Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

The message of this book is not that we are all constantly spied on by all state organizations. This is obvious and proven thanks to the Snowden revelations, we wouldn't need a book for this (even if this book has been published before those revelations, some of them were already known to people watching the leaks on Wikileaks).

This book is a conversation between four knowledgeable people about the implications of this. The book is useful for learning how to think about "state surveillance" usin

The message of this book is not that we are all constantly spied on by all state organizations. This is obvious and proven thanks to the Snowden revelations, we wouldn't need a book for this (even if this book has been published before those revelations, some of them were already known to people watching the leaks on Wikileaks).

This book is a conversation between four knowledgeable people about the implications of this. The book is useful for learning how to think about "state surveillance" using the appropriate lexicon. It is a book that does not lend itself to summaries or syntheses of one bit of information (good/bad, right/wrong, ...). For example: it makes no sense to ask whether this book is for or against state surveillance, despite being sold and presented as an "against" book (the fact that this book is presented as written by just Julian Assange is an example of this). Indeed, the greatest value of the book is that it gives the opportunity to attend a conversation that brings out the details and subtleties of the surveillance topic. For example, the four participants in the conversation have different ideas on how to act against the Four Horsemen of Info-pocalypse so as not to harm the privacy of other users, which specifically means that the topic is difficult and there is no one-size fits all solution.

For reasons of readability, the conversation is edited and inserts definitions of lesser known words both with notes and inline. This is useful because it gives the reader the lexicon and references to deepen the concepts he is interested in. The result is that the reader witnesses an exchange of thoughts between four people who have direct experience of the problem.

One of the consequences of surveillance is the ubiquity of politically correct and self-censorship: these consequences affect people's freedom of communication. (one of the three fundamental freedoms according to Assange, together with that of economic movement and interaction). Another consequence of surveillance is the fear of reading and seeking the truth: f people are afraid to go to the wikileaks site, for example, they wouldn't know that in some treaties or proposals for international treaties such as ACTA, where the mainstream narrative was that of promoting "fair" trade and was actually supported by lobbies like Scientology for very different purposes.The devil is in the detail: it is not that Scientology is bad per se, what's bad is there is no transaparency on how those international treaties are really about.

One last example. The links I put in this review are from Wikipedia. The four participants agree that Wikipedia, which is highly politicized, cannot be trusted. This topic was recently taken up by one of the co-founders of Wikipedia which describes how it is badly biased. The linked blog post is from 2020, the conversation from the book is from 2012: this is another example for which the 4 were right. What else were they right about?

In conclusion, this is obviously a biased book, but one that expresses common sense concepts. It cannot be the only source on the subject and to understand the privacy/surveillance tradeoff it is necessary to read other books from the opposite side and decide for yourself.