In the end it doesn’t matter whether Google is a completely willing participant [with U.S. surveillance efforts], a partly willing participant or a not at all willing participant. All that matters is that it is Google’s business model to collect as much information about the world and people as possible and store it and index it and compile virtual dossiers on everyone and predict their behavior, and sell it to various organizations and advertisers and so on. For any organization that does that and is based in the United States, the U.S. National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies will make sure that they get hold of that information. It’s simply too easy to do so and too attractive. It is very valuable information that gives the U.S. deep state an edge.

To read the rest of the interview, visit The Huffington Post.

Google, a flag-bearer of the new Californian “free market” ideology of digital capitalism, is an accomplice of the American state, Assange insists. He reminds me that early Google search technology was seed-funded by the NSA and CIA “information superiority” programs. Since then, the family integration of Google and the government has tightened. Assange rattles off a string of cases. Each runs well beyond the politics of personal connections, and each connection is damaging to Eric Schmidt’s claim that Google has clean political hands.

To read the rest of the article, visit The Monthly.

Lawyers for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will lodge an appeal with Sweden’s highest court, the Supreme Court today, urging it to drop his arrest warrant. They will do so on the grounds that Assange is suffering “severe limitations” on his freedoms which have been unreasonably restricted since he was first granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012. He has not left the embassy building since.

To read the rest of the review, visit Newsweek

The danger of discounting or ignoring WikiLeaks, at a time when much larger news organisations still can’t compete with the group’s record of releasing classified material, is that we shun a rebellious and adversarial group when it’s needed most. The value of WikiLeaks isn’t just in uncovering new material, though that’s important, it’s that the group’s published material is one of the most important archives of our time.

To read the rest of the article, visit The Guardian

So, Google is a, in itself, a type of private National Security Agency. It’s in the business of collecting as much data around the world as possible, about as much people and places as it can, making interconnections between this data in order to make people more predictable, in order, partly, to sell them advertisements. That’s its business model.

To hear the rest of the interview, visit DemocracyNow!

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, who has been in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, was under house arrest at a British estate in 2011 when he received a special visitor: Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. “When Google Met WikiLeaks” is about the meeting.

To read the rest of the article, visit Truthdig

I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world, which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts. And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts.

And one can ask, “What are your philosophical axioms for this?” And I say, “I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is an axiom because it is that way.” That avoids getting into further unhelpful philosophical discussion about why I want to do something. It is enough that I do.

To read the rest of the article, visit Newsweek

Assange “showed us the breadth and reach of the secret state. In When Google Met Wikileaks (OR Books, £10) Assange comments on what he thinks of Google but also provides a transcript of a conversation between himself and its CEO, Eric Schmidt, when they met up in England during Assange’s house arrest. He comments that Eric’s team of people was ‘one part Google, three parts US foreign-policy establishment’. An intriguing and pithy analysis of Google’s relationship with the US government.”

To read the rest of the list, visit The Independent

The very concept of the Internet — a single, global, homogenous network that enmeshes the world — is the essence of a surveillance state. The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored.

To read the rest of the article, visit The New York Times