-sounding debate that will leave the reader wishing for a more 
tightly edited and coherent declaration of the trouble Assange thinks 
we’re in.

Aside from the annoying format, the general disregard of Assange’s book 
is probably due in no small part to its discomfiting thesis. 
/Cypherpunks /would have the reader nakedly confront a truth that even a 
clear-eyed realist like Al Gore would find inconvenient: the dark steed 
on which we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia” is nothing 
less than our favorite toy, tool, and distraction. “The internet,” 
Assange states portentously in the introduction, “is a threat to human 
civilization.” According to Assange, the “Information Superhighway” that 
Gore championed throughout the 1980s and 1990s ought now be renamed the 
Highway to Hell. Or at least — to borrow Assange’s terms — the Highway 
to “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia.”

Assange’s pessimistic outlook derives from his very personal 
confrontation with “the enemy,” which is his unsubtle shorthand for the 
hybrid entity he sees taking shape as the internet continues to “merge” 
with governments increasingly controlled by multinational corporate 
interests. Assange describes the emergence of this “invasive parasite” 
as one predicated on mutual interest in surveillance and control. He 
believes that, if it remains unopposed, the resulting supranational 
“surveillance state” will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of 
mass surveillance and mass control.”

"We know the new surveillance state,” Assange says of himself and his 
coauthors, “because we have plumbed its depths.” They have also met its 
wrath. WikiLeaks has been the subject of an ongoing Department of 
Justice investigation ever since the organization rose to prominence in 
2010 with the release of video footage of an American helicopter attack 
on unarmed journalists, publication of classified documents related to 
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the leak of hundreds of thousands 
of US diplomatic cables. High-ranking US officials like California 
senator Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on 
Intelligence, have called for Assange’s prosecution. Assange, in turn, 
has cited these American demands of vengeance as his reason for 
resisting extradition to Sweden, where he faces arrest on charges of 
sexual misconduct. Sweden, Assange believes, would be the first stop on 
a longer extradition journey to the US.

Luddites and conspiracy theorists will be as titillated by Assange’s 
opening salvos on the surveillance state as anarchists and hardcore 
privacy activists. Indeed, it was the “threat to human civilization” 
quote that surfaced and then circulated listlessly around the 
blogosphere at the time of the book’s publication. The bluntness with 
which Assange damns the current drift of internet-related activity is 
probably the reason nobody wanted to read /Cypherpunks/: it’s easier to 
write Assange off as having jumped the shark. For most Westerners, the 
internet has made many aspects of daily life so easy and convenient that 
we dare not imagine its sinister double-edge. We want to retain our 
endless up-to-the-moment entertainment, on-the-fly driving directions, 
and breezy one-click payments with home delivery. Internet use has 
developed in ways that have normalized self-absorption and conspicuous 
consumption; our society’s feel-good relationship with the internet has 
anaesthetized the gradual but near total loss of privacy involved in the 
tradeoff. For most users, thought of the internet as a technology of 
mass surveillance and control, then, is both uncanny and unwelcome. And 
yet, Assange and company assure, that is /exactly/ what the internet has 
become.

But another obvious reason for the book’s vanishing act is its 
surprisingly proprietary method of distribution. A manifesto could have 
been Xeroxed and tossed daily from the balcony of the bobby-besieged 
Ecuadorian embassy in London, where, since August 2012, Assange has been 
granted asylum. Or it could even have been disseminated on the internet, 
thus poisoning the bowels of the very beast Assange believes threatens 
to destroy all our freedoms. Alas, /Cypherpunks/ is only available as a 
conventional copyrighted text (or e-book) distributed by an independent 
publisher who has, with due respect for convention and copyright, 
decreed that “no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in 
any form or by any means.” Despite actually discussing proprietary 
control as one of the clear impediments to the liberating potential of 
new communication technologies, /Cypherpunks/ does not offer further 
comment on its own self-imposed limitations beyond its martyr’s 
performance of self-banishment to the province of the Unread.

