The long term is not so sanguine. Assange, along with three co-authors -- Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn and Je're'mie Zimmermann -- wrote a book titled "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet." It warns that we are "galloping into a new transnational dystopia." The internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to create a "Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia" that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will "merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control."
"All communications will be surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each individual in all their interactions permanently identified as that individual to this new Establishment, from birth to death," Assange says in the book. "I think that can only produce a very controlling atmosphere."
"How can a normal person be free within that system?" he asks. "[He or she] simply cannot, it's impossible."
It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, the authors argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we expose the abuses of power. But ultimately, they say, as the tools of the state become more sophisticated, even these mechanisms of opposition will be difficult and perhaps impossible to use.
"The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation," Assange writes, "has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen."
That is where we are headed. A few resist. Assange and Manning are two. Those who stand by passively as they are persecuted will be next.
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