The Diagnosis That Outlived the Diagnostician

Eric Schmidt drove up to Ellingham Hall in June 2011 with an entourage that included Jared Cohen, and the FBI's most-wanted digital fugitive gave them roughly five hours of unrehearsed philosophy about information flow. Assange's account of that afternoon is the spine of this book, but its evidentiary weight comes from what surrounds it: the DARPA seed funding for Google's original search research, the two million dollars the NSA paid Google for search tools during the Total Information Awareness years, the absorption of Keyhole — a mapping firm spun out of the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — into what became Google Maps, the GeoEye-1 spy satellite Google helped launch and whose imagery it still shares with the Pentagon. None of this reads as speculation. It reads as a corporate biography assembled from public contracts and FOIA'd email, in which Schmidt calls the head of the NSA "General Keith" and General Keith writes back about the value of Google's seat inside the Defense Industrial Base. Assange published his review of Schmidt and Cohen's *The New Digital Age* in the *New York Times* on June 2, 2013. Four days later, Edward Snowden's PRISM documents landed, and the entanglement Assange had been mocked for describing stopped