Its internal contradictions notwithstanding, /Cypherpunks/ is a 
pertinent wake-up call. While we’ve been busy chuckling at the subtitled 
antics of cats, the internet has become increasingly monitored and 
militarized: all of our web-based communications are now intercepted by 
military spy organs. The internet, Assange claims, has become an 
occupied public space, and “we are all living under martial law as far 
as our communications are concerned.” This observation is in tune with 
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s nearly decade-old warning about the 
encroachment of martial law in their 2004 book /Multitude/, in which the 
authors claim that the military and the police are becoming 
indistinguishable. With the military occupation of cyberspace, Assange 
argues, control is being insinuated into the most quotidian of 
activities. Further thickening the aura of shadows and cigar smoke, he 
asserts, in his introduction, that this threat to our freedom has been 
cleverly concealed by those in “national security circles” and “the 
global surveillance industry.”

Assange understands the encroachments of the parasitical surveillance 
state into private communications as state violence enabled by corporate 
collaboration. He is not the first to read the writing on the wall. 
Beginning as early as 1946, thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor 
Adorno have warned of the imbrication of entertainment with disciplinary 
social control in the form of the “culture industry.” Since then a 
lineage of theorists influenced by Guy Debord’s /Society of the 
Spectacle/ (1967), Michel Foucault’s late lectures on biopolitics, and 
Gilles Deleuze’s 1990 essay on the rise of the “control society” have 
expanded on these ideas, cautioning against the advent of technocratic 
governments that will crush opposition and difference through 
mass-surveillance and data- and statistics-driven managerialism. More 
recent works bring these theories to bear on the internet. Alexander 
Galloway’s book /Protocol /(2004) made explicit the link between the 
material architecture of the internet and the decentralized management 
style favored for the administration of such biopolitical control societies.

Nor are the stakes of these discussions purely theoretical. Today, 
domestic spying is indeed undergoing massive expansion under the banner 
of “cyber security,” an Orwellian euphemism that most Americans probably 
find more palatable than “spying” or “data-mining.” “Cyber security” 
technologies are also now classified as “weapons” in order to divert 
more defense spending into their development, and the National Security 
Administration (NSA) has spent the last 10 years expanding its 
facilities far beyond its Fort Meade, Maryland, base. The crown jewel of 
these facilities is the Utah Data Center, a sprawling complex scheduled 
to be operational in September 2013. The $2 billion facility is nestled 
in the mountain enclave of a polygamist Mormon sect, a valley where /Big 
Love/ and Big Brother, as NSA expert James Bamford reported in /Wired 
/magazine last year 
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/>, have 
unexpectedly become neighbors. Facts about the facility are being kept 
under tight wraps by the NSA, which has deflected FOIA requests by 
citing the classified status of National Security Presidential Directive 
54, the order George W. Bush issued in 2008 that authorized the NSA’s 
new projects in so-called cyber security. According to Bamford, the 
facility will contain thousands of servers that will archive and analyze 
“the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google 
searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking 
receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases” and the rest of what 
he calls “digital pocket litter.” Bamford also believes the data center 
will host a secret codebreaking unit needed to decrypt all that “secure 
encrypted” data transmitted over the internet: worldwide credit card 
transactions, stock and business deals, diplomatic cables, and the like. 
The energy costs of the facility alone are estimated at $40 million a year.

The Utah center is the centerpiece of a broad expansion in NSA 
data-mining and storage facilities across the country: bases for the 
interception of communications from abroad are located in Hawaii, Texas, 
Colorado, and Georgia. Like Assange, Bamford thinks that strong 
encryption is the only remaining strategy for resisting the slide into a 
totalitarian surveillance state. But paired with the NSA server farms is 
investment in supercomputing capabilities at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge 
National Laboratory — the former site of top-secret atomic research and 
reactors for the Manhattan Project — where the government is developing 
juggernaut codebreaking machines to keep up with similar computers being 
unveiled in China and Japan.

