Latest News: Posts Tagged ‘cypherpunks’

In the Guardian, COLIN ROBINSON responds to Andrew O’Hagan’s piece on JULIAN ASSANGE

Thursday, March 6th, 2014

A great deal has been written recently about the frustrations of publishing a book with Julian Assange, mainly in a widely discussed, marathon article for the London Review of Books by Andrew O’Hagan. O’Hagan relates his experiences when working as a ghostwriter on an autobiography of the WikiLeaks leader that ended up being published in opposition to its subject’s wishes. I’m the co-publisher of Assange’s most recent book (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet) and I, too, have found the experience frequently exasperating. Let me give an illustration. It’s June of last year and I’m at a party in New York when a friendly, youngish man with a beard and a beer engages me in conversation. He tells me he is a journalist on one of the city’s listings magazines and asks what I do for a job. I reply that I’m a publisher and he asks whose books I’m working on. I pick the one writer of whom I’m pretty certain he will have heard. “Well,” I say, shouting to make myself heard above the music, “I’ve just published Julian Assange.” The young man’s demeanour changes abruptly and he fixes me with a sneer. “Assange,” he echoes, “he’s a bit of a cunt isn’t he?”

I’ve become wearily accustomed to this over my time working with Assange: the vituperation heaped on my author, the scorn directed at me for giving him a platform. I know the general script that will follow. And, sure enough, here it so often comes, as if read from the page: “I mean, he’s a weirdo isn’t he? That massive ego. And the sex offences in Sweden.”

Read the full piece in the Guardian.

The Daily Californian reviews CYPHERPUNKS by Julian Assange

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

WikiLeaks mastermind Julian Assange explains the necessity of “A Call to Cryptographic Arms” in his book of international political philosophy, “Cypherpunks.” He defines cypherpunks as people who write and solve secret codes to help achieve sociopolitical change and do so because of the rising fear that in the near future “global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia.” Assange calls for a widespread adoption of cryptography, or the protective coding of language, in all of our online and telecommunications in order to defend what he sees as the three basic human freedom rights of physical mobility, free speech and and free economic interaction.

In the opening pages, Assange warns that “like sailors smelling the breeze, we rarely contemplate how our surface world is propped up from below by darkness.” In eloquent simile, Assange explains that through his personal experiences he has learned that our world is riddled with more censorship, surveillance and corruption than we can imagine. Much still lies in secret beneath the surface.

In an expository nonfictional dialogue, Assange engages in an intellectual discussion with WikiLeaks supporters and fellow cryptographers Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn and Jeremie Zimmermann. Over the course of “Cypherpunk’s” 150 pages, the four men analyze and interpret various political events such as the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt from a progressive outlook. By structuring “Cypherpunks” in an endless-dialogue format, Assange evokes earlier philosophical works of the same structure such as philosopher George Berkeley’s “Three Dialogues.” The four cypherpunks explicate and support their ideas in a formal, informative manner and evoke the didactic prose style of philosophers, but with a modern technological twist.

Read the full review at The Daily Californian.

Computational Culture reviews CYPHERPUNKS by Julian Assange

Friday, November 22nd, 2013

When our imaginary relationship to our conditions of existence becomes desynchronized with ongoing events, phenomena such as Wikileaks become impossible to comprehend. One snowy Berlin night after the Chaos Computer Congress in 2009, I rather accidentally ended up getting dinner with Jacob Appelbaum and a few other assorted computer security experts. In the context of a rather arcane discussion of routing problems in Tor, the topic of Wikileaks was broached. Not one to mince words, I warned Jake that Wikileaks was going to get him into deep trouble. He cracked a smile in return and said “We’re not dissidents, we’re meta-dissidents. We only provide tools to dissidents.” Alas, the FBI does not make such fine-grained distinctions. Now, the situation is grim; Jacob Appelbaum is on a terrorist watch-list, Julian Assange is trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and Bradley Manning is on trial after being in solitary confinement for far over two years. In the largest leak yet, Edward Snowden has revealed that the NSA is spying on all internet communications, and finds himself a man without a country despite the help of Wikileaks. The contradictions of Wikileaks are apparent to all; the hackers that wished to free the world’s information find themselves caged within fleshspace.

Read the full review at Computational Culture.

CYPHERPUNKS reviewed by Fuse Book Review

Tuesday, October 29th, 2013

In his introduction to Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Julian Assange—the founder of WikiLeaks and the subject of the new movie The Fifth Estate—writes, “On March 20, 2012, while under house arrest in the United Kingdom awaiting extradition, I met with three friends and fellow watchmen on the principle that perhaps in unison our voices can wake up the town.”

