Julian Assange, The Pursuit Of Freedom

By Edoardo Moreni - March, 8th 2014

Freedom is something that we should all share on the internet. Freedom means being free of surfing the web without having someone looking at the websites you are visiting, who you are chatting with and what you are reading. Freedom also means being free to own our data, personal information, facebook profile, twitter account, linkedin account and anything that we upload on the web.

Unfortunately, even if the internet is the place where direct democracy was born, where revolutions have been won, there is still someone whose using it to spy us. They say they do it for terrorism, the only true reason is that there are people who want to control other people. I think we should be able to control ourselves, as individuals. No one should control what I am doing right now to protect me. That’s not what I call protection.

Julian Assange is one of those people, with Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, who have dedicated their lives to great deeds that have changed their lives and people’s. By funding Wikileaks, Assange has started to “open governments” and tell us what really goes on behind the military operations in Afghanistan and in other countries. The amount of leaks that Wikileaks has released are remarkable because they are able to show us the world from a different perspective.

There are people who think we shouldn’t know these things for our own security; but I believe I have the right to know if my country is fighting a war and killing people just to make more money through the oil industry. We have the right to know if countries do what they have promised not to do. Truth must be publicly available when there are promises not respected and lies.

Julian has just spoken at SXSW, South by Southwest, in Texas, Austin. As he has recalled, in the past years, “there has been a military occupation of the Internet space”. Referring to the US government, and in particular to the NSA that has collected thousands of petabytes of data over the years thanks to projects such as Prism, where, as Snowden revealed, most of the internet companies were involved, including Facebook and Google.

When they asked him about how life is in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he has been living for the last two years, he said:

It is a bit like prison. Arguably prison is far worse in relation to restrictions on visitors, for example, and the level of bureaucracy involved.” Noting that at any given point there are about a dozen police officers stationed outside, he said: “The UK government has admitted to spending $8m so far just on the police surveillance of the embassy.

Assange also criticised Mark Zuckerberg who, in a recent interview, said we live in a “post privacy world”, which for Julian is a distraction that helps feed Facebook’s revenue model. Accordingly to Julian Assange, Zuckerberg’s statement obscure from the “unprecedented theft of wealth from the majority of the population to the people that already have power”.

Further, Wikileaks’ Founder praised Edward Snowden for having leaked tons of material, recalling that we have seen just the 10% of it, and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who firstly got in touch with Snowden. Nowadays, they both live in countries where they feel protected and don’t feel any legal prosecution, Russia and Brazil.

He also commented the situation we are living today and the way we were living it several years ago:

We are now all involved in this. We are all involved in what we traditionally called the state, whether we like it or not. So we have no choice but to try to manage the behaviour of the state that we have been forced to be part of.

We are actually living in a world that we don’t understand, before all this material came out, CableGate or what we did with the Iraq war, or Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, we were going about our business in what we thought was the world. But we weren’t living in the world: we were living in some fictitious representation of what we thought was the world. And we are still living in this fictitious representation.

We are walking around constantly in this fog where we can’t even see the ground. We think we can see the ground, but we’re wrong. And every so often a clearing in the fog happens when there is one of these grand disclosures. And we see the ground, and we are surprised.

People like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are heroes of our modern world, because they believe in something and have sacrificed their lives to achieve it. The NSA, the US government and any other organisation can try to keep recording and storing all this information about our lives, but until there will be people and organisation like Wikileaks, we can sleep well, because we know there is someone who is ready to open these governments.

We don’t know when and how Julian Assange will be able to walk as free man in London, but in the meantime, we are on his side, because we believe the internet needs people like Assange, who have affected dozens of governments, just by letting us know the truth behind lies.