Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

Julian Assange

We see that there is now a militarization of cyberspace in the sense of a military occupation. When you communicate over the Internet, when you communicate over mobile phones, which are now meshed to the Internet, your communications are being intercepted by military intelligence organizations. It's like having a tank in your bedroom. It's a soldier between you and your wife as you’re SMSing. We are all living under martial law, as far as our communications are concerned, we just can't see the tanks but they're there. To that degree, the Internet, which was supposed to be a civilian space, has become a militarized space.

Western societies specialize in laundering censorship and structuring the affairs of the powerful such that any remaining public speech that gets through has a hard time affecting the true power relationships of a highly fiscalized society because such relationships are hidden in layers of complexity and secrecy.