Politics & Power Quote by Julian Assange

Austere and almost bureaucratic, Assange’s phrasing is doing a lot of political work with very few words. “We have some material” is the language of a publisher, not a provocateur: it cools the temperature, signals receipts over rhetoric, and dares critics to argue with documentation instead of motive. It’s also a tease, a classic WikiLeaks tactic that converts information into suspense and suspense into leverage.

The real pivot is the reframing from “spying” to “industrial espionage.” “Spying” is ambiguous enough to be defended as national security; “industrial espionage” is a dirtier term, one that implies theft for competitive advantage. That choice yanks surveillance out of the war-on-terror moral shelter and drops it into the marketplace, where ordinary people and corporations alike understand the stakes: who wins contracts, who controls patents, who gets to set standards. Assange is effectively saying the state isn’t just watching you; it’s tilting the playing field.

“By a major government” is both strategic vagueness and a loaded wink. It invites readers to fill in the blank (the U.S., China, Russia) while insulating the claim from immediate factual pinning until the “material” appears. And “on the tech industry” signals a specific battleground: firms that hold the world’s communications, data, and infrastructure.

Context matters. Post-Snowden, “surveillance” became culturally legible; tech companies were recast as both victims and accomplices. Assange taps that contradiction, implying that the cozy public-private line isn’t just about security partnerships but about power, profit, and geopolitical advantage disguised as intelligence work.