Image of the Day: Live from the Ecuadoran Embassy
On Wednesday night, OR Books had a book launch party at Babycastles in New York City for When Google Met Wikileaks, featuring a videolink appearance by author Julian Assange, who remains in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. Photo: OR Books/Courtney Dudley
See the full newsletter on Shelf-Awareness
How does a wanted man have a book party? On Wednesday night at Babycastles, a Manhattan videogame-art collective, Julian Assange celebrated the publication of his new book, When Google Met WikiLeaks. He was present via videochat. The collectivists projected him on their walls. A crowd had formed to see the shining-haired hacker king – youngish New Yorkers, mostly. They stood or sat and drank beers as Assange talked about the internet.
Assange said: “Compare the mission statements of Google and the NSA – the NSA, who literally say, ‘We want to collect all private information, pool it, store it, sort it, index it, and exploit it.’ Whereas Google says, ‘We want to collect all private information, pool it, store it, sort it, and sell those profiles to advertisers.’ Really, they’re almost identical.”
He said, “Every time you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you’re being a rat. You’re being a narc.”
Read the full story on The Guardian
Schmidt’s job, he said is “difficult” because he has to be “secretary of state” for Google. Assange said it was “sad” that Schmidt had to resort to insults in his interview with ABC News yesterday.
Aware of the arrival of Assange’s book, Schmidt adamantly denied his allegations in that interview.
“Julian is very paranoid about things. Google never collaborated with the NSA and in fact, we’ve fought very hard against what they did,” Schmidt said. “We have taken all of our data, all of our exchanges, and we fully encrypted them so no one can get them, especially the government.”
Assange said the clash of ideologies was “not a matter of personalities. At least, not until last night.”
Read full coverage on CNET
“There now six million people in the United States with security clearances. That is more than the population of Norway, New Zealand, or Scotland. That is in effect a state within a state. Why is it a state within a state? Because people that have security clearances have extra laws that they are meant to obey. That is extremely alarming [at the] moment, if we go back to 2010, just back to when it was 2.5 million. So there has been more than a doubling in the size of the National Security State within the US in just 4-5 years.”
Watch the full interview on RT
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has spoken out about his continued self-imprisonment at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Mr Assange sought refuge at the embassy in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning over alleged sexual offences.
He said it was a “difficult situation for a national security reporter” but “in some ways there are benefits”.
The BBC’s John Simpson talked to Mr Assange about his new book on Google, which he claims working alongside the US government.
Watch the interview on BBC
LONDON—Disclosures of state surveillance touching the far corners of our digital lives make for grim reading. But Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks bombshells set in motion the new era of whistle-blowing on state surveillance, says there is a glimmer of hope for Canadians.
In an interview from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has claimed asylum for more than two years, Assange points to a Supreme Court ruling, and the subsequent actions of Canadian Internet service providers, as a step in the right direction in the battle for privacy.
Read the full interview at the Toronto Star.
Especially in the earlier days, there was a tension for many sites in covering Assange — and by extension, WikiLeaks — and it was very much visible in the way Gawker chose to approach the subject.
On the one hand, WikiLeaks became famous because it facilitated the publication of several important, consequential stories about the security state by providing leaked classified documents to journalists.
On the other hand, WikiLeaks, the organization, has more and more existed as a support structure for the career of the man who founded it — a man who is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, avoiding extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.
WikiLeaks and its supporters have argued that such criticism is a distraction from its mission.
To read the rest of the article, visit The Washington Post
While the 2011 meeting predated Snowden’s leaks, much of the writing has benefited from a post-Snowden perspective, an advantage Assange has over Schmidt’s early 2013 book, which came out just weeks before Snowden’s leaks began. As Assange repeatedly points out, Schmidt and his co-author make bogus predictions about how the future of whistleblowing in America will fade away.
Ever since Snowden shone sunlight on the American surveillance apparatus, Assange has had to deal with considerably less accusations of outright paranoia. The accusations of mad pessimism seem to have dropped off slightly as well.
“Populations basically don’t like wars and have to be lied into it,” Assange said. “That means we can be ‘truthed’ into peace. That is cause for great hope.”
At its most optimistic and convincing, Assange’s book gives a detailed outline of how he sees the Internet being used in an ideal world: An anti-surveillance, anti-censorship, anti-establishment tool that can fend off the advances of even the rich and powerful; a way to bring transparency and progress to power centers around the globe.
Valiant as it may be, that mission’s success may depend on whether anyone bothers to read the footnotes.
To read the full review, visit The Daily Dot
Matthew Phelan:There was a piece in Slate last year about Google, that I kept thinking about with respect to this book, about how Google’s internal culture and goals are bound up in Star Trek. For example: Amit Singhal, the head of Google’s search rankings team, told the South by Southwest Interactive Festival that “The destiny of [Google’s search engine] is to become that Star Trek computer, and that’s what we are building.”
It makes sense to me in that there’s a real Camelot-era liberal pro-statist ideal underlying Star Trek’s vision of the future, and I’m curious what your sense was as to whether or not Eric Schmidt really buys into that. AND/OR I am curious to know how your idealized vision of the future differs from that Google Star Trek model.
Julian Assange:I hadn’t seen that piece. At a glance, it reminds me of the discovery that the NSA had had the bridge of the Enterprise recreated. In my experience it is more reliable and fairer to look at peoples interests and expenditure rather than try to diagnose their inner mental state, as the latter often lets people project their own biases. As I say in the book, I found Eric Schmidt to be, as you would expect, a very sharp operator. If you read “The New Digital Age”, the apolitical futurism of Star Trek seems to fit what Schmidt writes quite well. I also quite liked this summary of Google’s vision for the future: “Google’s vision of the future is pure atom-age 1960s Jetsons fantasy, bubble-dwelling spiritless sexists above a ruined earth.”