It is cold comfort to know that, historically speaking, the NSA has been 
rather bad at gathering and sorting intelligence. Writing for /The/ /New 
York Review of Books/, Bamford reminds us that the agency was caught off 
guard by the 1998 attacks on two east African embassies, the 2000 attack 
on the /USS Cole/, and the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 
2001. Whatever the Agency’s inadequacies, it is regarded fondly by big 
business: neoliberal trends of outsourcing government activities to the 
private sector have created a booming surveillance industry in 
conjunction with domestic spying. By Assange’s count, there are over 
1,000 independent contractors working for the NSA, “smearing out the 
border between what is government and what is the private sector.”

This blurred public–private divide is where privacy rights are being 
swiftly eroded. Consider, for a moment, one of Google’s newest 
inventions: Google Glass, a pair of dorky and nearly indestructible 
eyeglasses that can capture photograph and video, access Google’s search 
engine and chat functions, and triangulate one’s exact location at all 
times. For a company whose unofficial “code of conduct” is “don’t be 
evil,” <http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html> this 
is a dubious development: Google Glass will effectively turn its users 
into a legion of Little Brother informers, as government agencies 
routinely spy on Google users by gaining access to their account 
information with secret subpoenas. As with other Google features like 
Street View and Google Earth, it is impossible to opt out of this 
surveillance technology. Now imagine Google Glass equipped with facial 
recognition technology (FRT) — as Facebook already is — and you get a 
dizzying glimpse into the postmodern dystopia that Assange foresees.

Biometric data gathering, facial recognition technology, domestic drone 
surveillance, and the strategic interception of all private 
communication: these are the four horsemen of Assange’s apocalypse. He 
acknowledges that, even 10 years ago, surveillance on this scale would 
have seemed like a delusional fantasy. But now even a country like Libya 
can afford systems like Eagle, a product sold by the French firm Amesys 
and used by the Gaddafi regime for mass interception of communication. 
Even poor countries are setting up surveillance systems: as 
Müller-Maguhn claims, African countries are getting entire spy network 
infrastructure as a gift from the Chinese, who expect to be paid back 
“in data, the new currency.”

It should come as no surprise that intrusive and aggressive data 
collection methods have been getting a test-drive in places under the 
sway — but not bound by the laws — of American empire. The Afghan 
government, for instance, is collaborating with US security firms and 
the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/world/asia/in-afghanistan-big-plans-to-gather-biometric-data.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0> to 
produce a biometric registry for all passengers at Kabul airport and at 
major border crossings. The FBI is likewise honing its spycraft 
<http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/april/afghanistan_042911> by 
assisting with the development of a biometric database of the entire 
Afghan population, and the Department of Defense has already created a 
Biometrics Identity Management Agency to coordinate biometric data 
sharing among these government agencies. In addition to fingerprint 
collection, already widely practiced, BIMA has been working to expand 
its facial, iris, palm, and DNA registries.

City police departments are not far behind: the LAPD has equipped 
officers with mobile biometrics devices since 2005 as part of a 
crackdown on undocumented workers. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg 
recently called the use of domestic drones and FRT in law enforcement 
“inevitable.” In fact, the NYPD already deploys FRT in investigative 
police work 
<http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130325/new-york-city/high-tech-nypd-unit-tracks-criminals-through-facebook-instragram-photos>, 
and licenses for domestic drone operation have been issued with abandon 
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/sunshine-week-year-drones>, 
including to city governments and police departments. The “inevitable” 
use of FRT in domestic police work will probably broaden to include 
devices similar to what the military currently uses in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. Crossmatch Technologies, the Florida company that developed 
the SEEK II device that was likely used to identify Osama bin Laden 
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/csi-bin-laden-commandos-use-thumb-eye-scans-to-track-terrorists/> at 
his Abbottabad compound, has lobbied the government to “document the 
undocumented” by using biometric technologies 
<http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/292093-documenting-the-undocumented-there-is-a-way>. 
In its efforts to foment wider use of biometric technologies, Crossmatch 
has even donated some of its rapid mobile identification technologies to 
the Palm Beach Gardens Police Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization whose 
“mission is to secure private funding to enhance the safety of the 
community and the effectiveness of the Palm Beach Gardens Police 
Department.”

