Reproduced, with permission, from Business Insider.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange does not have much faith that social networking services like Facebook and Twitter will be useful in political revolutions.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

In an interview with Russia Today, Assange called Facebook “the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.”

As he explains:

Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.

Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organisations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.

Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them.

He also says that WikiLeaks only scratched the surface — the organisation didn’t reveal any “really embarrassing stuff” because it didn’t have access to any top secret cables.

All these stories that have come out actually happened in the world, before 2010, but people didn’t know about it. So what is it that we don’t know about now? There’s an enormous hidden world out there that we don’t know about. It exists there right now.

Read the full interview here.

Reproduced, with permission, from Business Insider.