In many ways then When Google Met Wikileaks is a book of two parts. It is first and foremost an attempt to help people understand the role of Google, and secondly it is a more general insight into some the most important issues around information today. On both points Assange reminds us why he matters.

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Julian Assange’s understanding of the nature and scope of ideological power is staggering.

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We may […] look back on When Google Met WikiLeaks as the first declaration of new digital war. We hear it here first, from a soft voice quietly speaking to the truths of Silicon Valley: Google is as capable of being evil—may already be evil—as any other company, body, or state.

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Eric Schmidt: But how in the future will people deal with the fact that the incentive to publish information that is misleading, wrong, manipulative, is very high? Furthermore, you can’t figure out who the bad publisher was as well as the good, because there’s anonymity in the system.

Julian Assange: First we must understand that the way it is right now is very bad. A journalist for the Nation, Greg Mitchell, who has also written about us, wrote a book about the mainstream media called So Wrong for So Long.229 And that title is basically it. Yes we have these heroic moments with Watergate and so on, but actually, come on, the press has never been very good. It has always been very bad. Fine journalists are an exception to the rule. When you are involved in something yourself, like I am with WikiLeaks, and you know every facet of it, you look to see what is reported about it in the mainstream press and you see naked lie after naked lie. You know that the journalist knows it’s a lie; it is not a simple mistake. Then people repeat lies and so on. The condition of the mainstream press nowadays is so appalling I don’t think it can be reformed. I don’t think that is possible. I think it has to be eliminated, and replaced with something that’s better.

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Despite its cuddly image and free services, he said, Google’s mass harvesting of data and dominance of the internet are cause for ‘serious concern’ worldwide.

He said: ‘Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of U.S. power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation.’

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In a world where the Web is more decentralized, with more autonomy and anonymity, how does leadership play out on that Internet? Or is there a need for leadership? Or is it OK if it’s simply a fragmented experience?

Leadership is still very important because when you have a cacophony of ideas, it takes a lot of time to understand which ones are worth considering. And so to solve that problem, people look to those who they respect or understand. That’s why we like to read the books of authors that deepen our understanding of a particular area of the world.

But there’s a difference between leadership and direction—coercive control over something. Extremely large states, they have a coercive control structure, and large companies like Google are intertwined with the mechanisms of the state such as law, courts, and police.

Leadership through values or through the creation of new standards or new software or new formulations of human institutions, these are structures that can propagate to others but where the originator doesn’t maintain more than a spiritual or philosophical influence. Most good ideas in human development have spread that way—from writing to the gramophone.

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Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, England, about three hours’ drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention.

But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.

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Assange was introduced by one of his editors, who joked, “One of the things we love about Julian is that we always know where he is.” The man himself appeared in suit and tie, rosy-cheeked and seemingly well nourished. As he spoke about Google’s unsavoury ties to Washington, a man in an electric blue suit and yellow neckerchief sat cross-legged on the floor, sketching Assange’s face on a large drawing pad. Twenty minutes in, the British singer M. I. A. joined Assange on screen. The two spoke briefly about freedom of expression before Assange opened the floor to questions. Someone asked how Assange felt about still being labelled a traitor. Assange replied that he was well and truly over it, reminding the crowd of his own country’s response to his case. “The Australian government came after me harder than the US government,” he said. “It’s a sad thing how pathetic my own country is.” An OR Books rep then asked any Google employees in the room to come forward and ask Assange a question. No one fessed up. (The publisher of When Google Met WikiLeaks is now offering 20 per cent off the book for all Google employees.)

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Assange’s book, When Google Met Wikileaks, is the transcript (with commentary by Assange) of a secret meeting between the two that took place on June 23, 2011, when Schmidt visited Assange in England. In his commentary, Assange explores the troubling implications of Google’s vast reach, including its relationships with international authorities, particularly in the U.S., of which the public is largely unaware. Schmidt’s book, How Google Works, is a broader, sunnier look at how technology has presumably shifted the balance of power from companies to people. It tells the story of how Google rose from a nerdy young tech startup to become a nerdy behemoth astride the globe. Read together, the two books offer an unsettling portrait both of our unpreparedness for what lies ahead and of the utopian spin with which Google (and others in the digital world) package tomorrow. While Assange’s book accuses Google of operating as a kind of “‘Don’t Be Evil’ empire,” Schmidt’s book fulfills Assange’s worst fears, presenting pseudo-irreverent business maxims in an “aw shucks” tone that seems willfully ignorant of the inevitable implications of any company coming to so sweepingly dominate our lives in unprecedented and often legally uncharted ways.

