“If Chevron or Lockheed Martin had written down what its vision for the future of the world is, and how it’s going to bring it about and how it was shaping up and the nature of its, some of the nature of its relationships, a book that has on the back of it pre-publication endorsements by Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, Tony Blair and the former head of the National Security Agency and CIA [General Michael] Hayden, we would be quite concerned and there would be political scholars, like Noam Chomsky, trying to understand what that meant,” explained Assange.

“But because Google has successfully—up until about a year ago—successfully positioned itself as a playful thing, their colored logo presenting itself under the eyeballs of people around the world more than a billion times a day, a playful thing, like it is a playroom, with soft, curved [thoughts] and soft toys, a place where we can go to look at things, a place that provides information for free, we have come to think of it as something that is helpful, or an assistant, a tap, a magical angel that disgorges helpful and useful information and not an organization like every other organization,” he continued. “Not an organization which spends now more money lobbying with Washington, DC than Lockheed Martin. Not an organization which has engaged in contracts with the National Security Agency since 2003…. And not an organization with a revolving door between the US State Department and Google and between the White House and Google.”

Read full coverage of the launch at Long Island Press