Noam Chomsky: "Well, Julian Assange committed a major crime. He acted as an honest journalist. Can't have that. There are things that systems of power want to be concealed from the population. Assange violated that. He brought to the general population information that they have every right to have and that power systems don't want them to have. Information about war crimes, for example. That's a crime. You have to be punished for that. So he's been kept in conditions of virtual torture for six years now. First isolated in an apartment, the Ecuadorian embassy is a small apartment. I visited him there. He had fewer rights than a prisoner on death row who can at least walk outside and see the sun; not Assange. Then the British put him in a high security prison for the crime of not paying bail. The UN Rapporteur on Torture simply described this as torture. He is personally frankly destroyed. Now he's facing extradition to the United States where he could spend the rest of his life, such as it is, in a high security prison. Well, that's punishment for a major crime. You don't tell citizens things they ought to know, but the powerful don't want them to know. And the failure of most journalists to defend him is outrageous. They're the ones who should be right in the front defending him. Some are, very good ones, but too many are not. It's a real scandal. Also a scandal in Australia. He is an Australian citizen. Australia should have been pressing hard for him to be released to Australia at the very beginning of this. Everyone in the world is afraid of stepping on the toes of the United States. Might as well face it the world is, you know, international relations specialists can publish their essays, but the fact is that the world is run very much like the Mafia. If the Godfather lays down orders, you better follow them or you're in trouble. We see this all over. Like take the Iran situation. The United States pulled out of the joint agreement, the nuclear agreement, in violation of Security Council orders. It imposed very harsh sanctions to punish Iran for the fact that the United States is violating the agreement. Europe doesn't like it. Europe opposes the sanctions and it's been spoken out strongly against them, but it follows them. It adheres to them. Because you don't anger the Godfather. Pretend whatever you like, but that's the way the world works. Same on the Cuba sanctions; 60 years of torture of Cuba. The whole world is against it. You look at the UN votes, the 184 to 2, United States and Israel, but everyone adheres to it. The same reason; you don't anger the Godfather, he has plenty of weapons to punish you. More weapons, thanks to Putin's stupidity."
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The internet, GPS, voice recognition programs like Siri – many of the technologies that we use today were developed with national security in mind. These inventions and many others began as projects of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Department’s secretive military research agency. For more than fifty years, DARPA has held to a singular and enduring mission: to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. The genesis of that mission and of DARPA itself dates to the Cold War and the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and a commitment by the United States that it would be the initiator and not the victim of strategic technological surprises. Working with innovators inside and outside of government, DARPA has repeatedly delivered on that mission, transforming revolutionary concepts and even seeming impossibilities into practical capabilities. The ultimate results have included not only game-changing military capabilities such as precision weapons and stealth technology, but also major innovations in modern civilian society.
How do they do it? What makes this military organization such fertile ground for invention? What technologies with useful daily applications have failed to enter into civilian use? Can Silicon Valley learn from DARPA, or vice versa? Drawing on extensive interviews, declassified memos and inside sources, investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen will share insights into this top-secret organization.
Speaker Annie Jacobsen is an Investigative Journalist and Author.
The conversation is moderated by Andrew Becker, Reporter, The Center for Investigative Reporting.