Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has spoken about his battle against extradition to Sweden in a rare and defiant interview with the BBC from the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Watch the video on the BBC’s website

The interview was anticipated. CNN host Erin Burnett was to have WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange, author of the new book, Cypherpunks, come on her show. Another pundit, Brooke Baldwin, promoted it on CNN just after 3:30 pm EST and said, “You have quite the big interview scoop, so we’ll talk about that in a minute,” just before getting to a segment on Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Burnett set out to do a hit job on Assange. From the beginning, Assange tried to discuss what he found to be important and not trivial or plain disingenuous and ignorant. As the clip shows, he got into how companies are working in countries to engage in widespread surveillance showing documents. Burnett reacted, “I’m curious though about this — A lot of people share this fear about being under surveillance, right? Some people might say you go way too far on it, but people do share your fear. But you are someone trying to champion and like I said benefiting by the Internet by putting out information governments don’t want people to have.”

Read the full article on Firedoglake

Watch the video on CNN’s website

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

Sometimes a paranoid, to paraphrase William Burroughs, is just a person in possession of all the facts. There is no one on earth for whom this description is more accurate than the WikiLeaks founder, dubious hacker messiah and noted cop-dodger Julian Assange, currently holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy evading extradition on rape allegations in Sweden. Assange knows more than almost anyone about the surveillance and security issues that affect every internet user; that he writes like a jaw-gnawing conspiracy theorist with crippling delusional narcissism doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

Read the full review on the New Statesman

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has co-authored a book arguing that the world is at a pivotal decision: Whether the Internet will free us, or enslave us. Assange, famous for his ‘hacktivism,’ used a decidedly low-tech medium for his latest polemic.

Titled Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, the book is partially based on RT’s ‘The World Tomorrow’ television series. In several episodes, Assange interviewed his co-authors, Jacob Applebaum of the US, Jérémie Zimmermann of France and Andy Müller-Maguhn of Germany.

Read the full article on Russia Today or watch the video

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, still in his asylum sanctuary at the Ecuadorean embassy in west London, is publishing a book about “the resistance” movement against internet surveillance.

Read more at The London Evening Standard

Julian Assange’s last foray into the publishing world ended in an acrimonious and highly costly dispute, after he withdrew from his million-pound contract and his publishers released a draft autobiography manuscript against his wishes.

Now confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London after being granted asylum, the WikiLeaks founder has announced he is to publish a new book about the internet, freedom and what he terms “the resistance”.

The book, entitled Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, will be published in paperback and electronically on 26 November, the US publisher OR Books told the New York Times. Three “cutting-edge thinkers and activists from the frontline of the battle for cyberspace” are listed as co-authors: US-based Jacob Applebaum, Jeremie Zimmermann from France and German Andy Müller-Maguhn.

The text is largely based on a transcript of an interview Assange conducted with the three others for an episode of his TV show, The World Tomorrow, broadcast in June on the Russian state-funded channel RT, Zimmermann told the Guardian. But he said there would be “plenty of added content”.

Read the full coverage in The Guardian

The publisher OR Books announced on Sunday that it had acquired “Cypherpunks,” a new book about freedom and the Internet by Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Mr. Assange, who was granted asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in August, wrote the book with three other authors: Jacob Appelbaum, Jérémie Zimmermann and Andy Müller-Maguhn. The book will go on sale Nov. 26 in paperback and as an e-book. Mr. Assange said in a statement that he wrote the book in response to his longstanding worries about government control of the Internet and surveillance. “In March 2012 I gathered together three of today’s leading cypherpunks to discuss the resistance,” he said. “Two of them, besides myself, have been targeted by law enforcement agencies as a result of their work to safeguard privacy and to keep government accountable. Their words, and their stories, need to be heard.”

Read the announcement in The New York Times