| And now we have a special guest and we’re hoping that there can be a bit of a talk and then we can have a Q&A. So, um, gentlemen, ladies, if you could plug in the HDMI cable,
| Everybody, ladies and gentlemen, Julian Assange.
| Yeah. Wow. I can even see some people in the audience. Yes, sir. Stop hiding. Put this back. 184.
| Um, sometimes I ask why does this keep happening to me? Other people who have seen me trying being in various places will understand this is very— but uh Chris are you are you there?
| Yeah I’m here and Jake is here too.
| Okay. So, I thought I would just say that I’ve been following um the IGF for quite some time now. Uh and we were involved in Net Mundial in various ways as well. And so I’ve come to see what the IGF is about in the geostrategic plan. I don’t know uh people here properly understand it but the IGF should not be called an Internet Governance Forum. It should be called an Internet Censorship Forum. Uh and the purpose of the IGF is to strategically deploy the new law that will govern our new international society. As the internet has merged with society and society has merged with the internet, the internet has become a major element of power within human interaction and within geopolitics. And so what laws are to what laws and bodies are to govern uh the new international society uh is something that major power actors uh are looking to sew up before minor actors are able to uh resist or to stake a claim of their own. And for IGF it really the I suppose it’s its dominance is by what we would call the West, the actors in— some actors in particular who were who were um significantly involved in it and that is the United States, the UK, and interestingly uh Sweden and um some elements like uh Net Mundial at least in some direction in which was going not of course what finally happened are perceived to be um rival institutions or rival rival forum that will take take matters in a different direction. So the this forum, the internet uh ungovernance forum, uh is is really quite important in stopping um the future of the world in terms of its laws, standards, uh and uh international bodies are being sewn up by those organizations that already have um significant power and you can look at the events uh that were not hosted and people who were not invited uh to the IGF. Yes, a lot of it has to do um with the host country Turkey and the extensive censorship that it has been engaged in and the desires by um western countries principally United States to have Turkish support for what’s going on in the Middle East. Um but uh also it is uh reflective um of what is happening with these um western backed forums in general. For for example uh earlier this year there was the Stockholm Internet Forum which is the the Swedish-backed uh version of the same thing run by Carl Bildt, the the hawkish Swedish foreign minister, and that forum has excluded the last four years. uh this year excluded Jacob Appelbaum from the Tor Project and excluded uh Edward Snowden as well um from that forum and um so um perhaps I understand having done these things a lot that these remote beings can get frightfully boring at least when I’m presenting them because it seems like I’m just stuck here as some disembodied uh figure on the TV but actually a real uh flesh and blood, a human being um that is somewhat remote in difficult circumstances but nonetheless like to to to prove that to you you’re going to ask them question if you want to proceed.
| So if there’s anyone in the audience that has some questions for Julian um primarily I’d like to prioritize the voices of the women of Turkey request from some of the organizers. So if there are women from Turkey that would like to ask questions of Julian Assange. I know some of the people in this audience are reading our book Cypherpunks and um if you’d like to ask a question of Julian maybe we could get a microphone asked. This is the microphone for Julian and— Do you have a question? She’s got a question. Fantastic.
| So she asked I just heard the phrase open culture. Yeah, she asked about— she asked about what do you think about free software in the context of free freedom freedom free freedom of the internet and freedom of the human rights and also in the context of the open culture and free culture.
| Okay. I haven’t ever spoke about this before about open free culture but— and so my perspective may be a bit a bit different to some people but what we have now uh in the West and western influenced countries um is the develop is industrial culture. So our culture is largely an industrial product and it is produced uh over the last 100 years by the entertainment and media industries and as a result the culture has been very significantly skewed to the interests of those industries uh and the individuals within them and the associated power groups and it is not a bonafide organic culture and so this is why I support piracy. I I support the restriction from copyright not because like some other people do. Um so I think necessarily um uh uh people should be uh always free to run any small organizations involved in that business but rather because I believe it will disempower major industrial organizations that are producing industrial culture and industrial culture is not real culture. Real real culture comes from the organic vent interaction interactions of individuals into society freely um uh exploring uh how they see the world with each other and from these smaller industries. That’s real culture. Industrial culture is not real culture.
| Great. And do we have another question? I think we do. I saw some hands. Can open it up to the whole floor. But there is another woman right there in the fourth row. Julian one second.
