Now there is a title that you make or may not understand. I will do my best to make it clear. Let's set the stage by noting a few of the inconvenient truths that I have touched on in my title.EXCLUSIVE: Julian Assange on WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Cypherpunks, Surveillance State Let's glimpse at the idea that:
Human civilization has merged with the internet. Every society has gone onto the internet, with communications between all of us as individuals but also communications between businesses, economic transfers, and even the internal communications and external communications of states. So there is no barrier anymore between the internet and global civilization. That means that when the internet develops a sickness, global civilization also runs the risk of suffering the same sickness.
Now couple that idea with this:
There’s not a barrier anymore between corporate surveillance, on the one hand, and government surveillance, on the other. You know, Facebook is based—has its servers based in the United States. Gmail, as General Petraeus found out, has its servers based in the United States. And the interplay between U.S. intelligence agencies and other Western intelligence agencies and any intelligence agencies that can hack this is fluid. So, we’re in a—if we look back to what’s a earlier example of the worst penetration by an intelligence apparatus of a society, which is perhaps East Germany, where up to 10 percent of people over their lifetime had been an informer at one stage or another, in Iceland we have 88 percent penetration of Iceland by Facebook. Eighty-eight percent of people are there on Facebook informing on their friends and their movements and the nature of their relationships—and for free. They’re not even being paid money. They’re not even being directly coerced to do it. They’re doing it for social credits to avoid the feeling of exclusion. But people should understand what is really going on. I don’t believe people are doing this or would do it if they truly understood what was going on, that they are doing hundreds of billions of hours of free work for the Central Intelligence Agency, for the FBI, and for all allied agencies and all countries that can ask for favors to get hold of that information.
That is just the appetizer. Read on below for the main course.
Let's go back to the sexy general for a moment. Surely I'm not the only one that had this thought cross my mind.
AMY GOODMAN: Your reaction—you mentioned Petraeus, General Petraeus, before and how he’s been taken down as his email was gone through. What do you think about that? The—here he was—
JULIAN ASSANGE: I think it’s fascinating, Amy. Now, we can look into—you know, if you’ve been involved in this business for a while, you can start to smell when there must be something more to the situation. So I assume, in those emails that the FBI got hold of, there’s additional information that would be embarrassing to Petraeus above and beyond an extramarital affair, which is why he’s resigned. But that someone in the position of being the ultimate—an ultimate insider, the head of the CIA, has fallen victim to the surveillance state really shows you how massively out of control the thing has become, where it is like a vicious dog that has suddenly spotted its own tail and has gone after it, is lashing out irrationally, and now it’s affected an insider. And people have started to take note, but of course it’s been doing that to activists and, in fact, most of—most of us, it has been doing that, although we can’t see the result, for years.
I hope the meaning of what he said needs no further interpretation
Now let's get into the future and see how good my crystal ball is. It seems clear to me that governments around the world will be playing these games (Nero fiddling?) while they fail to do much about Climate change and other real problems (Rome burns). The predicted result will be a host of interacting catastrophes that will lead to turmoil of the worst kind. The short version is that population control and police states will be the way the Global Plutocracy tries to hold on. It is not a pretty picture. Our new book says this in more academic style but the message is clear. Human cultural evolution is tied to the evolution of technology as a mainstay for a global economic system based on exploitation and growth that is doomed.
So at 76 I am not lamenting my age nor wishing I were younger. My empathy for the young is immense. I grew up in a time of struggle. What is coming makes it look like paradise. Like I keep saying, we really do not need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.