Cypherpunks is a transcription of that conversation. Assange’s interlocutors are Jacob Appelbaum, a founder of the San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge; Andy Müller-Maguhn, a member of the German hacker group the Chaos Computer Club and co-founder of the European Digital Rights Association; and Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson for La Quadrature du Net, “the most prominent European organization defending anonymity rights online and promoting awareness of regulatory attacks on online freedoms.”.

Read the full review at Fuse Book Review.

Counterfire reviews CYPHERPUNKS by Julian Assange

Monday, September 16th, 2013

Since the infamous PRISM surveillance system was exposed by the NSA analyst Edward Snowden, the existence of what the cypherpunks have long called ‘the transnational surveillance state’ is beyond doubt. Conspiracy has become reality, and paranoia has become the number-one necessity of investigative journalism.

Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, published last year, describes itself as ‘a watchman’s shout in the night’. An apt description, given everything we have learned lately. What the book is trying to hammer home is the immense importance of the internet as a new political battleground: how it is structured, monitored and used has serious ramifications for political organisation, economics, education, labour, culture and just about every other area of our lives, because increasingly, their world is our world. And if knowledge is power, and it is never been as ubiquitous as it is in cyberspace, there is a great deal at stake.

Read the full review at Counterfire.

Vanity Fair profiles JULIAN ASSANGE

Monday, September 9th, 2013

Recently, on the occasion of a WikiLeaks-hosted conference call to mark his one-year anniversary in the embassy, Assange was asked by a reporter whether his ability to work had been hindered by his confinement. Assange said that of course confinement made some things more difficult, but “that is contrasted by my complete inability to do anything else but work.”

And work he has. The physical Assange may be restricted to a few hundred square feet of real estate, but his avatar and his organization remain actively engaged with the world. It has been a very busy year. In September 2012, Assange addressed the United Nations via satellite, urging the U.S. to end what he calls its persecution of Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks. In November, he released a book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, based on a lengthy conversation between himself and several Internet activists from around the world who, like Assange, consider themselves part of the cypherpunk movement. (The movement grew out of hacker culture and advocates using strong encryption codes to ward off government surveillance; it has promoted civil disobedience to advance the cause of privacy.) Cypherpunks opens with characteristic understatement: “This book is not a manifesto,” Assange writes. “There is not time for that. This book is a warning.” He and his three collaborators—Jacob Appelbaum, a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks; Andy Müller-Maguhn, a member of the hacker association Chaos Computer Club, in Berlin; and Jérémie Zimmermann, the spokesperson for and co-founder of the Paris-based La Quadrature du Net, a French Internet-advocacy group—discuss the importance of keeping the Internet free from government intrusion. The book depicts Facebook and Google as part of “the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed” and describes a world spiraling toward a “new transnational dystopia.”

Read the full article at Vanity Fair.

h+ reviews CYPHERPUNKS

Tuesday, August 27th, 2013

Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is a fascinating series of conversations between Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. While illuminating the political dangers of state “total surveillance” of the uploaded lives of the population of the entire industrialized world, the more positive case on the internet at the end of the book draws attention to the unprecedented level of popular influence and freedom it can still represent. For those who only go with a highly optimistic view of technology, Cypherpunks may cause disillusionment, but it also offers hope and a brilliant direction for incumbent technological change to be channeled. At the very least, this book enables those of you who consider yourselves to be “hackers” or to be striving for positive technological change in society to quickly know thine enemy. The book captures how hacking is the popular conquest of technology, while “centralization of technique” is the state conquest of technology for sustaining the power of a privileged few.

Read the entire review at h+.

RT reports on JACOB APPELBAUM‘s interview with Edward Snowden

Wednesday, July 10th, 2013

Snowden’s interviewer, 30-year-old Jacob Applebaum, has also fallen foul of US law enforcement in the past. Applebaum co-wrote a book with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange detailing tips on how to evade cyber-surveillance while surfing the web.

The book called ‘Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet’, was also co-written by Jeremie Zimmermann and Andy Muller-Maguhn. Assange invited his co-authors on to the Julian Assange show, which aired on RT last year in March, to discuss cyber resistance.

“Two of them, besides myself, have been targeted by law enforcement agencies as a result of their work to safeguard privacy and to keep governments accountable. Their words, and their stories, need to be heard,” Assange told the New York Times.

