LONDON—Disclosures of state surveillance touching the far corners of our digital lives make for grim reading. But Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks bombshells set in motion the new era of whistle-blowing on state surveillance, says there is a glimmer of hope for Canadians.

In an interview from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has claimed asylum for more than two years, Assange points to a Supreme Court ruling, and the subsequent actions of Canadian Internet service providers, as a step in the right direction in the battle for privacy.

“There is a standard slowly starting to develop among the service providers that want to be seen as credible and trustworthy,” says Assange of the pushback by Rogers and other ISPs against Bill C-13, the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, which would require them to give authorities their users’ data without a warrant.

This spring, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of the right to anonymity and privacy online, and the need for police to obtain a warrant when seeking data from ISPs. Rogers responded with a new policy on disclosing subscriber information in July, and Thursday Telus issued its first report revealing how many requests authorities made for its customers’ data last year.

Yet Assange urges them to go further. “There is an obligation on ISPs to have mass interception equipment,” he says, adding their “engineers could say ‘this is what is installed, and this is what it is collecting.’”

Tonight he is moving from room to room in the embassy, which sits kitty-corner to the luxury Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, doing media interviews with outlets around the world as he promotes his new book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, published this week by OR Books. Assange holds a wandlike digital recorder in his hand to archive each interview. It has been a very busy week of early mornings and late evenings, says one of his staff.

Sporting a white beard and dressed casually in stylish, bright blue sneakers, Assange sits at a large table in one of the ground-floor conference rooms. You wouldn’t guess he is one of the world’s most-wanted men.

His face lights up with a smile when asked about a town hall in New Zealand that he took part in early this week via video link. It was like “they got the band back together,” he says, as it brought him alongside NSA leaker Edward Snowden and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald to talk about the Five Eyes surveillance partnership between Canada, the U.S., Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

What data about Canadians is collected under the Five Eyes agreement is difficult to know, Assange says, pushing back his long white hair.

He equates the multiple data-sharing agreements between the spy agencies to a shell game.

The Canadian government and the Communications Security Establishment Canada maintain that the private data of Canadians is protected. Yet a recently declassified report from July 2013, by then CSEC watchdog Robert Decary, said he could not assess whether the intelligence service’s Five Eyes partners follow agreements to protect information about Canadians as they monitor large volumes of data in and out of the country.

This sprawling system of global surveillance, which scoops up every website we visit and piece of data we enter online, now suffuses the fabric of the Internet, says Assange, whose new book presents two visions of the future of the Internet battling for supremacy.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever,” he writes, echoing Orwell in the book’s early pages.

He sees the search giant’s free services as a trap. “Google has more than 1.5 million Android activations per day,” Assange says of its smartphone and tablet operating system. “Unknowingly working for Google,” he writes, people “click information about themselves and their friends, Google ads, analytics, and other content. And now, of course, Google has bought drones, cars, you have Google maps, Google Internet infrastructure.”

This data creates predictive models of each citizen’s behaviour and Google shares much of it with the NSA, according to documents released by Snowden, which allege that Apple, Skype, Yahoo and Hotmail were also bound under gag order to provide access to their customers’ chat, email, video, photos and stored data. Canadians who use these services have their data included in those interceptions, too.

The path Google is pushing is fraught with danger to civil liberties and democracy, argues Assange, who imagines another way forward. In the book he unfurls a blueprint for a very different looking web address and cataloguing system that borrows the complex letter and number codes of the digital currency Bitcoin and floods information throughout the network. Censorship is nearly impossible.

This, along with a strong culture of leaking, Assange writes, will “disincentivize” governments from carrying out “unjust” acts like spying on their own citizens.

“I don’t think the answer is going to come from legislation or regulations,” he says at the embassy, since it is difficult for the law to keep up with the rapidly evolving technologies used by spy agencies. Leaks, he maintains, are the best way to keep governments in check.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Before rushing to his next interview, Assange urges unconcerned citizens who say they have nothing to hide to think about history and the world that is being built around them.

“They can be a participant in history, or a victim of it,” he says.

“It’s their choice, but any rational human being who cares about their family and others wouldn’t choose to be a victim.”

Read more about: