Second email released from #Assange to #Cumberbatch



From: Julian Assange XXXXXXXXXXX

To: Benedict Cumberbatch XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Subject: From 1945 to 2012

Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2013 04:31:50 +0000



XXXXXXXXX



You may be interested in comparing these two, which were written

without knowledge of each other.



INTRODUCTION: A CALL TO CRYPTOGRAPHIC ARMS



This book is not a manifesto. There is not time for that. This book is

a warning.



The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational

dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of

national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity

and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been

transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we

have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.



These transformations have come about silently, because those who know

what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no

incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few

years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia,

from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be

impossible. In fact, we may already be there.



While many writers have considered what the internet means for global

civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have

the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong

because they have never met the enemy.



No description of the world survives first contact with the enemy.



We have met the enemy.



Over the last six years WikiLeaks has had conflicts with nearly every

powerful state. We know the new surveillance state from an insider's

perspective, because we have plumbed its secrets. We know it from a

combatant's perspective, because we have had to protect our people, our

finances and our sources from it. We know it from a global perspective,

because we have people, assets and information in nearly every country.

We know it from the perspective of time, because we have been fighting

this phenomenon for years and have seen it double and spread, again and

again. It is an invasive parasite, growing fat off societies that merge

with the internet. It is rolling over the planet, infecting all states

and peoples before it.



What is to be done?



Once upon a time in a place that was neither here nor there, we, the

constructors and citizens of the young internet discussed the future of

our new world.



We saw that the relationships between all people would be mediated by

our new world, and that the nature of states, which are defined by how

people exchange information, economic value, and force, would also

change.



We saw that the merger between existing state structures and the

internet created an opening to change the nature of states.



First, recall that states are systems through which coercive force

flows. Factions within a state may compete for support, leading to

democratic surface phenomena, but the underpinnings of states are the

systematic application, and avoidance, of violence. Land ownership,

property, rents, dividends, taxation, court fines, censorship,

copyrights and trademarks are all enforced by the threatened

application of state violence.



Most of the time we are not even aware of how close to violence we are,

because we all grant concessions to avoid it. Like sailors smelling the

breeze, we rarely contemplate how our surface world is propped up from

below by darkness.



In the new space of the internet what would be the mediator of coercive

force?



Does it even make sense to ask this question? In this otherworldly

space, this seemingly platonic realm of ideas and information flow,

could there be a notion of coercive force? A force that could modify

historical records, tap phones, separate people, transform complexity

into rubble, and erect walls, like an occupying army?



The platonic nature of the internet, is debased by its physical

origins. Its foundations are fiber optic cable lines stretching across

the ocean floors, satellites spinning above our heads, computer servers

housed in cities from New York to Nairobi. Like the

soldier who slew Archimedes with a mere sword, so too could an armed

militia take control of the peak development of Western civilization,

our platonic realm.



The new world of the internet, abstracted from the old world of brute

atoms, longed for independence. But states and their friends moved to

control our new world -- by controlling its physical underpinnings. The

state, like an army around an oil well, or a customs agent extracting

bribes at the border, would soon learn to leverage its control of

physical space to gain control over intellectual space. It would

prevent the independence we had dreamed of, and then, squatting on

fiber optic lines and around satellite ground stations, it would go on

to mass intercept the information flow of our new world -- its very

essence -- even as every human, economic, and political relationship

embraced it. The state would leech into the veins and arteries of our

new societies, gobbling up every relationship expressed or

communicated, every web page read, every message sent and every thought

searched, and then store this knowledge, billions of interceptions a

day, undreamed of power, in vast top secret warehouses, forever. It

would go on to mine and mine again this treasure, the collective

private intellectual output of humanity, with ever more sophisticated

search and pattern finding algorithms, enriching the treasure and

maximizing the power imbalance between interceptors and the world of

interceptees. And then the state would reflect what it had learned back

into the physical world, to start wars, to target drones, to manipulate

UN committees and trade deals, and to do favors for its vast connected

network of industries, insiders and cronies.



But we discovered something. Our one hope against total domination. A

hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use to resist.

A strange property of the physical universe that we live in.



The universe believes in encryption.