| Person asking a question now, Julian, but they will ask it in English. So could you please talk a little bit about uh censorship in Turkey? um and you know your impression of um where Turkish media freedom is going and the impact that has on you know domestic and foreign policy as well as those you know those of Turkish—
| well it seems clear from my reading of the situation from view shared to me by contacts in Turkey that Turkish media really is going down in tubes um If you look at the country with the largest number of journalists in prison, uh it is presently Turkey. Uh when I last looked about a year ago, it was 48 journalists. Of course, uh some countries have clever ways of classifying who’s in prison and who’s not in prison. For example, the United States doesn’t accept that it has any journalists in prison, but it actually has people involved in the business of journalism who can criminalize in other ways in prison. So we have to be a bit careful with the the different standards of what is journalism, what isn’t when it comes to criminalization um of information sharing. Um I don’t want to be uh however I don’t want to be um a western cultural imperialist. It is a fact that uh small smaller countries um are the recipient of the dumping of industrial cultural product and industrial media product uh and their internal agendas start to get set by the dumping of that product. So there does need to be for society to remain true to itself and is to remain there does need to be some kind of regulation about how big uh major major media organizations can grow uh and if they are very large organizations disincentives to them on telling significant uh and politically destabilizing uh lies. So we can— that’s quite obvious when we look at um the very smallest countries that deal with the very largest countries um and the industrial dumping of propaganda or uh cultural industrial spare product onto those countries. But what is happening in Turkey is maybe not about that. What is happening in Turkey is um concrete uh censorship done in order to preserve the appearance uh of authority or the uh seemingly pristine qualities of authority. I believe this is counterproductive. Um authority should come uh from the legitimate exercise of authority uh the proven responsible uh exercise of authority. um uh and fairly documented in the media. That shouldn’t come from censoring uh those who are describing what is really going on.
| Great. We have another question here in the front row.
| J we are very sad to see are not free. We are living a kind of present and it is same for Edward Sno. Why I am telling this to you? I would like to see no piece of art should be given to you or Edward Snowden. uh but public attention, public interest is not very widely especially in Turkey but also in the world. I am a journalist. I writing about the censorship but it is not only blockage of websites but also they are preventing to make investment in fiber lines in Turkey. This is also a kind of you know and also uh trying to keep the monopoly although it is showing privacy act privacy lies and uh Turkish ter— I mean I ask you we are writing the stories but public attention is only rising their voices when a website is blocked but they are not interested with the whole story. They are not giving uh reaction against some stupid actions. What are you thinking about it? how the public will be uh awake will be aware awareness.
| Well well I think you can you can combine some features. One one of the problems in Turkey is that the census of climate was allowed to develop and many people in Turkey allowed it to develop. You should have known better. They allowed it to develop because they were happy for censorship uh to be used against the Kurds uh and to be used against the references to the Armenian genocide. Um but but we’re seeing country after country um that if you allow censorship regime to develop against one marginalized group who may be inheritant to the majority soon enough this is going to cross over to the majority of people. For example, this text I have behind me. Now, this is my uh favorite, most favorite, and least favorite cable we have ever published. Uh, and it is about to— um this cable has uh everything in it. It has uh Turkey, how the head of NATO got his job. the one that’s currently going around, one is currently having a meeting in Wales previously, corruptly, uh Obama, the violation of the separation of powers, uh in Denmark, uh and the uh and the uh complete censorship of the largest Kurdish language TV station, ROJ TV. So I invite you to um search for for that story. Uh you can just search for WikiLeaks ROJ TV uh to find it. But in a nutshell, uh the prime minister of Denmark, former prime minister of Denmark, Rasmussen, uh did a secret deal, uh with Turkey and Obama to become the head of NATO in exchange for the complete destruction of the largest Kurdish language TV broadcaster, uh ROJ TV. And all of them were in on it. All of it hap was happening. and they set up a corrupt uh judicial procedure in there involving the the Danish intelligence agencies, the Danish uh judiciary and the Danish prime minister and Obama uh and representatives uh from Turkey to completely destroy that TV station. But there’s an example that if you allow censorship to develop somewhere, allow these unjust acts to occur somewhere, soon enough they’re going to occur everywhere. Similarly, we have published cables that relate to the censorship of the Turkish National Archives uh the Ottoman archives uh and the destruction there of references uh to the mass slaughter uh of the Armenians uh because that’s an embarrassing thing uh for Turkey. So if you allow to develop for one group another group soon enough it’s going to it’s going to everyone. So how perhaps you can get um more people to talk about the censorship that is occurring is that is to combine stories. So um there is no censorship for example without surveillance. The censorship story in Turkey is also a surveillance story is also part of the mass surveillance story. How do you know when someone is going to your website in order to block it? We have to monitor every single request that is going to these websites. It’s the same reason that Tor which provides anonymity to people uh also provides censorship resistance because if you can’t see what websites people are going to then you can’t see uh what it is that you need to block. So these these two technologies uh and these two stories are in fact uh in many ways exactly the same thing.
