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<a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html?_r=0">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html?_r=0</a>
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Reading this article by Julian Assange, most people will be left
with a gnawing feeling of deep concern and worry, but they may only
be able to frown and fret helplessly about where the world seems
headed. However, those among the Internet governance civil society
will perhaps have to read it with a certain sense of introspection
and political responsibility....<br>
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I think it is worth having a discussion in the IGC on this article,
examining what needs the support of civil society and maybe what
doesn't so much, assuming there is at least some significance to
what Assange writes. <br>
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Article also cut pastes below....<br>
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<h1 itemprop="headline" class="articleHeadline">The Banality of
‘Don’t Be Evil’</h1>
By <span itemprop="author creator" itemscope=""
itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">JULIAN
ASSANGE</span></span><br>
<br>
“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 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/google_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More information about Google Inc" class="meta-org">Google</a>,
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.
<p itemprop="articleBody"> 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. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> “The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything
else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s
geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the
question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a
respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been
trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to
Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to
Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A.
director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> In the book the authors happily take up
the white geek’s burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient,
hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen,
graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San
Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are
all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties
of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the
Western empire. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> The authors offer an expertly banalized
version of tomorrow’s world: the gadgetry of decades hence is
predicted to be much like what we have right now — only cooler.
“Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer
technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day,
another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated.
Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States
government, between the communications of every human being not in
China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous;
young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease
and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of
surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as
“participation”; and our present world order of systematized
domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned,
unafflicted or only faintly perturbed. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> The authors are sour about the Egyptian
triumph of 2011. They dismiss the Egyptian youth witheringly,
claiming that “the mix of activism and arrogance in young people
is universal.” Digitally inspired mobs mean revolutions will be
“easier to start” but “harder to finish.” Because of the absence
of strong leaders, the result, or so Mr. Kissinger tells the
authors, will be coalition governments that descend into
autocracies. They say there will be “no more springs” (but China
is on the ropes). </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> The authors fantasize about the future of
“well resourced” revolutionary groups. A new “crop of consultants”
will “use data to build and fine-tune a political figure.” </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> “His” speeches (the future isn’t all that
different) and writing will be fed “through complex
feature-extraction and trend-analysis software suites” while
“mapping his brain function,” and other “sophisticated
diagnostics” will be used to “assess the weak parts of his
political repertoire.” </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> The book mirrors State Department
institutional taboos and obsessions. It avoids meaningful
criticism of Israel and Saudi Arabia. It pretends, quite
extraordinarily, that the Latin American sovereignty movement,
which has liberated so many from United States-backed plutocracies
and dictatorships over the last 30 years, never happened.
Referring instead to the region’s “aging leaders,” the book can’t
see Latin America for Cuba. And, of course, the book frets
theatrically over Washington’s favorite boogeymen: North Korea and
Iran.<br>
</p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> Google, which started out as an
expression of independent Californian graduate student culture — a
decent, humane and playful culture — has, as it encountered the
big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional Washington
power elements, from the State Department to the National Security
Agency. </p>
Despite accounting for an infinitesimal fraction of violent deaths
globally, terrorism is a favorite brand in United States policy
circles. This is a fetish that must also be catered to, and so “The
Future of Terrorism” gets a whole chapter. The future of terrorism,
we learn, is cyberterrorism. A session of indulgent scaremongering
follows, including a breathless disaster-movie scenario, wherein
cyberterrorists take control of American air-traffic control systems
and send planes crashing into buildings, shutting down power grids
and launching nuclear weapons. The authors then tar activists who
engage in digital sit-ins with the same brush.
<p itemprop="articleBody"> I have a very different perspective. The
advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the
death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward
authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book,
“Cypherpunks.” But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that
the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive
autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say
governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling
them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In
reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the
attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving
the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> The section on “repressive autocracies”
describes, disapprovingly, various repressive surveillance
measures: legislation to insert back doors into software to enable
spying on citizens, monitoring of social networks and the
collection of intelligence on entire populations. All of these are
already in widespread use in the United States. In fact, some of
those measures — like the push to require every social-network
profile to be linked to a real name — were spearheaded by Google
itself. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> THE writing is on the wall, but the
authors cannot see it. They borrow from William Dobson the idea
that the media, in an autocracy, “allows for an opposition press
as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits
are.” But these trends are beginning to emerge in the United
States. No one doubts the chilling effects of the investigations
into The Associated Press and Fox’s James Rosen. But there has
been little analysis of Google’s role in complying with the Rosen
subpoena. I have personal experience of these trends. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> The Department of Justice admitted in
March that it was in its third year of a continuing <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/doj-wikileaks.pdf">criminal
investigation</a> of WikiLeaks. Court testimony states that its
targets include “the founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks.”
One alleged source, Bradley Manning, faces a 12-week trial
beginning tomorrow, with 24 prosecution witnesses expected to
testify in secret. </p>
<p itemprop="articleBody"> This book is a balefully seminal work in
which neither author has the language to see, much less to
express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing.
“What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” they tell us,
“technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.”
Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly
implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the
future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto
vacant human faces — forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer
technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they
ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone
caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple
imperative: Know your enemy. </p>
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