Assange and his colleagues are — tellingly — more concerned about the 
mass interception of communications than they are about biometric 
registries. But the general complaint applies to both contexts: there 
has been a shift from “tactical” data gathering (the kind you associate 
with a search warrant) to the “strategic” mass interception of all our 
calls, emails, and internet activity for storage and analysis. The 
capture of so much private information represents the extension of a 
domestic spying program the NSA has been conducting since at least 2001 
<https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/how-it-works>. The program began with 
extralegal wiretapping facilitated by the major telecommunications 
corporations in direct violation of the Constitution. The 
“antiterrorism” activities of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 
also includes more conventional spying usually associated with the FBI: 
recently obtained documents show the DNS engaging in routine spying on 
peaceful protesters 
<http://www.salon.com/2013/04/03/dhs_had_policy_of_daily_spying_on_activists/>.

Combine government snooping with another of Google’s new ambitions — to 
become the sole internet service provider of large municipalities like 
Kansas City, Missouri — and a very worrying picture emerges. Kansas City 
government was willing to grant the company a nearly regulation-free 
contract to install citywide fiber-optic service. Not only would this 
deal allow the internet access of hundreds of thousands of users to be 
provided by a single company, it would also enable that company to 
collect deep data — every search, every page visit, every electronic 
payment — about the entire population of a major American city. The 
Kansas City project requires Google to make huge investments in city 
infrastructure, but the venture is not a charitable one. Google expects 
to reap windfalls with the data. As the scholar and activist Harry 
Halpin recently wrote in /Radical Philosophy/ 
<http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-philosophy-of-anonymous>:

    Massive web platforms such as Apple, Google and Facebook are
    monopolies increasingly reminiscent of the golden age of capitalism,
    in which the new form of commodity is personal identity: every
    interaction with the Internet is recorded for marketing purposes,
    ideally with a full name and billing address.

The recent travails of Assange’s coauthor Jacob Appelbaum offer an 
object lesson in the danger of these projects. Appelbaum is one of the 
central figures in an ongoing legal dispute between Twitter and the 
Department of Justice, which subpoenaed Twitter for the IP addresses and 
records of the accounts used by Appelbaum, Dutch citizen Rop Gonggrijp, 
and Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir as part of a grand 
jury investigation into WikiLeaks. Twitter, the ACLU, and the Electronic 
Frontier Foundation have fought the order, but it represents only a 
single high-profile case of far broader practice: Google receives tens 
of thousands of similar requests each year — most of them subpoenas 
sealed under court order, not search warrants — and complies with 90 
percent of them. The interpretation of outdated legislation effectively 
allows the US government to use Google and Facebook as extensions of its 
own intelligence-gathering activities. In most cases, sealed subpoenas 
delivered to Google and social media sites prevent those under 
investigation from ever becoming aware that their accounts are being 
reviewed by the government. It is for this reason, Assange and his 
coauthors argue, that cryptography has become the most vital means of 
resisting the tightening control of surveillance society.

