Cypherpunks
Visionary WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange brings together a small group of cutting-edge thinkers and activists to discuss whether electronic communications will emancipate or enslave. Among the topics addressed are: Do Facebook and Google constitute the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed,' perpetually tracking people's locations, contacts and lives? Far from being victims of that surveillance, are most people willing collaborators? Are there legitimate forms of surveillance? And does anyone have the ability to resist this tide?'
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What Hacker News says
- > Hacker spirit. Nowadays, the word “hacker” conjures up visions of Russian trolls, Julian Assange, and Angelina Jolie’s 90s pixie cut. But a nobler usage predates this. Hacker culture, in the original sense, grew out of places like MIT in the 60s, with its tradition of highbrow silliness and elaborate technical pranks.
Implying that Julian Assange's endeavours were not noble, or in some sense comparable to "Russian trolls", or in some sense antithetical to the "hacker culture" of yore, is heinous and ahistorical. I mean that specifically in the sense that I think history will show it to be false.
Not only that, it's also a gross misunderstanding of what Wikileaks was - a huge "hack", in the early MIT sense. A problem was observed, and a solution with genuine "hack value" was applied to it.
The facts illustrating this are already in the public domain, although I am of course aware that they're floating around in a sea of insinuations and fake scandals and half-truths and propaganda and bare lies.
Source: I followed Wikileaks and Julian Assange since around 2009. It naturally goes unmentioned in the majority of newspaper and documentary treatments of the subject, but Wikileaks is deeply rooted in the cypherpunk ethos of the early 90s, which itself is historically tied to the earlier MIT hacker culture.
Stallman, who this introduction goes on to cite as a bona fide representative of the early culture and an "open source gnuru" (shudder), is a vocal supporter of Assange, and has stated clearly his belief that Wikileaks has that hack value I mentioned above.
I recommend the book Cypherpunks to get a feel for the actual cultural and technical ethos surrounding Wikileaks, for anyone interested. For a rebuttal to the incredible amount of crappy reporting on the legal side, Nils Melzer's book on the Swedish case is good. There are plenty of good articles too (in the middle of a couple of orders of magnitude as many bad ones), but here's one that might be a good start for someone interested:
https://theindicter.com/the-significance-of-wikileaks-as-inv...
- "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet" Julian Assange.
"Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkess." Warren Carroll
- It's more like an Internet that meatspace governments can't mess with. Like Tor .onion sites, I2P and other decentralized overlay networks. But ubiquitous.
Here are some of the fundamental documents:
"The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" (1992) by Timothy C. May <https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html>
"The Cyphernomicon" (1994) by Timothy C. May <https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/cyphernomicon.txt>
"Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities" (1994) by Timothy C. May <https://nakamotoinstitute.org/virtual-communities/>
"A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (1996) by John Perry Barlow <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence>
Cypherpunks (2012) by Julian Assange et al. <http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/>
- Mostly fair points... you don't deserve to get downvoted so heavily. As one of the probably few people here who has spent significant time living in China (first trip: 2001, last trip: less than a month ago, total time: 7-8 years), and has also lived in various parts of the west (Australia, UK, US), I agree with you that the west isn't much better.
For more discussion on why this absolutely is the case, see (1) the Cypherpunks interviews at http://assange.rt.com/ (2) the longer-form Cypherpunks book at http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/ (3) Bruce Schneier's recent essay at http://www.schneier.com/essay-420.html (which actually evidences some of the same) (4) Applebaum's 29C3 keynote at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl5OQz0Ko8c (5) Echelon as best we knew it through the eyes of multiple intelligence agencies 12 years ago: http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep-fin.htm (6) ... if you get this far, you will find more sources on your own.
- This Machine Kills Secrets - Andy Greenberg - http://www.thismachinekillssecrets.com/
Cypherpunks - Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann - http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/
- I think it was in the book "Cypherpunks" (the one with Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann) where one of them said something about the last few decades with the move to total dependence on digital technologies in so many ways, and it being the largest transfer of power in the history of the species.
If someone has the exact quote, I'd welcome it...
Anyway, the idea stuck with me. Anyone who wants to reject the point will have an easy time as it's such a broad claim, but I think it's worthy of reflecting on, and perilous to ignore.
There's a lot of ink splattered about technology these days, of course, but it's still rare enough that the larger picture of what's going on historically in terms of power structures is seriously reflected on.