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By the time Google began as a Stanford University research project in 1996, the Creation Myth of Silicon Valley (and all the hubris that it brings) was locked solid. People have struggled to name and define this ideology over the years: the California Ideology, Digital Utopianism, Technolibertarianism, and so on. Whatever you wish to call it, its apotheosis was Wired in its heyday, before being sold to Conde Nast in 1998. The magazine connected and crystallized a number of ideological strains that had been popular in the valley for decades, making them seem real. And one of the key parts of the Silicon Valley myth is that governments cannot and never will be able to keep up with digital communications technology, which is why government is slow and stupid, while Silicon Valley is smart and fast.

But a look at the history of the tech sector betrays this notion for the con job that it is. As long as American intelligence has needed computers, it has needed Silicon Valley – who has been paid handsomely for its part in this marriage born out of the Cold War.

“It’s not surprising that Silicon Valley would be collaborating with the biggest industries in society,” says Assange. “Including intelligence agencies, which are an industry in terms of their need to or their desire to purchase large amounts of data.”

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So has Google earned the ire of Assange? First, he was naive to expect fair or favourable treatment. He is any capitalist’s nightmare and, although Google may present itself as a new type of company, in many respects it is an old-style one. It is Wall Street-dependent and close to government, partly through conventional lobbying and partly through a joint interest in amassing information. It used to be unremarkable to say that the interests of General Motors and those of the US were aligned. It should be equally unremarkable to say the same of Google and the Obama administration.

This is not necessarily a bad thing but plainly it could be and it is here that Assange is on relatively solid ground. Schmidt and Cohen did use him rather ruthlessly and misrepresented him at certain points in their book. Furthermore, Google’s power – as demonstrated, embarrassingly, by the ease with which it can walk, carefree and practically tax-free, into Downing Street – is disturbing, unaccountable and, increasingly, global. “Technocratic imperialism” is a substantial charge.

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Post the Edward Snowden revelations, it is common knowledge that surveillance is universal and online privacy is a myth. But the general assumption has been that tech companies were being dragooned into spying for the government. When Google Met WikiLeaks shows that assumption to be largely unfounded.

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In his book, Assange made it clear that Google is not as innocent as it portrays itself to be. He revealed what happened when this company, that grew out of an innovative California graduate student culture, came in contact with Washington’s halls of power. With its official motto“Don’t be evil”, the company claims its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

Assange unveils how, contrary to Google’s efforts to create a positive public image by giving away free storage, making it appear not like a corporation driven solely by profit motives, this seemingly philanthropic company is a willing participant in its own government co-optation. Indeed, he argues, Google Idea was birthed as a brainchild of a Washington think-tank.

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In a Canadian broadcast exclusive, controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange joins Jian Ghomeshi on the phone from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been living for over two years.

Despite his physical confines, the publisher continues to joust with his ideological opponents on the world stage. His latest book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, is a scathing take on what he alleges are the internet giant’s geopolitical ambitions and what he sees as a business model built of “free service traps”.

Listen to the full interview at Q.

HP: Could Google keep its current business model while also making it impossible for the NSA to access its data, or is it baked into the business model?

JA:As long as Google is operating its current business model and runs out of the U.S. jurisdiction, it cannot protect people from the National Security Agency or the FBI, or other arms of the U.S. government.

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“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.”

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Earlier last week, winds off the Atlantic brought a rumour that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange might be appearing at the Nantucket Project this weekend. But how? Had he left his place of asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London? No, he will not be appearing in the flesh, but as the latest celebrity to follow the likes of Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur to be beamed by hologram.

The question of the day is a large one, about the fate of mankind. As the town square of yesterday (with its post office, bank, library and general store) is fast being displaced by its digital equivalent (email, online banking, Wikipedia and Ocado), what are the societal benefits and attendant costs? Finally, what measures does Assange see as necessary to ensure an optimal information future?

Read the full write-up of the event on The Guardian

During the interview Assange outlines his philosophy and expands on what he calls “scientific journalism”. The press “has always been very bad. Fine journalists are an exception to the rule.” His idea of scientific journalism is that “things must be precisely cited, with the original source, and as much of the information as possible should be put in the public domain, so that people can look at it, just like in science, so that you can test to see whether the conclusion follows from the experimental data.” Otherwise, he says, “the journalists probably just made it up.”

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“How many Google employees are at this party?”

The question hangs in the air at the Babycastles arcade in Manhattan, where Julian Assange’s silver-haired visage is being projected onto the walls via video stream. Assange is taking questions about his new book, When Google Met Wikileaks, which rails against the company’s ever-expanding ambitions, its ties to the surveillance state, and the increasingly intimate relationship between Silicon Valley and the US political machine in Washington.

Seeing no hands raised in the packed room, Assange offers an incentive: 20 percent off sticker price for Google employees. “And we’ll mail the book to you in a brown paper bag,” he adds with a grin, the audience’s laughter echoing faintly through the stream’s audio. And yes, you can buy it with bitcoins.

This is how you throw a book launch party when you’re an international fugitive that’s been holed up in an Ecuadorean embassy for the past two years.

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