The Internet has led to revolutions across the world but a crackdown is now in full swing. As whole societies move online, mass surveillance programs are being deployed globally. Our civilization has reached a crossroads. In one direction lies a future promoting "privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful"; in the other is an internet that transfers power over entire populations to an unaccountable complex of spy agencies and their trans-national corporate allies. Cypherpunks are activists who advocate the mass use of strong cryptography as a way protecting our basic freedoms against this onslaught. Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of an visionary behind Wikileaks, has been a leading voice in the cypherpunk movement since the 1990s. Now, in a timely and important new book, Assange brings together a group of rebel thinkers and activists from the front line of the battle for cyberspace to discuss whether the internet will emancipate or enslave all of us.--

Cypherpunk Ethics explores the moral worldview of the cypherpunks, a movement that advocates the use of strong digital cryptography—or crypto, for short—to defend individual privacy and promote institutional transparency in the digital age. Focusing on the writings of Timothy May and Julian Assange, two of the most prolific and influential cypherpunks, the book examines two competing paradigms of cypherpunk philosophy—crypto anarchy and crypto justice—and examines the implications of cypherpunk ethics for a range of contemporary moral issues, including surveillance, privacy, whistleblowing, cryptocurrencies, journalism, democracy, censorship, intellectual property, and power. Rooted in theory but with very real applications, this volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of digital media, communication, journalism, philosophy, political science, critical data studies, sociology, and the history of technology but also to technologists and activists around the world.

'There are few original ideas in politics. In the creation of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was responsible for one.' This essay reveals the making of Julian Assange - both his ideas and his world-changing actions. Robert Manne explores Assange's unruly childhood and then his involvement with the revolutionary cypherpunk underground, all the way through to the creation of WikiLeaks. Pulling together the threads of his development, Manne shows how Assange became one of the most influential Australians of our time.

If you've ever made a secure purchase with your credit card over the Internet, then you have seen cryptography, or "crypto", in action. From Stephen Levy—the author who made "hackers" a household word—comes this account of a revolution that is already affecting every citizen in the twenty-first century. Crypto tells the inside story of how a group of "crypto rebels"—nerds and visionaries turned freedom fighters—teamed up with corporate interests to beat Big Brother and ensure our privacy on the Internet. Levy's history of one of the most controversial and important topics of the digital age reads like the best futuristic fiction.

In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at Ellingham Hall, the country residence in Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest. For several hours the besieged leader of the world's most famous insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the world's largest information empire locked horns. The two men debated the political problems faced by society, and the technological solutions engendered by the global network--from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin. They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness.For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to American companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the Internet's future that has only gathered force subsequently. When Google Met WikiLeaks presents the story of Assange and Schmidt's encounter. Both fascinating and alarming, it contains an edited transcript of their conversation and extensive, new material, written by Assange specifically for this book, providing the best available summary of his vision for the future of the Internet.

It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination. Award-winning Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding have been at the centre of a unique publishing drama that involved the release of some 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. At one point the platinum-haired hacker was hiding from the CIA in David Leigh's London house. Now, together with the paper's investigative reporting team, Leigh and Harding reveal the startling inside story of the man and the leak.

The fascinating untold story of digital cash and its creators—from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies Bitcoin may appear to be a revolutionary form of digital cash without precedent or prehistory. In fact, it is only the best-known recent experiment in a long line of similar efforts going back to the 1970s. But the story behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and its blockchain technology has largely been untold—until now. In Digital Cash, Finn Brunton reveals how technological utopians and political radicals created experimental money to bring about their visions of the future: to protect privacy, bring down governments, prepare for apocalypse, or launch a civilization of innovation and abundance that would make its creators immortal. Filled with marvelous characters, stories, and ideas, Digital Cash is an engaging and accessible account of the strange origins and remarkable technologies behind today's cryptocurrency explosion.