| Great. And we do we have another question here.
| All right. You’ve asked, you’ve asked before. I’m sorry, but I we’ll give you the microphone later. Can someone pass this back? The woman with the really frizzy— Where are—
| story that’s coming out just in the last week um that uh the National Security Agency spying on Kurdish uh lead and others um pass their information to Turkey uh and it was used uh to to for targeting purposes. So there we see something that is uh we also see in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen that uh mass surveillance is part of the kill chain that in order to uh work out where a target is or might be or might probably be you need to collect information about the world and and that feeds into the kill chain. So people who are involved in the production of mass technologies, the selling of it, the running of it are part of the a conspiracy to commit killing or murder. uh that’s actually just been looked at now the last couple of days with a report by here in the UK uh into cables laid by British Telecom um and their involvement in carrying information uh related to the targeting of uh drones um and whether British Telecom had may have some legal certainly moral complicity and that but going back to what I said previously that if you start allowing censorship of some group uh it will spread soon enough to the others. Well, here we have an example where if you start allowing surveillance of a minority this fed minority then soon enough it’s going to spread to others and that’s what happened in Turkey. Uh Turkey was happy to accept uh US surveillance and feed off that information. But soon enough the Turkish leadership itself became subject to that same inner surveillance.
| Great. Next question.
| Got a couple hands over here. Maybe bring to the—
| We saw that story in—
| one is the Five Eyes alliance which is predominantly run by National Security Agency, GCHQ in the UK and the other partner countries of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. And then there’s second tier u partners that there about 30 countries involved exchanging some amount of information that western allies in various sense but the the center of power that is the United States National Security Agency and it completely dwarfs um any any other country’s international surveillance efforts this the size of the Five Eyes alliance and it spying um is a a matter of concern for the whole of civilization because it covers enough for the active parts of civilization to sweep up the majority of intellectual uh and economic power world. No other country is in that position and even you see the um head of National Security Agency admitting that— then there’s some things happening domestically. So domestically, Chinese surveillance is a serious concern domestically and other countries are moving towards that same pervasive uh domestic uh Chinese surveillance model as the technology becomes cheaper. Uh for example, even in Libya um shortly in 2009 before the um fall of the Gaddafi government, a whole nation inception system was deployed called Amesys um bought off the French uh and the French had backed and sucked out the information from deployment to that system which was no doubt extremely— which no doubt gave the French and allied forces confidence about uh which elements ments in Libyan society to destroy uh when they went in there in 2011. So I would caution the Turkish government in its deployment of domestic surveillance to understand uh that it the information if it’s collected by the Turkish government will not remain uh permanently in Turkish government hand agency or whoever it’s buying— whoever it’s buying this technology off or corrupt contractors who are installing it will also suck down the data and that will compromise Turkish sovereignty.
| Well, Julian, we’re we’re all really surprised that you learned Turkish that quickly. And um kudos to you and your amazing basileş there. And you surprised basically everyone in the room. Apparently, according to the nice Turkish gentleman here, he actually did answer the question that was asked in Turkish for everyone that was wondering why you just started talking. So, um, we have a question from Chris Soghoian, who’s actually moved off of the podium here, and he has a question. Maybe Chris, do you want to just you want to ask in the microphone?
