"Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet"

Lou Thomas: "This book summarizes one of the great struggles of our age: the opportunity offered by the Internet for creating transparency and organizing resistance to dominance hierarchies, vs. the already-advanced mass surveillance that has been made possible by the increasingly cheap and available technologies for capturing not just specific communications, but *every* communication, whether by voice or text, on the entire Internet, with very few exceptions.

Cryptography is presented as a technical means through which to counteract this mass surveillance. Political constraints on surveillance are also explored, including an appraisal of both strategic (e.g., grassroots organizations) and tactical (e.g., Internet businesses) allies in supporting such constraints.

In a way, it's a race to see which tendency will get to the finish line first. Just as the opportunities for spreading knowledge, and for organizing, are increasing, the risks of being snooped upon, and stymied, by those supporting hierarchical institutions are ramping up.

The book starts with an eloquent - at times startlingly so - 'call to cryptographic arms.' 'The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen...The platonic nature of the Internet, ideas and information flows, is debased by its physical origins. Its foundations are fiber optic cable lines stretching across the ocean floors, satellites spinning above our heads, computer servers housed in buildings in cities from New York to Nairobi. Like the soldier who slew Archimedes with a mere sword, so too could an armed militia take control of the peak development of Western civilization, our platonic realm...The state, like an army around an oil well, or a customs agent extracting bribes at the border, would soon learn to leverage its control of physical space to gain control over our platonic realm. It would prevent the independence we had dreamed of, and then, squatting on fiber optic lines and around satellite ground stations, it would go on to mass intercept the information flow of our new world...'

But we discovered something. Our one hope against total domination. A hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use to resist. A strange property of the physical universe that we live in.

'The universe believes in encryption.'

Following this formal introduction, the book proceeds with a discussion between Assange and his co-authors, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, and Jeremie Zimmermann, all prominent (and younger) activists for Internet freedom. Topics include communication vs. surveillance, the militarization of cyberspace, legal constraints upon surveillance, private sector involvement in surveillance, the merging of such private surveillance with that of state organizations, encryption technologies that support democracy, economic systems (both hierarchical and free), censorship, privacy, transparency, the attacks upon Wikileaks itself, and prospects for improvement, and its opposite, going forward."

Footnote:

"I looked for this book here a few weeks ago and it was nowhere to be found. I had to go to the publisher's Web site, where the book was offered in all electronic formats. Now, we see it on this site only thanks to a small third-party bookseller - Earthlight Books - not Amazon itself.

As another reviewer has noted, this seems odd, given the importance and notoriety of the author. It seems even more odd when we consider that Amazon de-hosted Assange's Wikileaks site from its EC2 service in the heat of the Wikileaks Cablegate revelations. Or maybe not so odd at all...

I don't believe that Amazon hates Wikileaks, but I do suspect that it is bowing to government pressure to throw roadblocks in the path of Wikileaks and its innovative brand of journalism. As the UK's Guardian wrote at the time, 'The company [Amazon] announced it was cutting WikiLeaks off [thereby disabling its Web site] yesterday only 24 hours after being contacted by the staff of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security.'

I am forced to ask: 'Who loves you, Amazon? Your customers, or the censors of the national security state? And, even more importantly, who do *you* love?'

Having said that, it is good to see a listing, at least, because this is a very important book." (Source).