Assange also posed the question, “How is it that the internet that everyone looked upon as perhaps the greatest tool of human creation that had ever been has, in fact, been co-opted and [is] now involved in the most aggressive form of state surveillance the world has ever seen?”

He added that the world is “moving into a new totalitarian world — not in the sense of Stalin or Pol Pot, but totalitarian in the sense that the surveillance is total.”