| Yeah. Uh, Julian, so you just sort of hinted at this with the description of uh of the French surveillance company. Uh there’s a professor in the UK, George— Menus, who had a really interesting essay that he wrote earlier this year on cyber colonialism in which he basically says that smaller countries have to pick which major power they wish to be hacked by. Either they’re going to install Americanmade technology and then they’re going to be back doors in that equipment or they have to install Chinese technology or I guess in this case French technology and then have have the back doors there being used by those governments. What do you think of that concept? I mean do do you think it’s right that these smaller countries do have to submit because of their lack of a domestic technology industry or do you think you know open source technology can actually provide a way for smaller countries to be free of this nation major nation state surveillance?
| So what what you’re suggest— it’s a it’s actually a very important question but what you’re suggesting Chris is open source domestic mass surveillance. Is that right?
| Well, I I wasn’t in that direction. I I think you know in the context of of fears about um foreign made technology or foreign made telephone switches, there are a lot of countries and and Edward hinted at this also in his written statement that was read out before we spoke. Um, I think in George’s essay, he was really talking more about national communication infrastructure and this desire to not have foreign equipment, whether in Australia or Indonesia or New Zealand, wherever. Um, but it’s a it’s a it’s a serious problem. I have dealt with a number of small um well not small but small medium size Latin American countries uh and countries in Southeast Asia and they absolutely have this problem. In fact, um, one of my friends who’s in the secure, uh, telephone business described to me a few years ago, um, the position taken by a number of countries in the Middle East when buying, uh, cryptographic telephone, uh, which was they could pick, um, whether they were going to be— where the phones were going to be backed by the Americans uh, and broader access to the UK. UK and others exchanging that data. Um or whether the phones were going to be backed by the Chinese or whether the phones were going to be backed by the Russians. And what those Middle Eastern uh rulers were— intelligence agencies were most concerned about of course uh is is their domestic rivals and those rivals just um on their borders. and uh and they actually were in a position where they also wanted to make the US feel reassured uh that at the intelligence agency level they weren’t making plots against the US. So by having the US listening to or what they were doing um the US would be less parano and aggressive towards them. So that’s that’s something that’s been going on for a while. Um there is an important movement now that’s really been going for a few years but it’s really been kicked along by it’s known regulations of developing uh industrial standards for telecommunications encryption— encryption telecommunications uh and open-source uh technology uh that can be developed by several different organizations but um it is actually really really hard— Um as soon as a telecommunications or cryptography um a product or infrastructure piece of software uh takes off um the incentives to corrupt the people behind it or the people behind the the other bits of software, the other bits of software users or so on down the track or to hack those servers uh become such that I find it hard to believe that anything can be secure uh in that way. Um the what has done now in terms of backdooring things is introduce stuff called bug doors where you just change the single character uh and it looks like it’s just a typing mistake and it becomes almost impossible to prove um you insert that and you can do it many many layers upstream to to the software and just wait until all the dependencies cascade out until um your bug door takes hold. So I think that’s a serious problem. I think it’s to properly solve it, academic research is needed and to standardize communication protocols in such a way that there can’t be any covert carriers and to to standardize encryption protocols in such a way that um the intercompatibility of the different types of systems is proof that there is not um a back door in the system. uh hard thing to do.
| Okay, we have a few more questions. Just to take a show of hands, how many people in the room think they’d like to ask a question in the next uh 15 minutes? We got a few. We got a few more. Julian and uh to the SC. Hi. Uh this is Yan from Leeds University and by reference to your recent book called— when Google Met WikiLeaks I would like to ask you to if possible comment about the practices of Google also other uh social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter if you have any knowledge. Thank you very much.
| Thank you for that question. I’m I’m rather pleased you ask that question because I have a a book coming out on the 18th.
| You see there’s a little button there which says I’m feeling evil.
