Very interesting piece here from the head of Wikileaks, excerpted from his forthcoming book, recounting his meeting with Google chairman Eric Schmidt and discussing the tech company's ties to the U.S. government and its foreign policy establishment.
http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Extremely interesting; thanks, Starchild. I just ordered Assange's book.
Hi Starchild,
Thanks for this post! Fantastic insights by Assange. The introduction to the article pretty much summarizes the challenge, and I think two items by Assange are especially worth thinking about.
"They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange,
the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness.
For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with U.S. foreign policy objectives and is
driven by connecting non-Western countries to Western companies and markets."
"Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and
churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism,
transforming “civil society” into a buyer’s market for political factions and
corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm’s length. The last forty
years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose
purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy."
"A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire." Marcy