CYPHERPUNKS

FREEDOM and the FUTURE

of the INTERNET

JULIAN ASSANGE

with JACOB APPELBAUM

ANDY MOLLER-MAGUHN

and JEREMIE ZIMMERMANN

© 2012 Julian Assange

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

insiders 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 dou-

ble 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.

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>>6150085

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 dem-

ocratic 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, ideas and information flows,

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 buildings 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 underpin-

nings. 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 our platonic realm. It would pre-

vent 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 googled, 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 human-

ity, 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 domi-

nation. A hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use

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

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>>6150101

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 uni-

verse 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 super-

power on earth may not decipher it. And the 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 state control.

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

lized 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 vio-

lence. 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 pla-

tonic 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 civili-

zation 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.

We must raise an alarm. This book is a watchman's shout in the

night.

On March 20, 2012, while under house arrest in the United

Kingdom awaiting extradition, I met with three friends and fellow

watchmen on the principle that perhaps in unison our voices can

wake up the town. We must communicate what we have learned

while there is still a chance for you, the reader, to understand and act

on what is happening.

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

selves 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

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>>6150119

>>6150194

There will be a great shock or jolt that will awaken many but it will have a tremendous momentum behind that will create a temporary mass psychosis. Some will make it through, others will psychologically destroyed and those that cannot accept the truth, or paid not to, will become Domestic terrorists.

>>6150246

Maybe we didn’t need Assange but we are lucky we do.