Personal Privacy Rights: SXSW: Assange, surveillance, and the world's wake-up call - by Alistair Fairweather

All is not well in Technology Land. The normally ebullient mood at the annual SXSW Interactive conference is darker this year, weighed down by concerns about the prying eyes of governments. A keynote address by WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange over the weekend captured this growing unease.

Speaking to a packed audience via video conference, Assange contrasted the relative comfort of his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London with the plight of prisoners around the world. But for nearly two years he has essentially been in prison.

"Outside the embassy at any one point there are at least a dozen police … The UK government has admitted to spending $8-million on surveillance of the embassy alone," Assange said, which he feels illustrates just how much money a government is willing to spend to "keep its prestige" in a situation of "international conflict".

Asked about how governments should be reacting to the revelations about abuses by the National Security Agency (NSA) and UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Assange takes a long view on the issue.

To him this problem has been developing for over 20 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, and is the natural result of "75% of military spending" residing in "one power block: Nato". In Assange's view, the NSA has grown, unfettered, into a "rogue agency". As the internet has come to include so much of our personal and economic lives, the NSA and GCHQ have been "sucking all this up". Given the constant exponential growth in the power of computing and a relatively stable population, "the ability to surveille everyone on the planet is almost there, and arguably will be there in a few years."

This is "a huge transfer of power from the people who are surveilled to the people who control the surveillance". And this isn't just the product of a single agency in Washington but a "fluid postmodern amalgam of agencies and private contractors, many of whom are transnational". The Edward Snowden case and the raw power brought to bear on efforts to detain the whistleblower represent, for Assange, a kind of global wake-up call for ordinary citizens.

We began to ask: "How is it that the internet, that was looked upon as the greatest tool for human emancipation that has ever been, had been co-opted … for the most aggressive form of state surveillance that had ever been." This foreshadows a kind of "new totalitarian world ... not in the sense of Stalin or Pol Pot, but totalitarian in the sense that surveillance is total, no one can exist outside of the state".

In just four years the internet has transformed from a quite "apathetic" space into a political battlefield. Assange praises activists and journalists such as Glenn Greenwald (who is also speaking at SXSW), Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum. All of these people are now living outside of the US and the UK in "effective exile" in countries such as Brazil and Germany. "There's an exodus of national security reporters, national security reporters are a new type of refugee."

Ironically, the internet allows these people to continue work and do so without fear of arrest or harassment by the governments about which they are reporting. These new nodes of reportage can "bring some restraint to the growing militarism" of the US and UK, he says. Later Assange is even more blunt: "There has been a militarisation of our civilian space – an occupation of our civilian space." You might be tempted to dismiss Assange as a lone kook or a dangerous attention seeker, but earlier in the conference Eric Schmidt, chairperson of Google, was equally blunt about his views on the US's security apparatus.

Read more: SXSW: Assange, surveillance, and the world's wake-up call | Columnists | Columnists | Mail & Guardian

Drones: The dark side of power - by Hatem Bazian Hatem Bazian

European Neuron Stealth Drone

In the science fiction universe of "Star Wars", the Death Star is a moon-sized space station capable of destroying an entire planet with a powerful weapon. As the Galactic Empire's ultimate weapon, it is used to destroy the home planet of Alderaan in "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" after Grand Moff Tarkin attempts to pressure Princess Leia to give up the location of the secret rebel base.

She gives a false location, but Tarkin destroys Alderaan anyway. As an "ultimate weapon", the fearsome capability of the Death Star is revealed and it continues to be used as a weapon of choice.

In the real world of military strikes and the mounting losses of civilian lives in Arab and Muslim nations, in the United States' war on terror one of the many weapons of choice are drones, which can be deployed anywhere in the world, and their effects are immediately devastating. It is the indiscriminate killing of so-called targets of interest without the mobilisation or loss of US troops on the ground.

Added to this is the highly dubious tactic of "double taps", whereby a second strike closely follows the first strike, as people gather to help the injured. This makes the use of drones even more controversial because it increases the number of casualties to include rescuers. It also blatantly reveals the destructive power drone warfare. It enables President Obama to become "really good at killing people".

It is ironic that President Obama has been the direct beneficiary of both the anti-war and the civil rights movements, which allowed many generations to discover their inner power and harness it for positive change.

The relationship of the struggle for human dignity led by the civil rights movement and the victory of President Obama should never be underestimated or underappreciated.

But this continuation and strategic escalation of the "war on terror" policies, in particular drone warfare, mars his legacy. I voted for President Obama in two elections hoping that he would uphold the legacy of the real "Jedi order" of civil and human rights advocates.

But alas, it is a loss and a profound disappointment that he opted for the allure of the "Dark Side". What would Martin Luther King, Jr and Nelson Mandela say about the drones? The easy, silent and clinical deployment of death and destruction while constructing the illusion that it is a sound, legally defensible policy and in-line with universal human right principles is confusing at best, and outrageous at worst.

Blood is not an argument and the ability to kill without being seen and not knowing how many are being killed is not a rationale or an argument for dealing with the threat of terrorism.


Drones are in reality a growth industry and are part of the economy and they are no longer only an ethical, moral and legal justification for fighting terrorism.

The choices that we make in the military industrial economy are used to expand government and private expenditure to save "us" from the imminent threat. War is business and the business of war is the ongoing securitisation of societies across the globe.

Drone production, deployment, and warfare moved from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen to US and European urban centres, where police has started using drones. The peaceful spin-offs of the military drone technology are many and their use in the civilian market will complicate our relations with them and curtail the ability to resist the constant deployment of this weapon of choice.

Indeed, the American public accepted its utility first in fighting terrorists abroad but it was only a matter of time before corporate and security interests saw the giant domestic market and moved to create the needed rationale for its adoption across the country. Fear of terrorists abroad has led us to accept government intrusion into our privacy, and now spying and wire-tapping our conversations and deployment of drones are all driven by economy and growth dynamics.

Becoming good at killing people is about selling and marketing weapons of choice in the modern battlefield that has no limits for rationalising death and destruction, and no rationales are more alluring than money and power.

Read more: Drones: The dark side of power - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

European Youth Parliament Poll: "Fight against Terrorism Does not Justify Mass Surveillance" - says youth

The recently disclosed mass surveillance programmes of the NSA and other intelligence services step over the line. That is at least the opinion of 62.3% of participants in the recent European Youth Poll.

Still, differences in attitude exist between countres: In Sweden and Germany, less than a fourth of all participants think surveillance is justified by the fight against terrorism, while in Russia and Ukraine, more than half of all participants speak out in favour of surveillance.

59% of all participants also think they have to restrain their communication over the Internet, because it is being watched.

For the complete survey report click here.

Read more: European Youth Parliament - Parlement Européen des Jeunes