| Um, so the position of of Google and those other major companies is something that I’ve been investigating and this book documents um what I found out in relation to Google and the basic story which is true for all these companies is that when a company becomes extremely large and Google is now— has a market capitalization of $400 billion is by market capitalization the second largest company in the United States after Apple and it is a type of company that is based on worldwide usage or or exports. um it starts to lean heavily uh on in the case of United States uh the US State Department and US intelligence agencies and those organizations that have the um function of understanding and manipulating uh the rest of the world because what does Google know about um how to influence regulation in Turkey? or may know something now but historically he’s known very little that’s not his expertise his expertise is a technology and marketing so that entering into these relationships which you see with Lockheed Martin and all these big international brands that we know about um has caused a social um alliance between the— a social and kind of practical alliance between the major— some of the major power figures that are in control of Google and the US State Department and um some US intelligence agency figures in the US military to the degree that Google is now formally defined as part of the US defense industrial base. And that formal definition doesn’t mean that Google is simply a very a very valuable communications medium uh that supplies Gmail to soldiers or advertising to recruit soldiers. Being part of the defense industrial base means that it does critical customized work with the military. And when you have an organization that in uh in practice um is deploying its power um for uh geopolitical geostrategic reasons in order to— it seems— satisfy that network of connections and favor exchange that becomes a a really serious thing. Um if you look at for example the National Security Agency’s uh penetration of China uh okay yeah it has penetrated China in a whole lot of ways concentrating on high value systems and of course flows of data uh out of China but Google has really domestically penetrated China and not as a search engine— it’s been excluded in its obvious punishments down to something like 3 to 7% of the market as a search engine in China but through Android. So through all the other— and YouTube and all the other Google properties and advertising uh it is able to surveil um a large number of human beings in detail with a a new form of industrial scales which is then accessed uh by the National Security Agency and other deep state actors. uh and to to give you an idea of the scale uh there are now uh 1.5 million Android-powered— that’s the Google system— powered devices turned on for the first time each day turned on each day but turned on for the first time each day that means that the extent of Google’s surveillance ability just on Android is expanding by 1.5 million people a day uh and That’s their locations, what their language is, what their web browsing and so on. That iPhone, their contacts, their email, and that’s more than the population in the United States per year. It’s near the population uh of Europe per year. Can can you imagine if this conference that we are having right now was expanding by 1.5 million people a year or that WikiLeaks as an organization in terms of the number of its sources was expanding by 1.5 million per year and the company is also investing in support eight growing companies recently and it does customized work for the military and so on. So even if Google or a company like it uh didn’t have that kind of um geopolitical uh infiltration, even if it didn’t consider itself as part of American exceptionalism, whenever you have that much concentration of power within a jurisdiction, it’s the same as having an unlimited oil well somewhere bouncing great wealth. it doesn’t stay there for long. In fact, people with guns turn up and start demanding a cut. Uh and that is what happens with Google. It’s what has happened with Facebook. And it is why those two companies amongst others were so attracted uh to the National Security Agency and the FBI. And at the end at the end of the day, if you know where something is and it’s within the jurisdiction you can affect uh you can send your people around with guns and in the end human organizations if the human— if the human structure of something is revealed uh guns uh trump every other uh form of uh human allegiance.
| Next question. And let me let me just finish that. So I’ll just read something from the um from the the first chapter in the analysis. It’s actually it’s a quote um that we managed to uh find uh from uh Thomas Friedman who wrote this in 1999. Thomas Friedman is a columnist for the New York Times and he— self-description is an extreme centrist. Uh and this extreme liberal centism is something that is now the dominant uh ideology in the United States and it’s not liberalism in the sense that we once knew once knew it of that people should be uh free. It is a sort of statement that has emerged and has merged with some of the dominant players in Silicon Valley. So Thomas Friedman says that— well I’ll paraphrase to begin with it is sometimes not enough to lead the global dominance of the American technology corporations to something as materialistic free market. So here’s the quote. The hidden hand of the market will never work without hidden fists. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15 fighter jet. And the hidden fist it keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish. It’s called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. That’s not John. This is an American liberal centrist and that now dressed up in different ways uh is the dominant ideology uh within the West more broadly and uh it’s an ideology that having flourished in the West in its authoritarian connected postmodern component uh has been picked up by other countries that also strive for the power of the dominant um political, military and technological elite.
| All right. And now sharing your— question. Hi.