It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.



We saw we could use this strange property to create the laws of a new

world. To abstract away our new platonic realm from its base

underpinnings of satellites, undersea cables and their controllers. To

fortify our space behind a cryptographic veil. To create new lands

barred to those who control physical reality, because to follow us into

them would require infinite resources.



And in this manner to declare independence.



* * *



Scientists in the Manhattan Project discovered that the universe

permitted the construction of a nuclear bomb. This was not an obvious

conclusion. Perhaps nuclear weapons were not within the laws of

physics. However, the universe believes in atomic bombs and nuclear

reactors. They are a phenomenon the universe blesses, like salt, sea or

stars.



Similarly, the universe, our physical universe, has that property that

makes it possible for an individual or a group of individuals to

reliably, automatically, even without knowing, encipher something, so

that all the resources and all the political will of the strongest

superpower on earth may not decipher it. And paths of encipherment

between people can mesh together to create regions free from the

coercive force of the outer state. Free from mass interception. Free

from outer state control.



In this way, people can oppose their will to that of a fully mobilized

superpower and win. Encryption is an embodiment of the laws of physics,

and it does not listen to the bluster of states, even transnational

surveillance dystopias.



It isn't obvious that the world had to work this way. But somehow the

universe smiles on encryption.



* * *



Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action. While

nuclear weapons states can exert unlimited violence over even millions

of individuals, strong cryptography means that a state, even by

exercising unlimited violence, cannot violate the intent of individuals

to keep secrets from them.



Strong cryptography can resist an unlimited application of violence. No

amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem.



But could we take this strange fact about the world and build it up to

be a basic emancipatory building block for the independence of mankind

in the platonic realm of the internet? And as societies merged with the

internet could that liberty then be reflected back into physical

reality to redefine the state?



Recall that states are the systems which determine where and how

coercive force is consistently applied.



The question of how much coercive force can seep into the platonic

realm of the internet from the physical world is answered by

cryptography and the cypherpunks' ideals.



As states merge with the internet and the future of our civilization

becomes the future of the internet, we must redefine force relations.



If we do not, the universality of the internet will merge global

humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.



It is time to take up the arms of our new world, to fight for ourselves

and for those we love.



Our task is to secure self-determination where we can, to hold back the

coming dystopia where we cannot, and if all else fails, to accelerate

its self-destruction.



-- Julian Assange, London, October 2012





You and the Atom Bomb



Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a

widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the

physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating

weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so

the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow

civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)



Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly

altered. The distinction between great states and small states would

have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual

would have been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President

Truman's remarks, and various comments that have been made on them,

that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture

demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four

countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal

importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb,

so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which

have been apparent for a dozen years past.



It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the

history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery

of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been

pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions

can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found

generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or

difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the

dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.

Thus, for example, thanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently

tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades

are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong

stronger, while a simple weapon--so long as there is no answer to it--

gives claws to the weak.



The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the

age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock,

and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly

efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be

produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the

success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular

insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day.

After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively

complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries,

and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even

the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one

source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans--even

Tibetans-- could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with

success. But thereafter every development in military technique has

favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised

country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of

power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging

war on the grand scale, and now there are only three--ultimately,

perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was

pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that

might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon--or, to put it more

broadly, of a method of fighting--not dependent on huge concentrations

of industrial plant.



From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess

the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus

of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So

we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states,

each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out

in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather

hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps

an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose--and really this

the likeliest development--that the surviving great nations make a tacit

agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they

only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to

retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only

difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and

that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more

hopeless.



[...]



More and more obviously the surface of the earth is

being parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut

off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one

disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to

where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will

continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states--East

Asia, dominated by China--is still potential rather than actual. But

the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of

recent years has accelerated it.



[...]



Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the

drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the

reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but

for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James

Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet

considered its ideological implications--that is, the kind of

world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would

probably prevail in a state which was at once UNCONQUERABLE and in a

permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbors.



Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily

manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged

us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the

end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state.

If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult

to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale

wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a 'peace that is no peace'.



George Orwell, 19 October 1945



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