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class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>on<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span
class="book_title" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border:
0px; font-family: crimson_700_it, serif; font-size: inherit;
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line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks</span></h2>
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font-family: crimson_700, serif; font-size: 20px; font-style:
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inherit;">Fair Warning: Julian Assange's "Cyberphunks"</h3>
<abbr class="published" style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px; padding:
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<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;"><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Triptych image:
Ali Prosch, "Ground," 2012</em></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;"><br>
WIKILEAKS FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE’S newest book <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet</em> 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 — <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks </em>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 <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks</em>,
and nobody seems to have read it. This is a pity, since the book<em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;"> </em>rings a justifiably strident alarm bell over
the erosion of individual privacy rights by an increasingly
powerful global surveillance industry. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Though <em style="margin: 0px; padding:
0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks </em>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<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;"> </em>— would
probably have garnered Assange more attention. A good
old-fashioned manifesto would have been more readable, too: <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Cypherpunks </em>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. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Aside from the annoying format, the
general disregard of Assange’s book is probably due in no small
part to its discomfiting thesis. <em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks </em>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.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">"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.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <em style="margin: 0px; padding:
0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks</em>:
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 <em style="margin: 0px; padding:
0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">exactly</em> what
the internet has become.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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, <em style="margin:
0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it,
serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant:
inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks</em> 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, <em style="margin: 0px; padding:
0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks</em> 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.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Its internal contradictions
notwithstanding, <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border:
0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit;
font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight:
inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks</em> 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 <em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Multitude</em>,
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.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Society of the Spectacle</em> (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 <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size:
inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Protocol </em>(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.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Big Love</em> and Big Brother, as NSA expert James
Bamford <a
href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">reported
in <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit;
font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight:
inherit; line-height: inherit;">Wired </em>magazine last
year</a>, 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. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">It is cold comfort to know that,
historically speaking, the NSA has been rather bad at gathering
and sorting intelligence. Writing for <em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The</em> <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">New York Review of Books</em>, Bamford reminds us
that the agency was caught off guard by the 1998 attacks on two
east African embassies, the 2000 attack on the <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">USS Cole</em>, 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.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <a
href="http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">unofficial
“code of conduct” is “don’t be evil,”</a> 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. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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.” </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/world/asia/in-afghanistan-big-plans-to-gather-biometric-data.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">collaborating
with US security firms and the Departments of Justice and
Homeland Security</a> to produce a biometric registry for all
passengers at Kabul airport and at major border crossings. <a
href="http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/april/afghanistan_042911"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">The
FBI is likewise honing its spycraft</a> 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. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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, <a
href="http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130325/new-york-city/high-tech-nypd-unit-tracks-criminals-through-facebook-instragram-photos"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">the
NYPD already deploys FRT in investigative police work</a>,
and <a
href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/sunshine-week-year-drones"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">licenses
for domestic drone operation have been issued with abandon</a>,
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 <a
href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/csi-bin-laden-commandos-use-thumb-eye-scans-to-track-terrorists/"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">the
SEEK II device that was likely used to identify Osama bin
Laden</a> at his Abbottabad compound, <a
href="http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/292093-documenting-the-undocumented-there-is-a-way"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">has
lobbied the government to “document the undocumented” by using
biometric technologies</a>. 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.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 href="https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/how-it-works"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">a
domestic spying program the NSA has been conducting since at
least 2001</a>. 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 <a
href="http://www.salon.com/2013/04/03/dhs_had_policy_of_daily_spying_on_activists/"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">routine
spying on peaceful protesters</a>.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <a
href="http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-philosophy-of-anonymous"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">the
scholar and activist Harry Halpin recently wrote in <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style:
italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;
line-height: inherit;">Radical Philosophy</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote style="margin: 0px 24px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit; quotes: none;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;
border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style:
inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;
line-height: 1.4em; text-align: justify;">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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks</em> 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 <em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Oxford English
Dictionary </em>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.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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.” <a
href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">Malcolm
Gladwell also expressed skepticism in <em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it,
serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant:
inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The</em> <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style:
italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;
line-height: inherit;">New Yorker</em></a>, 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.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">Assange gets the last word in the
“discussion” with his interlocutors in <em style="margin: 0px;
padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks</em>.
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
href="http://rt.com/usa/google-lobby-backs-cispa-792/"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">A
lobbying firm representing Google and Yahoo supports the bill</a>,
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.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">With the corporate hijacking of the
government and the prioritizing of “security” above all else,
Assange and his <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border:
0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit;
font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight:
inherit; line-height: inherit;">Cypherpunks </em>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. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <em style="margin: 0px; padding:
0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it, serif;
font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit;
font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Faust</em> (Assange’s
cultural allusions have never been subtle; his memoir <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Autobiography </em>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.”</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">This droll tableau becomes, in Assange’s
hands, a metaphor for “the most probable scenario for the
future”:</p>
<blockquote style="margin: 0px 24px; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit; quotes: none;">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;
border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style:
inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;
line-height: 1.4em; text-align: justify;">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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <a
href="https://ssd.eff.org/" style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125);
text-decoration: none;">Surveillance Self-Defense site</a>. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <em style="margin:
0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: crimson_400_it,
serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant:
inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;">is </em>available
for free perusal <a
href="http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology.html"
style="color: rgb(135, 134, 125); text-decoration: none;">online</a>).</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em; padding: 0px; border: 0px;
font-family: inherit; font-size: 1em; font-style: inherit;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4em;
text-align: justify;">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 <em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
crimson_400_it, serif; font-size: inherit; font-style: italic;
font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height:
inherit;">Atlas Shrugged</em>. 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.</p>
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