| And apparently it didn’t. Um so um now there’s this belief that open data and open technologies will change everything and like will just uh the um power structures mainly especially open source technologies they are mainly by white um so I wonder what you think about this whole craze about um it or technology technology and this whole belief that it’s— one day you manage to find the right technology to just change the power structures whereas in all these years it’s actually that rather undermining the power structures it’s just strengthening the uh established power structures um so what do you think about that
| well I think we we— you know that most technological pundits and people that talk about techn— technology uh ignorant provincial pure fasile um yeah I’m not sure the problem is that they’re being white and male but um they they are certainly very provincial people— geographically provincial, intellectually spiritual— uh but the the question is I suppose what changes things at all And um given that human beings are at least at the moment essentially genetically invariant, human genetics is not changing very quickly at all. Um and human ideological ideas uh although there’s a a great cacophony of them now because we have quite a cheap distribution. So it’s it’s not clear that there’s going to be any real change that comes about as a result of changes in human ideology. There’s so many um different aspects of ideology that have been explored in political ideas, but I know it’s cool to kind of talk about them, but there’s so many that are out there. If we look at history, it it seems that ideological ideas are there like seeds scattered in the field. You have all sorts of seeds and all sorts of weeds. Weed seeds scattered in the field and what grows uh is a bit— is mostly dependent on what type of fertilizer is added to the soil, what the weather is, whether the soil is alkaline or acidic. And it is technology that is new. Um and new technology uh over many years going all the way back to industrializ— you know going all the way back to printing press into industrialization has changed human society in many ways. There’s an interesting question about whether it is resolved to be more or less human liberty, more or less uh human uh suffering. But I think the the desire to to ascribe positive attributes to it uh is because there doesn’t seem to really be another game. And so technology is evolving in all sorts of ways that are used for extremely malign uh purposes. uh new new forms of weaponry, new forms of centralization, new forms of control and surveillance of individuals. Uh and so that seems to be the game’s foot that is changing everything in a negative sense. Uh so if one has any hope against it, it’s going to have— we are going to have to try and repurpose or redesign some of this technology. I I think it’s a similar description to when you look at the uh postcolonial movements in Africa taking up AK-47s. Um it’s not that these movements wanted to be proponents of the AK-47. What they wanted was independence and self-determination. Uh but uh a necessary tool uh to combat M16 uh is AK-47. and that seems to be the only game in town and I think overall technology tends to be hostile to human liberty. Uh and the reason I say that is because technology is sophisticated um increasingly sophisticated and to develop m and maintain and build and source of ingredients for something that is complex and sophisticated um you need generally speaking uh organization and centralization. You understand that— sophistication and with organization and dependencies on other organizations comes about an ability to centralize and to control that technology in the hands of centralization. We can look for example,— well I just go back to— we go back to 1945 my favorite essay um which is by George Orwell on the atomic bomb which had just been dropped 2 months before and um introduced the term Cold War for the first time and Orwell looked at the future trajectory of the invention of the atomic bomb which was a device— was to that state— was only made by United States but clearly construction only be made by major industrial states. And he looked forward and said this is going to cause something like a domination of just one or two superpowers uh over the next um 50 years uh and predicted essentially correctly the geopolitical architecture of the world. Whereas there’s other technologies for example like rifles where it’s one man one rifle um talk separately about what manufactures rifles but once they are distributed— once they are taken from this original point of manufacturer they can be deployed essentially on a democratic basis. Now there are some analoges in technology to this position of deployable goods regardless of their complex origin can end up in the hands of individuals who can deploy them on essentially a democratic basis of one person— one effective piece of technology and an example of that is cryptographic programs that yes they may require quite a bit of organization um behind their development. But once they enter into the hands of individuals, they can be deployed and run autonomously. That uh control to the originator is disconnected in the same way that the division of AK-47 or a rifle is disconnected from the manufacturer. So there are some of those forms of technologies and through network lines of people cooperating um across the globe people who seek independence and self-determination cooperating. One can also subsidize what is that interconnectedness um and dependency which complex things need to reach. An example of that is the open source ecosystem where it’s not that easy to somehow grab hold of the the connections that you could normally grab hold of when you’re looking at a big supply chain that is necessary to produce something say like an F-15 or or a MiG fighter jet or um a complex extraction uh technology like production of um say nuclear energy or iron or all these the explosive power out.
| So Julian, we have by the schedule about 45 seconds left, though I suspect people would be willing to tolerate uh hearing you talk for a few more minutes. I wanted to use my position as the moderator and uh ask you to uh make a prescriptive statement. That is yesterday when I gave the keynote um I I basically said that I felt that we needed economic, political, social, cultural and technological action in order to change the issue of mass surveillance and the issue of targeted surveillance. And I put it in the frame of social justice. And so I think mass surveillance is a social justice issue. I think transparency is a social justice issue. Just due process, these these issues have to do with justice, right? And as you said quite often, you know, transparency is the method, but the goal is justice. And I wonder if in the spirit of some of those African liberation movements, if you could suggest to people what they might be able to do. I know that some people here feel quite hopeful, but they wonder what action they could take or what it is that they could do personally or how they could support these causes. And I wonder if you could close on on a note trying to be uplifting, trying to suggest what could be done in order to make positive change. I know that it’s hard for us to be positive when talking about a pretty scary and dangerous world, but I think you could do it.
