Well, here comes Julian.  Never one to stand on the sidelines of any global surveillance debate, Julian Assange has emerged yet again to state his opinion.  This time he has emerged with what can only be described as some kind of WikiLeak version of Moore’s law or something, except that instead of CPU speed, he’s talking about the NSA and the power they are increasingly gaining.  The remarks came out of a speech he broadcast at the OHM2013 Observe, Hack, Make conference.  Assange also added that some experts might not have enough perspective about what is going on.

“The world is witnessing the creation of a new world order that involves the security state apparatus as an overwhelming force”

His argument goes that people are increasingly sharing their information voluntarily and therefore doing the NSA’s work for free.  This hinges on the revelations of the reported NSA leaks and the powers that are suggested are within the agency’s technology reach.  He also took a jab at Google, saying they had become “too big and bad”.  Calling on people to fight for their sovereignty he adds:

“Do not let them scare you. Do not let them paralyze your meaningful contributions to the World,” he said.

However, Assange hasn’t reported any statistics behind his claim that the NSA’s power doubles every four years.  That sounds pretty specific.  It also seems that it is along the lines of the reported superpowers of the NSA, that they are all just “one click away” from anyone’s internet behavior, chat histories, emails, phone calls and they can do it without proper justification.  Without a doubt the NSA is scaling their operations everyone is.  Without a doubt they’re using the most sophisticated technologies available, including cloud, virtualization, super-computing, clusters, rapid storage, analytics, the list goes on.  You would expect them to.  This comment however about the doubling has no factual basis.

There is perhaps no way to get a true factual basis, this is after all top-secret, but that doesn’t give him license to throw some scary stats around that will become the talking points of anti-government, anti-corporate, anti-military people out there.  He’s preaching to his people, the ones who want to believe in massive global conspiracies and the fact that he is marking these things up just proves that. Earlier in the week, he called Bradley Manning a hero- the man who stole and released about 750,000 classified documents.  As far as the NSA stuff goes, I said it recently – we have a bunch of names and some slides and the rest is being played out theatrically for the sole purpose of exposure and the maximum embarrassment of not only the United States, but the military and all the contractors that support/supply the military effort.  The grown-ups in the business I have spoken are concerned about privacy and security, as anyone that is sensible would be.  The truth is we don’t know everything yet and this is starting to feel like the technology BigFoot or Loch Ness monster – you choose.  Still, the press is quite willing to repeat so many things they don’t know about and many of us don’t know about.  We may never know everything about the system or how right these claims are.  And because these revelations are here, it’s certainly high time for a continued debate about security, about privacy, about the constitution, your rights and you.  However we shouldn’t let pithy little nuggets that have no factual basis become canon for a vocal, but misinformed side in the debate. Moore’s law this is not.  That was based on science.