Read the full report at Russia Today.

JACOB APPELBAUM interviews Edward Snowden in Der Spiegel

Wednesday, July 10th, 2013

Shortly before he became a household name around the world as a whistleblower, Edward Snowden answered a comprehensive list of questions. They originated from Jacob Appelbaum, 30, a developer of encryption and security software. Appelbaum provides training to international human rights groups and journalists on how to use the Internet anonymously.

Appelbaum first became more broadly known to the public after he spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a hacker conference in New York in 2010. Together with Assange and other co-authors, Appelbaum recently released a compilation of interviews in book form under the title “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.”

Read the full interview at Der Spiegel.

In the Guardian, JULIAN ASSANGE argues that less powerful states can use cryptography to resist oppression

Wednesday, July 10th, 2013

This is why the message of the cypherpunks is of special importance to Latin American audiences. Mass surveillance is not just an issue for democracy and governance – it’s a geopolitical issue. The surveillance of a whole population by a foreign power naturally threatens sovereignty. Intervention after intervention in the affairs of Latin American democracy have taught us to be realistic. We know that the old powers will still exploit any advantage to delay or suppress the outbreak of Latin American independence.

[…]

But the new great game is not the war for oil pipelines. It is the war for information pipelines: the control over fibre-optic cable paths that spread undersea and overland. The new global treasure is control over the giant data flows that connect whole continents and civlisations, linking the communications of billions of people and organisations.

Read the full article at the Guardian.

LiveMint argues that PRISM surveillance confirms CYPHERPUNKS’ prescience

Wednesday, June 26th, 2013

When it came out in late 2012, Cypherpunks may have seemed like a book ahead of its times. After all, even six months ago, how many in the world had heard about the PRISM worldwide surveillance programme of the US National Security Agency (NSA)? Or about Boundless Informant? Or that India was one of the top five countries monitored extensively by the NSA? Or that Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, and several other tech companies shared user data that were supposed to remain private? But a few weeks ago a man named Edward Snowden confirmed to the world that the “surveillance dystopia” Assange had warned “may already be there” is, in fact, already here.

Read the whole article at LiveMint

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Pacific Standard: Prism leaks vindicate Assange and CYPHERPUNKS

Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

“There’s a real danger that the dodgy personal reputation of theorists like Assange will blind us to the possibilities for reform. It’s unfortunately true that many of our most visible experts in this area have been tainted one way or another in the press. In particular, the “outlaw” status of “hackers” like Assange should be set aside when they offer remedies for the overreach of government.

[…]

It makes no difference whether or not Assange is a stone cold liar in his personal life when we consider the protection that cryptography might offer a public that is being spied on illegally by its own government. If that is good advice, as it appears to be, we should surely act on it.”

Read the full essay at Pacific Standard.

The Verge refers to CYPHERPUNKS in review of Schmidt and Cohen’s The New Digital Age

Wednesday, June 12th, 2013

The New York Times was right to ask Julian Assange to comment on The New Digital Age. His book, Cypherpunks (reviewed for The Verge by R.U. Sirius) both foreshadows Schmidt and Cohen’s work and serves as a response. Say what you will about Assange’s prose — sure, the man is kind of a Debbie Downer — it’s obvious that he cares about what happens to the least of us, those of us who are not shareholders. The core of his message is inevitably missing from mainstream press coverage of WikiLeaks: that a just society would protect the weak from the powerful and corrupt. By way of contrast, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have spent the bulk of their short, happy lives sucking up to power.

Read the full article at The Verge.

CYPHERPUNKS author Julian Assange publishes an op-ed in the Sunday New York Times

Monday, June 3rd, 2013

“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.

The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.

The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.

Read the full article at the New York Times.

Cornel West for Smiley & West interviews Julian Assange about CYPHERPUNKS

Friday, May 10th, 2013

Listen to the whole interview at Smiley & West.

The Los Angeles Review of Books publishes a review of CYPHERPUNKS by Julian Assange

Monday, April 29th, 2013

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.

Read the full review at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

CYPHERPUNKS is reviewed by Kevin Thomas for the Rumpus Comics

Friday, March 29th, 2013

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Read the full review at the Rumpus.

Jacob Appelbaum, contributor to CYPHERPUNKS, talks to The Verge

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

R.U. Sirius: Could you tell me a bit about discovering the cypherpunk idea and how it affected you? Also, anything about your sense of the history of the group and/or anything that was inspiring, like manifestos by Tim May or Eric Hughes

Jacob Appelbaum: I discovered the mailing list and the general ideas through some friends I’d met away from the keyboard. I later met a number of cypherpunks in the San Francisco bay area and at various cypherpunk events around the world.

