Julian Assange Blasts NSA Spying, Says ‘Obama …

Entertainment

03.08.14

The WikiLeaks founder participated in a glitch-filledbut candidlive video chat from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London as part of the South By Southwest tech fest.

Introduced as a trailblazer who has led the fight against censorship, the White Stallion of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was beamed into a packed hall of journalists and concerned citizens from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he has been staying in asylum from an extradition order for over a year, for a Skype chat with Benjamin Palmer of The Barbarian Group, an interactive marketing firm based in Boston.

And the dapper Assange, whos been in exile for 650 days, had some harsh words for President Obama on the National Security Agency revelations brought forth by Edward Snowden.

There is a question whether the Barack Obama administration is at all serious and who really wears the pants in the administration, said Assange. Is it the intelligence agencies, or is it the civilian part of that administration?

He continued: We know what happens when a government gets serious: someone is fired, someone is forced to resign, someone is prosecuted, a big criminal investigation is launched, or budgets are cut, and none of those five things have happened in the last eight months since the Edward Snowden revelations. That means the Obama administration isnt serious.

Assange did, however, admit that Obama had his hands tied thanks to NSA spying, saying that if Obama decided to disband the NSA, he would be rolled and people would come up with some type of dirt. The National Security Agency, having intercepted all this information, has dirt on everyone. Congress would impeach him for some act or another, or he would have been found to have committed some criminal act.

'The ability to surveil everyone on the planet is almost there, and arguably will be there within a few years. Thats led to a huge transfer of power from the people who are surveilled upon, to those who perform the surveillance.'

The SXSW keynote discussion was plagued by several glitches, and basically forced the Aussie hacker to go rogue and respond to questions sent in onlinewhich, he joked, was because of the NSA crowding the airwaves. But it wasnt all about the NSA. Assange also spent a portion of the chat giving his two cents on Ukrainea country he described as very dear to my heart.

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Julian Assange Blasts NSA Spying, Says ‘Obama ...