For once, Julian Assange is right. Global digital surveillance is a reality – and it's happening to you, not just people who post offensive tweets

The 'global network' is not a conspiracy theory

It’s hard to take the message seriously when the messenger is wanted for questioning and hiding out in an embassy. It’s even more difficult when a book containing warnings about surveillance is largely comprised of interviews conducted for a state-controlled Russian TV channel. And yet, Julian Assange – the ranting, paranoid bail-jumper, trapped in the Ecuadorian ambassador’s box room – is right to warn about the future of the internet in Cypherpunks.

Strip back hyperbolic phrases that compare using the internet to “having a tank in your bedroom” and reduce the mobile phone to “a tracking device that also makes calls” and Assange’s central thesis is correct: many of us are giving up too much information about ourselves, too freely. For many internet users, the amount of information the state holds about them pales in comparison to the stash of personal data placed in the hands of Google, Facebook and Twitter. It’s surveillance we’ve submitted to willingly and contribute to.

The tinges of paranoia and narcissism that run through Assange’s writing make his warning that the “universality of the internet will merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control” sound laughable. But as Russia and China continue to push for United Nations control of the internet and individual citizens become more and more laissez faire about what they share online, it’s far from unthinkable. We should all be asking more questions about how our information is used and how much we should give up.

Assange and his “cypherpunk” compatriots believe the solution is for everyone to master encryption. That’s simply not going to happen. We are addicted to convenience and desperate to belong. This is a world where the head of the CIA was caught using Gmail to share illicit messages and professional politicians can’t resist sending naughty pictures via Twitter. Assange doesn’t have an answer to the human fear of missing out which drives so many to join social networks and remain there.

Despite frequent privacy scares, the prevailing attitude to social networking appears to be a modern spin on the old fallacy that “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about”. But if you suddenly find yourself under suspicion that all that data you’ve been putting online can take on a very different character. And governments are asking to see more of that information every year – in the first half of 2012, UK government agencies made 20,938 requests for user data from Google.

We ignore these issues because we assumed that we won’t be the one arrested for a tweet that’s deemed offensive, sacked for a Facebook message or have our Google records pored over by a government agency. Those are things that happen to other people and when it’s Julian Assange issuing the warnings, it’s easy to dismiss them. But we must seriously question our growing willingness to so freely share information online or face giving up freedoms simply for the love of convenience.

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