Read the full conversation at Gawker.
When Google Met Wikileaks raises constructive ways around the growing totalitarian state, including the use of mobile peer-to-peer communications that don’t require going through a telco; comprehensive encryption (files and communication); and the use of non-persistent operating systems on a USB stick or DVD, such as TAILs.
This will be the face of freedom in the new digital age: Running and hiding and subverting goofy billionaire philanthropists who only want what’s best for you, who only want to help you make the right choices, all watched over, as Adam Curtis would have it, by machines of loving grace. And if you won’t be watched over, you will be targeted, put on the president’s future Tuesday morning hit list. You will never see it coming.
Read the full review at Prague Post.
But having believed Schmidt to be “a brilliantly but politically hapless Californian tech billionaire”, Assange concedes “I was wrong”. He had not appreciated the Google chief’s relationship with the US government, including the National Security Agency (NSA). The penny dropped when Wikileaks formally warned the State Department of its publication of cables and received an email response from Lisa Shields who, as Schmidt’s partner, attended the Ellingham Hall interview. “At this point I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone,” claims Assange.
He acknowledges that the Internet giant began with a “decent, humane and playful culture” and is still widely-seen as “a magical engine”.
But after reading The New Digital Age he decided that Google’s aim was to “position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary”. Angry, he wrote a disparaging review in the New York Times headlined “The Banality of Don’t Be Evil” (after Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ slogan). Four days later, Snowden made his revelations of the NSA’s accessing of Google data.
Read the full review in The Independent.
Either way, the notorious Internet publisher is already gearing up for a speaking schedule to promote his anti-Google book, When Google Met WikiLeaks.
In true WikiLeaks style, the book reveals a private conversation between Google chair Eric Schmidt and Assage. The book asserts that Schmidt (and Google) believe that technology will save the world by helping the United States achieve its foreign policy goals. Assange, ever the anarchist, believes technology will help the world become more “stateless.”
Read the entire article Venturebeat.
In his upcoming book, When Google Met Wikileaks, Assange offers an edited transcript of his conversations with Google chairman Eric Schmidt while Assange was under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in the UK.
In the book, Assange cites several of Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley investigations, and writes that “my discussion of [the ties between Google and the military/intelligence industry] draws on Levine’s research.”
Read the full post at Pando Daily.
In When Google Met WikiLeaks, Assange’s upcoming book featuring a 2011 face-to-face conversation with Google executive Eric Schmidt, Assange explained the then-new cryptocurrency to the leader of the world’s most powerful technology company.
At the time, Bitcoin had just surpassed the U.S. dollar in price and was being sold for just over 1€. Bitcoin has since reached peaks above $1,000 and currently sits at a $576 average sales price.
While talking to Schmidt, Assange recommended he “should get into the Bitcoin system now” in order to reap the most rewards.
It’s no surprise that Assange was one of the earliest big investors in the Bitcoin economy.
Read the full article on The Daily Dot.
Assange announced earlier this month that he was writing a “major” new book, in which he said he would detail a 2011 encounter with Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Chairman Eric Schmidt. His publisher said that the book, “When Google Met WikiLeaks,” includes “an historic dialogue” between the “North and South Poles of the Internet.”
Read the full report at the International Business Times.
Julian Assange has also announced a new book: When Google Met WikiLeaks. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The Guardian reports that “It will recount how, in June 2011 when Assange was living under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, [Google chairman Eric] Schmidt and ‘an entourage of US State Department alumni including a top former adviser to Hillary Clinton’ visited for several hours and ‘locked horns’ with the Wikileaks founder.” But will it recount the night that Assange spent with Lady Gaga?
Read the full article at Entertainment Weekly.
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, has agreed to write a new book detailing his tussles with Google, his publisher, the independent house OR Books, announced.
The book is to focus on the whistleblower’s discussions with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt in a 2011 meeting in London, and is described by the New York-based publisher as “an historic dialogue” between “the North and South poles of the Internet.”
Read the full announcement at the Los Angeles Times.
Julian Assange is writing a “major” new book, in which the Wikileaks founder details his vision for the “future of the internet” as well as his encounter in 2011 with Google chairman Eric Schmidt – a meeting which his publisher described as “an historic dialogue” between “the North and South poles of the internet”.
The book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, will be published in September this year, announced publisher OR Books this morning. It will recount how, in June 2011 when Assange was living under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, Schmidt and “an entourage of US State Department alumni including a top former adviser to Hillary Clinton” visited for several hours and “locked horns” with the Wikileaks founder.
Read the full article at the Guardian.
Julian Assange dumped his Canongate memoir deal but his quill is beginning to stir again. The WikiLeaks founder, still stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy, is writing another book. It is entitled When Google Met WikiLeaks, and is due out in September. The new work documents the encounter between Assange and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, when they met at Ellingham Hall where Assange was holed up 2011.
Read the full article at the Telegraph.
Journalist Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website, has landed a deal with OR Books.
When Google Met WikiLeaks chronicles a conversation that took place in June 2011 between the infamous whistleblower and Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt. It contains an edited transcript of that conversation. The publisher plans to release the book in September 2014.
Here’s more from the press release: “Assange proposes a radical overhaul of the naming structure of the Internet, one which would revolutionize the way information is accessed. By coupling the intellectual content of a document to its online name—doing away with the haphazard URL system—Assange outlines a potential future for the Internet that would make it faster and much more difficult to censor.”
Read the announcement in full at GalleyCat.
