WikiLeaks’ Assange Talks Google, NSA & Granai Airstrike Video At NYC Book Launch

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Appearing from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where hes been holed up since seeking diplomatic asylum there on June 19, 2012, the thinly bearded 43-year-old spoke for roughly an hour and a half about his book, the man at the top of the worlds most popular search engine, and its revolving door with the U.S. government. He talked about Bitcointhe online-based currencythe Obama administrations ongoing war against whistleblowers and Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army private who supplied WikiLeaks with more than 750,000 diplomatic cables and Army reports regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with two cockpit videos documenting U.S. air strikes massacring civilians in those conflicts.

Assange repeatedly warned of the dangers posed by the mass surveillance of tech giants Google and Facebook, assailing Schmidt and the omnipresent search engine he oversees as worse than the National Security Agency (NSA) in terms of privacy concerns and the sheer, unregulated power it wields via the mass personal data voluntarily handed over by users.

Perhaps one of the most wanted men in the worldthere has been a longstanding European Union-wide warrant requested by Sweden in effect for his extradition to that country to face questioning for allegations he raped one woman and molested another during a 2010 visit to Stockholm, thus, his exile at the embassyAssange also shed light on the whereabouts of perhaps one of the United States most sensitive wartime footage to date: the Granai Airstrike Video, documenting the killing of up to 150 Afghan civilians, purportedly mostly children, by a US Air Force bomber in Farah Province in May 2009.

Projected on the second-floor wall of art space/collective/indie arcade Babycastles at 137 W. 14th Street via Skype and superimposed before the cover art of When Google Met WikiLeaksthe books title entered within the search box on Googles homepage with the added option Im feeling evil as opposed to its typical Im feeling luckyhe sat alongside singer/rapper Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam aka M.I.A., though she only popped into the broadcast briefly.

Daniel Stuckey of Motherboard moderated.

Assange, the hacker-turned-publisher of the worlds governments most damning secrets-turned-captive began the evening by reciting lyrics from M.I.A.s song The Message, which he also quoted in his book:

Headbone connected to the headphones / Headphones connected to the iPhone / iPhone connected to the Internet / Connected to the Google/ Connected to the government, he read, quoting a passage from his book.

Essentially, he explained throughout the course of the launchfirst during a discussion and then a brief Q&A with the public and media outletsthere is no difference or separation between Google or the United States government. Rather, they are, in fact, one in the same.

Google has become an invasive organization that wants to have a business model of formulating every single person it can on the Earth, collecting their private information, storing it, indexing it, and producing profiles of individuals so they can sell those profiles to better target ads on them and also sell its other services to the National Security Agency, and the US military, and enter into strategic relationships with the US state department, he told reporters from The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, New York Post (who sent several, organizers told the Press, among them its Page Six photographer, who snapped away as we all drank $5 bottles of warm beer and cups of wine, conversing among arcade games, paintings and stacks of other titles published by OR Books, the publisher of When Google Met WikiLeaks and Assanges Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet). Co-publisher Colin Robinson announced to everyone thered be a 20-percent discount for any Google employees in attendance.

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WikiLeaks’ Assange Talks Google, NSA & Granai Airstrike Video At NYC Book Launch