I have read the account of Giorgio Agamben about his meeting with Assange in which he says that Assange's prosecution and locking him up was not for what he HAD done but for what he was ABOUT to do. Giorgio Agamben:
"I met Assange two years ago in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thinking back to what he told me during our meeting I think we can understand why he was arrested today. Assange told me that he was investigating the use that Google was preparing to make of the immense amount of information it has. According to Assange, it was about selling to insurance companies and to the secret services data on interests, desires, consumption, health status, readings, in short, on the life in all its aspects of millions of individuals. According to Assange - and I believe we can share his opinion - this would have meant an unprecedented increase of the possibilities of control by economic and police powers on human beings. At issue in the arrest of Assange is therefore not only the desire to punish the past investigations of Wikileaks, but to prevent the investigation still in progress, which is evidently perceived by those concerned as a threat. It is also for this reason that one must unreservedly express one's solidarity with Assange."
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Today it is not just Google, but every "social media" platform like Facebook, this one, Twitter, Instagram, Tic Toc. While people flock like sheep into their own camp. Agamben once said that the State-citizens paradigm has been already transformed into "guards-camp" one. We are now all illegal and outlaw, unless proven otherwise. Even then, we are only well-behaving camp inmates, not citizens. What Assange was attemting to do, in case he succeeded, would mabe the "pandemic response" impossible, with all digital surveillance, isolation of people from the real world and gluing them to gadgets, TV and computers, lockdowns with cynical "moral" demands, then QR codes, Green Pass, segregation and scapegoating law-abiding citizens as some threat without evidence, the presumption of guilt and erosure of basic human rights, such as the right of free movement and freedom of speech, under the guise of "public health emergency". However, as with the "War On Terror", we see that the presence or the absence of the virus or the pandemic already makes no difference for the new form of digital technocratic dictatorship which is here to stay. No, Assange is dangerous not because of Pentagon secrets.
Here is the original in Italian: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-arresto-di-julian-assange?fbclid=IwAR1HsKxOWjrDWu96w6gYSQq-5c_NKXm_dfOz3O7eqHAIwHnOguZlMuWTBvM