Although Assange disavows the intention of writing a manifesto on the 
lofty grounds that “there is no time” for such histrionics, his 
introduction is nevertheless subtitled “A Call to Cryptographic Arms,” 
and /Cypherpunks/ is clearly a summons to action. As he and his 
co-authors argue repeatedly throughout the book, cryptography is our 
last hope to resist the otherwise inevitable slide into a totalitarian 
regime of panoptic surveillance and control. As Assange sees it, 
cryptography is “an embodiment of the laws of physics” that he considers 
elegant and noble for providing “the ultimate form of non-violent direct 
action.” Free source activists will already understand the relation 
between cryptography and the title of Assange’s book, but the table of 
contents is preceded by a useful definition that informs the lay 
audience that “cypherpunk” is not only in broad usage in the digital 
activist community, but was also added to the /Oxford English Dictionary 
/in 2006. The term dates to the “crypto-wars” of the early 1990s and was 
revived during the so-called “internet spring” of 2011, by which the 
authors presumably mean the simultaneous, and not unrelated, movements 
connected with the war waged on WikiLeaks and the online activism that 
flared during the Arab Spring, in which protesters pitted social media, 
freedom of information, and cryptography against despotic regimes.

Assange’s author bio lists him as a contributor to the original 
Cypherpunk mailing list, and “one of the most prominent exponents of 
cypherpunk philosophy”; his organization WikiLeaks is guided by the 
cypherpunk motto “privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful.” 
Assange is also credited as the “author of numerous software projects in 
line with the cypherpunk philosophy”: computer programs that facilitate 
privacy through encryption. His discussants are likewise active in 
cryptographic resistance. Appelbaum is an advocate and developer for the 
Tor Project, which provides freeware that uses “onion routing,” or 
layered encryption, to strengthen anonymity for its users; Müller-Maguhn 
is one of the creators of Cryptophone, a for-profit venture that markets 
encrypted telephone calls; and Zimmermann is a European legal activist 
for La Quadrature du Net, which defends online anonymity and campaigns 
against regulations that limit online freedoms.

Cryptography is also central to the tactics used by Anonymous, an 
international movement that has acted in support of WikiLeaks by 
providing documents and declaring war on opponents of transparency. The 
movement’s participants all remain anonymous, in keeping with precedent 
established on 4chan and other online forums where the movement 
originated. In the age of identity capitalism and surveillance society, 
the determination to remain anonymous is an act of resistance against 
the knowing gaze of both corporations and the police. The movement’s 
decentralized and nonhierarchical affiliation of cyber activists is best 
known for online forms of protest and activism in the form of 
information leaks, hacking, and website vandalism. One of the group’s 
most widely used tactics is DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) 
attacks, in which activists cause a surge in traffic by simultaneously 
accessing a webpage in massive numbers, thus causing it to crash and go 
offline. Actions undertaken by Anonymous often employ their famous 
signoff: “Knowledge is free. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not 
forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”

The link between Assange and Anonymous began in 2008, when the latter 
supplied secret Scientology handbooks to WikiLeaks for publication. The 
movement also acted to defend Assange and WikiLeaks from their 
persecution by the US government. Joe Biden has referred to Assange as a 
“high-tech terrorist,” and corporate compliance with Joe Lieberman’s 
call for businesses to cut off transactions with WikiLeaks in the wake 
of the War Logs and Cablegate prompted an Anonymous-led DDoS attack on 
Paypal, Visa, and Amazon. Lieberman and others have also called for 
Assange’s arrest and prosecution under the Espionage Act, a demand that 
makes little sense given that unlike Private Bradley Manning, who faces 
charges for allegedly leaking classified military information to 
WikiLeaks, Assange is not an American citizen and therefore not capable 
of treason against the United States. While Anonymous remained allied 
with WikiLeaks throughout the Cablegate fallout, the movement has 
recently distanced itself from Assange, criticizing his supposed egotism 
after a highly publicized dinner with Lady Gaga.

Anonymous was also active in the Occupy protests of 2011–12, and 
continues to take on a diverse range of activism projects. These include 
continued support for Occupy, defense of gay rights in Africa, attacks 
on the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and government 
copyright enforcement agencies, and working to expose the identities of 
alleged rapists in high profile sexual assault cases in Ohio and Nova 
Scotia. Anonymous also now appears to maintain a consistent interest in 
responding to Israeli aggressions against Palestinians. Israel 
airstrikes on Gaza this spring provoked Anonymous’s #OpIsrael 
retaliation, a coordinated attack on Israeli government websites, bank 
accounts, and social media accounts. The mass strike defaced or 
compromised tens of thousands of websites and bank accounts.

