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The Internet has led to revolutions across the world but a crackdown is now in full swing. As whole societies move online, mass surveillance programs are being deployed globally. Our civilization has reached a crossroads. In one direction lies a future promoting "privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful"; in the other is an internet that transfers power over entire populations to an unaccountable complex of spy agencies and their trans-national corporate allies. Cypherpunks are activists who advocate the mass use of strong cryptography as a way protecting our basic freedoms against this onslaught. Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of an visionary behind Wikileaks, has been a leading voice in the cypherpunk movement since the 1990s. Now, in a timely and important new book, Assange brings together a group of rebel thinkers and activists from the front line of the battle for cyberspace to discuss whether the internet will emancipate or enslave all of us.--
Reviews with the most likes.
Well, my timing was great on this one. I started it just a couple days before the whole project PRISM scandal, if you can call something so endemic a scandal. Cypherpunks predicts and warns against exactly this type of destruction of privacy by governments in the name of the “four horsemen of the infocalypse” (terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime). While on one hand, those things are unarguably bad, what is the correct response and solution to them? Is it the complete forfeiture of privacy by all, innocent, suspected and guilty alike?
The discussion in the book is good, but it's poorly organized and sometimes too informal and repetitive.