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Reading back the official transcript of a secret five-hour meeting between Julian Assange and then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt — released 12 years ago this week — gives an equally eerie feeling.

Along with veteran global affairs fixer Jared Cohen, who was head of internal think tank Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), Schmidt was co-writing a book, The New Digital Age, about the intersection of US global power and social media. It was set in the backdrop of the so-called “Twitter revolutions” of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s. 

The meeting was set under pretence of research for that book,…

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