Assange does a thorough background check—WikiLeaks style—of the four individuals who had visited him. He finds that all of them have close links to the US State Department, with Cohen being a former advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Clinton. And all four were associated with the powerful Council for Foreign Relations, a think tank known to be intimate with the US foreign policy establishment. Assange presents an unflattering portrait of Cohen, director of Google Ideas, whom he dubs “Google’s director of regime change”. He cites internal emails and US State Department cables that show Cohen as a meddler extraordinaire in some of the major political hotspots in the world: he was in Egypt during the revolution, in Afghanistan in 2009, in Lebanon, trying to establish a rival to Hezbollah, in Azerbaijan to “engage the Iranian communities closer to the border”, and had meetings planned in Palestine and Turkey. Interestingly enough, we learn that in London, Cohen “offered Bollywood movie executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into their films, and promised to connect them to related networks in Hollywood .” When Google… doesn’t restrict itself to Google’s shenanigans. Assange also expounds at length on the philosophy behind WikiLeaks, and his vision for the future of the internet. The besieged publisher wants nothing more, and nothing less, than to put in place a “total system” where censorship, secrecy, and surveillance (of data) would all be losing propositions, and the internet will function as an emancipating tool beyond the purview of state control, channelling information to political agents who seek to bring about social transformation. This vision is elementally opposed to that of Google, and of Schmidt, for both of whom liberation is identical with the fulfillment of US foreign policy objectives and the integration of all the world’s markets into the American economic regime. Zero privacy for the powerless and extreme secrecy for the powerful, history tells us, is a recipe for totalitarianism. The work done by WikiLeaks in punching holes through the armored cocoons of governmental secrecy is well known, and is set to continue. Assange’s next big project is to find a technological solution that would make surveillance-proof communication and censorship-proof publishing the norm rather than a dream. If he succeeds, its global impact could be even greater than that of WikiLeaks’ leaked cables.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 08:25:34 +0000
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