“We might think that the Internet is a place where we are all equals and we all communicate. It is a new civilian world, a new world where we can develop our ideas and understandings about how planet earth actually works. Where in some sense we are all equal because we can all communicate to everyone. They may not want to listen… but if they do they can send it to anyone. But it is not an equal place. This week’s revelations have proved that it is very far from an equal place, and it is very far from a civilian place.

The Internet has been transformed into a militarily occupied state. When all of our private communications, heart felt, the inner core of our life, communications between boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, between business partners, even between bureaucracies and states; when all those communications are swept up, hovered up into a vast collection apparatus, indexed and stored for all time available only to a select few… then we are in the situation where we have a tank on the street of the inner core of our lives, where we have a soldier under our bed, listening to everything that a husband and wife says to one another when they are communicating by email or sms. The penetration of the digital on civilian life is also the penetration of the military and intelligence agencies of civilian life.”
Julian Assange (full transcript)

Wikileaks Party National Council Member Cassie Findlay spoke out in July 6th 2013, at the Sydney PRISM-BREAK rally, in response to the revelations of Edward Snowden. She pledges to uncover the extent to which Australian citizens have been spied upon by foreign intelligence agencies, at the behest of our own government.

“The Wikileaks Party in the Australian Senate will demand that security agencies and the rest of government come clean on what they’ve signed up to with PRISM and other surveillance programs. An Abbott or a Rudd led government will inevitably steer us into ever more secretive arrangements with foreign intelligence bodies, with our own telecommunications providers and with our own internet service providers. Rather than going with a rubber stamp for a sweeping surveillance by these foreign powers and providers, our Party will ins ist on knowing the full story of surveillance and data collection, and fight to give the power back to the Australian people, to decide what rights to privacy and liberty we deserve.”

The Australian Wikileaks salute... a double peace sign