This is an enlightening and disturbingly revealing discussion on the radically expanding levels of online surveillance that governments and corporations are able to wield today over your personal information on the internet.

It is about the new technology of “mass surveillance,” referred to as “strategic interception,” where corporations are helping to enable governments to record and store all phone transmissions, all internet communication from the entire population of a country. This is the militarization of cyberspace, which has been considered a form of civilian space, where a whole range of details of our lives flows to and fro through, and which are documented and stored upon.

This is staggering in its implications, and happening at a rate and to a degree which populations are not prepared for. It certainly challenges the fundamental basis of any notion of rights which are elaborated in the American Constitution, or any international covenants on human rights.

“Every civilian is now a target of military intelligence activity. Everyone.

“There is little left of democratic life that is not surveilled. But it is not being surveilled equally. It is not the public that is surveilling big corporations, secretive government agencies, and the rest of the public. Rather, there is a disproportionate flow of information from us, from the public, into organizations that are already very powerful. And that permits the elite - the surveillance elite, the national security state elite of any country - to lift off from its people. To disconnect from its people. To predict its people. That’s a dangerous situation.

“And what we’re dealing here is not merely the surveillance elite of one country operating alone, but rather an international surveillance elite; transnational companies selling these products all over the world, and then intelligence agencies swapping data that they collect with each other. That’s a worrying situation for western democracies.”

“That’s a worrying situation for western democracies.”

Understatement of the year.

And to think, the power establishment is working overtime to convince you that its this guy talking about this who is the threat to “freedom” and your rights to privacy and liberty..

Highly recommended, even essential viewing.

And while you’re at it, this is worth taking in, as well. Julian Assange Julian Assange speaking to The Cambridge Union Society, about freedom of information, freedom of discourse, the rise of the the modern technological national security state, and more.

[The internet is] a technology which can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen. Or, on the other hand, if taken by us, and taken by activists, and taken by all those who wish a different trajectory for a technological world, it can be something that we all hope for.

That battle between people wo want to use the internet as a tool of liberation, and those tremendous organizations that want to use the internet as a tool of control - mass control - is not over. It is only just beginning.

Watch The Video