RU: It’s interesting to have a book on Cypherpunk with Julian Assange as the author (his name, at least, is writ largest) when most people think of WikiLeaks as an anti-secrecy organization. Did he (or all of you) intentionally want to complexify the discussion around WikiLeaks or did anything like that even cross your mind(s)?

JA: Personal privacy and institutional transparency are complementary ideas that help to create a free and open society.

Read the full interview at The Verge.

CYPHERPUNKS by Julian Assange is reviewed on Reason.com

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013

The first great conflict over cryptography and state power happened in the 1990s. In one corner were cryptographers equipped with subtle math, digital technologies, and new ideas. In the other were the Clinton administration and its National Security Agency (NSA), which sought to maintain and extend the federal government’s control over cryptography. They struggled over the concept that cryptography could be classified as munitions, over requirements to include NSA-friendly chips in communication hardware, and, in general, over the shape of post–Cold War security.

The geeks eventually defeated the feds, freeing up crypto for public use. Cryptography became a huge force in business and private life, making ecommerce possible and enabling relatively secure interpersonal communication. At the same time, the rise of mobile devices and early social media raised new questions about privacy. In response, a “cypherpunk” movement arose, its name and attitude drawing on the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Its proponents argued that only through personal use of encryption could individuals defend their right to communicate without interception.

Read the full review at Reason.com.

Julian Assange and CYPHERPUNKS are the subject of a major piece on The Verge

Friday, March 8th, 2013

Flashback: 1995. Julian Assange’s first words on the cypherpunk email list: “I am annoyed.”

Of course, Julian Assange has gone on to annoy powerful players all over the world as the legendary fugitive editor-in-chief and spokesperson for WikiLeaks, publisher of secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. And while the mass media world has tracked nearly every aspect of Assange’s personal drama, it’s done very little to increase people’s understanding of WikiLeaks’ underlying technologies or the principles those technologies embody.

In the recent book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange enlists the help of three fellow heroes of free information to set the record straight, aligning those principles with the ideas that Tim May dreamed up in 1989 with “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”

Read the full article on The Verge.

Cory Doctorow reviews CYPHERPUNKS for BoingBoing

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

Cypherpunks – a quick, stirring, scary read – transcribes a wide-ranging conversation between Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum (Wikileaks/Tor Project), Any Muller-Magnum (Chaos Computer Club) and Jeremie Zimmerman (La Quadrature Du Net).

Edited together in thematic chapters (The Militarization of Cyberspace, Fighting Total Surveillance With the Laws of Physics, Private Sector Spying), Cypherpunks exceeded my expectations. I know some of the book’s protagonists personally and know how smart and principled they are. But I was afraid, going into this, that what would emerge would be a kind of preaching-to-the-choir consensus, because all four of the participants are on the same side.

Instead, I found Cypherpunks to be a genuine debate, where each speaker’s best arguments – well-polished, well-spoken, and convincing – were mercilessly tested by the others, who subjected them to hard questions and rigorous inspection. Most of our discussions about Wikileaks lack nuance, and they’re often hijacked by personal questions about Assange. Whatever you feel about Assange, he is not Wikileaks – Wikileaks is an activity, not an organization, and its participants, including Bradley Manning, are engaged in something important and difficult and fraught, and there is a place for a debate about whether the tactics of Wikileaks best serve a the strategic end of a free and open Internet in a just and humane society.

Read the full review on BoingBoing.

CYPHERPUNKS author Julian Assange appears on Real Time with Bill Maher

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

 

Bill Maher interviewed Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks on his “Real Time with Bill Maher” show on HBO. President Barack Obama’s “kill list” was one of the major subjects brought up in the interview.

In Assange’s first interview on a major US TV channel, he lashed out against President Obama and his administration. He criticized the fact that the Obama administration has given the go-ahead to eliminate American citizens abroad using military Unmanned Automatic Vehicles (UAVs), or drones as they are more commonly known.

Read more and watch the interview at Digital Journal.

CYPHERPUNKS receives a starred review in Publishers Weekly

Monday, January 7th, 2013

“We have met the enemy [and he is us]” could sum up the “warning” of this bleak conversation-cum-polemic from Assange — the WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief — and three fellow activists. The talk, which occurred during Assange’s London house arrest, is a provocative look into the minds of these of geek-philosophers.