Social media and hacktivist groups like Anonymous represent obverse 
sides of the rise of identity capitalism. The opposition was made 
strikingly clear in 2011, when Anonymous threatened to “destroy” 
Facebook for violating user privacy and collaborating with government 
intelligence agencies. That the US media rushed to celebrate the use of 
Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring uprisings but has consistently 
maligned the activities of WikiLeaks and Anonymous is thus unsurprising. 
Having exhausted resources for regime change, cheerleaders for exporting 
“freedom” now uncritically regard digital communication technologies, 
especially Twitter, as the bearers of democracy and freedom in the 
Middle East and elsewhere. As Evgeny Morozov, an outspoken critic of 
such “internet-centrism,” has sardonically observed, “The Freedom Agenda 
is out; the Twitter Agenda is in.” Malcolm Gladwell also expressed 
skepticism in /The/ /New Yorker/ 
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell>, 
pointing out that the perceived importance of Twitter and Facebook in 
the Iranian Green Movement and the Moldovan uprising of 2009 derived 
less from facts than from the desire to understand these technologies as 
inherently liberating. Assange likewise notes that the Mubarak regime 
cut off internet access in Egypt early on in the revolution, and 
admonishes uncritical celebration of social media for disavowing the use 
of Facebook by repressive governments to monitor, track, harass, and 
sometimes kill dissidents.

Acknowledging this double-edge, Assange asserts that “the internet, our 
greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most 
dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.” But even 
here, he indulges in the silicon-plated myth that propels, if not 
entirely underwrites, this process of accelerating surveillance and 
control of our management society. Allow me to cast some doubt on 
Assange’s confident assertion that the internet is “our greatest tool of 
emancipation”: we did not need to await the arrival of the internet in 
order to end slavery, grant women the vote, or struggle for civil rights 
for oppressed racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

Doubtless the internet now plays an important role in strategies to 
influence social change. But so did television in the 1950s and ’60s, 
and no one would have called TV a great tool of emancipation. To do so 
is to express one’s ignorance regarding corporate control of televised 
media. Like Galloway, who asserts that protocol is not necessarily 
“bad,” but rather “dangerous,” Assange explains that technologies are 
not politically neutral, but can be used for a variety of ends. “Good” 
or “evil,” if you like. And the fact that the motto of a company trained 
in his critical crosshairs (“don’t be evil”) could seem so mordantly 
Orwellian from the perspective of privacy rights is evidence of a 
Silicon Valley’s bad faith.

Assange gets the last word in the “discussion” with his interlocutors in 
/Cypherpunks/. In the final pages, he insists that complaining about the 
“burgeoning security state” is not enough; we must instead “build the 
tools of a new democracy.” This would be a vigilant democracy, one that 
is aware of the political ambiguity of communications technologies and 
the complicity of big business and corporate media in eliminating legal 
protections on privacy. Debate surrounding the Cyber Intelligence 
Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) gives an idea of the current 
situation in America. Although recently shelved by the Senate, which is 
working out a version more concerned with protecting privacy, the House 
CISPA would allow companies to share data with each other and with 
government agencies like the NSA. The House CISPA would, in effect, 
legalize many of the domestic spying activities that were or are 
conducted extralegally or in legal gray areas. A lobbying firm 
representing Google and Yahoo supports the bill 
<http://rt.com/usa/google-lobby-backs-cispa-792/>, while the ACLU and 
Electronic Frontier Foundation remain vehemently opposed. Although the 
House bill has been sidelined in the upper chamber, Republicans on the 
Senate Intelligence Committee have already expressed concern about 
perceived failures in information sharing between agencies in the wake 
of the Boston marathon bombing. Coupled with Americans’ show of 
eagerness to inform on their fellow citizens by participating in the 
misguided and frenetic crowdsourcing of police work, the senators’ 
opportunity to look tough on terror will likely weaken privacy provisions.

