Julian Assange Says Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen Are "Witch Doctors" 253
An anonymous reader writes "The Times publishes Assange's takedown of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. From the article: 'New Digital Age is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.'"
Book review (Score:5, Informative)
In case it's not clear from the article, it's Assange doing a book review.
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1480542288
"“The Future of Terrorism” gets a whole chapter. The future of terrorism, we learn, is cyberterrorism. A session of indulgent scaremongering follows, including a breathless disaster-movie scenario, wherein cyberterrorists take control of American air-traffic control systems and send planes crashing into buildings"
Difficult to believe Schmidt put his name to that crap, there's no reason to open Air Traffic control to hackers.
"The section on “repressive autocracies” describes, disapprovingly, various repressive surveillance measures: legislation to insert back doors into software to enable spying on citizens, monitoring of social networks and the collection of intelligence on entire populations. All of these are already in widespread use in the United States. In fact, some of those measures — like the push to require every social-network profile to be linked to a real name — were spearheaded by Google itself. "
Yeh CALEA and CALEA II coming soon. American.
He pans the books.
Re:Why give this man air time? (Score:1, Informative)
Treacherous. It's not a synonym for treasonous.
Re:who cares (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Very good point (Score:3, Informative)
There is ample historical precedent for authorities using sex crimes to silence successful dissidents who are obviously in the right.
John Wilkes was the first person to successfully publish the proceedings of parlement, arguably creating our notion of freedom of the press. He was also imprisoned for sex crimes. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/11/henry-porter-wikileaks-cables
I'm imagine the U.S. would keep him for a while if they had him, but doing so would prove messy. In reality, the U.S. doesn't want him so long as someone else has a better way to punish him, which the Swedes do.
Sweden's govt also assisted CIA torture renditions (Score:3, Informative)
...which were illegal. They have a history of bending over when the US establishment wants something.