Read the full review in Publishers Weekly

CYPHERPUNKS is reviewed in the Morning Star

Thursday, December 20th, 2012

You either worship Julian Assange as a modern-day hero or you hate him.

While one can admire what he has done to expose government hypocrisy and secrecy around the world and in doing so done us all a vital service, he’s certainly not the easiest person to love.

This book, despite accolades from the likes of John Pilger, Slavoj Zizek, Naomi Wolf and Oliver Stone, is often more irritating than illuminating but it is a provocative and fascinating read.

Read the full review in the Morning Star

The Wall Street Journal features a review of CYPHERPUNKS

Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

You can’t buy Julian Assange’s new book at Barnes & Noble. Or through Amazon.com. And he probably wouldn’t be all that pleased if you “liked” it on Facebook, either. In Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Mr. Assange and three of his acolytes—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann—warn us that the Internet, once a “platonic realm,” is now under attack not just from the state but also from corporations like Google and Facebook. They argue that the Internet is the “most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen” and that, “within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia” controlled by an omniscient combine of big government and big capital.

Read the full review in the Wall Street Journal

Publishers Weekly reports on ReKiosk and OR selling CYPHERPUNKS

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

ReKiosk, the independent online retailer, has landed an exclusive with Julian Assange. The start-up, which sells music and books (largely from indie labels and houses), is the only retailer selling Assange’s new e-book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, which OR Books released last week.

The e-book, acquired by co-founder of OR Colin Robinson, has been covered extensively in the press by outlets ranging from The Guardian (which put the book on the cover of its weekend magazine on December 7) to CNN to The New York Times. The 200 page work, Robinson explained, came about, in part, through connections other OR authors had to Assange. (Robinson said Micah L. Sifrey, whose WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency OR published, along with Chase Madar, who wrote The Passion of Bradley Manning for OR, both know Assange.)

Read the full article on Publishers Weekly

The Guardian magazine cover is devoted to Julian Assange and CYPHERPUNKS

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

The Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge looks rather lavish from the street, but inside it’s not much bigger than a family apartment. The armed police guard outside is reported to cost £12,000 a day, but I can see only three officers, all of whom look supremely bored. Christmas shoppers heading for Harrods next door bustle by, indifferent or oblivious to the fact that they pass within feet of one of the world’s most famous fugitives.

It’s almost six months since Julian Assange took refuge in the embassy, and a state of affairs that was at first sensational is slowly becoming surreal. Ecuador has granted its guest formal asylum, but the WikiLeaks founder can’t get as far as Harrods, let alone to South America, because the moment he leaves the embassy, he will be arrested – even if he comes out in a diplomatic bag or handcuffed to the ambassador – and extradited to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. Assange says he’ll happily go to Stockholm, providing the Swedish government guarantees he won’t then be extradited on to the US, where he fears he will be tried for espionage. Stockholm says no guarantee can be given, because that decision would lie with the courts. And so the weeks have stretched into months, and may yet stretch on into years.

Read the full article at the Guardian

John Pilger discusses CYPHERPUNKS in his column at the New Statesman

Thursday, December 6th, 2012

This is hacking on a vast scale by the state and its intelligence and military arms and “security” corporations. It was unmentionable at the Leveson inquiry, even though the internet was within Leveson’s remit. It is the subject of Cypherpunks (OR Books, £11) by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller- Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. That the Guardian, a principal gatekeeper of liberal debate in Britain, should describe their published conversation as “dystopian musings” is unsurprising. Understanding what they have to say is to abandon the vicarious as journalism and to embrace the real thing.

Read the full article on the New Statesman

Salon publishes an excerpt from CYPHERPUNKS

Thursday, December 6th, 2012

Julian Assange: If we go back to this time in the early 1990s when you had the rise of the cypherpunk movement in response to state bans on cryptography, a lot of people were looking at the power of the Internet to provide free uncensored communications compared to mainstream media. But the cypherpunks always saw that, in fact, combined with this was also the power to surveil all the communications that were occurring. We now have increased communication versus increased surveillance. Increased communication means you have extra freedom relative to the people who are trying to control ideas and manufacture consent, and increased surveillance means just the opposite.

Read the full excerpt on Salon

Julian Assange speaks to the BBC World Service about CYPHERPUNKS

Thursday, December 6th, 2012

The BBC World Service interviews Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London about Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.

Listen to the interview at the BBC World Service

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