With the corporate hijacking of the government and the prioritizing of 
“security” above all else, Assange and his /Cypherpunks /discussants 
seem to see successful resistance to surveillance and control through 
legislation as unlikely. This leaves privacy defense up to individuals 
themselves, who must begin to understand the communications technologies 
they use. In Appelbaum’s words, people need to get “socially used to” 
coding in order to modify their own software.

This kind of individual responsibility sounds like a good thing. But 
such a position usually ignores structural inequalities that drastically 
alter one’s capability of awareness, let alone resistance. Education is 
one such factor. This is exactly where a class-based analysis of 
Assange’s ideology finds the impasse between techno-libertarianism and 
traditional leftist politics. Assange ends his book by fantasizing about 
the imminent dystopian future. His valedictory reverie begins with a 
self-romanticizing anecdote about “smuggling” himself into the Sydney 
Opera House to take in a performance of /Faust/ (Assange’s cultural 
allusions have never been subtle; his memoir /Julian Assange: The 
Unauthorized Autobiography /is clumsily littered with them). The 
heavy-handedness exposes a superiority complex that plays out in 
Assange’s concluding morality tale: while our lone hero strolls the 
waterfront after the opera, he spies through the glass panels a rat that 
has likewise smuggled itself into the Opera House, where it is merrily 
“scurrying back and forth, leaping on the fine linen-covered tables and 
eating the Opera House food, jumping on to the counter with all the 
tickets and having a really great time.”

This droll tableau becomes, in Assange’s hands, a metaphor for “the most 
probable scenario for the future”:

    an extremely confining, homogenized, postmodern transnational
    totalitarian structure with incredible complexity, absurdities and
    debasements, and within that incredible complexity a space where
    only the smart rats can go […] All communications will be
    surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each
    individual in all their interactions permanently identified as that
    individual to this new Establishment, from birth to death […] So I
    think the only people who will be able to keep the freedom that we
    had, say, twenty years ago — because the surveillance state has
    already eliminated quite a lot of that, we just don’t realize it yet
    — are those who are highly educated in the internals of this system.
    So it will only be a high-tech rebel elite that is free, these
    clever rats running around the opera house.

This is elitism plain and simple, and it ought to have been purged from 
the book. It would have been more productive to conclude this 
non-manifesto with more practical information about how everyday 
internet users can protect themselves, a nuts-and-bolts tutorial like 
the one that can be found on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 
Surveillance Self-Defense site <https://ssd.eff.org/>.

Moreover, the notion of a “high-tech rebel elite” is embarrassingly 
redolent of the likes of Ayn Rand, and a form of libertarian 
neoliberalism that has found so many devotees in Silicon Valley. Assange 
himself dismissively refers to these “California libertarians,” a 
strange and contradictory socio-political class that has gained 
tremendous power and prestige in recent years. The hodgepodge of 
free-marketeering and wannabe counterculture that characterizes the 
California libertarians is worthy only of caricature, and the rise of 
this ideology in the new powerhouse of the US economy was presciently 
characterized by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in their 1996 essay 
“The Californian Ideology” (a text that /is /available for free perusal 
online <http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology.html>).

In Assange’s rodent parable, the rat serves as a stand-in for Assange 
himself, who seems bizarrely eager to reprise the role of John Galt in 
Rand’s plodding opus /Atlas Shrugged/. In that novel, a visionary elite 
led by Galt abandons a welfare state full of moochers and takes to the 
hills, leaving the freeloaders — we know them today as the 99% — to go 
to hell in a handbasket, wondering “Who is John Galt?” Down on the 
docks, another lone hero wanders. “Who is Julian Assange?” he imagines 
the future masses wondering. If the effective media blackout surrounding 
Assange and WikiLeaks continues, we’ll start to hear that question 
sooner rather than later.

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