It’s hard to take the message seriously when the messenger is wanted for questioning and hiding out in an embassy. It’s even more difficult when a book containing warnings about surveillance is largely comprised of interviews conducted for a state-controlled Russian TV channel. And yet, Julian Assange – the ranting, paranoid bail-jumper, trapped in the Ecuadorian ambassador’s box room – is right to warn about the future of the internet in Cypherpunks.

Strip back hyperbolic phrases that compare using the internet to “having a tank in your bedroom” and reduce the mobile phone to “a tracking device that also makes calls” and Assange’s central thesis is correct: many of us are giving up too much information about ourselves, too freely. For many internet users, the amount of information the state holds about them pales in comparison to the stash of personal data placed in the hands of Google, Facebook and Twitter. It’s surveillance we’ve submitted to willingly and contribute to.

Read the full article on the The Daily Telegraph