Excerpted from Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. OR Books, New York, 2012, 186 pages, Paper. Buy online. Cryptome review of the book.

This book is not a manifesto. There is not time for that. This book is a warning.

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles.…

As unbelievable as it sounds, facial recognition technology is now being deployed in mannequins. While this might sound completely insane, it’s not all that surprising given the rise of facial recognition systems capable of scanning 36 million faces per second, the FBI giving out facial recognition software to police and rolling out a $1 billion facial recognition system across the United States, not to mention drone-based facial recognition along with behavioral recognition and much…

It takes a brave hacker to declare war on the state of Israel. As Israel’s neighbors can attest, declaring war on the Jewish state doesn’t tend to produce favorable outcomes.

So it was interesting to see the hacker group Anonymous declare “war” on Israel, which probably has as much legal significance as America declaring war on “terror”. Vowing to retaliate against Israeli strikes against Gaza, Anonymous claimed to have attacked hundreds of Israeli government and private Web sites,…

The Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube accounts of Israeli Deputy Premier Silvan Shalom have been hacked and filled with pro-Palestine status updates. ZCompanyHackingCrew claimed responsibility for this latest act of cyber war against Israel.

The group also claims to have hacked Shalom’s email and extracted personal mail, contacts and documents. The hackers announced plans to release the documents shortly.

In Shalom's hijacked Twitter feed, the hacker group posted calls…