posted June 13, 2013 12:28 PM            

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WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange has been scathing in his attack on Google in a keynote address at Sydney University.

Streaming live from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London an eerily calm Assange left the crowd of media and delegates at the International Symposium of Electronic Arts Conference with no doubt he thought Google was acting as a "mole" for the US government.

Assange described a five-hour meeting he had with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and his girlfriend, Lisa Shields, media manager for the US council of foreign relations, in June 2011.

He alleges that Schmidt and Shields attended the meeting under the pretence of researching a book on WikiLeaks called "The New Digital Age", to be written by Google ideas man Jared Cohen, a former advisor to Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. But that instead they used the opportunity to feed information back to the government. A transcript of the meeting can be read here.

Assange said the meeting could have looked to people like Google was secretly on his side but that the company "has a much more complex agenda" than that.

"Google's goal is not to sell books, but rather to project itself into the Washington old estate: The Kissingers, the Blairs, the Clintons and the CIA," said Assange. "It wants to show Washington that Google can be America's geopolitical visionary."

These chilling words came as it was revealed this week that the US government has allegedly been spying on internet users by using tech companies, such as Facebook, Google and Skype, to provide the content of user communications without the use of a warrant.

Everything you need to know about NSA leaks

"Do you remember what you were thinking about two years and three months ago?" Assange asked the crowd.

"You don't know. Your own mother doesn't know. But Google does. Google's power is that it knows you better than you know yourself.

"When our heartfelt communications between boyfriends and girlfriends, between sons and daughters, even between bureaucracies and states have been hoovered into vast data apparatuses and made available only to a select few that’s when you get to a situation where we have tank on every street in our lives, a soldier under our beds listening to everything we're saying on email or SMS," he said.

Assange went on to say that his WikiLeaks party would work to make Australia’s intelligence agencies more transparent because unlike the CIA, ASIO is not subject to Freedom of Information requests.

"ASIO must and will expose itself to FOI and we will see that it is enforced," he said. "It is not my intent to write laws that are not enforced."

News.com.au has contacted Google for comment.

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posted June 17, 2013 08:53 AM            

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"Do you remember what you were thinking about two years and three months ago?" Assange asked the crowd.

You don't know. Your own mother doesn't know. But Google does. Google's power is that it knows you better than you know yourself.

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This is a good reason to be cautious about what one posts then edits/deletes.

You can bet google kept it