| Look, I I’ve thought about this quite a lot uh in terms of negative and positive descriptions. Uh so let let’s sort of really look at this from a— you know from a philosophical or from a phenomenological description of what is happening. The whole world has been wired to itself. The internet’s merged with society. Society has merged with the internet producing inevitably one global society one global civilization. its destiny is the destiny of all nations and all peoples. Now when you connect a dominant power uh when you connect a power center— a powerful power center or what we have now is sort of kind of interesting postmodern network power— to everything else. Um what normally happens is the dominant center uh spreads out through its connections through— we go back through Roman roads now through missiles and through internet and mass surveillance and control of various forms of economic interaction. um and you end up with a homogeneous uh and uh and and and a con— conformous sometimes authoritarian structure in the region of control. And so the whole world is moving into that. That’s the reality. The whole world is becoming connected together economically and in terms of information flow and therefore it’s all going into the same place um whether we like it or not. And it’s doing it extremely quickly. So you might say, what can be done about it? Well, there’s there’s simply no choice but to do something about it. There’s no area of life um that you can escape from this phenomenon. Injustice at a large scale is arbitrary uh and it will infect you no matter no matter where you are. It is going to affect you. Then we have in the end, let’s let’s be realistic. We’re human beings living on the earth. Uh in the end, you personally are dead anyway soon enough. So what are you going to do with your time? Are you going to do something that’s serious uh that involves the fate of your civilization and your family and the nation? Uh or you going to do something that’s not serious? I say it’s it’s just given the reality of the circumstance and understanding of it uh that it is impossible to sit back and let this um situation proceed. One has to try and and uh to make the best effort that you can. And the important thing in doing that is to not give up and to stay uh to stay uh creative and look for opportunities as they arise and as they come together. There’s some reasons— there’s some ways that you have to produce something important and there are some important phenomenons. For example, cryptography as a phenomenon um gives individuals in certain circumstances um the ability to stand up to the full power of a sup— of a superpower at what is now an international superpower uh is not yet able to break directly uh encryption. So that’s an example hope. Um the same connection of technology that is clustering everything together and emitting mass surveillance and emitting mass censorship uh and meaning domination percentage to the periphery is also empowering new forms of— look Scotland is pushing towards a referendum which will probably lose but it might just win but it wouldn’t have happened a long time ago. the increasing independence and regional sovereignty of Latin America has happened in the past 10 years. Why? Yes, the US has taken the tie off the ball for the Middle East, but it’s also because um regionally and nationally individuals are communicating faster coming faster decision-m— being able to coordinate and make alliances uh and their own postmodern network groups faster than the mass surveillance is able to understand that same problem. So in some ways what is to be done is is to yes look at things from this interesting intellectual perspective and understand this broader phenomenon and where one’s place is in it. But on the other hand, it is just doing what people always done uh when we face these situations uh which is to find people who are similarly minded uh who are courageous uh to stick together to learn from the environment to display uh solidarity uh with each other and to never let any bit of ground be vacated. Uh so it’s not always just about— it’s not always about winning. It’s not always about setting important circumstance uh important examples like some of our alleged sources are have actually— Manning and Edward Snowden. Um but it’s also about um never letting uh uh the other side— in this case the side that is pushing towards authority and centralization and to diminish the human condition— never giving that side a break. Never vacating any ground never retreating and when it is necessary just occasionally to— retreating as slow as possible. And I believe that circumstance is something that on the one hand can produce perhaps a better world, but will certainly the degradation uh of justice that uh is developing in certain places and is nonetheless um a very healthy thing uh for human beings uh to do with their time. And that um healthy activity creates in my view the sort of solidarity and international um society or aspect of international society uh that human beings should aspire to. So it’s not just about winning in the end that we can win right now in terms of creating that form of human international solidarity right now.
| Great. Well, and unless you have any last words, I’d like to thank you for coming here to the um conference and I’d like to say continue— the struggle continues. Thank you, Julian.
| Great. Thanks.