Facebook is a Spy Machine

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again Facebook ain’t your friend. From the facile and shallow way it connects people to the awesome power it gives authorities to monitor and surveille, Facebook is a technology born not in the hallways of emancipation and freedom but in the byways of power and control. Or at least, that’s what Julian Assange founder of WikiLeaks thinks and frankly, I tend to agree. Never before in this history of this planet have so many been monitored by so few with so little responsible oversight.

Big Brother is Watching

Big Brother is Watching

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange touched on the subject of social networking in an interview with Russia Today, calling Facebook “the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.”

Assange said he believes Facebook is a giant database of names and records about people, maintained voluntarily by its users but developed for U.S. intelligence to use.

“Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies, and building this database for them,” Assange said.

While Assange doesn’t claim that Facebook is actually run by U.S. intelligence agencies, the fact that they have access to its records is — in his view — dangerous enough.

“Now, is the case that Facebook is run by U.S. intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that U.S. intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure to them,” he said.

Assange also weighed in on the subject of secret government cables released by WikiLeaks, claiming the really important ones haven’t been exposed yet.

“We only released secret, classified, confidential material. We didn’t have any top secret cables. The really embarrassing stuff, the really serious stuff wasn’t in our collection to release. But it is still out there,” he said.

At the end of the interview, Assange trashed the media industry, claiming it is heavily distorting reality to the public and doing too little to prevent wars and remove corrupt governments from power. “It really is my opinion that the media, in general, are so bad, we have to question whether the world would be better off without them altogether,” he said.

See the full video of the interview below.

[Russia Today via The Next Web]

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About the Author: I'm a sociologist at Athabasca University where I coordinate,amongst other things, the introductory sociology courses (Sociology I and Sociology II). FYI I did my dissertation in the political economy of scholarly communication (you can read it if you want). It's not that bad. My current interests lie in the area of scholarly communication and pedagogy, the sociology of spirituality and religion, consciousness research, entheogens, inequality and stratification, and the revolutionary potential of authentic spirituality. The Socjourn is my pet project. It started as the Electronic Journal of Sociology but after watching our social elites systematically dismantle the potential of eJournals to alter the politics and economies of scholarly communication, I decided I'd try something a little different. That something is The Socjourn, a initiative that bends the rules of scholarly communication and pedagogy by disregarding academic ego and smashing down the walls that divide our little Ivory Tower world from the rest of humanity. If you are a sociologist or a sociology student and you have a burning desire to engage in a little institutional demolition by perhaps writing for the Socjourn, contact me. If you are a graduate student and you have some ideas that you think I might find interesting, contact me. I supervise graduate students through Athabasca Universities MAIS program.

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