Today, however, Assange wants to talk about Eric Schmidt.

In June 2011, Schmidt, then CEO of Google The New Digital Age, met Assange at a cottage in England for a conversation When Google Met WikiLeaks. The book targets Google’s cooperative relationship with the U.S. government in terms of privacy, mass surveillance and Internet freedom.

Assange’s new book hit the shelves, the day after Schmidt’s latest book, How Google Works.

Schmidt told ABC News last week. “We have taken all of our data, all of our exchanges, and we fully encrypted them so no one can get them, especially the government.”

HuffPost asked Assange to respond.

“Eric Schmidt has a difficult job defending what Google has become and that he uses — Google uses private collection,” said Assange. “The revelations, the Snowden revelations, showed that he did hand over the information to the U.S. government. I think it’s sad he that feels it’s necessary to resort to ad hominem attacks, but I understand that he has no real arguments to defend Google’s position.”

Eric Schmidt did not say that Google encrypts everything so that the US government can’t get at them. He said quite deliberately that Google has started to encrypt exchanges of information — and that’s hardly true, but it has increased amount of encrypted exchanges. But Google has not been encrypting their storage information. Google’s whole business model is predicated on Google being able to access the vast reservoir of private information collected from billions of people each day. And if Google can access it, then of course the U.S. government has the legal right to access it, and that’s what’s been going on.

As a result of the Snowden revelation, Google was caught out. It tried to pretend that those revelations were not valid, and when that failed, it started to engage in a public relations campaign to try and say that it wasn’t happy with what the National Security Agency was doing, and was fighting against it. Now, I’m sure that many people in Google are not happy with what has been occurring. But that doesn’t stop it happening, because Google’s business model is to collect as much information as possible and people store it, index and turn it into predictive profiles. Similarly, at Eric Schmidt’s level, Google is very closely related to the U.S. government and there’s a revolving door between the State Department and Google.

Google’s foreign policy positioning is encapsulated in Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas. Google Ideas is Google’s in-house think tank that specializes on Google’s geopolitical interactions with the world. Eric Schmidt has become Google’s secretary of state, a Henry Kissinger-like figure whose job it is to go out and meet with foreign leaders and their opponents and position Google in the world. The question becomes: What is the positioning?

We can see that positioning, for example, in relation to the proposed bombing of Syria, when Google took an interventionist stance and used its extremely powerful advertising network to push John Kerry’s call to bomb Syria. This is not the State Department buying some Google ads. This is Google using its front page, of its own volition, to promote John Kerry’s attempts to bomb Syria.

Google has become more integrated … People know more or less what they’re dealing with when they’re dealing with Facebook. But Google controls 80 percent of Android phones now sold, YouTube is buying up eight drone companies. It’s deploying cars, it’s running ISPs — Internet service providers. It has a plan to create Google towns.

It’s not just Google, but Google represents a push towards a technocratic imperialism or digital colonialism. While it can sound a bit strange to use these terms, that’s very clear from Google’s book about its vision for the future of the digital age, where Google envisages pulling in everyone, even in the deepest parts of Africa, into its system of interaction. Now that system of interaction concentrates global power into those people who already have a lot of it, and that means not just companies like Google but a lot of the alliance of interests that revolve around what we traditionally call the deep state — but it’s organizations like the National Security Agency and contractors that account for more than 80 percent of operations, institutions like Google and Facebook, which directly or indirectly are involved in the worldwide collection efforts of those organizations. At a less geopolitical level and at a more personal level, the global erosion of privacy for the average person brings democratic states socially into a position of where they are more like authoritarian states. That’s the big problem for the average person.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/30/julian-assange-eric-schmi_n_5905804.html